McKay Coppins | The Atlantic

The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics

2026-03-20T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Adriana Loureiro Fernández

They arrived suddenly—five white vans, identical and unmarked, blocking the street.

It was February 9, 2023, and Mauricio Morales was leading a group of migrants he had found at a bus station through Mexico City’s San Rafael neighborhood. Mau, as his friends called him, had told the migrants he could help them at the nearby refugee camp where he worked. They had just crossed a busy boulevard and were making their way down a side street when the five large utility vans lurched to a stop in front of them.

Men with machine guns, wearing tactical gear, spilled out and started barking orders and threats: ¡Entren todos! ¡Ahora mismo, hijos de puta! Were they police? Military? Mau couldn’t tell, and there was no time to ask for identification. Within seconds, the migrants were being shoved into the vans. When Mau tried to resist, something hard hit him on the head, and he fell to the ground. As he was loaded into the back of one of the vans, he heard gunshots. He thought of his mother. If this is the end, he remembers thinking before he lost consciousness, please let her be okay.

Mau woke on the floor of a dank, windowless room with a single mattress and a bucket in one corner. His wallet was gone; so was his phone. He had no idea where he was or why he’d been taken, but for the next few days, he and several other captives held with him were beaten and tortured. Men took turns pummeling him—breaking his ribs and pulling out his fingernails. When he tried to ask what they wanted, the beatings only got worse.

Then one day the men removed him from the room without explanation and deposited him back into a van. Assuming he was about to die, Mau began to weep. But when the van came to a stop and his captors hauled him out, he noticed that they were being careful with him now, almost gentle. “The boss wants to talk to him,” he heard one of them say.

The facility they took him to was strange. It vaguely resembled a school: four wings divided into classroom-like compartments and an enclosed courtyard in the middle. But there were no children here. Instead, men with guns patrolled the premises while women who looked like they were dressed for a night of clubbing loafed around. Narcocorridos, accordion-heavy cartel ballads, played loudly over speakers in the courtyard.

Mau was taken to a makeshift office, where a man with a paunch and a thick mustache sat behind a desk. He was flanked by a large bodyguard in a butcher’s apron and a voluptuous woman in a low-cut, form-fitting dress. He seemed irritated as he assessed Mau. “Look at him,” the man grumbled. “He’s so fucked up.” He sent the bodyguard and the woman, who seemed to be his girlfriend, out of the room. Once they were alone, the man became warm and friendly. He introduced himself as Don Paco, and apologized to Mau for what he’d been put through.

“I know who you are,” Don Paco said.

He told Mau that his men had noticed a tattoo of the Olympic rings on his wrist. After some research, they discovered that they had inadvertently kidnapped a world-class athlete—an Olympic runner who’d competed in Beijing, London, and Rio de Janeiro. This was serendipitous, Don Paco explained, because he happened to be in the market for athletes.

He said he was a leader of an organization called La Unión Tepito. Mau had heard about La Unión on the news. The cartel was relatively new, having risen to power in the past decade or so, but its tight grip on Mexico’s capital city had made it one of the country’s most notorious criminal syndicates. Don Paco told Mau that for all the attention paid to bloody turf wars and theatrical executions, organizations like his were an important part of the community—and Mexico was better off when its cartels got along.

Then Don Paco revealed something that would forever change how Mau saw his own country: For many years, Don Paco said, a secret tournament had been organized by Mexico’s biggest cartels. They each fielded teams in sports such as soccer, flag football, and boxing, and rival cartel leaders gathered to watch the games. He described the event as a civilized affair, where the bosses could place friendly wagers and do business without shooting one another.

Winning the tournament was a point of immense pride, Don Paco explained. And so he had a proposition for his new prisoner: He wanted Mau to coach and play on a flag-football team. The team would train at the facility and then represent La Unión at the tournament. If Mau won, he and his teammates would be released. If not, they would meet the same fate as anyone else who let down the organization.

Perhaps sensing Mau’s incredulity, Don Paco put it bluntly.

“If you win, you live,” he said. “If you lose, you die.”

Then the cartel boss flashed a broad smile. “But I’m sure you’ll win, so it won’t be a problem.”

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

The left hand of Mauricio Morales, which he says was mangled during torture sessions by the cartel that kidnapped him off the street

The email arrived in my inbox on a Thursday evening in December 2024: “Are you free for a call?” the subject line asked. “Massive story.”

The message was from Robert Reynolds, a Las Vegas lawyer and talent manager whose clients included a collection of aughts rock acts, most notably the Killers. I barely knew Reynolds. We’d first spoken years earlier, when I tried unsuccessfully to get an interview with the band’s front man, Brandon Flowers. Reynolds had never given me a tip before, and frankly, I couldn’t imagine what “massive story” the manager of the Killers might be privy to. But my curiosity was piqued, so I gave him a call.

Reynolds picked up after one ring—“McKay!”—and launched into his story. He spoke in a throaty rumble, his bro-ish cadence punctuated, in moments of peak enthusiasm, with an emphatic dude. A few months earlier, he told me, he’d fielded an unusual ticket request from a high-ranking official at the United Nations. The official told him that a beloved volunteer at the UN’s refugee camps in Syria, Ukraine, and Mexico had recently been held captive for months by a cartel. He was now recovering from the ordeal, and his colleagues wanted to lift his spirits with surprise tickets to his favorite band’s sold-out show in Mexico City.

Reynolds obliged, and met the volunteer, whose name was Mauricio Morales, before the concert. After some coaxing, he got his new friend to recount his harrowing experience. The story floored Reynolds. “I was like, ‘Dude, this is a movie!’ ” he told me.

Reynolds was a fledgling filmmaker himself. He’d helped produce a few documentaries—including an Emmy-nominated HBO film about his brother Dan Reynolds, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons—but what he really aspired to was screenwriting. This story, he believed, was his way in. Shortly after their meeting, he purchased Mau’s life rights and began working on a film treatment for The Cartel Olympics.

The project was already generating buzz, Reynolds told me. The actor Michael Peña, of Marvel Cinematic Universe fame, had expressed strong interest in playing Mau. The darkness of the story was just the kind of thing that Oscar voters loved. So was the “body transformation” that would be required for Peña to convincingly play an Olympian. But the actor had a condition: He wanted a journalist to vet Mau’s account and publish it in a reputable outlet so that he and the filmmakers could say, with full confidence, that the movie was “based on a true story.”

That’s where I came in. Speaking in excited, hurried tones, Reynolds laid out his proposal. I would interview Mau and write a story about his captivity, and then sell the film option to Reynolds, who—with his industry connections and Peña’s attachment—could get the project fast-tracked at a major studio, and make us all a small Hollywood fortune.

I told Reynolds I’d think about it, but when I hung up the phone, I burst out laughing. The story seemed preposterous. An intercartel sports tournament? The hero’s life hanging in the balance? Flag football? It sounded like an overwrought episode of Narcos or something. “It would be an incredible story if it were true,” I told my wife that night. “But it almost certainly isn’t true.”

My opinion changed the first time I spoke with Mau, a few weeks later. I understood immediately why Reynolds found him so compelling. He was understated and self-effacing, politely answering my questions in good but imperfect English, and apologizing whenever he stumbled over a word. In a squawking, almost Muppety voice, he told me about his work in the refugee camps, how he organized intramural sports teams to keep the kids entertained while they endured their nightmarish limbo. I liked him right away.

When I asked him about the kidnapping, he told me the story in halting, disjointed fragments, pausing periodically to steady his emotions. He didn’t get flustered by skeptical questions—he simply explained what he’d seen as best as he could recall, sometimes admitting that certain bits were hazy. After a while, as I made him recount repeatedly the gruesome details of his torture, my skeptical-reporter persona began to soften. I found myself apologizing for my aggressiveness. “It’s okay, Mr. McKay,” he said.

To my surprise, Mau seemed credible. More important, he offered a list of sources who he said could vouch for him and verify parts of his story.

My first interview request went to James Winston, an aid worker and human-rights investigator based in London who worked for R4V, a UN-backed organization that supports migrants and refugees. Winston was the person who had initially contacted Reynolds and connected him with the UN official. He had also worked closely with Mau at the refugee camps, and spent years studying the atrocities committed by Mexico’s cartels. He was doing fieldwork when I first reached him, but he answered a list of questions by email. When I asked him if there was any reason I should distrust Mau’s story, his response was chiding. To uninformed outsiders, he told me, the depravity of Mexico’s cartel culture was difficult to comprehend. “Many stories may seem unbelievable,” he wrote. “But after years of immersion, I can assure you that they reflect a very real aspect of this society.” In fact, Winston said, he was writing to me from a rural outskirt of Guadalajara, in west-central Mexico, where he was investigating what appeared to be a clandestine crematorium operated by the Jalisco New Generation cartel. Authorities had discovered a pile of bones, bullet casings, and more than 200 pairs of shoes in a burned-out building on a remote ranch.

“If I may,” Winston wrote, “I’d suggest delving further into this culture to better grasp the reality and, potentially, write a more informed piece on Mau’s story.”

I felt like an idiot. I thought I’d been approaching this story with the clear-eyed wariness of a savvy reporter. But to Winston, I was exposing my sheltered-American naivete. He had a point. My sole experience in Mexico had been a week in 2011 at a resort, where I’d snorkeled with my wife, eaten coconut ice cream, and taken guided tours of some ruins.

But I knew Mexico was a real place, with real problems. The country’s past two presidential administrations had catastrophically failed to rein in the cartels, and the new president didn’t seem to be faring much better. If I was going to do Mau’s story justice, I would need to go deeper.

Before signing off, Winston warned me that pursuing this story would come with risks. Publishing Mau’s account “could very likely result in his death,” he wrote. And if I tried to report in Mexico, I would be putting myself in peril: “Mexico is currently a very dangerous country for journalists.”

In the cartel prison, training began daily at 7 a.m. sharp: laps in the courtyard, followed by push-ups and weight lifting with cinder blocks. Then the prisoner-athletes of La Unión Tepito were divided into groups and spent the rest of the day practicing for their assigned events. There were teams for soccer; a handball-style game called frontón; and tochito, or American flag football, which has become popular in Mexico.

Mau mostly kept to himself at first, interacting as little as possible with his teammates. Unlike him, most of the men in the prison were creatures of Mexico’s criminal underworld, and he found them frightening.

One, nicknamed El Diablo, was a dead-eyed ex-cop who’d worked for a rival gang and spoke about his body count in an unnerving monotone. He specialized in disappearing victims. “It wasn’t just drug dealers,” he volunteered. “I had to do 14 kids one time.” There had been nowhere to hide the bodies, he explained, so he’d meticulously dismembered each corpse and then dissolved the limbs in a vat of hydrochloric acid. Mau had trouble looking him in the eye.

Another teammate, Augusto, was a hulking lawyer who looked to be about 70. Augusto claimed that he was in the tournament as punishment for mishandling one of La Unión’s cases. But the rumor around the prison was that he’d actually raped and murdered a young assistant who turned out to be the girlfriend of a cartel leader. Augusto was an asset to the team: He was deceptively strong for his age, and skilled, too, having played American football when he was young. But he had a menacing air and a virulent misogynistic streak. One evening, the team was watching a movie in which a woman was strangled to death on-screen. Augusto, visibly aroused, began to masturbate.

Weeks passed in the prison, then months. Deprived of contact with the outside world, Mau lost track of time. He ran drills for his team and drew up plays. At times, the experience felt almost like summer camp: sports and exercise during the day, dinner and taped soccer games on TV at night.

But terror was never far away. Many nights, Mau would lie in bed, listening to agonized screams echoing from other wings of the prison, and try not to think about who was getting tortured this time, and for what, and whether he would be next.

As Mau got to know his teammates better, he was surprised to discover that they weren’t all irredeemable and depraved. Palomino was a taxi driver who had started running errands for the cartel to supplement his family’s meager income. Loquillo desperately missed his wife. Little Hugo was a skinny sicario in training who’d been lured into cartel life as a teenager with the promise of glamour and travel, and who peppered Mau with questions about what London and Beijing were like.

Mau became especially close with Mamers, a muscular hit man who was his first real friend in the cartel prison. They talked about their lives outside—Mau’s work in the refugee camps earned him the mocking nickname Samaritan—and traded workout routines. When the subject of ex-girlfriends came up, Mamers admitted that he struggled with jealousy in relationships, and Mau counseled him on how to relax and be less controlling.

The more time he spent with Mamers, the more Mau realized that they weren’t so different. They’d simply had different opportunities. Mamers—like Little Hugo, and Palomino, and so many more—had wound up on the Mexican conveyor belt that transports directionless young men into organized crime with ruthless efficiency. He had done terrible things, it was true, but how many choices did he really have? Mamers wasn’t a rotten person, Mau concluded. He was the product of a rotten country.

And unfortunately, Mau could now relate all too well to being trapped in a corrupt system. No matter how many kids his cellblock mates had killed or women they’d raped, his survival depended on working with them.

One night, after training was over, Don Paco gathered the prisoners in the courtyard. There was a chill in the air that reminded Mau of late summer, though he couldn’t say for sure what month it was. Don Paco announced that they would leave for the tournament the next day. Celebratory cervezas were passed around as the boss gave a pep talk on the importance of sportsmanship and clean play. He didn’t want to see his teams cheating, he told them—it would spoil the pride of La Unión’s victory.

Before he left, Don Paco reminded the prisoners of the life-and-death stakes of the event, and then added a further warning.

“Some of you will walk free tomorrow,” he said. “But you must swear never to speak of what you saw here. We know who you are and where to find you.”

I began talking regularly with Mau on the phone. It was clear to me that independently verifying his story would be difficult. If it had happened the way he said it had, there would be no public record and few living witnesses. But I wanted to get a sense of the story’s plausibility. Were Mexico’s cartel leaders really operating with such impunity that they could routinely force scores of kidnapped athletes into a Squid Game–style tournament for their own amusement?

Mau pushed me to expand my imagination. He was endlessly patient with my ignorance. Sometimes he would recommend movies for me to watch, as though I were an addled child who could understand how his country worked only by watching TV.

When I would express surprise at one of his assertions—about judges bought off by cartels; about celebrities and politicians with known narco connections—I could almost hear him stifle a sigh of exasperation. “The thing you need to understand about Mexico …” he would say, before launching into a lecture about how things work there.

A brief review of Mexico’s narco history confirmed that there was a lot I didn’t understand. For all their potency in the popular imagination, the country’s notorious drug cartels are only a few decades old—much younger than America’s crime families. But they have woven themselves into Mexican society. They raise money for churches and build health clinics in rural areas. They throw block parties and hand out toys to kids at Christmastime. And, yes, they host sporting events—see the boxing matches organized by Los Zetas.

In some parts of Mexico, the state has been effectively replaced by cartel rule. Extortion payments to organized crime are part of daily life—required to run a business, secure protection for your family, and retrieve abducted loved ones. In 2010, after a photographer was gunned down in a parking lot near his newsroom in Juárez, the newspaper El Diario published a front-page editorial pleading with the cartels: “What is it you want from us? What is it you want us to publish or not publish? Explain so that we can respond. You are at present the de facto authorities in this city.”

Even after the Mexican government declared war on the cartels in 2006, some of the most-wanted bosses were still able to roam the country freely, untouched by the law. El Chapo, the elusive leader of the Sinaloa cartel, was known to drop by high-end restaurants for dinner—gunmen politely confiscating patrons’ phones, El Chapo picking up everyone’s tab when he was done.

The more time I spent reading these stories, the more I had to admit that Mau’s, while still improbably wild, didn’t seem impossible.

One day, at the end of an unusually long phone call, Mau seemed dejected. The news in Mexico City was dominated by the broad-daylight assassination of two aides to the mayor, possibly by cartel sicarios. The shooting had taken place not far from where Mau lived, and though it had nothing to do with him, he seemed to feel like he was running for his life with nowhere to hide. He told me that he’d come to believe that corruption and violence were so deeply rooted in Mexico that, even if all the cartels disappeared overnight, the culture they’d created would outlive him.

For several months, I interviewed people in Mau’s life—friends, former co-workers, anyone who could vouch for his essential reliability. Some of them knew more about his captivity than others. Mau had evidently not been eager to talk when he was first released, and few had pressed him for details. It had seemed insensitive for them to ask too many questions—and besides, maybe not knowing was safer for everyone. But those I talked with could remember Mau disappearing one day in February and returning—shaken, scarred—many months later. “His gaze had changed,” Eduardo, a friend of Mau’s, recalled. “He was always looking around, very watchful of everyone.”

My reporting that spring was frequently interrupted by a stream of messages from movie producers. Word had somehow gotten out in Hollywood, and multiple studios and production companies were suddenly vying to option my forthcoming story. Each of them had its own angle. The head of a large film studio in Spain, who had served as a U.S. ambassador under President Obama, appealed directly to The Atlantic’s vice chair. A producer in Mexico claimed a loose personal connection to Mau—he had been friends with her college boyfriend, she said—but then referred to him by the wrong surname: Bermúdez.

How did all of these people know about my article? I had yet to write a word of the story—I still wasn’t even sure there would be a story at all. And out of concern for Mau’s safety, I’d told almost no one what I was working on. But when I asked the producers how they’d gotten my contact information, they all said the same thing: Mau had sent them.

Mau, for his part, seemed as mystified as I was. Reynolds was the only filmmaker he’d spoken with, he insisted, and the idea that he would be peddling this story around was lunacy. “I don’t want to get killed!”

When I told Reynolds about the inquiries, he was not surprised. People in Hollywood talk, he reasoned; everyone pretends to be more connected than they are. Maybe Peña or his team had been hyping the project, or maybe the leak had come from William Morris Endeavor, the agency that represented Reynolds. (Peña did not respond to requests for comment.)

But the prospect of competition clearly put Reynolds on edge. Soon after our conversation, he began pestering me to sign a contract giving him exclusive film rights to the story, and sending regular texts that sought to mask his anxiety with enthusiasm—How’s it going?? Just checking in :) So excited!

The morning after Don Paco’s speech, Mau and his team were awakened early. Hoods were placed over their heads, zip ties were attached to their wrists, and then everyone was loaded into vans like the ones that had first brought them there.

They drove for hours, Mau listening closely for clues about their location. City streets turned into freeways and then a winding, bumpy road. Eventually, the vans stopped, and Mau heard what sounded like a metal gate swing open. A few minutes later, he and his fellow prisoners were ushered out of the vans. When the hood was removed from his head, Mau was astonished by what he saw.

They were at some kind of vast, remote ranch in a mountainous region that Mau didn’t recognize. Armed men in uniforms—could they really be police?—were directing traffic and confiscating weapons and phones, while men in cowboy hats and women in flamboyant dresses milled around drinking and chatting. The atmosphere was upbeat, almost festival-like. On a nearby stage, a group of musicians played brassy banda music; elsewhere, a gaggle of spectators admired a collection of parked monster trucks.

Mau’s surprise turned to disbelief when he was escorted into an enormous gymnasium at the center of the property. In one section, magicians and clowns entertained young children. In another, a large board projected betting odds for the various tournament events, while men below clamored to place their wagers. Surveying the hundreds of attendees in the bleachers, Mau was shocked by how many people he recognized. The gym was filled with boldfaced names of Mexican society: celebrities, influencers, high-ranking politicians, TV-news anchors.

An emcee announced that it was time for the sorteo—a random drawing that would determine the first round of flag-football matchups. As Mau waited, Don Paco’s girlfriend sidled up to him. “Luck is going to be very important here,” she whispered. “You don’t want to play against Sinaloa.” Mau held his breath until the matchup was announced: La Unión Tepito would play Los Caballeros Templarios. “You got lucky,” the woman said.

The flag-football games took place on a field outside the gymnasium. A referee briefly ran through the rules and blew a whistle, starting a 40-minute clock.

Mau realized quickly they were in trouble. Flag football is supposed to be a no-tackle, limited-contact sport. But their opponents were openly trying to maim them—punching, kicking, gouging—without any objection from the referees.

After a few minutes, Mau called his teammates into a huddle. He told them to forget every rule he’d taught them. “There’s no fair play in here,” he said. If they were going to win, they’d have to play dirty.

The rest of the game was a violent scrum of chipped teeth and punctured skin. When the whistle blew, La Unión Tepito had defeated Los Caballeros Templarios, 14–7.

Spectators cheered while Mau and his teammates, bloody and panting, tended to their wounds. He barely noticed at first as the opposing team was led off the field, disappearing behind the gym. But then came a loud series of bangs that, amid all of the celebrating, sounded to Mau like firecrackers.

A sweetly acidic smell wafted toward the field, and Mau asked his teammates what it was.

El Diablo was the first to answer. “That’s blood.”

When summer came, I set out with an Atlantic fact-checker to confirm the details of Mau’s biography. With his account of the cartel tournament largely impossible to verify, Mau’s story would have to hang on his trustworthiness as a source. If he was telling the truth about the small stuff, I figured, he was more likely to be a reliable narrator.

Mau seemed eager to help. He offered to dig up any documents we might need and promised to put me in touch with colleagues at the various NGOs on his résumé.

We started with his athletic credentials. Mau spoke often about his experience in the Olympics—how he’d been shaped by sports, and how competing had given him the necessary resilience to endure his captivity. An accomplished middle-distance runner, he sometimes lamented that he’d never made it to the Olympic podium—his final chance for a medal, in Tokyo, had been derailed by the pandemic and a devastating injury to his Achilles tendon.

On June 19, the fact-checker and I emailed officials at the Olympic committee in Colombia, the country for which Mau said he had competed. (His mother was a native Colombian, he said, and he had dual citizenship.) We asked for confirmation that Mau had been on the team. The reply came back a few weeks later: They had no record of Mau competing on the track team. We scoured Colombia’s published results from the past five Olympic Games, and came up similarly empty-handed.

When I called Mau, he sheepishly admitted that he had fudged some small details in our interviews to protect himself. He had actually competed for Mexico’s Olympic team, he told me, not Colombia’s, and he promised to share his accreditation documents to prove it. But he was worried that revealing this to a reporter would put him in danger. “The thing you need to understand about Mexico is that the press is very different here,” he told me. Many reporters disregarded basic professional standards, Mau said, and some were actually on a cartel’s payroll.

Besides, Mau was starting to wonder if the real threat might come from the government, not the gangs. Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, was under enormous pressure from her voters and from the Trump administration to crack down on cartel violence. A former Olympic athlete from Mexico alleging an illuminati-style gathering where politicians mingled with murderous cartel leaders would not go unnoticed in the National Palace. Mau was consumed by images of the police dragging him from his apartment in the middle of the night and disappearing him again, this time for good.

He apologized repeatedly for lying. “I kept some information to myself,” he explained. “I didn’t want anything to happen to me. People around me are very much afraid. I’m afraid.”

The fear in his voice sounded genuine. And I had to admit that his paranoia was understandable. What reason did he have to trust me, really?

We talked about various ways of ensuring his safety; he even said he might leave the country before the story came out. I told Mau that I would take every reasonable precaution, but that I needed him to be completely honest with me going forward. He agreed. Before we hung up, I asked him if there was anything else I should know.

“No, Mr. McKay,” he said. “I promise.”

The next several rounds of the tournament passed in a macabre blur—violent and frenzied, yet oddly methodical. Each game ended the same way, with Mau’s motley team limping off the field in victory, and the losers disappearing behind the gymnasium. More firecrackers. More of that sweet, acidic smell.

As the tournament progressed, Mau became monomaniacally focused on doing what was necessary to win. With each round, the games got harder, and Mau got more ruthless—twisting limbs, stabbing at eyes, trying to inflict maximum pain with each illegal tackle. Some of the players he was assaulting were not even sicarios or drug traffickers—they were ordinary kidnapping victims like him. But his conscience had been numbed by a single-minded focus on staying alive.

By the time the championship game arrived, the sun was setting behind the distant mountains. The crowd on the sidelines had ballooned as word got around about La Unión Tepito’s unlikely run. Mau’s team had beaten cartels with more money and more manpower, and he got the sense that La Unión was the Cinderella story of the tournament. Even the guards, previously gruff and dismissive, were now treating them with grudging respect.

Their final game would be against the Tláhuac cartel—a team of tall, quiet, wiry men. As Mau studied his opponents from a distance, Don Paco’s girlfriend pulled him aside with some intel. She’d been watching Tláhuac all day, she said, and he should know that the players specialized in torture. “They are super dirty,” she told him.

The game, as predicted, was brutal. Mau broke a rib and two fingers; other players lost teeth, causing blood to stream from their mouths. At one point, a Tláhuac player threw Palomino to the ground and tried to strangle him while the refs looked on indifferently and the crowd roared its approval.

When regulation ended, both teams were still scoreless, and the game entered overtime—the first team to score would win. Mau called a play that they’d practiced often during their training. Mamers faked a handoff to Palomino, who scampered furiously toward the end zone, drawing the defense away. Mau, left open, sprinted to the opposite side and caught a short touchdown pass from Mamers.

The whistle blew. The game was over.

For a moment, there was silence. Then the sidelines erupted—cheers, banda music, firecrackers. Mau collapsed to the ground, sobbing. It didn’t feel like a celebration, but something closer to grief.

From the field, Mau was shepherded onto a stage in the gym, where he was greeted by a beaming Don Paco. Someone placed a gold-colored medal around Mau’s neck. It felt heavy and ridiculous. For a moment, the two men stood side by side—the cartel boss and his champion—as the whooping, chanting crowd bathed them in applause.

Then, without warning, guards grabbed Mau and shoved him into a van. His bloody clothes were ripped off his body; a hood was placed back over his head. Dizzy and dehydrated, Mau slipped in and out of consciousness. Eventually, a door was opened, his hood was removed, and he was pushed out onto some pavement. The van peeled off.

It was dawn, and he was in a quiet slum that he’d never been to before. Stripped to his underwear, bruised, barefoot, and bleeding from his face, Mau stood and began to walk. The medal was still hanging around his neck.

In the days after my come-to-Jesus meeting with Mau, he labored to reassert his trustworthiness. He sent me documents, screenshots, and references to prove that he was who he claimed to be. He wanted me to know that he wasn’t a dishonest person—that he’d lied only out of fear for his safety. But every piece of evidence he produced just raised more questions.

He sent me a medical report that he said was from his first doctor visit after his release from captivity; it showed high cholesterol and not much else. Where, I asked him, were the mentions of broken ribs, mangled fingers, and stripped fingernails? Mau seemed faintly amused by my question. “If you’re looking for something that says, ‘This guy was tortured by a cartel,’ it’s not going to say that,” he deadpanned. Fair enough.

The Olympic “accreditation” he’d promised to send, meanwhile, turned out to be a grainy photo of a laminated pass, attached to a lanyard, with his name printed on it and the familiar Olympic rings in the corner. At first glance it looked impressive enough. But when we shared the photo with a source at the International Olympic Committee, he said it was a guest credential—something issued to friends and family, not athletes. (By now I’d also heard back from the Mexican Olympic Committee, which said it had no record of Mau competing.)

Then there was Mau’s surreal Instagram profile. He had mentioned his account in passing more than once, but whenever I asked for a link, he would change the subject. Once I finally found it myself, I understood why. The account had nearly 400,000 followers but close to zero engagement, suggesting that his “fans” were mostly bots. The grid was filled with photos that seemed to slide in and out of reality: Mau posing with Mike Tyson, Mau posing with Lionel Messi, Mau shaking hands with Kofi Annan, and at least one apparently AI-generated image of a tuxedo-clad Mau at the Oscars.

There were plenty of Olympic photos, but those were confusing, too. Most of them were selfies, not action shots. In some pictures, he was in a Mexican uniform; in others, an American one. There was an image of a glossy 2008 spread from an English-language magazine in Beijing that featured a photo of a shirtless Mau alongside an article describing his preparations to compete for the Mexican national team—in volleyball.

There did appear to be one photo of Mau running in the Olympics. It was pinned to the top of his Instagram profile: a pack of middle-distance runners on a blue track, and a bright-red arrow hovering above one of them. But when I looked closer, I noticed that he was wearing blue instead of Mexico’s green and red. When I asked him about this over text, he insisted that the photo was from the 2016 Games in Rio, and that an Instagram filter had altered the color of his uniform. But a reverse image search quickly debunked this lie: The picture was from Paris 2024, and the runner was an Italian named Pietro Arese, who just happened to look a little like Mau from a distance.

Exasperated, I called Mau.

“I’ll be 100 percent honest with you,” he said, when I told him what I’d found. “I didn’t have a picture of myself running in the Olympics, so I posted that to keep people interested.”

“How can you possibly not have a photo of yourself running?” I demanded.

He hesitated. “The reason,” he finally said, “is because I didn’t run.”

The story tumbled out of him all at once, in a rush of righteous indignation—how he’d made it onto the national track team as an alternate in 2016; how he’d witnessed rampant corruption among Mexican Olympic officials, who sold off valuable credentials to politicians and businessmen instead of prioritizing athletes and training staff; how he’d been caught leaking evidence of bribery to the press and was blacklisted from competing.

Mau admitted, with some embarrassment, that his Instagram persona was embellished—but he insisted that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. (Didn’t everyone exaggerate their accomplishments on social media?) If the Olympic committee claimed to have no record of him, he told me, that was only because it had punitively scrubbed his name from its records. “People saw me there,” he said. “They know me.” This was just what happened when you tried to blow the whistle on corruption in Mexico.

I found this explanation dubious, but it didn’t matter all that much. Mau’s Olympic record per se was not essential to the story. His repeated lying, though, posed a clear challenge to his credibility.

James Winston, meanwhile, was proving strangely difficult to get on the phone. The London-based aid worker had been one of Mau’s most persuasive validators. We had corresponded at length over email and WhatsApp, but every time I asked him for a phone interview, he was unreachable—traveling in Honduras, or en route to Gaza. He always promised he’d call as soon as he could. He never did.

Hoping to at least confirm Winston’s expertise, I asked him to connect me with some of his colleagues at the NGOs where he’d worked. He gave me email addresses for two people, both of whom responded with warm notes about Winston’s knowledge and dedication; when I asked if we could talk on the phone, they grew skittish. One said she was too afraid of the cartels to be quoted. Both stopped responding. A subsequent Google search revealed that the websites for the organizations in their email domains didn’t exist. Both URLs led to identical “under construction” Squarespace pages. When I asked Winston for his LinkedIn profile, he said he would send it to me, but never did.

A few days later, however, I found a page for a “James M. Winston” that matched his purported résumé—and had been created that same month. The profile was sparsely populated, and parts of it appeared to have been written by a non-native English speaker. When we checked with the institutions he claimed to have an affiliation with—the London School of Economics, the UN Refugee Agency, R4V—none of them had any record of him. The James Winston with whom I’d been corresponding for months seemed not to exist.

By August, I was ready to give up. Investigating Mau’s story felt like trying to clutch an ice cube—every time I attempted to grab hold of it too tightly, it slipped out of my grasp.

Only one thing was keeping me from walking away from the story: I’d found Mamers.

At the outset of my reporting, Mau had told me that he was in touch with his sicario teammate—the two men had a soldiers-after-the-war bond that transcended their many differences. At first Mamers didn’t want to talk with me, but Mau finally persuaded him to give me a brief FaceTime interview. His account of the cartel games overlapped with Mau’s in ways that were hard to dismiss. He was nervous, but said he could go into more detail if we met in person. I had to decide if this story, whose chief narrator had a gaping credibility problem, was worth a trip to Mexico.

On August 14, Robert Reynolds texted me in a characteristic flurry of exclamation points. “How’s it going?” he wrote. “So excited for progress!! Michael Peña just called me. He’s really excited about this.”

Maybe it was the seduction of a Hollywood deal. Maybe I just felt like I’d gone too far to turn back now. But seeing this story through felt like the only option. I booked a flight to Mexico City.

I landed late on the night of August 24, and found the driver The Atlantic had hired waiting for me outside baggage claim. He was short and quiet, wearing a baseball cap and a serious expression. As we pulled away from the airport, he locked the doors and merged onto a wide, well-lit highway.

In preparing for the trip, I’d encountered a strange kind of narrative confusion when it came to American perceptions of Mexico City. As a tourist destination, the city had never been hotter; travel websites and influencers hyped its food scene and museums. At the same time, the Trump administration and its allies, seeking to justify a maximalist immigration crackdown, had cast the city as the apocalyptic capital of a failed state. The day after I arrived, Stephen Miller would make headlines by declaring, with his usual brittle certainty, that the Mexican government was “run by criminal cartels.”

There were legitimate reasons to believe that the Mexican capital was growing more dangerous. The broad-daylight assassination of the mayor’s aides in May had rattled the city’s political class and awakened fears that Mexico City was no longer considered a neutral zone in the cartel wars. Sales of armored vehicles in the city were up, and private-security details were becoming more common.

The Atlantic wasn’t taking any chances. Because the story involved cartels, my editors insisted on certain precautions. I would be traveling around the city with the private driver and accompanied, most of the time, by a fixer. A photographer would join us for some of the reporting, and when we ventured into neighborhoods considered especially risky, a security guard would come along. I’d shared my location with my editors on my phone and agreed to check in every three hours. I couldn’t decide if this was prudent or ridiculous.

As we drove toward my hotel in the verdant neighborhood of La Condesa, I watched the city roll past the van window: taquerias still open at midnight, couples walking dogs, clusters of young people outside bars lit with fairy lights. I thought about the Mexican TikTokers who made videos mocking American tourists for posting breathless dispatches about how “nice” and “safe” Mexico City felt—wide-eyed foreigners marveling that the streets were paved and the toilets flushed.

The next morning, I met my fixer, Ulises, in my hotel’s restaurant. He was impossible to miss: 6 foot 4, burly, and jovial, with a stubbly beard and a roguish demeanor. I’d been warned by a Mexican reporter before my trip that some local journalists resented being called “fixers,” but Ulises told me he didn’t mind. Fixing had been good business for him. And besides, why take yourself so seriously? “My secret is that I’m a shitty journalist,” he said, “but I know all the best restaurants in Mexico City.”

Over breakfast, I asked what he made of Mau’s story. He shrugged. He’d seen terrible things in his years as a cartel tour guide for foreign journalists, so he was open to the possibility that Mau’s story was true. But he also seemed uncomfortable with the image of his country that Mau was conveying.

“Mexico isn’t the Third World,” he said. “I mean, look.” He gestured toward the window, where a clean, tree-lined street stretched past the hotel. Cyclists weaved among cars; a woman in workout gear jogged by with headphones. “Isn’t it scary?” he said sarcastically.

There were parts of the country where the cartels had enormous power, he said. But it wasn’t accurate to suggest that Mexico as a whole was a dystopian gangland, or that the government was simply a puppet of organized crime.

I appreciated Ulises’s skepticism, but I wasn’t ready to write off Mau just yet. I would sit with him, in his own city, and let him tell his story one last time.

We drove to a quiet street in Ciudad de los Deportes and met Mau on the ground floor of his building. He looked as he did in his Instagram photos—handsome and fit, with a well-maintained coil of curly hair and a raglan T-shirt clinging to his shoulders and chest. But his smile was uneasy. As we climbed the stairs to his apartment, I noticed dark half-moons of sweat blooming under his arms.

“I’m nervous,” he admitted. He’d spoken with Reynolds, who had urged him to be totally honest. Mau assured me that he would be: “I don’t have anything to hide.”

We entered a sunlit one-bedroom, and Mau and I took seats on perpendicular couches. Ulises and the photographer, Adriana, remained on the room’s perimeter, quiet observers. Mau looked almost small sitting there, his muscular shoulders slouched, his hands fidgeting in his lap, a restive expression on his face.

I asked him to tell me the story of his kidnapping and captivity again, from beginning to end. The beats were familiar by now, and as I listened to him talk, I found myself thinking about all the people who benefited from narratives of cartel violence: American politicians; Mexican politicians; the journalists who hired Ulises to help them produce their sensational dispatches from narco land; the Hollywood executives monetizing movie treatments; the cartels themselves, who thrived on the fear. I almost pitied Mau. Even if his account wasn’t entirely true, so many others were profiting from stories like this—why shouldn’t he get a piece?

After finishing his account, Mau turned to what had become a persistent theme in our conversations: the metastasizing corruption in Mexico. He talked about the large number of people who were currently missing. When he rode the bus, the ads on the digital screens used to be for cellphone plans and soft drinks. Now they were almost exclusively for missing persons—grainy photos and cash rewards and phone numbers to call.

At my request, Mau FaceTimed his mother. I had hoped to interview her in person, but she lived too far away. She appeared on-screen in a modest living room, an older woman with careful makeup and a tight, anxious smile, sitting on a couch pressed up against a bare wall. I sat next to Mau as he held the phone, and he translated her narration of his disappearance from her perspective.

Recounting the story was clearly painful for her. At several points, she broke down in tears and had to stop, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue while Mau murmured reassurances in Spanish. She described the first call from the kidnappers, the male voice demanding money, the impossible deadline, the panic of scrambling to find the cash.

She also said something I’d never heard in Mau’s many accounts of the story. The kidnappers, she told me, had demanded nearly 1 million pesos, or about $60,000. To cover the payment, she said, Mau’s older brother had been forced to sell his house.

Mau had mentioned before that his family had made extortion payments, but he’d always presented this as a minor detail. The money was not, in his telling, what saved him; it was his own triumph on the football field. Taken aback, I asked her to repeat herself. I glanced at Ulises, who had an inscrutable look on his face.

After we hung up, Ulises spoke. “That’s a good brother,” he told Mau. “He saved you, man.” Mau seemed to stiffen at the comment.

Mau had promised to take us to the street where he’d been kidnapped. Before we left, he went to use the bathroom, and for the first time I looked around the apartment.

The walls were crowded with Olympic paraphernalia—selfies of Mau in branded warm-ups, medals hanging from nails, what appeared to be a framed letter from the International Olympic Committee certifying his participation in the Games. It was all perplexing. Hadn’t he already admitted to me that he had never actually competed, that his Olympian persona was a social-media performance? He lived here alone—whom was he trying to convince with all this stuff on the walls? In the kitchen, a framed race bib hung near the refrigerator, the kind marathon runners pin to their shirts. To my surprise, it said “Bermúdez”—the last name that the Mexican movie producer had used for Mau. I made a note to ask him about it later.

When we got into the van, Mau blanched. This, he said, was exactly like the vehicle he’d been stuffed into when he was taken. As we drove, he warned us that the neighborhood we were headed to was known “cartel territory”—we would have to be careful. But the street he directed the driver to was in a gentrifying enclave of expats and hipsters with man buns.

We got out, and Mau began narrating his kidnapping, pointing at various landmarks like a tour guide. But nothing about the scene he described made sense here. The street was too narrow and crowded with parked cars to accommodate the five vans he claimed had pulled up to snatch him and dozens of migrants. The block was lined with security cameras and bustling with pedestrians. In the 30 minutes we spent there, I saw multiple police cars roll by.

I kept thinking back to the conversation with Mau’s mother. She certainly didn’t seem like an accomplice in any hoax. Everything about her distress—the wobble in her voice, the tears—had felt sincere. While Adriana led a reluctant-looking Mau to a sunny corner of the street to take his portrait, I pulled Ulises aside and asked what he made of the mother’s testimony. Maybe Mau was embellishing his story, I said, but it certainly seemed to me that his family really had made those extortion payments.

Ulises responded by asking what I knew about “self-kidnapping.” The practice—people staging their own abduction to extract money from relatives—had become such an epidemic in Mexico, he told me, that the government had begun cracking down with tougher sentences and public-service announcements warning that it was a serious crime.

“I think he stole that money,” Ulises said quietly.

I looked over at Mau, who had dropped his coquettish act and was now preening for the camera. I wondered, for the first time, if I was dealing with a very different kind of man than I had allowed myself to believe.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Mau’s girlfriend, Nancy, a physician who met him on Bumble, said her view of Mexico was transformed by hearing about the cartel tournament.

I met Mau’s girlfriend, Nancy, at a café near the clinic where she worked as a doctor. She was slim and pretty, with wavy dyed-red hair and an assortment of tasteful bracelets adorning her wrists. She’d grown up in the city in an upper-middle-class family, gone to private school, and spent a year living in the U.S. as a teenager, where she honed her English, before returning home for medical school at one of the country’s most respected public universities.

She told me she’d met Mau on Bumble a year earlier. She was drawn by the impressive claims in his bio—that he’d visited at least 100 countries and spoke seven languages. “I was captured by that,” said Nancy, an aspiring globe-trotter herself.

Early in their relationship, Mau told her that he’d been kidnapped by a cartel, but he didn’t talk much about his captivity at first. Details trickled out over time—the torture, the tournament, the VIP audience. Once, while she was watching her favorite news anchor, Mau pointed at the TV and said, “He was there.” She was shocked—she had always trusted the anchor’s reporting. “How could he be there? How could he know that, and not tell about it?” she remembered thinking. On another night, a well-known politician appeared on TV, and Mau told her that he, too, had attended the tournament.

Nancy came to feel as though she didn’t know her own city, her own country. The Mexico of her childhood had been replaced by shadowy figures and conspiracies of silence—a malevolence that lurked in places she’d passed a thousand times. She recalled driving one afternoon with Mau in the passenger seat when he’d suddenly tensed up. He told her this was the street where he’d been abducted.

“Here?” she’d exclaimed, in disbelief.

I asked her where it was. The neighborhood she named was miles away from the spot that Mau had taken us to.

It was clear to me that Nancy was genuinely in love with Mau. (When I conferred later with Ulises and Adriana, they agreed.) She said she was glad to be there for him as he processed the trauma of his captivity. They had built a tender and adventurous life together. She traveled with him around the world, and nursed his injuries. (One day, as she was running her fingers along his cheek, she felt the ridge of an old fracture that had never properly healed.) She also helped him work through old grievances with his family. Mau had never gotten along with them, she said. His mother had favored his brother, doting on him while treating Mau as an afterthought. “His mother is not very nice to him,” Nancy told me. She had not met his family and didn’t want to: “I can’t stand that someone is that mean to him.”

I asked Nancy what Mau did for a living—a question I’d somehow never gotten a clear answer to.

She responded as if the answer were obvious: He was a runner for the U.S. Olympic team. She went on to gush about his athletic accomplishments—how most runners retired well before their late 30s, and how, defying the odds, he was determined to make it to the Summer Games in Los Angeles. “If he can get to 2028, that would be almost a record at his age!” As her eyes gleamed with pride, my stomach sank.

Before we left, I asked Nancy what she thought about Mau’s prospective Hollywood deal. She said that Mau had told her all about Reynolds, and Peña, and the development of the script. Ulises asked: Would she be a character in the movie?

Nancy laughed self-consciously and cast her eyes downward. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, clearly embarrassed by how much the idea pleased her. “He told me yeah, I might.”

One thing that Mau had told me was undeniable: The missing-persons posters were omnipresent in Mexico City. Once you saw them, they were impossible to miss—on buses, on street corners, at subway entrances. At the center of the city, there was a traffic rotary known locally as “the roundabout of the disappeared,” plastered with hundreds of faces. The government, eager to project an image of calm and security, had begun scraping the posters off the wall, but mothers returned every day to put them back up. More than 130,000 people are currently listed as missing in Mexico, a number that has roughly tripled in the past decade.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Images of missing persons, many of whom have been kidnapped by the cartels, are omnipresent in Mexico City.

One evening, Ulises, Adriana, and I drove to an upscale shopping mall, where Mamers had suggested we meet. I had messaged him on WhatsApp earlier that day to ask if I could bring a photographer. He agreed on the condition that she not take pictures of his face—for a former cartel hit man risking his life to tell his story, anonymity was essential for survival. To keep a low profile, he told me, he’d be wearing a hat and sunglasses.

But when I spotted him as we descended the escalator into the mall’s atrium, I almost laughed out loud: He was dressed like a caricature of a tough-guy sicario—oversize sunglasses, a tight blue tank top stretched across his bulging chest, a gold chain around his neck.

We sat down at a table outside a coffee shop, and I asked Mamers to tell his version of the story from the beginning. He related the events in a steady voice, without embroidery or visible self-regard. He recalled meeting Mau in the prison for the first time and taking pity on him—a soft, bewildered naïf who clearly had no idea what kind of world he’d been dropped into. He described the members of their team: El Diablo, the taxi driver, the perverted old lawyer. He recounted the day of the tournament, the gymnasium in the mountains, the bands and the monster trucks and the VIPs in the stands.

“People from different political parties, different criminal organizations in the same place hanging out,” he said at one point, switching briefly to English. “I was like, What the fuck? ”

I asked him why he was telling his story now—wasn’t he afraid?

Mamers said he’d taken precautions. He had moved to a different part of the city and grown a beard to avoid recognition. He was out of the cartel game, he told me, and now worked in construction. He wanted a different life.

He’d agreed to the interview largely out of loyalty to Mau. Befriending an innocent person who had been victimized by a cartel had forced him to reckon with his own complicity. For years, he said, he had done his employers’ violent bidding without giving it much thought. Watching Mau endure it had unsettled him—and he wanted people to know what was going on in his country.

“I’m proud to be Mexican,” he said, “but Mexico is sick.”

When the meeting ended, we said goodbye to Mamers and walked out of the mall in a quiet daze.

Adriana broke the silence. “That was a mindfuck,” she said. Ulises nodded. “I think,” he said carefully, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say, “that maybe something did happen to them.”

I agreed. Whatever else was going on with Mau, Mamers’s story seemed too detailed, too internally consistent, too mundanely specific to dismiss as a fabrication for my benefit. When I checked in with my editor that night, I told him that I wasn’t quite so sure anymore that this was all a hoax.

Before going to bed, I started watching The Maltese Falcon in my hotel room. I felt a certain self-aggrandizing kinship with Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade as he groped his way from one deception to another—each revelation rearranging the pieces without clarifying the picture, the truth always just out of reach.

But I couldn’t shake the sneaking suspicion—though I tried to repress it—that in Mau’s story, I was not the shrewd, enterprising detective, but a mark.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Mamers, who describes himself as a former hit man, corroborated Mau’s account of competing for their lives together while imprisoned by the cartel.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

“Pedro,” a member of La Unión Tepito cartel, told grisly stories of kidnapping and mutilation—but said he’d never heard of any cartel tournament.

La Unión Tepito sprouted in 2009 from a massive open-air market in one of Mexico City’s most dangerous neighborhoods. It presented itself at first as a kind of neighborhood watch, in which young men from Tepito provided security, for a fee, to local vendors worried about larger cartels. The arrangement grew into a profitable protection racket, and La Unión Tepito soon expanded into narcotics and kidnapping. Ulises had told me that we’d need to be careful when we visited the market—no loitering, no pictures. But as we wound our way through the crowded maze of vendor stalls hawking counterfeit Gucci bags and black-market smartphones, I saw few obvious signs of organized crime. It wasn’t until we slipped some cash to a shopkeeper who let us climb a hidden ladder in the back to a secluded rooftop overlooking the market’s expanse that Ulises spoke freely: Those men zipping through the market on motorized scooters, he told me, were likely employees of the cartel.

Through one of Ulises’s contacts, we’d arranged to meet a low-level employee of La Unión Tepito, a young man who asked me to call him Pedro. We sat with him at a plastic table in an alleyway a few blocks from the market. He wore a flamboyant tracksuit embroidered with a gold dragon that belied his flat, affectless demeanor. He told me he’d started working for “the organization”—the preferred term for the cartel among its members—when he was about 16, following his father, a leader in La Unión, into the family business. He was now in his early 20s and served in a supervisory role.

I asked Pedro how a typical cartel kidnapping worked. He walked me through the logistics in a matter-of-fact monotone, as if he were explaining how to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture.

“First you study the person who is going to be kidnapped, then you go do the job,” he said. “They’re taken to a safe house. The family is contacted and a ransom is demanded. If the family doesn’t agree, then they start with the mutilation until the family complies.”

Mutilation? I glanced at Ulises to make sure I’d heard his translation correctly. He gave me a look that suggested I not seek elaboration.

I decided to tell Pedro why I was there. I’d heard a story, I told him—without using names or excessive identifying information—about a man who’d been kidnapped by La Unión and forced to compete in an intercartel sports tournament. I painted the picture for him as Mau had painted it for me—cartel bosses from Sinaloa and Jalisco in the stands, politicians and celebrities placing bets.

Pedro, who had been stone-faced throughout our interview, smirked. “Like a movie,” he said.

He told me that he had never heard of such a tournament, and that it went against everything he knew about how the cartel operated. Kidnapping, he explained, was a risky business. Hold on to a victim for too long, and the chances that he escapes or someone comes looking for him grow. La Unión rarely kept a victim for any length of time—if the extortion payments didn’t come, they’d simply get rid of him. Scooping up scores of people and holding them for months in some kind of remote training facility would be too dangerous.

As we made our way back to the hotel, my phone buzzed with an email notification from someone in New York. After I’d seen the Bermúdez race bib hanging on Mau’s wall, I’d done another round of Google searches on his name. Buried in an American court database was an opaque legal filing suggesting that a man named Mauricio Morales Bermúdez was involved in some kind of criminal case in Mexico. On a whim, I’d sent cold emails to several of the people named in the document. Now one of them wanted to talk.

When I reached him by phone later that day, he asked for anonymity to discuss ongoing proceedings. Then he told me the story.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

The area around Tepito market, in Mexico City, is largely controlled by La Unión Tepito cartel.

In 2010, according to several sources and allegations made in court documents, Mauricio Morales Bermúdez opened the Mexican office of the Non-Violence Project Foundation, a Switzerland-based nonprofit best known for its “knotted gun” logo. The foundation, with offices in multiple countries and a dazzling slate of celebrity “ambassadors” (Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, Lionel Messi), made for an impressive résumé line. It also gave Mau entry into an elite segment of Mexican society.

Through a fundraising auction for Non-Violence Project Mexico in 2013, Mau met Alejandro Martínez, a wealthy, well-connected labor-union leader in Mexico City. Martínez, a trained musician and lifelong Beatles obsessive, was intrigued by some of the rare items up for bid: guitars signed by Eric Clapton and George Harrison, a ukulele bearing McCartney’s name, and—most tantalizing—a T-shirt that had belonged to John Lennon, signed by all four Beatles. Martínez submitted bids on multiple items, and won more of them than he’d expected. Soon after that, he received an email from Mau, who introduced himself as the organization’s director.

In 2015, Mau invited Martínez to an event in Arizona on Super Bowl weekend. There would be a flag-football exhibition featuring celebrities and former NFL players, and then, as a valued donor, Martínez would attend the big game on Sunday. Martínez, thrilled, accepted the invitation.

The exhibition was as advertised. Miguel Herrera, then the coach of Mexico’s national soccer team, ran plays in the huddle; TV personalities from Univision and Fox Sports posed for photos with fans. Mau moved easily among them all—hugging athletes, greeting journalists, navigating the game as if the stars were old friends. Martínez would later remember thinking that Mau was a natural salesman. He even joked that Mau should come work for him.

But when Martínez tried to claim his Super Bowl ticket, he was told there wasn’t one waiting for him; he ended up having to watch the game from a bar. He flew back to Mexico livid, and wrote to the organization to complain.

A few days later, Martínez began receiving contrite emails from an executive at Non-Violence Project Mexico. She apologized profusely for the Super Bowl mishap and said the organization wanted to make it up to him. Soon Yoko Ono herself was emailing him, on behalf of the foundation, offering him a special investment opportunity, available to VIP donors, that would guarantee a return of 50 percent.

The pitch was seductive. The union would receive not only a sizable return, but also anti-violence workshops for its members, and an array of perks for Martínez: a trip to the World Cup, concert tickets, and meet and greets with the foundation’s celebrity “ambassadors.” It sounded like an incredible deal. Martínez and Ono both signed the contract, and Martínez wired $200,000 to the organization.

