Stephanie McCrummen | The Atlantic

What Happened to Pam Bondi?

2026-01-20T06:00:00-05:00

Updated at 3:00 p.m. ET on January 20, 2026

By the time she faced her first oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pam Bondi had become a person she never really wanted to be. She had told a reporter once that in college she’d wanted to be a pediatrician, but she ended up becoming a lawyer. She’d said that she wasn’t sure she wanted to actually practice law, but she became a prosecutor. She’d told reporters that she “never dreamed” of running for political office, but she did that too, twice winning campaigns for Florida attorney general. She’d said that when Donald Trump eventually asked her to be U.S. attorney general, she “made it really clear” that she did not want the job. During his first term, she had confided to a friend that she wanted to be ambassador to Italy.

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But here she was in a Senate hearing room in October, a person who had once seemed so mild, so warm, so kindhearted that she’d earned the nickname “Pambi,” opening up a folder full of slap-downs, each tailored to a Democratic committee member, with notes on how to deliver them.

“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she told Senator Dick Durbin, who’d asked about the rationale for sending federal troops to his state.

“I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service,” she said to Senator Richard Blumenthal, referring to a matter for which he had apologized 15 years earlier, while dodging his question about why the Justice Department had dropped an antitrust case after lobbying by Bondi’s former firm.

“You took money, I believe, did you, from Reid Hoffman, one of Epstein’s closest confidants,” she said to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who’d asked whether the FBI was investigating suspicious financial activities related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and who later said that Bondi had “made up nonsense.”

“If you worked for me, you would have been fired,” Bondi told Senator Adam Schiff.

And on it went for hours, a calculated performance that amounted to a giant middle finger to basic notions of decorum and accountability, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered, including a fundamental one that some of Bondi’s old friends and colleagues back home in Florida had been asking. As one of them put it to me: “I keep asking myself, What the fuck happened to Pam? ”

At this point, there is little mystery about who Pam Bondi has become. She is an attorney general who does not tell Trump no. During the first year of her tenure, Bondi has carried out the most stunning transformation of the Justice Department in modern American history, turning an autonomous agency charged with upholding the U.S. Constitution into one where the rule of law is secondary to the wishes of the president.

What this has meant so far includes firing more than 230 career attorneys and other employees and accepting the resignations of at least 6,000 more, gutting the Civil Rights Division and units that investigate public corruption, and challenging core American principles such as birthright citizenship and due process. It has meant turning the might of the department against Trump’s political enemies, a growing list that includes former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Senator Schiff, a man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent, an Office Depot clerk who refused to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil, and reportedly Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and the partner of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by a federal immigration officer on January 7. It has meant providing a legal justification for the extrajudicial killings of at least 123 people suspected of smuggling drugs, and for the operation to capture the Venezuelan president, an action that opens the door to a world in which the only law is power. And it has meant becoming the face of the Epstein-files scandal, a position that could ultimately be Bondi’s undoing.

Trump’s previous attorneys general were loyalists who pursued a vision of robust executive-branch authority, but they had red lines: Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, citing ethics concerns; Bill Barr refused to say that the 2020 election had been stolen. Bondi’s willingness to do what Trump wants appears to be boundless, and yet that still might not be enough for him. Trump has reportedly been complaining in recent weeks that Bondi has not been moving as fast as he’d like in pursuing cases against his political opponents.

His frustration extends to her handling of the Epstein files, a political disaster for him that could mean legal jeopardy for her. Bondi has so far failed to comply with a federal law that required the release of all the unclassified Epstein files by December 19—millions of investigative documents known to contain not only references to Trump but potentially compromising information about some of the most powerful men in the world. After promising “maximum transparency,” Bondi has released only 12,285 out of more than 2 million documents—a delay she has blamed on the volume of the files—leading even some of Trump’s supporters to abandon him and leaving Bondi under enormous pressure. Arguably, nothing less than the future of the MAGA movement and the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution depend on what the attorney general is willing to do next.

All of which raises a question: not so much what happened to Pam Bondi, but why.

Any answer would have to come from sources other than Bondi herself. A Justice Department spokesperson rejected my requests to interview Bondi. Even as the attorney general has gone on Fox News and posted selfies with MAGA-friendly media personalities, she has not given any extended interviews with mainstream news outlets since she arrived at the Justice Department, where one of her first acts was to move from the traditional corner office of the attorney general to a far larger conference room. The space is some 100 feet long, with floor-to-ceiling windows, ornate wood paneling, and murals called The Triumph of Justice and The Defeat of Justice, the latter depicting Lady Justice as a blond woman collapsed on the ground. At this point, Bondi, who is 60, has sequestered herself within the MAGA-verse.

I went looking for the person who existed before all of that, which meant going to Tampa, where Pamela Jo Bondi grew up in a middle-class suburb between Busch Gardens and I-75, now a landscape of smoke shops, chiropractors, and strip malls moldering in the sun. Temple Terrace, a golf-course development of ranch houses and mossy oaks, was not the best or the worst neighborhood in Tampa. Bondi came from blank-slate America.

She was the oldest of three children. Her mother, Patsy, was a teacher, and her father, Joe, was also a teacher, as well as an education professor and the mayor of Temple Terrace. His grandfather had emigrated from Sicily and was a cigar maker in Ybor City, home to Tampa’s large community of Italians, Cubans, and Spaniards. Joe Bondi was an FDR Democrat, and by all accounts a generous person and the patriarch of the family. In an article in
La Gaceta, a local trilingual paper, he spoke of himself as “an underdog” who had “lived the American dream,” and said that growing up in Ybor City, he’d developed “a strong sense of togetherness—this is something I’m happy to say I’ve successfully instilled in my children.” Pam was extremely close with her father and, when he died in 2013, referred to him as “my beautiful Daddy.”

She went to the local public high school down the road, also not the best or the worst. The future attorney general had Farrah Fawcett hair, served as secretary of the student council, and lost her bid for homecoming queen. She went for three years to a college that was also down the road, the University of South Florida, where her father worked, before graduating from the University of Florida, in Gainesville, with a 3.4 GPA and a degree in criminal justice. She often said she loved children, that she wanted to have a big family.

Bondi went to law school at Stetson University, half an hour outside Tampa, later telling Florida’s Business Observer, “I wasn’t certain I wanted to practice law.” Her father urged her to try the state attorney’s office in Hillsborough County, where he had connections. She said yes, joining dozens of young prosecutors who worked in the courthouse in downtown Tampa, many of whom were women. The state attorney at the time was known to have a preference for blondes, among other eccentricities; one lawyer described the environment as the “Blond Ambition Tour.” Bondi adapted to a courthouse buzzing in the ’90s with local corruption scandals and often surreal cases involving drugged-out teenagers, fallen baseball stars, the murder of a circus performer called Lobster Boy, and flamboyant defense attorneys with names like Boom-Boom Benito.

Although most prosecutors stayed for five or so years before moving into more lucrative private practice, Bondi stayed for nearly 20, rising from misdemeanors to the felony section, where she handled high-profile murder cases, among others. Her evaluations from that time describe an earnest and hardworking prosecutor who sometimes lacked confidence. On a five-point scale, she got fives on diligence and threes, fours, and a few fives on legal acumen. “While Pam is very capable with good potential, she unnecessarily becomes too intimidated by difficult, long, or important cases. She sometimes becomes intimidated by some attorneys as well,” read one evaluation. Others said “team player” and “my right hand” and “Through some demanding times, she has learned the meaning of the word ‘sacrifice.’ ”

Colleagues and others who knew Bondi then remember her as a competent, at times excellent prosecutor who was good with juries, won many convictions, and was able to convey the moral certitude necessary to seek the death penalty. A former boyfriend, Billy Howard, called her “The Paminator.” At the same time, he told me, “Pam was very well liked—that is something she worked at. She liked to be liked.” Howard said that during their time together, he was at a high point in his career and also a “big partier.” He said that Pam called his boss, saying she was worried about Howard, a moment he now credits with possibly saving his life. “A part of her was genuine and caring and concerned, and it helped me,” he said.

Many others recalled how kind she could be, how accommodating, how Pambi. One courthouse colleague remembered how a relative of a crime victim mistook Bondi for a secretary and asked her to copy some papers, which Bondi did without hesitating or correcting the woman. “She had humility,” said this person, who, like some others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity because they feared retribution. Patrick Manteiga, the publisher of La Gaceta, remembered seeing Bondi at an annual event called the Governor’s Luncheon, part of the kickoff for the state fair. She was standing next to the state attorney at the time, Mark Ober, who became one of Bondi’s most important mentors. Ober was shaking hands, while Bondi supplied him with hand sanitizer.

Besides her willing persona, what began to distinguish Bondi from the courthouse crowd were her appearances on local television. She became the spokesperson for the state attorney’s office, facing cameras during big trials, becoming friendly with reporters. Bondi was good at it, and by 2000, she was making her first appearance on the Today show, talking about a high-profile murder case she had prosecuted. She began getting booked as a talking head on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

Florida politics was trending Republican with Jeb Bush’s election as governor. Though no one I spoke with could recall Bondi expressing strong ideological views—if anything, she seemed fairly liberal—it was around this time that she switched her party registration from Democratic to Republican. She became friendly with Sean Hannity. Soon, Fox News was sending black cars to drive her to the studio to talk about sensational cases such as that of Terri Schiavo, the comatose Florida woman who became the center of a national political drama over whether to end life support. Producers would give Bondi a tape of her appearances afterward, or she’d tell friends to record her segments, and they would gather in a living room and rewatch them. “She’d be like, ‘Did I sound stupid the way I said that?’ ” a close friend from that time told me.

As Bondi’s local fame grew, this side of her personality grew as well, people who knew her said. She could be hyper-defensive and hyper-sensitive to criticism. “The overwhelming thing you have to understand about Pam is her debilitating insecurity—she was always assuming someone was talking about her,” the close friend told me. “Then she’d overcompensate.” At the same time, Bondi was socially ambitious, excelling at the cocktail-party art of remembering details about people—asking about kids, a sick mother—while looking past them at the more powerful person she wanted to meet. People who experienced this spoke of being “Bondied.” She could be thoughtful and kind, yet she would exile friends at the first hint of disloyalty. She needed constant reassurance, and sometimes this came from dogs.

Pam Bondi loves dogs. Always had them, one after another. She got involved with dog shelters and dog rescue, and once pulled off to the side of a busy road and got out of her car to chase down a stray. Another dog she helped was a Saint Bernard named Master Tank. She adopted him from a shelter after he was lost during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, not long after her own Saint Bernard had died. The story has been told but bears repeating. Master Tank belonged to Steve and Dorreen Couture and their grandson, who was 4, recovering from the murder-suicide of his parents and losing his dog during the storm. Bondi said the dog was a “walking skeleton” and “dying from heartworms” when she adopted him. The Coutures eventually tracked down Master Tank, but instead of giving him back, Bondi hired a lawyer, who accused the Coutures of abusing the dog, which Bondi had renamed Noah. “She lied,” Dorreen told a Palm Beach Post columnist years later. “My little grandson begged her to take the dog home, and she refused. She thought she would just wear us down. That we were unstable people and would just quit.” The case was settled out of court, with Bondi securing visitation rights, but she never did visit. She got another dog.

St. Petersburg Times / ZUMA Press / Alamy

Bondi with Master Tank in September 2005. She adopted the Saint Bernard after Hurricane Katrina but ultimately had to return him to his original family.

Meanwhile, Bondi was attracting more attention, including, in 2006, that of Donald Trump, who was at the peak of his TV celebrity with The Apprentice. Bondi had been defending him on TV during his dispute with the town of Palm Beach over an enormous American flag he was flying at Mar-a-Lago. As Bondi would later tell the story, Trump called her after one such appearance. “He wanted to thank me,” she recalled in an interview with Lara Trump. “All he cared about was America.”

By 2009, Bondi had also befriended a Florida political operative named Adam Goodman. They had met on a film set where Goodman, a Republican whose specialty was television, was directing an ad for Bondi’s boss, Mark Ober. She was behind the scenes, and Goodman remembers that she kept correcting him whenever he used the word jail. “Prison,” she would say. Goodman had seen Bondi on air, and when the party needed a candidate for Florida attorney general, he thought of her. “I look at things politically, through the lens of performance,” he told me. “Both of us were into the power of performance to compel things to happen.” It helped that Bondi was familiar to voters in the largest media market in the state. If she carried Hillsborough County, she would win.

When Goodman pressed Bondi to run, she told him she had never considered it and needed time to think. He thought she might say no, but then she said yes. Goodman, who remains a Bondi ally, recalled how she “knocked it out of the park” when they filmed one of her first three-minute ads. “She loves the camera, and the camera loves her,” he said, then corrected himself. “She loves the camera because she knows the camera loves her.”

As time went on, reporters began noticing another quality Bondi had developed. Manteiga remembered calling her before he printed a critical story during the campaign. “And she gets on the phone with me, and she’s crying—‘Don’t print this article,’ ” Manteiga told me. “Crying, crying.” He hung up the phone and called a friend who worked for the St. Petersburg Times. “I said she was crying, and he said, ‘Yeah, she does that to us too.’ I called another reporter, and he said, ‘Yeah, she’s done that to me.’ ”

People who knew Bondi during her eight years as Florida’s attorney general tend to make two observations about her. On the one hand, she seemed to have no burning political passions, other than saving dogs. No one I spoke with could point to some dramatic shift in her outlook, or to any newly blossoming conservative values. Privately, she did not express any. She did not seem to hate Barack Obama, subscribe to birtherism, or rail against the Affordable Care Act. She was not worried about the legalization of gay marriage, or gay adoption, or other issues animating the GOP base at the time.

“We talked for an hour about our bunions,” one GOP political operative recalled. “She was not ideological.”

On the other hand, Bondi was willing to make herself useful to the party. She became the public face of a multistate challenge to the ACA. She began wearing a necklace with little elephants. She defended Florida’s bans on gay adoption and gay marriage, arguing in a brief that the latter would cause “significant public harm,” even though she had many gay friends back in Tampa.

This was when some of Bondi’s friends began to wonder what was happening with her. When Bondi was home and ran into people who questioned her position, she would respond with some version of “I had to do it for the party,” or an exhausted “You have no idea how politics works,” or “I was elected to enforce the laws.” When one friend pressed her further, arguing that other attorneys general were refusing to enforce laws denying gay people rights, and telling her how some of her closest friends felt personally betrayed by what she was doing, Bondi said, “You know me. I love gay people. You know my heart.” Sometimes there were tears.

As state attorney general, Bondi was widely praised for her crackdown on opioid pill mills and for her work combatting human trafficking. But more and more, her success hinged on her willingness to be a spokesperson for the party, especially on Fox News. She appeared regularly as a legal commentator on Hannity, Fox & Friends, America Reports, and The Five, where she had a three-day stint as a guest host. “She was an accomplished, well-spoken carrier of the message,” the GOP operative, who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, told me, recalling Bondi’s role as a Romney surrogate. “Pam was somebody you could put out for almost anything,” this person said. “She was somebody you could put on a Sunday show.”

Charles Dharapak / AP

Bondi, then Florida’s attorney general, campaigns with Mitt and Ann Romney in October 2012.

Bondi’s time in office coincided with a dramatic rise in lobbying of state attorneys general. Historically, the office had been a kind of political backwater. But in the years following the 1998 multistate settlement against tobacco companies, corporations aiming to head off similar litigation began donating to attorney-general campaigns and sponsoring lavish conferences for them at resorts in California or Hawaii. Bondi attended many of them. And many of her actions tracked closely with the wishes of corporate lobbyists and campaign donors.

The most well known of these was a decision by her office to drop a formal investigation into fraud and deceptive practices at Trump University, which came after Bondi had solicited a $25,000 donation from Trump’s foundation. (A state ethics commission later stated that the timing of the decision “may raise suspicions” but found no evidence that Bondi had been “involved with the investigation or decisions regarding Trump University.”)

Soon after taking office, Bondi also pushed out two attorneys who had been among the first in the nation to expose fraudulent practices at so-called foreclosure mills; their investigation found that law firms and lending companies were using false documents to monetize foreclosures at the height of the subprime-mortgage crisis. (A Florida inspector general found “no evidence of wrongdoing” by Bondi or her department.)

Documents obtained by The New York Times showed that after being lobbied by the firm Dickstein Shapiro, Bondi declined to prosecute a hospital-bill-collection company accused of abusive practices, an online school accused of “unconscionable sales practices,” and online travel-reservation companies accused by Bondi’s own predecessor of improperly withholding taxes. Bondi has said that she was not unduly influenced, stating at the time that “absolutely no access to me or my staff is going to have any bearing on my efforts to protect Floridians.”

Along with the flood of corporate money to attorneys general came a sharp rise in partisanship, a trend that Bondi helped accelerate. This first became obvious at an annual conference of the National Association of Attorneys General, an event where members would elect a new president. Typically, the elections were a low-stakes formality, the title rotating regionally and, for the most part, alternating between Democrats and Republicans. But one year, Bondi threw herself into contention, mounting a mini-campaign against Jim Hood of Mississippi, a Democrat, calling GOP conferees as they sat around tables. “Are you with me?” she would ask. “It was bizarre,” a Republican attorney general from that time told me. “It was a popularity contest, like in high school. She wanted the recognition.”

Bondi lost, but the move left bitter feelings, and helped diminish the sense of trust at the national association. Bondi was eventually elected to head the Republican Attorneys General Association, where she helped lead an effort to do away with another long-standing norm, that the two parties would not fund campaigns against their incumbent colleagues. The idea was that incumbents often cooperated in a bipartisan way on complex, multistate litigation, and getting rid of them would only hinder those efforts. Bondi was part of a group that seemed to simply want more GOP wins.

“I think she did more to increase partisanship among AGs than any single AG during my tenure,” Chris Toth, an independent who led the national association, told me. “And I just don’t understand why she did that.”

Bondi’s personal life during this time was difficult. Her engagement to a wealthy ophthalmologist ended. Her father died. Some friendships became strained. In an interview during her first term, Bondi described spending 13 hours a day at the office and heading home to a rented condo in Tallahassee. She was becoming a person who said of her life, “It’s been lonely, very lonely,” and who said of her dog Luke, another Saint Bernard, “He’s my company.” Bondi would bring Luke to work. She bought him a therapeutic mattress for car trips back to Tampa.

She began bringing rescue dogs to cabinet meetings, trying to get them adopted, and posting about them on Instagram—a puppy named Baker, a shepherd mix named Zeke. “I was thrilled to introduce Rosie, the gorgeous rescue Boxer mix, at the cabinet meeting yesterday,” she posted. “Rosie is looking for a forever home.”

During this time, Bondi was becoming more entrenched in Republican circles, which for her would come to mean Trump’s circles. When she ran for reelection in 2014, Trump threw her a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. When the 2016 presidential primary arrived, Goodman, the operative who had first gotten her into politics, encouraged her to endorse Trump even though establishment Republicans were still keeping their distance. If Trump won, he told her, the endorsement could give her status in his administration.

“She calls me out of the blue, 9 a.m. one morning,” Goodman told me. “She said, ‘I’m going to pick you up in five minutes.’ ” Trump was holding a rally in Tampa that day in March. “She said, ‘We’re going to the convention center, and I’m going to endorse Trump, and I need your help on talking points.’ I’m scribbling as we go to the convention center. It was one of those high-intensity moments and, turned out, historic moments.” In her speech, Bondi spoke of her yearslong friendship with Trump; Trump spoke of their “great relationship.”

And that was how Bondi became a person standing on the stage of the Republican National Convention in Ohio. Before a cheering prime-time audience, she declared that she loved “Donald.” She pointed to someone holding a sign calling for Hillary Clinton to go to prison. Clinton had criticized Bondi over her handling of the Trump University complaints.

“ ‘Lock her up,’ ” Bondi said. “I love that.”

“Oh, Pam, why did you say that?” Chris Toth remembered saying to the television at that very moment. He was certain that she knew better.

It was around this time that Bondi’s old friends began speaking of her as someone they could no longer recognize.

“She was loved around here, just so sweet,” the courthouse colleague said. “People who knew the old Pam, we just can’t resolve it.”

“I thought, Do I really know this person? ” the close friend remembered thinking after Bondi endorsed Trump.

The person they thought they knew was venturing ever deeper into Trump’s world. Though Bondi did not get a position in his first administration, in a way, she got something better. When she finished her second term as Florida attorney general, she joined a lobbying firm called Ballard Partners, which was co-led at the time by Trump’s 2016 Florida campaign manager, Susie Wiles, who would go on to run his 2024 campaign and is now his chief of staff.

Soon Bondi was making more money than she ever had in her life. She lobbied for Qatar. She lobbied for Amazon. She lobbied for Uber. And eventually she lobbied for Trump, joining his defense team during his first impeachment trial. She helped launch a group called Women for Trump during the 2020 campaign, greeting supporters at a mall in Pennsylvania. When Trump contested the 2020 election results, Bondi was one of the first high-profile figures to amplify the lie that the race had been stolen, rushing to Philadelphia with the Trump-campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski the day after the election, where she declared before a small crowd that Trump had “won Pennsylvania” even as votes were still being counted. Bondi went on Fox News, claiming that there was “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots,” though she never signed her name to lawsuits with those allegations, which could have gotten her disbarred.

After rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Bondi remained a willing Trump operative. In testimony before the House select committee investigating the insurrection the next year, Cassidy Hutchinson, who had been an aide to then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, said that Bondi was among the Trump surrogates who had called her prior to her appearances before the committee to shore up her loyalty to Trump, or, as they often put it, “the family.” Hutchinson said the message was that she would be “taken care of” if she protected Trump, and that they could “ruin her life” if she did not. Bondi, whom Hutchinson knew from their encounters at the White House, assumed a kind of caretaker role, calling and texting her with job opportunities in Trump world.

[From the February 2026 issue: Jamie Thompson on January 6, five years later]

“This is Susie Wiles,” Bondi messaged her on Signal at one point, providing Wiles’s email address. “She’s my best friend. She’s super sweet. She’s going to love you.”

“Susie, Matt Schlapp and I had dinner with POTUS at Mar-a-Lago tonight,” read another Signal message, referring to Wiles and a GOP operative, Hutchinson recalled. “Call Matt next week. He has a job for you that we all think you’d be great in. You are the best. Keep up the good work. Love and miss you.” (Through the Justice Department spokesperson, Bondi declined to comment on Hutchinson’s testimony. At the time, she appeared on Fox News, calling the hearings “show trials.”)

Under pressure, Hutchinson wrestled with her conscience and ultimately broke away from Trump. Bondi appeared not to wrestle. She remained inside Trump world, which meant making at least $1 million at Ballard and nearly $3 million from shares in the Trump Media & Technology Group for consulting on the merger that created the company, according to financial disclosures covering the two years prior to her nomination as attorney general.

She would make another $520,000 in consulting fees from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, the disclosures show, where her work in the run-up to the 2024 election forecast the kind of attorney general she was willing to be. Bondi signed on to a brief supporting absolute presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for Trump when he was being investigated for 2020-election interference. In public letters and press releases, she backed a Georgia election-board official who’d claimed authority to unilaterally delay or deny the certification of election results. In April 2024, she warned election officials to do more to ensure that noncitizens could not vote, embracing a long-debunked idea that has been used to make voting more difficult and to contest election results.

Then came the day that Trump won reelection. And the day not long after that when his first nominee for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew amid concerns that allegations of sexual misconduct and drug use would sink his confirmation. And the day not long after that, the one that Bondi said she never expected would come, when Trump called and asked her to be his attorney general.

At first, she said no. She said she wanted to “go back to my great life in Florida.”

Then, as she often had, Pam Bondi said yes.

As she would later tell Lara Trump, the president, “in his way, talked me into doing this.” Bondi said that she was so devoted to Trump that if he asked her to answer the phones, “I would become the best switchboard operator ever.”

In Tampa, where she had built a wall around her home in one of the city’s best neighborhoods, black SUVs began to let the neighbors know when she was in town. In Washington, D.C., Bondi was easily confirmed, despite concerns among Democrats that she’d declined to acknowledge Trump had lost the 2020 election, and that her first loyalty would be to the president instead of the law. “I need to know that you would tell the president no if you’re asked to do something that is wrong, illegal, or unconstitutional,” Dick Durbin said during her confirmation hearing. Bondi responded that she would “enforce the law fairly and evenhandedly.” She said that the department “must be independent and must act independently” and that “politics will not play a part.”

After Bondi was sworn in, she moved her office into the large, ornate conference room, where Joseph Tirrell, the director of the department’s ethics office, soon met her and her then–chief of staff for their first ethics briefing. Tirrell had worked in the ethics office since 2018, and had briefed the previous AG in the traditional corner office. “I had been prepared, but it was still a bit shocking,” he told me.

Tirrell said that Bondi was courteous as he went over various regulations. She had no concerns until he began explaining restrictions around accepting gifts, specifically challenge coins, the metal medallions that are given out by the military, police departments, the FBI, and other components within the Justice Department, to signify camaraderie. Trump has displayed his own collection in the Oval Office. According to Tirrell, Bondi and her chief of staff had questions about the restrictions, and a 10-minute conversation ensued. She wanted the coins.

“They were like, ‘We still need to dig deeper on this,’ ” Tirrell told me. “That was the only real back-and-forth we had.” (Through her spokesperson, Bondi said, “No ethics advice was ever overruled.”)

Tirrell said that in the weeks that followed the meeting, Bondi pressed to keep other gifts even after he told her she couldn’t. A box of cigars. A FIFA World Cup soccer ball. Tirrell was going back and forth with Bondi’s office about the ball when he was fired, a moment he had been half-expecting; he had recently approved pro bono legal services for then–Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s role in January 6 and now is on Trump’s enemies list. Tirrell is among many employees suing the department over their dismissals, believing that they were motivated by Trump’s need for retribution rather than any wrongdoing. Bondi has said the opposite—that she is “ending the weaponization” of the department. (The Justice Department is attempting to get Tirrell’s case dismissed.)

[From the February 2026 issue: Franklin Foer on Donald Trump’s destruction of the civil service]

Standing in the Great Hall when Trump visited the Justice Department in March 2025, she proclaimed that “we are going to fight to keep America safe again,” and called Trump the “greatest president in the history of our country.”

“We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump,” she said.

By the end of her first year, Bondi had taken a litany of actions pleasing to the White House. She said yes to dropping the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, allegedly in exchange for his cooperation with Trump’s deportation plans, over objections from senior prosecutors who resigned rather than cooperate; she said yes to the firing of career prosecutors even tangentially involved with investigations concerning Trump; and she said yes to an ongoing raft of pardons, including for at least 1,500 January 6 rioters, as well as dozens of MAGA loyalists, white-collar criminals, drug dealers, and business and political allies of Trump’s. Bondi defended the deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans. And she publicly stood by her then–acting deputy, Emil Bove, even after he allegedly said that colleagues might have to tell a federal court, “Fuck you,” a moment described in a whistleblower complaint. (The Justice Department declined to comment on the incident, due to ongoing litigation.) Bove is now a federal judge.

“That would be the Honorable Judge Emil J. Bove III to you,” Bondi said to Sheldon Whitehouse during the Senate oversight hearing in October.

Bondi kept saying yes, with one possible exception.

According to reporting by multiple outlets, Bondi had quietly raised concerns about the case against Comey, the former FBI director, after federal prosecutors in Virginia concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

For a moment, it seemed that Bondi might say no.

But Trump was relentless. He forced the resignation of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. He sent a Truth Social message to “Pam,” which he accidentally posted publicly. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???” he wrote, referring to Senator Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and calling them all “guilty as hell.” “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Ultimately, Bondi said yes.

Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters

Bondi and Trump at a roundtable discussion at the White House in October 2025

She called reports of her hesitation over Comey a “flat out lie.” Trump appointed a new, inexperienced prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, who moved forward with the indictment. A judge dismissed the case on the grounds that Halligan had been unlawfully appointed, but the Justice Department appealed the decision.

What the loyalty of Pam Bondi might require her to do next remains an open question, especially after her clumsy handling of the Epstein files. After Trump had suggested during his campaign that he would release the files, Bondi went on Fox News in February 2025 and said that a supposed Epstein client list was “on my desk,” implying that documents were about to be released. Then she invited pro-Trump social-media influencers to the White House and handed out thick binders branded “The Epstein Files: Phase 1,” a moment that immediately backfired because the binders contained no client list and little new information. Many of the influencers criticized the move as a publicity stunt that made a mockery of Epstein’s victims, and some called for Bondi to be fired. Then Bondi backtracked, issuing a joint statement with the FBI saying that in fact there was no client list, which only further enraged a MAGA faction that has been marinating for years in the Epstein scandal and conspiracy theories about global child-trafficking rings. And then came the bipartisan legislation that required Bondi to release the files.

Now she faces an exquisite dilemma: how to comply with the law while also somehow satisfying Trump, who has given conflicting statements about the files. He has called the whole matter a “Democrat hoax,” but eventually supported the legislation requiring the release, saying that “we have nothing to hide.” He has more recently lamented that documents released so far are destroying the reputations of people who “innocently met” Epstein. Trump is exasperated that the issue won’t go away and, according to The Wall Street Journal, has blamed Bondi for making the situation worse. Even Bondi’s friend Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, has said that the attorney general “whiffed” on the matter. When I asked the White House if I could speak with Wiles, or any allies of Bondi’s, I got no response for weeks. A spokesperson eventually emailed statements praising Bondi from Trump, Wiles, Vice President J. D. Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, all of which had already appeared in the Journal.

Will Bondi continue to delay the full release of the documents, risking contempt charges? Will she resign and take the blame for the fiasco? Is it possible that Bondi’s red line is not the prosecution of the president’s political enemies, or the killing of 123 people who may or may not have been drug smugglers, or the ransacking of the Justice Department, or the undermining of the Constitution, but the prospect of her own ruin? How far is Bondi willing to go for Trump?

With midterms coming, would she say yes to deploying federal monitors to interfere at polling stations? Yes to challenging election results?

Can Pam Bondi say no?

She has new friends now, a support group of women who have also said yes to Trump, including Lara Trump and Tulsi Gabbard. “We text a lot,” Bondi told Katie Miller, a former Trump-administration aide and the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, on her podcast last year. “We all support each other, and have each other’s backs.”

In Tampa, Bondi’s old friends are still trying to figure out what happened to the person they remember, but one of them, the close friend, told me that she has finally stopped trying. At this point, she knows. She has been friends with Bondi since their days at the courthouse in Tampa, and on through Bondi’s time as Florida attorney general, her decision to endorse Trump, and several years after that. She said that she loved Pam, that she had tried to understand Pam, to support her, to care about her, and maybe also to excuse her. She said that she is distressed by what she believes Bondi is doing to the rule of law in America, and distressed to have concluded why.

“She went cheap for power,” the friend decided, and now she has only one question left. “Was it worth it?”

This article previously misstated the location of Stetson University law school. The article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “Never Say No.”

Charlie Kirk and the ‘Third Great Awakening’

2025-09-27T07:00:00-04:00

In the two weeks since Charlie Kirk’s killing, Trump-administration officials and allies have not only promised a sweeping crackdown on liberal groups. They have marshaled the language of a rising charismatic Christian movement to describe their political agenda as a cosmic battle against the forces of evil.

At Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the moment at hand as “not a political war” and “not even a cultural war—it’s a spiritual war.” The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson called out the heads of the Justice Department, the State Department, and the newly rebranded “Department of War”: “God has instituted them. God has given them power over our nation and our land,” he told the crowd of roughly 70,000 people at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. “May we pray that our rulers here—rightfully instituted and given power by our God—wield the sword for the terror of evil men in our nation.” Holding up a rosary, the far-right activist Jack Posobiec asked the crowd: “Are you ready to put on the full armor of God and face the evil in high places and the spiritual warfare before us? Then put on the full armor of God. Do it now. Now is the time. This is the place.”

The exception was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who said that she forgave Kirk’s killer because “it is what Christ did, and is what Charlie would do,” and that “the answer to hate is not hate.” Two days after Kirk had been shot and killed on a Utah college campus, though, she, too, had said that “the spiritual warfare is palpable.”

[From the February 2025 issue: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

The proliferation of this kind of language is a sign of the growing momentum of a movement often known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which has become the vanguard of the broader Christian right, and whose ideas Kirk had begun to embrace before his death. Followers believe that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit is under way, a third “Great Awakening” that is raising up new apostles and prophets and an army of God; for them, spiritual warfare is a matter of combatting demonic forces and bringing all of government and society under God’s dominion. At this point, concepts popularized by the NAR have spread to churches in cities and towns across the country, supplying Donald Trump with millions of followers who believe that God anointed him to usher in a new Christendom.

The prophets and apostles of the NAR often speak of a time when spiritual warfare will break out “in the natural,” meaning real life, giving rise to a “warrior generation,” as one prominent prophet, Rick Joyner, has put it. He has written about a “new breed of Christians” and described how “churches will start being thought of more as military bases than congregations.” Many NAR leaders who rallied their followers to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, saw the insurrection as a form of spiritual warfare. And although they have not called for actual warfare in response to Kirk’s killing, leaders have framed the assassination as the work of demonic forces rising against God’s kingdom.

On his podcast, Lance Wallnau, an influential NAR leader who described Kirk as a friend, called Kirk “the first martyr of the third Great Awakening.” He and others compared Kirk to the biblical figure Stephen, who was stoned to death by a Jewish council for preaching the Gospel. They said that Kirk was killed by satanic forces. They described leftist radicalization as a “demonic evil spreading across America like a cancer,” in the words of Sean Feucht, a popular singer in the movement. They cast Kirk’s political opponents as “enemies of the true cross,” as Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts put it.

“Christians must learn to hate again,” a Texas pastor posted on X, citing a psalm that reads, “Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?”

[Read: The Christian radicals are coming]

“The preacher in Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for love and a time for hate, a time for war and a time for peace,” Doug Wilson, a theologian who leads a network of churches, including one that Hegseth attends, posted on social media. “This is not the time for love and peace.”

Similar messages could be found in churches across the country after Kirk’s killing, including a square-angled beige-brick building called Church on the Rock that I visited in Oklahoma City on the Sunday after his death. The pastor there that day, Judith Benefiel, told the congregation of a few hundred people that “it was evil that took him out—and the Bible says that we don’t wrestle with flesh and blood but against principalities and powers. Amen?”

Benefiel said that evil was “trying to consume our nation,” that Kirk was martyred for fighting against it. “I don’t want to live in a country where Christians are martyred.”

“God told us: Go and possess the earth,” she said. “Who will rise up? Who will rise up? How far are you willing to go for the Lord?”

Although Kirk was best known for his organization Turning Point USA, which swept droves of college students into the MAGA movement, in more recent years he’d founded TPUSA Faith, which tapped into and mobilized the energy gathering in this realm of charismatic Christianity. At the time of his death, Kirk had embraced a concept popularized by NAR leaders called the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” the idea that Christians are called to dominate seven spheres of society, from government to education to business; Turning Point Faith had an arm devoted to each sphere, according to Matthew Boedy, the author of a forthcoming book that describes how Kirk turned the mandate into a “central organizing element of the Trump era.” Kirk spoke often of creating “biblical citizens.” He argued that the separation of Church and state is a “fabrication” that was “made up by secular humanists.” He spoke of God’s design for humanity—traditional marriage, two genders, biblical education—as “beautiful” and “true.” He described Democratic leaders as “maggots, vermin, and swine” and said that the Democratic Party “supports everything that God hates.”

[Read: What Charlie Kirk told me about his legacy]

The question remains how grassroots believers will understand and respond to the calls for spiritual battle that have only ratcheted up in recent weeks. Within days of Kirk’s death, followers of his had already taken up the cause in one form or another. In Oklahoma City, a man named Devin Shipman had set up his own protest on a grassy corner in front of a suburban veterinary clinic whose owner had reportedly written that Kirk was a “right wing stupid fuck MAGA activist” and asked, “Could we actually be getting smart and culling the sick ones!!!” The veterinarian’s name was on a growing list of people accused of saying critical things of Kirk, which was circulating on social media and would eventually gather millions of views. Shipman told me that he had seen the vet’s post on Facebook, gotten angry, and prayed to God, asking if he should print the veterinarian’s words on a four-by-eight-foot banner and post it in front of the clinic to expose a person he considered to be “a symptom of pure, unchecked evil.”

“I didn’t get told no,” Shipman said, and so he’d been sitting in a lawn chair in front of the banner every day since the Friday after Kirk’s killing, and now it was Monday.

He said that he definitely believed that a spiritual battle was under way, and that Jesus Christ could show up at any moment. A Newsmax personality broadcast Shipman’s vigil live to his 800,000 social-media followers. After that, at least a dozen people had stopped by to support Shipman’s effort, staking American flags in the grass. At this point, two men were sitting with Shipman, all three of them armed with guns. Shipman’s was under his sun hat in the grass. They waved at drivers who passed by honking their horns or pulled into the parking lot.

“Thank you for what you’re doing,” said a woman who had walked over with her son. “I’ve been getting the word out.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the son, a skinny teenager wearing a large cross necklace. He shook Shipman’s hand.

More cars passed and honked. The men talked about Kirk’s killing and what it meant. “Tucker said we are seeing spiritual war spilling over into the natural,” said the man sitting to Shipman’s right, Paul Ainsworth, referring to Tucker Carlson. “The evil side of things has had their way for a long time. They haven’t gotten pushback. They crossed a line here.”

By 5 p.m., the men had decided that they’d accomplished their mission. The veterinary clinic had been shut down all day; a sign said closed for business. They folded up the banner. “I guess he was successful,” Ainsworth said, referring to Shipman’s idea. “This guy’s gone.”

The Message Is ‘We Can Take Your Children’

2025-07-16T06:00:00-04:00

In the Trump administration’s escalating effort to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, next up was Brian, age 7, who took a seat alone before a judge in a Manhattan courtroom recently. His shirt was pressed, his posture slumped.

“Would you like some candy?” the judge asked.

“No,” the boy said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Do you speak French?” the judge said, reading the boy’s last name.

“No, English,” said the boy, who was among more than a dozen children in the early stages of removal proceedings that morning, most in court without lawyers, and nearly all of them stuck in the custody of a protective agency called the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR.

What was supposed to be happening—according to ORR’s legal mandate, child-welfare experts, and a long-standing bipartisan consensus that all children deserve special protection—was reunification. When a migrant child is unaccompanied, as Brian was, immigration authorities are supposed to refer them to ORR shelters, where caseworkers are supposed to quickly place them with vetted sponsors in the U.S., usually parents or relatives, at which point the child’s advocates often pursue some form of relief from deportation.

On this Wednesday in May, though, Donald Trump was president again, the same Trump who had separated children from parents during his first term, with the same adviser, Stephen Miller, who had defended the practice even as the public was revolting against images of children penned behind chain-link fences. “No nation can have a policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” Miller had said.

[From the September 2022 issue: An American catastrophe]

Six months into Trump’s second term, children are once again fair game, according to dozens of lawyers, advocates, shelter operators, case managers, and others I spoke with in recent weeks. More systematically than in his first term, Trump’s administration is reaching into the federal immigration bureaucracy to roll back an array of protections for undocumented children, not only recent arrivals but also those who have only ever known life in this country. More and more, children are being picked up on family vacations, at traffic stops, and at worksites, and winding up in detention.

Since March, at least 150 children have been sent to a newly reopened Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Dilley, Texas, whose staff sometimes refer to them as “inmates,” according to two lawyers who visited recently. Another 2,400 children are currently stranded in the ORR shelter system, a situation becoming more distressing to families by the day.

Instead of being reunified with sponsors, children are being held for longer and longer periods of time, ORR figures show—an average of 35 days in January had become 191 days by May, when Brian was summoned to court.

The judge turned to a video screen, where a child advocate explained that the boy was still “pending reunification” with a known relative in the U.S.

“They still need ID verification and a DNA test,” the advocate told the judge, referring to an array of new sponsor requirements, including U.S. identification and income verification, that the administration says are meant to keep children safe from traffickers but are blocking even biological mothers and fathers from claiming their children. At this point, parents are submitting library cards, baptismal records, family photos, and whatever else they have in an attempt to get their children out. The judge turned to Brian.

“That lady on the screen? She is trying to reunify you with your sponsor so you can be released,” the judge explained.

She gave the boy a new court date, a few months later, and this is how it went all morning as a parade of children faced the bench alone.

A teenage girl with a long braid: “The child is pending placement,” the advocate said.

A young boy videoconferencing in from a shelter in upstate New York: “Angel is awaiting reunification,” the advocate said.

A girl in jeans and a T-shirt who spoke only the Guatemalan Indigenous language K’iche’: pending reunification. The judge addressed the girl through an interpreter.

“Here is a list of low-cost attorneys,” the judge said as the clerk handed her a sheet of paper with names. “Maybe you can contact them.”

“Okay, very good,” the girl said.

The judge gave a hearing date.

“Okay, very good,” the girl said.

“Any questions?” the judge said.

“Nothing,” the girl said, and then she and the other children walked out of the courtroom and out of public sight.

What is Donald Trump planning to do with undocumented children? Not just those who recently crossed the border but the hundreds of thousands more who are going to school, working jobs, and otherwise living versions of American lives in cities and towns across the country?

Many attorneys told me that the emerging picture reminds them of the early days of Trump’s first family-separation policy, when shelter operators and others close to the system were not sure whether the children coming into their care represented a one-off situation or a pattern. “We noticed it in El Paso first, then it came out a year later that that was the official policy,” Imelda Maynard, the director of legal services for the group Estrella del Paso, told me. “Right now you have a lot of practitioners saying, ‘Yeah, I’m noticing this.’ But there’s nothing officially out yet.”

So far, the administration is rushing children into removal proceedings, blocking paths they have had to legal status, and trying to cancel what federal funding exists for their legal representation. The Department of Homeland Security is sending investigators to their homes. And the Justice Department has moved to end a decades-old legal settlement that establishes standards for the care and release of children held in ICE detention centers, which is where more and more children are heading.

In recent weeks, ICE agents have been picking up children when their parents are arrested and sending them either into the ORR system or to the ICE detention facility in Dilley, which reopened in March, nine months after the Biden administration had shut it down. The 2,400-bed facility, run by a private prison company, is called a “family detention” center—a government euphemism for what is happening. A boy may be detained with his mother at Dilley but separated from his father and siblings, for example.

Leecia Welch, a lawyer for the advocacy group Children’s Rights, visited the facility in June. She told me that out of the roughly 300 detainees there at the time, more than half were children, including some who had begun exhibiting distressing behaviors: a toddler who kept throwing himself on the floor, a young child who had lost eight pounds, others who were expressing suicidal thoughts. Although the number of children in federal custody is still relatively small, the administration is planning for it to rise: The new budget for ICE sets aside $45 billion to build more detention facilities across the country, including ones for family detention. The budget includes additional funding for something called “promoting family unity,” which involves detaining children with their parent for the duration of that parent’s removal proceedings—or, as the budget language reads, “detaining such an alien with the alien’s child.”

Whether the administration is willing to conduct large-scale deportations of children remains to be seen, but lawyers and others are coming to believe that large-scale detentions may be the goal—a means of ramping up psychological pressure on immigrant families to leave the country.

“The message is ‘We can take your children,’” Andrew Rankin, an immigration attorney in Memphis, told me. “The message is ‘We have the power.’ They want to scare the daylights out of people.”

Last year, as Trump campaigned for a second term, he insisted that he was going to save migrant children. In addition to blasting the Biden administration for allowing millions of people to enter the country, Trump began falsely claiming that the administration had “lost” migrant children—a number that started out at 80,000, then nearly doubled to 150,000 before Trump settled on 325,000. He repeatedly said that they had been trafficked and raped, and that some were dead. The narrative fed into a broader set of conspiracy theories among Trump followers about an underground child-sex-trafficking ring involving high-profile Democrats.

[Read: The self-deportation psyop]

“We’re going to rescue those children,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News in January, describing their lives in the U.S. as “hell.” “No one’s going to stop us.”

In reality, more than 300,000 children who crossed the border without a parent or guardian during both the Trump and Biden administrations were processed by ORR. They were never “lost” in the sense that Trump claimed. A 2023 New York Times investigation did find that thousands of those children wound up working in chicken plants, cereal factories, slaughterhouses, and other dangerous jobs. A 2024 Homeland Security inspector general’s report found that ORR had in some instances failed to thoroughly vet sponsors or follow up with children, leaving them vulnerable to trafficking, among other lapses that the Trump administration seized upon.

But instead of taking steps to address the problem of child labor in the U.S., the administration is using the “lost children” narrative as a pretext to transform ORR, a protective agency, into an enforcement tool for ICE.

Echoing Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose Health and Human Services Department oversees ORR, claimed in May that the refugee office had become a “collaborator in child trafficking” and pledged full cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security to “find” the lost children, obliterating a firewall that has existed between protective and enforcement agencies, and opening up a huge trove of data on migrant children and their sponsors. A former DHS official now heads the refugee agency. And DHS investigators who specialize in combatting crime, not addressing child welfare, are now conducting surprise “wellness checks” across the country, showing up at children’s homes and schools.

Federal officials say the visits are meant to ensure children are being properly cared for, but the checks are also turning up older children and adults who are more easily deportable. An ICE memo leaked earlier this year instructs investigators to sort children into priority groups based on “flight risk” and whether they are “public safety” or “border security” threats; the memo also outlines criminal charges that might be applied to adults and other minors living in the same home. Under a new budget provision, investigators are supposed to inspect children as young as 12 for “gang-related” tattoos and “other gang-related markings.”

The lost-children narrative is also the administration’s pretext for revamping the requirements for sponsors trying to claim children in ORR custody. Historically, sponsors could use a foreign passport or a foreign driver’s license to prove their identity. The administration criticized those standards as too lax.

New requirements adopted in January in the name of child safety are more closely tied to immigration status. Besides taking a DNA test, most sponsors must now produce a U.S. or state-issued identification, or else a foreign passport with a stamp indicating that they crossed the border legally. They must show proof of 60 days of income or a letter from an employer, both of which can be impossible to get for those being paid in cash.

The requirements are creating grave dilemmas for immigrant families. If you are an undocumented parent, coming forward to claim your child could mean exposing your status and risking deportation. If you are a parent with legal status but others in your household are undocumented, coming forward could put all of them in jeopardy because the new vetting process requires everyone in the household to produce documents. If you decide not to come forward, your child could wind up in the custody of an American foster family.

In a statement, the Administration for Children and Families, an HHS division of which ORR is part, denied that it is using minors to pressure undocumented families. “Our policies are designed to protect the safety and well-being of the children in our care,” the agency said. “The new verification requirements are about safeguarding minors—not separating them. Every sponsor is vetted to ensure a child is being released to a safe and appropriate environment.” (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

Immigration advocates are challenging many of the new rules in court, arguing that they violate ORR’s mandate to reunify children with relatives regardless of their immigration status.

Meanwhile, children such as Brian are languishing in shelters. An ORR reunification specialist who works with a number of shelters around the country told me about a Guatemalan mother and father whose DNA test matched with their 6-year-old son but who have still been unable to get him out. The specialist, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired, told me that the parents submitted a thick file including baby photos, a baptismal certificate, text messages, and other documents, but her supervisors have rejected them for three months and counting. Another case involves an Indian teenager in ORR custody whose sponsor, a relative, met the new requirements, but ORR still rejected the application.

“The case managers have no concerns with this sponsor,” the specialist told me. But ORR supervisors “want him to answer more questions—who paid for the transport, who brought him, is it trafficking.”

Two ORR shelter operators in different parts of the country who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their job told me that many children being referred to them from the border have been separated from their parents out of what immigration authorities are calling “national security” concerns. They are also receiving children from the interior caught up in ICE enforcement actions. Neha Desai, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, told me that this practice is new.

People close to the ORR system told me that recent detainees include children who were passengers in cars pulled over for traffic stops; a teenager who was part of a landscaping crew that got pulled over by ICE; and a 17-year-old detained after an unrelated appearance in juvenile court. In many such cases, the children had already gone through the ORR shelter system and were living with vetted sponsors, who will now have to requalify under the new rules. Last week, nine teenagers—a Honduran girl, seven Mexican boys, and one Mexican girl—detained during a workplace raid in Los Angeles were sent to ORR care rather than returned to their families. Roughly 300 children have been referred to shelters following enforcement actions.

“This is just another form of family separation,” Jane Liu, the director of policy and litigation at the Young Center, which advocates for immigrant children, told me. “These requirements are not about safety or other legitimate concerns.”

Beyond imposing the new vetting requirements, the administration is also moving to dismantle protections that migrant children have used to avoid deportation. The administration canceled a grant that funds legal representation for more than 25,000 unaccompanied migrant children, even as those children are facing deportation proceedings. (A federal judge has ordered the funds reinstated, at least for now, citing concerns that the cancellation violated a 2008 anti-trafficking law.) Migrant children, who have routinely been granted deferred-action status—which effectively freezes removal proceedings—are being told that relief has been revoked or denied, and the administration has stopped processing more than 100,000 backlogged applications for the status. Student visas are being canceled. Government lawyers are being instructed that they can no longer use prosecutorial discretion to back-burner cases considered low priority, such as undocumented toddlers. They are on the docket.

The lawyers, advocates, and others I spoke with believe that the administration is planning for large-scale child detention as ICE prepares to hire 10,000 new agents and become the highest-funded federal law-enforcement agency in the country. The ORR system has a total capacity of roughly 15,000 beds, and advocates worry that the shelters are essentially becoming detention centers. But with billions of additional dollars about to fuel an expansion of prison-like private detention facilities, the administration may be going in a different direction.

In late May, the administration moved to end a landmark legal agreement, called the Flores settlement, which establishes basic standards for how migrant children are to be treated in federal custody. The settlement was named for Jenny Lisette Flores, a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador who was detained for months, strip-searched, and deprived of education while she awaited deportation. Reached in 1997, the settlement spells out basic requirements, involving everything from soap to medical care, and limits the length of time children can remain in ICE detention facilities. (That limit does not apply to ORR, an agency charged with caring for unaccompanied migrant children.) If the courts side with the administration, ICE would be free to detain children in facilities like Dilley indefinitely, and with minimal independent oversight.