At first, the arrangement worked as promised. Trainers led workshops for Martínez’s union in Mexico. Packages of memorabilia arrived—soccer jerseys signed by Pelé, Maradona, and Messi; NFL helmets covered in the signatures of Super Bowl MVPs; game balls from European championship matches. Martínez traveled with his family to a concert in California where McCartney and the Rolling Stones played on the same bill, and also got tickets to multiple Super Bowls.

Martínez ended up wiring about $700,000 to the organization. But the promised financial returns never materialized.

When Martínez began asking pointed questions about how the nonprofit planned to produce such returns, he got evasive answers about corporate sponsors and VIP boxes donated by FIFA.

Eventually, the perks dried up. The workshops ceased. In Russia for the World Cup, Martínez discovered that his hotel reservation was missing and his game tickets weren’t available under his name. By the time he flew home, he no longer trusted anyone associated with the organization.

He hired a team of lawyers and private investigators. Together, they pieced together an elaborate—and almost comically audacious—scheme. Those emails signed by Yoko Ono? They weren’t written by her; her signature on the contract was a forgery. That shirt signed by all of the Beatles? Almost certainly fake. And the union money Martínez had wired for its “investment”? It had landed in a bank account controlled by Mauricio Morales Bermúdez.

Martínez’s lawyers contacted the Non-Violence Project Foundation in Switzerland to alert the group that it had a con man in its midst. But instead of offering to help sort things out, foundation executives sent back a series of strange, contradictory responses. (The foundation later disavowed some of the people who had written to Martínez, and said that key signatures and emails appeared to be fake. The foundation did not respond to detailed questions from The Atlantic, but in a statement it said that Bermúdez was never an official employee and that Non-Violence Project Mexico was a “separate and independent” nonprofit entity.)

The more Martínez’s lawyers dug into the foundation, the more suspicious he became that it might be involved in Mau’s scam. The fake employees who had pitched the investment had all somehow managed to use official @nonviolence.com email addresses. Some celebrities featured on the foundation’s website, meanwhile, said they had not authorized the use of their names or images. And an outfit calling itself the Non-Violence Project USA had been linked in press reports to a Medicaid-fraud scheme.

Martínez filed a legal complaint on behalf of the union naming both Mau and Non-Violence Project Mexico. Mau, seeming to catch wind of the investigation, left the country. For several months, according to private investigators hired by Martínez, he traveled around Europe, apparently using some of the union money to cover the cost of his jet-setting.

Finally, Mau came back to Mexico, where authorities turned up outside his apartment with a warrant. They arrested him for fraud on February 9, 2023—the same day he would later tell his friends, his girlfriend, and me that he had been kidnapped by a cartel. According to legal records, he spent 18 months in prison awaiting trial; he was released after promising to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and to cooperate in a fraud investigation against the Non-Violence Project Foundation. (In its statement, the foundation denied responsibility for the alleged fraud and said that it is “not a party to any legal proceedings” connected to Martínez’s claims against Bermúdez. Martínez declined to comment.)

Mau did his time at Reclusorio Sur, a men’s penitentiary near the mountains on the southern edge of Mexico City. Also awaiting trial in the prison was a small-time businessman who’d been accused of fraud and the theft of a bicycle. His full name was Edgar Omar González Giffard, but most people inside the prison called him Mamers.

Adriana Loureiro Fernández for The Atlantic

Mau, photographed in August at the spot where he said he’d been kidnapped by La Unión Tepito

On my last day in Mexico City, I asked Mau to meet me at a park near his apartment. Given the conversation I knew we needed to have, it felt unwise to go back to his home. We chose a concrete table with a built-in chessboard, surrounded by trees and low shrubs. Mau wore a yellow track jacket with ROCKY stitched across the chest.

Shortly after we sat down, I pulled up his mug shot on my phone. Turning the screen toward him, I asked, “Is this you?”

Mau didn’t flinch or scoff or reflexively start making denials. He just paused as his eyes scanned the image. I could almost see him processing this new development—testing the angles, deciding how to respond.

Determined to maintain control of the conversation, I plowed ahead, reading off the details that accompanied the photo: the fraud complaint, the sums of money, the name on the arrest warrant.

“You were arrested the same day you told everyone you were taken by the cartel, right?” I asked.

Unflustered, he began to tell me a new story. Yes, he said, he’d been arrested—but my timeline was wrong. He’d been arrested in 2022, a year before he was taken by the cartel.

And the arrest warrant that stated clearly he’d been taken into custody in February 2023? I asked.

It must have been doctored, he told me. Very powerful people were involved. He was the victim of a conspiracy—caught between a politically connected union and a corrupt international NGO whose bidding he had been forced to do. He said he could explain everything, but it would have to be off the record—he couldn’t be sure of his safety otherwise. I heard the familiar refrain of his pitch returning: What you don’t understand about Mexico …

But I was tired of Mau’s stories.

I asked him if he had stolen the money his family had paid for his ransom.

“No, obviously not,” he said.

And James Winston—he wasn’t a real person, was he?

Mau insisted that he was.

Realizing that we weren’t going to get anywhere, I stood up to leave. Before we parted, I asked if he could send me the case file from his arrest—the documents that would establish the timeline and basic facts of what he’d been charged with.

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “I need to talk to my lawyer.”

Something in his demeanor had changed. It was as if he’d flicked off a switch. The likable, self-effacing man I’d been talking with for months had withdrawn, and in his place was someone colder, more distant. His mark had gotten wise—it was time to move on.

I said goodbye and made my way up the hill toward the park’s exit, looking back for one last glimpse at Mau. He was heading in the opposite direction, shoulders slightly hunched, staring down at his phone, his thumbs moving quickly across the screen.

When I got back to my hotel that night, I called Robert Reynolds to break the news that the story he’d wanted so badly to adapt for the screen wasn’t true after all. He sounded genuinely shocked.

“Wow,” Reynolds said, almost as if to himself. “He seemed like such a good guy.”

Did he? I found myself wondering about that now. Had Mau’s performance really been so compelling? Or was his story just exciting enough, just potentially profitable enough, just flattering enough to American sensibilities and preconceptions, that Reynolds and I and everyone else had simply wanted too badly to believe it?

In retrospect, it seemed absurd that I’d ever taken Mau so seriously. As more of the pieces fell into place following my discovery of his arrest and imprisonment, he looked less like a heroic survivor or even a mastermind hoax artist, and more like a low-level scammer with a talent for improvisation. That email from the high-ranking UN official asking Reynolds for Killers tickets for a beloved volunteer? It was signed by Filippo Grandi, then the UN high commissioner for refugees, whose office confirmed that it was a forgery. (Mau denied writing it himself.) Those messages from movie producers who had somehow caught wind of the story I was writing? It turns out Mau was stringing along multiple filmmakers—the producer in Mexico told me they were on the verge of signing an “exclusive” contract with him.

And yet, I still couldn’t say definitively that he’d invented his account out of whole cloth. In the course of my reporting, I learned about interprison sports tournaments, including a football competition, organized by the Mexico City penitentiary system. It is well established that the cartels have a presence in the country’s prisons—was it possible that Mau’s fantastical story of heroism and life-and-death stakes was rooted in his own less cinematic, less blood-drenched experience as a regular prison inmate? Then there was the mystery of Mamers’s “disappearance.” Late last year, Mamers went dark on social media and, Mau said, stopped responding to his messages. My own attempts to contact him were also unsuccessful. Mau told Reynolds that his old friend was dead, most likely taken out by a cartel. Maybe he’d just gone to ground. In a country with 130,000 missing people, I suspected I would never know for sure.

In the months after I left Mexico, the news in my own country would be dominated by ICE raids and mass deportations—a hard-line immigration agenda built on the stories we are told about crime and migrants and cartel bosses. When the death of a drug lord in February set off a brutal wave of cartel attacks, the United States canceled flights to resort cities and issued shelter-in-place alerts for Americans in Mexico. Mau’s account of the cartel Olympics fit neatly into the governing narrative of the age, one that imagines a permanent, untamable dystopia just beyond America’s southern border.

Some stories take on a life of their own because they show how things really are. Others spread because they tell us what we already believe. And sometimes a story that’s too good to be true is just that.

But a good story is a hard thing to kill.

Two weeks after my return from Mexico City, Reynolds called me.

“Dude,” he said breathlessly. “I just talked to Michael Peña.” He had filled the actor in on the latest developments—Mau’s deception, my investigation, the whole ridiculous misadventure—and Peña saw potential. “He said he loves this even more than the original story!” The movie was back on.

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics.”

Sucker

2026-03-12T06:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Tyler Comrie

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On a Thursday evening in September, I excused myself from the family dinner table and slipped into my bedroom. I didn’t want my kids to see what I was about to do.

With the door locked behind me, I pulled out my phone and downloaded the DraftKings betting app. I felt a certain thrill as I typed in my debit-card information and deposited $500. The first game of the NFL season was a few minutes away. Anything seemed possible.

I am not, by temperament, a gambling man. As a suburban dad with four kids, a mortgage, and a minivan, I’m more likely to be found wrestling a toddler into a car seat than scouring moneylines or consulting betting touts. And as a practicing Mormon, I am prohibited from indulging in games of chance. Besides, I had always thought of gambling as a waste of time. This makes me an outlier among my generational peers: Since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports, and roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sportsbook.

When I set out to report on the sports-betting industry—its explosive growth, its sudden cultural ubiquity, and what it’s doing to America—my editors thought I should experience the phenomenon firsthand. Mindful of my religious constraints, they proposed a work-around: The Atlantic would stake me $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season. The magazine would cover any losses, and—to ensure my ongoing emotional investment—split any winnings with me, 50–50. Surely God would approve of such an arrangement, my editors reasoned, because I wouldn’t be risking my own hard-earned money.

This spiritual loophole intrigued me. But for the sake of my soul, I decided I’d better consult a higher ecclesiastical authority than The Atlantic’s masthead.

A few days later, I sat across from my bishop, explaining the experiment and watching a look of pastoral concern come over his face. After some consideration, he said (a bit tentatively, if I’m being honest), “I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.” He grasped the difference between gambling with my own money and using my employer’s for research purposes. But he had also seen too many lives wrecked by vice to let me leave without a warning. He told me stories he’d heard about upstanding family men who had let an initially modest gambling habit ruin them, and a cautionary tale about a churchgoing lawyer who developed an unhealthy curiosity about sex work after handling a prostitution case and wound up devastating his family.

I promised the bishop that I would steer clear of slippery slopes. “This will really just be a journalistic exercise,” I assured him.

Fifteen minutes before kickoff, I scrolled through the available wagers on DraftKings in wide-eyed bewilderment. Struggling to make sense of the terminology—Profit boosts? Alternative spreads?—I punched in bets almost at random. I bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by at least nine points, based on the sophisticated premise that the Eagles had won the previous Super Bowl and the Cowboys had not. I placed a bet that Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts would throw for more than 200 yards, and wagered on something called a “same-game parlay” that would pay out if both Hurts and running back Saquon Barkley scored touchdowns.

Then, after tucking in my kids for the night, I turned on the TV in our bedroom and settled in next to my wife, Annie.

Watching the game was unexpectedly stressful. Toggling among my five different bets—monitoring their progress, weighing live “cash out” options—left me feeling harried and sweaty. Four seconds into the game, I got a taste of the capriciousness of the enterprise when the Eagles’ best defender inexplicably spit on the Cowboys’ quarterback and got himself ejected. Had the Eagles’ chances of beating the spread, and my chances at winning $75, just been expectorated away?

But the experience was also strangely mesmerizing. For 200 bucks, I had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game I had no reason to care about. I kept watching even after a weather delay pushed it late into the night, scrolling frenetically next to my sleeping wife in search of angles to exploit with late-game bets. Most of my bets ended up losing, but the long-shot Hurts-Barkley parlay hit, and when the game ended, I calculated that I was up $20.

The next morning, I proudly shared the news with Annie, who high-fived me and immediately began to fantasize about how we would spend my winnings for the season. Could we replace our dying KitchenAid mixer? Remodel the kitchen pantry? Like so many wives before her, she had looked upon my foray into sports gambling with a bemused air of exasperation; now she was seeing a potential upside.

I laughed at her sudden enthusiasm—but I was starting to get ideas myself. I had made $20 on my very first night of gambling. Scale up the wager sizes, multiply across all 272 games in the NFL season, throw in some NBA and college football, and I stood to make—what, $10,000? $20,000? More?

I knew, of course, that I wouldn’t win every bet. But I didn’t see the harm in dreaming. As Annie and I traded home-improvement fantasies, I tried my best not to dwell on the last thing the bishop had said to me: “Be careful.”

Ever since the advent of sports, humans have found ways to lose money gambling on them. Ancient Greeks wagered on the (occasionally rigged) early Olympic Games; Romans bet on chariot races and gladiatorial contests (also sometimes rigged). When 17th‑century settlers arrived in North America, they encountered Native tribes placing high‑stakes bets on “little brother of war,” a precursor to lacrosse.

Throughout most of America’s history, gambling was heavily regulated and generally discouraged. In 1631, Puritans banned games of chance in Plymouth Colony “under pain of punishment.” In 1794, a Pennsylvania law prohibited “cockfighting, cards, dice, billiards, bowling, shuffleboard, horse racing, or any other type of gambling.”

Laws varied by state and century, but the practice always came with a healthy social stigma, one rooted in millennia of accumulated wisdom. To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling: “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.” As a result, gambling was largely contained to certain disreputable corners of society, such as riverboats, red‑light districts, and Nevada. For a time, it was the near‑exclusive province of leg‑breaking bookies and pin-striped criminals. Later, Native American reservations and offshore bookmakers got in on the action.

But professional sports leagues remained determined to keep gambling at a distance. High-profile scandals—the White Sox World Series fix in 1919, the Mafia-instigated point-shaving scheme at Boston College in 1978—had convinced commissioners that betting posed an existential threat to organized sports. In June 1990, officials from the major U.S. leagues testified before the Senate. Paul Tagliabue, then the NFL commissioner, captured their shared assessment: “Nothing has done more to despoil the games Americans play and watch than widespread gambling on them.”

Two years later, Congress passed the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which effectively banned most sports betting outside Nevada. It remained the law of the land for decades.

Then, in 2012, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, hoping to boost Atlantic City’s flagging economy, signed a bill expanding sports betting to licensed locations in his state. The leagues sued New Jersey, and the case began winding its way through the federal courts. When I spoke with him recently, Christie recalled the thundering indignation that his bill provoked at the time. He was once cornered at an event by Bill Bradley, the former Knicks player turned senator, and NBA Commissioner David Stern, who both shouted at him so loudly that other attendees started to gawk. “I’m not an animal to be bet on, like a horse,” Bradley scolded Christie. “We’re going to come after you with everything we’ve got,” Stern warned.

“You know what, David?” Christie recalled telling Stern. “After I win this thing—and I’m going to win it—you’re going to thank me.”

G. K. Chesterton once wrote about two people who encounter a fence erected across a road. One of them demands that it be torn down; the wiser of the two responds that they should find out why it was put there in the first place before deciding on a course of action.

By 2018, Christie’s case had landed before the Supreme Court, which overturned the federal ban on sports betting. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, made no effort to consider the public-policy rationale that had led Congress to make the law, or the cascading consequences of overturning it. He simply ruled that the Constitution empowers states, not the federal government, to regulate gambling, and scrapped the entire legal framework that had been in place for the past quarter century. No one involved—not Alito; nor the five justices who joined him; nor the legislators in 36 states who would legalize sports betting for their constituents; nor the league commissioners, who would rush into partnerships with online sportsbooks—seemed acquainted with Chesterton’s fence.

Practically overnight, we took an ancient vice—long regarded as soul-rotting and civilizationally ruinous—put it on everyone’s phone, and made it as normal and frictionless as checking the weather. What could possibly go wrong?

Week Two

Total gambled: $376.00
Down $58.15

If I was going to do this, I decided, I would need a gambling guru—someone to talk me through the basics of sound sports betting (if such a thing existed) and teach me best practices.

The obvious choice was Nate Silver, America’s most famous statistics nerd. Silver first made a name for himself as the founder of 538, an election-forecasting website that accurately predicted the winner of all 50 states in the 2012 presidential campaign. A few years ago, Silver, citing a midlife crisis and political fatigue, discarded the pundit suits, threw on a baseball cap, and started writing more about gambling. He launched a newsletter full of sophisticated sports-betting models and wrote a book about the psychology of successful gamblers. He estimates that he has netted in the “mid–six figures” over the course of his gambling life. If anyone could turn me into a respectable bettor, I figured, it was him.

Before our first call, I sheepishly sent Silver my week-one bet slips. After that first triumphant game, things had gone downhill. Scrolling through DraftKings’ offerings, I had turned into a little kid at a carnival, emptying my parents’ wallet into any ring toss or high striker that caught my eye. I’d taken fliers on games without doing any research, and placed live bets on whatever ESPN happened to be showing when I turned on the TV. On Saturday afternoon, while casually watching a random college-football game with my brother, I bet $10 that the point total wouldn’t go over 52.5, lost, tried to make my money back with a new bet that it wouldn’t go over 61.5, and lost that one too. Of the 14 wagers I’d placed in my first week, I’d won three.

Silver pulled up my slips when we got on the phone, and began to audibly react as he scrolled:

“Okay …”

“Oh.”

“Oh no.” He started laughing.

Is it possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver? Apparently, yes.

Perhaps sensing my humiliation, he tried to soften his assessment. “Look, the nice way to put it is that you’re betting like a recreational bettor.” I took this as a withering insult.

Silver laid out some basic realities of the sports-betting economy. The books effectively charge you about 4.5 percent for every bet you place, he explained, which means it isn’t enough to win 50.1 percent of the time; you have to win 52.5 percent of your bets just to break even, and that’s before taxes. My most obvious mistake, he said, was that I was using only DraftKings. To find edges, I would need to shop for lines across at least three or four books every week.

He gave me other tips, too: Avoid “prop bets” on individual players (Josh Allen to rush for more than 50 yards) and multi-leg parlays, which pay out only if every outcome hits (the Chiefs cover the spread, the Ravens win, and the Chargers score more than 24 points). Props and parlays are how sportsbooks generate most of their profits. “They’re suckers’ bets,” Silver said, which made sense, given that I had already placed several of them.

Live betting—placing wagers in the middle of games—was also a bad idea, he told me, because it leads to gambling based on emotion more than logic. Also, televised games are broadcast on a delay, which means the sportsbooks can adjust lines before you even see what has happened on the field. You are, in effect, betting against people who live 20 seconds in the future.

To guard against emotional betting, Silver suggested a Tuesday-morning ritual: I should sit in a quiet place, study the lines for that week’s games, gather information on injury reports and weather forecasts, and then place $100 bets on the six or seven games I liked best.

Before we hung up, I asked Silver what kind of profit would make it a successful season for me.

He seemed confused by the question. “If you make one penny, that would be better than 98 percent of people over an entire season,” Silver answered, as if this were obvious.

I was taken aback. Hadn’t Silver himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling? Yes, he said, but that was mostly from poker tournaments. Sports betting was a game of razor-thin margins and microscopic edges. NFL football was among the hardest sports to win money on—the lines were too sharp, the teams too evenly matched. Silver told me that, even with his quantish models and prognosticatory brilliance, he would consider it cause to celebrate if he broke even on the season.

Intellectually, I understood what he was saying. But some part of me didn’t believe him. Somehow, I was still convinced that I could beat the odds.

Illustration by Tyler Comrie. Source: Mitchell Layton / Getty.

There is something unsettling about the suddenness with which gambling became omnipresent in American sports.

Turn on any game, on any channel, at any time of day, and you are likely to be bombarded with neon-soaked, star-studded ads for sports-betting apps: Jamie Foxx stalking a Bellagio suite, phoning Wayne Gretzky, Kevin Garnett, and Barry Sanders for betting tips. Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Hart hyping new-customer bonuses for DraftKings. Hall of Famers who would have been selling sneakers and Wheaties a generation ago are now getting paid millions of dollars to lure 21-year-olds into online casinos.

Virtually every sports-media outlet in America, from CBS Sports to your favorite niche football podcaster, takes sponsorship money from gambling companies. ESPN now recaps the day’s games by covering which teams beat the spread; gambling talk pervades pregame studio panels. Every major TV network now seems to employ a data whiz with glasses and rolled-up sleeves who can break down the betting angles for viewers at home.

The leagues, initially so opposed to legalized sports betting, embraced it to help reverse sliding TV ratings and lure back the younger fans who were drifting away. Before long, they found themselves beholden to the industry they’d helped create. Now the NFL, the NBA, and MLB all have large equity stakes in the data companies that power the sportsbooks. They license broadcast rights directly to sportsbook-operated streaming services, and hurry to defend their partners whenever a game-fixing scandal breaks. “Gambling touches everything,” the former ESPN reporter Joon Lee recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “The betting apps are in charge now, and everyone knows it. The leagues are hostage to the forces they unleashed.”

In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion—and once you’re hooked, the list of sporting events you can gamble on is seemingly endless. Unsatisfied with wagering only on Sunday football games? Not to worry: How would you like to bet on an Indian cricket match, or Lithuanian Ping-Pong, or a Polish soccer game in a league whose name you can’t pronounce? In 2023, an offshore book called BetOnline briefly allowed people to gamble on the Special Olympics. The plan ran aground when athletes were apparently awarded identical medals in the same event—the Special Olympics is not, strictly speaking, about winners and losers—and bettors revolted after their payouts were delayed. A spokesperson for BetOnline acknowledged to the New York Post that grading the Special Olympics had been “more challenging than we expected.”

Now, with the rise of “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket, gambling options are no longer limited to sports. Live-betting odds have been featured on the Golden Globes telecast and CNN’s election coverage. In 2026, you can gamble on how warm it will get in Los Angeles tomorrow, and the winner of the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and how much money Avatar: Fire and Ash will gross, and the date of Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Time magazine’s Person of the Year, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life being discovered, and how many people will be deported from the United States, and the prospect of Iranian regime change, and the chances that Donald Trump declares martial law before his term ends, and whether Jesus Christ will return to Earth this year.

In remarkably short order, gambling has permeated every nook and cranny of American life. (If this strikes you as apocalyptic, the odds for the Second Coming currently stand at 23 to 1.)

Week Three

Total gambled: $1,011.00
Down $185.40

In late September, my family piled into our Honda Odyssey and drove to Greenville, North Carolina, for the Brigham Young–East Carolina football game. Like any good father, I had made a project in recent years of indoctrinating my young kids in the sports fandom of my alma mater. We rolled up to the BYU tailgate party—fancy bespoke sodas instead of beer; a canned-food drive in place of keg stands—and spent the hours before the game eating barbecue and taking pictures with Cosmo, the beloved Cougar mascot.

I had decided in advance not to bet on the game—I didn’t need any action in order to be invested in its outcome, and the stress might sour the family experience. But at the tailgate, I met a BYU administrator who told me about how prepared the team was and how the defense would be “locked in.” This was hardly insider information, but it was enough to compel me—an hour before kickoff—to put $100 on BYU to win. When I mentioned this to my 12-year-old daughter, she rolled her eyes. “That’s not very Mormon of you,” she said.

The game was a blast. BYU fans had traveled from all along the East Coast to fill a large section of the stadium. Our defense was indeed locked in, forcing two turnovers and propelling the team to an early lead. By the middle of the third quarter, East Carolina fans were leaving in droves while my kids and I belted the Cougar fight song until we were hoarse: Rise and shout, the Cougars are out!

It was one of those ecstatic family moments—a core memory in the making. And yet, as we sang, I couldn’t quite ward off an intrusive thought: I should have bet BYU to cover the spread. Much better juice.

Week Five

Total gambled: $2,206.00
Down $220.13

By October, I had settled into a rhythm with my betting. Following Silver’s advice, I had downloaded several more sportsbook apps (FanDuel, ESPN Bet) and spent time early each week searching for the most enticing games on the NFL schedule. I kept tabs on roster updates and checked various prediction models.

One of my most valuable resources was a website that aggregated the lines across all sportsbooks and tracked the micro-movements in real time. The differences were minimal, but Silver had told me that exploiting even the tiniest advantage was crucial. If I liked the Seahawks to beat the Buccaneers, one book might have them as four-point favorites, while another would have them at 3.5; one might require me to bet $110 to win an additional $100, while another needed only $106. The books are constantly adjusting their lines to keep users evenly balanced on each side of a given bet, in order to limit the risk of lopsided payouts, which would cut into their profits.

I took a certain perverse pride in my mastery of the lingo and the basic betting math. Scouring the sportsbooks each week for the best lines made me feel like a sharp. But the process could be time-consuming. One rainy evening, I found myself parked outside a big-box store in Northern Virginia where my wife had sent me on an errand, obsessively scavenging for lines on my phone and jotting down favorites in my Notes app. When I looked up, 45 minutes had passed. I would be late for dinner.

Doing all of this homework heightened my investment in the games—but it also conjured something disconcerting and primal in me.

I first noticed it during the fourth quarter of the Cardinals-Titans game that Sunday. The Cardinals had been heavy favorites, and I’d bet on them to win by a touchdown. Early in the fourth quarter, it looked like a win was in the bag. The Cardinals were already up 21–6 when running back Emari Demercado ran for what looked like a game-sealing 72-yard touchdown. But when the referees reviewed the play, they found that Demercado, who had dropped the ball after scoring, had actually let it go half a step before reaching the end zone. The touchdown was reversed, the play was ruled a fumble, and the Titans proceeded to pull off an improbable 16-point comeback to win the game. My money vaporized.

Rewatching clips of Demercado’s fumble, I was filled with an irrational hatred for this person I had never met. I hated the way he sauntered so cavalierly into the end zone. I hated the way he tossed the ball to the ground like a used dish towel in what I’m sure he thought was a cool flex. I hated the way he shrugged off reporters’ questions in the locker room afterward by repeating the same meaningless quote (“Just gotta be smarter”).

The intensity of the feeling, fleeting as it was, unnerved me.

Caroline Garcia doesn’t remember the first abusive message she received from an angry gambler who lost a bet on her, but she knows she was still a teenager.

Garcia, a French tennis player who at her peak was ranked fourth in the world, told me she got so many deranged messages over the years—so many slurs and death threats, so many fuck you s and kill yourself s—that they started to feel like background noise. She recalled the dissonance of receiving the most unhinged message imaginable and then looking at the sender’s wholesome Instagram: “His profile picture is with his kid of 1 year old, and you’re like, I don’t understand—what is the problem with you? ” I felt a twinge of shame as I realized I could empathize with that gambler’s brief spell of insanity more than I’d like to admit.

Garcia, who retired last year, was speaking with me via Zoom from Dubai, where she now lives with her husband. She told me she likes how safe the city feels. More than a decade of death threats from deranged bettors can make you appreciate high-tech security systems and heavily policed streets.

Athletes are no strangers to wrathful comments, of course. But the rise of legal, normalized betting has coincided with an increase in harassment. More than a third of men’s Division I college-basketball players say they’ve received abusive messages from gamblers, and 21 percent of gamblers themselves cop to lashing out at athletes in person or online. The trend makes sense: When a player underperforms, he’s not just letting down his teammates and fans. He’s costing gamblers money. In the adrenaline spike of a tough beat, a bettor loses perspective; the athlete becomes a subhuman extra in the gambler’s personal drama.

Tennis is among the most gambled-on sports in the world. And because it’s primarily an individual game, the frustration of losing bettors lands directly on the players themselves rather than on coaches or whole teams. Garcia, who hosts a podcast called Tennis Insider Club, said players trade tips on how to deal with the abuse. They call law enforcement and hire private security; some of them rely on AI-powered software called Threat Matrix, which monitors and assesses the credibility of menacing messages across platforms.

A few have taken to mocking the misdirected rage. After Gaël Monfils lost in the first round of the Stuttgart Open last year, he posted a “special message” on Instagram for the gamblers who were filling his DMs with racist insults. “Really? You’re still betting on me?” deadpanned Monfils, who at 38 was one of the oldest players on the tour. “You write in that I’m shit. I know I’m shit! We both know I’m shit!”

But even the most easygoing athletes realize that the desperation of a losing bettor can lead to scary places. In 2024, during a fourth-round women’s match at the U.S. Open, in New York City, the official X account for the U.S. Tennis Association received a DM: “I’m inside Louis Armstrong with a bomb that will go off at 1 pm est.” As experts worked to determine the credibility of the threat and the NYPD quietly swept the arena for explosive devices, tournament officials considered evacuating the stadium. Eventually, the message was traced to Strasburg, Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old man had wagered a large sum on the match. When his player fell behind, he tried to disrupt the match and void his bet with a bomb threat. He now faces up to five years in prison.

Before Garcia retired, she told me, she often found herself wondering if a losing gambler’s digital threat would escalate to physical violence. She told herself it was unlikely, but the possibility was always in the back of her mind. “You just hope that he will always stay in messages, and he will never go the next step,” she said. Her eyes drifted to some unseen point off camera. “You never know.”

Week Seven

Total gambled: $3,551.00
Down $567.23

I was surprised at how quickly and extensively the experiment was bleeding into the rest of my life. I was listening to gambling podcasts in the shower and spending my Sunday afternoons watching five football games at a time—one on my phone and four on the TV’s split screen.

I routinely stayed up past midnight scrolling through the apps, my face illuminated in the dark of our bedroom by brightly colored ads for “NO SWEAT BETS” and “SAME GAME PARLAYS.” I impatiently swiped away FanDuel’s “Reality Check” pop-ups, which notified me, in what I took to be a passive-aggressive tone of disapproval, that I was spending quite a lot of time on the platform.

It was now common for my family to catch me furtively tapping in wagers. On one occasion, my 10-year-old son discovered me on my phone in the kitchen pantry, where I’d gone to get snacks for the kids, and announced, “Dad is hiding again!” On another, Annie happened to glance down the pew at church just as I was sneaking a peek at DraftKings. “You’re addicted,” she stage-whispered.

My wife was no longer having fun with this stunt of mine. Having given up on the prospect of a big payday, she was now focused on the more immediately visible consequences of my gambling—like the fact that our 7-year-old daughter knew the difference between a point spread and a moneyline, and that our 10-year-old’s first question whenever I turned on a game was “Who are we betting on?”

Once, Annie overheard me enthusiastically explaining to our kids that if the third leg of my parlay hit, I would win enough money to erase all of my losses for the season. “But gambling is bad,” she shouted from the other room, “and people who do it eventually lose all their money, right?” Her tone of voice suggested that I was bound by marital covenant to endorse this position, which I promptly did.

“I can’t wait for your gambling experiment to be over,” Annie muttered one night as we drove home from a long weekend at my parents’ house. I had been up late the night before, sweating a Texans-Seahawks game that didn’t end until about 1 a.m., and I’d slept in longer than intended, leaving Annie to wrangle the kids by herself all morning. This had become, she noted, a regular occurrence in recent weeks.

“I’m fine with you sleeping in when you’re up late working, but …” Annie began.

“This is for work,” I insisted.

She scoffed. “You don’t have to watch every game you bet on,” she said. “You have no control over the outcome.”

The irrefutability of her point reduced me to indignant sputtering.

In truth, I was beginning to wonder about what Annie had said to me at church. I had always told people that I didn’t have an addictive personality, believing that to be so. Now I had to consider a different possibility: Maybe I had simply constructed a life with strong enough guardrails that I’d never had to test the premise.

What would happen to me, I wondered, if those guardrails were removed?

I met Craig Carton at his Midtown Manhattan studio—faux brick, wood floors, klieg lights—near Madison Square Garden, about an hour before he went on air. Carton was a quintessential sports-media success story, having leveraged his bombastic New York morning show, Boomer and Carton, into a national following, as well as a book deal and a lucrative TV gig.

Now he spends a lot of his time talking to gambling addicts.

Carton hosts a weekly call-in show on WFAN called Hello, My Name Is Craig, in which he interviews recovering gambling addicts. The guests’ stories are invariably bleak. The Wall Street trader who maxed out 15 credit cards and started stealing jewelry from his parents to cover his losses. The father of two whose wife left him when she found out he hadn’t paid the mortgage for two years. The Little League umpire who got so deep in the hole that he decided he would try to win it all back in one trip to Atlantic City or else kill himself.

Carton, a bald, wiry guy with a raspy New York accent, toggles between empathy and razzing his guests—routinely interrupting a confession to bark, “Heard that one before!”

He’s hard on them because he’s been there. “I’m not a therapist,” he told me. “But I can talk to a gambler the way a nongambler can’t. You can’t bullshit me—anything you’ve done in the gambling world, I’ve done times a hundred.”

The story of Carton’s own descent into ruinous gambling addiction is typical: He started out playing low-stakes blackjack and placing modest bets on sporting events. But little by little, the habit consumed him. He began gambling so much that casinos would fly him out to Vegas on private jets and comp his meals and hotel rooms. As his bets got bigger, the losses became harder to conceal. He borrowed, refinanced, moved money around, and lied about it all, until federal agents showed up early one morning in 2017 outside his Tribeca apartment and arrested him for securities and wire fraud. Prosecutors accused him of siphoning millions from a ticket-resale business, and misleading investors, in order to pay off gambling debts. What Carton remembers most vividly from the morning agents handcuffed him to a bench outside his building was the look on his wife’s face when she saw him.

Carton went to rehab in Arizona, spent a year in prison, and, when he got out, started counseling compulsive bettors and speaking at schools about the dangers of gambling addiction. He is overbooked. Since 2018, when the sports-betting ban was overturned, internet searches for phrases like Am I addicted to gambling? have spiked by 25 percent, and calls to gambling helplines from young men have surged. Gamblers Anonymous has reported young men showing up in droves across the country, and one survey found that nearly one-third of 11-year-old boys had gambled in the past year. (The CEO of FanDuel’s parent company, Flutter Entertainment, has spoken enthusiastically about the growth potential provided by the massive, exploitable market of Americans soon to come of age.)

Experts estimate that only about 2 to 5 percent of gamblers will develop compulsive behaviors. But as Carton likes to point out, that small percentage becomes a very large number when tens of millions of Americans suddenly have casinos in their pockets.

Gambling addiction is similar to other addictive disorders, but there are key differences. It’s easier to hide, at least at first—the addict doesn’t have glazed eyes or slurred speech, and no one can smell it on him. Plus, the compounding financial pressure of the habit can quickly turn a private vice into a full-blown crisis. One in five compulsive gamblers will attempt suicide in their life, a higher rate than for any other category of addict.

Executives at the major online sportsbooks are quick to trumpet their commitment to “responsible gaming.” But that purported commitment runs up against an economic reality: As much as 90 percent of the sportsbooks’ revenue comes from less than 10 percent of their users. Their apps seem clearly designed, much like TikTok and Candy Crush, to keep users scrolling and tapping in a hypnotic stupor. If your account is nearing empty, DraftKings will offer a “reload bonus” of gambling credits to entice you to deposit more money; if you’ve gone a couple of days without making a wager, you might get a push alert from FanDuel offering a “no sweat bet,” promising to refund a loss with site credits to be used for more gambling.

When I asked Christian Genetski, the president of FanDuel, about accusations that online sportsbooks prey on problem gamblers, he dismissed the idea as “a bit of a trope.” He said his company goes out of its way to identify and slow down users who exhibit reckless or addictive behaviors. Bettors who start spending more time or money than usual on the app will receive a notification alerting them to the anomaly—hence the Reality Check alerts I had impatiently dismissed. If they disregard too many of these notifications, FanDuel will impose limits on their gambling, and may even shut down their accounts. (An executive at DraftKings told me it has a similar policy.) “We don’t want any revenue from someone that has a gambling problem,” Genetski told me, noting that the platform’s biggest spenders are not necessarily the ones with unhealthy habits. Genetski said that it’s in FanDuel’s long-term interest to keep users gambling at a sustainable rate. “If people are burning out because they are spending beyond their means, they’re not going to be customers for very long.” (“Loss smoothing” is the industry’s term of art for this tactic; gamblers call it “the slow bleed.”)

When Carton sits down with a gambling addict, his first suggestion is to fill out a “self-exclusion” form. Most states that have legalized gambling allow you to submit a document to the government that prohibits online sportsbooks from taking your action for a defined period—the gambling equivalent of Odysseus binding himself to the mast so he can withstand the temptation of the Sirens. (The strategy isn’t fail-safe: After Carton filled out his own self-exclusion form in New Jersey, he received a letter from a brick-and-mortar casino in Atlantic City. “It said something to the effect of ‘We see that you’ve self-excluded from online gaming. Feel free to come in anytime. We’d love to have you.’ ”)

Many of the young men Carton works with started out betting on football games with their dads. The dad, craving a Sunday-afternoon bonding experience, would open the account, make picks with his son, and then split the winnings—while covering the losses himself. “You’re creating these little mini-monsters in gambling who have no idea that there are times you lose, and the money is real,” Carton told me.

Listening to him talk, I became aware of the troubling parallels to my arrangement with The Atlantic. When I mentioned this to him, he chuckled ruefully. “You’re in harm’s way, that’s for sure,” he said.

I asked him, hypothetically, what warning signs a new gambler should watch for, and he rattled off a list of questions. Are you going to sleep and waking up thinking about your bets? Are you staying up late to watch West Coast games with teams whose rosters you know nothing about? Are you “chasing”—making reckless new bets to win back the money you lost? Are you placing bets on your phone in the bathroom so your family doesn’t see you gambling?

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

Week Eight

Total gambled: $5,321.00
Down $132.40

On October 23, the FBI announced the arrests of more than 30 people in a pair of interlocking gambling schemes. The indictments alleged a yearslong mob operation that drew on insider information to manipulate NBA games and win bets. Terry Rozier, while playing for the Charlotte Hornets, was said to have tipped off associates that he would leave a game early with a foot injury, enabling bettors to place more than $200,000 on “under” prop bets for his points, rebounds, and assists. The implicated included NBA players and a retired Hall of Fame point guard turned head coach. (They have pleaded not guilty.)

As I watched the FBI press conference on CNN, my phone pinged with messages from friends and sources who knew about my sports-betting experiment, including one from the governor of Utah: “Really relieved your name didn’t come out in that gambling ring.”

That evening, I had made plans to check out a real-life sportsbook in Washington, D.C. I invited along two friends, Steve and Ryan, who had been following my gambling rumspringa with deep amusement, and were eager to see me in action.

Neither their wives nor mine expressed interest in joining us. This had become something of a pattern since my experiment began—whenever I started talking about gambling with a couple, the woman would almost invariably tune out or recoil, while her husband leaned in attentively, eager to hear more. Neuroscientists have sought to explain this phenomenon. Men are, on average, less psychologically affected by financial loss than women, and more prone to optimism (rational or otherwise) about their financial future; this combination naturally leads to more risk-taking. There are complicated brain-chemistry factors involved that have to do with testosterone, and dopaminergic systems, and kappa-opioid receptors, all of which seem to add up to a Jim Gaffigan joke about how men are morons compared with their wives. Whatever the reason, the gender split is undeniable: Men make up about 70 percent of sports bettors in America and, according to one study, 98 percent of online sports bettors who qualify as “problem gamblers.”

Our plan was to watch the Chargers play the Vikings, along with a couple of NBA games, at the Caesars inside Capital One Arena. But the place was smaller than anticipated and depressingly empty, redolent with the smell of cleaning chemicals, secondhand smoke, and dissatisfaction with life choices. “This feels like the DMV,” Ryan said. We decided to take our business across the Anacostia River to the MGM National Harbor casino, in Maryland.

I approached the counter, eager to show off my newfound gambling prowess to my friends, and confidently told the bored-looking woman in a blazer that I wanted to “put $100 on the Thunder minus 7.5.” I whipped out my debit card, feeling particularly proud of this bit of lingo I’d picked up. “Cash only,” the woman responded, without making eye contact. Chastened, I shuffled over to an ATM that charged me a $9.75 withdrawal fee.

We settled into recliners facing a wall of massive TV screens. I had expected the sportsbook lounge to be more glamorous, more fun, than the apps I’d been using—a classic sports bar on steroids. But the communal experience I craved was curiously absent. Everyone seemed to be paying attention to different games, or rooting for different sub-outcomes within the games. I tried to bond with some guys nearby who, like me, had money on the Chargers. But they were preoccupied with a prop bet, and barely noticed when Justin Herbert completed a perfect 27-yard touchdown pass to Ladd McConkey with 45 seconds left in the first half.

Gambling had made us all care much more about the games, but it had also atomized us—taking the last and purest expression of American monoculture and turning it into a hyper-individualized, every-man-for-himself portfolio of micro-bets.

The Chargers game was a blowout, but the Oklahoma City Thunder went into double overtime against the Indiana Pacers, and I stayed late with Steve to watch the end. My 7.5-point cover looked out of reach until the final seconds of the game, when the Pacers, down six, tried to foul Thunder center Chet Holmgren. Two free throws would have won me the bet, but the referees ignored the foul, and the game ended. Shouts of indignation rang out from disparate quarters of the lounge. I buried my head in my hands while Steve cackled at my misfortune.

“Tough beat, buddy,” he said.

Seeking company in my misery, I pulled up X, where I found a stream of outraged gamblers accusing the referees of fixing the game, perhaps with the aid of the NBA commissioner.

“Clearly they had money on Indiana,” one wrote.

“Disgusted.”

“Adam Silver must resign.”

I am not usually prone to paranoid thinking. But to my surprise, I found myself wondering if these venting gamblers were right. The morning’s indictment lingered in my mind. Had the refs rigged the game? Were league officials involved? What about players? How deep did this thing go?

The NBA gambling ring exposed in October was only the beginning. In November, two MLB players pleaded not guilty after being indicted for manipulating pitches to help bettors. In January, federal prosecutors accused 39 college-basketball players across 17 Division I teams of taking bribes from gamblers to underperform. (The indictment alleges that the scheme began with rigging Chinese professional-basketball games, then spread to the NCAA.) That same month, the Ultimate Fighting Championship canceled a bout after reports of suspicious betting activity.

Taken together, the proliferating scandals have posed the most significant threat to the credibility of organized sports in the U.S. since Shoeless Joe Jackson got paid to help fix the 1919 World Series. One recent poll found that 65 percent of Americans now believe that professional athletes sometimes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes; in another poll, 70 percent of respondents agreed that sports betting “lessens the integrity of the game.”

Gambling apologists argue that the recent revelations are proof that new laws are working—offshore sportsbooks and black-market bookies never coordinated with law enforcement to flag suspicious bets the way FanDuel and DraftKings do now. The cheating isn’t new, this argument goes; it’s just getting discovered and prosecuted more frequently.

Even if that’s true—and some researchers are skeptical—fans’ teetering confidence could become an existential problem. It’s easy to start questioning the legitimacy of what you’re watching on the field or the court, especially when the leagues and the gambling-subsidized sports media both have such clear conflicts of interest. (In October, while ESPN was covering the gambling-ring indictments, producers scrubbed the screen of references to its own online sportsbook.) If trust in the integrity of the game disappears, then interest is likely to follow. Every sport risks becoming professional wrestling—an entertaining spectacle that everyone knows is bogus.

Sports leagues, of course, are not the first American institutions to suffer a crisis of authority in the 21st century. (See also: Wall Street, Congress, the military, the police, the press, etc.) But the recent decline of trust in sports is, to an extraordinary degree, self-inflicted and avoidable. By embracing gambling so completely—normalizing it, celebrating it, reaping massive profits from it—the leagues have all but ensured that many fans will see it as baked into the game itself. Even if point-shaving is rare, each new revelation reinforces the notion that the system is rigged. To watch sports in 2026 is to become, almost inevitably, a kind of conspiracy theorist.

After a late penalty in a December game between the Broncos and the Raiders turned a meaningless field goal into a bad beat for anyone who had Denver minus 8.5, the Barstool Sports founder, Dave Portnoy, filmed himself melting down on camera. “This is the most rigged game I have ever seen in my entire life,” Portnoy ranted, pacing around his living room alone, looking like a paranoid QAnon adherent. He demanded that the referees be investigated; he demanded that the Raiders’ coach, Pete Carroll, be investigated. Then he called for more decisive punishments. “Prison for Pete Carroll!” he bellowed. “Murder Pete Carroll! I want Pete Carroll murdered!”

Portnoy apologized the next day, clarifying that he’d only been calling for a “metaphorical murder.” But he didn’t back off his accusation. He had lost a quarter of a million dollars on “one of the wildest sequences” of the season, he told his audience. Somebody needed to get to the bottom of it.

Week Thirteen

Total gambled: $10,941.00
Up $156.16

A couple of days before Thanksgiving, I called Nate Silver, who was preparing to leave for a poker tournament in the Bahamas. He asked me for a gambling status report, and I informed him that I’d been following his advice—diligently shopping for lines, mostly sticking to point spreads. Three months in, I had wagered about $11,000 on 117 bets and was right about even. I didn’t think this sounded like something to brag about, but Silver set me straight. If I could sustain that kind of performance over the long term, he said, it would place me in the top 5 percent of sports bettors.

“So, a moral victory?” I joked.

“I’m serious,” he insisted. This NFL season had been a particularly “weird” one, he said—injuries galore, untested quarterbacks, and no dominant favorites steamrolling the rest of the league, among other anomalies. I had noticed that the FanDuel-sponsored sports podcasters I listened to most often—Bill Simmons, Cousin Sal, Joe House, and the rest of the Ringer crew—were all under .500 with their recommended picks for the year.

Silver didn’t want to reveal how much money he’d personally wagered on NFL games, but he said if it were 100 “units,” he was down about two-tenths of one unit. “You’re beating the lines,” he told me. He sounded almost impressed.

My family and I spent Thanksgiving in Florida, where my parents and siblings teased me relentlessly about my new gambling vocabulary. I laughed along with them, acknowledging the strangeness of the reporting project I’d embarked upon. I also shared their revulsion when we saw a dystopian FanDuel ad depicting a family gathered around a Thanksgiving table, each member staring at their phone, accompanied by the tagline “Bet together like never before.”

What I didn’t tell my family was that I was experiencing my first bout of gambling withdrawal. Upon arriving in Orlando, I had discovered that none of my regular apps worked. Florida allows online sports betting only through an app called Hard Rock Bet, whose servers are on Native land—the result of a 2021 compromise between gambling lobbyists and the Seminole Tribe.

When my brother put on the Chiefs-Cowboys game, a barn burner that came down to the final minutes, I noted with some alarm that I could barely muster any interest. The dopamine system in my brain had been hijacked; I needed money on the game to care about it.

When we got back to Virginia, I reflexively reached for my phone and opened DraftKings as soon as I woke up in the morning, a junkie reaching for his fix. Silver’s encouragement had filled me with irrational confidence. Could it be that I was actually good at gambling? Exceptional, even? A sports-betting savant who had discovered his talent only in middle age? This was not exactly what Silver had said, but I could read between the lines.

That night, the Patriots, my favorite team, were playing the Giants on Monday Night Football, and I spent all day putting together what I thought was the perfect play. The Pats had been on a good run, and the Giants were only 2–10. But New England was dealing with multiple injuries, and I thought the 7.5-point spread was a little rich. I decided to violate one of Silver’s key guidelines and bet $350 on a parlay: the Patriots to win outright, and the game’s point total to be under 50.5. I figured, given my performance, that I’d earned the right to break some rules.

Before the game, I showed the parlay to my 10-year-old son, explaining my logic as if I were a physicist explaining a particle accelerator. The temperature in Foxborough was forecast to be 29 degrees at kickoff, I told him, and teams always score less in the cold.

“You’re, like, a betting genius now,” he said. I felt, briefly, the swelling pride of a father who has impressed his son.

Paul Tonko does not cut an especially imposing figure. He has white tufts of hair that flare over his ears, and a rumpled, curmudgeonly affect that calls to mind a disapproving grandfather. But the 76-year-old congressman from New York is one of Washington’s few prominent crusaders against the sports-betting industry. It’s a lonely job.

Tonko came to the cause four years ago, when he saw that the social-media feeds of his younger aides were filled with ads for sports-betting apps. The marketing, he thought, bore a striking resemblance to the cigarette campaigns from a generation earlier—glossy, predatory, and calibrated to hook the young. As a co-chair of the Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus, Tonko says he recognized immediately that the industry needed more regulation. “They’re delivering a known addictive product,” he told me, sitting in his office overlooking the U.S. Capitol.

When he began working on a bill that would ban certain kinds of advertising for sportsbooks, he was surprised by the energy around the issue. He was urged on forcefully by parents whose sons had gambled away their tuition money, and by politicians and experts in the United Kingdom and Australia who wished that they’d cracked down on the industry earlier. Key players in the fight against Big Tobacco told him that online gambling was the next major public-health crisis, and volunteered their help.

The only place Tonko struggled to find support was in Congress. When he brought up the bill with colleagues, they would listen politely and then waffle when asked to sign on. They seemed to regard sports betting as an insignificant problem—a nice pet issue for Tonko, maybe, but not something worth spending time or political capital on.

Maybe the hurdle was generational: The average House member is about 60 years old, well outside the DraftKings target demographic. But Tonko suspects that at least some of the resistance has to do with money. In the years since the Supreme Court paved the way for state-by-state legalization, sports-betting companies have mounted a lobbying blitzkrieg in statehouses across the country.

In Kansas, industry representatives plied lawmakers with steak dinners, premium whiskey, and cigars in a private club as they pushed favorable tax legislation. In Mississippi, DraftKings courted the House speaker, bringing him and his wife to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, where they mingled with celebrities in a luxury suite over drinks and gourmet Creole food.

The lobbyists’ pitch to politicians is easy enough to understand: Tax revenue from online gambling can help fund schools and roads. In 2024, online sportsbooks generated at least $2.9 billion in taxes for state and local governments, a figure that is growing rapidly. Mindful of this, Tonko has been careful to frame his proposals in terms of basic harm reduction. “We’re not out to outlaw sports gambling,” he told me. He has proposed a new bill that would restrict how online sportsbooks can target and track customers, as well as cap certain kinds of losses, ban prop bets on college and amateur athletes, and create a national self-exclusion list so that people who want to bar themselves from betting don’t have to fill out a new form every time they cross a state line.

When I asked Tonko how confident he was of the bill’s passage, he seemed to slump into his sofa. “It’s an uphill battle,” he admitted. “The industry’s got megabucks. So I don’t kid myself.”

But he noted that his colleagues do seem to be growing more interested in the issue. As the hazards of ubiquitous gambling become harder to ignore, Tonko expects political support to grow. “Give it time,” he said; three years from now, things might be so bad that Americans will be clamoring for regulation.

This, it seemed, was his best-case scenario.

Week Fourteen

Total gambled: $11,841.00
Down $74.60

The tailspin began on a Thursday night, with a Lions-Cowboys game. I had bet on the Cowboys, who were 3.5-point underdogs, to cover the spread—and in the fourth quarter, a win looked within reach for me. Quarterback Dak Prescott was driving toward the end zone in pursuit of a touchdown that would have pulled the Cowboys within three. But with less than four minutes left and the Cowboys on the 11-yard line, a controversial offensive-pass-interference call ended the drive and my hopes for a backdoor cover. “That call is gonna be talked about,” the announcer boomed.

Illustration by Tyler Comrie. Source: Aleksandra Sokolachko / Getty.

It was almost midnight—the Christmas tree was glowing nearby, my father-in-law was dozing on the couch, and I had just lost $500. I noticed that I was grinding my teeth.

I had endured plenty of tough beats up to that point, but the fluky nature of this particular loss made something inside me snap. Despite all of my research—my monastic study of the lines, my careful hunt for small edges, my righteous avoidance of the high-risk suckers’ bets that the apps were constantly pushing on me—I had been burned by a bad call from a random referee. I became determined to win it all back.