“It’s like a perfect storm of state-sanctioned child abuse,” Leecia Welch, the Children’s Rights lawyer, told me. “We are treating children like criminals, essentially.”

When Welch and I spoke, she had just returned from Dilley, a 50-acre compound where detainees told her that they are under constant video surveillance and the lights stay on all the time. Welch is among a group of attorneys who monitor government compliance with the Flores settlement, and she visited Dilley to take sworn declarations that will be used in court to argue that the agreement should remain in force. She was also trying to find out exactly how the children had ended up there.

Some children told her that they had been detained at the border after crossing with their parents from countries around the world. But many more said they had arrived from Ohio, California, New York. They had been on football teams and cheerleading squads and taking standardized tests and now they were in lockup, some assigned to trailers with names like Yellow 2.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

In a sworn statement, one woman told Welch that she had been driving to work in Ohio when she was pulled over, handcuffed, and detained because she did not have a driver’s license. She said that when she told ICE agents that her 3-year-old son was with a babysitter, they drove to the sitter’s house, went inside with guns drawn, and retrieved the child; they were transported to Dilley together.

Another woman told Welch that she had shown up for an immigration-court hearing with her son and daughter, ages 9 and 6, only to be told that her case was being terminated, at which point ICE detained her and her children. She told Welch that her son has leukemia, and that a week into detention, no one had explained how he would receive treatment. She said her daughter was not eating.

Welch said she met one family who had been at Dilley for 42 days, and another who’d been detained for 52 days. Many parents reported that their children were getting diarrhea from the water or from stale food. A woman told Welch that the staff treated people “like dogs.”

Welch also took declarations from children. “I had planned to take the SAT and go to college,” a 16-year-old girl told Welch. “I want to get back to my life. I want to go back home and see my aunts and cousins and all the rest of my family and friends.”

A 13-year-old told Welch that she and her two sisters, ages 11 and 4, had been detained at Dilley for four months. She was worried that she had messed up during her asylum interview. She said that she had stopped eating and was having nightmares. Welch and others told me they have come to believe that this is precisely what the administration intends.

“I feel really sad and angry all the time,” the girl declared. “I hate it here.”

The Minnesota Suspect’s Radical Spiritual World

2025-06-17T13:50:02-04:00

With the suspect accused of killing Minnesota’s Democratic house leader and her husband now in custody, investigators will have a long list of questions to ask about what the alleged shooter believes. The emerging biography of Vance Boelter suggests a partial answer, one that involves his contact with a charismatic Christian movement whose leaders speak of spiritual warfare, an army of God, and demon-possessed politicians, and which has already proved, during the January 6 insurrection, its ability to mobilize followers to act.

Reporting so far describes Boelter, the 57-year-old man now facing murder charges, as a married father of five who worked in the food industry for decades, managed a gas station in St. Paul and a 7-Eleven in Minneapolis, and recently began working for funeral-service companies as he struggled financially. At the same time, Boelter had an active, even grandiose, spiritual life long before he allegedly carried out what authorities describe as a “political assassination” and texted his family afterward, “Dad went to war last night.”

[Read: The Christian radicals are coming]

To some degree, the roots of Boelter’s beliefs can be traced to a Bible college he attended in Dallas called Christ for the Nations Institute. A school official confirmed to me that Boelter graduated in 1990 with a diploma in practical theology.

Little known to outsiders, the college is a prominent training institution for charismatic Christians. It was co-founded in 1970 by a Pentecostal evangelist named James Gordon Lindsay, a disciple of the New Order of the Latter Rain, one of many revivalist movements that took hold around the country after World War II. Followers believed that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way, raising up new apostles and prophets and a global End Times army to battle Satanic forces and establish God’s kingdom on Earth. Although Pentecostal churches at the time rejected Latter Rain ideas as unscriptural, the concepts lived on at Christ for the Nations, which has become a hub for the modern incarnation of the movement, known as the New Apostolic Reformation. NAR ideas have spread far and wide through megachurches, global networks of apostles and prophets, and a media ecosystem of online ministries, books, and podcasts, becoming a grassroots engine of the Christian Right.

[Read: The ‘army of God’ comes out of the shadows]

Many prominent NAR leaders have connections to the school. These include Dutch Sheets, a graduate who taught there around the time Boelter was a student, and who went on to become an influential apostle who used his YouTube platform to mobilize many of his hundreds of thousands of followers to the U.S. Capitol on January 6. More recently, Sheets suggested on his podcast that certain unnamed judges—“including Supreme Court justices,” he said—oppose God and “disrespect your word and ways,” and he prayed for God to “arise and scatter your enemies.” Cindy Jacobs, an influential prophet who is an adviser and frequent lecturer at the school, was also in D.C. on January 6, praying for rioters climbing the Capitol steps.

During his time at the school, Boelter would have been exposed to the beliefs that motivate these movement leaders. He would have been taught to see the world as a great spiritual battleground between God and Satan, and to consider himself a kind of spiritual warrior. He would have been told that actual demonic forces can take hold of culture, political leaders, and entire territories, and thwart God’s kingdom. He would have been exposed to versions of courses currently offered, such as one that explains how “the World is in an era of serious warfare” and how “the body of Christ must remember that Jesus has already won this war.” He may have heard the founder’s slogan that “every Christian should pray at least one violent prayer a day.”

[Read: This just in from heaven]

On Saturday, Christ for the Nations Institute issued a statement that read, in part, “We are absolutely aghast and horrified that a CFNI alumnus is the suspect. This is not who we are,” and “CFNI unequivocally rejects, denounces and condemns any and all forms of violence and extremism, be it politically, racially, religiously or otherwise motivated.” The school clarified that the slogan refers to the founder’s belief that prayer should be “intense, fervent, and passionate, not passive and lukewarm, considering that spiritual forces of darkness are focused on attacking life, identity in God, purpose, peace, love, joy, truth, health, and other good things.”

Precisely what Boelter absorbed or rejected from the school remains to be seen. On an archived website, Boelter claims that he was “ordained” in 1993. Tax documents from 2008 to 2010 show him as president of something called Revoformation Ministries. He claimed to be writing a book called Original Ability, promising readers “a different paradigm on the nature of man” and warning that it “may change the way you see yourself, other people, and God.” Boelter claimed that before the September 11 terrorist attacks, he had gone to Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank to “share the gospel” with militant Islamists.

In recent years, Boelter traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where videos show him delivering guest sermons at a large church, chastising Christians who don’t fight abortion and homosexuality, and saying that “God is going to raise up apostles and prophets in America” who will “correct his church.” As law enforcement searched for the suspect across rural Minnesota on Saturday, a childhood friend of Boelter’s told reporters that Boelter had texted him that he had “made some choices.”

Minnesota authorities said that they’d found “voluminous writings” in the suspect’s vehicle and at his home, and that he’d kept a notebook that mentioned about 70 potential targets, including politicians, civic leaders, and Planned Parenthood centers. Boelter is now facing federal murder charges for the fatal shooting of State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark. State prosecutors have also charged Boelter with two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of attempted second-degree murder for allegedly shooting and wounding State Senator John A. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. If Boelter’s beliefs were a factor in the shootings, the question is not exactly what radicalized him, Frederick Clarkson, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates who has been tracking the NAR movement for years, told me: The worldview that Boelter appeared to embrace was radical, he said.

“Everyone brings faith to their life and the things they do—the question is, in what ways does your faith inform your actions and your decision making?” he told me. “Without knowing exactly what motivated the shooter, we can say that being oriented into this kind of NAR thinking, to my mind, it’s just a matter of time before an individual or group of individuals take some kind of action against the enemies of God and the demons in their midst.”

The Scramble to Save Rural Health Care From DOGE

2025-04-21T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Lucy Garrett

The clinic was at the end of a craggy parking lot, in the husk of an old Dollar General, and on a morning in March when its future was more tenuous than ever, people were lining up to see a doctor while they still could.

A woman worried she was having a relapse of tuberculosis. A man had a mysterious cyst on his neck. An 87-year-old woman hobbled to the check-in desk.

“How’re you doing this morning, Ms. Birdie?” the receptionist said to Birdie Nelson.

“I’ve had a bad couple days—I’m tired,” said Nelson, giving her phone number. “That’s a landline.” She sat down in the waiting room, beyond which was Perry County, Alabama, an area of roughly 700 square miles with no hospital, one ambulance, and a per capita income of $16,900 a year. People called the clinic Cahaba, which was short for Cahaba Medical Care, a larger system that was managing to get doctors into some of the poorest, sickest, least-served parts of the state, and whose leaders were now worried that years of painstaking work were about to be undone.

The reason wasn’t only because so many patients relied on Medicaid, which was currently being targeted by the Trump administration for $880 billion in cuts. Cahaba’s clinics also depended upon an array of more obscure federal grants of the sort that President Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had been summarily deleting before fully understanding the lives that would be upended in the real world.

In the gray language of the federal bureaucracy, the funding that mattered most was from the Teaching Health Centers Graduate Medical Education Program—THCGME—and it was the reason the clinic in Perry County and others in some of the poorest corners of rural America had any doctors at all.

“Please do not be nervous about your jobs because of the news cycle,” one of Cahaba’s co-founders, a doctor named John Waits, had emailed his staff in January as Musk began firing thousands of federal workers and Trump briefly froze all government grants.

Now it was March, the cuts were getting closer to home, and he was the one who was nervous. The $175 million THCGME grant was up for renewal. A Trump-aligned think tank, the Paragon Health Institute, had criticized the program, and now Paragon’s former director was a domestic-policy adviser to the president. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 had proposed solving the rural health crisis with volunteers. Waits was facing not only the question of whether THCGME and so many more rural health programs would continue to exist, but a whole cascade of other questions that had to do with whatever the country was becoming.

What did being a leader mean at such a moment? What should he do to ensure Cahaba survived? The grant had always been renewed with bipartisan support, but did that Washington exist anymore? Did serious policy arguments matter anymore? Was it better to keep quiet and not risk offending the duly elected president, which he did not want to do, or speak up? If the latter, to whom? Did Congress matter, or only Trump, or only Musk? Was it naive to hope that an innovative billionaire who built space rockets could also understand the complex life of someone who scrounged for a $3.90 copay?

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

If the grant survived, for how long? And if it didn’t survive, what then? What would become of his staff? What would become of his patients? What would become of him? Was he being responsible, or paranoid? He was 51. How many more nights would he fall asleep in a recliner with half-eaten Chinese food in his lap? How many more times would he have to shut his office door because all he could think of were patients such as Birdie Nelson, and a DOGE worker at a keyboard pressing “Delete,” “Delete,” “Delete”?

There were so many questions, on top of the most urgent ones that came every day.

“Can we get a chest X-ray?” a doctor was saying at the clinic in Perry County. “She doesn’t have insurance. It’s us or nobody.”

The Cahaba Medical Care clinic in Marion (Lucy Garrett for The Atlantic)

Efficiency was not exactly the concern when Waits, a family physician and obstetrician, first started practicing medicine in 2003. He was a doctor’s son who had grown up in Alabama and been raised Southern Baptist, and his most fundamental conviction was that all human beings deserved health care, a belief that almost took him to Indonesia as a medical missionary until that plan got stalled. Instead, he moved to a town called Centreville, the seat of rural Bibb County, on the edge of Alabama’s Black Belt region, a fertile swath of the state defined first by slavery, then by the civil-rights movement, and that was now a lush green landscape of decaying towns, tornado-blasted trailers, chronic illness, and afflictions more common in developing nations.

After one week of seeing patients, Waits realized that the mission field was Alabama. And six months after opening his first clinic inside a red brick house in Centreville, he realized that policy ideas that had enthralled him as a college student, such as health savings accounts for the uninsured, made no sense for people who had nothing to save. He had patients who skipped appointments because they had no gas money. He had one who tried to pay his bill with pine straw, offering to landscape the flower beds outside the clinic.

Waits and his practice partner, Dr. Lacy Smith, another Alabama-born family-medicine physician, who joined Cahaba in 2011, had taken a “blood oath” never to turn anyone away, but the regular business model was not working. The two doctors were waiving appointment fees left and right for patients who could not afford them, and every hour came someone who needed not only a doctor but help with food, housing, or transportation, which the doctors would often cover out of their own salaries. So, in 2012, they converted Cahaba into a “federally qualified health center”—commonly known as a community health center, a nonprofit designation that enabled the clinic to receive specific Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements in exchange for doing what it was already doing. The idea went back to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, a vision of how the government could create a more equitable country. Waits and Smith soon saw what that could mean.

As their nonprofit expanded, the percentage of low-income people with access to affordable care in Centreville rose from 7 percent in 2010 to 49 percent in 2014, according to federal data. Meanwhile, provisions of the Affordable Care Act were kicking in. The best-known was Medicaid expansion, which Alabama did not accept. A lesser-known provision was THCGME, the result of years of public-policy research and hard-won bipartisan consensus in Washington around solving one of the most persistent problems in American health care: how to get primary-care doctors into rural areas, roughly 80 percent of which the federal government designates as “medically underserved,” and most of which are in Republican states.

Traditionally, medical-school graduates complete their residencies at teaching hospitals in larger cities, places abounding with specialists, equipment, and nursing support. The idea behind the THCGME program was to establish residencies at health clinics in underserved areas where resources are scarce. The theory was that residents would not only gain confidence practicing medicine in a challenging context but develop a sense of mission about the work, and stay.

After an elaborate process of getting Cahaba accredited as a teaching health clinic, Waits and Smith welcomed their first group of four residents in 2013. The initial funding allocated $150,000 per resident, enough to pay for their salaries and the support staff needed to retool Cahaba as an educational institution. Smith and Waits were not at all sure the plan would work. But out of the first group of residents, one decided to stay on at the Centreville clinic after she finished. Another one stayed from the second group of four, and out of the third group, all four stayed—a pattern that continued not only at Cahaba but at more than 80 other health clinics that became teaching health centers in other parts of the country. Out of the roughly 2,000 doctors who have graduated from rural residency programs, roughly 70 percent have continued to practice in underserved areas, according to program data.

[Nicholas Florko: Spared by DOGE—for now]

As a practical matter, the $175 million federal program was creating a steady pipeline of doctors into some of the nation’s worst health-care deserts: places such as the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, inner-city Detroit, and southern West Virginia. And every year, the grant got renewed with bipartisan support, even as Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act dozens of times.

In Alabama, Waits and Smith kept betting on that bipartisan version of Washington, and the residency program became integral to their vision for Cahaba. They recruited more residents into the program, and every year, more than half of them decided to continue working in underserved areas; many stayed with Cahaba. The clinic in Centreville expanded into a larger building, and all of this began to have spillover effects.

Along the town square in Marion, a building’s window shows a picture of the civil-rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose killing by police in 1965 sparked the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. (Lucy Garrett for The Atlantic)

In a state where at least 14 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, Waits was able to tell the director of Bibb County’s only hospital that he’d never have to worry about recruiting doctors again. In 2015, the hospital reopened its labor-and-delivery unit, the first such unit to launch in Alabama in 20 years. When the mayor of Centreville pitched his town as a retirement destination, he could tell people that, yes, it had doctors and a hospital. Developers were building new housing. The town was repaving roads and sprucing up its downtown facades. By 2023, literally every low-income person in Bibb had access to affordable health care, according to federal data. State data also showed that the county’s infant mortality rate was beginning to drop.

Cahaba continued to expand, its share of the grant rising to $9 million, which was paying for a graduate program that now had 60 three-year residents who saw hundreds of patients across 11 rural clinics, two emergency rooms, a labor-and-delivery unit, and an RV for home visits to people who lived down long dirt roads in the pines. To Waits’s great satisfaction, two of the clinics were deep in the Black Belt.

One was in Wilcox County, where the only full-time doctor until the residents showed up was 82 years old, and had been trying to recruit a partner to take over his practice for 25 years. The other was the one in Perry County, off a two-lane road in a town called Marion.

The clinic was down the street from a hardware store, a boarded-up Hardee’s, and the rest of what Marion had become—a half-abandoned town of rotting antebellum houses, patched-up roofs, sunken porches, and frequent boil-water notices. When the doctors and medical residents first arrived, what came through the doors was a parade of long-term neglect. A woman whose breast cancer was so advanced that it was eating through her skin. Pregnant women with out-of-control blood pressure. People with diabetes-numbed legs and needlessly advanced heart disease. And now, six years after the Marion clinic opened, every day was a version of a recent Friday in March.

[Michelle Andrews and Kaiser Health News: Rural hospitals are shutting down their delivery rooms]

Exam room 8: “I don’t know what the thing is,” Birdie Nelson was saying to a resident named Joshua Murphy, complaining about a growth in her nose. “Sure been sore.”

“Well, let’s take a look,” Murphy said.

Exam room 6: A young man with a sexually transmitted disease.

Exam room 10: “How are you doing today, friend?” a resident named Reese Land was saying to Maurice Cash, who reported, proudly, that he was down 23 pounds.

“Well, that’s not a small thing. What’ve you been doing?” Land said.

“Just been trying not to eat so much junk,” Cash said, as Land told him that his cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar were down too, which meant a lower risk of premature death in a county where life expectancy was a decade less than the national average.

Exam room 5: “When was the last time anyone took a look at your heart?” Murphy said to Richard Hopkins, who was 79. “Been a couple years?”

“Yeah,” Hopkins said.

“Okay let’s get you scheduled—that’s something we can do here,” Murphy said.

Exam room 8: “Looks like your blood pressure finally went down,” a resident named Michael Wu was saying to a woman who had first come to the clinic when she was a few weeks pregnant and had uncontrolled hypertension, a situation that might have gone untreated in Perry County before 2018, when women had to drive 45 minutes to an hour away for prenatal care. “Those are healthy, healthy numbers, Ms. Thomas,” Wu said. “Beautiful.”

Lishman discusses a patient with Dr. Osama Ali, a second-year resident.
(Lucy Garrett for The Atlantic)

He walked down the hallway to go over the visit with Laura Lishman, a former resident who now ran the Marion clinic and was the only obstetrician in the county. She’d seen women barrel through the doors in advanced labor. She’d once seen a woman rush in with a newborn girl that was not her daughter, the baby turning blue, umbilical cord still dangling. Beyond saving the girl, Lishman knew the mother was probably somewhere bleeding out and yelled at the woman to go get her, which the woman did, which was why the mother was still alive. Cases like these were why Lishman had wanted to work in a county with one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, and why Waits had wanted her here.

“Oh nice,” she said now, reviewing Wu’s patient’s chart. “This is beautiful.”

Exam room 10: “So we have three options,” Lishman told Briana Billingsly, going over delivery options with the 29-year-old, who had given birth to a stillborn child, most likely because of undetected preeclampsia, before she became a Cahaba patient. She had been seeing Lishman for prenatal care all through her current pregnancy. “If everything’s going fine with your blood pressure and you decide to deliver with me, I think we’d plan on a repeat C-section.”

“So you’re gonna do it?” Billingsly said.

“I hope so,” Lishman said.

“Ain’t that something,” Billingsly said. “We’ll be in there together.”

[Brian Alexander: America's rural hospitals are dangerously fragile]

Dr. John Waits, the CEO of Cahaba Medical Care, in Centreville, Alabama
(Lucy Garrett for The Atlantic)

This was the less tangible part of what an obscure federal grant was creating in rural Alabama. Patients were getting used to the idea that these weren’t the kind of doctors who swooped in to study rural poverty and left. They weren’t beaming in on a computer screen. The doctors lived in Marion. Lishman and her husband had bought a farm on the outskirts of town. The residents lived five minutes from the clinic. They shopped at Foodvalu, and learned to pronounce it as locals did, food-valoo. They got their hair cut at Fresh Cutz, and knew the barber by name. They knew the history of Marion, because another doctor on staff, Michael Luther, made sure of it. He told each new class of residents about the 1965 killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a voting-rights activist, and how that had sparked the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. He told them that many of their patients would remember that, and how providing health care was an extension of a longer struggle. “We are trying to make a small dent in the universe,” he would tell them.

And that was how things had been going in Perry County, which struck Waits as an example of what government could be at its cost-efficient best, a version of American progress.

“This is working,” he would say to himself when he went over statistics showing improved health outcomes.

Then came the election, and DOGE, and a blizzard of executive orders, and an email that landed in Waits’s inbox: “Immediate Next Steps,” read the guidance sent to all THCGME grantees. “Carefully review policies, staffing plans, titles, roles and responsibilities, service offerings, etc., in the context of the related EOs. Consider immediate revisions and appropriate operational changes for compliance, particularly DEI.”

What did it mean? In Centreville, Waits and Smith began reading through all the executive orders. There was “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” but they were already compliant. Cahaba had never provided gender-affirming care, even before that became illegal in Alabama. There was “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” but they were already following state anti-abortion laws. There was “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” which required more attention.

They reviewed their employment and promotion guidelines. Compliant. They considered Cahaba’s mission itself. Could DOGE possibly construe providing health care to their clientele as some sort of DEI program? No, they decided. As news reports emerged that certain words seemed to be triggering DOGE, Waits and Smith combed through their website and program materials for anything that might even remotely run the risk of making Cahaba seem noncompliant. Gone from their grant applications was the phrase health equity, which they had simply meant in the spirit of helping everybody. Gone, they decided, was a regular meeting they had implemented to talk about “cultural humility.”

One day, the administration froze all federal grants, then clarified that the freeze applied only to grants that violated executive orders, causing a surge of panic through Cahaba, so Waits emailed his staff. “Reasonable people might worry about headlines like ‘Health Resources Vanish Following D.E.I. and Gender Orders,’” he began. “Please do not be nervous.”

Meanwhile, he was following the news closely. DOGE was starting to delete federal grants. For foreign food aid. For international nuclear inspectors. For programs across the country, including in Alabama. Gone was $10 million for a school food program. Gone was $22 million for the state’s department of mental health. Gone were millions of dollars for medical research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Marion, Alabama (Lucy Garrett for The Atlantic)

[Russell Berman: The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing]

Now it was March, and the federal budget deadline was looming, a moment when whatever DOGE cut could be enshrined. The uncertainty was such that two teaching-health-center programs in Arizona and Maryland dropped out, worried they would be unable to fulfill their commitments to residents if federal funding was cut.

Waits and Smith were too invested in the program to drop out. Too much was in motion. Besides the 60 residents depending on the grant, and the hundreds of patients those residents saw every day, Cahaba was already recruiting the next class of residents.

Waits had cultivated close relationships with his congressional delegation over the years, all but one member of which were Republican, and most of whom had sent staff to tour the flagship clinic in Centreville. He began emailing and calling them. Their staff kept reassuring him. The congressman loves Cahaba. The senator loves what Cahaba is doing. One congressman reassured Waits that he was in contact with Musk.

Coincidentally, Waits and Smith had read a biography of Musk before the presidential election, as part of a book club they convened to keep up with innovative thinkers. On one hand, Waits wanted to believe that building rockets could translate into understanding the intricacies of health-care policy. He imagined all the arguments he’d make to Musk about the innovation of the residency program, how it was solving a vexing problem, how it ultimately saved money by keeping people out of emergency rooms. On the other hand, he kept thinking of Musk holding up what the Tesla CEO called the “chainsaw for bureaucracy.”

And so with two weeks to go before the federal budget deadline, Waits packed up a beaten leather briefcase with charts and graphs and headed to Washington, D.C., as he did every budget cycle. On a bright Tuesday in March, the line to get into the Dirksen Senate Office Building wound around the block.

“I’ve never seen it this crowded,” Waits said, making his way inside the marble hallways, one more citizen in an off-the-rack suit and a plastic nametag pleading for a budget line.

He passed by people representing community colleges from California and Virginia, and disabled veterans in full uniform. “Sorry,” he said, brushing by someone representing the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, and a professor from the University of Pittsburgh—“Ovarian-cancer trials are being stopped,” she was saying. “They need to know that their constituents are in my trials”—and soon Waits arrived for his first meeting: Senator Katie Britt, Republican, Appropriations Committee. He talked with her staff about health outcomes. He talked about keeping people out of expensive emergency rooms.

“I think it went well,” he said afterward, heading to the other side of the U.S. Capitol.

Outside, it was a bright and warm day. He passed metal barricades going up ahead of Trump’s speech to Congress that evening, and protesters chanting “No king!” and “Deport Elon!” He arrived at a House office building.

“All right,” Waits said, adjusting his tie, and heading through the heavy wooden doors of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over health programs.

“I just want them to know that it’s this policy, that it’s this program that’s making it happen,” he said after.

Back to the Senate side.

“John Waits? Teaching Health Centers?” he said to a receptionist in Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville’s office.

Back to the House side.

“I could see he was interested,” Waits said after meeting more staffers, and at some point during the day of blue carpet and leather couches, Waits met with staff for Senate Majority Leader John Thune. When it was over, they invited him out on the leader’s private balcony, which Waits knew was the usual drill, but it was hard to be cynical looking out over the National Mall and the Washington Monument. This is worth preserving, he thought, then continued on to the last meeting of the day, with Representative Gary Palmer, who was a member of the House DOGE caucus, and who attended the meeting himself.

[Brian Klaas: DOGE is courting catastrophic risk]

By then, Trump had posted a message on Truth Social. He wanted a “clean CR,” he wrote, a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through September, and now the congressman explained that THCGME funding would likely survive, though there were still 10 days to go.

Back in Centreville, Waits and Smith convened a meeting to go over what they’d do if THCGME got canceled. Smith stood in front of a whiteboard with a red marker.

“No THC,” she wrote at the top, abbreviating the grant’s acronym, and began listing what they would have to cut in order to keep the clinics open.

“Don’t recruit,” she wrote, meaning they’d try to survive with the staff they had.

“No family health insurance,” she wrote, referring to employee benefits.

“As time goes on we’d get rid of coordinators, because we don’t need them to coordinate anything,” Waits said, referring to staff that managed residency-program matters.

“What about the hospital?” he said.

“Can we hire someone to run the hospital without the residents?” Smith said.

Waits said they could hire a private staffing company—a kind of temp agency that supplies doctors for struggling rural hospitals—but that option was more expensive, plus it meant a rotating cast of physicians.

“Continuity of care would suffer,” Waits said. “Health care is already so fragmented.”

As they lost residents, they’d have to figure out how to juggle patients.

“Double-book appointments,” Smith wrote, and kept going.

No labor and delivery. No translation services. No psychiatric services. No adult vaccines. No ultrasounds. No RV for remote clinics. No remote appointments. No optometry. No echocardiograms. No vascular ultrasounds. She stopped writing.

The partners who had vowed never to turn anyone away stared at the sea of red representing the barest of bare-bones operations.

“I don’t feel the need to press further today,” Waits said.

He went into his office and shut the door.

He meditated. He prayed. He went running.

Lishman entertains Kali, who is 2 years old, to give the toddler’s mother a moment to herself. (Lucy Garrett for The Atlantic)

He attended a fundraiser for Cahaba in a strip mall with five round tables and Mexican takeout on paper plates, and addressed a group of pastors, two mayors, local officials, and businessmen.

“I hope to show you our value,” Waits said, clicking through slides starting with the original brick house in Centreville, and he could not have felt more grateful to raise $1,250 toward the $9 million that, if Palmer proved wrong, Cahaba would need to raise every year to cover the THCGME grant.

[Craig Spencer: The diseases are coming]

Then he waited. He shut his office door again. He watched an episode of The West Wing. He imagined the worst. He imagined the best: Musk said he cared about efficiency, and this program was efficient. Trump said he cared about rural America, and this was helping rural America. The new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he cared about chronic illness, and that’s what Cahaba residents were treating every hour.

A few days later, the House of Representatives gathered to vote on a continuing resolution to keep the government running, and Waits got an email from a contact in Washington saying that THCGME funding had made it into the resolution. As the Senate began considering the resolution a few days later, he got an email saying the funding was still there, on page 83, which is where it stayed as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rallied enough Democrats to pass the resolution, funding the government through September. When it was over, Waits felt momentarily relieved, but also something else.

“Disoriented,” he said.

The resolution would expire in six months. There had been so much stress and confusion but no debate over policy. No discussion of health outcomes. No discussion about what would happen if THCGME and so many other grants got canceled, discussions he was more than willing to have, and now the questions were starting again. Why had this grant survived when so many others hadn’t? Was it because someone had asked a favor of Elon Musk? Was it because the grantees had complied with executive orders? Was it because Alabama was a red state? Or was it simply because DOGE had not gotten around to them yet? What would he have to do in September? How much more time would he have to spend defending a program that Republicans and Democrats agreed was working, instead of building upon progress? What was the point? Who knew anymore. Waits emailed his staff.

“This is really great news about what we—and you—do every day,” he wrote. “And. I want you to remain vigilant. Because I’ll need you this summer / fall when we have to do this again.”

He did not mention what else was coming. The Trump administration was seeking $880 billion in Medicaid cuts. Soon, The Washington Post would report that the administration was proposing another $40 billion in cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, including cuts to rural health programs.

But now it was the Monday after the continuing resolution had passed, and the clinic in Perry County was open, and the doctors were in, and a 71-year-old man with a heart condition was walking up to the check-in window.

“May I help you?” the receptionist said.

Dr. Josué Breaux (left) assists as Lishman performs an ultrasound on a patient who is 32 weeks pregnant. (Lucy Garrett for The Atlantic)

Migrants Prepare to Lose Their American Lives

2025-03-01T08:00:00-05:00

One recent morning on Chicago’s southwest side, the manager of a Mexican grocery store began the day posted at the front door, rehearsing the phrase “I wish to exercise my right to remain silent” in English in case immigration agents showed up asking about employees.

At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.

Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.

A month into President Donald Trump’s promise to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, this is what life was becoming in a neighborhood where generations of Mexican immigrants had built versions of American lives: People were in various stages of preparing for a crackdown that felt more imminent every day.

Although much of the controversy around immigration has focused on the southern border and recent waves of asylum seekers from Venezuela, Haiti, and Central America, anxiety over Trump’s deportation plan is seeping into the nation’s more long-standing population of undocumented immigrants. Experts estimate that at least 11 million people are in the United States without legal status, about 4 million of whom are Mexicans, many with deep roots in cities and towns across a nation whose central hypocrisy has long been to use the cheap labor that immigrants supply, while often demonizing them for political expedience.

[Read: The deportation show]

Since Trump returned to office last month, his administration has claimed that it is rounding up immigrants with violent criminal backgrounds, though little information has been released about detainees so far. During the first two weeks of his current term, more than 8,000 people were arrested, including more than 100 in the Chicago area, a number roughly in line with enforcement surges in the past. What mattered more was the ever more dire message people were hearing.

Trump was no longer simply using terms such as “bloodthirsty criminals” and “animals” to describe immigrants. In a barrage of militaristic propaganda and executive orders, he was declaring them to be enemies and spies, and the situation at the southern border an “invasion.” His border czar, Tom Homan, was calling bystanders swept up in raids “collaterals,” the blithe euphemism for civilians killed in wars. Trump was preparing to designate foreign drug cartels and gangs as “terrorists,” and pledging to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which could give the administration extraordinary wartime powers to bypass due process and accelerate deportations. U.S. forces were building a tent city at Guantánamo Bay. Before being repatriated, a group of Venezuelan detainees had been held at a prison that once housed al-Qaeda suspects. In recent days, Trump was reportedly growing impatient with the pace of deportations, reassigning his acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And hour by hour, all of this was filtering into the social-media feeds and WhatsApp groups of people trying to figure out what was going to happen next.

[Read: The ‘right way’ to immigrate just went wrong]

“It’s the rhetoric; it’s the dehumanization; it’s the narrative of what Trump is making people think about us,” Eréndira Rendón, an immigrant-rights advocate in Chicago, told me. She herself had been brought to the U.S. as a child, and her legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was uncertain. “It feels more intense this time,” Rendón said, comparing the moment with previous crackdowns during Trump’s first term, and during the Obama administration before that. “Like there is no going back.”

That feeling was widespread in southwest Chicago, where dozens of people told me that they had no choice but to take Trump’s rhetoric seriously. The level of anxiety was such that almost no one wanted their name used, or their specific location mentioned, for fear of attracting the attention of immigration agents. The people I spoke with included restaurant workers, shopkeepers, meatpackers, construction workers, lawyers, a graphic designer, a teacher, and parents of American children, some of whom were attending a “Know Your Rights” seminar in the back of a public library one night.

“You should memorize your alien number,” an advocate named Laura was saying, referring to a number assigned to track noncitizens. “It starts with the letter A and is nine digits. This is how your loved ones will be able to find you.”

By the first week in February, life on the southwest side had entered a kind of limbo. In the days before Trump’s inauguration, several people told me, they had stockpiled food. Now the streets were quiet. School attendance was down. Attendance was down at a Catholic church that had welcomed immigrants for generations. “We are preparing for the worst,” the priest there told me; he requested anonymity to avoid drawing scrutiny to a place he was trying to keep safe.

He had tried to reassure people of this, even though the Trump administration had just rescinded a policy protecting places of worship, schools, and other sensitive locations from immigration raids. The priest had promised that he was not going to fling open the front doors for agents, even though Trump was threatening to prosecute anyone interfering with enforcement. He’d done the only other thing he knew to do: On a table just inside the heavy wooden front doors of his church, he’d set out a stack of pamphlets with hotlines and names of lawyers who could help people sign over belongings, transfer home titles, establish guardians for children.

Outside, the steeple rose above a neighborhood of rowhouses and battered mailboxes with one name taped or painted over another—Ariza, Arevalo, Ramirez. In the past two years, thousands of Venezuelan migrants had arrived, but the dominant immigrant community was composed of Mexicans, many of whom had arrived in the 1990s after NAFTA sent a flood of subsidized U.S. corn across the border, decimating small farmers. At this point, lives were settled. The names and images of Mexican heroes and saints were chiseled on schools and framed on walls—Benito Juárez, Cesar Chavez, Óscar Romero, a thousand Virgins of Guadalupe. A commercial strip was packed with Western Unions, taquerias, and shops named for Mexican towns. A photography studio had sun-faded images of weddings propped in the window. Businesses were open, but many of their front doors were locked.

There had been reports of a man detained in an adjacent neighborhood, and rumors of ICE trucks patrolling. At a clothing store, the owners, a married couple, buzzed people in only after screening them. In came a delivery guy wearing a face mask. In came the undocumented man who lived above the shop. A portable television on a glass counter was blaring something about Trump. “This man is crazy,” the husband was saying.

He and his wife both told me that they had legal status, but worried that Trump was taking away protections for whole categories of immigrants. Their three grandchildren were born in the U.S., but Trump was trying to abolish birthright citizenship. Besides the man who lived upstairs, a daughter-in-law who lived with them was undocumented, which made the shop owners possible “collaterals,” and so they were saving money for lawyers. They were considering selling the business, and imagining what might be left for them back in Guanajuato, Mexico, after 28 years away.

Everyone had some plan. A couple decided that if one of them got picked up, the other would signal trouble by texting random letters.

At a restaurant, the cashier’s strategy was to stay inside except for work. “I don’t walk my dog. I don’t do laundry. I canceled my doctor,” she told me. She was in the process of establishing residency but had little confidence this would save her. She’d given her lawyer’s number to a friend. “If they come, I cannot start running,” she said.

Down the street, the grocery-store manager had gone over a plan with workers. If immigration agents came, employees were to calmly walk to areas designated as private, where agents were not supposed to go without a specific judicial warrant: up a spiral staircase to an office; behind the meat counter. A back door was open. The owner had recorded a video message as if preparing them for battle. “Your strength inspires us all,” he said. “We are with you.”

At the public library, people took notes as Laura, the advocate, explained about alien numbers, and which rights undocumented immigrants still had in America.

“You have a right to be silent, but you have to say so,” she said. “Say: ‘I wish to remain silent,’” she told them, and they repeated the phrase. She continued: You have a right to refuse to sign anything. You have a right to refuse to open your door, or to open it only a few inches; any wider could be interpreted as permission to enter. You should know the difference between an administrative warrant and a judicial warrant, and insist that the officer slip it under the door or press it against a window. You should know what to expect if a warrant is valid.

“They might break down the door,” Laura said, telling people not to panic if that happened, not to run, which could make the situation turn violent.

A woman raised her hand. “If they are looking for someone who used to live in this place before, can they enter?”

“Let them know they don’t live there anymore, but it is up to them to believe you,” Laura said.

“If I’m not at home, but my kid is, can they enter?” came another question. Laura explained that if the child says their mother or father isn’t home, agents might not accept it. “They can enter because they will think the child can lie,” she said.

She continued: Do provide ICE agents with your date of birth. Do familiarize yourself with locations of detention facilities. The nearest are in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kentucky.

“How long is the process to get people back?” someone asked.

“It depends,” Laura said, explaining how the detention process could go.

“Your cellphone is going to be taken away,” she said, handing out pamphlets. “You will have to request to make phone calls.”

If due process is followed, she said, you get to contact your lawyer. If you are eligible for bond, it is $6,000 on average. And if you make bond, your case joins a backlog of 3.5 million cases, built up over decades. “It could take years,” she said.

If you are unable to prove that you’ve been in the country longer than two years, though, due process may no longer apply, Laura said. She explained that Trump had recently expanded a policy called expedited removal that used to apply only to border areas but now applied to the whole country. In theory, you could be transferred directly to a waiting airplane, Laura said, advising people to start carrying old utility bills or leases to prove long-term residency.

She continued for a while, advising people not to carry any documents that would identify them as a citizen of Mexico or any foreign country. She warned that immigration agents might be driving any kind of car, or wearing any kind of clothes, and that the situation was fluid. The old rules could change any day.

“It’s hard to know what is going to happen,” she said. “It’s hard to plan.”

People exchanged phone numbers, and when the session was over, Laura did what she has been doing most nights since Trump’s inauguration, which was to pick up her undocumented father from the restaurant where he worked, sleep a few hours, and then start another day of Know Your Rights seminars. She had given dozens all over the city. Homan, Trump’s border czar, was calling such events “How to Escape Arrest” seminars.

“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals,” he’d said on CNN. “For instance, Chicago, very well educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”

Chicago activists took this as a minor victory; the city had a long and proud history of immigrant-rights advocacy, and had often set the tone for how activists around the country would handle federal crackdowns. A veteran immigrant-rights advocate named Omar Lopez, who had been involved in the cause since the early 1960s, told me that he believed this was one reason Chicago was among the Trump administration’s first targets.

“I think they wanted to see how Chicago would respond,” Lopez said. His organization was planning work stoppages and boycotts in the months ahead.

But one month into the Trump administration, he and others worried that the barrage of propaganda casting detainees as “criminals” and “the worst of the worst” was taking hold, stifling protest, even though federal authorities had released little information about who was actually being detained. No one wanted to be perceived as standing up for criminals.

“Once that idea takes hold, we’ve lost the narrative,” Rendón said.

There were rumors that the organizations such as the one where Laura worked were going to be targeted next, which the leaders took seriously enough that they told all their employees to stay home for a few days. Homan had floated the idea of prosecuting Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, for spearheading a similar effort in her district. Even hardened attorneys understood that legal challenges would not necessarily stop a Trump administration determined to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Those challenges were mostly based on due-process rights; ultimately, the president had the power to pursue an aggressive deportation policy.

“People are saying to me, ‘Aren’t you going to stop this?’ Well, no, we’re not going to stop all of it in court, because deporting people who are here illegally is not, per se, unlawful,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who argued the challenge to the family-separation policy and other high-profile cases during Trump’s first administration, told me. “The immigration laws are incredibly harsh. The only way this is going to be stopped is if the American public rejects it.”

[From the September 2023 issue: An American catastrophe]

But there has been no large-scale rejection, not yet, and in many corners of Trump-supporting America, people have been cheering him on. For now, there was the quiet of a neighborhood where people were memorizing alien numbers, locking doors, and hiding inside houses, including one where the curtains were drawn on a bright afternoon and a cooler full of stockpiled food sat on the front stoop.

Inside, Consuelo was waiting for her husband to return to the home they’d bought with money from his job as a busboy, waiter, and bartender at the country club, and from her jobs at a shampoo factory, a metal-shelf factory, a frozen-food factory, and a florist, and stuffing envelopes on the night shift. The rest was their American life: photos of two American-born children on a piano, a box of dried mangoes on top of the refrigerator, a Virgin of Guadalupe on a kitchen wall, crucifixes in the living room, and so many saints and prayer candles these days that Consuelo’s son complained that they lived in a church.

He was 21, and she had been busy preparing him for the next four years under Trump. If agents came to the door, he was the one designated to answer. He would tell them his parents were not home. In a few days, she would sign over the house to him. She would put his name on the bank accounts. If she was deported, she planned to take her teenage daughter, who has autism. Her son would petition to bring his mother and sister back, a process she knew could take years, and might not happen at all. In the late afternoon, waiting for her husband to return from work, she thought about the town in Mexico where she’d spent her childhood and young-adult life. It was difficult to picture. Her parents had died. People she once knew were gone. What she knew was the life that she was beginning to think of in the past tense.

“This has been my home,” she said.

The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows

2025-01-09T07:45:00-05:00

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On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning. The Kingdom was coming.

“Hallelujah!” said a woman arriving for the weekly 7 o’clock “government watch,” during which a group of 20 or so volunteers sits in a circle and prays for God’s dominion over the nation.

“Now the work begins!” a man said.

“We have to fight, fight, fight!” a grandmother said as they began talking about how a crowd at Trump’s election watch party had launched into the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

“They were singing that!” another man said.

Yes, people replied; they had seen a video of the moment. As the mood in the barn became ever more jubilant, the grandmother pulled from her purse a shofar, a hollowed-out ram’s horn used during Jewish services. She blew, understanding that the sound would break through the atmosphere, penetrate the demonic realm, and scatter the forces of Satan, a supernatural strike for the Kingdom of God. A woman fell to the floor.

“Heaven and Earth are coming into alignment!” a man declared. “The will of heaven is being done on Earth.”

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

Although the secular establishment has struggled to take all of this seriously, Trump has harnessed this apocalyptic energy to win the presidency twice.

If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision. If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white flag with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right. The NAR is supplying the ground troops to dismantle the secular state.

Alexandre Luu

And if you are wondering where all of this is heading now that Trump has won the presidency, I was wondering the same thing. That is why I was sitting in the circle at Gateway House of Prayer, where, about 20 minutes into the evening, I got my first clue. People had welcomed me warmly. I had introduced myself as a reporter for The Atlantic. I was taking notes on Earth-heaven alignment when a woman across from me said, “Your writers have called us Nazis.”

She seemed to be referring to an article that had compared Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler’s. I said what I always say, which is that I was there to understand. I offered my spiritual bona fides—raised Southern Baptist, from Alabama. The woman continued: “It’s an editorial board that is severely to the left and despises the Trump movement.” A man sitting next to me came to my defense. “We welcome you,” he said, but it was clear something was off, and that something was me. The media had become a demonic stronghold. The people of God needed to figure out whether I was a tool of Satan, or possibly whether I had been sent by the Almighty.

“I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us, then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray,” a woman said.

“We won’t hurt you,” another woman said.

“We just take everything to God,” a woman sitting next to me said. “Don’t take it personally.”

The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.

How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points, the most immediate of which is Trump himself. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump’s. He needed a way to rally evangelicals, so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR, a wilder world where he was cast as God’s “wrecking ball” and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters, people long regarded as the embarrassing riffraff of evangelical Christianity. But the DNA of that moment goes back further, to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner.

He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression, and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife. They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and ’60s, when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America, filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed, and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy. Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America. Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia. The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States. Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation, emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.

In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist. Wagner, by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission, rose to the occasion. In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that aimed to counter these trends. He wrote a book—Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?—which was handed out to all participants, and which argued that concern with social issues “may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God.” Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell.

After that, Wagner became a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, teaching in the relatively experimental field of church growth. He began revisiting his experience in Bolivia, deciding that the overflowing churches he’d seen were a sign that the Holy Spirit was working in the world. He was also living in the California of the 1970s, when new religions and cults and a more freewheeling, independent, charismatic Christianity were proliferating, a kind of counter-counterculture. Droves of former hippies were being baptized in the Pacific in what became known as the Jesus People movement. Preachers such as John Wimber, a singer in the band that turned into the Righteous Brothers, were casting out demons before huge crowds. In the ’80s, a group of men in Missouri known as the Kansas City Prophets believed they were restoring the gift of prophecy, understanding this to be God’s natural way of talking to people.

Wagner met a woman named Cindy Jacobs, who understood herself to be a prophet, and believed that the “principalities” and “powers” mentioned in the Book of Ephesians were actually “territorial spirits” that could be defeated through “spiritual warfare.” She and others formed prayer networks targeting the “10/40 window”—a geographic rectangle between the latitudes of 10 and 40 degrees north that included North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia that were predominantly Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu.

C. Peter Wagner (Alexandre Luu)

Wagner also became captivated by a concept called dominionism, a major conceptual shift that had been emerging in conservative theological circles. At the time, the prevailing view was that God’s mandate for Christians was simple evangelism, person by person; the Kingdom would come later, after the return of Jesus Christ, and meanwhile, the business of politics was, as the Bible verse goes, rendered unto Caesar. The new way of thinking was that God was calling his people to establish the Kingdom now. To put it another way, Christians had marching orders—a mandate for aggressive social and institutional transformation. The idea had deep roots in a movement called Christian Reconstructionism, whose serious thinkers—most prominently a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony—were spending their lives working out the details of what a government grounded in biblical laws would look like, a model for a Christian theocracy.

By 1996, Wagner and a group of like-minded colleagues were rolling these ideas into what they were calling the New Apostolic Reformation, a term meant to evoke their conviction that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was moving around the globe, endowing believers with supernatural power and the authority to battle demonic forces and establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. The NAR vision was not technically conservative but radical: Constructing the Kingdom meant destroying the secular state with equal rights for all, and replacing it with a system in which Christianity is supreme. As a practical matter, the movement put the full force of God on the side of free-market capitalism. In that sense, Wagner and his colleagues had found the answer to liberation theology that they’d been seeking for decades.

Wagner, who died in 2016, wrote dozens of additional books with titles such as Dominion! and Churchquake! The movement allowed Christianity to be changed and updated, embracing the idea that God was raising new apostles and prophets who could not only interpret ancient scripture but deliver “fresh words” and dreams from heaven on a rolling, even daily basis. One of Wagner’s most talented acolytes, a preacher named Lance Wallnau, repackaged the concept of dominionism into what he popularized as the “7 Mountain Mandate,” essentially an action plan for how Christians could dominate the seven spheres of life—government, education, media, and the four others posted on the walls like targets at Gateway House of Prayer.

What happened next is the story of these ideas spreading far and wide into an American culture primed to accept them. Churches interested in growing found that the NAR formula worked, delivering followers a sense of purpose and value in the Kingdom. Many started hosting “7M” seminars and offering coaching and webinars, which often drew wealthy businesspeople into the fold. After the 2016 election, a group of the nation’s ultra-wealthy conservative Christians organized as an invitation-only charity called Ziklag, a reference to the biblical city where David found refuge during his war against King Saul. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the group stated in internal documents that its purpose was to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains.” Wallnau is an adviser.

By last year, 42 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society,’ ” according to Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who has been developing new surveys to capture what he and others describe as a “fundamental shift” in American Christianity. Roughly 61 percent agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” Roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” and that the Church should “organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.”

Overall, Djupe told me, the nation continues to become more secular. In 1991, only 6 percent of Americans identified as nonreligious, a figure that is now about 30 percent. But the Christians who remain are becoming more radical.

“They are taking on these extreme beliefs that give them a sense of power—they believe they have the power to change the nature of the Earth,” Djupe said. “The adoption of these sort of beliefs is happening incredibly fast.”

The ideas have seeped into Trumpworld, influencing the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called Unhumans, co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as “unhumans” who want to “undo civilization itself” and who currently “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment”—the seven mountains. The book argues that these “unhumans” must be “crushed.”

“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the authors write. “It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

my own frame of reference for what evangelical Christianity looked like was wooden pews, the ladies’ handbell choir, and chicken casseroles for the homebound. The Southern Baptists of my childhood had no immediate reason to behave like insurgents. They had dominated Alabama for decades, mostly blessing the status quo. When I got an assignment a few years ago to write about why evangelicals were still backing Trump, I mistakenly thought that the Baptists were where the action was on the Christian right. I was working for The Washington Post then, and like many journalists, commentators, and researchers who study religion, I was far behind.

Where I ended up one Sunday in 2021 was a church in Fort Worth, Texas, called Mercy Culture. Roughly 1,500 people were streaming through the doors for one of four weekend services, one of which was in Spanish. Ushers offered earplugs. A store carried books about spiritual warfare. Inside the sanctuary, the people filling the seats were white, Black, and brown; they were working-class and professionals and unemployed; they were former drug addicts and porn addicts and social-media addicts; they were young men and women who believed their homosexual tendencies to be the work of Satan. I met a young woman who told me she was going to Montana to “prophesy over the land.” I met a young man contemplating a future as a missionary, who told me, “If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples.” They had the drifty air of hippies, but their counterculture was pure Kingdom.

They faced a huge video screen showing swirling stars, crashing waves, and apocalyptic images, including a mushroom cloud. A digital clock was counting down, and when it hit zero, a band—keyboard, guitars, drums—began blasting music that reminded you of some pop song you couldn’t quite place, from some world you’d left behind when you came through the doors. Lights flashed. Machine-made fog drifted through the crowd. People waved colored flags, calling the Holy Spirit in for a landing. Cameras swooped around, zooming in on a grown man crying and a woman lying prostrate, praying. Eventually, the pastor, a young man in skinny jeans, came onstage and demon-mapped the whole city of Fort Worth. The west side was controlled by the principality of Greed, the north by the demonic spirit of Rebellion; the south belonged to Lust. He spoke of surrendering to God’s laws. And at one point, he endorsed a Church elder running for mayor, describing the campaign as “the beginning of a righteous movement.”