My first move was to bump up the size of my wagers. When I’d started out, I put no more than $100 on most games; now I was betting up to $500—impatiently swiping to deposit more money when DraftKings or FanDuel told me I was out of funds. Months of diligent recordkeeping were abandoned as the flurry of action caused me to lose track completely of how much I had bet, and on what. Uncertain of what remained of my $10,000 stake from The Atlantic, I routinely woke in the middle of the night, panicked that I was inadvertently dipping into my own savings.

On tilt—this was one of the terms I hadn’t known before my foray into betting. It describes the emotional distress that causes a gambler to make unwise decisions. Over several frenzied days in December, I disregarded every rule Silver had taught me—throwing money at random prop bets and constructing multi-leg parlays like I was a mad scientist mixing volatile compounds in a lab.

Point spreads and moneylines ran constantly through my head, mingling with the omnipresent Christmas carols to create a strange backbeat to the holiday season. Every festive family outing became an opportunity for me to gamble. While my wife and kids ice-skated, I sat in the minivan, our toddler napping in his car seat, as I put together a six-game parlay (lost $80). While my daughter practiced for a Christmas choir performance, I stayed outside the church, chewing my fingernails as I watched a Chiefs-Chargers game on my phone (lost $400).

One Sunday evening, we hosted a small Christmas party, where Steve and Ryan asked me how my gambling was going. I tried to adopt the same wry, self-aware tone that had so amused them when I began the experiment. But I was too keyed up to stay in character. Instead, as I rattled off betting lines in rapid succession, explaining my strategy to get back in the black with ever larger bets, I saw them exchange looks of concern.

“So you’re chasing,” Steve said.

I laughed, too loudly, and then slipped into the pantry to check the Seahawks-Colts score on my phone.

I had put a lot of money on the Seahawks to cover a two-touchdown spread. But while our guests filtered out in a blur of hugs and Merry Christmas es, I watched miserably as Seattle eked out a measly two-point win with a field goal in the dwindling moments, losing me $450.

When the house was empty, I collapsed onto the couch and started doing the math in my head. The flames were low in the fireplace; Bing Crosby was playing over the speakers. I had lost more than $2,500 in 13 days.

Week Eighteen

Total gambled: $20,511.00
Down $3,605.77

Four months of burying myself in gambling apps had apparently made me twitchy in ways that were perceptible to my colleagues. The editor in chief, concerned for my mental health, suggested that I log off for a bit and touch felt.

I landed in Las Vegas on a Sunday in early January and headed to the Bellagio, where I met Tom Nichols, the colleague that my editors had selected as my chaperone. Tom, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College and a blackjack obsessive (who knew?), came to Vegas several times a year, and was eager to teach me his ways.

He led me across the casino floor as I scampered behind him taking notes—the sage professor, goateed and clad in a black oxford shirt, explaining slot machines and table games to his earnest pupil. In my notebook, I wrote down, “Always tip the dealer” and “Forget roulette, that’s a Eurotrash game.”

Tom’s main piece of advice was to never gamble on the Strip. The corporate casinos had gotten too greedy, he explained: The odds were bad, the table minimums too high. Besides, the real Vegas wasn’t in places like the Bellagio.

He took me downtown to Fremont Street, where showgirls wandered past buskers beneath a canopy of LED screens. We passed a bar with a sign that read DRINK BEER THROW AXES, and a restaurant, the Heart Attack Grill, that offered free meals to anyone over 350 pounds and displayed customers’ weight in giant neon numbers. Tom let out a contented sigh. “America is already great,” he said.

Tom loves Las Vegas—the kitsch, the unsavory history—and seems almost protective of it. Too many people think of casinos as depressing, predatory places, he said, filled with dead-eyed senior citizens sucking on oxygen tanks as they pump their Social Security checks into slot machines. But what he loves about casinos is not so much the gambling per se as the sense of community it generates.

Tom’s favored casinos (the Golden Gate, El Cortez, the Plaza) were decidedly grimier than the Bellagio—the synthetic air-freshener-and-cologne scent replaced by the stench of beer-soaked carpet and secondhand smoke. But they were also surprisingly friendly places. At one blackjack table, we met two chain-smoking blond women in their 60s from Green Bay, one of whom ribbed me for refusing to hit on 16 while the other proudly recounted her second wedding, where the guests wore Packers jerseys. At another table, a young Black guy with facial tattoos was playing $100 hands and had developed a rollicking alliance with the white-haired geriatric at the other end of the table. “I see you!” he shouted in celebration whenever the old man got a blackjack. Tom, meanwhile, developed a running bit with the dealer about their “dysfunctional marriage.”

There was something quaintly American about the scene: strangers from different parts of the country, of different races and generations, chatting, drinking, joking, commiserating. Yes, everyone was slowly getting ripped off, but at least they were getting ripped off together. Compared with the solitary swiping of the sports-betting apps, the blackjack table was almost Rockwellian.

But as I followed Tom around town for three days, I began to appreciate Vegas for another reason: As a venue for vice, it is inherently self-limiting, a kind of containment zone for sordid behavior. Even for someone who didn’t partake in booze or strip clubs, it was an exhausting place to spend time in. The sensory overload wore me down after a while—the smells, the noise, the permanent neon twilight, the intentional assault on my circadian rhythm. I was never quite sure what time it was, only that I had probably stayed too long.

Las Vegas struck me as a monument to a truth that America once knew and had somehow chosen to forget: If gambling had to be legal, it should be contained to remote cities in the desert that make you feel a little bad about yourself.

Before leaving Las Vegas, I was determined to meet with Sean Perry, a professional sports bettor with nearly half a million followers on Instagram. Perry belongs to a new, influencer-age breed of “handicappers”—people who sell picks to recreational gamblers, claiming inside information or proprietary analytics models.

I had come across Perry’s Instagram profile months earlier, when my algorithm began to identify me as a degenerate gambler. Scrolling through his posts, I didn’t find much sports analysis—but I did find the fruits of his purported success: the private-jet selfies and Lamborghinis in his driveway, the yacht off the Amalfi Coast, the 21 Hermès handbags he presented to his girlfriend for their six-month anniversary. “Sports betting,” Perry likes to tell his followers, “is the highest-paying job in the world.”

I was fascinated by the fantasy that Perry was selling—and, if I’m being honest, a part of me was intrigued to learn his secrets. But interviewing him turned out to be trickier than anticipated. Perry was a moving target, constantly bouncing around the Strip from one sportsbook to another.

The first time we met was on Sunday afternoon at the Bellagio. He arrived with an entourage: his mom, his girlfriend, a leashed English bulldog named Ripple, and a muscly bodyguard named Ron. Perry was surprisingly quiet, even awkward, in person, mumbling as he introduced himself and generally avoiding eye contact. “I’m gonna record a little intro if you want to watch,” he muttered as he handed Ron his phone.

But once the camera blinked on, Perry’s face lit up. He pulled $100,000 in cash out of his Goyard backpack. “If you’ve got a house, sell the house!” he exhorted his followers. “If you’ve got a car, sell the car! I’ve got a guaranteed winner for you.” He marched up to the counter—his bodyguard still recording—and plunked down the wad of cash on the Ravens to beat the Steelers in that night’s game.

I was so mesmerized by the performance that I got in line behind him and put down $300 on the Ravens myself. (I’d never bought my wife 21 Hermès bags.)

Before I could ask him any questions, Perry—displeased with the size of the TV that was showing that afternoon’s Las Vegas Raiders game—decided to change his plans. He and his squad were headed to Allegiant Stadium, the Raiders’ home field, to watch the game in person. He promised to text me a meetup spot later, but I never heard from him. And when the Ravens ended up losing that night with a missed 44-yard field goal, I was glad that I hadn’t sold my house.

For three days, I chased Perry up and down the Strip. He would text me plans to be at one casino or another, and then flake at the last minute. One afternoon, he DMed me on Instagram: “I’ve got a major play lined up, ready to move when you are. How much do you usually bet on something big?” I didn’t see the message until it was too late—and good thing, because it turned out to be another loser when the Montana State Bobcats failed to cover the spread against the Illinois State Redbirds in the Football Championship Subdivision title game.

One reason to doubt the betting prowess of handicappers like Perry, who claims to make tens of millions a year gambling, is that the professional sportsbooks are carefully designed to prevent such success stories. When a gambler starts to win too consistently, the books will place limits on how much he can bet. A true sharp will be effectively banned by every sportsbook in the country before too long.

Once that happens, a game of cat and mouse ensues: The sharp might hire someone else to place bets on his behalf—on any given day, the Las Vegas Strip is teeming with “runners” who carry backpacks stuffed with $100 bills—but this strategy has its own risks. Betting in another person’s name violates the terms of most sportsbooks, and depending on how the transaction is executed, it could be considered fraud. To avoid detection, some sharps will “prime” their accounts—placing scattershot bets to make themselves look like reckless gambling addicts and prompt the sportsbooks to increase their limits—before moving in for the kill. Although the tactics are always evolving, one element of the sportsbook business model remains constant: to take as many bets as possible from bad gamblers, and as few as possible from good ones.

On my last day in Vegas, I finally caught up with Perry at Circa, whose sportsbook features a 1,000-seat theater, a 78-million-pixel Jumbotron, and half a dozen rooftop swimming pools from which gamblers can watch games and place bets. Circa, widely considered the largest sportsbook in the world, is the closest thing that sports betting has to Mecca.

Perry walked in alone—it was a weekday afternoon, and the place was mostly empty—but he was clearly dressed for another Instagram stunt. He wore wide-leg, diamond-studded jeans; a $350,000 Rolex; and two massive, bejeweled chains that read SPW (“Sean Perry Wins”). As soon as he saw me, he thrust a phone into my hand and asked me to get ready to film.

I followed him to the counter, where he placed a $100,000 bet on an NBA game. The ticket writer typed something into his computer, and then informed him that the book could take only $3,000 from him.

Perry, elated, told me to press record. “I just got limited by the biggest sportsbook in Vegas!” he declared. He was feigning outrage, but in fact, this was a badge of honor for a handicapper like him—proof that the sportsbooks were scared of his gambling facility. I pointed out that the man at the counter had cited a player injury as the reason bets on the game were limited, but Perry waved me off. “If you walk to that window right now and try to bet the 100K, they would 100 percent have accepted it.”

When he was done preening for the camera, we retreated to a quiet row of empty seats. I asked him how closely he resembled his social-media persona. “What do you think?” he scoffed. In real life, he told me, he didn’t wear bling or gaudy watches. “I put on a character when I’m on the internet,” he explained. “You have to—that’s how you get views. That’s how I make money.”

Did he ever worry that his followers might take him literally when he tells them to sell their house for a bet?

“They know I’m trolling,” Perry insisted.

I pressed him. “Sometimes people are degenerate,” he conceded. “They’ll go all in on a single play and lose money. The truth is, that’s not my fault.” Perry said that he employs a team of data analysts who pore over statistical models. One of his clients, he claimed, had made $8 million following his picks; another had made $13 million in four months.

No single bet is guaranteed, he told me. But if you stick with him over time, “it’s impossible to lose money.”

Week Nineteen

Total gambled: $22,386.00
Down $4,257.67

Upon my return from Vegas, the editor in chief asked for an update on my losses. I admitted that I was down about $4,000 but assured him, like an underwater debtor talking to his loan shark, that I was going to win it all back—the NFL playoffs were coming up. He reminded me that this was the magazine’s money I was playing with. “The future of The Atlantic depends on you,” he said. “Pick wisely.”

What I didn’t mention to him was that I was no longer gambling just on sports. I was now experimenting with prediction markets.

I had been aware of platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to “invest” in predictive outcomes and trade their “positions.” I also knew that the platforms, which are available in all 50 states, were competing for market share in sports betting with FanDuel, DraftKings, and other incumbents.

But my curiosity wasn’t piqued until U.S. forces stormed Venezuela in January. Days before the operation, an anonymous user had created a Polymarket account and started wagering tens of thousands of dollars that President Nicolás Maduro would be in U.S. custody by the end of the month. When Maduro was captured, the account holder walked away with more than $400,000 in profit.

I assumed at first that the story was an example of obscene abuse—insider trading on a deadly military raid. But once I started playing around with the markets, it became clear that insider trading was a feature, not a bug. The platforms’ founders say they’re providing a social utility, moving the entire digital public square from social-media sites, where AI slop and rage bait reign, to prediction markets, where you are incentivized to invest based on what you genuinely know or believe. “People don’t lie when money’s involved,” Tarek Mansour, a Kalshi co-founder and its CEO, told The New York Times. And although the platforms technically prohibit manipulation—and, in Kalshi’s case anyway, insider trading—proponents have acknowledged that insiders making bets based on what they know only heightens the markets’ predictive value.

But scrolling through the available bets on Kalshi, I struggled to locate the civic spirit. Would anyone truly benefit because I could wager on which words Trump would use next week (5-to-1 payout on Somalian), or which nicknames he’d deploy for his political enemies (3-to-1 for Newscum)? Was the quality of the discourse improved by our ability to gamble on drug-boat bombings in the Caribbean or whether Gaza would experience a famine? “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” Mansour has said.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the casinofication of America is taking place while the Oval Office is occupied by a former casino operator. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission opened investigations into whether Kalshi and Polymarket were flouting federal regulations. But the government scrutiny ended when Trump returned to office. Polymarket hired a former Trump adviser as its first Washington lobbyist and added the president’s son Don Jr. to its board; Kalshi also brought on Don Jr., as a “strategic adviser.” The investigations were quietly closed, and the companies began to scale up rapidly.

But the great gambling experiment that we’ve embarked on is bigger than the current president. The prediction markets represent the logical end point of the sports-betting explosion: Everything in American life—politics and culture, art and war—becomes a Las Vegas table game, tantalizing in its promise of profit, rigged against regular people, destined to demoralize and crush those who play.

In 1907, a Unitarian minister, writing in The Atlantic, warned against “speculation.” “The long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling,” Charles F. Dole wrote. “It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement; it hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, tempts men to self-destruction.”

[From the December 1907 issue: Charles F. Dole on the ethics of speculation]

Not every consensus of the past is worth clinging to, of course. But as a society, we are making an enormously risky bet: that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price; that the litany of social ills long associated with this vice—addiction and impoverishment, isolation and abuse, cheating and chasing and corrosive idleness—can, this time, be kept in check; that, unlike every civilization that came before us, we can beat the house.

What are the odds that we’re right?

The Super Bowl

Total gambled: $28,206.00
Down $4,787.70

Despite my assurances to the editor in chief, the playoffs did not go well. For complicated reasons involving point spreads and, possibly, divine punishment, I somehow managed to correctly pick the winner in 10 out of 12 games through the first three rounds while still losing money.

As the losses piled up, I took solace in my beloved Patriots’ improbable postseason run. I had grown up in Massachusetts at the dawn of the Brady-Belichick dynasty; now I was sharing in the joy of New England fandom with my son, who perched next to me for every game. When quarterback Drake Maye scrambled through a blizzard for a game-clinching first down in the AFC championship—my son and I jumping up from the couch in a frenzy of high fives and enraptured whoops—it felt a little like destiny.

It also felt like an opportunity: When the line opened that night for Super Bowl LX, the Patriots were 2-to-1 underdogs against the Seattle Seahawks. I had what I thought were sound analytical reasons to believe the sportsbooks were underestimating the Patriots. But I was also seduced by the allure of a big, go-for-broke win, the chance to dig out of the hole I’d dug myself into.

If I put everything I had left on the Patriots moneyline and they won, I would end the season up about $5,000. Not life-changing money, but enough to put that new KitchenAid mixer in play.

Nate Silver did not endorse this plan. My fanatical faith in the Patriots didn’t factor into his model, and he calmly walked me through the many reasons it favored the Seahawks. “You’re gambling, McKay,” he said disapprovingly.

I spent some time perusing the Cheesecake Factory–size menu of available Super Bowl bets. It turned out you could gamble on essentially every second of the event, from the length of the national anthem (the smart money was on less than 116.5 seconds for the whole song but more than 3.5 seconds for how long the singer would hold the last note on brave) to the coin toss (it had been tails eight out of the past 12 games) to the color of the Gatorade poured on the winning coach’s head (the chalk bet was yellow/lime, but red would pay out 15 to 1).

In the end, I put $4,735 on the Patriots to win the game, and spent about $700 on a smattering of long-shot parlays and prop bets that ranged from plausible to preposterous.

The Super Bowl was a disaster. After the Patriots got shut out in the first half—which I spent shouting at the TV and anxiously shoving tortilla chips into my mouth—our guests decided they needed to “get the kids to bed.” By the time Maye threw a hope-killing fourth-quarter interception, I had retreated into my phone, watching despondently as the live odds for a Patriots comeback got longer and longer until finally the TV screen filled with confetti.

As I toggled between gambling apps, my son sullenly turned off the TV and announced that he was going to bed. He was suffering the first sports-fan heartbreak of his young life; I was checking on my prop bets. The rest of my family soon followed him, leaving me to wallow alone. Before going to bed, Annie forwarded me an email from our bank alerting us that a card had been declined. Apparently, in my last frantic flurry of pre-kickoff bets, I had unwittingly overdrawn the checking account I had set up for my gambling. “The end of an era,” she wrote.

Was it? That had been the plan, of course. My adventure in sports betting was supposed to conclude with the Super Bowl, when I no longer had journalism as an excuse and my employer’s money to gamble with. But was I really going to let my grand gambling experiment end like this?

I slept poorly that night—tormented by the loss, moral dissonance, and Walmart-brand ranch dip—and woke before the sun came up. Sitting at my desk, I made a final tally of my wagers. I’d had an astonishingly bad night, even worse than I’d realized. Of my 22 Super Bowl bets, I’d won exactly two: that Patriots receiver Mack Hollins would score a touchdown, and that Ricky Martin would perform with Bad Bunny in the halftime show.

The season was over. I had lost $9,891.

Staring at that number, I thought about all the people who had placed their first-ever bets on the Super Bowl. Some 68 million Americans had been expected to gamble on the game, and 70 percent had picked the Seahawks. I knew how they were feeling this morning—the thrill of a win, the sudden appetite for more, the hubristic belief that they just might be savvy enough to make money at this.

But I also knew how easily that joyful naivete could curdle into delusion and compulsion. When I’d started this project, I had presented it to my bishop as journalism; at some point, it had veered into obsession. And as clearly as I could see that now, in the cold comedown from a brutal loss, I didn’t know how long that clarity would last. As I scrolled through the apps, my eye was drawn to the March Madness promotions—some of the Final Four odds looked intriguing. On Kalshi, meanwhile, the Oscars futures were calling to me. The temptation to chase would never go away, it seemed. Those fences that I, and the country, had erected—the ones that had convinced me that I wasn’t prone to addiction and America that it didn’t need to worry about this particular vice after all—suddenly seemed more vital than ever.

My family was still asleep upstairs; the gray winter light seeped through the cracks in the blinds. I thought about the advice that every addiction counselor gives to a problem gambler, and I opened my laptop. In the Google search bar, I typed the words Virginia self-exclusion form.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “Sucker.”

The First Couple of a Dysfunctional DHS

2026-02-26T15:14:12-05:00

On a winter night last year, shortly after Donald Trump was sworn into office, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security assembled discreetly at a private home in Washington, D.C., to discuss what they saw as a gathering crisis inside the agency: the relationship between their new boss, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski, her adviser, enforcer, and rumored boyfriend.

The officials were under enormous pressure. Trump had recaptured the presidency amid a popular backlash against illegal immigration, and had promised a shock-and-awe program of mass deportations once he returned to power. Now DHS—conceived after 9/11 to protect the country from terrorist attacks—was being ordered to shift its focus and resources toward delivering on the president’s campaign pledge. This project, already controversial and logistically fraught, was being complicated by Lewandowski—a menacing, omnipresent operator who had no experience in immigration enforcement, but who was nonetheless quickly consolidating power at the agency. The officials had gathered that night to map the ways his relationship with Noem could destabilize the department. The conversation ran six hours.

The secret meeting, which has not been previously reported, is described in Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump’s Mass Deportation Program, a forthcoming book by the NBC News reporter Julia Ainsley. The book is set to be published in early May, but The Atlantic obtained portions of it early.

The book, based on extensive reporting, depicts the Department of Homeland Security as a dysfunctional fiefdom in Trump’s Washington empire—tasked with carrying out the most aggressive immigration crackdown in U.S. history even as the agency’s internal culture is warped by the relationship between an ambitious, attention-thirsty secretary and her domineering right-hand man and alleged paramour. In Ainsley’s account, Lewandowski is involved in nearly every aspect of the agency: who gets heard in meetings, what information reaches Noem’s desk, which contractors get hired, and even what kind of detention facilities are built to hold arrested migrants.

[Michael Scherer: The buzz in Kristi Noem’s home state]

Noem and Lewandowski, both of whom are married with children, have denied a romantic relationship. “It’s bullshit,” Lewandowski told The Atlantic in October. A spokesperson for DHS said, “This Department doesn’t waste time with salacious, baseless gossip.”

But their rumored affair has been widely treated as an open secret in Washington—first whispered about in political and media circles, then chronicled in tabloids such as the Daily Mail, and, more recently, making its way into The Wall Street Journal, which reported that the pair flies around the country together in a luxury 737 with a private cabin in the back, and that the president frequently asks about the relationship. In Undue Process, Ainsley quotes unnamed officials describing the alleged affair as common knowledge. “They don’t hide it,” says one Customs and Border Protection official who interacted with them regularly. A member of Trump’s transition team, Ainsley writes, put it more crassly to her in January 2025: “Oh yeah, they’re still fucking.”

The reported affair has caused tension with the West Wing: When Noem tried to install Lewandowski as her chief of staff, the White House vetoed the move. Rumors about their relationship were already circulating too widely—and Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and most influential immigration hawk, was personally repelled by their apparent infidelity, according to Ainsley’s book. (Miller, Ainsley writes, is a “hard-liner when it comes to monogamy in marriage,” though a quick survey of the White House org chart surfaces at least one exception to his purported no-adulterers rule.) When a CBP official sought Miller’s advice on how to navigate the new terrain at DHS, Ainsley writes, he warned, “Stay away from Corey.” Reached for comment, a White House official disputed this account, saying “Stephen has never had any conversations about these rumors nor expressed any thoughts or feelings on them” and “Stephen has never told anyone to stay away from Corey.”

Instead, Lewandowski was hired as a “special government employee,” similar to Elon Musk’s arrangement as the head of DOGE. The designation is supposed to cap government work at 130 days a year, but according to Ainsley, Lewandowski seemed to disregard the rule. Inside DHS headquarters, he began referring to himself as “chief adviser” to the secretary. (According to the DHS spokesperson, Lewandowski worked 115 days last year as a special government employee.)

Lewandowski was a relative no-name in Republican politics when he was hired in 2015 to serve as Trump’s first campaign manager. He developed a reputation for vindictiveness and bullying; his brief tenure was marked by multiple physical confrontations with reporters and protesters. He was also accused of making sexually suggestive comments and unwanted romantic advances toward female journalists covering the 2016 campaign. (Lewandowski denied these allegations at the time.)

But his loyalty earned him a permanent place in Trump’s orbit, which Lewandowski has used in recent years to advance Noem’s political career—introducing her to key Trump-world figures and shaping her public image. Noem’s rise from governor of South Dakota to MAGA political celebrity was also abetted by her own refashioning. As Ainsley writes, Noem underwent an extensive physical transformation to conform to a certain MAGA aesthetic—including dental surgery and other apparent cosmetic enhancements—and, by 2024, she was traveling with a personal makeup artist. (The DHS spokesperson noted that Noem has not traveled with a makeup artist as secretary.)

She also has a flair for the theatrical. Shortly after she was installed in the Cabinet, she attended a pre-raid briefing for ICE officers in New York City. As career officials looked on in bewilderment, Noem walked onstage—in TV-ready makeup, coiffed curls, and a Kevlar vest—to a country song by Trace Adkins called “Hot Mama.” (“And you’re one hot mama / You turn me on. Let’s turn it up, and turn this room, into a sauna.”) The surreal spectacle helped earn Noem the nickname “ICE Barbie.”

Trump had reportedly considered tapping Noem to be his running mate in 2024. But her name was crossed off the short list after she disclosed in a memoir that she had shot an “untrainable” family dog years earlier. The story prompted widespread outrage and ridicule, and many observers assumed it sank her prospects of an administration post. But Ainsley reports that Trump actually saw this particular biographical detail as an asset in his homeland-security secretary—it was one of the reasons he chose her.

[Nick Miroff: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’]

While Noem played to the cameras, Ainsley writes, Lewandowski was busy accumulating an “unchecked level of power” inside DHS. Officials were reluctant to question him out of fear that they’d be terminated by Noem, and a chill settled over any meetings that he attended. “She would ask, ‘Why is everyone so quiet?’ when it was plain to see people were afraid to speak up in front of Corey,” one of the CBP officials told Ainsley. “What are you going to do? Make an accusation? They’ll tear you apart,” the official said.

One policy that Lewandowski took a particular interest in, according to Undue Process, was migrant-detention centers. Inside the administration, Ainsley writes, a divide had formed over how to house the millions of immigrants Trump wanted to arrest. One group, which included “border czar” Tom Homan, favored scaling up the construction of traditional brick-and-mortar facilities. But Lewandowski was dead set on a cheaper, more austere solution: He envisioned shuttling detained migrants to tent cities in punishing locations. His lobbying ultimately led to the creation of the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Florida Everglades as well as a tent compound in Guantánamo Bay.

Lewandowski also took a heavy-handed approach to distributing DHS contracts, Ainsley writes, insisting that any expenditure over $100,000 be signed off by himself and Noem. Previously, a secretary’s sign-off was required only for expenditures of $25 million or more. The new policy prompted contractors to complain to the White House.

But even those within the administration who objected to his management of the department were reluctant to challenge him without a “smoking gun,” Ainsley reports. As one White House official put it, Lewandowski was like a cockroach who’d grown immune to insecticide—getting rid of him was easier said than done.

A Prophet’s Diagnosis

2025-09-30T14:39:00-04:00

On Sunday morning, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints woke to the news that Russell M. Nelson—the leader of their faith, and a man they considered a prophet of God—had died. The sadness of the news was tempered somewhat by its foreseeability. Nelson, who had recently celebrated his 101st birthday, was the oldest living global religious leader, and he spoke freely about his own mortality. “At this point,” he said in a 2022 speech, “I have stopped buying green bananas.”

I had interviewed Nelson several years earlier for The Atlantic, and the late prophet was on my mind Sunday morning as I drove my family to our Latter-day Saint ward in Northern Virginia. After the sacrament meeting, I walked two of my kids to the Primary room, where they’d been given small assignments in that day’s children’s program. As the kids began to sing, I heard a fellow congregant behind me say, “There’s an active shooter at an LDS church.”

A quick glance at my phone revealed a stream of nightmarish news alerts from Grand Blanc, Michigan: Witnesses were reporting that a man had crashed his pickup truck into a Mormon chapel, opened fire on the congregation with an assault rifle, and set the building on fire. Early details were sketchy—the number of victims varied; some reports mentioned homemade explosive devices. But one image dominated my feed: an aerial shot of a utilitarian brick church, which looked strikingly similar to the one I’d driven my family to that morning, wreathed in flames.

[McKay Coppins: The death of a prophet]

I put my phone away. I watched my 7-year-old daughter say a prayer and my 10-year-old son read a verse of scripture. I flashed them a thumbs-up and slipped out the back of the room. Walking down the halls of the church, I found myself mentally noting the location of the exits.

As the day wore on, the discourse around the shooting took on a grimly familiar pattern. Conservatives rushed to declare that “Christianity is under attack,” while liberals circulated photos of a Trump sign hanging outside the alleged shooter’s house. The stampede to politicize the shooting dispirited me—I knew the story would likely vanish from the news cycle unless the killer’s motives proved narratively convenient to one party or the other. But I just kept thinking about Nelson. How would he have responded to the horrific violence in Michigan if he’d lived one more day? I doubt the shooter’s motives would have changed his answer. I suspect that Nelson—who spent his final years urgently pleading with Latter-day Saints to be peacemakers in a fractious and angry world—would have reminded us of that most radical, and unnatural, of Christ’s teachings: to love your enemy.

I first met Nelson in 2019, a year after he’d ascended to the presidency of the Church. His energetic tenure up to that point had surprised many observers—myself included—who expected the 93-year-old, a former heart surgeon, to play more of a caretaker role. Instead, he set out to transform the Church. He shortened worship services and introduced new hymns; he appointed the Church’s first Asian American and Latin American apostles and reversed a policy that restricted baptisms for children of same-sex couples. He announced scores of new temples to be built around the world and dramatically increased humanitarian spending to nearly $1.5 billion a year.

I had been assigned to write a feature on Mormonism, pegged to the faith’s bicentennial, and I was hoping that Nelson—who rarely sat down with reporters—would agree to an interview. To help make the case, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, had accompanied me to Salt Lake City. This convening of my boss and my spiritual leader made for a slightly unsettling dynamic, especially when Goldberg began talking up my qualifications.

“McKay is one of the most gifted young journalists in America,” he asserted, not without hyperbole.

The discerning prophet, looking surprised and perhaps a bit skeptical, glanced at me. “Really?”

Nelson agreed to the interview. But by the time I got on his calendar—10 months later—the world was unraveling. It was May of 2020, and a plague of biblical proportions was wreaking havoc on society.

As I sat across from the socially distanced prophet in a giant, wood-paneled conference room, I felt conflicted. I’d been struggling with the assignment. Should I approach the story as an observer or a believer? Could I really write thousands of words about a subject so personal to me while maintaining journalistic distance? In preparing for my interview with the prophet, I felt the tug of competing impulses. I had a list of reporterly questions to ask—about the Church’s history and its future and the painful tensions of the present—and the journalist in me wanted answers. But in the apocalyptic spring of 2020, I was looking for something more from the encounter—wisdom, hope, a measure of spiritual comfort.

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

I don’t know if Nelson sensed my ambivalence, but he had a doctor’s bedside manner that put me at ease. He prayed for each member of my family by name, and gave me business cards with little notes made out to each of my kids. About 15 minutes into the interview, he began talking about the various identities we carry through life. I mentioned that I sometimes found myself compartmentalizing the different roles I played—journalist, parent, person of faith—and his eyes lit up. “Don’t separate them,” he said.

He told me that when he was in medical school, a professor had once chastised him for failing to draw a line between his faith and his studies. “Why should I separate them?” Nelson recalled thinking. “If it’s true in one place, it’s true in another.” Studying human anatomy could enrich his faith in the creative powers of the divine; embracing the Christian ethic of patience and forbearance could improve his behavior in the operating room. Nelson chose not to be a doctor at the hospital and a Christian at church—he was both things all the time, and he was better off for it.

Some epiphanies are realized only in retrospect. I didn’t see it at the time, but Nelson’s teaching had a lasting effect on both my spiritual life and my journalism.

In his final years, Nelson concentrated much of his ministry on the ruinous divisions that define modern life. In a landmark 2023 sermon titled “Peacemakers Needed,” he called on his flock to reject the “venomous contention that infects our civic dialogue” and to instead build “bridges of understanding” to those with whom we most profoundly disagree. He pressed this point until the very end: In an op-ed published three weeks before his death, he wrote, “A century of experience has taught me this with certainty: anger never persuades, hostility never heals, and contention never leads to lasting solutions.”

Nelson’s diagnosis of our times wasn’t necessarily prophetic. He was seeing what we all see—a world riven by war, a country spiraling into hatred and violence. What made his prescription so powerful was how unfashionable it was. For all the talk lately of “lowering the temperature,” vanishingly few people seem interested in understanding their perceived enemies. Nelson’s example inspired me—and many others—to at least try.

Last night, I drove back to our chapel in Northern Virginia. There were no meetings to attend, but I had an urge to check on the building. It had been about 36 hours since news of the Michigan shooting first broke. The casualty count had been confirmed—four dead, eight injured—and the motives were becoming clearer: According to The New York Times, the shooter had nursed an irrational hatred of Mormons for years, apparently stemming from a breakup with a Latter-day Saint girlfriend.

But other stories were coming out, too—about the church members who used their bodies to shield children from bullets; about the nurses at a nearby hospital who, though they’d been on strike, left their picket line to attend to the injured.

[Listen: Why assassinations shaped the 1960s and haunt us again]

Sitting in the church parking lot, I thought about one of the last things Nelson had said to me. We were nearing the end of our interview when he began to contemplate the questions he would face in his imminent interview with God.

“I doubt if I’ll be judged by the number of operations I did, or the number of scientific publications I had,” he said. “I doubt if I’ll even be judged by the growth of the Church during my presidency. I don’t think it’ll be a quantitative experience. I think he’ll want to know: What about your faith? What about virtue? What about your knowledge? Were you temperate? Were you kind to people? Did you have charity, humility?” In the end, Nelson told me, “we exist to make life better for people.”

Nelson was not naive about the world in which he lived. He surely knew that he would die before seeing peace triumph over contention. But he kept inviting us to reach for something better, because that’s what a prophet does—and because he knew that some of us would take him up on it.

As I pulled out of the parking lot, I passed the church’s VISITORS WELCOME sign. The sun had set, but a nearby light illuminated the sign just enough to reveal a small bouquet of flowers left on top of it by a stranger.

Trump Has a Warning for Spencer Cox

2025-09-13T10:03:00-04:00

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Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that seemed at risk of spiraling into further violence. “To my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” he said. “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”

Shortly after he finished, Cox’s phone rang. The president was calling.

“You know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us,” Cox says Trump told him. Trump went on to recite statistics suggesting that the presidency was “one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.” Fifteen percent of the men who’d held his office had been shot; 8 percent had been killed.

Cox understood Trump’s concern—after all, the president had narrowly escaped assassination himself just a year earlier. And Kirk’s murder was the latest grim turn in a season of political violence that has terrified America’s elected officials. “People are scared to death in this building,” a member of Congress told NBC News this week. But as Cox and I spoke yesterday evening, he didn’t seem especially focused on his own safety. He had something else on his mind.

We were talking via Zoom. Cox looked exhausted; he told me he hadn’t slept in 48 hours. And though he was relieved that an arrest had been made, he also seemed unnerved by the alleged killer’s identity: a 22-year-old man who’d grown up in a Mormon family in the southern-Utah town of Washington.

[Read: Utah’s governor almost seemed like he was speaking to Trump]

Cox had admitted in his news conference that he’d been quietly hoping for a different outcome. “I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn’t be one of us—that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country,” he’d said. “But it did happen here, and it was one of us.”

The comment drew some criticism from people who accused him of seeking a politically convenient scapegoat. But I understood what he meant. I was born in Orem, where Kirk’s shooting took place. And though I grew up on the other side of the country, I chose to return to the area after high school, attending college just 15 minutes from the now-infamous campus of Utah Valley University. It is difficult to overstate just how surreal it was to watch the macabre scene—the bullet, the blood, the screams—play out in the heart of a county so cartoonishly friendly and wholesome that Utahns refer to it as “Happy Valley.” For people like Cox, who have devoted themselves to realizing a certain idealized vision of Utah—the city on a hill, the beacon to the world—the assassination had a shattering effect.

“It does feel like there’s a bit of our innocence lost,” Cox told me last night. “We’re kind of sheltered here in these mountains and these valleys, and we push the world out. But the world is certainly here. It’s at our doorstep.”

From its inception, Utah has aspired to be a sanctuary from the strife and sin and violence that scarred the rest of the country. The Mormon pioneers who settled the territory had been driven into the desert by a campaign of state-sanctioned persecution, and at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains they set out to build an American Zion. A civilization sprouted; a mythology took root. In 1864, when a writer for The Atlantic visited Utah, he found Brigham Young, the governor and prophet, presenting his state as an idyllic haven from the Civil War. “You find us trying to live peaceably,” Young told the writer. “When your country has become a desolation, we, the saints whom you cast out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a home.”

More recently, Utah’s political leaders have sought to position their state as a model of cooperation and consensus-building. “The Utah Way,” they proudly call it. They’ve made headlines with bipartisan compromises on LGBTQ rights, religious freedom, and immigration. In 2023, as the chair of the National Governors Association, Cox launched an initiative he called “Disagree Better,” focused on improving America’s political discourse. Leaders of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, meanwhile, have oriented much of their preaching in recent years around the Christian call to be peacemakers.

Cox is the ideal pitchman for this brand of Utah politics—affable and smiley, temperamentally averse to the confrontational style that has taken over so much of politics. “We’re weird,” he declared at his State of the State address last January. “The good kind of weird. The kind of weird the rest of the nation is desperate for right now.”

The reality, of course, was always more complicated than the picture Cox painted. Utah politics has seen its share of corruption and scandal, of demagogues and frauds. Still, in an era of radicalization, the state’s politics had remained idiosyncratic enough to create space for Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney and Cox—a genteel breed of Republican that had lately become scarce elsewhere. But at some point in the past decade, the sense of hostility and menace that’s bloomed across the country began leaching into Utah.

In 2021, then-Senator Mitt Romney was booed at a Utah Republican convention with such viciousness that he found himself wondering if he was safe. “There are deranged people among us,” he later told me, noting that, in Utah, “people carry guns.” Last year, when Cox was running for reelection as governor, he received a similar response at the same convention. Dismayed and exasperated, he scolded the jeering members of his party: “Maybe you just hate that I don’t hate enough.”

As he slogged through a bitter campaign, one marked by conspiracy theories and uncharacteristically heated rhetoric, Cox realized something had changed in his state. “There’s kind of been a breach in the stronghold,” he told me at the time.

Cox looked for ways to close the breach. He launched “Disagree Better.” He filmed ads alongside his political opponents making earnest appeals for democracy and decency. Convinced that young people in his state were being poisoned by radicalizing content on the internet, he signed a first-in-the-nation law designed to limit children’s access to social media. (Social-media companies sued, so the law, tied up in court, has not gone into effect.) Still, the breach widened. Nothing seemed to reverse the torrent of nasty, feral politics flowing in from the rest of the country.

Cox told me he had no doubt the alleged shooter’s worldview had been warped in some very dark corners of the internet. And watching the online discourse around Kirk’s murder this week only underscored the damage done by algorithmically incentivized ghoulishness. “Discord, 4chan, Twitter, Bluesky—these things are really hacking our brains and hijacking our agency,” he told me. “The worst of humanity is in our pockets.” Even the most carefully constructed sanctuary can’t withstand an onslaught like the one generated by Silicon Valley.

[Read: One of Utah’s own]

And yet, as our conversation wound down, Cox made clear that he wasn’t ready to let go of his Utah exceptionalism. He spoke of candlelight vigils and touching conversations with Democrats who were devastated by Kirk’s death. “Maybe, just maybe, there’s a path forward for our country that comes through the great people of Utah,” he told me. I sympathized with his reaching for optimism. The dream of an American Zion doesn’t easily die.

In the days since Kirk’s assassination, I’ve found myself repeatedly humming a strange old Mormon-pioneer hymn.

“In our lovely Deseret,

Where the Saints of God have met,

There’s a multitude of children all around …”

Deseret was the name first given to the territory that would become Utah. The word, borrowed from the Book of Mormon, means “honeybee,” and it was meant to convey the pioneer values of hard work and self-reliance. But the name eventually came to evoke the broader vision of Utah’s Zionic ideal—a place of peace and comity, of safety.

The students who gathered at a campus amphitheater this week to listen and debate and protest—the ones who wound up fleeing in terror as a speaker bled out onstage and a sniper slipped away into the woods—were old enough to no longer be “a multitude of children.” Nor were they likely blind to the problems in their state. But they’d taken for granted that they lived in a place lovely enough to allow for a free exchange of ideas without bullets ripping through the air above their heads.

That they had to be disabused of that belief is a tragedy. Cox, and all of us, are left clinging to the hope that it’s not a harbinger.

The Visionary of Trump 2.0

2025-05-16T07:30:00-04:00

The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.

But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.

Behind all the DOGE pyrotechnics, Vought—who serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget—is working methodically to advance a sophisticated ideological project decades in the making. If Musk is moving fast and breaking things, as the Silicon Valley dictum goes, Vought is taking the shattered pieces of the federal government and reassembling them into a radically new constitutional order.

“I’m not going to say it’s a misdirection play, but they’re the trauma-inducing shock troops,” Steve Bannon, who worked with Vought during Trump’s first term and remains in touch with him, told me of DOGE. “Russ has got a vision. He’s not an anarchist. He’s a true believer.”

Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicized or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.

[Lila Shroff: It’s a model of government efficiency, but DOGE wants it gone]

Despite having been a Trump adviser for nearly a decade, Vought has not cultivated the political celebrity of high-profile White House officials such as Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt. Vought rarely gives interviews (he declined my request), and when he does speak in public, he is usually explicating the wonkish intricacies of the federal government in a nasal voice. His job title is dull and opaque. Even his physical bearing is forgettable: Bald and bespectacled, with a graying beard, he looks a bit like a middle-school social-studies teacher.

But whereas Musk’s influence already seems to be waning, Vought remains among the most powerful figures in today’s Washington. As a co-author of Project 2025, and later a chair of the Republican National Convention’s platform committee, he drew up detailed plans to “tame the bureaucracy” once Trump returned to power. Now, as head of an agency that touches every aspect of the $6.8 trillion federal budget, Vought is in position to enact his vision. And he’s wasted little time.

In his early days as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—an independent agency that was designed to be insulated from partisan pressure—Vought sent layoff notices to 1,500 employees, closed the office, canceled contracts, and declined funding for the agency from the Federal Reserve. Across hundreds of other federal agencies, he is spearheading an effort to simply stop enforcing many regulations. And last month, Trump proposed a rule that would convert 50,000 federal workers into Schedule F employees, whom the president can fire at will—a policy that Vought has championed since the first term. Vought’s ideas, once seen as radical, are now being realized.

Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda—for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID—are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.

Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”

[Anne Applebaum: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The White House did not respond to a list of questions I sent them for this story. But in a statement, Communications Director Steven Cheung called Vought a “patriot” and told me, “There is nobody more qualified or better suited to lead OMB in order to implement President Trump’s goals and priorities.”

Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.

What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.”

Vought’s radicalization was not a foregone conclusion. He grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut, with a devout family who sent him to a private Christian school and Bible camp in the summers. At Wheaton College, the evangelical university where he studied history and political science, Vought was bookish and a bit “nerdy,” according to one fellow graduate who knew him at the time. The former student, who requested anonymity to recount personal interactions, told me that Vought was a target of periodic pranks on their floor in Traber Hall. On one occasion, some of Vought’s dorm mates took a putrid-smelling bin that had been collecting dirty dishes in the common bathroom and hid it under his bed.

On Wheaton’s conservative campus, Vought didn’t stand out as particularly ideological. He made a brief foray into electoral politics with a failed bid for student-body vice president, during which he campaigned, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, on improving the school’s recycling program. His views began to take on a sharper edge when he got to Washington. He spent a decade working on Capitol Hill, including as a policy aide to the House Republican Conference under then-Chairman Mike Pence, and became the executive director of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus founded to exert pressure on House GOP leadership from the right. In 2010, he left Congress to join the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm.

[Elaine Godfrey: Federal workers are facing a new reality]

Vought earned a reputation in Washington’s right-wing circles for his deep knowledge of how the federal government actually works. “There’s a category of conservative activists who say, ‘This is what should be done,’ and there’s a much smaller group who actually know how to make it happen. Russ is one of them,” Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative pressure group Judicial Watch, told me.

The early years of Barack Obama’s presidency inspired a wave of libertarian energy on the right. Tea Party activists railed against excessive federal spending and bloated bureaucracy. The popular rallying cry of the moment was to shrink the government down to the size where one could “drown it in a bathtub,” as Grover Norquist famously put it. But Vought wanted to go further than the Norquists of the world.

After Republicans failed to recapture the White House in 2012, Vought joined a small group of activists and operatives who began gathering a few blocks from the Capitol, at the Judicial Watch offices, to strategize. They called themselves Groundswell, and their stated mission, according to leaked documents, was bold if a bit grandiose: to wage a “30 front war” that would “fundamentally transform the nation.” The weekly meetings drew a who’s who of influential insurgents, including Ginni Thomas, Dan Bongino, Leonard Leo, and Bannon, who was then running Breitbart News. Their agenda was diffuse, but they were united in a shared conviction that the Republican establishment and much of the conservative movement were insufficiently radical. They were impatient with the standard small-government activism of the era—they wanted more confrontation, and were open to more extreme ideas.

The conservative commentator Erick Erickson, who first met Vought in 2004, recalls his friend explaining to him early in Obama’s first term the mechanisms by which the purportedly nonpartisan civil service had come to be teeming with Democrats intent on thwarting right-leaning policies and pushing left-wing ones. It was a prototype of the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy” rhetoric that Vought and his allies would deploy in the Trump era.

The unitary executive theory had been circulating in GOP circles since at least Ronald Reagan’s first term. The idea held that Article II of the Constitution gives the president absolute control over the executive branch, including nonpartisan civil servants and independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Republicans had periodically experimented with ways of applying this principle: After Reagan took office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation lobbied the new administration to recruit partisan supporters to fill 5,000 new jobs created by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

There was, during the Obama years, limited intellectual appetite on the right for a return of the imperial presidency. But Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office in 2017—and his running claims that the “deep state” was sabotaging his presidency—changed all of that. Suddenly, Republicans were eager to discover new and creative ways to tighten the president’s grip on the executive branch. Vought, who joined the administration as deputy director of OMB before eventually becoming director, was happy to offer his services.

[Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Matteo Wong, and Shane Harris: This is what happens when the DOGE guys take over]

Unlike most OMB directors, whose only forays into political controversy are in drafting the president’s budget proposals, Vought quietly played a role in some of the Trump era’s most combustible moments. In 2019, when Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, it was Vought’s office that withheld military aid to the country, eventually triggering Trump’s first impeachment. And when Congress refused to fund the border wall, it was Vought who convinced the president to declare a state of emergency so that he could redirect $3.6 billion from a military construction budget to the project.

Vought has expressed pride in his record of pushing boundaries in ways that unsettle less dogmatic Republicans. Whereas many religious conservatives distance themselves from the “Christian nationalist” label, Vought wears it proudly. At a Heritage event, he sarcastically derided some of the Cabinet officials in Trump’s first term, whom he described as “a bunch of people around him who were constantly sitting on eggs and saying, Oh my gosh, he’s getting me to violate the law.”

And in a 2023 speech at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank he led after Trump’s first term, Vought touted the virtues of cruelty as he held forth on his plans for the federal civil service. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at a closed-door meeting, according to a video that was later leaked to ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

As disruptive as Vought’s early moves have been, his most dramatic provocations are likely still to come. Vought has been a vocal champion of reviving the presidential “impoundment” power, which would allow the president to effectively circumvent Congress to unilaterally withhold appropriated funds. Congress outlawed the practice in 1974, and the Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional. But Trump has publicly rejected this interpretation of the law, and Vought has called impoundment “a necessary remedy to our fiscal brokenness.”

Earlier this month, the White House released its proposed budget to Congress, calling for $163 billion in reductions to federal spending, and making many of DOGE’s cuts permanent. In a letter to Congress, Vought wrote that the proposed cuts aimed to root out “niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.” The proposal included slashing the budget for the CDC by nearly 40 percent, dramatically scaling back rental-assistance programs, and cutting aid to international-development banks.

[From the May 2025 issue: I should have seen this coming]

In a typical year, the president’s budget proposal is little more than a messaging document, with virtually no chance of becoming law as written. Congress has the power of the purse. But given Trump’s stated indifference to such conventions, this year’s White House budget could be less a proposal than a warning shot. It doesn’t require much imagination to envision how the coming budget fight could spiral into the kind of constitutional crisis that Vought’s allies are rooting for: Congress declines to enshrine Trump’s spending cuts as law. Trump cuts the funding anyway. Legal challenges follow, court orders are issued, and Trump defies them, claiming a decisive mandate from voters and sweeping power under the unitary executive theory.

Some conservatives, wary of concentrating so much power in the Oval Office, question the path that Vought is taking. Philip Wallach, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who recently wrote a book called Why Congress, told me that he generally supports Vought’s effort to rein in the so-called administrative state. But he is alarmed by what he considers to be Vought’s disregard for core constitutional principles such as separation of powers. “For those of us who care about constitutional government,” Wallach said, “this administration is creating a lot of moments of truth.”

Of course, partisan enthusiasm for executive power rarely outlasts the loss of the White House. But Vought’s allies trust that he knows what he’s doing. “He’s mindful enough to understand that eventually a Democrat will become president again,” Erickson told me. “So how do you make the bureaucracy responsive to the president of the day without making it powerful enough to work at cross-purposes with conservative goals when a Democrat is in there? One of the easiest ways is to downsize.”

In other words, the durability of Vought’s ideological project might depend on just how much of the federal government Trump can unravel before he leaves office.

Growing Up Murdoch

2025-02-14T13:50:00-05:00

Updated at 4:00 p.m. ET on March 24, 2025.

James Murdoch was seated at a conference table in a Manhattan law office in March 2024 when he realized he was witnessing the final dissolution of his family.

Three months earlier, his father, Rupert, had told James and his sisters that he was rewriting the family trust to grant his elder son, Lachlan, full control of the Murdoch empire after his death, rather than splitting it equally among his four oldest children. The amendment was part of a secret plan that the patriarch’s allies had code-named “Project Family Harmony.”

Rupert’s shocking decision was the climax of a succession battle that had pitted James and Lachlan, born just 15 months apart, against each other essentially their entire lives. (Their older sisters, Prudence and Elisabeth, had never been serious contenders to run the business: “He is a misogynist,” James said of his father.)

Rupert believed that he had no choice but to take aggressive action. He was 92 years old, and was certain that James was plotting with his sisters to seize control of the family’s companies as soon as he died, after which they would defang his conservative media empire and destroy his life’s work.

He was right that his younger son did not share his vision for the family business. James had come to see Fox News as a blight on his family’s name and a menace to American democracy. He believed that drastic changes were needed to save the companies from the consequences of his father’s reckless mismanagement. (“If lying to your audience is how you juice ratings,” he would tell me, “a good culture wouldn’t do that.”) Determined to retain a voice in the business, James and his older sisters had moved to block Rupert from changing the trust.

The legal drama was set to play out far from public view, in a Reno probate court—Nevada is known for its flexible estate laws—but it had global significance: The trial would determine who controlled the most powerful conservative media force in the world, one that had toppled governments and delivered Donald Trump to the White House. For the Murdochs, the stakes were also intensely personal. Depositions and discovery were surfacing years of painful secrets—intra-family scheming and manipulation, lies and leaking and devious betrayals. James and Rupert had barely spoken in years.

In the communications that emerged during the discovery process, James had learned how his father talked about him to the rest of the family—how calculating and manipulative he could be. When a packet of documents that James’s lawyer had requested arrived from Rupert, it came with a handwritten note: Dear James, Still time to talk? Love, Dad. P.S.: Love to see my grandchildren one day. James, who could not remember the last time Rupert had taken an interest in his grandchildren, didn’t bother to reply.

Now, at the Manhattan law office, James sat across the table from his father and prepared to be deposed. For nearly five hours, Rupert’s attorney asked James a series of withering questions.

Have you ever done anything successful on your own?

Why were you too busy to say “Happy birthday” to your father when he turned 90?

Does it strike you that, in your account, everything that goes wrong is always somebody else’s fault?

At one point, the attorney referred to James and his sisters as “white, privileged, multibillionaire trust-fund babies.” At another, he read an unsourced passage from a book about the Murdochs to suggest that James was a conniving saboteur.