Walking across the bleak, hot parking lot to my rental car afterward, I could understand how people were drawn into their realm. After that, I started seeing the futuristic world of the NAR all over the place. Sprawling megachurches outside Atlanta, Phoenix, and Harrisburg with Broadway-level production values; lower-budget operations in strip malls and the husks of defunct traditional churches. Lots of screens, lots of flags. Conferences with names like Open the Heavens. A training course called Vanquish Academy where people could learn “advanced prophetic weaponry” and “dream intelligence.” Schools such as Kingdom University, in Tennessee, where students can learn their “Kingdom Assignment.” In a way, the movement was a world with its own language. People spoke of convergence and alignment and demon portals and whether certain businesses were Kingdom or not.

In 2023, I met a woman who believed that her Kingdom assignment was to buy an entire mountain for God, and did. It is in northwestern Pennsylvania, and she lives on top of it with her husband. They are always finding what she called “God signs,” such as feathers on the porch. Like many in the movement, she didn’t attend church very often. But every day, she followed online prophets and apostles such as Dutch Sheets, an acolyte of Wagner’s who has hundreds of thousands of followers and is known for interpreting dreams.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

In 2016, Sheets began embracing prophecies that God was using Trump, telling fellow prophets and apostles that his victory would bring “new levels of demonic desperation.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Sheets began releasing daily prophetic updates called Give Him 15, casting Trump’s attempt to steal the election as a great spiritual battle against the forces of darkness. In the days before the insurrection, Sheets described a dream in which he was charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol to stand for the Kingdom. Although he was not in Washington, D.C., on January 6, many of his followers were, some carrying the APPEAL TO HEAVEN flag he’d popularized. Others from Wagner’s old inner circle were there too. Wallnau streamed live from near the U.S. Capitol that day and, that night, from the Trump International Hotel. Cindy Jacobs conducted spiritual warfare just outside the Capitol as rioters were smashing their way inside, telling her followers that the Lord had given her a vision “that they would break through and go all the way to the top.” In his most recent book, The Violent Take It by Force, the scholar Matthew Taylor details the role that major NAR leaders played that day, calling them “the principal theological architects” of the insurrection.

Faith leaders, including major figures in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, pray with Donald Trump at the White House in 2019. (Storms Media Group / Alamy)

At the Pennsylvania statehouse, I met an apostle named Abby Abildness, whom I came to understand as a kind of Kingdom diplomat. It was the spring of 2023, and she had recently returned from Iraqi Kurdistan, where she had met with Kurdish leaders she believed to be descended from King Solomon, and who she said wanted “holy governance to go forth.”

I watched YouTube videos of prophets broadcasting from their basements. I watched a streaming show called FlashPoint, where apostles and prophets deliver news from God; guests have included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because another dimension of the NAR is that the movement is a prominent advocate of Christian Zionism.

I came to understand how the movement amounts to a sprawling political machine. The apostles and prophets, speaking for God, decide which candidates and policies advance the Kingdom. The movement’s prayer networks and newsletters amount to voter lists and voter guides. A growing ecosystem of podcasts and streaming shows such as FlashPoint amounts to a Kingdom media empire. And the overall vision of the movement means that people are not engaged just during election years but, like the people at Gateway House of Prayer, 24/7.

[Read: This just in from heaven]

As November’s election neared, I watched the whole juggernaut crank into action to return Trump to the White House. Wallnau, in partnership with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, promoted an effort called Project 19, targeting voters in 19 swing counties. He also launched something called the Courage Tour, which similarly targeted swing states, and I attended one event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It looked like an old-fashioned tent revival, except that it was also an aggressive pro-Trump mobilization effort. Wallnau dabbed frankincense oil onto foreheads, anointing voters into God’s army. Another speaker said that Kamala Harris would be a “devil in the White House.” Others cast Democrats as agents of Lucifer, and human history as a struggle between the godless forces of secular humanism and God’s will for humankind.

A march called “A Million Women” on the National Mall drew tens of thousands of people and culminated with the smashing of an altar representing demonic strongholds in America. With the Capitol dome as their backdrop, people took turns bashing the altar as music surged and others prayed, and when it was rubble, the prophet Lou Engle declared, “We’re going to point to the north, south, and east, and west, and command America! The veil has been ripped!”

The NAR movement was a major source of the “low-propensity voters” who backed Trump. Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates, which tracks antidemocratic movements, has been documenting the rise of the NAR for years, and warning about its theocratic goals. He believes that a certain condescension, and perhaps failure of imagination, has kept outsiders from understanding what he has come to see as the most significant religious movement of the 21st century, and one that poses a profound threat to democracy.

“Certain segments of society have not been willing to understand where these people are coming from,” Clarkson told me. “For me, it’s part of the story of our times. It’s a movement that has continued to rise, gathered political strength, attracted money, built institutions. And the broad center-left doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

Which leaves the question of what happens now.

The movement certainly aligns with many goals of the Christian right: a total abortion ban, an end to gay marriage and LGBTQ rights. Traditional family is the fundamental unit of God’s perfect order. In theory, affirmative action, welfare programs, and other social-justice measures would be unnecessary because in the Kingdom, as Abildness, the Pennsylvania apostle, and her husband once explained to me, there is no racism and no identity other than child of God. “Those that oppose us think we are dangerous,” her husband told me, describing a vision of life governed by God’s will. “But this is better for everyone. There wouldn’t be homelessness. We’d be caring for each other.”

Matthew Taylor told me he sees the movement merging seamlessly into “the MAGA blob,” with the prophets and apostles casting whatever Trump does as part of God’s plan, and rebuking any dissent. “It’s the synchronization with Trump that is most alarming,” he said. “The agenda now is Trump. And that’s how populist authoritarianism works. It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over.”

[Read: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

In another sense, the movement has never been about policies or changes to the law; it’s always been about the larger goal of dismantling the institutions of secular government to clear the way for the Kingdom. It is about God’s total victory.

“Buckle up, buttercup!” Wallnau said on his podcast shortly after the election. “Because you’re going to be watching a whole new redefinition of what the reformation looks like as Christians engage every sector of society. Christ is not quarantined any longer. We’re going into all the world.”

On the day after the election, I went to Life Center, the NAR church where Elon Musk had spoken a couple of weeks earlier. The mood was jubilant. A pastor spoke of “years of oppression” and said that “we are at a time on the other side of a victory for our nation that God alone—that God alone—orchestrated for us.”

The music pounded, and people cheered, and after that, a prominent prophet named Joseph Garlington delivered a sermon. He was a guest speaker, and he offered what sounded like the first hint of dissent I’d heard in a long time. He talked about undocumented immigrants and asked people to consider whether it might be possible that God was sending them to the U.S. so they could build the Kingdom.

“What if they are part of the harvest?” he said. “He didn’t send us to them; maybe he’s sending them to us.”

It was a striking moment. Life Center, Mercy Culture, and many other churches in the movement have large numbers of Latinos in their congregations. In 2020, Trump kicked off his outreach to evangelical voters at a Miami megachurch called El Rey Jesús, headed by a prominent Honduran American apostle named Guillermo Maldonado. I wondered how the apostles and prophets would react to the mass deportations Trump had proposed. Garlington continued that Trump was “God’s choice,” but that the election was just one battle in the ultimate struggle. He told people that it’s “time for war,” language I kept hearing in other NAR circles even after the election. He told people to prepare to lose friends and family as the Kingdom of God marched on in the days ahead. He told them to separate from the wicked.

“If you’ve got a child and he says, ‘Come and let us go serve other gods,’ go tell on him. Tell them, ‘I’ve got a kid who is saying we need to serve other gods. Can you help me kill him?’ ” Garlington said he wasn’t being literal about the last part. “But you need to rebuke them,” he said. “You need to say, ‘Honey, if you keep on that path, there’s a place reserved in hell for you.’ ”

This was also a theme the next day at Gateway House of Prayer, where I waited to learn my own fate, as people began praying in tongues and free-forming in English as the Holy Spirit gave them words.

Alexandre Luu

“We’re asking for a full overturning in the media,” a man said. “We’re asking for all the media to turn away from being propagandists to being truth tellers.”

“Their eyes need to be opened,” a woman said. “They don’t know God at all. They think they know all these things because they’re so educated and worldly. But they do not see God … And that’s what we need. The harvest.”

“The reformation,” the grandmother added.

“The reformation,” the woman said.

At one point, a man questioned me: “The whole world knows The Atlantic is a left-wing, Marxist-type publication. Why would you choose to go and work there?” At another point, the group leader defended me: “I feel the Lord has called her to be a truth seeker.” At another point, the grandmother spoke of a prophecy she’d heard recently about punishment for the wicked. “There are millstones being made in Heaven,” she said. “Straight up. There’s millstones.” Another woman spoke of “God’s angry judgment” for the disobedient.

“There’s a lot of people that are going to change their minds,” a man said.

“You’ll be happy with the changes God brings,” a woman reassured me. “You’ll be happy.”

This went on for a while. I wasn’t sure where it was going until the leader of the group decided that I should leave. She could not have been nicer about it. She spoke of God’s absolute love, and absolute truth, and absolute justice, and then I headed for the door.

A few women followed me into the lobby, apologizing that it had come to this. They were sorry for me, as believers in the movement were sorry for all of the people who were lost and confused by this moment in America—the doubters, the atheists, the gay people, Muslims, Buddhists, Democrats, journalists, and all the godless who had not yet submitted to what they knew to be true. The Kingdom was here, and the only question was whether you were in, or out.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Army of God.”

This Just in From Heaven

2024-11-03T06:00:00-05:00

When the presidential-election results begin rolling in on Tuesday night, a sizable audience of pro-Trump Christians will not turn to Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, or Right Side Broadcasting. Instead, they will stream their news directly from God, on a show called FlashPoint, where an affable host named Gene Bailey sits behind a desk with a large red phone.

“This is God saying ‘This is my program!’” Bailey says in a promotional video for the show, which airs three times a week and, at peak moments, draws hundreds of thousands of viewers on YouTube alone.

“We have a responsibility to report what we hear from heaven,” a prophet from Omaha named Hank Kunneman has said on the show.

One of the many signs that FlashPoint is a departure from the usual televangelism is that the o in its logo looks like the view through a rifle scope. Another is that the audience is referred to as the “FlashPoint Army.” A third is that the red phone is a hotline to Donald Trump. A fourth is that, sometimes, heaven sends not just news of the End Times, but earthly instructions. This was the case during the run-up to January 6, when FlashPoint was getting millions of views, and the prophets told the FlashPoint Army to claim the U.S. Capitol for God’s kingdom.

In an episode last month, there were no such instructions, not yet. Just breaking news that a hurricane was heading for Florida, and the question of how that fit into demonic plans to thwart victory for Trump. “What do you think, supernatural impact here?” Bailey said to Kunneman.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

“There are a lot of conspiracy theories about whether man can manipulate weather,” the prophet said at a moment when such disinformation was leading to death threats against FEMA workers. “I do know this: Evil spirits work with man. And there are some very evil men who cooperate with evil spirits. And God did say in the prophecies that these storms would be sent to interrupt the flow of our election process.”

It was a relatively typical night for FlashPoint, which I can say because I have watched hours and hours of episodes going back to its launch in September 2020. That was when the show first entered the sprawling media ecosystem that has risen alongside a growing movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose theology includes the idea that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. The movement has become the vanguard of America’s Christian right, and its media wing is not the realm of prosperity-gospel preachers or Sunday services on basic cable. It is part of another propaganda universe—an unruly world of YouTube prophets broadcasting from basements about a dream God gave them about World War III, or a TikTok prophecy about what the war in Gaza means for the End Times, or a viral video about what the Almighty told a pink-haired prophet named Kat Kerr, who claims to have spoken with Trump 20 minutes before the first attempt to assassinate him. Such prophecies can rack up millions of views on social media.

Within that world, FlashPoint has emerged as the premier outlet for the most trusted prophets with the largest followings, and a venue for politicians eager to reach that audience. By now, Bailey has interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Trump himself. Most important, the show has become a kind of command center for the people Trump refers to as “my Christians.” In a sense, FlashPoint is where God’s memo goes out, which makes it all the more noteworthy that, in recent weeks, the prophecies have become more apocalyptic.

From the beginning, the show has framed politics as a great “spiritual war.” It launched on the Victory Channel, a streaming platform and satellite-television network that is part of the well-funded empire of Kenneth Copeland, an old-guard televangelist in the multifaceted world of charismatic Christianity. Copeland himself never exactly belonged to the apostle-and-prophet crowd. But he was part of the broader mobilization of charismatic Christians behind Trump, and provided the most prominent prophets with the platform they needed to build a movement they likened to a new Great Awakening. Among these was Lance Wallnau, the chief marketer of the idea that God anointed Trump. Wallnau quickly became a FlashPoint regular.

The Victory Channel had virtually no presence on YouTube before FlashPoint debuted, according to Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies who has documented the involvement of NAR figures in the January 6 insurrection. As FlashPoint began amplifying election-fraud conspiracy theories, viewer data show, the Victory Channel’s overall YouTube views grew from 152,000 in October 2020 to 32.4 million in January 2021. On the evening of January 6, 2021, FlashPoint covered the insurrection that its guests had helped foment, broadcasting live from Copeland’s Texas church, blessing what has become a lasting narrative of the day for millions of Americans.

Bailey brought on a pastor who cast himself as a reporter, who said that he had “confirmed that the FBI had a busload of antifa people come in and infiltrate the rally.” The host tossed to a prophet named Mario Murillo, who said, “I know that there is a spirit in the land that wants to take away our Christian rights and our freedoms and that today we demonstrated to them we are not going to let this happen—and anyone who thinks this ends tonight is totally mistaken.” Wallnau Zoomed in from Trump International Hotel in Washington. He described the march to the Capitol as a “giant Disney parade,” and said the violence had been carried out not by “our people” but by antifa and Black Lives Matter, calling them “the devil’s people.” Bailey turned to Kunneman: “What’s God showing you?” Kunneman videoed in from Omaha, calling the violence “a smokescreen from the Devil.” “Remember,” he continued. “Big God, little devil. Big God, little corrupt Democrat rat. Big God, little Republican pathetic person that cannot stand for their democracy.” People clapped.

“Here are your orders from heaven: Be strong, fear not … Your God will come with a vengeance,” Kunneman said, declaring FlashPoint to be “part of the new spirit of truth in media that’s going to rise in the land.”

In the four years since then, the hour-long show has offered regular sustenance for Americans who believe that a great spiritual battle against demonic forces is under way, one that could culminate any moment. Production values improved. The red phone was added. Each show opens with urgent, triumphant music and a red, white, and blue montage of apocalyptic images—dire headlines, hands praying, a tattered American flag flying, and the slogans “We are believing patriots!” and “It’s time to stand up!”

Bailey and the prophets have often hit the road for live broadcasts, part of a circuit of pro-Trump events meant to keep followers energized. In Georgia last year, they led a crowd of thousands in a pledge called the “Watchman Decree,” in which the audience promised allegiance “first and foremost to the kingdom of God,” declared the Church to be “God’s governing body on the earth,” and committed to be “God’s ambassadors” with “legal power from heaven.”

Most of the time, Bailey has been behind the desk, with the prophets Zooming in from offices and basements as they did on a Tuesday last January, kicking off the election season with news from the Iowa caucuses, where Trump was winning. “It’s election season!” Bailey said, showing a clip of the freezing weather in Iowa, and another meant to suggest that Democrats were trying to tell people to stay home. “Hank,” he said. “What do you see as we get into this?”

Kunneman said the freeze meant that God was “freezing the efforts” of Democrats to “manipulate things to alter our election integrity and our freedom.” He said Trump was winning Iowa because voters “recognize the voice God has raised up that is going to bring a deliverance to this country.”

“I want to go to Dutch,” Bailey said, turning to a popular South Carolina prophet named Dutch Sheets, who claims that God speaks through dreams, including one Sheets talked about on January 1, 2021—a few days after he visited the White House—in which he described charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol. As he usually does, Sheets joined from a studio lit with blue lights. His blue eyes glowed.

“I feel like God is exposing evil and opening the eyes of a nation,” he said in a soothing voice, and then he described a cryptic dream God had given him that could be taken as prediction or instruction or some sort of coded plan.

“Watchmen are supposed to be watching for the enemy,” he began. “In this particular dream, 50 people found themselves in a military strategy room. They had been summoned there, one from each state. And Gene in the dream was one of them. I was one of them. We were all gathered. Then a general and an admiral came into the room, and said, ‘We have asked you to come because we need your help.’ There was a map of all 50 states on all the walls. And the dams and waterways were highlighted.” Sheets said that this was God’s “advance warning” of a terrorist attack on the nation’s water supply, a sign of how far the enemy was willing to go, and told people to pray for the safety of supply lines.

“Amen,” Bailey said, turning to Wallnau. “Tie it all together for us.”

Wallnau said the show was God’s way of bringing the disparate prophets together ahead of the election. He said the movement was “apostolically maturing” and would not make the same mistakes it had made on the day of the Capitol riot. “When I was up at January 6, I was upset when it happened, because I could see that Trump did not have the voices that he needed to be there speaking in proximity to him,” he said. “That will not happen this time.”

He did not clarify what he meant by “this time,” and Bailey did not ask. “Amen to that,” the anchorman said.

That is how FlashPoint has been going all year long, each episode rolling current events into an ever-escalating End Times narrative building toward the election. After a helicopter crash killed the president of Iran in May, the usual panel of prophets convened. “What does this mean?” Bailey asked.

Kunneman shuffled through some papers and pulled out a prophecy about Iran that he’d delivered five years earlier, in which he stated that “God is literally going to tear their leadership from them and there would be a regime change.”

“The Lord said 2024 would be his justice,” Kunneman said.

When Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a scheme to silence a porn star before the 2016 election, Bailey Zoomed in from his beach vacation. “Rick?” he said to Rick Green, a regular on the show who runs something called the Patriot Academy in Texas, and who began trashing the judicial system.

“Joseph Stalin would be so proud of Joe Biden right now,” Green said. “He’s looking up from hell right now saying, ‘Great job, Joe. You’re doing this even better than I did with my show trials during Communism.”

“Talk to the people,” Bailey said, turning to Kunneman.

“God said there are two he’s put his hand on: Netanyahu, and Donald Trump,” Kunneman said, explaining that Netanyahu was reelected prime minister despite corruption charges, and that Trump would also triumph. “Same scenario.”

When Trump survived the assassination attempt in July, the panel invoked prophecies and Bible stories about ears. Wallnau spoke of God being “in control of every fraction of what’s happening with this man.” He said angels had turned Trump’s head. As he always did, he spoke of Trump as a King Cyrus, the ancient Persian ruler whom God uses in the Bible to liberate the Babylonians and return Jewish people to their homeland.

“As history teaches, in the final battle, King Cyrus had a wound to his head,” Bailey said as the program ended. “There you go.” The episode got more than 300,000 views on YouTube, which was not unusual.

On a Tuesday in August, FlashPoint promoted a new prophet from Colorado Springs, a fit-looking, bald-headed young man who calls himself “Joseph Z,” who said God had told him that the anti-Christ is working through the “deep state” to assassinate Trump, and scapegoat Iran. “The spirit of the Lord forewarns, to forearm, to prepare us for these moments,” said Joseph Z, who publishes a newsletter for his followers, one of which recently began, “There is a war coming against the will of the antichrist.”

One day in September, the subject was the upcoming debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. “The thing we are dealing with, I believe, is witchcraft at a very high level,” Wallnau said. “You’re dealing with a whole lot of mind control.”

“I think we are going to see the colliding of two kingdoms,” Kunneman said. “The kingdom of God. And the kingdom of the enemy.”

“I am decreeing that the angels of the Lord are on that stage,” Sheets said.

For days, the show had been posting a short promo video of the red phone ringing, signaling that the anointed himself was coming, and now Bailey played the videotaped interview.

“We want to bring religion back into our country, and let it get stronger, bigger, better,” Trump told Bailey just before the debate, pledging to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofits such as churches from endorsing political candidates. “You will be in great shape,” Trump added. Bailey then prayed over the former president, who bowed his head but kept his eyes open.

“It was a great moment,” Bailey said on the show.

“I could feel the spirit of the Lord on his words, on you,” Kunneman said.

“He saw the genuineness of your faith,” Wallnau said, and Bailey cried.

On a Wednesday in October: “We keep turning on the lights and showing where the cockroaches are running,” Wallnau said, referring to the mainstream press, and the work that FlashPoint was doing to unearth satanic plots against Trump.

In recent weeks, the show has shifted into mobilization mode, promoting pro-Trump events such as A Million Women, a recent march on the National Mall organized by some of the NAR movement’s most prominent apostles and prophets. A conservative estimate is that tens of thousands of people showed up. Many in the crowd wore camouflage FlashPoint Army T-shirts and hats. The event was rich with symbolism invoking violent moments in the history of Christianity. Organizers described the march as “an Esther call,” invoking the biblical story of Esther, the Jewish queen of the Persian king, who persuades her husband to save her people from persecution, after which the king grants them permission to kill their enemies.

“What they are wanting is to give the nation back to God,” Bailey said of the crowd gathered in the sunshine on the Mall, where people were praying, crying, laying prostrate, blowing shofars, and waving the Appeal to Heaven flag, white with a green pine tree, that has become a symbol of the movement to advance God’s kingdom.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The Christian radicals are coming]

FlashPoint aired many of these scenes during its recap of the event. But the episode did not show the culmination of the march, when apostles and prophets surrounded a cement altar on a stage in view of the U.S. Capitol. The altar was meant to symbolize demonic strongholds in America, and as music swelled, Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jewish pastor, prayed to cast out these demons. Then he began smashing the altar with a sledgehammer. Others, men and women both, took turns smashing until the altar was in pieces. Later, a California apostle named Ché Ahn, one of the most powerful figures in the movement, declared that Trump would win the election and that Harris was a “type of Jezebel,” an evil biblical figure who was thrown from a tower to her death and eaten by dogs. Ahn decreed that Harris would be “cast out”—a moment that Matthew Taylor, the religion scholar, interpreted as a veiled way of blessing violence against her. (Ahn did not respond to a request for comment but told The Guardian after the event that his message was “all spiritual.”)

“It was a great thing,” Bailey said, describing the march.

During that show and others in recent weeks, Bailey reminded viewers to subscribe to FlashPoint on Rumble, a social-media platform favored by Trump supporters, in case YouTube removes the show. He and the prophets have continued likening the election to epic biblical battles. They’ve spoken about God’s lawyers preparing to fight demonic “shenanigans” in Pennsylvania. They’ve spoken of “taking territory back.” Kunneman has started calling Harris “cackling Hamas.”

At a recent live show in North Carolina, he told Bailey that the nation was in “an Exodus 32 moment,” when thugs were “trying to steal the leadership and take over the nation, just like today, and God called them out, and he opened up the ground and swallowed those evildoers, and I believe we are going to see that.”

Kunneman said that God is saying, “What will my people decide? Are you going to choose life, or are you going to choose death? You gonna choose good, or you gonna choose evil?”

Bailey said that he was having visions of a decisive moment on a battlefield. The question now was whether the FlashPoint Army that the show had been cultivating for the past four years was ready to follow orders from heaven. “We see an opening,” Bailey said, adding that he believed “this is the time that we’re going to have to go harder, faster, and take back what the devil stole.”

The show ended, and the conversation continued offline.

The Christian Radicals Are Coming

2024-10-01T16:05:00-04:00

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In the final moments of the last day, some 2,000 people were on their feet, arms raised and cheering under a big white tent in the grass outside a church in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. By then they’d been told that God had chosen them to save America from Kamala Harris and a demonic government trying to “silence the Church.” They’d been told they had “authority” to establish God’s Kingdom, and reminded of their reward in heaven. Now they listened as an evangelist named Mario Murillo told them exactly what was expected of Christians like them.

“We are going to prepare for war,” he shouted, and a few minutes later: “I’m not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.”

That is how four days under the tent would end—with words that could be taken as hyperbolic, or purely metaphorical. And on the first day, people were not necessarily prepared to accept them. But getting people ready was the whole point of what was happening in Eau Claire, an event cast as an old-fashioned tent revival, only not the kind involving Nilla wafers and repentance. This one targeted souls in swing states. It was an unapologetic exercise in religious radicalization happening in plain sight, just off a highway and down the street from a Panera. The point was to transform a like-minded crowd of Donald Trump–supporting believers into “God-appointed warriors” ready to do whatever the Almighty might require of them in November and beyond.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

So far, thousands of people have attended the traveling event billed as the “Courage Tour,” including the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, who was a special guest this past weekend in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. The series is part of a steady drumbeat of violent rhetoric, prayer rallies, and marches coming out of the rising Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose ultimate goal is not just Trump’s reelection but Christian dominion—a Kingdom of God. When Trump speaks of “my beautiful Christians,” he usually means these Christians and their leaders—networks of apostles and prophets with hundreds of thousands of followers, many of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a day preceded by events such as those happening now.