James did his best to concentrate, but he couldn’t help stealing glances at his father. Rupert sat slouched and silent throughout the deposition, staring inscrutably at his younger son. Every so often, though, he would pick up his phone and type. Finally, James realized why. “He was texting the lawyer questions to ask,” James told me. “How fucking twisted is that?”

When the session ended, Rupert left the conference room without saying a word.

In 1960, at age 29, Rupert Murdoch acquired the Daily Mirror, a Sydney tabloid, as part of his aggressive expansion of the news business he’d inherited from his father. (Keystone / Hulton Archive / Getty)

James Murdoch likes to think of himself as a student of dynastic dysfunction. He quotes Shakespeare and cites Roman imperial history in casual conversation. He is not sure he agrees with Tolstoy’s dictum—“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Because when he surveys the literature on families wrecked by wealth and power, he mostly sees the same sad patterns in endless repetition.

The contours of his own family’s story are familiar to the point of cliché—the legacy-obsessed patriarch slipping into senescence and paranoia, the courtiers whispering in his ear, the siblings squabbling over their portion of the kingdom. “It’s all been written down many, many times,” he said. “The real tragedy is that no one in my family doing this bothered to pay attention.”

There had always been rumors about James—his more liberal politics, his rifts with Rupert—but over two decades as an executive at News Corp and Fox, he’d played the good soldier and loyal son. He’d even been groomed at various points to be his father’s successor. Then, in 2020, he abruptly resigned from News Corp’s board of directors in a short letter citing “disagreements over certain editorial content” and “other strategic decisions.” James had never fully explained what led to this decision, and when I approached him in early 2024, I hoped he might be ready to elaborate.

I didn’t yet know that the Murdochs were in the midst of a private meltdown over the family trust. But the trial, I would learn, was really the culmination of a decades-long story—one that James decided he was finally ready to tell.

Over the next year, he and his wife, Kathryn, told me about the mind games at a Murdoch family-counseling retreat, and all the ways that Rupert had devised to pit his sons against each other. They detailed the cynical deliberations that had led the family’s news outlets to support Brexit and Trump, and the machinations that various family members had undertaken to get one another fired or subpoenaed or humiliated in the press.

Some of these stories felt strangely familiar, having appeared in slightly altered forms on Succession, the HBO drama about a fictionalized family very much resembling the Murdochs. James had never watched the series; he’d tried the first episode, but found it too painful. But other members of the Murdoch clan were obsessed with the show; certain scenes and storylines seemed uncannily true to life. Throughout my reporting, I heard constant speculation about which family members might secretly have leaked to the show’s writers. James and Kathryn, I was told, thought his sister Liz was responsible. Liz swore she wasn’t, though for a while she was convinced that her ex-husband was talking with the writers—and in fact she later learned that he’d repeatedly offered his services, but the showrunner, Jesse Armstrong, had declined. Armstrong told me that he and his writers simply drew on press reports. “I think there’s a bit of psychodrama around this sort of thing,” he told me.

[Read: The play that explains Succession (and everything else)]

Airing the dirty laundry didn’t come naturally to James. In our conversations, he vacillated between seething anger toward his father and an odd kind of protectiveness. Trim and neatly dressed, he spoke in an even, British-inflected staccato that seemed to belie a subcutaneous anxiety. Sometimes, when I would ask him about a particularly painful episode with his father, he would find that the dishes suddenly needed clearing.

Kathryn often took on the role of taskmaster. In one meeting, James began our interview by speaking rapidly for 11 straight minutes about the adaptive cruise control on his Tesla, and the new venture he was launching with Art Basel, and his daughter’s summer internship working with giraffe conservationists in Zimbabwe. Finally, Kathryn interjected. “Sweetheart,” she said firmly. “I think you need to take a breath, take a sip of water, and maybe we should just talk about what we want to talk about.”

James had long ago internalized the edict that you never talk to reporters about the family. This was an inviolable rule of Rupert’s—one of the first things Kathryn had learned when she and James started dating. James hated the books and articles written by professional Murdoch chroniclers, which he mockingly referred to as “the canon.” It wasn’t until his father’s texts and emails came out in the trust litigation that James realized just how many insidious stories over the years—the ones that portrayed Kathryn as a meddling “former model” and James as a liberal dilettante—had been planted by Rupert’s camp. The revelation was liberating.

The couple’s motives in talking to me were surely mixed. Sometimes, they seemed fueled by raw anger at what they see as Rupert’s betrayal. Other times, they seemed preoccupied with reputation management—eager to present themselves as evolved, socially conscious billionaires, and distance themselves from certain unfortunate associations with the Murdoch name. (Rupert and Lachlan declined to be interviewed for this story, but a spokesperson objected to what he called a “litany of falsehoods,” noting that they came “from someone who no longer works for the companies but still benefits from them financially.”)

James also seemed compelled, in part, by a desire to add his chapter to the literature of family dysfunction, in hopes that some future family might take the lessons more seriously than his own had. During our first meeting, he told me about a document that one of his father’s lawyers had written, which included a quote from King Lear: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

James and Kathryn found it darkly amusing. Did Rupert and his lawyers not realize that the line is uttered by a mad king who disowns his only honest daughter?

“The whole point is that the crazy old man doesn’t know that Cordelia is telling him the truth,” Kathryn told me. Her husband studied a spot on the table in front of him.

Rupert and Anna Murdoch in 1977 with (left to right) Liz, Lachlan, and James (Bernard Gotfryd / Getty)

Rupert’s media empire has its own mythology, one that every Murdoch learns at an early age. The story begins during World War I, when a young reporter named Keith Arthur Murdoch visits Australian soldiers fighting in Gallipoli. There, Keith learns that the campaign has been a secret disaster. His countrymen are dying by the thousands, serving as cannon fodder for the British military. Press reports are supposed to be submitted to military censors, but Keith—exhibiting a rebellious streak and a nose for a great story—smuggles out news of the slaughter in an 8,000-word letter. The dispatch circulates widely in Australia, sparking public outrage, changing the course of the Gallipoli campaign, and turning Keith into a national hero. When he dies, in 1952, he leaves a newspaper in the coastal city of Adelaide to his 21-year-old son, Rupert, hoping to plant a dynasty.

Rupert graduates from Oxford and returns to Australia in a hurry to turn his inheritance into an empire. He conquers the country’s media landscape in a reckless scramble, buying one newspaper and leveraging it to finance the debt for the next. He gobbles up TV stations too. Murdoch outlets become known for an irresistible mix of sports, scandal, and populist outrage; some observers will later call him the inventor of the modern tabloid. By the time he’s 40, he is the most powerful media figure in Australia, eventually controlling two-thirds of the country’s newspaper market.

Rupert discovers that one of the great pleasures of being a press baron is wielding political power. After he arrives on Fleet Street, in the late ’60s, he buys a pair of popular British papers and uses them to successfully campaign for Margaret Thatcher, who later clears a regulatory path for Rupert to expand his British TV holdings. When he turns his attention to the U.S., he uses his acquisition of the New York Post to befriend an up-and-coming GOP operative running Ronald Reagan’s New York campaign. He works with Roger Stone to shape the candidate’s image, helping Reagan carry the state.

In the New York media world, Rupert’s conservative politics are held in suspicion, and his rapid pace of acquisitions—which include New York magazine and The Village Voice—is alarming. He appears on the cover of Time in 1977, his head pasted onto the body of King Kong, above a screaming tabloid-style headline: EXTRA!!! AUSSIE PRESS LORD TERRIFIES GOTHAM. But Rupert doesn’t care about popularity; he takes a certain arch delight in his nefarious reputation.

Once Reagan is in office, his administration waives a rule against owning TV stations and newspapers in the same market, allowing Rupert to launch his own TV network in America. Analysts call him foolish for trying to take on CBS, NBC, and ABC. But Rupert fills Fox’s prime-time lineup with provocations—sitcoms about dysfunctional families (The Simpsons, Married … With Children); pulpy crime shows (Cops, America’s Most Wanted )—and the network is an unexpected hit. He defies expectations again when he decides to challenge CNN’s cable dominance by launching a right-wing news channel.

Amid all the empire building that follows—the movie studio, The Wall Street Journal, HarperCollins, the push into Asia—Rupert insists on treating News Corp like a family business, drawing his children into his professional world at every opportunity. At breakfast, he spreads the day’s newspapers across the table, and gives his children a master class for budding media moguls. Family dinners feature visits from politicians and dignitaries. He takes his children on tours of printing presses, and gives them internships at his newspapers.

This is his animating motivation, he insists, his conglomerate’s entire reason for being. He loves his children, and he wants to leave them an inheritance that means something, just as his father did for him. “I don’t know any son of any prominent media family who hasn’t wanted to follow in the footsteps of his forebears,” he says. “It’s just too great a life.”

But there is one episode that often gets left out of the official mythology. In the early ’90s, News Corp is in trouble, the result of a debt crisis brought on by Rupert’s relentless expansion. It has lost the confidence of the markets, its share price is depressed, and it is nearing bankruptcy. Rupert sees an opportunity in the crisis.

Before dying, it turns out, his father placed his newspaper holdings in a trust and divided control equally among his wife and four children. Although Rupert has run the company all these years, he’s never truly owned it. Now, he decides, it’s time for that to change.

Taking advantage of the low stock price, he informs his mother and siblings that he is ready to buy them out: He makes clear that he is not interested in negotiating. When the family meets to discuss the matter, his biographer Michael Wolff will later report, Rupert’s mother “buries her head in her arms on the boardroom table.”

In Rupert’s conception of the family empire, the empire always takes precedence over the family.

Rupert and Anna Murdoch in the early 1980s with (left to right) Lachlan, James, and Liz (Peter Carrette Archive / Getty)

The Upper East Side penthouse where James spent his childhood had a private elevator entrance and a butler named George and panoramic views of Central Park. But kids want their fathers, and James’s was busy. “Is Daddy going deaf?” he once asked his mother, Anna, when he was young. “No,” she replied, “he’s just not listening.” Those storied bonding moments at the breakfast table were less rituals than special occasions, as far as James recalls. His parents moved to Los Angeles when he was around 16 and left James behind in Manhattan to attend the elite Horace Mann School. He would go long stretches without seeing them. When Rupert did come to town, striding into the penthouse in his double-breasted suits, talking about important things with a gaggle of employees, it felt almost like spotting a celebrity.

In the roles assigned to the Murdoch children when they were young, Prue was the peacemaking older sister from Rupert’s first marriage; Liz, the temperamental artist. The two boys were treated almost like twins—rivals in the unspoken competition for Rupert’s approval. Lachlan was the golden boy, the elder son and heir apparent, rugged and charismatic and self-consciously emulative of his father. James, the intense, cerebral kid who bleached his hair and pierced his ears and provoked his father at the dinner table with contrarian questions, was typecast as the rebel.

James bristles at the caricature now, but he admits that he was “not an easy son.” He got into trouble at school, and demonstrated a lack of interest in his father’s work that could reasonably be construed as disdain. When, at 14, James interned at Rupert’s Australian newspapers, he fell asleep during a press conference, and a photo of the snoozing scion wound up in the rival Sydney Morning Herald.

As a teenager, James spent summers at an archaeological site in Italy, digging holes alongside a bohemian collection of grad students, artists, and antiquities scholars. When they tried to provoke him with questions about politics, he responded simply, “I’m not my father.” He loved the work, and the freedom that came with it. Richard Hodges, who oversaw the excavation, thought James would make a worthy protégé, but he knew it wouldn’t happen. “His father wouldn’t have allowed him to do that,” Hodges told me.

Still, the fact that Lachlan was the obvious successor gave James room to shape his own identity in those years. After graduating from high school in 1991, he enrolled at Harvard, where he got a tattoo, grew a beard, and began drawing a satiric comic strip for The Lampoon called “Albrecht the Atypical Hun,” about a kindly, poetry-loving World War I–era German who feels excluded because he doesn’t enjoy war crimes. James dropped out his senior year and moved to New York to start a hip-hop label with his friends. The offices for Rawkus Records featured a poster of Chairman Mao.

He met Kathryn Hufschmid in 1997, when he was 24, aboard a charter flight to Fiji, where he, his brother, and an assortment of models, surfers, and Australian bodybuilders planned to spend a long weekend on a yacht. It wasn’t really James’s scene, but he was happy to find himself sitting next to a quiet, pretty blonde who shared his love of the Salman Rushdie novel Midnight’s Children. “We hardly saw them the whole weekend,” recalls Joe Cross, a friend who was on the trip. “They’d surface for meals.”

Kathryn was living in Australia at the time, and James was in New York, so for their second date, they met halfway, in Hawaii. For their third, James invited Kathryn to meet his family on his father’s 158-foot superyacht, Morning Glory, off the coast of Australia. They were already talking seriously about their future, and the trip was a chance for Kathryn to see what she’d be getting into.

The experience was enlightening. She caught Rupert cheating at Monopoly (he just smirked and shrugged), and observed constant sniping—at one point, Anna got up and left a family dinner in tears. Lachlan had brought along his latest girlfriend. When they got into an argument, Kathryn recalled, Lachlan shaved his head, jumped off the boat, and swam to shore. “He has a weird, dramatic side,” James told me. (A spokesperson for Lachlan denied James’s version of events.)

Kathryn had grown up the only child of a single mother in Oregon, and left home at 15 to pursue modeling. She wasn’t scared off by this big, noisy, disputatious family—the prospect of having a family at all appealed to her. And she left a good impression: After the trip, Rupert urged James to propose as quickly as possible. They were married at a small ceremony in Connecticut, where James read Pablo Neruda and Kathryn read James Joyce.

“She was very fond of Rupert, and she’s a very loyal person,” Chloe Hooper, a longtime friend of the couple’s, told me. “I don’t think she ever anticipated that 25 years later, she would be in this ideological knife fight with them.”

Rupert, Lachlan, and James at News Corp’s annual general meeting in 2002 (Fairfax Media / Getty)

On June 25, 1999, guests boarded the Morning Glory, now anchored in New York Harbor, to watch Rupert Murdoch marry Wendi Deng.

Rupert had finalized his divorce from Anna, his wife of nearly 32 years, just 17 days earlier, and both James and Lachlan objected to their father’s new marriage. The brothers believed that Deng, an executive at a News Corp subsidiary in Hong Kong, couldn’t be trusted, and suspected that she might even have ties to Chinese intelligence. (Deng has denied this, but James’s suspicion never died. More than two decades later, Kathryn would joke that Deng used “CCP-issued burner phones” to evade a subpoena in the trust litigation. A spokesperson for Lachlan denied that he objected to the marriage or had suspicions about Deng.)

It was a time of broad upheaval for the family. Liz had split from her husband and taken up with Matthew Freud—an intense, unnervingly slick PR executive from London (and a great-grandson of Sigmund). The Murdochs, always skeptical of interlopers, were especially wary of Freud, with his constant flaunting of social connections and his gleeful loutishness. The first time Kathryn met him, she recalls, he started the conversation by trying to convince her that it was morally defensible for a man to cheat on his pregnant wife.

At the wedding, Rupert gave a long, glowing speech about his new wife, while a barefoot Deng looked on adoringly. James and Kathryn parked themselves by a bucket of caviar and got drunk.

James had joined the family business a few years earlier, after Rupert bought Rawkus Records and folded it into News Corp’s fledgling music and new-media group. James’s title, head of “digital publishing,” was not an especially exalted one at a dead-tree media company. Lachlan was the one on the succession track—immersing himself in the tabloid business so beloved by his father and eventually apprenticing with the chief operating officer.

Before long, the New York City headquarters started to feel a bit cramped for both of the boss’s sons. At board meetings, James—ferociously analytical and eager to one-up his older brother—would freely challenge Lachlan, picking apart his logic and questioning his ideas. Lachlan, for all his easygoing confidence, was not as articulate as James—he had struggled with dyslexia and spent time in speech therapy as a kid—and sometimes grew flustered. The feuding was awkward for others in the room, but Rupert rarely stepped in to break them up.

In 2000, Rupert decided to give James a new assignment that would take him to Hong Kong. James had recently worked with his mother to impose some semblance of peace on the family. During the divorce, Anna had asked her younger son to meet with her. She told him she was prepared to give up half of the money to which she was entitled in exchange for alterations to the family trust. Anna had seen the way Rupert played the kids off one another, how he picked favorites, how their lives risked becoming consumed with a never-ending quest for the crown. What she wanted was an arrangement that would split the family fortune—and the empire—evenly among the four children once Rupert was gone.

With James acting as mediator, his parents reached an agreement. The trust would now give Rupert four votes and each of his four children one. When he died, his votes would disappear and control of the company would be split among Prue, Liz, Lachlan, and James.

“The idea,” James would later recall ruefully, “was that it would incentivize us to cooperate.”

In Hong Kong, James found that he thrived working 8,000 miles away from his father. He began repeating, almost like a mantra, a Chinese proverb: “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away.”

He had been sent to turn around Star, an Asian satellite-TV company that had lost $200 million since News Corp bought it, in 1993, and was mired in mismanagement. The job had been presented as a big opportunity, but it looked to some like a suicide mission for a green 27-year-old.

James’s first move was to pivot Star’s growth strategy from Hong Kong to India. He ordered an overhaul of Star’s Indian programming, commissioning mass-market shows in regional languages. After Star debuted an Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, James built on the prime-time success by ordering a series of splashy Hindi-language dramas. Two years after he arrived at Star, the company turned a profit.

James’s success in Asia came as something of a surprise back at News Corp headquarters, people familiar with the company told me. “I have to be honest,” James recalled one board member telling him, “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

A promotion came in 2003, when James was named CEO of British Sky Broadcasting, a large satellite-TV company in which News Corp owned a 39 percent stake. His arrival in London was noisy and unwelcome. Rupert, whose down-market tabloids had earned him the nickname the Dirty Digger, was a villainous figure in Britain, and the appointment of his son to run a major British broadcaster prompted howls of nepotism and a sharp backlash in the market. On the day James made his first major presentation to investors, Sky’s share price dropped nearly 20 percent.

Sky was profitable, but stagnant. Among Brits, it was widely seen as a price-gouging service that bought Premier League soccer rights and ransomed them to resentful subscribers. Its internal culture was macho and belligerent. The predominant mentality, James recalled, was “Everybody hates us and we don’t care.”

Early on, James laid out his vision for a new, respectable Sky. The company was going to have a set of “values,” he told executives, and would adopt the best practices of a modern workplace. “All these grumpy, old English guys were looking around like, ‘What the fuck is this guy talking about?’ ” James told me.

He pushed out Sky’s CFO and several other executives. After hearing that an employee had gotten drunk at a Royal Television Society banquet and thrown a dinner roll at the former director-general of the BBC, James ordered a manager to sack him. James told me that when the manager resisted, he had to explain why “being a dick in public when you’re an ambassador for the company” was a fireable offense.

Under James’s leadership, Sky’s brand image improved and subscriber numbers grew. “He took what was this Aussie-inflected cowboy operation, and turned it into a respected, high-growth company,” Matthew Anderson, an executive who worked with James at Sky, told me.

But James could feel Rupert’s ambivalence. He had succeeded in large part by rejecting the corporate ethos cultivated by his father. Rupert had a well-known management modus operandi: Hire aggressive executives, give them their own fiefdoms, and let them run wild. It was central to the Murdoch mythology—the empire built on instinct, run by a shrewd band of self-styled pirates and gamblers.

[From the September 2003 issue: James Fallows on the age of Murdoch]

In London and New York, James told me, the pattern was the same: Nobody seemed to listen to the in-house lawyers if they could help it, and human resources was an afterthought at best. “When I’d say things like ‘compliance,’ they’d be like, ‘Oh my God, he uses business-school speak!’ ” James recalled. “And it’s like, ‘No, it’s the English language, and it’s kind of an important idea.’ ”

Rupert, for his part, seemed to resent his son for what he saw as a preoccupation with respectability, according to former News Corp employees. His misgivings were exacerbated by his apparent belief that Kathryn had indoctrinated James in fashionable left-of-center politics. The caricature periodically popped up in press coverage of the family: the witchy, liberal daughter-in-law casting a spell on Rupert’s impressionable son.

It was true that Kathryn was becoming more political. An awakening came, of all places, at a News Corp retreat in Pebble Beach, California, where she listened to Al Gore deliver his famous presentation on climate change. Soon after that, Kathryn went to work for the Clinton Climate Initiative. She also became more outspoken while sparring with her in-laws.

Once, during an argument over gay marriage, Rupert asserted that allowing same-sex couples to wed would be an affront to the institution.

Some people would say the same thing about divorce, Kathryn told her father-in-law. Rupert was then on his third wife.

Still, Rupert couldn’t afford to push away his younger son. Lachlan had left the company in 2005 after a series of confrontations with his father’s lieutenants in New York. The final indignity came when Lachlan, who was in charge of Fox’s TV stations, delayed green-lighting a police series developed by Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News. Ailes went over Lachlan’s head to Rupert, who reportedly told him, “Do the show. Don’t listen to Lachlan.” After years of being undermined by his father, who seemed conspicuously uneager to retire, Lachlan had had enough. He resigned and moved his family back to Australia.

With Lachlan effectively taking himself out of the running, James was the new successor in training. In 2007, he resigned his post at Sky to take a major promotion running all of News Corp’s operations in Asia and Europe. James’s domain would be larger than ever.

James Murdoch at the offices of his investment firm, Lupa Systems, in New York City, December 2024 (Jingyu Lin for The Atlantic)

The James Murdoch who moved into News Corp’s corner office in London was all but unrecognizable to many who had known him earlier in life. He’d always been a “bundle of pent-up energy,” as one former employee put it to me, but now he was brash and cocksure. He charged into a rival newspaper’s office to castigate the editor for running an ad campaign critical of his family. He insinuated himself with major shareholders and dined privately with David Cameron. To some observers, he looked like a boy trying on his father’s sport coat, but James clearly felt like he was on a hot streak.

He assembled a team of loyal deputies—young men in dark suits and open collars who were similarly fluent in M.B.A. jargon—and launched an ambitious bid to acquire the part of Sky that News Corp didn’t already own. If completed, this would be the largest acquisition in the company’s history. By all appearances, James was establishing a rival power center on his side of the Atlantic—and he could sense that his growing confidence agitated his father.

In the 2008 biography for which he interviewed Rupert and his children at length, Michael Wolff noted an odd dynamic forming between James and Rupert around this time. James seemed to be deliberately cultivating a public persona modeled after his father’s—but rather than bringing the two men closer, the performance appeared to threaten Rupert. “His father is obviously proud,” Wolff wrote, “even perhaps slightly afraid of him.”

Then one day in 2010, Rupert did something out of character: He invited his adult children to a family-counseling retreat in Australia. He explained that he’d hired a therapist who specialized in families like theirs, and said he believed the guy could help them.

The retreat was held at the Murdoch family’s ancestral ranch in Cavan Station, a 25,000-acre farm a few hundred miles from Sydney where Merino sheep roam the plains and kangaroos have to be culled. The purpose was not ostensibly to discuss succession planning, James recalled, but rather how they would “behave with each other.” (“Was this more business or personal?” I asked. “There’s no difference in this family,” he said.)

Lately, Rupert had been talking with Liz about acquiring her production company, Shine Group. James didn’t think his sister should sell—she’d turned Shine, which produced megahits such as The Biggest Loser and MasterChef, into a success all by herself. Why let their father get his claws in it?

“My father was always trying to pull everyone into the company so that he could manipulate them against each other,” James told me.

The therapist began by sitting down with each Murdoch individually to get their view of what was wrong with the family. James, skeptical of the exercise, remembers telling him, “There’s some stuff you don’t need to pick at—nothing good is going to come of it.”

Sure enough, when the therapist convened the family, the session devolved into posturing, gaslighting, and recriminations. Everybody was spinning stories to garner strategic sympathy and advance their own agenda, James and Kathryn told me. “I think that the shrink was outmatched,” Kathryn said.

“It was a car crash,” James said. “Everyone was more alienated from each other at the end.”

Not long after that weekend, a mention of the Murdochs’ family therapy made it into Vanity Fair. Whoever leaked the story described a loving, supportive experience: James’s siblings advocating for their little brother, eager to help him strengthen his relationship with their father so that he’d be ready to take over the business one day. When I read this account to James, he scoffed.

The family-trust litigation had recently led him to some very different conclusions about the purpose of that strange retreat. His siblings, he’d come to believe, had grown irritated by his successful run at News Corp. Perhaps watching their little brother strut around like a boy-king—unsupervised by the king himself—had bred resentment. In any case, he believed, they’d been agitating for Rupert to rein in James. The family counseling was, James now believed, primarily an effort to get control of him.

At the end of the retreat, Liz told me, she offered to draft what she called a “family constitution”—an attempt to codify the values by which the newly therapized Murdochs would comport themselves. The document, titled “Murdoch Principles,” was passed back and forth between Liz and James, and eventually signed by all four siblings in February 2011. It contained a series of bullet-pointed aspirations:

“We commit to undertake active dialog with each other at all times and to relentlessly communicate openly, with trust and humility.”

“We agree not to delegate to anyone matters of family communication.”

“We will be vigilant of and defend against divisiveness, either between us or that which could infiltrate from without.”

Within months, the Murdochs would be at each other’s throats.

In 2002, a British teenager named Milly Dowler went missing. Her disappearance became a national fixation; after a six-month search, she was found dead. Nearly a decade later, on July 4, 2011, The Guardian published an explosive story, reporting that journalists at the Murdoch-owned News of the World tabloid had directed a private investigator to hack into Dowler’s voicemail before publishing the contents of some of the victim’s messages.

The Guardian article was followed by a cascade of stories alleging that News of the World had also hacked the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, relatives of victims of the 2005 London bombing, and the mother of an 8-year-old girl who was murdered by a pedophile. As the allegations piled up, James huddled with executives and lawyers to figure out how serious the issue was. He had never paid close attention to the company’s newspapers in London; they were his father’s preoccupation.

The alleged hacking had taken place before the newspapers were his responsibility. But James had made a decision three years earlier that now tied him directly to the scandal. In 2008, just six months after starting his new job, he’d signed off on a settlement with Gordon Taylor, a soccer executive who’d sued the company for hacking his cellphone. It didn’t seem like a big deal to James at the time—a reporter had gone rogue, a deal had been reached, and employees who knew more about the matter than he did had advised him to authorize the payment. When executives later presented him with evidence of widespread phone-hacking at News of the World, his approval of the Taylor settlement started to look like a cover-up. Over Rupert’s objections, James said, he instructed the company’s lawyers to call the police and hand over everything they had. (A spokesperson for Rupert disputed James’s account.)

Shortly after the Guardian story broke, James called his father to say they needed to shut down News of the World—the company’s most widely read newspaper—to contain the crisis. Rupert was not happy. He saw the scandal as an attack by his competitors—and the way to deal with an attack was to fight back. He instructed his son not to say a word to the press, James recalled. He’d be in London soon.

In the meantime, James became the public face of the scandal. Paparazzi camped outside his house. Pundits speculated that James might face a prison sentence. Every time Kathryn heard a siren in the distance, she was briefly gripped with a panic that the police were coming to arrest her husband.

“This is crazy!” she recalled telling James. “You cannot just sit here and hide!” He had to take control of the story.

“My father won’t let me,” he said.

Rupert’s arrival in London only made things worse. While James worked with his team on a damage-control strategy—including firings, internal compliance reforms, and an ad campaign apologizing to the public—Rupert was freelancing. He went around London answering reporters’ shouted questions, and paid a surprise visit to Milly Dowler’s parents. He told a Wall Street Journal reporter that he was “getting annoyed” with all the negative publicity, generating yet another round of negative publicity.

James was alarmed. His father looked frail and confused—nothing like the decisive, towering figure he’d long admired and tangled with. He remembers calling Lachlan in Australia and fretting, “Dude, our old man has gone crazy. This is terrible.”

To quell the public’s outrage, someone high up at the company would have to resign. To James, the obvious choice was Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor who now oversaw the Murdochs’ British newspapers. But Rupert loved Brooks, and insisted that he prized loyalty. “I don’t throw people under a bus,” he reportedly said.

James’s sister had a different idea. Liz, who lived in London and had sold Shine to News Corp earlier that year, had been a constant presence throughout the crisis, offering advice and comfort to their father. At one point, while talking with Rupert in the office he’d commandeered as a war room, she made the case that a member of the family would have to take the fall—and that person should be James. He’d already been planning to leave Europe to work under News Corp’s chief operating officer in New York. Why not reframe his resignation as a kind of Murdoch mea culpa?

Rupert said he’d think about it. The next day, he told Liz he liked the idea.

Then he added, “Go tell him.”

Liz obediently made her way down the hall to James’s office. “I was chatting with Dad, and we think the only way to stop the noise is for you to step down,” she recalled telling him. James was irate. He knew his father hated familial confrontation, but this represented a new level of cowardice. He told Liz that if their father wanted to fire him, he’d have to do it himself.

The episode did lasting damage to James and Liz’s relationship. When anonymously sourced stories appeared in the press painting James as the chief villain in the phone-hacking saga, he suspected that Liz’s camp was behind them. And when Liz’s production company was dismantled and merged with two other companies in 2014, she believed it was her brother exacting revenge. The siblings barely spoke for years. More than a decade later, Liz would tell me that she couldn’t believe she’d sacrificed her relationship with James in her quest for her father’s approval. “It’s one of the greatest regrets of my life,” she said.

James eventually came to understand that Rupert and Liz weren’t the only ones trying to scapegoat him. He told me that Liz’s then-husband, Freud, had used his extensive media contacts to wage a concerted leak campaign against him with the apparent goal of making Liz the new favored successor so that he could play puppet master. (The couple divorced in 2014. Kathryn, reflecting on his behavior throughout the marriage, told me, “I cannot exaggerate what a terrible person he is.” Freud did not respond to requests for comment.)

How much responsibility did James bear for the bungling of the phone-hacking scandal? Two News of the World employees would claim under oath that they’d told him about evidence that the practice went beyond one rogue reporter and a private investigator, and that he’d ignored them. James notes that a parliamentary committee later found that the pair had made misleading statements about other aspects of the phone-hacking scandal, and maintains that his employees hid evidence from him. A parliamentary investigation found that James was, if nothing else, guilty of “an astonishing lack of curiosity.”

What’s clear is that James took the brunt of the blame. On July 19, 2011, he appeared alongside his father at a high-profile parliamentary inquiry. James tried to read from the statement he’d prepared with the company’s lawyers, but Rupert cut him off to intone, “This is the most humble day of my life.” Later, when Rupert was asked why he hadn’t fired a reporter accused of phone-hacking, he said, “I had never heard of him,” and then added, “I think my son can perhaps answer that in more detail.”

James left London in disgrace in 2012 and moved back to New York, having resigned from his job as executive chairman of the Murdochs’ British publishing unit as well as his chairmanship at Sky. His role as deputy chief operating officer of News Corp had been presented publicly as a promotion, but in reality he was on a short leash—toiling in the company’s headquarters under the watchful eye of his father.

James and Rupert appeared before a parliamentary committee about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in July 2011. (PA Images / Getty)

Fourteen years later, the phone-hacking episode remains an obsession for James. It was the moment everything began to unravel, and his appetite for relitigation seems bottomless: the hit pieces that had gotten key facts wrong, the politicians and competitors who’d maligned him for sport. But whenever I’d ask about his father’s role in it all, he’d clam up. I began to wonder if he was actually protecting Rupert.

One afternoon in the spring of 2024, James, Kathryn, and I sat at the dining-room table in the couple’s grand country home in Connecticut, and I tried to get him to tell me the story again, this time without skipping the parts about his father. He kept standing up to clear the table, or asking if anyone wanted coffee, or suggesting that we move into the living room. At one point, he trailed off mid-sentence and nodded vacantly toward a window. “We had a bear in those little trees last year,” he said, to no one in particular.

Finally, Kathryn volunteered her version of events. For as long as she’d been in the family, she argued, Rupert had tried to force his two sons into a rigged competition. “He was pitting them against each other,” she said, “but there was always going to be one winner.” Every promotion James had gotten was, in Kathryn’s view, an invitation to fail, so that Rupert could validate his first choice of successor. When the phone-hacking scandal hit, Kathryn told me, “they could finally force a failure” on James.

This sounded a bit conspiratorial to me, and I wondered if James would quibble with it. Instead, he just shrugged. “I mean, you take your lumps, right?” he said. “It’s life.”

I wanted to press him on this point—to suggest that it might not actually be normal for your father to conspire to destroy your career and place you in legal jeopardy in order to give your job to your older brother. But James surely knew all this. Maybe he just didn’t want to dwell on his father’s cruelty, or the fact that he’d never been the favorite. James wasn’t protecting Rupert, I realized. He was protecting himself.

On April 22, 2015, James pulled up to the Lambs Club, a Midtown restaurant popular among media executives. He was scheduled to depart that afternoon for Indonesia, but he’d been asked to make time for a quick lunch with Lachlan and Chase Carey, one of Rupert’s most trusted lieutenants. He wasn’t expecting an ambush.

Four years after the phone-hacking scandal, the fallout was still being felt. Hundreds of victims had come forward, and millions in settlements had been paid. At least 15 employees had been charged with hacking crimes. The company had been forced to drop its bid for Sky, and Rupert, in order to protect his most valuable brands, had split his empire in two, with the newspapers and HarperCollins under the News Corp umbrella and the U.S. TV and film assets housed in a separate company, 21st Century Fox. (Rupert remained chairman of both companies.)

James believed, however, that he was still the only plausible successor. Lachlan was happily cocooned in Australia. He and his wife, Sarah, a former host of Australia’s Next Top Model, were a Sydney power couple. Rupert had made it clear in recent years that when the time came, James would become CEO of Fox while Lachlan maintained a symbolic chairmanship role from Australia. After years of succession drama, it seemed the Murdochs had finally come to an understanding.

But James sensed that something strange was going on as soon as he sat down at the Lambs Club. Finally, Lachlan and Carey came out with it: Lachlan would be returning to the U.S. to become CEO of Fox, and James was going to report to him.

James, stunned, tried to keep his voice steady. “No, I’m not going to do that,” he remembers telling them. They could run the company without him.

He walked out and headed straight to the airport. For the duration of his trip, he ignored texts and phone calls from his father and brother. James felt that he’d earned the top job after nearly two decades of work—a belief he’d thought his father shared. To discover now that Rupert had been talking with Lachlan about coming back and claiming his rightful spot as heir apparent was too much to take. There was simply no way he was going to work under his brother.

As rumors of James’s resignation spread through the companies, anxiety started to set in, former employees of Fox and News Corp told me. James, for all his shortcomings, was the only Murdoch son who knew anything about the business. One former executive told me that losing James would have been “a disaster.”

By the time James got back to the U.S., Rupert had retreated: James would become CEO as planned, and Lachlan would be named chairman. It would all be announced that summer.

James agreed to stay. But as the announcement neared, he told me, he began to suspect that he’d been played. First, Lachlan announced that he and his family were moving from Sydney to Los Angeles. Then he began setting up an office on the Fox studio lot. By the time the reorganization was announced in June, the bait and switch was complete: Lachlan was not taking a passive figurehead role; he was going to be executive co-chairman, a title he would share with Rupert. James and Lachlan would be running the company together.

Why didn’t James quit? He told me that he was guided by a lesson from the Divine Comedy. At the gateway to hell, Dante encounters a character believed to be Pope Celestine V, who in life had abdicated the papacy to live as a hermit. His choice had been celebrated for its holiness and purity, but Dante deems him a coward for allowing evil to enter the Church in his absence.

To James, the meaning was clear: If you have a chance to wield power for good and choose to walk away, you’re responsible for what comes next.

Roger Ailes in 2005 (Catrina Genovese / WireImage / Getty)

In June 2016, days before Britain was scheduled to vote on Brexit, James attended a News Corp board meeting in London. The once-fringe idea of the country leaving the European Union had, in recent months, gotten a major boost from the Murdoch press. The Sun ran stories warning of the “GREAT MIGRANT SWINDLE” being perpetrated by EU bureaucrats in Brussels. The Sunday Times endorsed the referendum and gave favorable coverage to Boris Johnson, the floppy-haired member of Parliament, as he campaigned for the Leave cause in a bright-red “battle bus.” Opponents argued that the referendum’s passage would have dire economic consequences—but that side of the story was no fun. The Brexit movement made great copy.

At a lunch before the meeting, James was chatting with top editors, executives, and directors at News Corp when Johnson himself dropped in. He cracked jokes and regaled the group with stories from the campaign trail. When someone asked him if the referendum would pass, Johnson smirked: We’ll see!

“It struck me that everyone was just having a laugh,” James recalled. “Nobody thought it was going to win, including Johnson.”

James noticed a similar attitude in the early coverage of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign by the Murdochs’ outlets. Like most everyone else in his orbit, James had initially regarded Trump as a sideshow. But as the candidate took off, the attitude among people inside Fox and News Corp was illuminating.

James had assumed, perhaps naively, that his older brother—Princeton-educated world traveler that he was—would balk when Trump, say, proposed banning Muslims from entering the country. But whenever James mentioned one of these outrages, Lachlan would bristle. “He immediately went to this nasty, knee-jerk, anti-Hillary stance,” James recalled. “I was sort of taken aback.” As time went on, James said, he was surprised by the degree to which his brother was apparently willing to indulge “reactionary” and “white nativist” ideas. (A spokesperson for Lachlan called this characterization false.) James never would have suspected affable, dilettantish Lachlan of being a secret ideologue.

Even more surprising to James was that his father seemed to have no ideology at all. He’d thought his father was a devoted free-marketeer, an internationalist who supported American global power, and a believer in immigration as a source of industry and ingenuity. His brand of conservatism seemed miles apart from Trump’s—and indeed, for the first few months of the campaign, Rupert was openly scornful of the candidate. He told James that if Trump won, it would “be the end of the Republican Party,” and when Fox News hosted the first debate of the GOP primaries, he reportedly ordered Megyn Kelly, one of the moderators, to hit Trump hard. But once it became clear that Trump’s appeal to Rupert’s audience was enduring, Rupert pivoted.

The Wall Street Journal ’s editorial page, a bastion of Reagan-Thatcherite conservatism, started running editorials defending Trump’s policies. The Fox News prime-time lineup became a four-hour Trump commercial. Rupert’s beloved New York Post ran covers celebrating Trump’s shredding of liberal pieties. There was no intellectually consistent way to reconcile the about-face. It was, James realized, just power and profit and mischief all the way down.

“There’s this tabloid culture that’s contrarian for the sake of it, and delights in poking people in the eye,” James said. “At its worst, it metastasizes into something nasty and scary and manipulative.” Press these cynical Trump boosters for a defense, he told me, and they would say something like “He’s not going to be president anyway—what’s the harm?” He compared the outlets to Paul von Hindenburg, the German president who in 1933 inadvertently enabled Hitler’s rise to power, earning himself the nickname “Undertaker of the Republic.”

“I underestimated the ability of a profit motive to make people do terrible things—to make companies do terrible things,” James later told me.

Then, in July, James thought he saw an opportunity to intervene. He and Lachlan were in Sun Valley, Idaho, for the annual Allen & Company media conference when news broke that Ailes was being sued by the Fox anchor Gretchen Carlson for sexual harassment. Rather than simply issue a statement of support for Ailes and wait for the litigation to resolve, James and Lachlan decided that the company should contract an outside law firm to conduct its own internal investigation.

This was not an obvious call: Ailes had built Fox News into the single most profitable asset in the Murdoch empire, and Rupert had rewarded him with wide latitude and loyalty. But Rupert was unreachable at the moment—flying back from France, where he’d been vacationing with his fourth wife, Jerry Hall—which meant that James and Lachlan had a brief window to act. Together, they decided to approve the investigation before their father’s plane landed.

Over the next two weeks, dozens of allegations would surface against Ailes. Ailes had reportedly demanded oral sex from women at work, and promised career advancement in exchange for sexual favors. (A lawyer for Ailes called the allegations false.) James wanted to fire him immediately, but Rupert insisted that it was better to let him resign.

[Read: Roger Ailes’s (other) legacy]

To replace Ailes, James wanted to hire David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, who’d gotten his start at Fox News. He thought Rhodes could clean up the network’s culture and instill more rigorous editorial standards. Lachlan was fiercely opposed. After letting the brothers squabble for a while, Rupert announced that he would run Fox News himself as interim CEO.

To James, the result was predictably catastrophic. Under Rupert’s nominal supervision, the Fox News talent was free to run wild. Tucker Carlson, whom Murdoch had promoted to prime time, began airing monologues about the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (aided by a head writer for the show who was later revealed to be posting racist content under an online pseudonym). Other hosts publicly sounded off about the injustice of the accusations against Ailes.

In January 2017, the anchor Bill O’Reilly settled a $32 million lawsuit with a former on-air analyst who’d accused him of sexual harassment. When news of the payout became public later that year, Rupert and his sons said they hadn’t been privy to the dollar figure, but they did know a settlement had been reached, and had decided to renew O’Reilly’s contract anyway.

In June 2017, British regulators punted on approving the Murdochs’ second bid for Sky, James’s longtime dream acquisition. The regulators cited antitrust concerns, but James thought he knew the real reason: He was now presiding over a company that was known around the world as a scandal-ridden propaganda machine for Donald Trump.

Kathryn and Rupert with Wendi Deng in 1999 (John van Hasselt / Sygma / Getty)

James and Lachlan tried to project unity as they ran Fox together. But in reality, James told me, the power-sharing was a disaster. Inside the company, Lachlan hated any suggestion that his younger brother was the more seasoned executive. And James grew exasperated by Lachlan’s certainty about the ins and outs of a company he’d left a decade ago. “You don’t develop the capabilities necessary for running large, complicated companies by osmosis,” James said.

Both brothers, who were based on opposite coasts, had to sign off on every major decision, James said—and Lachlan was often conspicuously unavailable when needed. He skipped meetings, and would go days without responding to certain texts and emails from James. People who observed the brothers’ dynamic were mystified. “It was like parallel play,” a former employee told me, “but one of them wasn’t playing.”

Then, in August 2017, torch-bearing white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” In the days that followed, the cable-news channel that James ostensibly ran spent hours defending Trump, who had asserted that there were “very fine people” marching with the neo-Nazis.

James wanted to say something to his employees about Charlottesville. But he also knew how it would look to his father and brother: pious, nagging James once again shoving his personal politics in everyone’s face. He dreaded the prospect of arm-wrestling with Lachlan over every word in the statement, as the brothers had earlier that year when they issued a company-wide memo responding to Trump’s travel ban. (James had wanted to reassure their Muslim employees and oppose the policy; Lachlan insisted on watering it down.) Maybe, James thought, it wasn’t even worth trying this time.

Finally, Kathryn asked a clarifying question: “If you’re not going to stand up against Nazis, who are you going to stand up against?”

James decided to put out his own statement without consulting Rupert or Lachlan. In an email sent to friends, and promptly leaked to the press, he denounced the protesters in Charlottesville as well as Trump’s reaction to them. “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis,” he wrote. He and Kathryn would be donating $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League, and he encouraged others to join them.

The couple thought Rupert might speak out, too. He had long considered himself a proud opponent of anti-Semitism, and had even once been honored by the ADL. But Rupert remained silent, as did Lachlan.

By the fall, James wanted out. The situation with his brother was becoming untenable. Lachlan had no interest in James’s reforms, and James could no longer look away from the effect that Fox News was having on both U.S. politics and the reputation of the broader Murdoch enterprise.

Around this time, Rupert began talking with Disney’s chairman, Bob Iger, about a potential sale of the 21st Century Fox film and TV studio. After decades of empire building, Rupert was coming to terms with the fact that Fox wasn’t big enough to compete in the streaming wars with Netflix, Apple, and Amazon. Better to whittle down the company to his first love—news—and cash out on everything else.

James knew a sale would give him cover to leave the company without causing too much speculation about the family’s growing rifts. It would also mean a payday for major shareholders, himself and his siblings included. He threw himself into the negotiations.

As the Disney deal took shape, however, Lachlan became more and more hostile to it. He grumbled that he’d moved his family from Australia to Los Angeles so he could preside over a proper media empire. Now they wanted to off-load its most glamorous asset and leave him with a collection of shrinking TV stations, cable channels, newspapers, and book imprints that, according to one former News Corp employee, he referred to as “ShitCo.”

Over dinner one night at Gramercy Tavern with James and Rupert, Lachlan—usually so friendly and unflappable—lost his temper. He shouted threats and ranted about his opposition to the deal, James recalled. Before storming out of the restaurant, Lachlan delivered an ultimatum: If you go through with this deal, he told Rupert, “you will not have a son.” Then he turned to James and added, “And you won’t have a brother.”

Years later, when James looked back on Lachlan’s prophecy, he would call it an “Oracle of Delphi moment.” In the end, a brother and son would be lost—just not the one they thought. (A spokesperson for Lachlan called James’s version of events false, and denied that Lachlan used the term ShitCo.)

The deal closed on March 20, 2019: Disney would purchase 21st Century Fox for $71.3 billion. As an apparent concession to Lachlan, the studio lot—where he kept his office and rock-climbing wall—would remain in the Murdochs’ possession. Within a few years, the price that James helped negotiate would be widely seen on Wall Street as a coup, with some analysts estimating that Disney had overpaid by as much as $20 billion. James and his siblings each received roughly $2 billion.

The day the deal closed, James and Kathryn contributed $100 million to their foundation. Its offices were in Lower Manhattan, two floors above James’s new investment firm, Lupa Systems. The firm was named after the she-wolf in Roman mythology who nurses the twin boys Remus and Romulus—one of whom goes on to kill the other to become the first king of Rome.

In January 2020, a reporter for the Daily Beast reached out to James. Australia was experiencing a devastating series of bushfires that were widely seen as a consequence of climate change—but in the Murdochs’ Australian news outlets, that notion was treated as absurd. The Daily Beast reporter wanted to know what James thought of the coverage. It was the kind of question he’d always ignored—but this time felt different.

Since stepping down as CEO of 21st Century Fox, James had retained his seat on the News Corp board. But now that he was no longer heir apparent, he found, his father’s courtiers and loyalists did not appear to be gripped by his views. One day, while sitting in a board meeting, he’d begun making a list of all of the investments, reforms, and initiatives he’d pushed for, only to be shot down or ignored. Looking at the list, and around the table, he thought, What am I doing here?

James had his spokesperson give the Daily Beast a statement: “Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known. They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.”

The quote angered the News Corp board. In May, James was told that if he didn’t resign his board seat, he risked being voted off—an outcome he’d expected. He resigned.

A wave of media speculation followed. Dynastic drama was in the ether; Succession was gearing up for its third season. The show’s popularity had created a life-imitating-art-imitating-life phenomenon: All the fictionalized on-screen scheming led to conjecture in the press about real-life scheming among the Murdochs, which seemed in turn to induce higher levels of paranoia within the family.

Observers had long understood that Liz and Prue were liberals who disagreed with the rightward tilt of Rupert’s outlets, while Lachlan was a man made in his father’s image. James was always the unknown variable. Now that he was adopting a publicly antagonistic posture, pundits were predicting that he and his sisters would team up once Rupert died, boot their brother from the corner office, and finally domesticate News Corp. Words like coup were getting tossed around in the press, and Rupert suspected that James himself was working to promote the narrative. (According to James, Rupert didn’t think Liz or Prue could possibly have been the ringleaders. “He doesn’t believe his adult daughters are capable of making decisions,” James told me.)

James would later tell me the idea was ridiculous. No secret conspiracy existed among him and his sisters, he insisted. Besides, if they were plotting a coup, why would James want it broadcast in the press?

But disabusing his father of this conspiracy theory wasn’t easy, because the two men were no longer speaking. Their estrangement hadn’t been a conscious choice. James had simply found that there wasn’t much to say to each other anymore—work had always been the foundation of their relationship. Now Rupert’s perception of his younger son was shaped more by what he read. James was becoming a problem.

James was still finding it difficult to stay away from the family business. In 2022, Rupert announced plans to recombine Fox and News Corp, and asked his four oldest children to sign a letter recommending the merger. They were to promise, among other things, not to sell any of the companies’ assets, regardless of how much was being offered.

Surely it wasn’t in shareholders’ best interest, James thought, to uniformly rule out any future offer. His sisters, and the directors who managed their trust, shared his concern. But when one of the directors, Richard Oldfield, raised it on an email thread, Rupert erupted.

“Sorry Richard! This has been a family dominated business for seventy years,” he wrote. “It would be a disaster for at least the US and Australia if these assets fell into the wrong hands.” Rupert believed that a transaction that gave liberals control of any piece of his empire would amount to an intolerable blow to his legacy.

But James was worried that the recombined company would be less valuable than it was divided in two. Before signing the letter, he requested additional information about the directors’ fiduciary responsibilities in the matter. Rupert responded by griping that James and his sisters were throwing up legal obstacles and told Liz that he might just “ram it through.”

The boards for Fox and News Corp had set up committees to study the merger, and James decided to write them each a letter detailing his concerns. James heard that the letters infuriated his father and brother. But he was vindicated, in January 2023, when Rupert was forced to abandon the merger amid a revolt by shareholders. More vindication came a few months later, when Fox announced a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Fox News had repeatedly aired false claims that Dominion’s voting machines had rigged the election against Donald Trump. Now, as a result of the reckless conspiracizing, the network’s parent company was paying one of the largest-known defamation settlements in history.

[David A. Graham: Fox News lost the lawsuit but won the war]

Lachlan and James at the 2016 Allen & Company media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, where they learned that Ailes was being sued for sexual harassment (Drew Angerer / Getty)

The final phase of the Murdoch-family crack-up, as best James could tell, began with a woman named Siobhan McKenna.

A longtime friend and confidant of Lachlan’s, McKenna served as his managing director in the family trust. Her fierce loyalty had helped make her one of the most powerful media executives in Australia—CEO of News Corp’s Australian broadcasting arm, chair of the Australia Post, and managing partner at Lachlan’s private investment firm.

In the summer of 2023, McKenna approached Lachlan with a proposition: She believed she could devise a plan that secured Lachlan’s future control of the companies and permanently sidelined James without necessitating an expensive buyout. Lachlan, intrigued, told her to start working on it. (McKenna did not respond to requests for comment.)

On September 14, 2023, Rupert, Lachlan, and a consortium of Fox and News Corp executives gathered to hear McKenna’s pitch for Project Family Harmony. The family trust, they all agreed, was untenable as it was currently structured.

Lachlan had by now spent years building the case to his father that James was plotting a coup. In the fall of 2022, an unauthorized biography of Lachlan had been published in Australia containing an incendiary quote from an anonymous source about James’s purported plans: “Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies.” When the quote made international headlines, Lachlan told Rupert that James’s camp was responsible. A few months later, in January 2023, the Financial Times ran a story detailing “how the scions could battle for control” of the family trust after Rupert was gone. Once again, Lachlan pointed the finger at his brother.

As it turned out, according to evidence that would later surface at trial, James had no involvement in either story—but Lachlan did. It was McKenna who had, with Lachlan’s approval, spent more than 14 hours giving anonymous interviews to the biographer. And Brian Nick, an executive at Fox, had anonymously briefed the Financial Times. (Nick denied providing information to the Financial Times.) But to Rupert, the stories only confirmed that he needed to act decisively.

In October 2023, Kathryn told James that she thought he should reach out to his father and brother. They’d barely spoken in years, and though she didn’t yet know about their plans for the trust, she worried that Rupert and Lachlan were sinking too deep into their own conspiracy theories. James never got around to calling them. Later, he would wish he’d taken her advice.

Over several weeks that fall, the participants in Project Family Harmony explored a range of aggressive options to neutralize James. PowerPoints were prepared; legal memos were produced. James was rarely invoked by name in these materials; he was referred to as “the troublesome beneficiary.”

Rupert ultimately decided that the best course was to negate the voting power of James and his sisters. To do this, Rupert would have to amend the Murdoch family trust to give Lachlan unilateral control after he died. And because the trust was irrevocable, with amendments allowed only if they were in the interest of the beneficiaries, Rupert would have to show, in effect, that disenfranchising three of his children was actually best for them.

McKenna drafted talking points for Rupert to use when discussing the amendment with his children. New directors were also secretly recruited to the trust, including Bill Barr, the two-time attorney general and a personal friend of Rupert’s, and a pair of lawyers who had scant experience with trust management but had the advantage of being politically connected in Nevada, where the inevitable litigation would play out.

Meanwhile, James and his sisters—unaware of Rupert and Lachlan’s plotting—were making plans of their own. On September 20, 2023, they met in London to discuss arrangements for after their father’s death. Liz’s managing director, Mark Devereux, had realized that the Murdochs didn’t have a logistical plan for such a scenario. Who would release a statement? What would it say? What kind of funeral did Rupert want? A plan had been drawn up and code-named “Project Bridge,” after the protocols developed for Queen Elizabeth II’s death.

In London, as the siblings talked through the details, their conversation turned to the long-term future of the companies. Prue asked James if he wanted to return as an executive, but he told her he had no interest.

In late November, James, Liz, and Prue were invited to join a “special meeting” on Zoom to discuss the trust. When Liz found out what Rupert and Lachlan were about to do, she texted Lachlan and pleaded with him not to go through with it. “Today is about Dad’s wishes,” Lachlan responded. “It shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. Love you.”

A less dysfunctional family, James and Kathryn told me, might have tried to have a normal conversation about their differences. Instead, in the Zoom meeting, on December 6, Rupert, surrounded by lawyers, read robotically from a script. Lachlan busied himself at an off-screen laptop and didn’t even look at the camera.

Early on the morning of September 16, 2024, a fleet of black SUVs pulled up to the copper-domed Washoe County Courthouse in Reno. James and Kathryn stepped out of their car and made their way up the steps alongside Liz and Prue. About 30 minutes later, another convoy appeared, this one carrying Rupert and Lachlan. The Murdochs had coordinated their arrival times to ensure that they didn’t have to see one another outside the courtroom. Nobody wanted the half a dozen camera crews to capture evidence of the hostility that now defined their family.

James and his sisters had filed their objection shortly after learning about their father’s amendment. The process had revealed, among other things, just how far apart James and his father were in their visions for the family’s media outlets. During James’s confrontational deposition, for instance, one of Rupert’s lawyers suggested that the success of Fox News derived from its willingness to pander to its viewers, sometimes at the expense of basic journalistic standards.

Isn’t it true that Fox is the top cable-news outlet because it respects its audience and gives them what they want? the lawyer asked him.

I would disagree with the idea that respect and giving people what they want are the same thing, James countered.

But the lawyer didn’t seem interested in the distinction. Are you aware that Fox News lost a significant part of its audience when it called Arizona for Biden in 2020? he asked. James said he was. And you know that Fox won back most of that audience through its election-denial coverage, right? the lawyer said.

Now, for the next six days, the two sides would make their case in court, testifying about some of the most painful episodes in the Murdoch family’s history as they wrestled over control of the empire. Rupert didn’t stick around to watch it—he was excused from the courtroom after testifying on the second day. “He claimed that he was sick, but I think it was cowardice,” James told me.

The trial was closed to the press and public, and because Kathryn was not a party to the litigation, she waited in an anteroom with Liz’s and Prue’s husbands. After long days of testimony, the families would convene at a Lake Tahoe house that James and Kathryn were borrowing from friends (“There are no good hotels in Reno,” she told me) and recap the day’s events over glasses of wine. Sometimes there were dramatic reenactments; other times they indulged in gallows humor. They searched Google for Edmund Gorman, the Nevada probate commissioner overseeing the proceedings, hoping to ascertain any biographical details that might reveal his sympathies. He was frustratingly unreadable during the trial: They knew he wore polka-dot bow ties under his robes, and someone had reported seeing him once leave the courthouse in a loud purple sport coat. They learned that he was a duck hunter, and that he’d served on the board of the Reno Jazz Orchestra. This last fact prompted James to observe to his sisters, “He can’t be that bad.”

James had resolved to approach the trial in a spirit of combat. “I’m good at that,” he told me later. “Stiffen your spine, harden your tummy.” Walking into the courtroom each day, past the scrum of reporters, he wore an expression of solemn professionalism. But it was harder than he’d expected to maintain personal detachment when the people on the other side of the courtroom were his father and brother. Watching these men he’d known his whole life, men he’d loved, he couldn’t escape one thought: How did we let it come to this?

On the third day of the trial, James took the stand to testify. When he recounted the dinner at which Lachlan effectively ended their relationship over the proposed Disney deal, James surprised himself by starting to cry. But the memory didn’t seem to have the same effect on his brother, James told me: When Lachlan was asked if he had in fact told James he wouldn’t have a brother anymore if they pursued the sale, Lachlan responded flatly, “I don’t recall.”

A month after the trial’s conclusion, while the commissioner was still deliberating, James decided to reach out to his father. The trial had gone well for him and his sisters; their lawyers were confident. Still, he knew the damage to his family might never be undone. Thanksgiving was approaching, and James was feeling sentimental. Maybe, he thought, his father might be open to a personal appeal, especially now that he looked to be on the verge of defeat.

James, Liz, and Prue wrote their father a letter suggesting an alternative course. “Thanksgiving and Christmas are upon us and the three of us wanted to reach out to you personally to say that we miss you and love you,” they wrote. “Over and above any other feelings all of us may have—of upset and shock—our unifying emotion is sorrow and grief.”

Maybe they could try to talk things out without lawyers and probate commissioners—and reach a compromise they all agreed on: “We are asking you with love to find a way to put an end to this destructive judicial path so that we can have a chance to heal as a collaborative and loving family.”

A couple of days later, Rupert wrote back. He’d read his children’s testimony from the trial twice over. “Only to conclude that I was right,” he told them. He instructed them to have their lawyers contact his if they wanted to talk further. “Much love, Dad.”

On December 7, the commissioner issued his ruling. Rupert and Lachlan had lost.

Liz and Rupert in Cheltenham, England, in 2011 (Max Mumby / Indigo / Getty)

The commissioner’s decision placed the fate of the Murdoch assets back in the same holding pattern it had been in for years. Barring a successful appeal, control of the companies would, in all likelihood, one day be split evenly among the four oldest children. Only now Rupert’s heirs were more divided than ever, with the chosen successor on one side, and his three alienated siblings on the other. What exactly that would mean for the empire was a question that wouldn’t be answered until their father died.

In the meantime, James and Kathryn have focused on projects of their own.

It’s hard to look at the couple’s political and philanthropic work, which Kathryn manages, without sensing an attempt at public repentance. They have given millions to Democratic campaigns and tens of millions to climate-change initiatives, and funded research on disinformation and political extremism. In 2021, Kathryn persuaded dozens of “democracy reform” groups to coalesce around the push for open primaries and ranked-choice voting, funding successful ballot initiatives in Alaska and Washington, D.C. James, meanwhile, is once again doing business in India, where he has invested in one of the country’s largest media companies. He has also bought large stakes in the Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel.

What would the Murdochs’ conservative news outlets look like if James had his way? This had become a central question in the legal battle over the trust; Rupert and Lachlan argue that James would sink the companies’ value by changing the outlets’ politics.

James and Kathryn were usually cautious when I asked about changes they would want to see at the family’s news outlets. But I got glimpses of their thinking. Once, over dinner in Washington, Kathryn told me she wasn’t sure if Fox News could still be reformed. “It doesn’t have a clear purpose in the ecosystem anymore,” she said.

On another occasion, I asked James if The Wall Street Journal ’s editorial page might serve as a model for a more responsible Fox News. He winced and said he hoped they could do better than that. At various points, both of them mentioned their investment in The Bulwark, which was founded as an organ of Never Trump conservatism, as proof that they weren’t categorically averse to “center right” media—though, of course, reinventing Fox News in The Bulwark’s image might be the surest path to a viewer revolt.

[McKay Coppins: The Bulwark’s writers are the new outlaws of conservative media]

The one thing James has said consistently is that any reforms he might seek would focus on corporate and editorial governance, not political orientation. Fox News, he thought, could still report from a conservative perspective without, say, giving a platform to unqualified doctors to spread medical misinformation during a pandemic, or misrepresenting an oil-company shill as an expert on climate change. James believed this wasn’t just the right thing to do, but the fiscally prudent one: Allowing Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell on air to spread voting-machine conspiracy theories had already cost Fox three-quarters of a billion dollars, and an even larger defamation suit was still pending. (James stressed that reforming the outlets would require support from the board.)

James and Kathryn in New York, December 2024 (Jingyu Lin for The Atlantic)

For now, James is left struggling to answer the question he found himself asking in the courtroom—how did we let it come to this? His 93-year-old father will, despite his most fervent wishes, die one day. And when he does, he will leave behind a family at war with itself—a bevy of estranged children and ex-wives exchanging awkward greetings at an expensive funeral.

Last year, James told me, he reread Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 novel about the titular second-century emperor of Rome. “I hate to use Roman emperors as a metaphor, because it’s totally douchey,” he told me in a moment of self-deprecating clarity. But when he came across a passage about a dying ruler in search of an heir, James felt that he suddenly understood something about his father. He committed the paragraph to memory, and quoted it repeatedly in the time we spent together. Hadrian’s imperial predecessor is “refusing to face his end.” Hadrian pities him: “We were too different for him to find in me what most people who have wielded total authority seek desperately on their deathbeds, a docile successor pledged in advance to the same methods, and even to the same errors.”

For decades, James realized, Rupert had tried to turn his children into vehicles for dynastic ambition—walking nodes of immortality. In the process, he’d wrecked the family. Now, at 52, James seems as if he is trying to disentangle himself from the character he once played in the Murdoch story.

One day late this past fall, I met James in his office. The trust trial had recently concluded, and he was tired and uncharacteristically disheveled—bags under his eyes, hair askew. He recounted the beats of the courtroom drama in between stifled yawns, but eventually lost interest. He seemed to have something else on his mind. He told me about a commencement speech he’d once given at a small university in Europe, where he told the graduates never to get themselves into a position where other people were defining success for them. It was good advice, he thought, and he wondered how his life would have been different if he’d taken it himself.

“My kind of regret—” he began, before hastily correcting himself. “I try not to have regrets, because I’m so lucky.” His eyes drifted toward the window, and for a moment, he looked strangely small at the end of the long conference-room table, almost like a little boy. “I used to paint a lot,” he told me. “I thought about being an architect. I did film animation in school.”

He was struggling to express what he wanted to say. “I had a story—” he tried, but started over. “In my head, there were so many—” He stopped again, and seemed to give up.

Maybe it was hopeless. Maybe nobody wanted to hear a rich heir from a powerful family complain about his father. History had plenty of those.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Growing Up Murdoch.” It has been updated to reflect that a spokesperson for Lachlan Murdoch denied that Lachlan had suspicions about Wendi Deng or objections to his father marrying her, and denied that Lachlan used the term ShitCo. The article has also been updated with additional context about two News of the World employees who testified before a parliamentary committee about phone-hacking. Additionally, it has been updated to correct the description of a passage from King Lear.

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

2024-11-26T09:00:00-05:00

This article contains spoilers for the movie Heretic.

When I was a Mormon missionary in Texas in the early 2000s, my companions and I used to get strange phone calls from a man with a British accent named Andrew. We didn’t know who he was, or how he’d gotten the numbers for a bunch of Church-owned cellphones, but the calls always went the same. He would begin in a friendly mode, feigning interest in our lives and work. Then, gradually, the questions would turn confrontational as he revealed his true agenda: to convince us that everything we believed was wrong. Sometimes he’d drop cryptic allusions to controversial Mormon history that he assumed we didn’t know; other times he’d try to fluster us with theological gotchas. Most of us found him amusing, and he became a figure of lore in our mission, someone to swap stories about—Andrew called again! But I remember finding the weird, gleeful quality of his performances mystifying. As a missionary in the Bible Belt, I could understand the proselytizing instinct of the Baptists we met who tried to save us from hell. Andrew, though, wasn’t trying to convert us to anything in particular—he just wanted us to admit he was right. Later, I would meet missionaries from other places who’d gotten similar calls from an unidentified zealous Brit. Was this a hobby for him? An obsession? How much time was he dedicating to this project?

I never solved the mystery of Andrew. But when I returned home and joined the rest of my generation on the internet, I realized that his type—a man whose personal passion was to argue with random strangers for no evident payoff beyond personal catharsis—was not uncommon.

I found myself thinking about Andrew recently after seeing Heretic, a horror-thriller released this month by A24. The movie follows Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, two young female missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who show up on the doorstep of a man named Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant. He invites them in under the pretense that he’s interested in learning about their faith, only to trap them in his labyrinthine home so he can torture them—first with a lengthy disquisition on the falsity of organized religion, then (in what may have come as almost a relief to the missionaries) with psychological torment and violence.

It is possible to read Heretic as a dark satire of a distinctly 21st-century type: the militant New Atheist who won’t shut up. Smug and self-righteous, he is consumed with an absolute conviction in his worldview that would rival that of a Pentecostal snake-handler. He can’t accept that he lives in a world where people—especially women—hold beliefs that he finds irrational. And in Heretic, the villain gets to act out what might seem like a fantasy for many such men: locking young religious women in his house and monologuing at them until they surrender to his intellect.

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

But if Heretic’s strength is the spot-on characterization of its villain, its weakness is showing too much interest in his Reddit-level ideas about religion.

Right off the bat, you might be wondering just how watchable any of this is. In trying to describe the film to an Atlantic colleague recently, I explained that much of Heretic’s first hour is devoted to the villain’s philosophical arguments against religion. “Is it … terribly dull?” the colleague asked. Like many of us, he had spent time in conversation with monologuing atheists, and did not come away thinking, That would make great cinema!

Mr. Reed’s essential argument—which he delivers to the missionaries in a lengthy, Galt-like lecture from a faux chapel he’s constructed in his house—is that today’s major world religions are simply rearrangements of more ancient mythologies. The biblical character of Jesus Christ, he argues, is a rejiggered version of the Persians’ Mithras, or the Egyptians’ Horus, or the Hindus’ Krishna—all gods who were purportedly born on December 25, who performed miracles and were resurrected after death. “My claim is that all 10,000 verifiable religions that exist worldwide right now are as artificial as the symbolic church you are standing in,” Mr. Reed declares. “It is farce. There’s nothing holy here.”

Grant does his best to make this material compelling, performing it with a creepy, cool-professor smarm, and making entertaining use of various props (board games, pop records) to illustrate Mr. Reed’s ideas. But the ideas themselves are the movie’s biggest defect. Anyone who has given serious thought to religion is likely to find them too superficial and stale to be interesting.

“I found myself checking out a bit,” one critic wrote in the Mormon journal Wayfare. “How many times have I heard this neo-Campbellian spiel that distorts Asian religions from the comfort of an armchair, reducing ancient systems of belief to the level of twentieth-century entertainment franchises?” Matthew Bowman, a historian of religion at Claremont Graduate University, wrote, similarly, that he “slumped a bit” in his seat as Mr. Reed sermonized. Bowman recognized his rant as a “fringe academic hypothesis” known as Jesus mythicism that’s “rejected by nearly all scholars of Christian history and the ancient world” but that has nonetheless found “a vast array of adherents on the internet.”

Just how seriously viewers are meant to take these ideas is open to interpretation. The character articulating them is, after all, a murderous psychopath. But the movie devotes considerable time to its villain’s ideology and seems to consider his diatribes provocative and sophisticated, even profound. Bryan Woods, who wrote and directed Heretic along with Scott Beck, has said that Mr. Reed is meant to have a “genius-level IQ.” It seems that we are supposed to think of Mr. Reed as brilliant but extreme—a man who, in the tradition of Marvel bad guys and Bond villains, takes a good point much too far. (Think of Black Panther’s Killmonger.)

Eventually, Mr. Reed tells the terrified young missionaries that they’re free to go but that they must choose between two identical doors, one of which he has labeled belief and the other disbelief. A test of faith has commenced. The movie, to its credit, allows the women at this point to challenge him intellectually. Sister Barnes, in particular, gets off a few lines about Mr. Reed’s “thin rhetoric” and reductive framing. “There is an entire spectrum that your game is neglecting,” she says, correctly. But unfortunately for her, and for viewers, she winds up dead a few minutes later.

Much of the Mormon discourse around Heretic has focused on questions of representation. Thirteen years into The Book of Mormon’s run on Broadway, many in the Church are inured to seeing missionaries treated as punch lines; we’re somewhat less used to seeing their throats slit on screen. When the trailer dropped this past summer, many Latter-day Saints assumed that the movie would be an anti-Mormon gorefest.

Graphic violence aside, the film is less antagonistic to Mormonism than other recent pop-cultural treatments. Unlike Hulu’s Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—which draws on a microscopic subculture of swinger-adjacent Utah TikTokers to draw sweeping conclusions about their Church—Heretic’s story is grounded in something millions of Latter-day Saints have actually experienced (missionary service, that is, not being trapped in Hugh Grant’s basement). And unlike the 2022 FX series Under the Banner of Heaven, which dramatized a double-murder committed by fundamentalists in the 1980s to advance its dubious thesis that Mormonism “breeds dangerous men,” this movie doesn’t seem to have any particular axe to grind with Latter-day Saints.

In fact, the two missionaries at the center of the story are sympathetic and complex. The actors, Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher, both grew up Mormon, and some of the most authentic moments in the movie were reportedly ad-libbed. (Ex-missionaries will chuckle when Sister Paxton assures Sister Barnes in one early scene that for every flight of stairs they have to drag their bicycles up, their future husbands will get “10 percent hotter.”) Not everything in the movie rings true—most notably the groaner of an opening scene in which the two missionaries discuss condom size—but for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised by how well drawn the protagonists were. Maybe the bar is just exceptionally low. What does it say about Mormon media representation that the most sympathetic portrayal in recent memory involves missionaries getting violently tortured by a lunatic?

[Read: The 15 films you should add to your watchlist this season]

In their press tour, the filmmakers have repeatedly said that they wanted to take their Mormon characters seriously, to treat them with empathy instead of condescension. This admirable notion has been somewhat undermined by the film’s marketing campaign, which has included, among other things, displaying fake MISSING posters for the fictional missionaries at the Salt Lake City airport, where hundreds of real-life missionaries fly in and out each day. (The Church’s official response to Heretic, incidentally, focused on concerns for the security of its 80,000 missionaries serving around the world. “Any narrative that promotes violence against women because of their faith or undermines the contributions of volunteers runs counter to the safety and wellbeing of our communities,” the Church spokesman Doug Andersen said in a statement.)

In the end, the film doesn’t actually have all that much to say about Mormonism specifically. The filmmakers have been honest in interviews about the constraints they faced. When they first started writing the script, they realized they didn’t know enough about religion to finish it. They had to spend a decade brushing up on religious texts and Richard Dawkins books before they felt they could return to the story. (Woods’s wife, Julia Glausi, is a graduate of Brigham Young University.) The film they ultimately made is suspenseful, creepy, and expertly staged and acted. But I found myself wondering what the movie would look like if it had been made by filmmakers whose exploration of faith was less academic and more deeply rooted in personal experience—filmmakers who’d wrestled with religious questions deeper and more difficult than the ones their villain poses.

As it turns out, we almost got to see such a movie. In 2022, a group of student filmmakers at Brigham Young University made a short film called The Handbook that shares a premise with Heretic: Two Mormon missionaries enter the home of a seemingly sweet stranger who turns sinister and traps them inside. I got in touch with Brandon Carraway, who wrote and directed the short film with his wife, Hannah Grace, and he told me that the idea had grown out of his experience as a missionary. Most of the cast and crew, he said, had served Latter-day Saint missions as well. After The Handbook screened at a few festivals, an agent asked them to write a feature-length version. They started taking meetings with studios, but the project died after A24 announced it was developing Heretic. (A source close to A24, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of the movie, told me that the similarities between the films are “pure coincidence” and that Beck and Woods had not seen the short.) Carraway had nothing bad to say about Heretic but told me simply, “I think ours would have been a different movie.”

In Heretic’s climatic scene, Sister Paxton enters a dark, leaky subbasement and discovers a room filled with women being held in dog cages. She and her companion, it turns out, were not Mr. Reed’s first victims. On cue, the villain materializes to deliver the argument to which he’s been building throughout the movie. The “one true religion,” he tells the young missionary, is “control.”

The upsetting scene has drawn a variety of complaints. Some think the glib ambiguity about the women’s fate is irresponsible. Others take issue with the substance of Mr. Reed’s claim (though I’d argue their real issue is with Karl Marx, who beat him to this particular insight about 150 years ago). But the scene I left the theater thinking about takes place a few minutes later. Sister Paxton and Mr. Reed lie bleeding out on the floor of the basement, apparently on the verge of death. For the first time in the movie, we see the devout young missionary pray, but not before delivering an eloquent monologue of her own—about the scientific inefficacy of prayer. In between pained gasps, she recites the findings of a 1998 Templeton Foundation study on intercessory prayer, which found no connection between medical outcomes and divine appeals. “I think it’s beautiful that people pray for each other, even though we all probably know deep down it doesn’t make a difference,” the missionary says. “It’s just nice to think about someone other than yourself.”

It’s a sweet sentiment, but it feels more like a secular screenwriter’s cop-out than a sincere articulation of how most devout people feel when communing with God. The people I know who pray are not consumed with questions like Does this work? Where’s the proof? Am I right? The real beauty in prayer, like religion in general, is in its transcendence of the empirical and its embrace of the mysterious and divine. Faith, much to the frustration of the world’s Mr. Reeds, is not something one can be talked out of.

‘We’re Just Going to Have to Deal With Him’

2024-11-18T07:31:00-05:00

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents.

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.

Triumph of the Cynics

2024-11-07T08:41:00-05:00

In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump did the following things: falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ pets; invited a comedian onstage at a rally to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”; said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the reporters who cover his rallies; fantasized about former Representative Liz Cheney having guns “trained on her face”; called America a “garbage can for the world”; and pretended to fellate a microphone in public. Then, on Tuesday night, he decisively won the presidential election, sweeping every battleground state in the country.

That Trump routinely gets away with saying things that would have ended any other politician’s career is hardly a novel observation. People have been making this point since he launched his first campaign nine years ago. Theories abound to explain the phenomenon, and we’ll get to those in a moment. But, first, do me a favor and reread that paragraph above. Clock your reflexive reaction. Do you find yourself indifferently skimming, or notice that your attention has begun to drift? Do you roll your eyes at what looks like yet another scoldy catalog of Trump’s alleged misdeeds, or mentally quibble with my characterizations? (He was obviously joking about Cheney.) Perhaps you’re thinking that you missed one of these moments—or maybe you’re not quite sure. Hasn’t he said something about shooting reporters before? Who can remember—all of this stuff blends together.

What you’re experiencing is the product of Trump’s clearest political accomplishment, and perhaps his most enduring legacy: In his near decade as America’s main character, he has thoroughly desensitized voters to behavior that, in another era, they would have deemed disqualifying in a president. The national bar for outrage keeps rising; the ability to be shocked has dwindled.

Trump is not the first modern president to contribute to this national numbing effect. Richard Nixon’s abuses of power shattered the idyllic image many Americans had of the presidency, seeding a skepticism that would eventually blossom into generational cynicism. And Bill Clinton’s affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky—complete with the airing of every graphic detail by opponents, and the rush to excuse his indiscretions by allies—helped normalize the idea that presidents don’t need to be moral exemplars.

But when it comes to lowering our collective expectations of presidential behavior, Trump is a singular figure. The lines he has enterprisingly crossed—legal, ethical, constitutional, moral—are too numerous to list. (Plus, chances are, you’d get bored and abandon this article if I tried.) But it seems worth noting here just a few of Trump’s firsts. He is the first president to try to stay in power after losing an election. He is the first president to be impeached twice (for attempting to trade military aid for political favors from the Ukrainian president, and for sending a violent mob to storm the Capitol). He is the first to be convicted of a felony (for crimes connected with hush-money payments to an adult-film star with whom he had an affair), and the first to be found liable for sexual abuse (for assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room). He demonstrates no contrition for these acts. In fact, he’s always denied all wrongdoing—even as he’s boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his base.

Trump’s apologists might argue that his success is a symptom, not the cause, of the country’s coarsened character. Alternatively, something about his public persona, forged in the New York tabloids and on reality TV, may make people uniquely tolerant of his sins. After all, the same voters in North Carolina who delivered him the state’s 16 Electoral College votes this week also rejected a Trump-aligned candidate for governor who’d been discovered making vile anti-Semitic and racist comments on a porn site. Trump has also no doubt been aided by Republican politicians who cravenly defend everything he does, blundering Democrats who have struggled to provide a compelling alternative, and a press corps still constrained by its “bias toward coherence.”

In any case, the fact remains that Trump’s brazenness damages the political culture. Every time he crosses a new line, he makes it that much easier for the next guy to do so. Nearly a decade into the Trump era, too many Americans have internalized the idea that expecting our political leaders to be good people is quaint and foolish. But this savvier-than-thou attitude only empowers Trump and his mimics to act with impunity.

Is it possible to resensitize an electorate to scandal and cruelty? I don’t know. Maybe we start by trying to remember how we felt when all of this was still new.

In recent weeks, Gen Z voters have been sharing videos of themselves on TikTok listening—for what they say is the first time—to Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape. I found watching these videos, and reading some of the young people’s interviews in The Washington Post, at once heartbreaking and hopeful. Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old in Georgia who had never actually heard the once and future president say “grab them by the pussy,” told the paper she “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.” Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio, was similarly shocked when she heard it for the first time. “I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

A less cynical age may dawn again.

This Is Not the End of America

2024-11-01T08:30:00-04:00

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Updated at 11:42 ET November 1, 2024

Everything about the staging of Kamala Harris’s “closing argument” rally Tuesday night on the White House Ellipse seemed designed to frame the upcoming election as a referendum on democracy. Flanked by American flags and surrounded by banners that screamed FREEDOM, the Democratic nominee delivered her speech against the same backdrop that Donald Trump used on January 6 when he addressed the crowd that went on to storm the Capitol.

“So look,” Harris said about halfway through her speech. “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office …”

Scattered shouts of You will! You will! echoed from the audience near the stage. In my conversations with Harris supporters afterward, their confidence seemed authentic. To a person, everyone I talked with believed they were on the verge of victory—that Harris would defeat the “wannabe dictator” once and for all, pull America back from the brink, and save the world’s oldest democracy from descending into fascism.

Then I would ask a question they found dispiriting: What if she doesn’t?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind for months. We are in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential races in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they are going to win—and that if they don’t, the consequences for America will be existential.

Trump and his allies have already clearly signaled what they will do if he loses: claim victory anyway, declare the election rigged, and engage in another conspiracy to overturn the result, whether by litigation, extra-constitutional arm-twisting, or even violence. The pressure campaign is unlikely to work; as Paul Rosenzweig noted in The Atlantic, none of the officials overseeing vote tabulation in battleground states is a partisan election denier. Still, this full-frontal assault on the validity of the election represents an ongoing threat.

If Harris loses, the response from her coalition would almost certainly be less dramatic and damaging; unlike Trump, she has committed to accepting the result. But as the election nears and panic over Trump’s authoritarian impulses reaches a fever pitch in certain quarters, I’ve begun to worry that prophecies of democratic breakdown following a Trump reelection could become self-fulfilling. What happens to America if Harris voters have fully internalized the idea that democracy is on the ballot, and then “democracy” loses?

In 2016, Trump’s surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, and record-breaking donations to the ACLU, and waves of grassroots organizing. Subscriptions surged at newspapers committed to holding the new administration to account; books about combating tyranny became best sellers. The energy wasn’t contained to the liberal “resistance” movement. Conservative expats launched their own political groups and publications. As my colleague Franklin Foer recently wrote, the warnings of impending autocracy in America at the time “helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump.”

That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden’s victory represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached president simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again.

But of course the story didn’t end there. And the fact that, four years later, Trump is within a coin flip of returning to the Oval Office has created some dissonance in liberal America. Trump has, in his third campaign, been more explicit than ever about his illiberal designs. He has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists, and revoking broadcast licenses for TV networks whose news coverage he doesn’t like.

Democrats have sought to warn voters about the threat that these actions would pose to democracy—sometimes dialing up the rhetoric in an effort to wake Americans to the peril. But the messaging seems to have had an unfortunate dual effect, deeply stressing out voters already inclined to believe it while largely failing to resonate with the undecided and politically disengaged. Last week, The New York Times reported on a memo circulated by the leading pro-Harris super PAC warning Democrats that persuadable voters weren’t being moved by messages that focused on the former president’s authoritarianism. “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” the email read. Compared with 2020, fewer Americans are telling pollsters that they are highly motivated to vote, or that this is the most important election of their lifetime.

Within a certain segment of Harris’s base, though, the struggle against autocracy remains very much top of mind. And if you spend too much time online monitoring the discourse, as I do, you might come away with the impression that, for many, Election Day will be the decisive moment in the battle for American democracy. Some liberals are even making plans to leave the country if Trump wins. Biden’s son Hunter recently told Politico he was worried that Trump’s reelection would mean “losing our democracy to a fascist minority” and warned that a second Trump term “is potentially the end of America as we’ve known it.”

I’ve heard similar sentiments from my most anxious Harris-voting friends and family members. And I’ve wondered whether another Trump victory would spur in them the same spirit of post-2016 activism or send them spiraling into fatalism and disengagement.

On Tuesday night, Harris was careful in her speech not to wallow too much in the doom and gloom of an imperiled democracy. But she did take aim at her opponent’s illiberalism. She said that Trump was “out for unchecked power” and warned that if elected, he would enter the Oval Office with an “enemies list.” She alluded to the country’s birth in revolt against a “petty tyrant,” and described Americans who have fought over centuries to defend and promote democracy around the world. “They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” Harris declared to cheers.

In my conversations after the speech, many supporters, teary-eyed and high on adrenaline as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” still blared from the speakers, were understandably loath to talk about what they’ll do next week if their candidate loses. But they politely indulged me.

Alyssa VanLeeuwen, a mom from Maryland who brought her eighth-grade daughter to the rally, emitted a guttural agghh when I posed the question to her. “Democracy is absolutely on the line,” she told me. A Trump victory, she said, would mean a bleak and uncertain future for her daughter. “I’m scared. I’m terrified if that happens.”

When I asked her if she thought that fear would translate to disillusionment or activism, she paused to give it thought. “I think,” she said, “everybody’s going to go to battle again to try to fight for their neighbors.”

I spoke with another Harris supporter who asked me not to use her name (“My family could be targeted”). She, too, called the prospect of Trump’s reelection “terrifying.” She said that Trump would herald “the return of McCarthyism” as he used federal power to root out and punish his political enemies, and went on to lay out in vivid detail the various worst-case scenarios of a second Trump term. But when I asked her whether she thought American democracy itself might be destroyed, she said no. “We have 300 million people in this country,” she told me, “and I don’t think we would allow that.”

This attitude was shared by almost everyone I spoke with that night on the Ellipse. Some of them told me about friends, glued to cable news and doomscrolling on their phones, who might tend toward fatalism if Trump wins again. But the people I met—the kind who travel long distances and wait outside in the cold for hours to attend political rallies—were not thinking of Election Day as a singular make-or-break moment. They seemed to know that, no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week, and the week after that. Its preservation depends, in part, on not pegging its fate to the outcome of any one election.

Before leaving the Ellipse, I met Salome Agbaroji, a 19-year-old Harvard student who had traveled from Cambridge to see Harris speak. As a poet, she spends a lot of time thinking about the language that shapes our politics, and she told me she resents what she considers hyperbolic rhetoric in the media about the end of democracy. A professor had recently taught her the root of the Greek word for democracy—demos, meaning “people,” and kratia, meaning “rule.” The power of the people doesn’t disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader.

“I don’t think democracy lives in an institution,” Agbaroji told me. “Democracy lives in the people.” As long as people hold on to “that spirit, it will be hard to kill.”

This article originally stated that the Harris rally was on Wednesday; it was on Tuesday.

The Comically Terrible Rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump

2024-10-28T14:32:00-04:00

One of the more puzzling, albeit obscure, subplots in the final weeks of this campaign season has been Donald Trump’s thunderingly incompetent effort to court Mormon voters.

Earlier this month, the former president’s campaign launched Latter-day Saints for Trump, one of several “coalition” groups designed to coordinate outreach to specific subsections of the electorate. (See also: Catholics for Trump, Jewish Voices for Trump, and Latino Americans for Trump.) The campaign’s special attention to the LDS vote makes sense. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once the most reliably Republican religious group in the country, have been considerably less loyal to the party in the Trump era. And enough of them live in the closely divided battleground states of Arizona and Nevada to make a difference.

But almost immediately, Latter-day Saints for Trump devolved into a Veep-like comedy of errors. The official website went live on October 7 with a photo of Russell M. Nelson, the president of the Church and a man considered by its members to be a prophet of God. When a reporter for the Church-owned Deseret News asked whether the campaign had gotten permission to feature the image, given the Church’s neutrality in partisan politics, the campaign quickly scrubbed the photo from its homepage.

A few days later, users on X discovered a page on the Trump-campaign website selling Mormon-branded merch—including Latter-day Saints for Trump coffee mugs ($25) and koozies (two for $15). When people pointed out that Mormons somewhat famously don’t drink coffee or alcohol, the campaign hastily rebranded the merch, and a social-media pile-on ensued. (“Next: Jews for Trump pork chops.”)

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

Meanwhile, Mormon-targeted campaign events have been scheduled with an odd indifference to Latter-day Saint religious practice. A canvassing event in Nevada, for example, was held the same weekend as General Conference, a semiannual series of Church broadcasts in which senior leaders deliver sermons and spiritual counsel. (The timing was a “challenge,” admitted the Utah GOP chair, who helped organize the event.) And when Trump held a rally in Prescott, Arizona, with an array of MAGA-Mormon luminaries—including Senator Mike Lee of Utah and the right-wing media personality Glenn Beck—it took place on a Sunday, which Latter-day Saints traditionally set apart for worship, service, and rest, not political events. (Perhaps to address this dissonance, the post-rally Latter-day Saints for Trump Zoom call was advertised as a “virtual fireside,” a reference to evening religious meetings held by Mormons.)

The latest hitch in Trump’s Mormon outreach came yesterday, when the Deseret News reported that Doug Quezada, a founding co-chair of Latter-day Saints for Trump, is being sued for fraud over an alleged scheme involving a cannabis company. (Quezada told the paper the lawsuit was a “shakedown” and denied wrongdoing; in July, a judge denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.) Such allegations may be somewhat commonplace in the Republican nominee’s orbit, but the words cannabis company and fraud will not reassure Trump-skeptical Mormons.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to my request for an interview about the rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump. But Rob Taber, the national director of Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group that works closely with the Democratic campaign, was happy to talk. Taber told me he’s been surprised by the “sheer incompetence” of Trump’s efforts, and chalked up the missteps to a lack of practice. “They’re used to being able to count on the LDS vote to be the door-knockers and the foot soldiers of the Republican Party,” Taber told me. “Actually having to engage in persuasion is a little bit new to them.”

For most Mormon voters, these political faux pas won’t be deal-breakers on their own. But the Trump campaign’s clumsiness is revealing. Taber has a point: There’s a reason professional Republicans are so bad at pandering to Latter-day Saints—before Trump came along, they never had to. In the modern political era, a typical GOP presidential nominee would receive the support of 70 to 80 percent of LDS voters in the United States. In 2016, Trump—with his “locker-room talk” and fondness for adultery, his rank xenophobia and religious illiteracy—barely managed to pull half of the national Mormon vote, and won deep-red Utah with a meager plurality. (Evan McMullin, a Mormon independent candidate, drew more than 20 percent of the vote.)

For most of 2016, Trump’s campaign seemed to take the Mormon vote for granted—even as Democrats saw an opening. That August, Hillary Clinton wrote an op-ed for the Deseret News touting her record of support for religious minorities around the world as secretary of state, and contrasting it with Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, which the Church had condemned. Intent on showing that she’d done her homework, Clinton even cited several historical LDS leaders by name. When Trump responded with his own Deseret News op-ed a few days later, it comprised a hodgepodge of generic GOP talking points, plus a tin-eared pledge to protect pastors who endorse political candidates from the pulpit (a practice that, though common in evangelicalism, is forbidden in LDS services).

Four years later, Trump and his allies seemed more attuned to their Mormon problem. The campaign repeatedly dispatched Donald Trump Jr. to Utah, and enlisted the help of Mormon surrogates. But they still struggled to connect. The most famous blunder came late in the 2020 campaign, when Lee gave a speech in Arizona ham-fistedly comparing Trump to a character from the Book of Mormon.

[Read: Why Mormons don’t like Trump]

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee said, pointing to Trump. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”

Many Mormons, including some Trump supporters, found the comparison blasphemous. Captain Moroni is a beloved scriptural figure, the personification of bravery and selflessness, and seeing him invoked at a MAGA rally was jarring. Lee quickly walked back the comments, but the incident illustrated just how uncomfortable many Mormons are with their newfound status as a voter bloc to be fought over. To court them effectively in a presidential campaign requires both a strong grasp of LDS culture and a certain amount of delicacy.

Rob Taber told me that this is where Mormon Democrats like him have an edge. People with left-of-center views in the Church spend their lives learning how to lay out their view gently and persuasively, he said: “You just get used to explaining things.”

There’s little doubt that most LDS voters will support Trump this year. Conservative attitudes on abortion and other cultural issues guarantee a certain degree of partisan loyalty. But younger Latter-day Saints, who came of age in the Trump era, are significantly less conservative than previous generations. And in the past eight years, some anti-Trump Mormons have gotten more comfortable voting for Democrats instead of third-party protest candidates.

The margins could matter. In a survey conducted shortly before the 2020 election, Quin Monson, a pollster and political-science professor at Brigham Young University, found that Joe Biden doubled Clinton’s share of the Mormon vote in Arizona—a state with a large Mormon population that Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes. For the Harris campaign, holding on to those voters this year could be the difference between losing Arizona and cracking open a celebratory beverage on Election Night. I know a website where they might be able to get some koozies on sale.

The Jewish Quarterback at a Mormon College

2024-10-18T07:31:00-04:00

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There may be, quite simply, no place in America less Jewish than Brigham Young University’s football stadium on Yom Kippur. In a typical year, few of the roughly 63,000 fans who streamed into LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo, Utah, for the annual homecoming game would even be aware that Saturday was the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. But this is no typical year: The star quarterback for BYU, Jake Retzlaff, is Jewish. And he has led the team for the flagship Mormon university to an undefeated start that’s confounded prognosticators and propelled the Cougars to a top-15 national ranking.

It is one of those wonderfully strange college-sports stories that serves as a magnet for camera crews. In recent weeks, ESPN and CBS have both turned up on campus to profile Retzlaff, and Fox Sports dispatched a team of 140 to broadcast its game-day studio show from Provo. The stakes for Saturday’s game were high—a win against the University of Arizona Wildcats would not only make the Cougars bowl-eligible, but keep the team’s chances at a Big 12 championship and national-playoff berth alive.

The stakes were also high for me personally. As a dad gradually surrendering to stereotype in my approach to middle age, I had recently embarked on a mission to indoctrinate my young kids in the college-sports fandom of my alma mater. I bought them overpriced royal-blue hats and sweatshirts, and showed them viral videos of the beloved Cougar mascot, Cosmo, doing TikTok dances and jumping through hoops of fire. After deciding I would bring them to Provo last week for their first BYU football game, I spent days teaching them the fight song. By the time we took our seats on Saturday afternoon, the propaganda had done its work—they couldn’t wait to belt out “Rise and shout, the Cougars are out” after each BYU touchdown.

I assured them they’d have many opportunities to sing, but I secretly had my doubts. Arizona’s defense was good; BYU’s first five wins of the season had been weird and a bit fluky. Most important, like any BYU fan, I harbored a vaguely superstitious notion that this was the point of the season—with national hype peaking and people finally taking notice—that our team usually melts down. Chatting with fans before the game, I discovered I wasn’t alone in this anxiety. One fan even wondered aloud if Retzlaff’s decision to play on Yom Kippur, which many religious Jews spend in prayer and fasting, would curse his performance. He was joking, I thought. But then the Cougars’ opening drive ended with Retzlaff missing an open receiver in the end zone on fourth down, and the Wildcats marched down the field to score, and suddenly the specter of divine punishment didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. I found myself wondering if any other nervous BYU fans were Googling How bad is it to play football on the day of atonement?

When I met Retzlaff on campus a couple of days later, I told him about the earnest Mormon’s concern over his compliance with Jewish law, and he laughed. “That’s fandom,” he told me. Retzlaff, who wore sweats and a Star of David necklace, said he never seriously considered skipping the game. He knew some Jews would disagree—Sandy Koufax famously sat out the first game of the World Series in 1965 to observe Yom Kippur. But to Retzlaff, playing on Saturday was a chance to represent his faith on a stage that is not exactly teeming with people like him. Utah has one of the smallest Jewish populations in America, and at BYU, there are only two other Jewish students. That puts Retzlaff in a strange position: He represents one of the university’s smallest minorities and is also one of its most famous students.

Retzlaff, a California native who spent two years as a top junior-college quarterback, told me that his first thought when BYU recruiters showed up was about football, not faith. The school has a comparatively high-profile program with a powerhouse pedigree—the Cougars won the national championship in 1984 and have churned out a string of famous quarterbacks over the years, including Steve Young and Jim McMahon. But he admits that contemplating what his non-football life would look like on a 99 percent Mormon campus gave him pause.

BYU, which strictly prohibits drinking, premarital sex, and a host of other traditional college pastimes, is not an obvious draw for most non-Mormon students. But every year, the school attracts a combination of college athletes who want to play their sport without distraction and students from other orthodox-religious backgrounds who don’t mind spending time on America’s most “stone-cold sober” campus. (Last year, a Muslim basketball player for BYU named Aly Khalifa made headlines for fasting during a March Madness game that fell during Ramadan.)

Retzlaff told me his arrival in Provo was a culture shock. Sundays were brutal: Local businesses closed, the campus shut down, and, with most of his teammates at church, Retzlaff found himself sitting alone in his room, struggling to ward off boredom. The mandatory religious classes, which frequently began with all the students singing a Mormon hymn, could also be disorienting. “Every single person around me has got this thing memorized,” he recalled, “and I have no idea what’s going on.”

Another player in his position might have chosen to downplay his religious differences; Retzlaff decided to lean in. On Instagram, he started referring to himself as the “BYJew,” and encouraged skittish friends and teammates to use the term as well. (Eventually, the Utah County Chabad began selling “BYJew” T-shirts.) To celebrate Sukkot last year, he arranged for a kosher food truck from Salt Lake City to visit campus so he could treat his teammates to shawarma and falafel. He relished the opportunity to educate. “Members of the LDS faith do have a funny fascination with Judaism,” he told me. Some of the questions he got—“Do you guys believe in Jesus?” for example—were rudimentary. (“To me, that’s like, you’ve never met a Jew in your life,” he told me.) But others were more sophisticated, prompting conversations about the overlapping theologies and shared cultural experiences of two religious minorities, one very old, the other relatively new.

The Latter-day Saint rituals weren’t his own, but Retzlaff learned to find comfort and even a kind of divine beauty in them. During the pregame team prayers, when all the other players bow their heads, he looks up and around the locker room at his friends and teammates—trying “to be present in the moment” as he reflects on his own gratitude.

Retzlaff’s experience took on a new dimension after the October 7 attacks on Israel last year. As campuses across America erupted in protests over the war in Gaza, and as many of those protests curdled into virulent anti-Semitism, Retzlaff was struck by how different his classmates seemed from the people in viral video clips hurling epithets at Jewish students. He suspected that the secularism that dominated those other campuses played a part. “I’d love to ask them about their faith,” Retzlaff told me of the protesters. “What are the odds that they’re faithful at all? I’d bet you they’re not.” For all the inconvenience and occasional awkwardness that BYU’s deep religious culture might cause him, Retzlaff believes it’s allowed his fellow students to see his Judaism not as a marker of political identity but as a faith that warrants respect, even reverence.

In fact, Retzlaff told me, as BYU’s quarterback he’s encountered more anti-Mormonism than anti-Semitism. The year before he joined the team, some fans at the University of Oregon greeted the Cougars with chants of “Fuck the Mormons.” The school eventually apologized, but Retzlaff told me he and his teammates have continued to face religious taunts in opposing stadiums. He’s less scandalized by the heckling than by the lack of outrage it seems to engender. “The blatant disrespect for their faith—it’s something to think about. What if there was a Jewish university that had a Jewish football team, and they were saying that in the stands?” Retzlaff asked me. “Like, imagine if that hit the papers. That would be a big deal.” The casual bigotry, and muted response to it, unnerves him. “There’s a lot of people who just don’t like Mormon people, for no reason,” he told me. “That’s what happened to the Jews all throughout history.”

In the arena on Saturday, Retzlaff and his team found their rhythm in the second quarter. After a perfect 20-yard touchdown pass tied the game, the Cougars never looked back. They scored 24 unanswered points, and forced four turnovers. We sang the fight song until our voices went hoarse, and by the time the game ended in a 41–19 blowout, my kids were converted. I had a Jewish quarterback to thank for helping me pass my fandom down to the next generation.

But BYU’s win wasn’t meaningful only to the Latter-day Saints who were watching that day. After the game ended, Retzlaff made his way to the locker room to shower and change, and then took questions at a press conference. Playing like that on Yom Kippur was, he would later tell me, a “spiritual experience.” He was exhausted and emotional. But before he could leave, he got word that someone was waiting for him in the stadium, now mostly empty. A Jewish fan had waited more than an hour to take a picture with the quarterback. After shaking Retzlaff’s hand and thanking him, the man said he was going home to break his fast.

Mitt Romney Braces for Trump’s Retribution

2024-09-24T07:00:00-04:00

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On a swampy afternoon this past spring, I met Mitt Romney in his soon-to-be-vacated Senate office. It was strange to see him in person again. For two years, we’d talked almost every week as I worked on a biography that would cement his reputation as a Republican apostate. Since the book’s publication last year, we’d kept in sporadic touch—mostly through texts, the senator’s preferred medium for venting about politics—but we hadn’t spoken in much depth.

Some things hadn’t changed. Romney was, as ever, acutely attuned to his own mortality. “I saw an article this morning saying that they find your chances of getting Alzheimer’s are significantly increased based upon two things,” he told me as soon as we sat down. One factor was alcohol consumption; the other was stress at work. The latter had him worried. Romney is a teetotaler but has been addicted his whole life to stressful jobs. “I mean, I’ve felt high stress in my work since—” He thought about it. “Well, since I went to grad school.” He’s stepping down when his term ends in January. Retirement, he told me, would be good for his health.

[Read: ]What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate

As we chatted, though, I noted a change in his countenance. In the past, his frustration—with the Senate, with the Republican Party, with politics in general—had always seemed tinged with resignation. Maybe he was miserable, but he felt obligated to stay in Washington and do his part. Now, at 77, he couldn’t wait to leave. He seemed lighter in a way, but also more restless. Mormon missionaries have a term for the feeling of distraction and homesickness that sometimes settles in as they approach the end of their service: trunky. I asked if the term applied to him now, and he smirked: “Oh yeah.”

This essay was adapted from the new afterword for the paperback edition of Romney: A Reckoning.

Romney had mentioned to me repeatedly, in those brief exchanges over the preceding months, that life in Congress was getting worse. He wasn’t alone in feeling this way. His planned departure was part of an unusually large wave of retirements from Congress in 2024—52 as of May—and the phenomenon had prompted much discussion about why lawmakers were rushing for the exits. “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress,” Ken Buck, an outgoing Republican congressman from Colorado, told CNN. “And having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress.”

When I asked Romney why his colleagues seemed so miserable, he surprised me by launching into an uninterrupted, seven-minute diatribe about everything that was wrong with Washington. He talked about growing polarization, and the radicalizing effects of the primary process, and the institutional dysfunction of the House, and the indignity of serving in Congress during a presidential-election year.

To illustrate this last point, he offered an example. Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers had negotiated a bill aimed at restricting illegal immigration. It had been written at the behest of Republicans, who said they would fund new Ukrainian military aid only if Congress also tackled the “crisis” at America’s southern border. Then Trump came out against the immigration bill, having reportedly decided that the crisis at the border was good for his reelection prospects, and Republicans promptly fell in line. To Romney, it was clear that the priority for most of his colleagues was “to do whatever their nominee wants”—not to solve the problems they’d been elected to solve: “If Donald Trump says, ‘Hey, kill that immigration deal,’ [they’re] gonna kill the immigration deal.”

Romney told me he’d been invited to deliver a commencement speech, and he planned to illustrate the cynical nature of politics today by talking about his childhood fascination with professional wrestling. As a kid, he’d been enthralled by the theatrical rivalry between “Dick the Bruiser,” a muscle-bound former NFL player, and “Haystacks Calhoun,” a 600-pound farm boy from Texas. The two men riled up crowds by thumping their chests and talking trash about each other. “I was intrigued,” Romney told me, “until my brother, six years older, said it’s all fake. And it suddenly became less interesting.” Congress, he’d come to discover, was more or less the same. “Most of what’s going on in these buildings is just fake”—less policy making than performative animosity and posturing.

I thought it sounded a little bleak for a commencement address, but Romney wasn’t soliciting feedback. Before I could say anything, he was venting about the lack of seriousness in legislative debates over the federal debt and climate change, and the plague of partisan “messaging bills” that are written to score points instead of make law. Finally, when he’d tired himself out, he slumped back in his chair. “We’ve got some real challenges,” Romney said, “and we just don’t deal with them.”

“So that’s—anyway, that’s a long answer,” he said with a sigh.

I joked that it seemed like he had a lot to get off his chest. He didn’t laugh.

It was not lost on me that the publication of my book, Romney: A Reckoning, was a more fraught experience for Romney than it was for me. As a biographer, I’d looked at his stories about the dissolution of the GOP under Trump as a valuable contribution to the historical record. But Romney had paid a price for his candor.

To the extent that there had been any doubt before, the book sealed his status as a villain in MAGA world. Conservative publications ran takedowns with headlines such as “Mitt Romney, We Hardly Knew Ye.” Sean Hannity, a onetime cheerleader for Romney’s presidential campaign, denounced him as a “small, angry, and very bitter man.” Trump himself weighed in with a characteristically rambling post on Truth Social in which he seemed to confuse the biography for a memoir. “Mitt Romney, a total loser that only a mother could love,” the review began, “just wrote a book which is, much like him, horrible, boring, and totally predictable.”

Romney was mostly amused by Trump’s reaction (“Hahaha!” he texted me at the time. “He’s such a whack job!”), but the book’s chilly reception among Republicans on Capitol Hill must have been upsetting. Some of his colleagues made known their disapproval in private. Others, including Senator J. D. Vance, lashed out in the press. “If he has a problem with me,” Vance told a reporter, “I kind of wish he just acted like a man and spoke to me directly, not whining to a reporter about it.” Romney wasn’t exactly surprised by the attacks from people he’d criticized in such withering fashion. (“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” he had told me.) Still, the hostility was unpleasant enough that, after The Atlantic published an excerpt from the book, he opted to skip the GOP caucus lunch.