Although Murillo headlined the Eau Claire revival, the chief organizer is the influential prophet Lance Wallnau, who exhorted his followers to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6, casting efforts to overturn the election as part of a new “Great Awakening.” Kindred events in the coming weeks include a series of concert-style rallies called “Kingdom to the Capitol,” aiming to draw crowds to state capitals in Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, with a final concert in D.C. just days before the election. A march called “A Million Women” is planned for the National Mall in mid-October. Every day, internet prophets are describing dreams of churches under attack, Christians rising up, and the start of World War III, acclimating followers to the prospect of real-world violence.

And this is what awaits people under the tent: leaders waging an intentional effort to move them from passivity to action and into “God’s army.” It involves loudspeakers. It involves drums and lights and a huge video screen roughly 20 feet wide and eight feet high. It is a deliberate process, one choreographed to the last line, and in Eau Claire, on the grass outside Oasis Church, the four days began with a kind of promise.

“The first thing I’m going to say is you did not come to see me,” Murillo said. “You came to see Jesus Christ.”

This was on a warm Sunday evening, the first day of the process. Volunteers were smiling and waving cars into a gravel parking lot, ushering people toward the tent on the grass. The mood was friendly. The crowd was young and old and mostly white, people wearing khaki pants and work boots, gold crosses and Bible-verse tattoos. They were locals and out-of-towners from as far away as Texas.

Into the tent they went, past a gantlet of tables that left no doubt that the great spiritual battle they believed to be under way included politics, and that God had chosen sides. People could sign up to be “patriots” with America First Works, which is linked to the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. They could sign up for something called the Lion of Judah, which aims to place Christians inside election offices, a strategy that the group’s founder would refer to on day two as “our Trojan horse.”

Now the sun was setting, and the video screen was glowing blue with drifting stars. A praise band blasted one surging, drum-pounding song after another until Murillo arrived to set expectations for the days to come, starting with establishing his own authority.

“God has chosen to speak through men—men and women—who are anointed,” he began.

“My father and my God … you have orchestrated for them to hear the words I’m about to speak,” he continued. Then, step by step, he framed the moment at hand. “Something evil is at work in America,” Murillo said, describing a country of lost souls, decaying cities, and drug addiction, and a degenerate culture preying on children. “Any culture that surgically alters the gender of children is a sick, perverted society.”

People began clapping. “I want you to listen to me,” he went on. “If you want equality? If you want women’s rights? If you want freedom from drugs? You want Jesus Christ.” More clapping and amens.

“But we chose, in America, a philosophical approach,” Murillo said, proceeding to argue against 400 years of Enlightenment thought underpinning the concepts of individual rights, religious pluralism, Church-state separation, and American democracy itself. The problem, he said, was a wrong turn in the Garden of Eden, followed by a wrong turn in the 17th century, when people replaced God with their own reason. “The philosophical elephant in the room for America is very simple,” he said. “To the degree that we took God out, we brought misery in. If we want the misery to get out, we’ve got to bring God back into our schools, back into our government.”

People cheered, and soon, Murillo introduced Wallnau, a slightly disheveled man in jeans and a sweat-soaked shirt, a fast-talking former pastor whom some modern-religion scholars consider the most influential theologian of the 21st century.

When mainstream evangelicals were rejecting Trump during the 2016 GOP primary, it was Wallnau who popularized the idea that God had anointed Trump for a “special purpose,” activating a fresh wave of so-called prophecy voters. By now, he was a Mar-a-Lago regular. He had about 2 million social-media followers. He had a podcast where he hosted MAGA-world figures such as the political operative Charlie Kirk, and frequently spoke of demonic forces in U.S. and global politics. He was a frequent guest on a streaming show called FlashPoint, a kind of PBS NewsHour for the prophecy crowd, where he’d implied that the left was to blame for the July assassination attempt against Trump. Lately, he’d been saying that Harris represented the “spirit of Jezebel.”

“America is too young to die. It has an unfinished assignment,” Wallnau told the crowd now.

“Tomorrow,” he went on, “I want to talk to you about your unfinished assignment.”

For the moment, though, he described a battle scene from the film Gladiator, one that takes place in an arena in ancient Rome, where a group of enslaved warriors comes under attack. The film’s hero, Maximus, rallies them to join forces, at which point they decapitate, bludgeon, and otherwise defeat their enemies in a bloody fashion. Wallnau wasn’t merely entertaining the crowd, but also suggesting how real-life events might play out.

“How many of you would like to be activated in your Maximus anointing?” Wallnau said. People in the crowd cheered. “Put your right hand up in the air!”

They did.

Day two. By 10 a.m., the drums were pounding, the band was blasting, and Wallnau was at the podium holding up a small brown bottle. It was frankincense oil.

“We’re adding to this wild army!” he told the crowd, calling people up to the stage.

“Lord, they are hungry,” he prayed. “Now, Lord, they want more. They believe this is real. They believe something is happening.”

He cued the praise band, then walked up and down the line of people streaming to the stage, pressing his oiled hand to their foreheads. He said the Lord was filling them with “mighty power.” Then he sent them back to their chairs, ready to hear what they were meant to do with it. People took out notebooks and pens.

“I daresay a lot of us are nobodies on Earth who are somebodies in the spirit,” Wallnau said, explaining how good Christians like them had allowed themselves to become something God never intended them to be: victims. He said that they had been naive. That they’d misplaced their faith in a government of “elites” and “oligarchs” who wanted world domination. He said the worst part was that Christians had allowed this to happen. “You either have God, or you’ve got government,” he said. “Only one person can be supreme.”

And this is when he explained the assignment he’d promised the day before. He set up a whiteboard. He drew seven mountains. Above them he drew a stick figure, representing Jesus Christ looking down on the world. He explained that each mountain was a sphere of society—education, business, government, and so on—and that believers’ job was to assert authority over each sphere. The point was not just individual salvation but societal reformation, the Kingdom. He said democracy would not work without the flourishing of Christian conscience. He said Christians are called to be “the head and not the tail.”

“I’m tired of people thinking Christianity is just some kind of a backwoods, redneck religion,” he continued. “It’s not. It’s the force that produced the Reformation in Europe. That formed the United States!”

After 30 minutes of this, Wallnau led the crowd in a declaration. “Father, I am ready,” came the sound of 2,000 voices repeating his words. “To be a part. Of a new move of God. In the United States. And I will occupy. The territory you give me. For the glory of God.”

Next came a man in a blue suit. This was Bill Federer, a former congressional candidate from Missouri and the author of a book called Socialism: The Real History From Plato to Present. He took out a laser pointer. “You are important people,” he said. “God has chosen you.”

Then he pointed his laser at the big screen, and began clicking through a slideshow illustrating human history as a bloody struggle between godly forces that want democracy and free-market capitalism, and demonic forces that want world domination and are currently working through Democrats. He clicked to a Bible verse. He clicked to a quote from the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. “The political slogan of the antichrist is ‘peace and safety,’” it read.

“In other words,” Federer told them, “don’t be afraid of the world ending. Be afraid of the people that promise to save you from the world ending.” He clicked to the last slide, a cartoon of a golden-walled Kingdom in the clouds. “Someday, you’re going to be dead,” he said, telling people to imagine heaven. Gold streets. Mansions. Also, a hypothetical gathering in the living room of Moses, where all the great Christian heroes would tell their stories. Moses would tell about facing a government “trying to kill us.” David would tell about chopping off Goliath’s head.

“Then everyone’s going to look at you,” Federer said. “Tell us your story … What did you do when the whole world was against you, when the government was trying to kill you?” He paused so they could imagine. “Guess what? We’re still on this Earth,” he said, smiling. “You can still do those courageous faith-filled things that you will be known for forever. This is your time.”

Wallnau returned to the stage. He told the crowd that 50,000 more people were watching online, a number that was not verifiable. Then he introduced a Polish Canadian preacher named Artur Pawlowski, who calls himself “The Lion” and “a convicted felon just like your rightful president of the United States.”

Pawlowski was known in Canada for protesting Pride Month, railing against Muslim immigrants, and leading anti-lockdown protests during the pandemic, including one involving tiki torches—activity that gained him notoriety in the U.S., where he turned up as a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He was later convicted for “inciting mischief” for encouraging truckers who staged a blockade at the U.S.-Canadian border.

Now the audience watched the big screen as a video showed scenes of Pawlowski cast as a martyr, being arrested, on his knees, in jail, all set to a pounding rock song that included the lyric “Once they grab the pastors, they come for the common man.”

And this was the point. Pawlowski told people that the government would be coming for them next. He spoke of “the venom of lies and poison of falsehoods that have been spreading through the veins of our society,” and “sexual perversion,” and politicians working for “the globalists,” calling them the modern-day Philistines, the biblical enemies of God’s chosen people, who are “under attack.”

He told them that Christians had been too timid, too “gentle” and “loving.”

“Here is what God is saying,” he said. “It is time to go after the villains. It is time to chase the wicked. The time has come for justice, and justice demands restitution.” People cheered. “It’s time to move into offense,” he said.

Like Federer, Pawlowski left things vague. “You want to be promoted in the Kingdom of God?” he said. “How many of you would like to see Jesus face-to-face? Then you have to go into the fire, my friends. He always comes to the fire. He is the fire. He is in the fire. And in the fire, he sets you free.” Pawlowski never explained to the people under the tent what the fire was, or what going into it meant, only that a time would come when each of them would have to make some sort of sacrifice.

Then Wallnau dismissed people for lunch. The anointed gathered their Bibles and hand fans and headed for Panera and McDonald’s to process what they’d heard. “It’s a little overwhelming,” a woman named Melanie Simon, a member of Oasis Church, said. “I’m praying for God to remove fear from our spirit,” a man in camouflage shorts said. He gave only his first name, Steven, because he had gotten fired from his job and was in a legal dispute with his former employer. “We’re going to have to go to extremes,” a 63-year-old Wisconsin man named Will Anderson said. He’d driven two hours to hear all of this. He said he was bracing for some kind of “clash” in November. He said it was possible that people like him would have to take “steps and measures,” but he was not sure what they might be. “I’m not into passivity, and neither is God,” he said.

Later, he and the others came back for more. In the hot afternoon, Wallnau introduced a young political operative named Joshua Standifer, who gave people one concrete idea of what they might do. He was the founder of the Lion of Judah, whose homepage includes the slogan “Fight the fraud.” Standifer flashed a QR code on the screen, explaining that it would connect people to their municipality, where they could apply to become an actual election worker—not a volunteer; a worker.

“Here’s the difference: At Election Night, what happens is, when polls start to close or chaos unfolds, they’re going to kick the volunteers out,” he said. “You’re actually going to be a paid election worker … I call this our Trojan horse in. They don’t see it coming, but we’re going to flood election poll stations across the country with spiritual believers.”

He flashed on the video screen the photo of Trump raising his fist after the July assassination attempt, blood streaking down his face. “Our enemy is actively taking ground and will do everything they can to win by any means necessary,” he said. “Our hour of action has arrived.” He added that he meant not only November but “what’s coming after that.” He did not elaborate on what that might be.

“The Lord is with you, valiant warrior,” Standifer said at one point. “Everyone say ‘Warrior.’”

“Warrior,” the crowd repeated.

Day three didn’t start until evening, and what happened felt familiar, normal, more like the old-fashioned tent revival that Murillo had promised in his ads. As the sun was setting, people streamed across the green grass and back into the white tent, now lit up under a deep-orange sky, the giant screen once again glowing blue with drifting stars. The band started, and the singer spoke of people “tormented by thoughts of premature death” as Murillo took his place in front of an audience full of diseased hearts, bad livers, arthritic hands, worn-out knees, and minds disturbed by depression. “Hallelujah,” he said as people clapped. “We are the only movement in the history of the world where the founder attends every meeting. He’s here!”

This, too, was part of the radicalization effort, an exercise in building trust and shoring up group identity. People waved colored flags, believing that the same Holy Spirit that would save America was swirling through the tent at that very moment. Murillo promised that the “power of God is going to fall on all of you.” He said that he didn’t want to get political tonight, but that the power was going to fall on the entire state of Wisconsin on Election Day, too. Then he launched into a barn burner of a sermon. Murillo spoke of souls in “spiritual danger,” and the death of the “brittle fairyland” of the self, and the power of surrendering that self wholly to the Lord. Soon he cued the band and called people to the stage.

“Lord, I believe the pain in their soul is greater than their fear of embarrassment,” Murillo said as people came forward, old men with canes, fresh-faced young women, young men crying. “Every step you take is a step toward freedom. Every step is toward power. What you’re doing is wise.”

He led them in a prayer about being washed in the blood of Jesus, then told them to turn around and look at the back of the tent. A line of volunteers smiled and waved, ready to welcome them with prayers, and take down their phone number and email address. “Ladies and gentlemen, they are saved,” Murillo declared as the crowd applauded and cheered for the new recruits. “The devil has lost them!”

The evening went on like that, the band playing gospel, Murillo moving onto the faith healings, the people willing to believe.

“People who are deaf, ears are opening,” he said.

“The lady in the orange—there is a growth that will vanish,” he said.

“God is healing your spine.”

“I rebuke cancer in the name of Jesus.”

Murillo looked out at the crowd of people crying, fainting, raising hands, closing eyes, walking when he said walk, dancing when he said dance. “Nothing will stop the will of God,” he said.

“How many of you believe we need a miracle in America?” Murillo began on the final day. By now Wallnau was gone and the Canadian preacher had left; it was just Murillo and a crowd that was the largest of all four nights, filling the folding chairs and spilling outside the tent onto the grass, where people had brought their own lawn chairs.

Murillo said that he’d had a sermon planned, but that God had “overruled” him and given him another message to deliver. “I want you to listen like you’ve never listened to me before,” he began. If there was any confusion about what the past four days had been about, Murillo himself now clarified. It was about November. It was not just about defeating Kamala Harris, but about defeating the advance of Satan.

“I don’t want a devil in the White House,” Murillo said.

“God is saying to the Church, ‘Will you wake up and realize that I’m giving you the authority to stop this thing?’” he said. “You have the authority.”

He said that the Secret Service had deliberately failed to protect the former president from an assassination attempt in July. “They wanted him dead.”

He said, “It is the job of every shepherd to get up in his pulpit … and say to the people, ‘We are going to prepare for war.’”

He said, “I didn’t pick a fight; they picked the fight,” he said.

He said what leaders of groups say when they are attempting to justify violence, and if people thought he was speaking only of spiritual warfare, Murillo clarified with a story.

[Tim Alberta: The only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism]

“Say you’re in your backyard grilling,” he said. “You got a fence. And somebody jumps that fence, comes after your wife. You’re not going to stand there and say, ‘It’s in God’s hands.’ No. Right now, brother, it’s in my hands. And my hands are going to come on you real strong right now. I’ll stop you any way I can. And we gotta stop the insanity going on in the United States.”

He went on like that, telling people to “quit feeling sorry for yourself” and to see themselves as an “absolute lion of God.” And as the process came to its final minutes, Murillo delivered the last message that he’d been preparing people to hear.

“I am not on the Earth to be blessed; I’m on the Earth to be armed and dangerous.” He went on: “I am not on the Earth to feel good. I’m not on the Earth to do my own thing. I’m on this Earth as a God-appointed warrior in a dark time.”

That is what four days of carefully choreographed sermons and violent imagery had come to with only weeks to go before the presidential election. And just as the crowds had in Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia, people in Eau Claire cheered. They said amen, and then 2,000 Christian warriors headed into the Wisconsin evening, among them a young man named Josh Becker, a local who’d attended all four days. He said he felt inspired. He said he wasn’t sure exactly what he was supposed to do, only that “we have to do something—we have a role.”

“I believe the father is going to lead us through a dark time,” he said, referring to the election and whatever God might require of him. “The Kingdom of God is now.”

Having a Chance Has Changed the Democrats

2024-08-07T09:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Updated at 9:17 a.m. ET on August 7, 2024

In the long, sweaty line for Vice President Kamala Harris’s Philadelphia rally yesterday, people said they were happy she’d chosen Tim Walsh as her running mate. They were glad about Tim Wentz, and truly thrilled with the man whose actual name is Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor whom most people were just now getting to know.

“She chose the least threatening person,” Prentice Bush, a 49-year-old caterer, said, making his way to the doors of the Liacouras Center, downtown. “He’s a soft glove, and he’s a good guy. I don’t mind Katz at all.”

The point was that after a whirlwind two weeks in which President Joe Biden dropped out and Harris stepped in, rallied an uncertain party, raised gobs of money, and threw a confident Trump campaign into disarray, the new Democratic nominee had once again done what the political moment required: She had chosen an affable, midwestern white man who might reassure voters inclined to stereotypes. The Democratic ticket was complete. The campaign was on. Fresh Harris-Walz signs were being handed out. And just beyond the doors of the arena, the familiar chords of Chic’s “Good Times” were playing. With 90 days until the election, the overall mood was trending toward astonished giddiness.

After months in which efforts to drum up urgency have often been at odds with a persistent gloom among reliable Democratic voters, yesterday’s rally suggested that the grassroots and the party leadership understood each other at last. People said they were loving Harris. They said they were loving Walz, whose name they were Googling, learning that he was a former teacher, football coach, and congressman and a veteran who had called Trump “weird.” In his third hour of waiting in line, a man named George Karayannis said he’d gone from “manic depressive” to “jubilant.”

[Read: Biden has a bigger problem than the debate]

“This is monumental,” Bush said as he reached the arena. “I’ll be honest, I was prepping for a Trump victory. I did not think Biden was going to win. Now we have a fighting chance.”

Inside, the crowd was full of the Democratic Party faithful, people who’d loved Biden until the bitter end, then seamlessly transferred that love to Harris: small-dollar donors, poll workers, campaign volunteers, and people such as Beth Sweet, who’d worked for local Democratic candidates in suburban Chester County, and said that the past two weeks had left her “shocked in the best way possible.” She said she’d gone from bleak worry to cautious hope to saying what had felt unimaginable a month before: “I will be making plans to celebrate,” she said.

Mandisa Thomas, a research coordinator whose mother had volunteered for Barack Obama, said the momentum was starting to feel “almost like Obama again.”

Nelson Haakenson, a house painter, said he’d gone from “very pessimistic” to “I think we’ve got a good shot” to how he felt now, heading inside a 10,000-seat arena where seats were filling up with people—a multiracial cross section of the party base dancing to “I’m Coming Out.” “There’s so much energy,” he said, “and we’re just getting going.”

“Just look around—we’re not going back,” said Carolyn Hopper, a retired art teacher, deploying what is becoming Harris’s signature line. “We can assemble. We can vote. We can fight. We don’t have to end up in a goddamn boxcar,” she said, referring to Trump’s promise of mass deportations.

A man walked by holding a homemade sign that read Kamala Is Future in glitter letters. People wore faded Biden-Harris T-shirts from 2020. They wore newer ones that read Keep Kamala and Carry On, and Blasians for Kamala, and Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala.

Heading inside the arena, Marta Teferi, a 27-year-old graduate student in psychology, said, “I’ve never felt this excited before.”

Her friend Elizabeth Martinez, a 27-year-old law student, said of Harris, “Whatever being in power is, I’m living vicariously through her—she’s one of us.”

Melanie Kisthardt, an English professor, thought back to two weeks ago, and then to now: “Oh my God—now I feel,” she said, then started to cry. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“It was getting too tight,” said Sheila Easley, who had taken the day off from her job to attend her first political rally. “It was starting to feel like 2016 again. Now it’s like a light just lit up in me. Like Armageddon is not going to happen. We still have a chance.”

[Read: Progressives are excited about Tim Walz. Should they be?]

She headed inside the arena, where the seats in every section except one appeared to be filled. Soon, the security guards began ushering in more people from outside, where the line was still growing, stretching past blocks of red rowhouses in a city where crowds in 2020 had poured into the streets after it became clear that Pennsylvania had delivered for Biden. Now people rushed inside to see Harris, faces red and shirts sweaty.

“Do you have more signs?” a woman asked a volunteer.

“I’m so grateful,” an out-of-breath man said.

“Here we go, here we go,” another man said, running up the stairs to the empty section, now filling up as the lights dimmed and warm-up speakers began.

The mayor of Philadelphia spoke of the “power of the people,” and people cheered. Senator Bob Casey ran onstage, and the crowd roared. And when Governor Josh Shapiro—heavily favored until yesterday to be Harris’s pick—said, “This election is all about you,” the roar was even louder.

“Fuck yeaahhh!” yelled a young man from an aisle in the nosebleed section.

This was Jesse Hughes, a 31-year-old personal trainer who said that two weeks ago, he was having “mild anxiety attacks” about the prospect of a Trump victory.

“Now I feel a lot more optimistic—” he began, then stopped himself because the lights were dimming, and the stage was lighting up, and Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” began pounding as Harris and Walz walked onstage.

“Now,” Harris said minutes into her speech, in the tone of a candidate who understood how quickly a political moment could change, “we have work to do.” With 90 days to go and the crowd cheering, she was still trailing Trump in most swing-state polls.

‘I Guess This Is Normal Politics Now’

2024-07-21T09:30:00-04:00

He had closed down the office of the Butler County Democrats and suspended local campaigning. And nearly every hour since a 20-year-old man had tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally on the edge of town, Phil Heasley, a party co-chair, had been fielding calls from members wondering what dark phase American politics might be entering now.

[Read: America’s political leaders are living in fear]

Someone texted him a photo of a truck with a huge digital billboard that read Democrats Attempted Assassination. Someone else sent a screenshot of what the local GOP member of Congress, Mike Kelly, had posted and quickly removed from Facebook: “We will not tolerate this attack from the left.” Neighbors were spray-painting fight on streets; fresh Trump flags and huge Trump signs were going up in yards and fields and on the cinder-block sides of auto shops along rural roads in this corner of western Pennsylvania. Someone suggested installing a panic button inside the party’s glass-front office in downtown Butler, where Heasley was now opening a not-very-secure door. The answering-machine light was blinking.

“Let’s see what we have,” he said, imagining the worst.

Beep: “I’m interested in volunteering … ?”

Beep: “Please call my cellphone as soon as you can. It’s urgent.”

Beep: “This is Carl in Columbia, South Carolina, and I just wanted to acknowledge the family of the man who got killed. Wanted to send some money to his family for funeral expenses. If you could please be so kind …”

Relieved, Heasley wrote down the numbers. This was on the Wednesday after the Saturday of the assassination attempt. Already, the escalating threat of violence was being folded into day-to-day life. He himself had watched the shooting on live television from his family’s cabin on Lake Erie, then gone down to the dock where he often hung out with his Trump-loving neighbors. “So what do you think?” they’d asked him, and he’d tried to read their faces. “I have no thoughts,” he decided to tell them, and they reverted to their Saturday-night custom, sharing beers and singing Frank Sinatra songs. The cycle of news moved on to the Republican National Convention and questions around Joe Biden’s candidacy, leaving people in Butler County with whatever rituals might ease anxiety.

[Read: A legendary American photograph]

In a front yard across the street from the rally site, a white tent popped up Tuesday where pastors offered prayers, telling a few people who stopped by that they were “citizens of heaven.” This lasted a few hours, until one of them said, “Well, I guess it’s time to pack it in.”

At the rally site itself, conspiracy theorists with cameras and notebooks began arriving, replacing federal investigators and television crews.

At a firehouse in the township of Buffalo, volunteer firefighters did what they did when one of their own died, in this case Corey Comperatore, a former chief whom the shooter had killed at the rally. They prepared their trucks for the funeral, polishing chrome, placing black electrical tape over the eyes of the buffalo on the town shield.

An hour away, in the neighborhood where the would-be assassin grew up, people said what people say when they have no explanation. They’d seen the boy here and there. They never imagined such a person living among them, though their upper-middle-class neighborhood was the very kind of place where young white men have grown up to be lone shooters. Not even the FBI has been able to offer a motive beyond the one implicating all of society—another young man who absorbed the violence of American life until he engaged in it himself.

Top: A video billboard in Butler, Pennsylvania. Bottom: The funeral procession of Corey Comperatore, a retired volunteer-fire-department chief who was shot and killed in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. (Carlos Osorio / Reuters; Eduardo Munoz / Reuters / Redux)

In the Democrats’ office in downtown Butler, Heasley understood what happened as political violence, even if it had the random quality of a mass shooting: “I saw a poll where something like 58 percent of Americans expected this to happen.”

He was among the 58 percent. He’d knocked on doors for President Barack Obama in 2012, and had seen nooses with Obama signs hanging from trees. People threw trash in his yard when he ran for township supervisor a couple of years ago, and he’d finally gotten his concealed-carry permit.

“I guess this is normal politics now,” Heasley said. So when local Democrats met to decide whether they should set up their usual booth at Horse Trading Days, a festival in nearby Zelienople, he argued yes. Police would be there.

“Visibility is still important,” he said.

On Thursday morning, the United Republicans of Butler County set up at one end of Zelienople’s Main Street, and at the other end, two volunteers with the Butler County Democrats set up a tent and table next to a woman selling homemade hot sauce.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman said to Karen Barbati, one of the Democratic volunteers, as she secured the tent poles in the grass.