The Trump-era GOP’s perception of Romney as a devious traitor put him in a precarious position. The 2024 presidential election had, by that point in the spring, played out exactly as he’d predicted. Trump had easily defeated a large and feckless field of Republican challengers to clinch the party’s nomination, despite facing 88 criminal charges. And Joe Biden looked to be on a glide path to renomination, despite having some of the worst approval ratings of any modern first-term president. In the months that followed, the race would become more volatile—a disastrous debate performance by Biden; a party-wide panic and push to replace him on the ticket; the nomination of Kamala Harris; the assassination attempts on Trump. But that spring, polls showed Trump clinging to a persistent lead, and Romney was convinced that a second Trump term was imminent.

Romney had made this prediction before, telling anyone who would listen in the run-up to the 2020 election that he thought Trump was going to get a second term. He’d even bet one of his sons his prized 1985 BMW that Biden would lose. But back then, he’d told me, it was a kind of psychological game he played with himself—predicting the outcome he most dreaded as a form of “inoculation.”

This time felt different. Trump had repeatedly pledged to use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies if reelected. “I am your retribution,” he enjoyed telling his crowds. Romney knew that he was likely to appear on any enemies list kept by the former president, and he’d privately mused to friends that it might be time for him and his wife, Ann, to consider moving abroad. (A spokesperson for the senator told me he was not serious about this.)

But when I asked Romney, in the spring, what a Trump reelection would mean for him and his family, he was careful at first. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. If Trump tried to sic the Justice Department on him, Romney told me, “the good news is I haven’t had an affair with anybody; I don’t have any classified documents; I can’t imagine something I’ve done that would justify an investigation, let alone an indictment.”

What about his sons? I asked. Might they be targeted?

“I mean, hopefully they’ve all crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s,” Romney replied, straining to sound casual. “But it’s hard for me to imagine that President Trump would take the time to go out and see if [he] can find something on members of my family.”

“You might need to expand your imagination,” I suggested.

Romney grew irritated. “Yeah, but I’ve got 25 grandkids!” he said, throwing up his hands. “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group.” This was clearly a problem to which he’d given serious thought, and realized there was no solution. In the weeks after January 6, he’d spent thousands of dollars a day to protect his family from red-capped vigilantes. But how do you hide a family of 40 from a president hell-bent on revenge?

Recognizing that I’d hit a nerve, I said it was possible, of course, that Trump’s “retribution” rhetoric was all bluster. But Romney didn’t seem comforted.

“I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” he told me, his voice suddenly subdued. “So I would take him at his word.”

Romney is the first to admit that retirement has never been his strong suit. The last time he attempted it, after losing the 2012 presidential election, the boredom nearly drove him crazy. Writing in his journal at the time, he struggled to even use the term retirement. “Terrifying word,” he wrote, “but worse reality.” Among those who know him best, the consensus is that he’ll need a post-Senate project—but what will it be?

Romney told me he’s received invitations from multiple universities to teach, and was considering a campus lecture tour. He also remained fixated on finding ways to pull American politics back toward the center. He wanted to collect data on how reforming the primary system to allow ranked-choice voting and greater participation from independents might yield less extreme candidates. And he was eager to see more coordination among the various centrist nonprofits and third parties—No Labels, Forward, Unite America—that are devoted to depolarization.

He conceded that there were hurdles impeding such efforts. Romney himself had been recruited by No Labels to run as an independent. Like everyone else approached by the group, Romney had turned them down. “The reality that anyone who looked at it had to confront was that you can’t win, right?” he told me. “And if you can’t win, you’re a spoiler, and you’re not quite sure who you’re going to spoil.” Sure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed content at the time to play the 2024 spoiler, but Romney didn’t exactly consider the anti-vaccine former Democrat a role model. The senator mentioned a recent New York Times article revealing that doctors had discovered a dead parasite in Kennedy’s brain in 2010. “I’m sorry, but there are certain people I will not vote for for president,” Romney told me. “People who’ve had a worm eat part of their brain should probably not be given the nuclear code.” (Kennedy dropped out over the summer and, perhaps confirming the wisdom of Romney’s litmus test, endorsed Trump.)

There was, of course, one other possibility for Romney’s final act: a position in the next Biden administration. The two men have become unlikely friends in recent years. And according to one person close to the Biden campaign, senior Democrats in the president’s orbit had discussed appointing Romney to a high-profile diplomatic post in a second term, before Biden dropped out of the race. The conversations were hypothetical—ambassadorships aren’t typically doled out six months before an election—but such an offer would presumably be conditioned on an endorsement. And Romney wasn’t sure he could oblige.

“Biden’s policies drive me crazy,” he told me. “And one of the reasons I think there are people like me who shrink at the idea of endorsing Biden is, does that mean I endorse his border policies? Or do I endorse giving trillions of dollars to college students to pay their debt?” He knew Trump’s authoritarianism and commitment to undermining America’s electoral system made him more dangerous than Biden. “The fact that if you want to be in the good graces of MAGA world you’ve got to say the election was stolen is extraordinary to me—but that is the test,” Romney said. Still, throwing his support behind a president whose policies he’d spent decades fighting against was a difficult thing to do. He told me he wasn’t ruling it out.

In September, after Harris’s ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, I asked Romney if he wanted to talk again, hoping to understand how the news might change his expectations for the election. He declined, but there are signs that his impression of the vice president, like that of many Americans, might be evolving. On the few occasions when he mentioned her in our interviews over the years, it was usually to describe the Democrats’ political bind. Romney had internalized the Washington consensus that, although Biden was clearly weak, Harris had no chance of beating Trump. But after her debate performance earlier this month, Romney seemed impressed. “Most people didn’t know her terribly well other than a few clips that were not flattering that you might see on the internet,” he told reporters. “And people saw, actually, she’s an intelligent, capable person.”

As our conversation in the spring wound down, I decided to ask Romney a question I’d somehow neglected to bring up in our dozens of interviews before: What—if anything—gave him hope about the future?

This question had come up repeatedly on my book tour. Invariably, after listening to me recount the sordid tales of cynicism, hypocrisy, and unbridled malice that Romney had witnessed inside Congress, someone in the audience would politely raise their hand and ask for a happy ending—and I’d draw a blank.

When I put it to Romney in his office, he told me about a book he’d recently read, The Age of Acrimony. The book chronicled America from 1865 to 1915, a period in which the country was exploding with political energy, much of it destructive. Torch-carrying mobs held massive rallies that turned into riots. Political assassinations were widespread. Many people were predicting a second civil war. Then, in relatively short order, “the air went out of the balloon,” Romney told me. Presidential-election turnout rates plunged from 80 percent in 1896 (when many people were bribed for their vote) to less than 50 percent two decades later. Romney invited the author, a historian at the Smithsonian, to his office. He wanted to know what had changed. How had a nation addicted to partisan tribalism and political violence managed to break the cycle? The author told him that members of the generation that had come of age during this “age of acrimony” simply decided they didn’t want to live that way anymore.

Romney thought about the young Americans who’d entered political consciousness during the Trump era. They’d watched their parents and grandparents fight endlessly with one another about politics on Facebook and fall down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes. They’d seen the caliber of politicians who rose to the top in this climate, and the havoc they’d wrought on democratic institutions. And he hoped that perhaps they were ready to try something different.

When Romney announced his retirement last year, he framed the decision as a move to make room for “a new generation of leaders.” At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to this notion. It seemed like a savvy bit of rhetoric aimed as much at dinging the two geriatric presidential contenders at the time as it was at explaining his own thinking.

But listening to him talk that day in his office, I was struck by just how much trust he was placing in younger Americans to fix Washington, if only because he’d lost confidence in the supposed adults running the town now.

“I have hope in the rising generation,” Romney told me—hope “that they’re watching what’s going on, and they’re going to say, Enough.”

This essay was adapted from the new afterword for the paperback edition of Romney: A Reckoning.

The Last Man in America to Change His Mind About Trump

2024-08-19T06:00:00-04:00

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On the evening last month when Donald Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania, Spencer Cox was at home in the Utah governor’s mansion. Pacing the second-floor residence, he scrolled for updates on his phone, watching and rewatching the same footage, studying photos of the former president’s bloody face.

“I was kind of captivated,” Cox told me. “But there was this sick-feeling pit in my stomach.”

Cox had grown steadily more anxious in recent years about the prospect of a complete democratic breakdown in America. He’d immersed himself in the literature of polarization and political violence. He couldn’t escape his fear that the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear had been millimeters away from starting a civil war.

As he sat in the pews of a Latter-day Saint ward the next morning, an idea came to him: He should write Trump a letter. This was not an obvious instinct. Cox was one of the few office-holding Republicans left in America who hadn’t gotten on board with the former president. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or in 2020, and had publicly pleaded with his party to nominate anyone else in 2024. But Cox was relieved that Trump—at least so far—had not responded to the assassination attempt with escalatory rhetoric or threats. He felt he should encourage whatever instinct was behind that restraint.

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

After church, he climbed into the back of an SUV headed toward his rural hometown of Fairview and took out his iPad to type.

“Your life was spared. Now, because of that miracle, you have the opportunity to do something that no other person on earth can do right now: unify and save our country,” Cox wrote. “By emphasizing unity rather than hate, you will win this election by an historic margin and become one of our nation’s most transformational leaders.”

The letter was, Cox told me, “admittedly a little over-the-top.” But he hoped Trump might be receptive to such flowery appeals. He asked Don Peay, a Trump ally from Utah, to hand-deliver it to the candidate, who was in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention. Cox says he didn’t expect it to become public, but of course it leaked, and the day after Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination, with a speech that included references to “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and illegal immigrants coming from “insane asylums,” Cox found himself fielding questions about the letter at a press conference. Asked if he would finally cast his first vote for Trump in 2024, Cox said he would.

“Republican Politician Buckles to Party Pressure, Endorses Trump” is not a new story. It has played out hundreds of times in the past eight years. But Cox is an unusual case. He did not endorse Trump during his own recent Republican primary, when he was fending off challenges from multiple MAGA rivals and had much more to gain politically. And his abrupt reversal has shredded his reputation as a principled Republican. Brian King, Cox’s Democratic rival this fall, condemned him for “going where the wind blows him.” Stuart Reid, an anti-Trump Republican and former state senator, wrote in an open letter, “You have lost your credibility and relinquished your honor.”

Among those who know Cox, the news was treated almost as a mystery to be solved. “I’m shocked at how many ‘WTF’ texts I’ve received on this one,” a longtime Republican strategist in Utah told me shortly after the announcement.

I met Cox on a Sunday afternoon in July, two days after his endorsement—and hours after President Joe Biden announced that he was dropping out of the race—in the governor’s mansion, a 120-year-old French châteauesque structure in downtown Salt Lake City. We’d been talking on and off all year, and not once in our conversations had he given any indication that he would support Trump. Just a couple of weeks earlier, he’d told CNN that he wouldn’t vote for either major-party candidate.

Throughout our 90-minute interview, Cox rejected the “MAGA” label, called Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, “antithetical” to his brand of Republicanism, and at various points seemed even to quibble with the idea that he’d endorsed Trump at all. “I said I’m going to vote for him,” Cox told me. “I didn’t say I support everything he does. I’m not even telling you that you need to vote for him.”

But Cox was surprisingly transparent about the calculation he was making. He told me that the Never Trump movement had utterly failed, and said he’d come to realize that he couldn’t have any influence on the modern GOP “if I’m not on the team”—that is, Trump’s team. “It’s absolutely a litmus test. I don’t think it should be. I wish it wasn’t that way. But it is.”

Cox told me he’s on a mission that’s more important than maintaining his anti-Trump credentials. This is perhaps the most mysterious part of his new posture. The cause for which he’s willing to ally with an insult-flinging felon? The healing of America’s political culture.

When I first sat down with Cox, in January, I thought it would be for a story about an embattled governor struggling to stem the spread of Trumpism in his own backyard.

Utah had developed a reputation in the Trump years for being a red state uniquely resistant to this brand of politics. Trump placed a distant third in the state’s 2016 Republican primaries, and carried the state in the general election with a meager 45 percent plurality of the vote. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—once the most reliably Republican religious group in America—were fleeing the newly MAGA-fied GOP. Only half supported Trump in 2016, 20 points lower than the share that supported a typical Republican presidential nominee.

For years, journalists and scholars offered theories to explain Trump’s underperformance in Utah: that his vulgarity and checkered personal life offended Mormon sensibilities; that his message of rigged systems and white grievance didn’t resonate in a state with low income inequality and high upward mobility; that his xenophobic rhetoric clashed with Utahns’ relative openness to immigrants.

I’d written many of these stories myself, and still saw evidence that the phenomenon was real. But I’d also noticed something changing in Utah—not a wholesale mutation, necessarily, but signs that Trumpism’s most toxic elements were seeping into the groundwater. Cox had noticed it too. “It’s what keeps me up at night,” he told me.

Cox had spent the Trump era preaching the gospel of depolarization—and arguing that his home state offered an antidote to our national politics. In speeches and interviews, he liked to talk about Utah’s old-fashioned communitarianism, how the Mormon pioneers who settled the state built homes in village centers and planted crops on the outskirts of town so that farmers could help one another and stay connected, how that ethos came to define his state. He proudly championed what he called the “the Utah model,” a consensus-minded approach to policy making that had yielded interesting compromises on culture-war issues, including immigration, LGBTQ rights, and religious freedom. He made national headlines when he vetoed a bill aimed at banning transgender girls from youth sports, noting that the law would have applied to just four high-school athletes. “When in doubt,” he explained at the time, “I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion.” Lean and sprightly, with rosy cheeks and a speaking cadence that makes him sound like he’s perpetually smiling, Cox was the perfect mascot for the version of Utah he was pitching—almost a walking stereotype of Boy Scout earnestness.

In 2023, he became chair of the National Governors Association and launched an initiative he called “Disagree Better.” The idea had originated in the fevered final weeks of the 2020 election, when Trump was already spreading stolen-election lies and indicating that he wouldn’t accept defeat. Cox, who was running for governor at the time, filmed a series of ads with his Democratic opponent, Chris Peterson, in which they good-naturedly teased each other and appealed to decency and democracy. Critics called the ads cloying and cheesy, but they seemed to accomplish the impossible: Researchers at Stanford reported that people who watched them exhibited marked drops in partisan acrimony. Through Disagree Better, Cox recruited bipartisan pairs of politicians to star in similar ads across the country.

[Watch: Spencer Cox at The Atlantic Festival]

Cox was soon welcomed in elite quarters as that rarest of Trump-era creatures: the palatable Republican, respectfully profiled in Time and The Washington Post, warmly received in such venues as The Atlantic Festival (where I interviewed him onstage last fall). At the same time, he surfaced as a villain in the right-wing media. Tucker Carlson took a special interest in Cox, deriding him as “creepy” for politely answering a high-school student’s question about his preferred pronouns, and accusing him of “auditioning for the title of ‘America’s Guiltiest White Guy.’” (When, in a podcast interview last month, Carlson mused that Utah’s governor must “get off on debasing himself,” I texted Cox the clip. “He seems to be projecting again,” he responded.)

Cox was not surprised by the MAGA resistance. In fact, he seemed almost delighted by it. Utahns had always taken pride in their peculiarity, and the governor was no exception. “We’re weird,” he boasted at his State of the State address in January. “The good kind of weird. The kind of weird the rest of the nation is desperate for right now.”

But a few months later, when Cox began campaigning in earnest for his reelection, it was hard to ignore just how ordinary his state’s politics had become—that is to say, mean and angry and fueled by division.

Cox’s primary was brutal. His chief opponent, Phil Lyman, was a state representative best known for having received a presidential pardon from Trump. (Lyman was arrested in 2014 for leading an ATV protest ride on public lands in a Utah canyon.) In taking on Cox, Lyman promoted outlandish rumors that the governor was interfering with his supporters’ Wi-Fi connections, and accused him of getting illegal immigrants from Colorado to vote for him. Lyman drew cheers on the campaign trail by attacking Disagree Better as “a leftist, Marxist tactic to get people to drop their opinions.” When Lyman ultimately lost the primary, he refused to concede and sued to have the results of the election overturned. (The lawsuit was dismissed.)

“It was the complete playbook,” Cox told me. “The lies, the vitriol, the denial of the legitimacy of the election.” Four years earlier, he had narrowly won a hard-fought but polite contest against Jon Huntsman Jr., the centrist former governor and presidential candidate. Now Cox felt like he was contending with a new species of Republican.

He wasn’t wrong. Survey data suggested that American Mormons were becoming less Republican overall in the Trump era, but those who remained in the party were becoming Trumpier. “I don’t think that a governor, or any kind of government, coming in and saying … ‘Let’s put some cute little ads together that we’re all gonna get along!’ is going to make a difference,” one woman said in a June focus group of Utah Republicans organized by the political consultant Sarah Longwell. “He’s just another RINO.” For every Mitt Romney, it seemed, there were now two Mike Lees, scrambling to memory-hole their former opposition to Trump and reinvent themselves as MAGA adherents.

[From the November 2023 issue: What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate]

When Cox addressed the state Republican convention in May, he was loudly booed by Trumpists. Finally, in a fit of exasperation, he spat, “Maybe you just hate that I don’t hate enough.” The race seemed to rattle his faith in Utah exceptionalism. “It only reinforced my concern that there’s kind of been a breach in the stronghold,” he told me.

The night of the primary ended up being a good one for Cox. Not only did he win comfortably, but a relatively moderate congressman, John Curtis, earned the Republican nomination to fill Romney’s Senate seat. But when I texted Cox that June evening to ask how he was feeling, he told me he was just relieved it was over. “It was rough,” he wrote.

So how did a governor who’s built his brand on standing against hatred and extremism in politics talk himself into supporting Trump? This was the question I wanted an answer to when I met with him at the governor’s mansion in late July.

We sat across from each other in his study, adorned with paintings of desert landscapes and a bullhorn hat rack that originally belonged to Theodore Roosevelt. Cox, wearing a slim-cut suit and socks with cartoon pictures of Abraham Lincoln, leaned forward as he explained how supporting Trump was a way of practicing what he preached.

“When we talk about disagreeing better and the work of depolarization, there’s this weird thing that happens to people,” Cox told me. “You start to criticize the people who are polarizing us … and then they become your enemies.” If you’re not careful, he said, you risk becoming a mirror image of the thing you’re working to defeat.

“That ‘Love your enemies’ stuff—it sucks. I hate it. I wish Jesus had never said that,” Cox told me. But if he was serious about injecting decency and compassion back into politics, he explained, he needed to find a way to work with his political enemies. And within his own party, at least, he could think of few figures who qualified as enemies more than Trump. “To me, this is kind of the ultimate test.”

Surely, I told him, there was a way to show Christian love to Trump and his supporters without endorsing the man for president. I pointed to the long list of things Trump has done and said that Cox has found abhorrent, and Cox insisted he still found all the same things abhorrent. He also made clear that he’s not among those claiming that Trump found God after his near-death experience: “I’m not an idiot. The guy’s 78. He’s probably not changing.”

But he believed that even if Trump’s core character is fixed, the former president might modulate his behavior in response to positive reinforcement rather than scolding. From Cox’s perch in late July, with Trump leading every major poll and the Democratic Party in chaos, the prospect of a Reagan-style landslide looked within reach. Cox said he wanted to be a good influence on the next president. “Even if it’s the smallest, tiniest possible influence over the next four years to move things in a better direction, it’s worth taking, even at great personal risk or harm,” he said.

I noted that many Republicans before him had attempted this strategy—ingratiating themselves to Trump so that they could steer his presidency. The results had generally ranged from ineffective to catastrophic. Cox insisted this was different. “All those people wanted something—they wanted to be closer to power, they wanted a Cabinet position,” he told me. “I don’t want any of that stuff at all. I’m not trying to get into his orbit.”

Later, I would run Cox’s thinking by a handful of his friends and allies. Even those willing to grant his sincerity seemed either confused or dubious. Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland and a friend of Cox’s, laughed when I asked about the idea that endorsing Trump could be an “act of depolarization,” as Cox had described it to me. “I would deeply disagree with that reasoning,” Moore told me. “Governor Cox is a decent man … so I hope he would look at the evidence and change his perspective.” Jared Polis, the centrist Democratic governor of Colorado, praised Cox for trying to make a difference. “It was a thoughtful letter,” he told me. “I hope Donald Trump reads it and heeds it, but I don’t think that either Spencer or I are holding our breath.”

At one point, I asked Cox what his wife, Abby, made of his decision to vote for the former president. She has made little secret of her distaste for Trump; earlier this year she endorsed Nikki Haley for president (while her husband remained officially neutral in the GOP primary). Cox spoke carefully. “We have a very close relationship,” he told me. “This wasn’t her favorite idea—to put it mildly. And still isn’t.”

I wondered how long Cox would stick to this plan. In 2020, he’d initially said he would vote for Trump, before changing his mind. When I asked if there was anything Trump could do to lose his vote, Cox shrugged. “I mean, there might be. You know, if you shoot someone on Fifth Avenue…”

[Read: The new Trump is always the old Trump]

In the weeks after our interview, Trump seemed determined to prove that his brief flirtation with magnanimity and restraint was over. Facing slipping poll numbers and a spirited new opponent in Vice President Kamala Harris, he returned to familiar patterns of demonization and venting. He posted conspiratorial diatribes on social media about the crowds at Harris’s rallies, and gave a rambling, lie-laden press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He called his opponent “nasty” and repeatedly questioned her racial identity. At a rally in North Carolina, he assured his fans that the shooting hadn’t softened him: “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice!”

So, last week, I called Cox one more time to find out if he’d changed his mind. “It feels like a year ago since we last chatted,” he told me, a trace of exasperation in his voice. He conceded that his party’s nominee had largely reverted to old habits—“playing the hits,” Cox called it—but said he stood by what he’d written in that letter to Trump and planned to vote for him. “He could still win big by focusing on issues instead of grievance,” Cox said. Trump will be in Utah later this month for a fundraiser, and Cox hopes they can find time to talk.

But as our conversation continued, Cox seemed eager to change the subject from Trump himself to Trump’s supporters. He said many of his allies in the fight against polarization felt betrayed by his decision (“They’re very angry at me, and that’s fine,” he said, sounding like it wasn’t totally fine), but that he hoped he might now be able to reach a new audience with his message: his own party’s base.

Cox told me about the people he grew up with in Fairview, and how much they distrusted politicians like him. In speeches, he frequently invokes his rural hometown as an example of how partisan politics can poison a community. “I really do care about them, but they don’t think I care about them,” he told me. “If you’re a Never Trumper, you’re the enemy.”

With his endorsement, Cox wasn’t their enemy anymore—would they listen to him now?

The Most Revealing Moment of a Trump Rally

2024-07-29T06:00:00-04:00

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A week before Christmas, an evangelical minister named Paul Terry stood before thousands of Christians, their heads bowed, in Durham, New Hampshire, and pleaded with God for deliverance. The nation was in crisis, he told the Lord—racked with death and addiction, led by wicked men who “rule with imperial disdain.”

“With every passing day,” the minister said, “we slip farther and farther into George Orwell’s tyrannical dystopia.”

But because God is merciful, there was reason for hope. One man stood ready to redeem the country: Donald Trump. And he was about to come onstage. “We know what he did for us and how he strove to lead us in honorable ways during his term as our president—in ways that brought your blessings to us, rather than your reproach and judgment,” Terry prayed. “We know the hour is late. We know that time grows shorter for us to be saved and revived.” When he finished in the name of Jesus Christ, Amens echoed through the hall. Soon Trump appeared to rapturous applause and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”

For all the exhaustive coverage of Trump’s campaign rallies, even before the assassination attempt at one of them in July, relatively little attention has been paid to the prayers that start each one. These invocations aren’t broadcast live on cable news, nor do they typically attract the interest of journalists, who gravitate toward the more impious utterances of the candidate himself. But the prayers offered before Trump speaks illuminate this perilous moment in American politics just as well as anything he says from the podium. And they help explain how the stakes of this year’s election have come to feel so apocalyptically high.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

To understand the evolving psychology and beliefs of Trump’s religious supporters, I attempted to review every prayer offered at his campaign events since he announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Working with a researcher, I compiled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The resulting document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, revealing religious text: benign in some places, blasphemous in others; contradictory and poignant and frightening and sad and, perhaps most of all, begging for exegesis.

There are many ways to parse the text. You could compare the number of times Trump’s name is mentioned (87) versus Jesus Christ’s (61). You could break down the demographics of the people leading the prayers: 45 men and 13 women; overwhelmingly evangelical, with disproportionate representation from Pentecostalism, a charismatic branch of Christianity that emphasizes supernatural faith healing and speaking in tongues. One might also be tempted to catalog the most comically incendiary lines (“Oh Lord, our Lord, we want to be awake and not woke”). But the most interesting way to look at these prayers is to examine the theological motifs that run through them.

The scripture verse that’s cited most frequently in the prayers comes from 2 Chronicles. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Ryan Burge, a Baptist minister and political scientist I asked to review the prayers, told me that this verse—which is quoted 10 times—is regularly cited by evangelicals to advance a popular conservative-Christian narrative: that America, like ancient Israel before it, has broken its special covenant with God and is suffering the consequences. “The Old Testament prophets they’re quoting talk about sin collectively instead of individually—the nation has fallen into wickedness and needs healing,” Burge said. “The way they use this verse presupposes that we’re spiraling down the tubes.”

Trump’s supporters attribute America’s fall from grace to a variety of national sins old and new—prayer bans in public schools, illegal immigration, pro-transgender policies, the purported rigging of a certain recent election. Whatever the specifics, the picture of America they paint is almost universally—biblically—bleak.

In Wildwood, New Jersey, a pastor declared, “Our nation finds itself in turmoil, chaos, and dysfunction.” In Fort Dodge, Iowa, the sentiment was similar: “Lies, corruption, and propaganda are driving civilization to ruins.” In Conway, South Carolina, one supplicant informed God, “Our enemies are trying to steal, kill, and destroy our America, so we need you to intervene.”

[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]

The premise of all of these prayers is that America’s covenant can be reestablished, and its special place in God’s kingdom restored, if the nation repents and turns back to him. Burge told me that these ideas have long percolated on the religious right. What’s new is how many Christians now seem convinced that God has anointed a specific leader who, like those prophets of old, is prepared to defeat the forces of evil and redeem the country. And that leader is running for president.

Early on in the Trump era, it was common to hear conservative Christians compare him to Cyrus the Great, the sixth-century-B.C.E. Persian king who, though he did not worship the God of Israel himself, liberated the Israelites from Babylonian captivity and helped them build their temple in Jerusalem.

The subtext was not subtle. Here was a handy biblical precedent for the “unlikely vessel”—the man God uses to fulfill his purposes even though he lacks the faith and character of a true believer.

But this analogy seems to have outlived its usefulness to the religious right: A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of Republicans viewed Trump as “morally upstanding,” and in a Deseret News poll commissioned last year, 64 percent said they believed he is a “person of faith.” The former president no longer needs to be described as a blunt, utilitarian tool in God’s hand. “Cyrus was a way of acknowledging, ‘I know this is an immoral person, but he could still do some good,’ ” Russell Moore, an evangelical theologian and the editor of Christianity Today, who has been critical of Trump, told me. “I haven’t heard Cyrus language in at least five years.”

The prayers at Trump’s rallies reflect this shifting perception. Cyrus isn’t mentioned, but Trump does get compared to righteous, prophetic heroes of the Bible, including Esther, Solomon, and David.

In America, more than perhaps anywhere else in the Western world, petitions to God are still a routine fixture of politics—at congressional sessions, presidential nominating conventions, inaugurations. After a gunman shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, both Democrats and Republicans prayed for the former president and for the country he hopes to lead.

And many presidential campaigns are infused with religion. In July, Joe Biden attended a church service in Philadelphia where the pastor compared the president’s recent political struggles to the Old Testament story of Joseph, and a member of the congregation prayed for Biden: “Touch his mind, O God, his body; rejuvenate him and his spirit.”

Bradley Onishi, a scholar and former evangelical minister who studies the intersection of politics and Christianity in America, told me that prayers at political events have traditionally fit a certain mold. God is asked to grant the political leader inspiration and wisdom, to help him resist temptation and lead the country in a righteous direction. “It was always ‘We pray for him to have the strength to do God’s will, to have character, to be the man we need,’ ” Onishi said.

Some of the prayers at Trump’s rallies run along these lines, and would be familiar to anyone who has spent time in an American church, myself included. “Give President Trump the strength to make the right decisions both in and out of the public eye,” one man prayed at a Trump event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “Remind him to seek your guidance as events unfold.” I have said “Amen” to a thousand prayers like this in my life, on behalf of government leaders in both parties.

But Onishi, like several of the other experts I asked to read the prayers, was struck by how many of them take Trump’s righteousness for granted. “No one prays for Trump to do right; they pray that God will do right by Trump,” Onishi told me.

Indeed, rather than asking God to make Trump an instrument of his will, most of the prayers start from the assumption that he already is. Accordingly, many of them drop any pretense of thy-will-be-done nonpartisanship, and ask explicitly for Trump’s reelection. “Lord, you have a servant in Donald J. Trump, who can lead our nation,” a woman offering a prayer in Laconia, New Hampshire, told God at a rally on the eve of the state’s Republican primary. “Help us to overcome any obstacles tomorrow so that we may deliver victory to your warrior.”

[From the April 2018 issue: Trump and the evangelical temptation]

With Trump’s goodness presumed, the criminal charges against him are cast not as evidence of potential wrongdoing but as a sign of victimhood. “We ask that you put a hedge of protection around President Trump,” one woman prayed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, “and deliver him from the baseless attacks, and remove from office those who are subverting justice in our legal system.”

At a February campaign event in North Charleston, South Carolina, Mark Burns, a televangelist in a three-piece suit, squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his right hand toward heaven. “Let us pray, because we’re fighting a demonic force,” he shouted. “We’re fighting the real enemy that comes from the gates of hell, led by one of its leaders called Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

Although Burns was more provocative than most, he was not alone in using the language of spiritual warfare. This is perhaps the most unnerving theme in the prayers at Trump’s rallies. One verse, from Ephesians, is quoted repeatedly: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Russell Moore told me he used to hear conservative evangelicals cite this verse as a way of shifting the focus away from earthly concerns like politics and toward the larger, more important battle for our souls. “The point would be that our opponents aren’t our enemies,” he told me. But something has changed in recent years. “That’s not the implication I see in these prayers. It’s ‘Politics is how we fight these spiritual battles.’ ”

[Russell Moore: The American evangelical Church is in crisis. There’s only one way out.]

Terry Amann, a conservative pastor in Iowa, told me I shouldn’t be surprised to hear such a dire framing of the election. Christians like him see abortion as a grave sin and fast-changing social mores around gender and sexuality as serious threats to the nation’s spiritual health. “Every election cycle, they say this is the most important election in your lifetime,” he told me. To him, it feels like this one really is. “Our republic is in trouble.”

But it’s easy to see the danger in internalizing the concept of politics as spiritual combat. Trump’s rallies become more than mere campaign events—they are staging grounds in a supernatural conflict that pits literal angels against literal demons for the soul of the nation. Marinate enough in these ideas, and the consequences of defeat start to feel existential. “This is not a time for politics as usual,” a Pentecostal preacher declared at a Trump rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last year. “It’s not a time for religion as usual. It’s not a time for prayers as usual. This is a time for spiritual warriors to arise and to shake the heavens.”

As I was reviewing these prayers, I wondered what Trump’s most zealous religious supporters would do if they didn’t get the result they were praying for in November. With so much riding on the idea that Trump’s reelection has a divine mandate, what would happen if he lost? A destabilizing crisis of faith? Another widespread rejection of the election’s outcome? Further spasms of political violence?

It wasn’t until I came across a prayer delivered in December in Coralville, Iowa, that a more urgent question occurred to me: What will they do if their prayers are answered?

Onstage, Joel Tenney, a 27-year-old evangelist with a shiny coif of blond hair and a quavering preacher’s cadence, preceded his prayer with a short sermon for the gathered crowd of Trump supporters. “We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime,” Tenney began. “The corruption in Washington is a natural reflection of the spiritual state of our nation.”

For the next several minutes, Tenney hit all the familiar notes: He quoted from 2 Chronicles and Ephesians, and reminded the audience of the eternal consequences of 2024. Then he issued a warning to those who would stand in the way of God’s will being done on Election Day.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

“Be afraid,” Tenney said. “For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”

With that, he invited the audience to remove their hats, and turned his voice to God. “Lord, help us make America great again,” he prayed.

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “‘Lord, Help Us Make America Great Again.’”

The New Trump Is Always the Old Trump

2024-07-19T00:32:00-04:00

For a brief moment last night, Americans saw Donald Trump try something new: stick to a script. Addressing delegates at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, the former president—and freshly anointed Republican nominee—read slowly and dramatically from a teleprompter as he recounted his near-death experience in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell,” he said.

The details were bracing, but the delivery was oddly labored—as if Trump was speaking in a foreign language that he hadn’t quite mastered.

Then, about 15 minutes into the speech, Trump veered from his scripted remarks. The teleprompter, which could be viewed from inside the convention hall, stopped rolling and Trump started riffing. He griped about his many indictments and the failed attempts to impeach him. He let slip a few of his favorite partisan epithets—“Crazy Nancy Pelosi,” “Deface the Nation.” Having returned to his usual derogatory style—and sounding much more natural as a result—Trump trained his attention on his opponent.

“If you add up the 10 worst presidents, they wouldn’t have done the damage that Biden has done,” Trump said, but quickly caught himself. “Biden—I’m not going to use that name anymore.”

Trump had apparently broken a rule he’d been given: The Republican’s advisers had been boasting before the speech that Trump wouldn’t even mention President Joe Biden’s name. But he couldn’t quite help himself.

The spectacle Thursday night—which also included appearances by the professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, the UFC star Dana White, and Kid Rock, who sang a Trumpified version of “American Badass”—was a fitting climax to a confused convention that spun wildly, like Trump’s speech, between partisan culture war and appeals to national comity.

After Trump’s attempted assassination last week, the campaign signaled that the candidate would reach for an unfamiliar mantle: national unifier. He had tossed his “humdinger” of a convention speech, he told The Washington Examiner, and would instead give one focused on bringing the country together. His campaign leaked that convention speakers were being told to “tone down” their rhetoric. The nation was rattled, desperate for comfort, and Trump was going to provide it.

“He understands there’s a moment,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, said in Milwaukee earlier this week. “If there’s one person I know who’s capable of meeting the moment … it’s him.”

This was not necessarily obvious to anyone who had followed Trump’s political career up to this point, or watched his highly rated reality show, or read his books, or followed him on social media, or listened to him talk for more than 30 seconds. Trump, as a political phenomenon, has been defined by his divisiveness—by the subversive thrill his supporters get when he says something so outrageous that it seems almost as if he’s daring them to take offense.

But just as they were descending on Milwaukee to nominate him for the third election in a row, Trump supporters were told the politician they had fallen in love with was a new man. And that reinvention came with new marching orders.

Ahead of Trump’s dramatic initial appearance in the Fiserv Forum on Monday evening, word spread on the convention floor that delegates should not yell “Fight! Fight!”—the words Trump had famously shouted as Secret Service agents surrounded him in Pennsylvania. The candidate’s arrival on the floor—his first public appearance since the assassination attempt—was meant to be cathartic and inspiring, scored to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Not everyone obeyed their instructions, however. The result: Some of the delegates yelled “Fight! Fight! Fight!” while others countered with shouts of “Love! Love! Love!”

In certain moments this week, especially during the prime-time programming, you could hear the speakers adopt a more conciliatory tone. Nikki Haley spent the bulk of her remarks appealing to voters who disagree with Trump on some issues, as she does. And Marco Rubio tried to argue that “there is absolutely nothing dangerous or divisive about putting Americans first.”

In other moments, the efforts at magnanimity had a clunky, awkward feel. “The beauty of life itself transcends all political hatred and divisions,” said Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, near the beginning of a speech that ended with her startling some attendees with loud howls of “RISE UP! RISE UP!”

Unsurprisingly, some supporters didn’t bother with the softer, kinder Trumpism at all. Delegates waved signs that read MASS DEPORTATION NOW while the former Trump White House official Peter Navarro, just out of federal prison, delivered a bitter screed against the supposedly weaponized Biden Justice Department. Roger Stone granted interviews to right-wing media outlets while fans gathered to cheer him on. Laura Loomer chased CNN’s Jake Tapper through the convention halls, demanding that he apologize for causing the assassination attempt.

The tension on display in Milwaukee was not factional. After eight years of political conquest, Trump’s successful purging of disloyal Republicans had produced a convention free of intraparty sniping or angst. Republicans acknowledged that Trump’s current lead in the polls, paired with the chaos in the Democratic Party, contributed to the optimism.

[David A. Graham: The next Republican leader]

“You couldn’t script the last two weeks any better,” Kevin Cramer, a senator from North Dakota, said. “Since the debate, it’s just been good news after good news after good news.”

In conversations with delegates and GOP leaders, I could sometimes sense them straining to keep up with the campaign’s sudden vibe shift. When I asked Representative Burgess Owens of Utah how he’d reconciled Trump’s promised new tone with his pledge last year to serve as “retribution” for his supporters, Owens pushed back: “He never said he’s gonna be the retribution, other than success will be his revenge.”

Before Trump’s speech, I heard several delegates try to explain the former president’s expected pivot as a natural consequence of the shooting. “It’s a different Trump,” Karianne Lisonbee, a Utah delegate, told me, her voice breaking as she described his attempted assassination. “I don’t know how you could take a bullet and not be changed,” Stephanie Gricius, another delegate, chimed in. This idea of a reinvented Trump had been circulating all week in Milwaukee. Jim Banks, a Republican congressman from Indiana who sat with Trump in the convention hall Tuesday night, told Politico that the candidate looked like a spiritually renewed man. “The reality of it, as I sat next to him … for an hour and a half, there were a number of references to faith and God, and he was very moved by those.”

But by the time the balloons had fallen and Trump had left the stage, few in Milwaukee seemed to be talking about a “new Trump.”

Asked what he thought of Trump’s jabs at Pelosi and Biden, Brian Turner, a delegate from Florida, seemed unbothered. “You know what? He says things that other people will not say,” Turner said. “And we know that’s President Trump.” Their candidate was back to his old self. It must have felt like a relief.

Tim Alberta and Mark Leibovich contributed reporting.

America’s Political Leaders Are Living in Fear

2024-07-17T06:00:00-04:00

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When Jeff Flake woke Sunday morning to news of an attempted political assassination in America, his first thought was not again.

The former Republican senator, who now serves as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, has had a career haunted by violence. In 2011, his friend Gabby Giffords, a fellow Arizonan then serving in Congress, was shot in the head while talking to constituents outside a Tucson supermarket. A few years later, a gunman opened fire at a park in Virginia where Flake was practicing with other Republicans for the next day’s congressional baseball game. Flake himself was not shot, but he still vividly remembers certain details from that day. Hiding in the dugout as he used a belt to apply a tourniquet to a wounded congressional aide. The sound of the gunshots. The blood on his clothes.

In a phone interview Sunday, Flake told me he couldn’t get those memories out of his head as he watched and rewatched clips of the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, over the weekend. “That pop pop pop brought it back for me,” Flake said.

In the days following the attempt on Trump’s life, a wide range of leaders and pundits have responded with variations of the same line: “Political violence has no place in America.” As an aspirational statement, it’s a good one. But as a factual assertion, it’s manifestly untrue. The Butler shooting fits an alarming pattern of violence targeting U.S. government officials, as my colleague David A. Graham recently detailed. To hold public office in America today is to know that people could very well try to kill you.

[From the September 2017 issue: Jeff Flake’s gamble]

Political assassinations are hardly a new phenomenon, and anyone who has worked in a congressional office or governor’s mansion can tell you about the protocols they’re taught for dealing with death threats. But when Flake was starting his congressional career in the early 2000s, he used to tell his staff not to worry about such dangers. “I would cavalierly dismiss them and say, ‘Suck it up, this comes with the job,’” he told me. That ended after Giffords was shot. He realized the threat was real, and not just for him but for his staff, his family, even his supporters. The tenor of our national politics—the heightened “temperature,” to use the preferred metaphor of the moment—makes this reality hard to ignore. “I never take it lightly,” he said.

The sheer number of close calls in recent years is similarly hard to ignore. For me, this fact was underscored as I looked back over the political figures I’ve profiled for this magazine and realized that a large share of them have been targeted for violence. There’s Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had a man planning to kill the judge show up outside his home in Maryland before turning himself in to the police at the last minute. There’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who had to be rushed from the U.S. Capitol Building by Secret Service on January 6, 2021, as a violent mob called for his hanging. There’s Senator Mitt Romney, who narrowly escaped that same mob and went on to spend $5,000 a day on private security for his family.

It would be naive to think that this ever-lingering prospect of violence has no effect on the psychology of elected leaders. When Romney spoke to a hostile crowd at the Utah Republican Convention in 2021, he told me, he found himself wondering if he was safe. “There are deranged people among us,” he said. And in Utah, “people carry guns … It only takes one really disturbed person.” When our political leaders live in fear of violence from their own constituents, isn’t it only a matter of time before those fears start to influence governing decisions? Romney told me he personally spoke with Republicans in Congress who wanted to vote for Trump’s impeachment and conviction after January 6, but who chose not to because they feared for their families’ safety.

[Tyler Austin Harper: A legendary American photograph]

The enduring image from the most recent act of political violence in America is likely to be one of defiance—Trump, his face bloodied, his fist raised, bravely facing his supporters moments after bullets had flown at his head. Already, that image is shaping the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. When the nominee appeared triumphantly in the Fiserv Forum on Monday night, a bandage over his right ear, delegates greeted him by raising their fists in solidarity.

But those performances of strength belie the undercurrent of fear many political leaders surely feel in this moment. Flake left elected office in 2019, and has spent the past three years overseas, where he tends to look at the plague of U.S. political violence through a global lens. (He recently announced that he would leave his post in September.) “I was just talking to Turkish friends today—this is not what they expect from the United States,” he told me. “There’s a real sorrow. They can’t look to the U.S. as this stable democracy that rights itself. They’re hoping that it will, but boy, it’s tough right now.”

The Most Consequential TV Show in History

2024-06-05T14:20:00-04:00

In a CNN interview shortly after launching his presidential campaign in 2015, Donald Trump told a skeptical Jake Tapper that he was “in it to win it” and boasted, “I’m giving up hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. I’m giving up a prime-time television show.” In fact, according to a new book, Trump wasn’t quite as confident as he claimed. For at least six months after he entered the race, he insisted on keeping the set for The Apprentice intact on the 14th floor of Trump Tower—if the whole presidential-campaign thing didn’t work out, at least it would generate good publicity for the next season of The Celebrity Apprentice. “There was a cognizant decision to leave the boardroom,” Trump’s son Eric told the book’s author, “and there was a possibility of it coming back.” When the set was eventually torn down, campaign staffers took over the floor.

This almost-too-perfect metaphor for the melding of Trump’s reality-TV and political careers appears in Apprentice in Wonderland, by the entertainment journalist Ramin Setoodeh. The book comes out later this month; I obtained an early copy.

It is by now a truism of the Trump era that the 45th president rose to power in large part thanks to the persona he popularized on The Apprentice, which he hosted from 2004 to 2015. Few readers will be surprised to learn that the character he played on the show—the tough-but-fair executive who doles out savvy business advice and decisively fires underperforming employees—was more reality-TV invention than reality. But the book’s peek behind the scenes of what is arguably the most consequential television show in history is still revealing. In Setoodeh’s look back at the series, Trump, a man who has now served in the most powerful office in the world, shows himself to be thoroughly steeped in the tawdry, lowbrow celebrity culture of the aughts—a culture that remains influential on his politics.

That the former president cooperated so extensively for a book about his reality-TV career is telling. According to an author’s note at the end of the book, Trump granted Setoodeh six interviews, four of them in person. That’s more than Trump has given to most of the people writing books about his presidency. Setoodeh writes that the interviews sometimes went on for hours, and that his subject seemed to thrill at watching old clips of the show. On the day Trump’s sister died in November 2023, Setoodeh assumed their scheduled interview would be canceled. But Trump proceeded as planned, alternating between taking personal phone calls and recounting old episodes of The Celebrity Apprentice to Setoodeh in the Mar-a-Lago living room. “In our days together,” Setoodeh writes, “Trump is happiest when he talks about The Apprentice and crankiest when he relives his years as the commander in chief.”

[McKay Coppins: Why Republican politicians do whatever Trump says]

The premise of The Apprentice was straightforward. On each episode, a cast of aspiring “employees,” who were divided into teams, competed in business-oriented challenges, after which Trump summoned the losing team to a boardroom and grilled them on their failures. At the end, he’d send a contestant home with his famous catchphrase: “You’re fired.”

The boardroom scenes became known for high drama and vitriolic sniping, and according to Setoodeh, Trump thrived on pitting the contestants against one another. The author reports that the dynamic was built into the set design, which placed Trump’s chair on a platform, allowing him to lord over the contestants competing for his approval. He hectored, humiliated, and bullied them—and only a small fraction of the interactions wound up on air. With Trump in charge, the filming of the boardroom scenes sometimes stretched on for hours, Setoodeh writes, leaving contestants exhausted and disoriented.

Trump also casually deployed racial division for entertainment, according to several contestants. In 2005, he publicly floated a segregated season of The Apprentice, in which “a team of successful African Americans” would compete against “a team of successful whites.” He argued at the time, “Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.” The idea never came to fruition. But Setoodeh quotes Black contestants who say the show’s racial politics were already retrograde enough, and that they were rooted in Trump’s personal views.

Tara Dowdell, who appeared on Season 3, recalls producers trying to goad her during interviews into acting angry: “They wanted me to be a stereotype of a Black woman,” she told Setoodeh. Randall Pinkett, a Rhodes Scholar and the first Black winner of The Apprentice, is quoted as saying, “I think Donald’s a racist. And I think he consciously and unconsciously and deliberately cast Black people in a negative light.” In the show’s first season, Omarosa Manigault, who was the lone Black woman in the cast and later went on to serve in the Trump White House, was depicted as so cartoonishly dishonest and manipulative that her name became shorthand in the reality-TV industry for “villain.”

In response to an email detailing several of the claims in Setoodeh’s book, Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump’s 2024 campaign, wrote, “These completely fabricated accusations and bullshit story was already peddled in 2016 and thoroughly debunked. Nobody took it seriously then, and they won’t now, because it’s fake news. Now that Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats are losing the election, and President Trump continues to dominate, they are bringing up old fake stories from the past because they are desperate.”

The accusation of racism that has proved most persistent is the rumor that Trump was caught on a hot mic using the N-word during a taping of The Apprentice. Manigault said in 2018 that she’d heard a tape of Trump using the slur. Mark Burnett, the series creator, told Setoodeh it wasn’t true. Last week, Bill Pruitt, a former producer on the series, revived the allegation with an essay in Slate, writing that Trump, while discussing the contestant Kwame Jackson, asked aloud, “I mean, would America buy a n— winning?” In an interview with Setoodeh, Trump repeatedly denies that any tapes exist of him using what he calls “the race word.”

“Number one, it’s a word that I’ve never used. I’ve never used it in my life!” Trump says, before adding, “Would I use it when the mics are all hot? The mics were always hot.”

[Megan Garber: Trump’s smoking gun is a dream that will never die]

Apprentice in Wonderland also offers new details about the experience of being a woman on the set. It is perhaps not shocking that Trump—who brags in the book that he made the Miss Universe swimsuit competition skimpier by introducing bikinis—objectified female Apprentice contestants. One challenge that involved creating a customized shopping experience at Home Depot, Setoodeh writes, spawned a rumor among contestants that Trump had told one of them, Erin Elmore, “I’ll show you my nine-inch power tool.” (Elmore, who later became a Republican strategist and Trump-campaign surrogate, tells Setoodeh it didn’t happen.) And when Trump was alone with the male contestants in Season 4, Pinkett says, the host talked about how much he wanted to have sex with Jennifer Murphy, a 26-year-old beauty queen who was another cast member.

Murphy herself offers a detailed description of her various encounters with Trump. At first, she tells Setoodeh, the relationship was like that of a mentor and protégée. “I think he looked at me in a way like he does his daughter,” Murphy says. “But also, I did think he had the hots for me a bit.” She says that Trump unexpectedly kissed her one day while she was waiting for an elevator, and that on another occasion he invited her to his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She declined the invitation because he was married to his current wife, Melania. “I have a conscience,” Murphy tells Setoodeh. “I have integrity. I made up a reason I was busy.”

Murphy says she that wasn’t offended by Trump’s advances, and that she didn’t consider him a predator: “I think, if anything, he likes beautiful women too much—if that’s a flaw.” The two remained friends. When she got engaged to a celebrity dentist in 2006, Murphy recounts, Trump let her hold the wedding at one of his properties at a discount. He also joined her in filming an Access Hollywood segment about the nuptials. But at one point during the filming, she says, Trump pulled her aside and asked her why she was marrying her fiancé. “He put his arm around me,” Murphy tells Setoodeh. “It was off camera. I think he smacked my butt a little. I was like, ‘Goodness gracious!’”

Trump’s vulgar behavior wasn’t limited to backstage. During a Season 4 boardroom scene that made it to air, Setoodeh writes, Trump asked the 22-year-old contestant Adam Israelov if he’d ever had sex. Israelov said he wasn’t comfortable answering the question, but Trump wouldn’t let it go. “How can you be afraid to talk about sex? Sex is, like, not a big deal. How can you be afraid?” Trump kept pushing. “Listen, Adam isn’t good with sex. He might be in ten years, but right now you don’t feel comfortable with sex. Do you agree with it? Someday, you will. It’s gotten me into a lot of trouble, Adam. It’s cost me a lot of money.” (This was nearly two decades before Trump would be convicted on 34 felony counts related to a hush-money payment to an adult-film actor.)

Another moment of candor came during a meal in 2004 with the publishing executive Steve Forbes, who made a cameo on the show. Alex Thomason, a contestant, tells Setoodeh that he heard Trump critique Forbes’s failed presidential bids in 1996 and 2000. “You went overboard on this pro-life nonsense,” Thomason recalls Trump telling him.

By 2008, ratings for The Apprentice had fallen off dramatically enough that NBC needed a new gimmick, and The Celebrity Apprentice was born. According to Setoodeh, Trump wasn’t wild at first about surrounding himself with other famous people—he wanted to be the only celebrity on the show—but a network executive eventually warmed him up to the idea of lording over a boardroom full of C-listers. As Trump reflects on those seasons, though, he seems consumed primarily by how many of his celebrity friends have since abandoned him.

Speaking with Setoodeh, Trump neatly divides all of Hollywood into two categories—pro-Trump and anti-Trump—and shifts his assessments accordingly. (If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s also how he talks about politicians.)

Tom Brady? When they were friends, Trump hailed the star quarterback as “a great winner” on the campaign trail. But after Brady visited the Biden White House and made a joke about election deniers, Trump was done with him. “He recommended crypto. That’s bad!” Trump tells Setoodeh. “Because he lost like $200 million in them. He was friends with this guy, [Sam] Bankman-Fried, and that’s not a good guy to be friends with right now.” (Brady was a paid “ambassador” for Bankman-Fried’s crypto company and reportedly lost tens of millions of dollars when it went bankrupt.)

Debra Messing? When the actor was (according to Trump, at least) effusively thanking him for saving NBC with his show’s massive ratings, he found her “quite attractive.” But once she became an outspoken critic of his politics, the attraction disappeared: “I watch her today, and it’s like she’s a raving mess.”