“What do you mean?” Barbati said.

The woman ignored her and wheeled a metal cart between her booth and theirs. Soon, people began arriving for the festival, which now had heightened security. At the Republican table, volunteers set out Bye-bye Biden signs and what was left of circa-2016 Trump gear, including black T-shirts with a huge image of a Colt .45 labeled Trump, and the words Because the 44 didn’t work for 8 years, a reference to Obama.

At the Democrats’ table, a volunteer set out a basket of small buttons with rainbows and peace signs. She hung up posters with headings such as Freedom From Gun Violence and Freedom to Have a Safe Infrastructure, each of which had long blocks of small type underneath explaining what Biden had delivered: $6,492,797 for Butler County Community College; $1,487,092 for Callery Bridge over Breakneck Creek; and “the first major gun-safety legislation in 30 years,” a politics that assumed people wanted policy details over emotion.

At the Republican table, a volunteer named Rick Markich was saying, “I would not want to be trying to figure out how to approach the public if I were a Democrat.”

At the Democratic table, a volunteer was saying to a man in a Trump hat, “Hello there, enjoying this weather?” and to a woman who walked up to the booth, “You can take a button” and “This is a form you can use to register.”

Back at the Republican table, a small crowd had gathered, and in between talking about the lovely weather and pastries, a woman was saying, “We were there,” referring to the rally. “We saw him go down.”

“I was 15 feet from the gentleman who died,” Markich said, referring to Comperatore. “Saw them carry him out. He was lifeless.”

“We were screaming,” the woman said in the bright afternoon.

“At first we thought he was the shooter,” said Markich, who was wearing a Trump hat now painted with the words Fight, fight, fight, and the date July 13, 2024. “We thought patriots had taken him down. In reality, they were trying to save that gentleman.”

“I like this Bye-bye Biden,” the woman said, moving on from that conversation. “But I’ll take a Drain the swamp.”

[Read: A searing reminder that Trump is unwell]

People walked by eating ice cream and drinking beer. People talked about hearing gunshots and seeing blood. People chatted about their goldendoodle dogs and diving for cover.

In another town an hour to the east, the public viewing for Comperatore was getting under way, a long line of people inching up a grassy hill past rows of American flags, to a community hall where two snipers were positioned on the roof, and plates of cookies were set out on tables inside.

In Zelienople, meanwhile, Barbati was saying that she had a Biden-Harris sign in her yard, and had gotten used to the man who drove by her house most days around 3:15 in the afternoon and yelled “Trump!” Another Democratic volunteer was saying she was not afraid, but after everything that had happened, she was going to get a gun from her son.

The wind blew, and the smell of barbecue drifted into the late afternoon. The volunteers sat in folding chairs and watched people walking from the doughnut booth to the hot-sauce tent. A man in camouflage shorts paused, stared at the Democrats for a moment, and walked on. A woman rushed over.

“I’m so glad I found you guys,” she said, explaining that she was new to the area.

At the Trump table, a woman considered a Trump sign for her car, then stopped herself. She lived in a country where a protester had been run over by a car during a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; and the U.S. Capitol had been stormed on January 6; and the speaker of the House’s husband had almost been bludgeoned to death; and now Trump, who had mocked and encouraged much of that, had nearly been assassinated in her hometown. She decided against the sign.

“You never know when you might get a bullet,” she said to a volunteer, who replied casually, “Yeah, I almost got killed Saturday.”

Biden Has a Bigger Problem Than the Debate

2024-06-30T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Arielle Gray for The Atlantic

With 224 days to go before an election that national Democrats are casting as a matter of saving democracy, a 21-year-old canvasser named Kebo Stephens knocked on a scuffed apartment door in rural southwestern Georgia.

“Hello, ma’am?” he yelled.

“What do you want?” a woman snapped back.

“It’s about the voting?” he said.

The door was in the city of Albany, a mostly Black, mostly working-class Democratic stronghold of about 70,000 people in an otherwise Republican area, the kind of place where high turnout among Black voters had delivered the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 and the Senate to Democrats in 2021.

Now it was spring, still weeks away from Biden’s unsteady debate performance, and he was behind. Polls were showing Donald Trump not only leading by several points in Georgia but chipping away at Biden’s support among Black voters nationwide. After winning just 6 percent of the Black electorate in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, Trump was polling at about 17 percent, a figure that some Democratic strategists were dismissing as an early blip and others were calling a “five-alarm fire.” If that 17 percent held, Trump would win the highest level of Black support of any Republican since Richard Nixon got about 30 percent in 1960, a margin that could return Trump to the White House.

[Read: What will happen in Georgia?]

Meanwhile, around Albany, the mood among Democratic voters was not one of urgency. No campaign signs were staked in yards. No Biden campaign offices had opened yet, and no caravan of organizers was rolling into town. Republicans controlled the Dougherty County election board. The county Democratic Party was just creaking to life after being all but defunct for years.

In a place long defined by Democratic solidarity, old loyalties were fraying, and not only because prices were high or Biden’s message wasn’t getting out. There were also signs of the sort of frustration, resentment, and burn-it-down nihilism that has defined Trumpism. Right-wing propaganda was seeping into the social-media feeds of young influencers, and even that of Kebo Stephens, for whom saving democracy was not exactly a calling but a decent-paying job that an aunt got him until he could make his fortune as a TikTok influencer with his own fashion line.

Lately, he’d started watching TikTok videos featuring a retired U.S. Army colonel named Douglas Macgregor, a regular on Tucker Carlson’s show and the Russian-government network RT. He’d heard the colonel say “I don’t think we’ll ever get to the 2024 election.” He’d heard him say “I think things are going to implode in Washington before then.” Stephens had heard enough that he wasn’t even sure whom he might vote for anymore, and now a woman was answering the door.

“Hey, ma’am,” Stephens said, doing his best to follow a script on an app developed by the New Georgia Project Action Fund, the progressive group that had hired him. “I’m Kebo, and we’re out talking to voters today. On a scale of one to 10, how important would you say the upcoming election is for you?”

“Five,” the woman said through the crack in the door.

“Okay, and what issues affect you most?” Stephens asked. “We have things like cost of living, health care, reproduction rights, climate change, Israel-Palestine—”

“Crime,” the woman answered. “I don’t really have time for this.”

She shut the door. Stephens kept going, marking the interaction as a successful face-to-face contact, data that would filter up to Atlanta, where it would count as progress toward turning out hundreds of thousands of Black and brown voters presumed to be Democrats.

Among the many questions hovering over the election, one is how much further the old certainties of American politics can break down amid the seductions of authoritarianism and social-media propaganda. Albany, Georgia, is a startling place for such a breakdown to happen.

The city’s Black precincts have routinely delivered more than 90 percent of their vote to Democratic presidential candidates, a political solidarity rooted in brutal history going back to Albany’s earliest days as a commercial hub for cotton plantations. W. E. B. Du Bois described the city as a place where newly freed Black citizens stuck together “for self-protection” against the violent backlash after their post–Civil War enfranchisement. After the expulsion of Black state representatives during that period, Albany was the launching point for a protest march, a show of bravery that ended when white locals killed about a dozen participants in what is now called the Camilla massacre. The city became a battleground during the civil-rights era, when Martin Luther King Jr. led marches and Black citizens began voting as a bloc for a Democratic Party promising to advance the cause—all of which was history that Trump was trying to defy, and that Kebo Stephens had not yet learned, and now there were 217 days to go.

Albany, Georgia (left). The interior of Helen Young’s barbershop (right). (Arielle Gray for The Atlantic)

He and a colleague, Meacqura Sims, 23, headed out to their turf, driving through the Albany they knew. Neighborhoods of patched roofs and windows sealed with plastic. Worn-out apartment complexes owned by investors who kept jacking up rent. Blocks of payday lenders and dollar stores where Stephens noticed his food stamps buying less and less. Another shiny new car wash when the city already had more than 20. They turned into a subdivision and parked, then Stephens followed the sound of a hedge trimmer into a backyard.

“Excuse me!” he yelled to a man, who cut off the trimmer. “We’re seeing how people are feeling about voting. Do you vote?”

“We always vote,” said the man, and Stephens marked him down as a 10 on the enthusiasm scale.

He knocked on a blue door with a Welcome Home sign: “Fifteen,” declared the woman who answered, and he marked down the 15.

Sims rang a doorbell on a porch with a dead plant.

“Five,” said the woman who answered. “When I first started voting, it was a 10, but not anymore.”

“I hear that, but when we vote, we can make a real change,” Sims said, trying to follow a script that often felt wooden to her. “What issues are important to you today? Cost of living? Health care?”

“Health care, definitely,” the woman said.

“Now that we’ve talked a little,” Sims read, “on a scale of one to 10, how important would you say voting is to you now?”

“I guess 10,” the woman said.

“I’m glad you feel a little more powerful,” Sims read, recording the 10.

A house with a broken-down, pollen-dusted truck in the yard: moved.

A house with falling-apart blinds: wrong address.

A house with a turned-over grill, creaking wood steps, and a crooked storm door braced with rusted paint cans: no answer.

A house with an Albany State University doormat: “I believe in voting,” said a woman, who credited Biden with getting her student loans forgiven. “That’ll be a 10.”

A few doors down: “I don’t trust neither side. Democrat or Republican.”

“Appreciate you, ma’am!” Stephens said. And on it went on a warm, sunny Tuesday when azaleas were blooming and anxiety was rising among Democratic strategists especially worried about the votes of young Black men like him.

Stephens himself was worried about so many disparate things he would not have known to worry about were it not for the viral TikTok videos that filled his phone every minute. He kept swiping through them.

He worried that the Baltimore bridge collapse was an inside job. He worried that World War III could begin at any moment. He worried a lot about his pineal gland, which he had learned was a part of the brain also called the “third eye.”

“It’s how we see our dreams,” he told me, heading to a door. “Like, when children first enter the world, it’s wide open. But it can become dull. Even school can dull the pineal gland. And as you grow up, it starts to close due to eating stuff.”

He rang a doorbell. Not home.

“Like fluoride,” he continued. “Like Red 40 dye that’s in stuff like hot chips. The FDA, they basically are not for the people.”

He crossed a green lawn to the next door. Not home.

He walked down the street, swiping to a video with more than 2 million views featuring Macgregor, whose voice drifted into the rural-Georgia afternoon.

“I think we’re going to end up in a situation where we find out the banks are closed for two or three weeks … I also think the levels of violence and criminality in our cities is so high that it’s going to spill over … I think Ukraine is going to lose, catastrophically … I also know that you get revolutionary change when people can’t eat. When they can’t afford to buy the food. When they can’t afford to buy the gasoline.”

At the next house, a woman was pulling into her driveway.

“I’m not interested,” she said through her window. “They’re not doing anything.”

“Yes, ma’am, I hear that a lot,” Stephens said, and asked for the one-to-10.

“Probably a one,” the woman said, offering that she always voted Democratic. “This year I don’t think I can do it. I thought if Trump runs again, I might vote for him.”

“It’s a lot of stuff that’s hard to understand,” Stephens said, and they went off script for a while, talking about gay marriage, toxic music lyrics, and immigrants who worked for local farms, factories, and chicken-processing plants.

“I’ve been seeing stuff where they are bringing people over to live basically for free,” Stephens said, referring to some video he’d seen.

“I’m not prejudiced, but they’re taking over,” the woman said, and then she was quiet, thinking about what she might do in November.

“I probably just won’t vote,” she said.

When the conversation ended, Stephens marked her down as “canvassed.”

And now there were 201 days to go.

At his rallies, Trump was saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and he was promising mass deportations. He was calling his political opponents “Marxists, Communists, and fascists” and vowing to use the presidency to prosecute them.

[Stephanie McCrummen: MAGA, the next generation]

And far away from Albany, in the northwest corner of the state, Republican activists were already weeks into an aggressive effort that was one reason many Trump supporters were energized and optimistic about their prospects of winning Georgia and the entire election.

The strategy was being spearheaded by the group Turning Point USA, which had announced a $100 million campaign to zero in on so-called low-propensity voters, people who did not vote regularly but had been identified as likely pro-Trump based on factors such as possessing a gun license. The group had developed its own app, which geolocated the names, addresses, and phone numbers of those voters in targeted counties. Its website featured a huge clock ticking down the days until the election, and week after week, local GOP leaders were pushing the app out to their members and rallying around the idea that the nation would not survive another Biden presidency.

“We’re going into what could arguably be the last election in the U.S.A. as we know it this November,” the chair of the Paulding County GOP had told 40 people at a regular monthly meeting. “It’s time for us to do something.”

Meanwhile, the regular monthly meeting of the Dougherty County Democratic Committee convened at a public library in Albany. On a warm Thursday evening, 10 people attended. Since the county party relaunched in 2022 after a decade of infighting, mostly the same people always showed up—among them a teacher, an accountant, a former newspaper reporter, two retirees, and Demetrius Young, 53, a city commissioner worried that these well-meaning people did not fully grasp what could be coming.

He listened as the new chair recounted the success of a recent local candidate forum. She thanked the volunteers who had handled the sound system. She thanked the ones who had set out refreshments. Then she reported that the county’s GOP-controlled election board had denied an initial request to expand Sunday early-voting hours, when Black churches traditionally encourage members to go to the polls. Someone else mentioned that a neighboring county had instituted “pop-up” voting sites that were popping up in mostly Republican areas, and now Young raised his hand.

“We have to remember that we are dealing with election deniers, still,” he said, trying to inject some urgency into the room. “We are dealing with insurrectionists, still.”

Martin Luther King Jr. talks with a reporter on July 12, 1962, the day after police in Albany arrested 32 civil-rights demonstrators who tried to march on city hall. (Associated Press)

He had grown up hearing firsthand accounts of the Albany Movement, the local campaign to challenge segregation that had ended with one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s biggest defeats. The local police chief had famously studied King’s tactics, then publicly embraced nonviolence to avoid bad press, even as he mapped out all the jails within a 60-mile radius and conducted mass arrests of protesters, including King, eventually negotiating King’s exit from the city with segregation intact. Young worried that a version of the same story was happening now. Democrats weren’t just struggling to turn out their base; they were also being outmaneuvered all over Georgia.

He reminded everyone that during the Senate runoff in 2021, a city commissioner had partnered with True the Vote, a conspiracist election-denier group, to challenge nearly 3,000 local voter registrations, and that a new state law had made such challenges easier. He reminded them that just down the road in Coffee County, Trump allies had allegedly breached voting equipment in an attempt to steal the election, helping to trigger the sprawling racketeering case that Trump’s team was successfully stalling in Atlanta.

He reminded them of what had happened at one polling place in October 2020, when he and other volunteers working with the group Black Voters Matter had been giving out bottles of water to people who’d been standing in line for six hours to vote, some of them fainting in the heat. A white woman had confronted Young, accusing him and the other volunteers of violating election rules. At one point she pulled out a gun and called them “dogs” and “Communists.” Later she claimed that she was “scared” because the group reminded her of the 1960s-era Black Panthers. State election officials found that the volunteers had broken no rules, and referred the woman to state prosecutors. But the more lasting impact was that another new election law was passed, this one forbidding volunteers from passing out water near polling places. Another reduced the number of drop boxes for absentee ballots. Gun laws had also changed; in 2022, Georgia became an open-carry state.

[Derek Thompson: The truth about Georgia’s voter law]

“So,” Young said as the meeting broke up, “the stakes are even higher than in 2020. It’s go time.”

The next afternoon, he drove through his ward, on the south side of town, past old churches where King once spoke. He noted the falling-down house where his mother, Albany’s first Black female lawyer, had launched the lawsuit that integrated the city commission—the kind of case that has become more difficult to win in recent years as a conservative Supreme Court majority has dismantled the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

He glanced at the yards. Still no Biden signs. He stopped to see his aunt, Helen Young, who owns a barbershop in a rambling old house that had become the unofficial Democratic headquarters during the years the local party was fallow.

When Stacey Abrams launched her first campaign for governor, and her strategy to turn Georgia blue, in 2017, it was Helen Young who had taken the local campaign director under her wing. She put up volunteers in her house and shared a thick folder full of contacts across dozens of counties, from Albany south to Florida and west to Alabama. During the 2020 election, it was Helen Young who had relentlessly called Biden’s office for signs until finally his campaign sent an 18-wheeler full of them, which she distributed all over southwestern Georgia. When members of Black Voters Matter cranked up their operation, her nephew Demetrius had used his aunt’s contact list, mapping a route they drove in vans, playing music and handing out bags of collard greens to inspire people to vote.

Helen Young with a customer (Arielle Gray for The Atlantic)

“It was old-school,” he said now.

“I put balloons all up and down the street,” his aunt was saying.

That had been the mood in 2020, when Albany had suffered badly from the coronavirus, and the police killing of George Floyd had spawned protests all over the country. There was a sense of urgency.

Now the list was in some drawer. A TV was on inside the shop, and in the late afternoon Helen Young and her friend Tijuana Malone were half-listening to another sprawling CNN panel chewing over Biden’s prospects. Their own panel of two supported him, even if they did not feel the same enthusiasm as they did in 2020. They recalled Abrams’s second campaign, in 2022, when a strategist had set up an office on the third floor of a bank, which had struck them as a remote and unfriendly location that only some out-of-touch consultant would choose.

“They sent a strategist who didn’t know anything about here—a degreed professional,” Malone said. “I could feel the absence of us.”

“I had to have my own Abrams signs made up,” Young said. “And I feel I’m going to have to do the same thing for Biden this time.”

And now there were 198 days to go.

The Biden campaign announced that seven offices would be opening across Georgia. White House officials were emphasizing record-low unemployment and the strongest post-pandemic economy in the world, but in the craggy parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly, a shopper named Renee James was worrying about food prices. “What I don’t get here, I go to the Dollar Tree to get, but Dollar Tree is up. Now it’s Dollar Tree Plus.”

It was hot, and she put her one bag of groceries into her trunk.

“They’ve got a smaller area for $1.25 items, but it’s just potato chips and stuff like that. Oatmeal cookies were $1.50, and now they’re $3.50 or $4.50. Towels are $5, and they used to be $1.50. I’m just cutting back,” she said. “Like, I prefer wings, but today I got drumsticks because they were on sale. Me and my husband have about $200 a month for food, and if we run out, we just bring a couple of plates from my son’s.”

Regarding November, she said, “I’m still weighing that out.”

On CNN, an ever more sprawling nightly panel had shifted focus to the minutiae of Trump’s hush-money trial. A New York Times/Siena College poll would soon show Trump widening his lead in Georgia to 10 points. A prominent Democratic strategist, reluctant to openly criticize her party, was telling me privately, “I think the entire political landscape has shifted. I think we are in denial.”

And in another corner of Albany, with 195 days to go, a voter named Adam Inyang was telling me, “I think the Democratic Party has failed a lot of folks. Unfortunately, the GOP side isn’t the answer either. The answer is to exit and create a better system.”

He was 34, and had grown up in a Democratic household. He knew the local civil-rights history but was also part of a network of young Black men drifting away from all of that.

Adam Inyang (Arielle Gray for The Atlantic)

His shift began when his job running a print shop took him to the Washington, D.C., area, where he was opening a new store inside Reagan National Airport. He would see politicians and pundits traipsing to their gates, and sometimes he’d chat with them, and he began to think that what he saw on TV was a kind of performance. This was in 2014, the year when the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, among others, sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Inyang had joined the protests breaking out in D.C., at one point as part of a group aiming to shut down a highway, only that began to feel like a performance too. As he recalled it, the protest was more supervised than defiant.

“The police actually guided us onto the interstate,” he told me. “The police blocked the traffic for us. They started counting down because they only gave us so much time. I’m up on the median with my fist in the air. I got my photo taken and all. And I’m like, Okay, I’m seeing how all these parts are working together. You’re not making any change if the police are controlling your protest. I was like, We’ve got to stop this symbolism and find out what really brings change.”

He came back to Albany and ran for city commissioner on a platform of lowering utility rates and preventing crime. He lost, a result he blamed partly on old-guard Democrats, who he felt were afraid to support him. Then he began to think that maybe the old guard was part of the problem. Then, he said, “I went back to square one.”

For him, that was Huey P. Newton, the revolutionary founder of the Black Panther Party, whose lesser-known predecessor was established in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965 as a challenge to the local Democratic Party, at that time still controlled by white supremacists. Inyang had read about Newton in school. The idea of Black self-reliance appealed to him. So did the idea of third-party politics. Alternative news sources appealed to him too, especially an Indian journalist named Palki Sharma on a YouTube channel with 5 million subscribers, and the podcast of the conspiracy-minded British actor Russell Brand.

“Now that people can get real news as opposed to propaganda like CNN and Fox, people are able to say ‘We’re sending billions where? For what?’ That’s why folks are looking at RFK and Cornel West,” he said, naming third-party candidates he liked. “Those people are saying what matters to me. Stop the wars. Feed our kids here. Invest in business here.”

He wasn’t worried that voting third-party might help Trump win, or that Trump posed a threat to constitutional democracy.

“The whole Constitution can suck it,” he said. “That’s why we need a third party. That’s a trash piece of paper that protects a few people. It was not written for us. Tear that sucker up. Burn it. Start over. It does not represent the U.S. we actually live in.”

Inyang had his own YouTube show, which he streamed from the back of the print shop he now owns, and one of his favorite guests was another young Black influencer in town named King Randall, whom Inyang had known long before Randall accumulated nearly 300,000 social-media followers.

King Randall (Arielle Gray for The Atlantic)

“On Instagram, you describe yourself as a Christian, a conservative,” Inyang had begun one interview with Randall last year. “Does that mean you’re Republican? Did you vote for Trump?”

Randall was wearing a Make Men Great Again sweatshirt, and a red Nike hat. “I’m not impressed by any president or politician,” he said. “But I would have preferred Donald Trump to Joe Biden.”

He, too, had grown up in a Democratic household. He had joined the Marine Corps, and returned to Albany at a time when gun violence was spiking, and decided that he needed to do something to help young men in his own neighborhood. He started tutoring. He started a summer camp where he taught boys handyman skills, which he called the X School for Boys. Then, in the summer of 2020, with protests raging after the police killing of George Floyd, he had tweeted out a video of the boys laying sheetrock, writing, “This is my way of fighting for black men while they’re alive.”

Within a few hours, the post went viral, and when he scrolled through the responses, nearly all were from white Trump supporters who lived outside Georgia. “This is beautiful!” read one. “This is wonderful!” read another. “How can I donate?”

His social-media following ballooned. He got a DM inviting him and his students to the Trump White House, and they flew to Washington for a tour. A wealthy Utah businessman flew them in a private jet to Salt Lake City, taking them tubing and skiing and giving them a gold American Express card for the duration of the visit. Randall attended the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference. He began to think Tucker Carlson made sense when he blamed societal collapse on the emasculation of men, a claim that vaguely resonated with Randall’s religious upbringing, and his sense that the Democratic Party cared only about Black women.

“I think Black men want to get back to some sense of traditionalism,” he told me. “Matriarchy is not working for our community. Our young men are falling by the wayside. Nobody is asking Black men what they want. What they need.”

But now King Randall was getting what he needed. He had a steady stream of donors, 40 acres of land for a school he was building, a contact for Governor Brian Kemp, and a contact for Trump’s campaign. Recently, he’d met a staffer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

With 194 days to go, Kennedy was polling around 7 percent in Georgia, about the same percentage that Biden was trailing Trump by, whom Randall did not yet want to endorse and Inyang did not like—though both welcomed the chaos Trump had unleashed.

“I am so glad that Trump has fissured the world so much that now third parties are a much more strong, viable option than ever before,” Inyang said. “The Democratic Party? God rest their soul.”

And now it was June. Less than five months to go.

All The Washington Post Has Is Its Credibility

2024-06-22T08:00:00-04:00

Updated at 10:00 a.m. on June 22, 2024

Hours after my Washington Post colleagues and I published the first of several articles in 2017 about the Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s history of pursuing teenage girls, the Republican nominee’s powerful allies launched an elaborate campaign seeking to discredit the story.

The best-known of these efforts was an attempt carried out by the far-right activist group Project Veritas to dupe us into publishing a false story, an operation we exposed. But there were others, perhaps none more insidious than the spreading of false rumors across Alabama that The Washington Post had paid Moore’s accusers to come forward, and were offering thousands of dollars to other women for salacious stories about him.

[From the June 1926 issue: Journalism and morality]

There is a reason Moore’s allies used this particular tactic: They knew that any whiff of a financial motive behind the stories would taint them. There is also a reason their efforts failed. And there is a reason I’m bringing this up seven years later.

The practice of paying for information violates ethical standards at The Washington Post, where I worked for nearly 20 years, and is forbidden in most American newsrooms. Will Lewis, the paper’s new British publisher, engaged in the practice when he was an editor at The Daily Telegraph, paying about $120,000 to secure information that led to a major government scandal. Lewis has defended his decision. Further reporting by the Post and The New York Times has linked him to using fraudulently obtained records in news stories.