Trump seems to reserve special disdain for the Kardashians. He once happily advertised his coziness with reality TV’s most famous family. Kim Kardashian made a guest appearance on The Apprentice, and her sister Khloé was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice. Years later, when Trump was president, he hosted Kim at the White House and granted clemency to a federal prisoner for whom she’d advocated. But after Biden won the 2020 election, Kim celebrated by posting three blue heart emoji on Twitter—and that was apparently enough for Trump to turn on the whole family.

When Setoodeh mentions Kim, he rants: “She went for Sleepy Joe! Which is incredible to me. Incredible, because I did something that was perhaps important to her.” He dismisses her criminal-justice-reform activism: “Maybe it was just publicity for her. I don’t know.” When Khloé comes up, he says, “I never got along great with Khloé,” and then offers, unprompted, “Khloé was arrested for drunk driving. Did you know that?” (The arrest took place in 2007.) “I think it’s a terrible thing—so many people die with drunk driving. You don’t hear about it, but they do.” Trump even seems to disavow the Kardashians’ parent Caitlyn Jenner, who voted for him in 2016 but later spoke out against what she considered his administration’s transphobic policies. When Setoodeh asks Trump about Jenner, he says blankly, “I don’t know her. I knew Bruce. But I don’t know Caitlyn.”

Trump tells Setoodeh that he seriously considered leaving the show in 2012 to run for president, but that Burnett talked him out of it. “You don’t understand,” Trump recalls Burnett saying. “They’re offering you millions of dollars to be on a show, to be on primetime television.” That this argument won out suggests an answer to the question of which job—Apprentice host or president—Trump considered more prestigious, at least at the time. Still, he says he would have easily beaten Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries and done a better job running against Barack Obama. “He ran a horrible race,” Trump says of the 2012 GOP nominee, who’s since become a vocal Trump critic. “Do you know why? Because he was intimidated by African Americans … He’s a total asshole anyway. He’s a total schmuck.”

[From the November 2023 issue: What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate]

Four years later, when Trump finally left, he tried to get his daughter Ivanka installed as the host. Instead, NBC tapped Arnold Schwarzenegger to host The New Celebrity Apprentice, which debuted weeks before Trump was sworn in as president. Speaking with Setoodeh, Trump is gleeful that the show was canceled after one season. He claims that Schwarzenegger was incapable of saying Trump’s catchphrase properly during rehearsals, and so had to come up with his own pale imitation: “You’re terminated.”

“He didn’t have it,” Trump tells Setoodeh with a grin. “The whole thing was, like, ponderous. And I view that as a great compliment to myself.” He adds, “Arnold was a guy, he supported Crooked Hillary, so I didn’t give a shit. He was a [John] Kasich supporter too, which made it even worse. So between Kasich and Hillary, I said, ‘I hope he bombs like a dog,’ and he did.” (A Schwarzenegger spokesperson told me in a statement: “We aren’t going to get into this because we understand that 90% of what he says is untrue,” but added that Schwarzenegger used the phrase “You’re fired” in the 1994 movie True Lies, “years before Donald Trump was a reality star.”)

Setoodeh’s book contains so many anecdotes like this that one can’t help but marvel at how Trump manages to keep his catalog of petty celebrity snubs straight. He might struggle to define nuclear triad, but he can tell you which Apprentice contestants sided with Rosie O’Donnell over him in their 2006 feud. As unsavory as this world might be to some readers, the lessons Trump took from his reality-TV era permeated his presidency. Recall those early scenes from his White House: the boss enthroned behind the Resolute desk, pitting advisers against one another, firing Cabinet officials at will, nursing his grudges and grievances. Many presidential libraries feature replicas of the Oval Office; by the end of Setoodeh’s book, I wondered if Trump’s would include a model of the Apprentice boardroom.

“The show would be a big part of history,” Eric Trump tells Setoodeh. “It’s going to be a big part of his legacy. I hope it will remain a big part of his legacy.”

What Europe Fears

2024-06-03T06:00:00-04:00

In early April, a crowd of diplomats and dignitaries gathered in the Flemish countryside to toast the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world, and convince themselves it wasn’t about to collapse.

They arrived in a convoy of town cars that snaked down a private driveway and deposited them outside Truman Hall, a white-brick house set on 27 acres of gardens and hazelnut groves. Originally built by a Belgian chocolatier, the estate was sold to the American government at a discount—a thank-you gift for liberating Europe—and became the residence of the U.S. ambassador to NATO. Tonight, Julianne Smith, the inexhaustibly cheerful diplomat who currently holds the job, was stationed at the front door, greeting each guest.

The reception was part of a two-day onslaught of ceremonial activity ostensibly organized to celebrate the 75th anniversary of NATO. There were photo ops and triumphant speeches. The original copy of NATO’s founding charter was brought from Washington, D.C., for display, left open to the most important lines in the treaty, Article 5: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all …” Officials ate cake, and declared the alliance stronger than ever.

At Truman Hall, every effort was made to keep the mood festive despite a storm looming outside. Beneath a backyard tent, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke, followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.

Jens Stoltenberg (Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Omar Havana / Getty.)

Stoltenberg, lean and unrumpled, decided to do something diplomatically unorthodox: acknowledge reality. Anxiety about America’s commitment to the alliance had been omnipresent and unspoken; now Stoltenberg was directly addressing the dangers of a potential U.S. withdrawal from the world.

“The United States left Europe after the First World War,” he said, adding, with a measure of Scandinavian understatement, “That was not a big success.”

The wind was picking up outside, pounding the flaps of the tent and making it difficult to hear. Stoltenberg raised his voice. “Ever since the alliance was established,” he said, “it has been a great success, preserving peace, preventing war, and enabling economic prosperity—”

A strong gust hit the tent, rattling the light trusses above. Guests glanced around nervously.

Stoltenberg stumbled. “The great success has been, uh, enabled or has happened not least because of U.S. leadership—”

Another gust, and the large chandelier hanging over the crowd began to swing. Murmurs rippled through the audience. Stoltenberg, perhaps aware of the unfortunate symbolism that would result from a NATO tent collapse, got quickly to the point.

“I cannot tell you exactly what the next crisis or the next conflict or the next war will be,” he said, but “as long as we stand together, no one can threaten us. We are safe.”

Stoltenberg would tell me weeks later that the speech was intended as a rallying cry. That night, it sounded more like a plea.

The undercurrent of dread at Truman Hall was not unique. I encountered it in nearly every conversation I had while traveling through Europe this spring. In capitals across the continent—from Brussels to Berlin, Warsaw to Tallinn—leaders and diplomats expressed a sense of alarm bordering on panic at the prospect of Donald Trump’s reelection.

“We’re in a very precarious place,” one senior NATO official told me. He wasn’t supposed to talk about such things on the record, but it was hardly a secret. The largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II was grinding into its third year. The Ukrainian counteroffensive had failed, and Russia was gaining momentum. Sixty billion dollars in desperately needed military aid for Ukraine had been stalled for months in the dysfunctional U.S. Congress. And, perhaps most ominous, America—the country with by far the biggest military in NATO—appeared on the verge of reelecting a president who has repeatedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the alliance.

Fear of losing Europe’s most powerful ally has translated into a pathologically intense fixation on the U.S. presidential race. European officials can explain the Electoral College in granular detail and cite polling data from battleground states. Thomas Bagger, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry, told me that in a year when billions of people in dozens of countries around the world will get the chance to vote, “the only election all Europeans are interested in is the American election.” Almost every official I spoke with believed that Trump is going to win.

Illustration by Chantal Jahchan. Sources: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; Oliver F. Atkins / Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

The irony of Europe’s obsession with the upcoming election is that the people who will decide its outcome aren’t thinking about Europe much at all. In part, that’s because many Americans haven’t seen the need for NATO in their lifetime (despite the fact that the September 11 terrorist attacks were the only time Article 5 has been invoked). As one journalist in Brussels put it to me, the alliance has for decades been a “solution in search of a problem.” Now, with Russia waging war dangerously close to NATO territory, there’s a large problem. Throughout my conversations, one word came up again and again when I asked European officials about the stakes of the American election: existential.

“The anxiety is massive,” Victoria Nuland, who served until recently as undersecretary for political affairs at the State Department, told me. Like other diplomats in the Biden administration, she has spent the three-plus years since Trump unwillingly left office working to restabilize America’s relationship with its allies.

“Foreign counterparts would say it to me straight up,” Nuland recalled. “‘The first Trump election—maybe people didn’t understand who he was, or it was an accident. A second election of Trump? We’ll never trust you again.’”

BERLIN, GERMANY

To understand why European governments are so worried about Trump’s return, you could study his erratic behavior at international summits, his fraught relationship with Ukraine’s president and open admiration for Russia’s, his general aversion to the liberal international order. Or you could look at the exceedingly irregular tenure of Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell.

Four years after he left Berlin, people in the city’s political class still speak of Grenell as if they’re processing some unresolved trauma. The mere mention of his name elicits heavy sighs and mirthless chuckles and brief, frozen stares into the middle distance. For them, Grenell’s ambassadorship remains a bitter reminder of what working with the Trump administration was like—and what Trump’s return would mean.

Often, people will tell you about the parties.

Hosting social functions is part of an ambassador’s job. But the parties Grenell threw were more eclectic than a typical embassy reception. The guest lists were light on German political elites—many of whom Grenell made a sport of publicly tormenting—and featured instead a mix of far-right politicians, semi-canceled intellectuals, devout Christians, gay Trump fans, and sundry other friends and hangers-on. Standard social etiquette was at times disregarded; so was good taste. When Grenell hosted a superhero-themed Halloween party at the ambassador’s residence in 2019, one male guest came dressed in a burka, while another wore a “suicide bomber” costume. Photos from the party circulated privately among mystified German journalists. “It was a freak show,” recalled one Berlin-based reporter who saw the pictures and who, like others I spoke with, requested anonymity to speak candidly about the former ambassador. (Grenell declined my request for an interview.)

The scandalized reaction to Grenell’s parties was emblematic of his broader reception in Berlin. A right-wing foreign-policy pundit and Twitter troll—he once posted that Rachel Maddow should “take a breath and put on a necklace” and talked about Michelle Obama “sweating on the East Room’s carpet”—he arrived in Germany in May 2018 at a moment of growing geopolitical anxiety. Despite efforts by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to develop a normal working relationship with Trump, the new president seemed intent on antagonizing Europe—hitting allies with tariffs, abruptly withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, and constantly questioning the need for NATO. Another ambassador might have seen it as his job to ease tensions. But Grenell was not just any ambassador.

He was belligerent and uncouth, less a diplomat than a partisan operative. He was “a special animal,” Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the U.S., told me. “He did not play by the rules.”

Hours after starting the job, Grenell tweeted a terse warning that “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” A few weeks later, he invited a Breitbart News reporter to his residence and said he planned to use his position to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe”—a comment widely interpreted as a political endorsement of European far-right parties, and one he later had to walk back.

Richard Grenell (Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Bernd von Jutrczenka / Picture Alliance / Getty.)

Grenell wasn’t any more tactful in private. In his first meeting with the German foreign ministry, according to a former diplomatic official in Berlin who was briefed on the encounter, Grenell announced, “I’m here to implement the American president’s interests.” The officials, taken aback by his audacity, tried politely to correct him: No, he was there to lobby for America’s interests. But Grenell didn’t seem to see the difference.

He hung a giant oil painting of Trump in the entryway of the ambassador’s residence, and made a party trick out of flaunting his access to the White House. He would call the Oval Office “for fun” just to show that “he had a direct line to the U.S. president,” recalled Julian Reichelt, a friend of Grenell’s who was then the editor of the right-leaning German tabloid Bild.

As Trump escalated his crusade against the European political establishment—publicly rooting for Merkel’s right-wing opponents and identifying the European Union as a “foe”—Grenell seemed eager to join in. After the president hijacked a NATO summit in July 2018 to deliver a tirade against countries that weren’t spending enough on defense, Grenell did his best to replicate the performance in Berlin.

The ambassador quickly became a villain in the German press. The magazine Der Spiegel nicknamed him “Little Trump.” German politicians publicly called on the U.S. to recall Grenell. One member of the Bundestag compared him to a “far-right colonial officer”; another was quoted as saying that he acted like “the representative of a hostile power.”

Some observers would later speculate that the bad press was the product of a leak campaign by Merkel’s government to isolate Grenell. Others believed that he deliberately courted outrage. “He didn’t care a bit about his reputation here,” Christoph Heusgen, the chair of the Munich Security Conference, told me. “He cared about offending the Germans and making headlines because he knew his boss would love that.” Soon enough, the president was referring to Grenell as “my beautiful Ric” and reportedly telling advisers that his man in Berlin “gets it.”

Grenell’s defenders would later argue that his hardball tactics got results. Take, for example, his vociferous opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The U.S. had long objected to its construction, which would dramatically increase Germany’s reliance on Russian energy. But Grenell pressed the issue much harder than his predecessors had—sending letters threatening sanctions against companies that worked on the project, and successfully lobbying Berlin to import American liquefied natural gas. After Russia invaded Ukraine, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier admitted that clinging to Nord Stream 2 had been a “mistake.”

To Grenell’s admirers, it was his effectiveness that made him unpopular in Berlin. “The ideal U.S. ambassador for your average German government,” Reichelt told me, “just talks nicely about, like, the American dream and transatlantic relations and blah blah and freedom blah blah and what we can learn from each other.” Grenell refused to be a mascot. “He was doing politics—he was actually driving policies,” Reichelt said. (Reichelt was fired from Bild in 2021 after The New York Times reported on a sexual relationship he’d had with a subordinate; Reichelt denied abusing his authority.)

But by the time Grenell left Berlin, the mutual disdain between the ambassador and the political class was so thick that some wondered if he’d kept an enemies list. Grenell, who briefly served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, is reportedly on the shortlist for secretary of state or national security adviser in a second Trump administration, which means he’d be in a position to make life difficult for political leaders he disfavors. “I know many of these ministers, and they would be afraid,” one prominent German journalist told me. “I think he’s a guy who doesn’t forget.”

The Germans are bracing for Trump’s return in other ways. Inside the foreign ministry, officials have mapped out a range of policy areas likely to be destabilized by his reelection—NATO, Ukraine, tariffs, climate change—and are writing detailed proposals for how to deal with the fallout, multiple people told me. Can Trump’s moods be predicted? Who are his confidants, and how can the government get close to them?

The Germans have a contingency plan for President Joe Biden’s reelection too, but few seem to think they’ll need it. They’re preparing for a third scenario as well: a period of sustained uncertainty about the election’s outcome, accompanied by widespread political violence in the U.S. Nuland, the recently departed State Department official, told me that, based on her conversations with foreign counterparts, Germany isn’t alone in planning for this possibility. “If you are an adversary of the United States, whether you’re talking about Putin, Iran, or others, it would be a perfect opportunity to exploit the fact that we’re distracted,” she said.

René Pfister, Der Spiegel’s Washington bureau chief, told me that the first Trump administration left Germany struggling with difficult questions about its relationship with the U.S. Was America still interested in being the leader of the free world, or would it be governed by ruthless self-interest like China and Russia? Could it be counted on to defend its allies if Trump were reelected? “The Germans always had the impression that, regardless of the political affiliation of the president, you can rely, on the big questions, on the United States,” Pfister told me. “I think this confidence is totally shaken.”

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

One afternoon in early April, I listened in as Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador who’d hosted the event at Truman Hall, conducted a virtual press briefing from NATO headquarters. Journalists had called in from across Europe, and their questions reflected the unease on the continent. A reporter from Portugal asked about the prospect of NATO countries reinstating military conscription in light of the Russian threat. Another, from Bulgaria, asked Smith to respond to politicians there pushing to withdraw from the alliance. A TV-news correspondent from North Macedonia asked whether Smith thought Russia would take the Balkans next if Ukraine fell.

When President Biden set about filling diplomatic posts after his election, he made reassuring rattled allies a top priority. Smith fit the mold of a model ambassador—a career foreign-policy wonk with deep government experience and comfortingly conventional views on America’s role in the world. She also brings a boundless Leslie Knopeian energy to the job, and has been well schooled in the finer points of diplomat-speak: She scarcely mentions a country or region without first establishing friendship—“our friends in the Middle East,” “our friends in Portugal”—and she does not talk to these friends; she only “engages” them (as in “I went to the Vatican quite a while ago to engage them on the war.”).

Julianne Smith (Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Omar Havana / Getty.)

Listening to the press briefing, I thought Smith did well—she sounded calm and confident and relentlessly optimistic. But when the briefing ended, I was ushered into a hallway to await my scheduled interview with the ambassador, and I overheard her fretting to an aide about how she’d handled a question about recent Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure inside Russia. American officials, worried about escalation, were reportedly urging Ukraine to stop the attacks, and Smith had responded that the U.S. was “not particularly supportive of” Ukraine going after targets on Russian soil. Now she was second-guessing herself. Maybe she should have said that the U.S. doesn’t “encourage” the attacks, or that the attacks don’t have America’s “blessing.” (Last week, the Biden administration gave Ukraine permission to use American weapons to attack Russian targets in limited circumstances.)

“Maybe I’m splitting hairs,” I heard Smith say. “Just with my lack of sleep, I didn’t have my game face on. I didn’t nail it.” She sounded exhausted.

During our interview, I asked Smith if the job was what she’d expected. She laughed: “No, no, no.” Part of what had appealed to her about the NATO post was the potential for a 9-to-5 lifestyle. Her kids were still young, and she’d been looking forward to some work-life balance. Then, six weeks after she moved to Brussels, Russia invaded Ukraine, and all of a sudden she was at the center of a geopolitical crisis.

Smith told me her ambassadorial role is unique in that she doesn’t have just one host country to worry about when she makes public statements. She’s speaking to audiences in dozens of countries, and each one needs to hear something different from her. “You have to sit down and understand: ‘What is it that’s keeping you awake at night?’” she said. Maybe it’s an errant Russian missile entering their airspace. Or a destabilizing wave of refugees. Or a cyberattack. Or tanks crossing their borders. “They’re obviously looking to hear time and time again that the U.S. commitment to the alliance, and particularly Article 5, is ironclad and unwavering.”

Smith has developed an arsenal of sanguine talking points to convey this message. She cites U.S. opinion polls showing strong support for NATO. She rehearses America’s long, bipartisan history of standing by its European allies. “For over seven decades,” she told me, “American presidents of all political stripes have supported this alliance.”

I encountered the same performative positivity in meetings with American diplomats throughout Europe. In Warsaw, Ambassador Mark Brzezinski sat in the airy living room of his residence and talked about the “economic efficiencies” America has enjoyed as a result of its alliance with Poland. “The Poles are spending billions of dollars to protect themselves, mostly buying from U.S. defense contractors,” he said. In Berlin, Ambassador Amy Gutmann met me in an embassy room overlooking the Brandenburg Gate and recounted the heroic role America had played in the massive airlift that broke the 1949 Soviet blockade of West Berlin. “Before I came here,” Gutmann told me, “President Biden said, ‘Make sure you tell every person you meet in Germany how important the U.S.-German relationship is.’ And I’ve done that.”

But sentimental rhetoric and gestures of goodwill only go so far. George Kent, the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, told me about an Earth Day photo op he’d taken part in earlier this year. The plan was to plant a tree at the Park of Friendship in central Estonia. Upon arrival, he was greeted by a kindly septuagenarian gardener who’d been participating in the tradition for decades. Kent tried to make small talk about horticulture, but the gardener had other things on his mind: “Can we talk about the vote in Congress?” He wanted the latest news on the Ukraine aid package.

In interviews, State Department officials in Washington, who requested anonymity so they could speak candidly, acknowledged that efforts to “reassure” European allies are largely futile now. What exactly can a U.S. diplomat say, after all, about the fact that the Republican presidential nominee has said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that he considers freeloaders?

“There’s not really anything we can do,” one U.S. official told me. European leaders “are smart, thoughtful people. The secretary isn’t going to get them in a room and say, ‘Hey, guys, it’s going to be okay, the election is a lock.’ That’s not something he can promise.”

WARSAW, POLAND

“What the fuck is happening in the United States?”

Agnieszka Homańska, seemingly startled by her own outburst, slowly placed her hands on the table as if to calm herself. “Sorry for being so frank.” We were sitting in a crowded bistro in downtown Warsaw with retro pop art on the walls and American Top 40 playing from the speakers. Homańska, a 25-year-old grad student and government worker who wore sneakers and a T-shirt that said BE BRAVE, was trying to explain how Poles her age felt about this year’s U.S. election.

Homańska exhibited none of the casual contempt for America often associated with young people in other European capitals. In the history she grew up learning, Americans were the good guys—defeating the Nazi occupiers, tearing down the Iron Curtain. Surveys consistently find that Poland is the most pro-America country in Europe, and one of the few where public opinion doesn’t change based on which party controls the White House. Ronald Reagan is a hero to many here; so is George H. W. Bush. In Poland, the mythology of America—vanquisher of tyrants, keeper of the democratic flame—persists. The U.S. is still a city on a hill.

But the Trump era punctured Homańska’s image of America, as it did for many younger Poles. Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election was jarring to those who saw the U.S. as an aspirational democracy. The storming of the Capitol on January 6 “was broadcast on every television,” she told me. Trump’s criminal charges—and his recent conviction on 34 felony counts in a Manhattan court—have made the news here too. “People don’t understand why Trump can still run for president.” (Like others I spoke with, Homańska was also confused by the fact that Joe Biden, who struck her as feeble and out of touch, is running again—were these really the best options America could muster? I told her she wasn’t alone in wondering about this.)

Many Poles see Trump through the prism of their own country’s recent politics. The right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party came to power in Poland a year before Trump’s election, and spent the next eight years co-opting democratic institutions, from the courts to the civil service to the public media. The government maintained a cozy relationship with Trump—President Andrzej Duda famously proposed naming an American military base in Poland after him—and he is still popular among conservative Poles. But last year, an intense electoral backlash to Law and Justice produced the largest voter turnout in Poland’s post-Soviet history, driven by young people. The new government, a coalition spanning from the center-left to the center-right, is focused on repairing Poland’s democracy.

After the election, Homańska decided to postpone her planned studies in Canada so she could help rebuild her country. When I asked her which countries she looked to as democratic role models, she mentioned Finland and Estonia, another former Soviet country that has successfully modernized. “Maybe there is something about the maturity of French democracy,” she added.

And America? I asked.

Homańska hesitated. “I don’t think that people my age would perceive America as an ideal way to create a democratic society,” she replied. She seemed almost apologetic.

Illustration by Chantal Jahchan. Source: NATO Archives Online.

Many of the Poles I met were especially perplexed by one recent display of U.S. political dysfunction: the struggle to pass a military-aid package for Ukraine earlier this year. Polls showed that a majority of Americans supported the funding. Reporting suggested that most members of Congress favored it too. But somehow, because Trump opposed it, a minority of Republicans in the House had succeeded in holding up the bill for months while Ukraine was forced to ration bullets and let Russian missiles level buildings. Although the aid package finally passed in late April, some Western officials worry that the battlefield advances Russia made during the delay will be difficult to reverse.

The Russian threat is no abstract matter in Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk has talked about living in a “prewar era” and regularly urges citizens to prepare for a conflict. I heard stories about people stocking up on gold and looking for apartments with basements that could double as bomb shelters. Schools are running duck-and-cover drills, and shooting ranges have become more popular as people realize they might soon need to know how to handle a gun. One Polish woman told me about a phone call she’d received from her aunt, who was wondering if she should restain her wood floors or save her money because her house might be destroyed soon anyway.

In Warsaw, Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski (who is married to the Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum) told me, “you will feel the physical vulnerability.” Travel 200 miles north and you reach Kaliningrad, where Russia is said to house nuclear weapons; go 200 miles east, and you hit the Ukrainian border. “It concentrates the mind.”

Poland has recently increased defense spending to 4 percent of its GDP—well beyond the standard of 2 percent set by NATO, and higher even than in the U.S. But officials know they’ll never be able to fend off a hostile Russia alone.

“It’s an existential threat,” Aleksandra Wiśniewska, who was elected to Poland’s Parliament last year, told me. Like other Polish politicians I spoke with, Wiśniewska—a 30-year-old former humanitarian aid worker who now sits on the foreign-affairs committee—was reluctant to say anything that might alienate the former, and perhaps future, American president. But she wanted me to understand that the choice American voters make this fall will reverberate beyond U.S. borders.

“I fear that the old United States that we all almost revere,” Wiśniewska told me, is “now sort of self-sabotaging. And by consequence, it will jeopardize the safety and security of the entire global order.”

FRANKENBERG, GERMANY

The U.S. Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment left Vilseck, Germany, before dawn on April 9 in a convoy of camouflaged jeeps, fuel tankers, armored vehicles, and trucks packed with soldiers and ammunition. They rumbled past windmills and pastoral villages, stopping only for fuel. Speed was essential: The road march to Bemowo Piskie, Poland, was more than 800 miles, and the fate of the Western world was—at least hypothetically—at stake.

The regiment was training for a long-dreaded crisis scenario: a Russian invasion of the Suwałki Gap. The 60-mile stretch of Polish farmland is sparsely populated but strategically important. If Russian forces annexed the territory, they could effectively seal off Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia from the rest of NATO. To save the Baltic states, allies in Northern Europe would have to mobilize quickly.

During a refueling stop at a German barracks in Frankenberg, U.S. Army officers rattled off facts to me about the Stryker, a lightweight armored vehicle that looks like a tank but can drive up to 60 miles an hour, and demonstrated a language-translation app they’d developed to facilitate communication among allied troops. The drill they were conducting that day was part of a monthslong NATO military exercise—the largest since the end of the Cold War—involving all 32 allied countries; more than 1,000 combat vehicles; dozens of aircraft carriers, frigates, and battleships; and 90,000 troops. Although NATO officials have been careful not to single out Russia by name, the intended audience for the war games was clear. “Are exercises like this designed to send a message? They are, absolutely,” Colonel Martin O’Donnell told me as soldiers in fatigues milled around nearby. “The message is that we’re here. We’re ready. We have the capability to work with our allies and partners and meet you, potential adversary, wherever you may be.”

But the demonstration in Frankenberg sent another, perhaps less convenient, message as well. The convoy rushing to confront a theoretical Russian invasion was composed almost entirely of U.S. soldiers driving U.S. vehicles filled with U.S.-made guns and bullets and missiles. They’d link up with military units from other NATO countries eventually. But if America were removed from the equation, would the battle group in Bemowo Piskie stand a chance?

Whether Trump wins or not, there’s a growing consensus in Europe that the strain of American politics he represents—a throwback to the hard-edged isolationism of the 1920s and ’30s—isn’t going away. It’s become common in the past year for politicians to talk about the need for European “defense autonomy.”

“We can’t just flip a coin every four years and hope that Michigan voters will vote in the right direction,” Benjamin Haddad, a member of France’s National Assembly, said at an event earlier this year. “We have to take matters in our own hand.”

What exactly that would look like is a subject of intense debate. Italy’s foreign minister recently proposed forming a European Union army (an idea that’s been raised and rejected many times in the past). Others have suggested diverting resources from NATO to a separate European defense alliance (though European countries are not immune to the kind of populist nationalism that could make such alliances dysfunctional). Replacing the so-called nuclear umbrella provided by the U.S. arsenal would require countries such as Germany and Poland to develop their own nuclear stockpiles, to supplement the small ones France and the United Kingdom already have.

Within NATO, the immediate priority is “Trump-proofing” the alliance. In the past 18 months, Finland and Sweden have joined, each bringing relatively capable and high-tech militaries. Secretary-General Stoltenberg has also proposed shifting responsibility for Ukrainian arms deliveries from the U.S. to NATO in case the next administration decides to abandon the war.

Most notably, allied countries have dramatically increased their own military spending. I spoke with several officials who grudgingly credited Trump for this development—something NATO officials and U.S. presidents had spent decades advocating for unsuccessfully. In 2017, when Trump took office, only three allies, plus the U.S., were spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. This year, that number is expected to rise to at least 18. Trump’s criticism of paltry defense budgets was not only effective, Stoltenberg told me, but fair. “European allies have not spent enough for many years,” he said. (No doubt Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also factored into the increased spending.)

Even with the funding influx, many officials believe Europe still has a long way to go before it could defend itself alone. The U.S. has some 85,000 troops currently stationed in Europe—more than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined—and provides essential intelligence gathering, ballistic-missile defense, and air-force capabilities. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” Ischinger, the former German ambassador, told me. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

That reality has left politicians and diplomats across Europe honing their theories of Trump-ego management ahead of the U.S. election. To some, the former president’s emotional volatility represents a grave threat. The former diplomatic official in Berlin told me that in May 2020, Merkel called Trump to inform him that she wouldn’t be traveling to Washington for the G7 summit out of concern for COVID. Trump was enraged, according to the diplomat, who requested anonymity to describe a private conversation, and the call grew heated. A week later, Trump announced plans to permanently withdraw nearly 10,000 U.S. troops from Germany—a move seen within Merkel’s government as a petty act of revenge. (Biden later reversed the order; a spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Others think Trump’s ego could make him easier to manipulate. “He’s very transactional, and he’s very narcissistic,” the senior NATO official, who’s met Trump multiple times, told me. “And if you combine the two, then you can sell him—” the official paused. He recited an expression in his native language. Roughly translated, it meant “You can sell him turnips as if they’re lemons.”

What’s striking about these calculations is how thoroughly allies have already adjusted their perception of the U.S. relationship. I noticed a certain pattern in my conversations with European political leaders and diplomats: At some point in almost every interview, the European would begin pitching me on how much the U.S. benefits economically from the alliance. Preserving peace in Europe has sustained decades of lucrative trade for U.S. companies. A broader Russian war on the continent would be felt in the average American’s pocketbook. I later learned that these talking points were being encouraged by NATO officials as well as the U.S. State Department. The thinking behind the strategy is that Americans need to hear why supporting European allies is in their self-interest.

“They keep telling us how important it is to go and convince the housewives in Wisconsin and the farmers in Iowa,” a senior official from an allied country grumbled to me. “How many Americans are going to the housewives of southern Estonia or … the countryside in France to tell why Europe should stand by the United States?” He noted that the alliance protects the U.S. as well.

The more I listened to prime ministers and parliamentarians deliver the same earnest spiel, the more dispiriting I found it. At its most idealistic, the transatlantic alliance has always been about a shared commitment to democratic values. Now Europeans are bracing for an America that behaves like any other transactional superpower. Several officials expressed fears that Trump would turn America’s NATO membership into a kind of protection racket, threatening to abandon Europe unless this ally offers better trade terms, or that ally helps investigate a political enemy.

“We are exposed,” Bagger, the German state secretary, told me. Europe’s alliance with America, he said, “has served as our life insurance for the last 70 years.”

And with Vladimir Putin seizing territory in Europe and trying to unravel NATO, what choice would these countries have but to accept Trump’s terms?

NARVA, ESTONIA

The city of Narva sits on Estonia’s eastern border, separated from Russia by a river and a heavily guarded bridge. Some experts believe that if World War III breaks out in the coming years, this is where it will begin. The city is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Russians, many of whom don’t speak Estonian and are therefore ineligible for citizenship. Western officials fear Putin might try to use the same playbook he developed in Crimea—enlisting Russian separatists to stoke unrest and create a pretense for annexing the city. Such a move would effectively dare the West to go to war with a nuclear power over a small Estonian city, or else watch the credibility of their vaunted alliance collapse. NATO calls this “the Narva scenario.”

On a cold spring morning, I drove two hours from the Estonian capital of Tallinn and arrived at the border-crossing station, a red-brick box of a building on the edge of the Narva River. There I met Aleksandr Kazmin, a border guard with close-cropped hair and a friendly face who spoke broken English with a thick Russian accent. He wore a patch on his coat that said Politsei and a gun on his hip.

The border checkpoint once saw a steady stream of commuters and tourists traveling back and forth between Russia and Estonia—at its peak, Kazmin told me, the station processed 27,000 people in a single day. But travel dropped dramatically once the war in Ukraine started. In the months following the invasion, many of the people coming across the Narva border were refugees. Then, earlier this year, Russia closed its side of the road for “renovations,” meaning that the only way to cross the bridge now is by foot. On the morning I visited, I saw a thin trickle of travelers—moms pushing strollers, young people with backpacks—shuffle in and out of the station.

Kazmin told me that the war had divided Narva, as it had the wider Russian diaspora. Those who are “already integrated in Estonian society” generally oppose Putin’s aggression, he said, but some “don’t want to integrate—they are living in Russian-media world.” He rolled his eyes before muttering in resignation, “Nothing to do. It’s their choice.”

I asked Kazmin if I could walk to the actual border, and he obliged. As we made our way across the bridge, passing a tangle of barbed wire that had been pushed to the side, he warned me that we might see a Russian border guard filming us from the checkpoint on the other side. Kazmin didn’t know exactly why the Russians did this—he guessed it was some kind of intelligence-gathering tactic—but it often happened when he brought a visitor to the bridge.

Sure enough, as we got closer, a guard appeared in the distance. He didn’t seem to have a camera, so I asked Kazmin if I could wave at him. Kazmin cautioned against it. Communication between the two sides, even for benign logistical coordination, is strictly regulated: Only specially trained officials at the station are allowed to talk to the Russians, and they do so using a Cold War–era crank phone.

We stopped when we reached the middle of the bridge. Kazmin told me this was the closest we would get to Russia, explaining that there was no permanent, official border; it was understood that the deepest point of the river was what technically separated the two countries, and that shifts over time. The spot was strangely beautiful. Below us, a current of water rushed toward the Baltic Sea; above us, a flurry of snow fell from the gray sky. Two imposing medieval fortresses faced each other from either side of the river, one built by the occupying Danes in the 13th century, the other by a Muscovite prince two centuries later—twin relics of conquests past. As I took in the view, Kazmin bounced up and down to keep warm, stealing glances at his Russian counterpart.

I thought about how much more precarious the world must feel to those living in a place like this, doing a job like his. The day before my visit to Narva, I had interviewed Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who talked about the stakes of preserving the transatlantic alliance. Her country has a population of 1.3 million and is roughly the size of Vermont. She recalled sitting in a meeting with other world leaders shortly after her election where they discussed the Russian threat. “I made a note in my notebook: ‘For some countries here, talking about security and defense is a nice intellectual discussion,’” Kallas told me. “‘For us, it’s existential.’”

After dozens of interviews, I’d become desensitized to politicians using this word. But walking back across the bridge, I thought I understood what she meant.

Kazmin pointed to a tall flagpole perched beside the Narva station. At the top, the Estonian flag waved in the wind; beneath it, a navy-blue flag with the NATO seal. He said that flag had been installed only a few months earlier. I asked him if he thought the day would ever come when he saw Russian tanks rolling across the bridge. Kazmin got quiet for a moment. He said Russia’s government has long promised that it would not attack the Baltics—but that Putin had said the same thing about Ukraine.

“When they tell us they will not do something,” he said, “it means for us that they can do it—or will do it.”

Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land

2024-02-16T07:00:00-05:00

Ten years ago, I stood in the back of a large room at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump ramble. The celebrity billionaire had been loitering on the fringes of American politics for a few years, but this was my first time seeing him give a proper speech. At least, that’s what I thought he was supposed to be doing. Speaking at the Politics & Eggs forum is a rite of passage for presidential aspirants, and Trump at the time was going through his quadrennial ritual of noisily considering a bid for office. Typically, prospective candidates give variations on their stump speech in this setting. Trump was doing something else—he meandered and riffed and told disjointed stories with no evident connection to one another. The incoherence might have been startling if I had taken him seriously. But the year was 2014, and this was Donald Trump—the man who presided over a reality show in which Gary Busey competed in a pizza-selling contest with Meat Loaf. Nobody took Trump seriously. That was my first mistake.

Over the past decade, I’ve told the story of what happened next so many times that I can recite each beat in my sleep. The ride to the tarmac in the back of Trump’s SUV. The phone call from his pilot with news that a blizzard had shut down LaGuardia Airport. The last-minute decision to reroute his plane to Palm Beach, and his fateful insistence that the 26-year-old BuzzFeed reporter in the car (me) tag along. What was supposed to be a short in-flight interview turned into two surreal, and oddly intimate, days at Mar-a-Lago, which I spent studying Trump in his natural habitat.

The article I published a few weeks later—“36 Hours on the Fake Campaign Trail With Donald Trump”—cannot exactly be called prescient, in that I rather confidently predicted that my subject would never run for office. But my portrait of Trump—his depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval—has largely held up. I described him on his plane restlessly flipping through cable news channels in search of his own face, and quoted him casually blowing off his wedding anniversary to fly to Florida. (“There are a lot of good-looking women here,” he told me once we arrived, leaning in at a poolside buffet.)

Trump, suffice it to say, did not like the article, and he responded in predictably wrathful fashion. He insulted me on Twitter (“slimebag reporter,” “true garbage with no credibility”), planted fabricated stories about me in Breitbart News (“TRUMP: ‘SCUMBAG’ BUZZFEED BLOGGER OGLED WOMEN WHILE HE ATE BISON AT MY RESORT”), and got me blacklisted from covering Republican events where he was speaking. It was a jarring experience, but enlightening in its way. I’ve returned to it repeatedly over the years, mining the episode for insight into the improbable president’s psyche and the era that he’s shaped.

As the tenth anniversary of my Mar-a-Lago misadventure approached this week, much of the conversation about Trump was focused on his mental competency. There were political reasons for this. Democrats, hoping to deflect concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and memory, were circulating video clips in which Trump sounded confused and unhinged. Trump’s Republican primary opponents had suggested that he’d “lost the zip on his fastball” or was “becoming crazier.” Nikki Haley had called on Trump (and Biden) to take a mental-acuity test. On social media and in the press, countless detractors have speculated that Trump is losing touch with reality, or sliding into dementia, or growing intoxicated by his own conspiracy theories. The sense of progression is what unites all these claims—the idea that Trump is not just bad, but getting worse.

[Helen Lewis: Biden’s age is now unavoidable]

To test this theory, I went back and listened to the recording of my hour-long interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2014. Half-convinced by the narrative of the former president’s worsening mental health, I expected to find in that audio file a more lucid, cogent Trump—one who hadn’t yet been unraveled by the stresses and travails of power. What I found instead illustrates both the risks of returning him to the Oval Office and the futility of trying to prevent that outcome by focusing on his mental decline: He sounded almost exactly the same as he does now.

This is not to say he sounded sharp. He struggled at times to form complete sentences, and repeatedly lost his train of thought. Throughout our conversation, he said so many obviously untrue things that I remember wondering whether he was a pathological liar or simply deluded.

Take, for example, our exchange over Trump’s embrace of the “birther” conspiracy theory. Trump had notoriously accused President Barack Obama of forging his U.S. citizenship and, near the end of the 2012 election, had offered to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choosing if he released his college transcripts.

Here is what Trump said to me, verbatim, when I asked him about the stunt:

Well, I thought it was good. I mean, I offered $5 million to his charity if he produced his records, so—to his favorite charity if he produced his records. Uh, and I didn’t want to see his marks; I wanted to see where it says “place of birth.” I wanted to see what he put on there. And to this day, nobody’s ever seen any of those records. Uh, they have seen a book that was written when he was a young man saying he was a man from Kenya, a young man from Kenya, ba ba ba ba ba. And the publisher of the book said, “No, that’s what he said,” and then a day later he said, “No, no, that was a typographical error.” Well, you know what a typographical error—that’s when you type the word, when you put an S at the end of a word because it was wrong. You understand that. The word Kenya versus the United States—okay. So he has a book where he said he was from Kenya. Uh, and then, uh, they said that was a typographical error. I mean, there’s a lot of things. Um, I mean I have a whole theory on it, and I’m pretty sure I’m right. Uh, but I have a whole theory as to where he was born, uh, and what he did. And if you noticed, he spent millions and millions of dollars on trying to protect that information. And to this day, I’m shocked that with the three colleges that we’re talking about—you know, Columbia, Harvard, and, and Occidental—that somebody in the office didn’t take that file and say, “Hey, here it is.” I just am shocked. But—and by the way, if it were a positive thing, I would say that it’s something he should’ve done. Because there were a lot of people that agree with me. You know, a lot of people say, “Oh, that was controversial.” A lot of those people in the room loved me because of it. You understand this. You know, there’s a group, a big group of people—I’m not saying it’s a majority, but I want to tell you, it’s a very strong silent minority at least that agrees with me. And I actually said that if he ever did it, I would hope that it showed that I was wrong. And that everything would be perfect. I would rather have that than be right.

A couple of minutes later, I asked Trump about the charges of racism he’d faced as a result of the birther crusade. His response:

Don’t forget, Obama called Bill Clinton a racist, and Clinton has never forgiven him for it. Um, uh, many, they called many—anytime anybody disagrees with Obama, they call him a racist. So there have been many people called racists. No, that didn’t, it never stuck in my case, uh, at all. It’s something I was never called before, and it never stuck. At all. But if you notice, whenever anyone got tough with Obama, including Bill Clinton, and including others, they would call him, they would call that person a racist. Uh, so, it’s, it was a charge that they tried, and it never stuck. And you know why it never stuck? ’Cause I am, I am, I am so not a racist, it’s incredible. So it just never stuck. As I think you would notice.

[George T. Conway III: Unfit for office]

What do you do with an answer like this if you’re a reporter? On a substantive level, it’s objectively detached from reality: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and there is no record of his having called Bill Clinton a racist. On a sentence level, the remarks are incoherent, confused, repetitive, and syntactically strange. Transcribing Trump is a nightmare. So is fact-checking him. In the end, I quoted eight words from this rant—“I am so not a racist, it’s incredible.”

Maybe that was a failure on my part. For years, a contingent of Trump’s critics have argued that journalists fail to show this side of the former president—that we sanitize him by extracting only his most coherent quotes for our stories. And I’ll be the first to admit that it’s difficult to capture Trump’s rambling rhetorical style in print.

But does anyone believe that publishing those comments in full would have meaningfully changed the public’s perception of Trump, then or now? There may have been a time—in the 1980s and ’90s, perhaps—when he sounded more articulate and grounded in reality. But that Trump was long gone by the time he announced his first campaign. It was not a secret. We all watched those rallies on TV; we all saw him in those debates. And he was elected president anyway.

There’s a simple reason coverage of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and general octogenarian confusion is more damaging to Biden than it is to Trump. Biden ran for president on a platform of stability and competence, and that image is undermined by suggestions of mental decline. Accusing Trump of going crazy doesn’t work because, well, he has sounded crazy for a long time. The people who voted for him don’t seem to mind—in fact, it’s part of the appeal.

After listening to the old recording of my Trump interview, I called Sam Nunberg for a gut check. A former political operative with a thick New York accent and a collection of shiny neckties, Nunberg was the prototypical Trump acolyte when I first met him. But his relationship with his former boss has been rocky since he arranged for my access to Trump in 2014 and accompanied me on that trip to Mar-a-Lago: Trump theatrically fired him after my story came out, hired him back, fired him again, then sued him for $10 million, before eventually agreeing to a settlement.

[Rich Jaroslovsky: The other time America panicked over a president’s age]

The two men haven’t spoken in years, according to Nunberg—but that hasn’t stopped reporters from calling him up for quotes about Trump’s mental state. “They’re wanting me to say he’s not the same,” Nunberg told me. “But I don’t see it, at least publicly. I think he’s the same guy.”

And what kind of guy is that? “He’s reckless, and he’s a narcissist,” Nunberg said. But that’s not exactly news. He’s always been that way.

Why Republican Politicians Do Whatever Trump Says

2024-02-08T14:00:00-05:00

The story Donald Trump tells about himself—and to himself—has always been one of domination. It runs through the canonical texts of his personal mythology. In The Art of the Deal, he filled page after page with examples of his hard-nosed negotiating tactics. On The Apprentice, he lorded over a boardroom full of supplicants competing for his approval. And at his campaign rallies, he routinely regales crowds with tales of strong-arming various world leaders in the Oval Office.

This image of Trump has always been dubious. Those boardroom scenes were, after all, reality-TV contrivances; those stories in his book were, by his own ghostwriter’s account, exaggerated in many cases to make Trump appear savvier than he was. And there’s been ample reporting to suggest that many of the world leaders with whom Trump interacted as president saw him more as an easily manipulated mark than as a domineering statesman to be feared.

The truth is that Trump, for all of his tough-guy posturing, spent most of his career failing to push people around and bend them to his will.

That is, until he started dealing with Republican politicians.

For nearly a decade now, Trump has demonstrated a remarkable ability to make congressional Republicans do what he wants. He threatens them. He bullies them. He extracts from them theatrical displays of devotion—and if they cross him, he makes them pay. If there is one arena of American power in which Trump has been able to actually be the merciless alpha he played on TV—and there may, indeed, be only one—it is Republican politics. His influence was on full display this week, when he derailed a bipartisan border-security bill reportedly because he wants to campaign on the immigration “crisis” this year.

[David Frum: The GOP’s true priority]

Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to Trump, has observed this dynamic with some amusement. “It’s funny,” he told me in a recent phone interview. “In the business world and in the entertainment world, I don’t think Donald was able to intimidate people as much.”

He pointed to Trump’s salary negotiations with NBC during Trump’s Apprentice years. Jeff Zucker, who ran the network at the time, has said that Trump once came to him demanding a raise. At the time, Trump was making $40,000 an episode, but he wanted to make as much as the entire cast of Friends combined: $6 million an episode. Zucker countered with $60,000. When Trump balked, Zucker said he’d find someone else to host the show. The next day, according to Zucker, Trump’s lawyer called to accept the $60,000. (A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Contrast that with the power Trump wields on Capitol Hill—how he can kill a bill or tank a speakership bid with a single post on social media; how high-ranking congressmen are so desperate for his approval that they’ll task staffers to sort through packs of Starbursts and pick out just the pinks and reds so Trump can be presented with his favorite flavors.

“I just remember that there’d be a lot of stuff that didn’t go his way,” Nunberg told me, referring to Trump’s business career. “But he has all these senators in the fetal position! They do whatever he wants.”

Why exactly congressional Republicans have proved so much more pliable than anyone else Trump has contended with is a matter of interpretation. One explanation is that Trump has simply achieved much more success in politics than he ever did, relatively speaking, in New York City real estate or on network TV. For all of his tabloid omnipresence, Trump never had anything like the presidential bully pulpit.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Loyalists, lapdogs, and cronies]

“It stands to reason that [when] the president and leader of your party is pushing for something … that’s what’s going to happen,” a former chief of staff to a Republican senator, who requested anonymity in order to candidly describe former colleagues’ thinking, told me. “Take away the office and put him back in a business setting, where facts and core principles matter, and it doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t as easy.”

But, of course, Trump is not the president anymore—and there is also something unique about the sway he continues to have over Republicans on Capitol Hill. In his previous life, Trump had viewers, readers, fans—but he never commanded a movement that could end the careers of the people on the other side of the negotiating table.

And Trump—whose animal instinct for weakness is one of his defining traits—seemed to intuit something early on about the psychology of the Republicans he would one day reign over.

Nunberg told me about a speech he drafted for Trump in 2015 that included this line about the Republican establishment: “They’re good at keeping their jobs, not their promises.” When Trump read it, he chuckled. “It’s so true,” he said, according to Nunberg. “That’s all they care about.” (Nunberg was eventually fired from Trump’s 2016 campaign.)

This ethos of job preservation at all costs is not a strictly partisan phenomenon in Washington—nor is it new. As I reported in my recent biography of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator was surprised, when he arrived in Congress, by the enormous psychic currency his colleagues attached to their positions. One senator told Romney that his first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?”

[From the November 2023 issue: What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate]

But the Republican Party of 2015 was uniquely vulnerable to a hostile takeover by someone like Trump. Riven by years of infighting and ideological incoherence, and plagued by a growing misalignment between its base and its political class, the GOP was effectively one big institutional power vacuum. The litmus tests kept changing. The formula for getting reelected was obsolete. Republicans with solidly conservative records, such as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, were getting taken out in primaries by obscure Tea Party upstarts.

To many elected Republicans, it probably felt like an answer to their prayers when a strongman finally parachuted in and started telling them what to do. Maybe his orders were reckless and contradictory. But as long as you did your best to look like you were obeying, you could expect to keep winning your primaries.

As for Trump, it’s easy to see the ongoing appeal of this arrangement. The Apprentice was canceled long ago, and the Manhattan-real-estate war stories have worn thin. Republicans in Congress might be the only ostensibly powerful people in America who will allow him to boss them around, humiliate them, and assert unbridled dominance over them. They’ve made the myth true. How could he possibly walk away now?

You Should Go to a Trump Rally

2024-01-15T06:00:00-05:00

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If Donald Trump has benefited from one underappreciated advantage this campaign season, it might be that no one seems to be listening to him very closely anymore.

This is a strange development for a man whose signature political talent is attracting and holding attention. Consider Trump’s rise to power in 2016—how all-consuming his campaign was that year, how one @realDonaldTrump tweet could dominate news coverage for days, how watching his televised stump speeches in a suspended state of fascination or horror or delight became a kind of perverse national pastime.

Now consider the fact that it’s been 14 months since Trump announced his entry into the 2024 presidential race. Can you quote a single thing he’s said on the campaign trail? How much of his policy agenda could you describe? Be honest: When was the last time you watched him speaking live, not just in a short, edited clip?

It’s not that Trump has been forgotten. He remains an omnipresent fact of American life, like capitalism or COVID-19. Everyone is aware of him; everyone has an opinion. Most people would just rather not devote too much mental energy to the subject. This dynamic has shaped Trump’s third bid for the presidency. As Katherine Miller recently observed in The New York Times, “The path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same.”

Perhaps we overlearned the lessons of that first Trump campaign. After he won, a consensus formed among his detractors that the news media had given him too much airtime, allowing him to set the terms of the debate and helping to “normalize” his rhetoric and behavior.

But if the glut of attention in 2016 desensitized the nation to Trump, the relative dearth in the past year has turned him into an abstraction. The major cable-news networks don’t take his speeches live like they used to, afraid that they’ll be accused of amplifying his lies. He’s skipped every one of the GOP primary debates. And since Twitter banned him in January 2021, his daily fulminations have remained siloed in his own obscure social-media network, Truth Social. These days, Trump exists in many Americans’ minds as a hazy silhouette—formed by preconceived notions and outdated impressions—rather than as an actual person who’s telling the country every day who he is and what he plans to do with a second term.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Loyalists, lapdogs, and cronies]

To rectify this problem, I propose a 2024 resolution for politically engaged Americans: Go to a Trump rally. Not as a supporter or as a protester, necessarily, but as an observer. Take in the scene. Talk to his fans. Listen to every word of the Republican front-runner’s speech. This might sound unpleasant to some; consider it an act of civic hygiene.

Yes, there are other ways to familiarize yourself with the candidate and the stakes of this election. (And, of course, some people might not feel safe at a Trump event.) But nothing quite captures the Trump ethos like his campaign rallies. This has been true ever since he held his first one at Trump Tower, in June 2015. Back then, he had to stack the crowd with paid actors, prompting many in the press (myself included) to dismiss the whole thing as an astroturf marketing stunt. But the rallies, like the campaign itself, soon took on a life of their own, with thousands of people flocking to Phoenix or Toledo or Daytona Beach to witness the once-in-a-generation spectacle firsthand. What would he do? What would he say? I still remember the night of the 2016 Nevada caucuses, standing in line for Trump’s victory rally at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino and overhearing one gawker enthuse to another, “This is a cultural phenomenon. We have to see it.”

Regardless of your personal orientation toward Trump, attending one of his rallies will be a clarifying experience. You’ll get a tactile sense of the man who’s dominated American politics for nearly a decade, and of the movement he commands. People who comment on politics for a living—journalists, academics—might find certain premises challenged, or at least complicated. Opponents and activists might come away with new urgency (and maybe a dash of empathy for the people Trump has under his sway). The experience could be especially educational to Republican voters who are not Trump devotees but who see the other GOP candidates as lost causes and plan to vote for Trump over Joe Biden. Surely, they should see, before they cast their vote, what exactly they’re voting for.

I recently undertook this challenge myself. As a reporter, I’ve covered about 100 Trump rallies in my life. For a stretch in the fall of 2016, I spent more time in MAGAfied arenas and airplane hangars than I did sleeping in my own bed. What I remember most from that year is the unsettling, anything-might-happen quality of the events. The chaos. The violence. The glee of the candidate presiding over it all.

But with the commencement of a new election year, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been to a rally since 2019. The pandemic, followed by a book project and a series of story assignments unrelated to Trump, had kept me largely off the campaign trail. I was curious what it would be like to go back. Had anything changed? Was my impression of Trump still up-to-date? So, one night earlier this month, I parked my rental car on a scrap of frozen grass near the North Iowa Events Center in Mason City and made my way inside.

[Peter Wehner: Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying?]

A line had formed hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, but the people trickling in from the cold through metal detectors were in good spirits. They chatted amiably about their holiday travel and arranged themselves in groups for selfies. An upbeat soundtrack played over the speakers—Michael Jackson, Adele, Panic! at the Disco—and people excitedly pointed out recognizable faces in the media section. “You’re that guy from CBS!” one attendee exclaimed to a TV-news correspondent.

I found the wholesome, church-barbecue vibe a little jarring. For months, my impression of the 2024 Trump campaign had been shaped by the apocalyptic rhetoric of the candidate himself—the stuff about Marxist “vermin” destroying America, and immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” The people here didn’t look like they were bracing for an existential catastrophe. Had I overestimated the radicalizing effect of Trump’s rhetoric?

Only once I started talking to attendees did I detect the darker undercurrent I remembered from past rallies.

I met Kris, a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers, standing near the press risers. (She declined to share her last name.) She was smiley and spoke in a sweet, grandmotherly voice as she told me how she’d watched dozens of Trump rallies, streaming them on Rumble or FrankSpeech, a platform launched by the right-wing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell. (She waited until Lindell, who happened to be loitering near us, was out of earshot to confide that she preferred Rumble.) The conversation was friendly and unremarkable—until it turned to the 2020 election, which Kris told me she believes was “most definitely” stolen.

“You think Trump should still be president?” I asked.

“By all means,” she said. “And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about.”

“What do you mean?”

“Military-wise,” she said. “The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she went on to explain. “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.” If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.

Around 8 p.m., Trump took the stage and launched into his remarks, toggling back and forth between what he called “teleprompter stuff” (his prepared stump speech) and the unscripted riffs that he’s famous for. Seeing him speak in this setting after so many years was strange—both instantly familiar and still somehow shocking, like rewatching an old movie you saw a hundred times as a kid but whose most offensive jokes you’d forgotten.

When he talked about members of the Biden administration, he referred to them as “idiots” and “lunatics” and “bad people.” When he talked about the “invasion” of undocumented immigrants at the southern border, he punctuated the riff with ominous warnings for his mostly white audience: “They’re occupying schools …They’re sitting with your children.” When he mentioned Barack Obama, he made a point of using the former president’s middle name—“Barack Hussein Obama”—and then veered off into an appreciation of Rush Limbaugh, the late conservative talk-radio host who taught him this trick. “We miss Rush,” Trump said to enthusiastic cheers. “We need you, Rush!”

I’d forgotten how casually he swears from the podium—deriding, at one point, his Republican rival Nikki Haley’s recent statement on the Civil War as “three paragraphs of bullshit”—and how casually people in the crowd swear back. Throughout the speech, two young men near the front repeatedly screamed “Fuck Biden!” prompting a wave of naughty giggles from others in the crowd.

[Read: What is Nikki Haley even talking about?]

If one thing has noticeably changed since 2016, it’s how the audience reacts to Trump. During his first campaign, the improvised material was what everyone looked forward to, while the written sections felt largely like box-checking. But in Mason City, the off-script riffs—many of which revolved around the 2020 election being stolen from him, and his personal sense of martyrdom—often turned rambly, and the crowd seemed to lose interest. At one point, a woman in front of me rolled her eyes and muttered, “He’s just babbling now.” She left a few minutes later, joining a steady stream of early exiters, and I wondered then whether even the most loyal Trump supporters might be surprised if they were to see their leader speak in person.

My own takeaway from the event was that there’s a reason Trump is no longer the cultural phenomenon he was in 2016. Yes, the novelty has worn off. But he also seems to have lost the instinct for entertainment that once made him so interesting to audiences. He relies on a shorthand legible only to his most dedicated followers, and his tendency to get lost in rhetorical cul-de-sacs of self-pity and anger wears thin. This doesn’t necessarily make him less dangerous. There is a rote quality now to his darkest rhetoric that I found more unnerving than when it used to command wall-to-wall news coverage.

These were my own impressions of the rally I attended; yours may very well be different. The only way to know is to see for yourself. Every four years, pundits try to identify the medium that will shape the presidential race—the “Twitter election,” the “cable-news election.” In 2024, with both parties warning of existential stakes for America, perhaps the best approach is to simply show up in real life.

Shortly before Trump began speaking, I met a friendly young dad in glasses who’d brought his 6-year-old son to the event. He’d never attended a Trump rally before and was excited to be there. When I asked if I could chat with him after Trump’s speech to see what he thought of the event, he happily agreed.

As Trump spoke, I glanced over at the man a few times from the press section. His expression was muted; he barely reacted to the lines that drove the crowd wild. The longer Trump spoke, I noticed, the further the man drifted backward toward the exits. Of course, I don’t know what was going through his head. Maybe he was just a stoic type. Or maybe his enthusiasm was tempered by the distraction of tending to a 6-year-old. All I know is that, halfway through the speech, he was gone.

Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies

2023-12-04T05:59:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Lee este artículo en español.

When Donald Trump first took office, he put a premium on what he called “central casting” hires—people with impressive résumés who matched his image of an ideal administration official. Yes, he brought along his share of Steve Bannons and Michael Flynns. But there was also James Mattis, the decorated four-star general who took over the Defense Department, and Gary Cohn, the Goldman Sachs chief operating officer who was appointed head of the National Economic Council, and Rex Tillerson, who left one of the world’s most profitable international conglomerates to become secretary of state.

Trump seemed positively giddy that all of these important people were suddenly willing to work for him. And although his populist supporters lamented the presence of so many swamp creatures in his administration, establishment Washington expressed pleasant surprise at the picks. A consensus had formed that what the incoming administration needed most was “adults in the room.” To save the country from ruin, the thinking went, reasonable Republicans had a patriotic duty to work for Trump if asked. Many of them did.

[From the December 2019 issue: James Mattis on the enemy within]

Don’t expect it to happen again. The available supply of serious, qualified people willing to serve in a Trump administration has dwindled since 2017. After all, the so-called adults didn’t fare so well in their respective rooms. Some quit in frustration or disgrace; others were publicly fired by the president. Several have spent their post–White House lives fielding congressional subpoenas and getting indicted. And after seeing one Trump term up close, vanishingly few of them are interested in a sequel: This past summer, NBC News reported that just four of Trump’s 44 Cabinet secretaries had endorsed his current bid.

Even if mainstream Republicans did want to work for him again, Trump is unlikely to want them. He’s made little secret of the fact that he felt burned by many in his first Cabinet. This time around, according to people in Trump’s orbit, he would prioritize obedience over credentials. “I think there’s going to be a very concerted, calculated effort to ensure that the people he puts in his next administration—they don’t have to share his worldview exactly, but they have to implement it,” Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesperson, told me.

What would this look like in practice? Predicting presidential appointments nearly a year before the election is a fool’s errand, especially with a candidate as mercurial as this one. And, whether for reasons of low public opinion or ongoing legal jeopardy, some of Trump’s likely picks might struggle to get confirmed (expect a series of contentious hearings). But the names currently circulating in MAGA world offer a glimpse at the kind of people Trump could gravitate toward.

One Trump-world figure with a record of deference to the boss is Stephen Miller. As a speechwriter and policy adviser, Miller managed to endure while so many of his colleagues flamed out in part because he was satisfied with being a staffer instead of a star. He was also fully aligned with the president on his signature issue: immigration. Inside the White House, Miller championed some of the administration’s most draconian measures, including the Muslim travel ban and the family-separation policy. In a second Trump term, some expect Miller to get a job that will give him significant influence over immigration policy—perhaps head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or even secretary of homeland security. Given Miller’s villainous reputation in Democratic circles, however, he might have a hard time getting confirmed by the Senate. If that happens, some think White House chief of staff might be a good consolation prize.

[From the September 2022 issue: The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy]

For secretary of state, one likely candidate is Richard Grenell. Before Trump appointed him ambassador to Germany in 2018, Grenell was best-known as a right-wing foreign-policy pundit and an inexhaustible Twitter troll. He brought his signature bellicosity to Berlin, hectoring journalists and government officials on Twitter, and telling a Breitbart London reporter early in his tenure that he planned to use his position to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe.” (He had to walk back the comment after some in Germany interpreted it as a call for far-right regime change.)

Grenell’s undiplomatic approach to diplomacy exasperated German officials and thrilled Trump, who reportedly described him as an ambassador who “gets it.” Grenell has spent recent years performing his loyalty as a Trump ally and, according to one source, privately building his case for the secretary-of-state role.

One job that Trump will be especially focused on getting right is attorney general. He believes that both of the men who held this position during his term—Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr—were guilty of grievous betrayal. Since then, Trump has been charged with 91 felony counts across four separate criminal cases—evidence, he claims, of a historic “political persecution.” (He has pleaded not guilty in all cases.) Trump has pledged to use the Justice Department to visit revenge on his persecutors if he returns to the White House.

“The notion of the so-called independence of the Department of Justice needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history,” says Paul Dans, who served in the Office of Personnel Management under Trump and now leads an effort by the Heritage Foundation to recruit conservative appointees for the next Republican administration. To that end, Trump allies have floated a range of loyalists for attorney general, including Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Josh Hawley; former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Jeffrey Clark, formerly one of Trump’s assistant attorneys general, who was indicted in Georgia on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election (the charges are still pending).

Vivek Ramaswamy—the fast-talking entrepreneur running in the Republican presidential primary as of this writing—is also expected to get a top post in the administration. Ramaswamy has praised Trump on the campaign trail and positioned himself as the natural heir to the former president. Trump has responded to the flattery in kind, publicly praising his opponent as a “very, very, very intelligent person.” Some have even speculated that Ramaswamy could be Trump’s pick for vice president.

One source close to Ramaswamy told me that a Trump adviser had recently asked him what job the candidate might want in a future administration. After thinking about it, the source suggested ambassador to the United Nations, reasoning that he’s a “good talker.” The Trump adviser said he’d keep it in mind, though it’s worth noting that Ramaswamy’s lack of support for Ukraine and his suggestion that Russia be allowed to keep some of the territory it has seized could lead to confirmation trouble.

Beyond the high-profile posts, the Trump team may have more jobs to fill in 2025 than a typical administration does. Dans and his colleagues at Heritage are laying the groundwork for a radical politicization of the federal civilian workforce. If they get their way, the next Republican president will sign an executive order eliminating civil-service protections for up to 50,000 federal workers, effectively making the people in these roles political appointees. Rank-and-file budget wonks, lawyers, and administrators working in dozens of agencies would be reclassified as Schedule F employees, and the president would be able to fire them at will, with or without cause. These fired civil servants’ former posts could be left empty—or filled with Trump loyalists. To that end, Heritage has begun to put together a roster of thousands of pre-vetted potential recruits. “What we’re really talking about is a major renovation to government,” Dans told me.

Trump actually signed an executive order along these lines in the final months of his presidency, but it was reversed by his successor. On the campaign trail, Trump has vowed to reinstate it with the goal of creating a more compliant federal workforce for himself. “Either the deep state destroys America,” he has declared, “or we destroy the deep state.”

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies.”

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

2023-09-13T14:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Yael Malka

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.

For most of his life, Mitt Romney has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.

He controls what he can, of course. He wears his seat belt, and diligently applies sunscreen, and stays away from secondhand smoke. For decades, he’s followed his doctor’s recipe for longevity with monastic dedication—the lean meats, the low-dose aspirin, the daily 30-minute sessions on the stationary bike, heartbeat at 140 or higher or it doesn’t count.

He would live to 120 if he could. “So much is going to happen!” he says when asked about this particular desire. “I want to be around to see it.” But some part of him has always doubted that he’ll get anywhere close.

He has never really interrogated the cause of this preoccupation, but premonitions of death seem to follow him. Once, years ago, he boarded an airplane for a business trip to London and a flight attendant whom he’d never met saw him, gasped, and rushed from the cabin in horror. When she was asked what had so upset her, she confessed that she’d dreamt the night before about a man who looked like him—exactly like him—getting shot and killed at a rally in Hyde Park. He didn’t know how to respond, other than to laugh and put it out of his mind. But when, a few days later, he happened to find himself on the park’s edge and saw a crowd forming, he made a point not to linger.

All of which is to say there is something familiar about the unnerving sensation that Romney is feeling late on the afternoon of January 2, 2021.

It begins with a text message from Angus King, the junior senator from Maine: “Could you give me a call when you get a chance? Important.”

Romney calls, and King informs him of a conversation he’s just had with a high-ranking Pentagon official. Law enforcement has been tracking online chatter among right-wing extremists who appear to be planning something bad on the day of Donald Trump’s upcoming rally in Washington, D.C. The president has been telling them the election was stolen; now they’re coming to steal it back. There’s talk of gun smuggling, of bombs and arson, of targeting the traitors in Congress who are responsible for this travesty. Romney’s name has been popping up in some frightening corners of the internet, which is why King needed to talk to him. He isn’t sure Romney will be safe.

Romney hangs up and immediately begins typing a text to Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. McConnell has been indulgent of Trump’s deranged behavior over the past four years, but he’s not crazy. He knows that the election wasn’t stolen, that his guy lost fair and square. He sees the posturing by Republican politicians for what it is. He’ll want to know about this, Romney thinks. He’ll want to protect his colleagues, and himself.

Romney sends his text: “In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”

McConnell never responds.

I began meeting with Romney in the spring of 2021. The senator hadn’t told anyone he was talking to a biographer, and we kept our interviews discreet. Sometimes we talked in his Senate office, after most of his staff had gone home; sometimes we went to his little windowless “hideaway” near the Senate chamber. But most weeks, I drove to a stately brick townhouse with perpetually drawn blinds on a quiet street a mile from the Capitol.

The place had not been Romney’s first choice for a Washington residence. When he was elected, in 2018, he’d had his eye on a newly remodeled condo at the Watergate with glittering views of the Potomac. His wife, Ann, fell in love with the place, but his soon-to-be staffers and colleagues warned him about the commute. So he grudgingly chose practicality over luxury and settled for the $2.4 million townhouse instead.

He tried to make it nice, so that Ann would be comfortable when she visited. A decorator filled the rooms with tasteful furniture and calming abstract art. He planted a garden on the small backyard patio. But his wife rarely came to Washington, and his sons didn’t come either, and gradually the house took on an unkempt bachelor-pad quality. Crumbs littered the kitchen counter; soda and seltzer occupied the otherwise-empty fridge. Old campaign paraphernalia appeared on the mantel, clashing with the decorator’s mid-tone color scheme, and a bar of “Trump’s Small Hand Soap” (a gag gift from one of his sons) was placed in the powder room alongside the monogrammed towels.

Top left: Mitt and Ann Romney at a dinner in Washington for Richard Nixon’s inauguration, January 1973. Top right: Romney speaking to a Mormon congregation in the Boston area, 1980s. Bottom: Romney and several of his sons. (Courtesy of Mitt Romney)

In the “dining room,” a 98-inch TV went up on the wall and a leather recliner landed in front of it. Romney, who didn’t have many real friends in Washington, ate dinner alone there most nights, watching Ted Lasso or Better Call Saul as he leafed through briefing materials. On the day of my first visit, he showed me his freezer, which was full of salmon fillets that had been given to him by Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska. He didn’t especially like salmon but found that if he put it on a hamburger bun and smothered it in ketchup, it made for a serviceable meal.

Sitting across from Romney at 76, one can’t help but become a little suspicious of his handsomeness. The jowl-free jawline. The all-seasons tan. The just-so gray at the temples of that thick black coif, which his barber once insisted he doesn’t dye. It all seems a little uncanny. Only after studying him closely do you notice the signs of age. He shuffles a little when he walks now, hunches a little when he sits. At various points in recent years, he’s gotten so thin that his staff has worried about him. Mostly, he looks tired.

Romney’s isolation in Washington didn’t surprise me. In less than a decade, he’d gone from Republican standard-bearer and presidential nominee to party pariah thanks to a series of public clashes with Trump. What I didn’t quite expect was how candid he was ready to be. He instructed his scheduler to block off evenings for weekly interviews, and told me that no subject would be off-limits. He handed over hundreds of pages of his private journals and years’ worth of personal correspondence, including sensitive emails with some of the most powerful Republicans in the country. When he couldn’t find the key to an old filing cabinet that contained some of his personal papers, he took a crowbar to it and deposited stacks of campaign documents and legal pads in my lap. He’d kept all of this stuff, he explained, because he thought he might write a memoir one day, but he’d decided against it. “I can’t be objective about my own life,” he said.

Some nights he vented; other nights he dished. He’s more puckish than his public persona suggests, attuned to the absurdist humor of political life and quick to share stories that others might consider indiscreet. I got the feeling he liked the company—our conversations sometimes stretched for hours.

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

I had never encountered a politician so openly reckoning with what his pursuit of power had cost, much less one doing so while still in office. Candid introspection and crises of conscience are much less expensive in retirement. But Romney was thinking beyond his own political future.

Earlier this year, he confided to me that he would not seek reelection to the Senate in 2024. He planned to make this announcement in the fall. The decision was part political, part actuarial. The men in his family had a history of sudden heart failure, and none had lived longer than his father, who died at 88. “Do I want to spend eight of the 12 years I have left sitting here and not getting anything done?” he mused. But there was something else. His time in the Senate had left Romney worried—not just about the decomposition of his own political party, but about the fate of the American project itself.

Shortly after moving into his Senate office, Romney had hung a large rectangular map on the wall. First printed in 1931 by Rand McNally, the “histomap” attempted to chart the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful civilizations through 4,000 years of human history. When Romney first acquired the map, he saw it as a curiosity. After January 6, he became obsessed with it. He showed the map to visitors, brought it up in conversations and speeches. More than once, he found himself staring at it alone in his office at night. The Egyptian empire had reigned for some 900 years before it was overtaken by the Assyrians. Then the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Turks—each civilization had its turn, and eventually collapsed in on itself. Maybe the falls were inevitable. But what struck Romney most about the map was how thoroughly it was dominated by tyrants of some kind—pharaohs, emperors, kaisers, kings. “A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,” he said the first time he showed me the map. “It’s a testosterone-related phenomenon, perhaps. I don’t know. But in the history of the world, that’s what happens.” America’s experiment in self-rule “is fighting against human nature.”

“This is a very fragile thing,” he told me. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”

For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure if the cathedral would hold.

Optimism—quaint in retrospect, though perhaps delusional—is what first propelled Romney to the Senate. It was 2017. Trump was president, and the early months of his tenure had been a predictable disaster; the Republican Party was in trouble. Romney’s friends were encouraging him to get back in the game, and he was tempted by the open Senate seat in Utah, a state where Trump was uniquely unpopular among conservative voters. On his iPad, he typed out the pros and cons of running—high-minded sentiments about public service in one column, lifestyle considerations in the other. Then, at the top of the list, he wrote a line from Yeats that he couldn’t get out of his mind: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

To Romney, this was the problem with the Trump-era GOP. He believed there were still decent, well-intentioned leaders in his party—they were just nervous. They needed a nudge. A role model, perhaps. As the former nominee, he told me, he felt that he “had the potential to be an alternative voice for Republicans.”

Romney leaves the Trump National Golf Club after meeting with the president-elect, November 19, 2016. (Drew Angerer / Getty)

Five years earlier, while running for president, Romney had accepted Trump’s endorsement. At the time, he’d rationalized the decision—yes, Trump was a buffoon and a conspiracy theorist, but he was just a guy on reality TV, not a serious political figure. Romney now realized that he’d badly underestimated the potency of Trumpism. But in the summer of 2017, it still seemed possible that the president would be remembered as an outlier.

Two days before he was sworn in as a senator, Romney published an op-ed in The Washington Post designed to signal his independence from Trump. “On balance,” Romney wrote, the president “has not risen to the mantle of the office.” He pledged to work with him when they agreed on an issue, to oppose him when they didn’t, and to speak out when necessary. He thought of this as a new way to be a Republican senator in Trump’s Washington.

His colleagues were not impressed. A few days after Romney was sworn in, Politico ran a story about the “chilly reception” he was receiving from his fellow Republican senators. The story quoted several of them, on the record or anonymously, griping about his unwillingness to get along with the leader of their party. Romney emailed the story to his advisers, describing himself as “the turd in the punch bowl.” “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.”

Romney had spent the weeks since his election typing out a list of all the things he wanted to accomplish in the Senate. By the time he took office, it contained 42 items and was still growing. The legislative to-do list ranged from complex systemic reforms—overhauling immigration, reducing the national deficit, addressing climate change—to narrower issues such as compensating college athletes and regulating the vaping industry. His staff was bemused when he showed it to them; even in less polarized, less chaotic times, the kind of ambitious agenda he had in mind would be unrealistic. But Romney was not deterred. He told his aides he wanted to set up meetings with all 99 of his colleagues in his first six months, and began studying a flip-book of senators’ pictures so that he could recognize his potential legislative partners.

In one early meeting, a colleague who’d been elected a few years earlier leveled with him: “There are about 20 senators here who do all the work, and there are about 80 who go along for the ride.” Romney saw himself as a workhorse, and was eager for others to see him that way too. “I wanted to make it clear: I want to do things,” he told me.

He quickly became frustrated, though, by how much of the Senate was built around posturing and theatrics. Legislators gave speeches to empty chambers and spent hours debating bills they all knew would never pass. They summoned experts to appear at committee hearings only to make them sit in silence while they blathered some more.

As the weeks passed, Romney became fascinated by the strange social ecosystem that governed the Senate. He spent his mornings in the Senate gym studying his colleagues like he was an anthropologist, jotting down his observations in his journal. Richard Burr walked on the treadmill in his suit pants and loafers; Sherrod Brown and Dick Durbin pedaled so slowly on their exercise bikes that Romney couldn’t help but peek at their resistance settings: “Durbin was set to 1 and Brown to 8. :) :). My setting is 15—not that I’m bragging,” he recorded.

He joked to friends that the Senate was best understood as a “club for old men.” There were free meals, on-site barbers, and doctors within a hundred feet at all times. But there was an edge to the observation: The average age in the Senate was 63 years old. Several members, Romney included, were in their 70s or even 80s. And he sensed that many of his colleagues attached an enormous psychic currency to their position—that they would do almost anything to keep it. “Most of us have gone out and tried playing golf for a week, and it was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna kill myself,’ ” he told me. Job preservation, in this context, became almost existential. Retirement was death. The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power. One of his new colleagues told him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?” (The second and third considerations, the colleague continued, should be what effect it would have on his constituents and on his state.)

Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddlerlike psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”

This dissonance soon wore on Romney’s patience. Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed, some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity. “I sure wish I could do what you do,” they’d say, or “Gosh, I wish I had the constituency you have,” and then they’d look at him expectantly, as if waiting for Romney to convey profound gratitude. This happened so often that he started keeping a tally; at one point, he told his staff that he’d had more than a dozen similar exchanges. He developed a go-to response for such occasions: “There are worse things than losing an election. Take it from somebody who knows.”

One afternoon in March 2019, Trump paid a visit to the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus lunch. He was in a buoyant mood—two days earlier, the Justice Department had announced that the much-anticipated report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. As Romney later wrote in his journal, the president was met with a standing ovation fit for a conquering hero, and then launched into some rambling remarks. He talked about the so-called Russia hoax and relitigated the recent midterm elections and swung wildly from one tangent to another. He declared, somewhat implausibly, that the GOP would soon become “the party of health care.” The senators were respectful and attentive.

As soon as Trump left, Romney recalled, the Republican caucus burst into laughter.

Few of his colleagues surprised him more than Mitch McConnell. Before arriving in Washington, Romney had known the Senate majority leader mainly by reputation. With his low, cold mumble and inscrutable perma-frown, McConnell was viewed as a win-at-all-costs tactician who ruled his caucus with an iron fist. Observing him in action, though, Romney realized that McConnell rarely resorted to threats or coercion—he was primarily a deft manager of egos who excelled at telling each of his colleagues what they wanted to hear. This often left Romney guessing as to which version of McConnell was authentic—the one who did Trump’s bidding in public, or the one who excoriated him in their private conversations.

In the fall of 2019, Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating the Biden family’s business dealings were revealed in the press. Romney called the scheme “wrong and appalling,” and Trump responded with a wrathful series of tweets that culminated with a call to #IMPEACHMITTROMNEY. A few weeks later, Romney read in the press that McConnell had privately urged Trump to stop attacking members of the Senate. Romney thanked McConnell for sticking up for him against Trump.

Romney’s Senate office (Yael Malka for The Atlantic)

“It wasn’t for you so much as for him,” McConnell replied. “He’s an idiot. He doesn’t think when he says things. How stupid do you have to be to not realize that you shouldn’t attack your jurors?

“You’re lucky,” McConnell continued. “You can say the things that we all think. You’re in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can’t say.” (A spokesperson said that McConnell does not recall this conversation and that he was “fully aligned” with Trump during the impeachment trial.)

As House Democrats pursued their impeachment case against the president, Romney carefully studied his constitutional role in the imminent Senate trial. He read and reread Alexander Hamilton’s treatise on impeachment, “Federalist No. 65.” He pored over the work of constitutional scholars and reviewed historical definitions of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” His understanding was that once the House impeached a president, senators were called on to set aside their partisan passions and act as impartial jurors.

Meanwhile, among Romney’s Republican colleagues, rank cynicism reigned. They didn’t want to hear from witnesses; they didn’t want to learn new facts; they didn’t want to hold a trial at all. During an interview with CNN, Lindsey Graham frankly admitted that he was “not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here,” and predicted that the impeachment process would “die quickly” once it reached the Senate.

On December 11, 2019, McConnell summoned Romney to his office and pitched him on joining forces. He explained that several vulnerable members of their caucus were up for reelection, and that a prolonged, polarizing Senate trial would force them to take tough votes that risked alienating their constituents. McConnell wanted Romney to vote to end the trial as soon as the opening arguments were completed. McConnell didn’t bother defending Trump’s actions. Instead, he argued that protecting the GOP’s Senate majority was a matter of vital national importance. He predicted that Trump would lose reelection, and painted an apocalyptic picture of what would happen if Democrats took control of Congress: They’d turn Puerto Rico and D.C. into states, engineering a permanent Senate majority; they’d ram through left-wing legislation such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Romney said he couldn’t make any promises about his vote. (McConnell declined to comment on this conversation.)

A week later, Republican senators met for their regular caucus lunch. Romney had come to dread these meetings. They had a certain high-school-cafeteria quality that made him feel ill at ease. “I mean, it’s a funny thing,” he told me. “You don’t want to be the only one sitting at the table and no one wants to sit with you.” He had always had plenty of friends growing up, but his religion often made him feel like he didn’t quite fit in. At Cranbrook prep school, in Michigan, he was the only Mormon on campus; at Stanford, he would go to bars with his friends and drink soda. Walking into those caucus lunches each week—deciding whom to sit with, and whether to speak up—Romney felt his differentness just as acutely as he had in his teens.

The meeting was being held shortly before Christmas break, and Romney hoped the caucus would get some guidance on what to expect from the trial. Instead, he was dismayed to learn that the featured guest was Vice President Mike Pence, who was there to talk through the White House’s defense strategy. “Stunning to me that he would be there,” Romney grumbled in his journal. “There is not even an attempt to show impartiality.” (Romney had long been put off by Pence’s pious brand of Trump sycophancy. No one, he told me, has been “more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly than Mike Pence.”)

[From the January/February 2018 issue: McKay Coppins on God’s plan for Mike Pence]

At the next meeting, McConnell told his colleagues they should understand that the upcoming trial was not really a trial at all. “This is a political process,” he said—and it was thus appropriate for them to behave like politicians. “If impeachment is a partisan political process, then it might as well be removed from the Constitution,” Romney recalled muttering to Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, who were seated near him. The senators politely ignored him.

Two articles of impeachment arrived at the Senate on January 15, 2020, and the trial began. Romney did his best to be a model juror—he took notes, parsed the arguments, and agonized each night in his journal over how he should vote. “Interestingly, sometimes I think I will be voting to convict, and sometimes I think I will vote to exonerate,” he wrote on January 23. “I jot down my reasons for each, but when I finish, I begin to consider the other side of the argument … I do the same thing—with less analysis of course—in bed. That’s probably why I’m not sleeping more than 4 or 5 hours.”

The other members of his caucus didn’t seem quite so burdened. They mumbled dismissive comments while the impeachment managers presented their case. He heard some of them literally cheer for Trump’s defense team. Maybe Romney was naive, but he couldn’t get over how irresponsible it all seemed. “How unlike a real jury is our caucus!” he wrote in his journal.

And yet, to at least some of his fellow Republicans, the case against Trump was compelling—even if they’d never say so in public. During a break in the proceedings, after the impeachment managers finished their presentation, Romney walked by McConnell. “They nailed him,” the Senate majority leader said.

Romney, taken aback by McConnell’s candor, responded carefully: “Well, the defense will say that Trump was just investigating corruption by the Bidens.”

“If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.” (McConnell said he does not recall this conversation and it does not match his thinking at the time.)

By the time the defense wrapped up its arguments, on January 28, Romney was privately leaning toward acquittal. In his journal, he rationalized the vote—Trump hadn’t explicitly told Zelensky he would withhold military aid until an investigation was open—but he also admitted a self-interested motive. “I do not at all want to vote to convict,” he wrote. “The consequences of doing so are too painful to contemplate.”

When he informed his senior staff of his thinking the next morning, he detected a palpable sense of relief. Maybe their boss still had a future in Republican politics after all. Romney’s wife, though, seemed less elated by the news. Ann didn’t argue with him. She didn’t render any judgment at all. She just said she was “surprised.” Romney, who’d organized much of his life around winning and keeping Ann’s respect, couldn’t help but wonder if she meant something more.

On January 30, the senators were allowed to question lawyers on both sides of the impeachment case. Late in the day, a question submitted by Graham caught Romney’s attention: Even if Trump really had done exactly what the House accused him of, he asked, “isn’t it true that the allegations still would not rise to the level of an impeachable offense?” Trump’s lawyers concurred.

The answer stunned Romney. Until then, Trump’s defense had been that he wasn’t really trying to shake down a world leader for political favors by threatening to withhold military aid. Now, it seemed to Romney, Trump’s lawyers were effectively arguing that such a shakedown would have been fine. Allowing that argument to go unchallenged would set a dangerous precedent. When the Senate recessed, Romney returned to his office to go over the facts of the case again. The gravity of the moment was catching up to him. Finally, Romney knelt on the floor and prayed.

A few days earlier, Romney had paid a visit to Senator Joe Manchin’s houseboat, Almost Heaven—the West Virginian’s home in Washington. The impeachment trial had presented a serious political quandary for Manchin, a moderate Democrat whose state Trump had carried with 68 percent of the vote in 2016. While the voters there liked Manchin’s independence, they wouldn’t be happy if he voted to convict. After listening to Manchin describe his predicament, Romney offered his take: “We’re both 72. We should probably be thinking about oaths and legacy, not just reelection.”

Now it was time for Romney to follow his own advice. Writing in his journal, he once again laid out the facts of the case as he understood them. Hundreds of words, page after page, he wrote and wrote and wrote, until finally the truth was clear to him: Trump was guilty.

Romney slept fitfully that night, rising at 4 a.m. to review the case one more time. Still convinced of the president’s guilt, he opened up a laptop at his kitchen table and wrote the first draft of the speech he’d eventually give on the Senate floor.

After that, he made his way to the Russell Building, where he broke the news to his senior staff. Some were surprised but approving; others were distressed. One staffer simply put her head in her hands. She didn’t speak or look up again for the rest of the meeting.

Shortly before 2 p.m. on the day of the vote, Romney left his office and walked to the Capitol, where he waited in his hideaway for his turn to speak. Minutes before going on the floor, he received an unexpected call on his cellphone. It was Paul Ryan. Romney and his team had kept a tight lid on how he planned to vote, but somehow his former running mate had gotten word that he was about to detonate his political career. Romney had been less judgmental of Ryan’s acquiescence to Trump than he’d been of most other Republicans’. He believed Ryan was a sincere guy who’d simply misjudged Trump.

Yael Malka for The Atlantic

And yet, here was Ryan on the phone, making the same arguments Romney had heard from some of his more calculating colleagues. Ryan told him that voting to convict Trump would make Romney an outcast in the party, that many of the people who’d tried to get him elected president would never speak to him again, and that he’d struggle to pass any meaningful legislation. Ryan said that he respected Romney, and wanted to make absolutely sure he’d thought through the repercussions of his vote. Romney assured him that he had, and said goodbye.

He walked onto the Senate floor and read the remarks he’d written at his kitchen table. “As a Senator-juror,” Romney began, “I swore an oath before God to exercise impartial justice. I am profoundly religious. My faith is at the heart of who I am—” His voice broke, and he had to pause as emotion overwhelmed him. “I take an oath before God as enormously consequential.”

Romney acknowledged that his vote wouldn’t change the outcome of the trial—the Republican-led Senate would fall far short of the 67 votes needed to remove the president from office, and he would be the lone Republican to find Trump guilty. Even so, he said, “with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me.”

He would never feel comfortable at a Republican caucus lunch again.

Early on the morning of January 6, 2021, Romney slid into the back of an SUV and began the short ride to his Senate office, with a Capitol Police car in tow. Ann had begged him not to return to Washington that day. She had a bad feeling about all of this. In the year since his impeachment vote, her husband had become a regular target of heckling and harassment from Trump supporters. They shouted “traitor” from car windows and confronted him in restaurants. Romney had tried to make light of her concern: “If I get shot, you can move on to a younger, more athletic husband.” A special police escort had been arranged for him that morning. But now, as he looked out the window at the streets of D.C., he found himself wondering about its utility. If somebody wants to shoot me, he thought, what good is it to have these guys in a car behind me?

He tried to go about his morning as usual, but he struggled to concentrate. Two miles away, at the White House Ellipse, thousands of angry people were gathering for a “Save America” rally.

The Senate chamber is a cloistered place, with no television monitors or electronic devices, and strict rules that keep outsiders off the floor. So when the Senate convened that afternoon to debate his colleagues’ objection to certifying the 2020 electoral votes, Romney didn’t know exactly what was happening outside. He didn’t know that the president had just directed his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue—“We’re going to the Capitol!” He didn’t know that pipe bombs had been discovered outside both parties’ nearby headquarters. He didn’t know that Capitol Police were scrambling to evacuate the Library of Congress, or that rioters were crashing into police barricades outside the building, or that officers were beginning to realize they were outnumbered and wouldn’t be able to hold the line much longer.

At 2:08 p.m., Romney’s phone buzzed with a text message from his aide Chris Marroletti, who had been communicating with Capitol Police: “Protestors getting closer. High intensity out there.” He suggested that Romney might want to move to his hideaway.

Romney looked around the chamber. The hideaway was a few hundred yards and two flights of stairs away. He didn’t want to leave if he didn’t have to. He’d stay put, he decided, unless the protesters got inside the building.

A minute later, Romney’s phone buzzed again.

“They’re on the west front, overcame barriers.”

Adrenaline surging, Romney stood and made his way to the back of the chamber, where he pushed open the heavy bronze doors. He was expecting the usual crowd of reporters and staff aides, but nobody was there. A strange, unsettling quiet had engulfed the deserted corridor. He turned left and started down the hall toward his hideaway, when suddenly he saw a Capitol Police officer sprinting toward him at full speed.

“Go back in!” the officer boomed without breaking stride. “You’re safer inside the chamber.”

Romney turned around and started to run.

He got back in time to hear the gavel drop and see several men—Secret Service agents, presumably—rush into the chamber without explanation and pull the vice president out. Then, all at once, the room turned over to chaos: A man in a neon sash was bellowing from the middle of the Senate floor about a security breach. Officials were scampering around the room in a panic, slamming doors shut and barking at senators to move farther inside until they could be evacuated.

Something about the volatility of the moment caused Romney—
a walking amalgam of prep-school manners and Mormon niceness and the practiced cool of the private-equity set—to lose his grip, and he finally vented the raw anger he had been trying to contain. He turned to Josh Hawley, who was huddled with some of his right-wing colleagues, and started to yell. Later, Romney would struggle to recall the exact wording of his rebuke. Sometimes he’d remember shouting “You’re the reason this is happening!” Other times, it would be something more terse: “You did this.” At least one reporter in the chamber would recount seeing the senator throw up his hands in a fit of fury as he roared, “This is what you’ve gotten, guys!” Whatever the words, the sentiment was clear: This violence, this crisis, this assault on democracy—this is your fault.

Soon, Romney was being rushed down a hallway with several of his colleagues. The mob was only one level below, so they couldn’t take the stairs; instead, the senators piled into elevators, 10 at a time, while the rest loitered anxiously in the hallway.

When they reached the basement, Romney asked a pair of police officers, “Where are we supposed to go?”

“The senators know,” one of the officers replied.

Marroletti, Romney’s aide, spoke up: “These are the senators. They don’t know. Where are we supposed to go?”

Romney was mystified by the ineptitude, but he knew the situation wasn’t the police’s fault. He thought about the text message he’d sent to McConnell a few days earlier explicitly warning of this scenario. How were they not ready for this? It was, in some ways, a perfect metaphor for his party’s timorous, shortsighted approach to the Trump era. As a boy, he’d read Idylls of the King with his mother; now he could understand the famous quote from Tennyson’s Guinevere as she witnesses the consequences of corruption in Arthur’s court: “This madness has come on us for our sins.”

Eventually the senators made it to a safe room. There were no chairs at first, so the shell-shocked legislators simply wandered around, murmuring variations of “I can’t believe this is happening.” When someone wheeled in a TV and turned on CNN, the senators got their first live look at the sacking of the Capitol. A sickened silence fell over the room as anger and outrage were replaced by dread. To Romney, the Senate chamber was a sacred place. Watching it transform into a playground for violent, costumed insurrectionists was almost too much to bear.

The National Guard finally dispersed the crowd and secured the Capitol. As the Senate prepared to reconvene late that night, Romney took solace in assuming that his most extreme colleagues now realized what their ruse had wrought, and would abandon their plan to object to the electors. Romney had written a speech a few days earlier condemning their procedural farce, but now he was thinking of tossing it. Surely the point was moot.

But to Romney’s astonishment, the architects of the plan still intended to move forward. When Hawley stood to deliver his speech, Romney was positioned just behind the Missourian’s right shoulder, allowing a C‑SPAN camera to capture his withering glare.

Romney glares at Missouri’s Josh Hawley as he addresses the Senate on January 6, 2021. (Senate Television / AP)

What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

When it was Romney’s turn to speak, he wasted little time before laying into his colleagues. “What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States,” Romney said. “Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.” His voice sharpened when he addressed the patronizing claim that objecting to the certification was a matter of showing respect for voters who believed the election had been stolen. It struck Romney that, for all their alleged populism, Hawley and his allies seemed to take a very dim view of their Republican constituents.

“The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth!” Romney said, his voice rising to a shout.

Before sitting down, he posed a question to his fellow senators—a question that, whether he realized it or not, he’d been wrestling with himself for nearly his entire political career. “Do we weigh our own political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our republic, the strength of our democracy, and the cause of freedom? What is the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience?”

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Barton Gellman on Donald Trump’s next insurrection]

For a blessed moment after January 6, it looked to Romney as if the fever in his party might finally be breaking. GOP leaders condemned the president and denounced the rioters. Trump, who was booted from Twitter and Facebook for fear that he might use the platforms to incite more violence, saw his approval rating plummet. New articles of impeachment were introduced, and McConnell’s office leaked to the press that he was considering a vote to convict. Federal law enforcement began sifting through hundreds of hours of amateur footage from January 6 to identify and arrest the people who had stormed the Capitol. Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, and Trump—who skipped the inauguration—flew off to Florida, where he seemed destined for a descent into political irrelevance and legal trouble.

But the Republicans’ flirtation with repentance was short-lived. Within months, Fox News was offering a revisionist history of January 6 and recasting the rioters as martyrs and victims of a vengeful, overreaching Justice Department. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, who’d initially blamed Trump for the riot, paid a visit to Mar-a-Lago to mend his relationship with the ex-president.

Some of the reluctance to hold Trump accountable was a function of the same old perverse political incentives—elected Republicans feared a political backlash from their base. But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him—why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.

As dismayed as Romney was by this line of thinking, he understood it. Most members of Congress don’t have security details. Their addresses are publicly available online. Romney himself had been shelling out $5,000 a day since the riot to cover private security for his family—an expense he knew most of his colleagues couldn’t afford.

By the time Democrats proposed a bipartisan commission to investigate the events of January 6, the GOP’s 180 was complete. Virtually every Republican in Congress came out in full-throated opposition to the idea. Romney, who’d been consulting with historians about how best to preserve the memory of the insurrection—he’d proposed leaving some of the damage to the Capitol unrepaired—was disappointed by his party’s posture, but he was no longer surprised. He had taken to quoting a favorite scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when he talked about his party’s whitewashing of the insurrection—twisting his face into an exaggerated expression before declaring, “Morons. I’ve got morons on my team!” To Romney, the revisionism of January 6 was almost worse than the attack itself.

In spring 2021, Romney was invited to speak at the Utah Republican Party convention, in West Valley City. Suspecting that some in the crowd might boo him, he came up with a little joke to defuse the tension. As soon as he went onstage, he’d ask the crowd of partisans, “What do you think of President Biden’s first 100 days?” When they booed in response, he’d say, “I hope you got that out of your system!”

But when Romney took the stage, he quickly realized that he’d underestimated the level of vitriol awaiting him. The heckling and booing were so loud and sustained that he could barely get a word out. As he labored to push through his prepared remarks, he became fixated on a red-faced woman in the front row who was furiously screaming at him while her child stood by her side. He paused his speech.

“Aren’t you embarrassed?” he couldn’t help but ask her from the stage.

Afterward, Romney tried to reframe it as a character-building experience—a moment in which he got to live up to his father’s example. When he was young, Mitt had watched an audience stacked with auto-union members vociferously boo his dad during a governor’s debate. George had been undeterred. “He was proud to stand for what he believed,” Romney told me. “If people aren’t angry at you, you really haven’t done anything in public life.”

But there was also something unsettling about the episode. As a former presidential candidate, he was well acquainted with heckling. Scruffy Occupy Wall Streeters had shouted down his stump speeches; gay-rights activists had “glitter bombed” him at rallies. But these were Utah Republicans—they were supposed to be his people. Model citizens, well-behaved Mormons, respectable patriots and pillars of the community, with kids and church callings and responsibilities at work. Many of them had probably been among his most enthusiastic supporters in 2012. Now they were acting like wild children. And if he was being honest with himself, there were moments up on that stage when he was afraid of them.

“There are deranged people among us,” he told me. And in Utah, “people carry guns.”

“It only takes one really disturbed person.”

He let the words hang in the air for a moment, declining to answer the question his confession begged: How long can a democracy last when its elected leaders live in fear of physical violence from their constituents?

[From the April 2023 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on a new type of extremist violence America doesn’t know how to stop]

In some ways, Romney settled most fully into his role as a senator once Trump was gone. He joined a bipartisan “gang” of lawmakers who actually seemed to enjoy legislating, and helped pass a few bills he was proud of.

He even tried to work productively within his caucus. Romney drew a distinction between the Republican colleagues he viewed as sincerely crazy and those who were faking it for votes. He was open, for instance, to partnering with Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the conspiracy-spouting, climate-change-denying, anti-vax Trump disciple, because while he could be exasperating—once, Romney told me, after listening to an extended lecture on Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business dealings, he blurted, “Ron, is there any conspiracy you don’t believe?”—you could at least count on his good faith. What Romney couldn’t stomach any longer was associating himself with people who cynically stoked distrust in democracy for selfish political reasons. “I doubt I will work with Josh Hawley on anything,” he told me.

But as Romney surveyed the crop of Republicans running for Senate in 2022, it was clear that more Hawleys were on their way. Perhaps most disconcerting was J. D. Vance, the Republican candidate in Ohio. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told me. They’d first met years earlier, after he read Vance’s best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Romney was so impressed with the book that he hosted the author at his annual Park City summit in 2018. Vance, who grew up in a poor, dysfunctional family in Appalachia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School, had seemed bright and thoughtful, with interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism. Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate, and reinvented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left” and denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” The speed of the MAGA makeover was jarring.

“I do wonder, how do you make that decision?” Romney mused to me as Vance was degrading himself on the campaign trail that summer. “How can you go over a line so stark as that—and for what?” Romney wished he could grab Vance by the shoulders and scream: This is not worth it! “It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?” The prospect of having Vance in the caucus made Romney uncomfortable. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”

By the spring of 2023, Romney had made it known to his inner circle that he very likely wouldn’t run again. He’d been leaning this way for at least a year but had kept it to himself. There were practical reasons for the coyness: He didn’t want to start hemorrhaging staffers or descend into lame-duck irrelevance. But some close to Romney wondered if he was simply being stubborn. Several Utah Republicans were already lining up to run for his seat, and the talk in political circles was that he’d struggle to win another primary. Romney, who couldn’t stand the idea of being put out to pasture, insisted that stepping down was his call. “I’ve invested a lot of money already in my political fortunes,” he told me, “and if I needed to do so again to win the primary, I would.”

But he was now at an age when he had to ruthlessly guard his time. He still had books he wanted to write, still dreamed of teaching. He wanted to spend time with Ann while they were both healthy.

Yet even as he made up his mind to leave the Senate, he struggled to walk away from politics entirely. Trump was running again, after all. The crisis wasn’t over. For months, people in his orbit—most vocally, his son Josh—had been urging him to embark on one last run for president, this time as an independent. The goal wouldn’t be to win—Romney knew that was impossible—but to mount a kind of protest against the terrible options offered by the two-party system. He also wanted to ensure that someone onstage was effectively holding Trump to account. “I was afraid that Biden, in his advanced years, would be incapable of making the argument,” he told me.

Romney relished the idea of running a presidential campaign in which he simply said whatever he thought, without regard for the political consequences. “I must admit, I’d love being on the stage with Donald Trump … and just saying, ‘That’s stupid. Why are you saying that?’ ” He nursed a fantasy in which he devoted an entire debate to asking Trump to explain why, in the early weeks of the pandemic, he’d suggested that Americans inject bleach as a treatment for COVID-19. To Romney, this comment represented the apotheosis of the former president’s idiocy, and it still bothered him that the country had simply laughed at it and moved on. “Every time Donald Trump makes a strong argument, I’d say, ‘Remind me again about the Clorox,’ ” Romney told me. “Every now and then, I would cough and go, ‘Clorox.’ ”

Romney leaves the Senate chamber after a vote, May 4, 2023. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty)

Romney almost went through with it, this maximally disruptive, personally cathartic primal scream of a presidential campaign. But he abandoned it once he realized that he’d most likely end up siphoning off votes from the Democratic nominee and ensuring a Trump victory. So, in April, Romney pivoted to a new idea: He privately approached Joe Manchin about building a new political party. They’d talked about the prospect before, but it was always hypothetical. Now Romney wanted to make it real. His goal for the yet-unnamed party (working slogan: “Stop the stupid”) would be to promote the kind of centrist policies he’d worked on with Manchin in the Senate. Manchin was himself thinking of running for president as an independent, and Romney tried to convince him this was the better play. Instead of putting forward its own doomed candidate in 2024, Romney argued, their party should gather a contingent of like-minded donors and pledge support to the candidate who came closest to aligning with its agenda. “We’d say, ‘This party’s going to endorse whichever party’s nominee isn’t stupid,’ ” Romney told me.

He acknowledged that this plan wasn’t foolproof, that maybe he’d be talked out of it. The last time we spoke about it, he was still in the brainstorming stage. What he seemed to know for sure was that he no longer fit in his current party. Throughout our two years of interviews, I heard Romney muse repeatedly about leaving the GOP. He’d stayed long after he stopped feeling at home there—long after his five sons had left—because he felt a quixotic duty to save it. This meld of moral responsibility and personal hubris is, in some ways, Romney’s defining trait. When he’s feeling sentimental, he attributes the impulse to the “Romney obligation,” and talks about the deep commitment to public service he inherited from his father. When he’s in a more introspective mood, he talks about the surge of adrenaline he feels when he’s rushing toward a crisis.

But it was hard to dispute that the battle for the GOP’s soul had been lost. And Romney had his own soul to think about. He was all too familiar with the incentive structure in which the party’s leaders were operating. He knew what it would take to keep winning, the things he would have to rationalize.

“You say, ‘Okay, I better get closer to this line, or maybe step a little bit over it. If I don’t, it’s going to be much worse,’ ” he told me. You can always convince yourself that the other party, or the other candidate, is bad enough to justify your own decision to cross that line. “And the problem is that line just keeps on getting moved, and moved, and moved.”

This article was adapted from McKay Coppins’s book Romney: A Reckoning. It appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate.”

McKay Coppins | The Atlantic

The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics

Sucker

Week Two

Total gambled: $376.00 Down $58.15

Week Three

Total gambled: $1,011.00 Down $185.40

Week Five

Total gambled: $2,206.00 Down $220.13

Week Seven

Total gambled: $3,551.00 Down $567.23

Week Eight

Total gambled: $5,321.00 Down $132.40

Week Thirteen

Total gambled: $10,941.00 Up $156.16

Week Fourteen

Total gambled: $11,841.00 Down $74.60

Week Eighteen

Total gambled: $20,511.00 Down $3,605.77

Week Nineteen

Total gambled: $22,386.00 Down $4,257.67

The Super Bowl

Total gambled: $28,206.00 Down $4,787.70

The First Couple of a Dysfunctional DHS

A Prophet’s Diagnosis

Trump Has a Warning for Spencer Cox

The Visionary of Trump 2.0

Growing Up Murdoch

A Horror Movie About an Atheist Who Won’t Shut Up

‘We’re Just Going to Have to Deal With Him’

Triumph of the Cynics

This Is Not the End of America

The Comically Terrible Rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump

The Jewish Quarterback at a Mormon College

Mitt Romney Braces for Trump’s Retribution

The Last Man in America to Change His Mind About Trump

The Most Revealing Moment of a Trump Rally

The New Trump Is Always the Old Trump

America’s Political Leaders Are Living in Fear

The Most Consequential TV Show in History

What Europe Fears

BERLIN, GERMANY

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

WARSAW, POLAND

FRANKENBERG, GERMANY

NARVA, ESTONIA

Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land

Why Republican Politicians Do Whatever Trump Says

You Should Go to a Trump Rally

Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

Total gambled: $376.00
Down $58.15

Total gambled: $1,011.00
Down $185.40

Total gambled: $2,206.00
Down $220.13

Total gambled: $3,551.00
Down $567.23

Total gambled: $5,321.00
Down $132.40

Total gambled: $10,941.00
Up $156.16

Total gambled: $11,841.00
Down $74.60

Total gambled: $20,511.00
Down $3,605.77

Total gambled: $22,386.00
Down $4,257.67

Total gambled: $28,206.00
Down $4,787.70