The controversy around Lewis is not some small matter of different journalistic methods. The reputation of the Post newsroom has been built upon readers’ trust that reporters do not pay sources, much less steal documents, hack computers, or engage in other deceptive news-gathering practices that have been associated with a certain kind of British journalism and the worst of American tabloid journalism. This is why the Roy Moore stories were not vulnerable to the attacks launched against them. How their credibility was achieved remains highly relevant.

First of all, the women who came forward—all of them using their full names—did so at great personal risk and for no reason other than that they wished the voting public to know the candidate as they did. None of them had slick lawyers or PR firms or shady intermediaries; all suffered an array of consequences for their decision to go public with their stories. Our primary source was working as a payday-loan clerk at the time, missed weeks of work, endured an array of threats, and essentially went into hiding after the first story appeared.

Second, my colleagues Beth Reinhard and Alice Crites and I spent weeks doing what Washington Post journalists do: old-fashioned reporting. This entailed long conversations, patience, and knocking on the same doors again and again. It entailed going through court records and vetting the minute details of the stories the women told us. It entailed vetting the accusers themselves. We earned the trust of our sources with the only assurance any journalist can provide: that we would do our work thoroughly and carefully and ethically and see where the reporting took us.

[From the November 2023 issue: How we got ‘Democracy dies in darkness’]

Third, and perhaps most important, we were transparent, laying out our reporting methods in the stories. Readers could see that we were playing no tricks.

The campaign to undermine the credibility of these stories was relentless. The elaborate Project Veritas operation got the most attention. But the false rumors that we’d paid for information were potentially more damaging in the way they sought to cast news-gathering as a cheap and tawdry affair. The conspiracy-peddling website Gateway Pundit spread a false story based on a false tweet claiming that a colleague of mine had been “outed” for offering $1,000 to Moore’s accusers. In Alabama, a minister claimed to have received a call falsely purporting to be from a Washington Post reporter trying “to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old, willing to make damaging remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between $5,000 and $7,000.”

The truth is that reporters earn revelations by listening, digging, and bearing witness. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward did not pay for information that led them to uncover the Watergate scandal; Bart Gellman did not pay Edward Snowden. David Fahrenthold did not purchase the Access Hollywood tape.

As publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Lewis did not institute the practice of paying for information, and he has pledged not to do so at the Post. This is a relief, to a degree. Journalism cannot afford to undermine itself. Since 2017, the kinds of active-measure attacks we faced while reporting on Moore have only become more ubiquitous. Threats against journalists are rising. Efforts to undermine legitimate reporting are sadly succeeding in many corners of the country. The Post and other newsrooms should defend the values and practices that produce journalism in the public interest, and that cynical forces would like to see swept away.

MAGA, the Next Generation

2024-06-21T06:30:10-04:00

The line began forming early Tuesday morning in Racine, Wisconsin, the usual river of red hats, cargo shorts, canes, and conspiracy theories, except that here and there were the fresh faces that the old-timers needed most.

“I was in fifth grade when Trump was elected,” Kylie Smith, 18, was saying, excited for her first rally. “I just remember my dad yelling, ‘Trump won! Trump won!’”

“I just wanted to be here—it’s a learning experience,” her friend Libby Kramer, 20, was telling me, as an older man in an I’m Voting for the Felon T-shirt listened in.

“Welcome to the party,” he said.

“It’s so good to see you girls,” a white-haired woman wearing a Fuck Biden hat said.

Nearly a decade into the “Make America great again” movement, what Donald Trump needs to return to the White House is new voters, and among the most promising are the youngest, most impressionable voters of all. They were in elementary school when Trump was first elected, and the machinations being deployed to sweep them into the fold are less about issues such as Gaza or the planet or student loans than lights, screens, music, and the emotional appeal of righteous belonging—which has always been necessary for building armies and social movements.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real youth-vote shift to watch]

That kind of production has remained the essence of Trump rallies such as the one in Racine. And it has been the year-round specialty of Turning Point USA, the right-wing youth organization whose recent “People’s Convention” in Detroit was a carnival of swirling lights and booming music, with sponsors including the Association of Mature American Citizens—the MAGA version of the AARP. That event drew a crowd of young attendees who cheered 70-year-old Steve Bannon as he yelled “Victory or death!,” and 78-year-old Trump as he spoke of “the largest deportation operation in American history,” and two young men in sunglasses who walked onstage and unfurled a red flag that read White Boy Summer, a white-supremacist slogan.

Outside of such events, the task of introducing young people to the shame-free camaraderie of the MAGA movement has been up to social-media influencers, parents, and, as the election nears, long-timers at rallies such as the one in Racine, where an older woman scanned the faces up and down the line.

“It’s so good to see all the young people here,” she said.

Just ahead, the rally was setting up in a park along a harbor of Lake Michigan: the stage, the screens, the speakers, the huge American flag hanging limp from a crane.

“I think we’re moving,” said a young man holding hands with his wife, both of them 21-year-olds for whom supporting Trump was a kind of rebellion.

“I grew up in a Democratic household, but I’m an adult now and I have to think for myself,” the woman was saying as her husband pulled her ahead. “We’re against abortion; we’re against illegal immigration.”

“We don’t support the culture Biden supports,” her husband said, and behind him, an older woman in the ubiquitous Fuck Biden T-shirt offered her solidarity: “And the economy has gone to hell—I’m scared for you young people.”

Behind her, a man from the state GOP was handing out cards. “Join the Milwaukee GOP! We’re on Instagram! We’re on Twitter! The whole political world is coming to Milwaukee!” he was saying, referring to the Republican National Convention next month.

Behind him, the line was getting longer. There were mothers who’d brought daughters, and fathers who’d brought sons. Joe Vacek smiled and nodded as his 18-year-old son, Chase, said, “I guess I was 12 when Trump was elected.”

“Yep, we were at hockey practice,” his dad said.

“I remember the TVs in the lobby and these big portraits kept coming up,” the son said, recalling how Trump’s image began to seep into his consciousness. “I guess I started paying closer attention in 2020, especially when people started talking about election integrity. I was like, What are they talking about?, and I started researching.”

He glanced at his father.

“You’re doing great,” Joe Vacek said.

Behind them was 19-year-old Jordan Lazier, who’d come with his grandparents. He had decided that his first presidential vote would be for Trump.

“I remember when he was elected, I just liked him,” he said, recalling how his mother felt similarly. “I just knew he was better than Hillary; I couldn’t tell you how.”

“You’re a smart kid,” his grandmother said. “Don’t forget about the evil versus good.”

“Good versus evil,” Jordan repeated, looking at her. “I know about satanic stuff most Democrats are into. Republicans talk about worshipping Jesus Christ, and Democrats worship the government.”

“We listen to a lot of prophets, and we understand Bohemian Grove,” his grandmother said, referring to some bleak corner of the QAnon conspiracy.

Behind her, a veteran rallygoer was explaining something called the Rattle Trap conspiracy to a newcomer who was saying, “There’s so much out there I don’t know about.”

Behind them were Bob Harper, 18, and Katherine Hughes, 19, who figured her journey to this point had begun in fifth grade, when her teacher instructed the class to color the states on a U.S. map red and blue after Trump got elected in 2016. That was the first time she thought about people as red or blue, and the country as something other than united. And she wanted to feel united, which is how being here made her feel.

“We can’t really talk about all this with many kids our age—they call you racist, homophobic,” Hughes said, referring to the mood on her community-college campus, where she said most students were liberal, and many were Muslim, and she felt ostracized.

“I just feel we should really be one country instead of divided,” Harper said, and soon the line began moving faster.

Music started blaring from the rally site. Someone from the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network began filming, and people chanted for the camera, “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

[Read: The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump]

Tyler Marquisse, 19, was getting excited. He had driven over from his hometown of Kenosha, where the formative experience of his young political life had come in the summer of 2020, when protests and riots had broken out after the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake, and a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse had shot and killed two protesters. Marquisse was 14 at the time, and his reaction had mostly been fear. He recalled his parents telling him there was a gun in the bedroom, and a gun in the kitchen. They told him, “If someone walks through that door, you protect yourself,” and he remembered Trump coming to Kenosha soon after that.

“Trump protected us,” he said now, standing near the front of a line that stretched several blocks past tables piled with T-shirts depicting Trump as an Old West outlaw, as a mafioso-looking convict, and with two middle fingers held up to the world.

Seeing all of this, Matt Lahee, 20, was not sure what to think yet. “I’m just curious mostly,” he said, standing in line with his younger brother and his friend, both of whom were wearing red MAGA hats.

Lahee was not. He wasn’t sure whom he would vote for in November. He had come with his siblings because he was home from school in Vermont, and because he wanted to see for himself what Trump and his rallies were all about.

What he remembered about growing up in an upper-middle-class Chicago suburb with Trump as president: bobblehead dolls of Trump and Hillary Clinton. Snapchat groups where kids took sides. A social-studies teacher who had a Trump T-shirt on the classroom wall. Another teacher who taught students about mass incarceration. Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia. Having Latino friends. Running track, fishing, and doing what you do as a kid up until 2020, when everything was upended by the pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd and the protests he never joined, even though he remembered the video, and feeling very sad about what happened.

“Hey, Matt?” his brother, Ryan, said now. “What was that thing you were saying in the car? About nostalgia?”

“I was saying things seemed like they were going smoothly before COVID hit,” Lahee said. “But I don’t know if that’s just nostalgia, or if it was really better?”

He wasn’t sure, and now the line was moving, and soon they were all inside.

Their first Trump rally had soft green grass, and a view of Lake Michigan, and the smell of hot dogs and fries. A warm breeze was blowing, and the sun was out.

“Isn’t it a great day to be at a Trump rally?” one of the warm-up speakers said.

People milled around. A young couple talked about the possibility of Trump being assassinated. A young man with long black hair, a beard, and an ankle monitor stood alone for a while until several police officers approached and quietly escorted him away. The loudspeakers began blaring “Time in a Bottle,” and older people mouthed the words.

Matt Lahee found a place toward the back of the crowd. He yawned. He sat on the grass through “Pinball Wizard” and a video of Elvis Presley, and when the crowd got restless and started chanting “We want Trump!,” he did not join in.

When Trump arrived and “God Bless the U.S.A.” swelled and people hoisted their phones, Lahee folded his arms.

He listened as Trump mocked his successor’s age, and the crowd chanted “Fuck Joe Biden,” and he did not join in. He listened as Trump talked about illegal immigrants and “all the killing you’re going to see unless you elect me.” And as the crowd chanted “Kick them out!” and “Do it! Do it!,” he did not join in, and instead listened.

He listened to the whole hour-and-a-half speech, and when it was over and the Village People were blasting, he headed toward the exit, still unsure what all of this meant.

“I don’t know,” Lahee said. “It was kind of dark.”

‘This Will Finish Us’

2024-04-08T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Nichole Sobecki

Updated at 10:00 a.m. ET on May 9, 2024

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

It was high safari season in Tanzania, the long rains over, the grasses yellowing and dry. Land Cruisers were speeding toward the Serengeti Plain. Billionaires were flying into private hunting concessions. And at a crowded and dusty livestock market far away from all that, a man named Songoyo had decided not to hang himself, not today, and was instead pinching the skin of a sheep.

“Please!” he was saying to a potential buyer with thousands of animals to choose from on this morning. “You can see, he is so fat!”

The buyer moved on. Songoyo rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He’d spent the whole night walking, herding another man’s sheep across miles of grass and scrub and pitted roads to reach this market by opening time. He hadn’t slept. He hadn’t eaten. He’d somehow fended off an elephant with a stick. What he needed to do was sell the sheep so their owner would pay him, so he could try to start a new life now that the old one was finished.

The old life: He’d had all the things that made a person such as him rich and respected. Three wives, 14 children, a large compound with 75 cows and enough land to graze them—“such sweet land,” he would say when he could bear to think of it—and that was how things had been going until recently.

The new life: no cows, because the Tanzanian government had seized every single one of them. No compound, because the government had bulldozed it, along with hundreds of others. No land, because more and more of the finest, lushest land in northern Tanzania was being set aside for conservation, which turned out to mean for trophy hunters, and tourists on “bespoke expeditions,” and cappuccino trucks in proximity to buffalo viewing—anything and anyone except the people who had lived there since the 17th century, the pastoralists known as the Maasai.

They were the ones tourists saw through their windshields selling beaded key chains at the gates of Serengeti National Park, or performing dances after dinner at safari lodges. They were famous for their red shawls and recycled-tire sandals. They grazed their cattle with zebras and giraffes, and built mud-and-dung houses encircled by stick fences barely distinguishable from the wild landscape. They were among the lightest-living people on the planet, and yet it was the Maasai who were being told that the biggest threat to conservation and national progress was them. Their whole way of life had to go.

[From the April 2020 issue: Ed Yong on the last giraffes on Earth]

And so Songoyo, after considering his alternatives, had devised a last-ditch plan for his own survival, one that had brought him to a town in Kenya called Aitong, where a cool wind was slapping sand and dung into his face as he scanned the market for buyers. He was far from home, roughly 65 miles north of the village in Tanzania where he had been tear-gassed and shot at for the first time in his life. He had seen elderly men beaten and guns fired at old women, and now it was down to this: He was a herder for hire, working for a distant relative, trying to make enough money to buy one single cow.

“Come!” he called to the buyers who kept passing his herd and weaving through the bleating mass. “You will not find any better!”

This was his plan: one cow, because that was the starting point of what it meant to be a Maasai man, which was what he still wanted to be.

The forces arrayed against Songoyo, whom I met in the course of two long trips to Tanzania late last year, include some of the world’s most powerful people and interests. (I have not used Songoyo’s last name out of concern for his safety.) What these people and interests want is what the Maasai are trying to keep: the land they live on.

Global leaders are seeking what they consider to be undeveloped land to meet a stated goal of conserving 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. Corporations want undisturbed forests in order to offset pollution. Western conservation groups, which refer to the Maasai as “stakeholders” on their own land, exert great influence, as does a booming safari industry that sells an old and destructive myth—casting the Serengeti as some primordial wilderness, with the Maasai as cultural relics obstructing a perfect view.

The reality is that the Maasai have been stewards, integral to creating that very ecosystem. The same can be said of Indigenous groups around the world, to whom conservation often feels like a land grab. In the past two decades, more than a quarter million Indigenous people have been evicted to make way for ecotourism, carbon-offset schemes, and other activities that fall under the banner of conservation. That figure is expected to soar.

For all its accomplishments, the cause of saving the planet has become a trillion-dollar business, a global scramble in which wealthy nations are looking to the developing world not just for natural resources, but for nature itself. The wealthy players include not only Europeans and Americans but Arabs and Chinese and others. On the African continent, political leaders are enthusiastic about what so-called green foreign investment might mean for their own economies (and, maybe, their bank accounts).

Such are the pressures being brought to bear on northern Tanzania, where the Maasai migrated with their cattle 400 years ago, settling in an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of square miles of grassy plains, acacia woodlands, rivers, lakes, snowcapped mountains, salt flats, forests, and some of the most spectacular wildlife on the planet. They called it Siringet, which in the Maa language means “the place where the land runs on forever.” The Maasai see their recent history as a struggle to save that land from those who claimed it needed saving.

First came the British colonial authorities, who established the 5,700-square-mile Serengeti National Park, pushing the Maasai to an adjacent zone called the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, with its famous crater, where they were promised they could live. Then came UNESCO. It declared both Serengeti and Ngorongoro to be World Heritage Sites, which came with new restrictions. Western tourists began arriving, seeking an experience of Africa that a thousand movies promised—one of pristine beauty and big game, not people grazing cattle. Tanzanian authorities began leasing blocks of land to foreign hunting and safari companies, many of which promoted themselves as conservationists—a word the Maasai have come to associate with their own doom. Spread among the villages that dot the northern tourist zone, the Maasai have meanwhile been growing in number—their population has doubled in recent decades, to about 200,000. Inevitably, the clash of interests has led to bitter and occasionally violent conflict.

Still, the threat unfolding now is of greater magnitude. It emerged soon after President Samia Suluhu Hassan took office, in 2021. “Tourism in Ngorongoro is disappearing,” she declared during one of her first major speeches. “We agreed that people and wildlife could cohabitate, but now people are overtaking the wildlife.” The Maasai listened with alarm, realizing that the people she was referring to were them.

Not long after Hassan’s speech, officials announced plans to resettle the roughly 100,000 Maasai who were living in and around Ngorongoro to “modern houses” in another part of the country. Meanwhile, in a region north of Ngorongoro, bordering Serengeti National Park, government security forces began rolling into Maasai villages. They were carrying out another part of the plan: annexing 580 square miles of prime grazing land to create an exclusive game reserve for the Dubai royal family, which had long hunted in the area. The government characterized the move as necessary for conservation. Traditional Maasai compounds, known as bomas, were burned. Park rangers began seizing cattle by the tens of thousands.

Songoyo at an abandoned boma in the village of Ololosokwan. It lies within a tract now placed off-limits except for the use of the Dubai royal family. (Nichole Sobecki for The Atlantic)

And more was coming: a $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part, that included new plans for tourism and conservation. A $9.5 million deal with the Chinese for a geological park that overlapped with additional Maasai villages. An offer from Tanzania to make Donald Trump Jr.—an avid trophy hunter—an official “tourism ambassador.” New maps and proposals from the government indicated that further tracts could soon be placed off-limits, including a sacred site that the Maasai call the Mountain of God.

[Read: What trophy hunting does to the elephants it leaves behind]

“This is 80 percent of our land,” a Maasai elder told me one evening during a meeting with other leaders in northern Tanzania. “This will finish us.” They had tried protesting. They had filed lawsuits. They had appealed to the United Nations, the European Union, the East African Court of Justice, and Vice President Kamala Harris when she visited Tanzania in 2023. They’d unearthed old maps and village titles to prove that the land was theirs by law, not just by custom. They’d written a letter to John and Patrick McEnroe after hearing that the tennis stars were hosting a $25,000-a-person safari-and-tennis expedition in the Serengeti. People made supportive statements, but no one was coming to help.

This is what Songoyo understood as he paced the market in Aitong. It was closing soon. Buyers were filtering out through the wire fence, and he still had 12 sheep left to sell, one of which was lame. A man tapped it with a stick.

“A cow stepped on his leg; that’s why he walks like that,” Songoyo said, bracing the animal with his knees.

The man walked away. Another came and tapped his stick on the lame sheep, and then on the rest of them. They agreed on a price, and the buyer pulled out a roll of bills.

“Please, can you add 500?” Songoyo said, asking for the equivalent of an extra $3.60 in Kenyan shillings. “I need 500. Please.”

The man added 200, and Songoyo brought the day’s earnings to the relative who had hired him. They sat under a tree, and he counted out Songoyo’s share for a week of work, roughly $10. One cow would cost about $200.

“See you next week,” the man said.

“May God give you favor,” Songoyo replied, putting the money in the pocket of his blue track pants. His cellphone rang, a battered plastic burner.

“I am coming,” he told one of his wives, who was waiting for him at their home in Tanzania.

He’d had options other than this. There had always been Maasai who’d given up traditional ways to reinvent themselves, shedding their red shawls for all kinds of lives. Now many more of them, having lost their cattle, were moving to cities, where the Maasai reputation for bravery and rectitude meant there was always work as a security guard—I saw them everywhere in Arusha and Dar es Salaam, in front of shops and banks. Others had taken a government offer to resettle in a town called Msomera, far to the south, only to return home with stories of loneliness and conflict with locals. Still others were falling apart. Songoyo had seen them, drunk men hobbling along the road or passed out on their red shawls under trees in the daytime. That would not be him.

“Never,” he said, and began the long walk back to his village in Tanzania, a tall man wrapped in a pink-and-purple plaid shawl passing cinder-block taverns where he would not drink, and motorbikes he would not hire, because the point was to save money for the cow. No cows, no life, he told himself, picking up the pace along an orange dirt road stretching into the late afternoon.

His earliest memories were of cows; he had never been without them. They were the huge, warm, brown beasts kept in the center of the boma. Their dung formed the walls of his home. Their milk and blood were what he drank as a child, when his father told him what Maasai children were traditionally told: that when the earth split from the sky and God left the world, he entrusted the Maasai with all the cattle, and by extension the land and the other animals that shared it. Songoyo learned how to herd with rocks, pushing them around in the dirt. He got his first calf when he was a small boy, herding it with a stick near the boma. When he was big enough, he followed his older brothers out into the wider grazing areas, including one the Maasai called Osero, a word that refers to lush grasslands—in this case, the 580 square miles of land adjacent to Serengeti National Park where Maasai had lived and kept cattle for generations.

It was in Osero that he learned about different kinds of grasses and trees: which ones had good branches for bows or good bark for tea that could ease a backache. He learned where to find natural salt and the coolest streams, and he learned certain rules: Never cut down a tree. Keep cattle away from wildebeests during calving season, because they carry a disease deadly to cows.

He listened to older boys tell stories, including one whose lesson he still lived by, about a group of Maasai heading out on a cattle raid when one of the warriors broke his sandal. The warrior turned to the man behind him and asked if he would stay and help, but the man refused. He asked another, who also refused, and so on until the very last one agreed to stay, while the rest continued on to cattle-raiding glory. The stern moral was: Be prepared. Don’t fall behind. Stay with the group. Struggle.

Songoyo had struggled. He held himself together after his father died, when he was still a boy, a moment when he might have turned delinquent but didn’t. He endured his adolescent coming-of-age ceremonies with dignity, by all accounts managing not to cry or shake during his circumcision, when people scrutinize and taunt boys for any sign of weakness, and he was rewarded with cows. He learned how to shoot arrows and use a machete, and became a moran—entering a stage of life when young Maasai men bear responsibility for protecting their village—and was given more cows, each with a name, each with a certain character he came to know. In this way, the life he wanted became possible.

He married his first wife, then a second and a third, and eventually built a boma in the village where his children went to school, and a larger compound on the edge of Osero, where the cattle were kept, and where he’d had one of the happiest moments of his life. This was just before everything began to unravel, an otherwise ordinary day when the rains were full and the cows were fat and he’d walked out into the middle of them, their bells jangling, realizing how far he’d come and thinking, “Yes, I am a real Maasai.”

Not that life was an idyll. In village after village that I visited, people described years of tensions with safari companies and conservation authorities. People who lived within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area—a vast zone that was almost like its own country—had complained about schools falling apart and poisoned salt licks and the indignity of their identity being checked as they came and went through the tourist gate. In other areas, people had accused certain safari companies of illegally acquiring leases and paying local police to beat herders off concessions. One company was notorious for using a helicopter to spray scalding water on cows.

In Osero, the problems went back to 1992, when an Emirati company called Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC) was first granted a hunting license for the Dubai royal family. They had their own private camp and a private airstrip and, for the emir himself, Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a compound on a hill, guarded by a special unit of the Tanzanian military police. When the rains ended each year, cargo planes full of four-wheelers and tents and pallets of food would buzz low over villages before landing, followed by private jets delivering the royal family and their guests. A few weeks later, they’d buzz out with carcasses of zebras and antelope and other trophies. For a while, OBC had its own cellphone tower, and Maasai villagers noticed that when they were near it, a message would pop up on their phone screens: “Welcome to the U.A.E.” The arrangement had been that the Maasai were supposed to keep away when the royals were in residence, but just about everyone had caught a glimpse. Songoyo had seen them speeding around, shooting animals from trucks with semiautomatic rifles. “Once, they pulled up in the middle of my cows and I saw them shooting so many antelope,” he told me. “They just kill, kill, kill!”

Bumper-to-bumper in Serengeti National Park, the first enclave in northern Tanzania to be set aside for conservation and tourism (Nichole Sobecki for The Atlantic)

There had been attempts at diplomacy. Sometimes the Arabs, as the Maasai called them, would give out bags of rice. They had hired Maasai men to work as guides and drivers and had flown some of their favorite employees to Dubai, buying them clothing and cars. One driver recalled being at the camp on a day when the emir arrived. The driver lined up with other staff, and the emir greeted each one of them while an assistant followed behind with a large bag of cash, inviting each worker to reach in. The driver said he pulled out $1,060.

But a bitterness was always there. Maasai leaders had long claimed that Osero belonged to 14 adjacent villages, and that they had never consented to the OBC deal. Tanzanian officials asserted authority over not only Osero but a far larger expanse—Loliondo—citing its colonial-era designation as a game-controlled area; they often resorted to violence to enforce this view. Maasai villagers described to me how government security forces had collaborated with OBC at least twice in recent years to conduct a large-scale torching of bomas in the vicinity of the camp. Young men grazing cows had been beaten and shot at. One man described to me being shot in the face, then handcuffed to a hospital bed as he was bleeding through his ears and nose and eyes, slipping in and out of consciousness. He remembered a police officer shouting at a doctor to let him die, and the doctor refusing the order and saving his life. He lost his left eye, the socket now scarred over with skin, and had kept a thin blue hospital receipt all these years in the hope of receiving restitution that never came. Most villages have people who can tell such stories.

[Read: The war on rhino poaching has human casualties]

In 2017, amid rising complaints and lawsuits filed by Maasai leaders, Tanzanian authorities suspended OBC’s license and accused the company’s director of offering some $2 million in bribes to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, which led to a court case that ended in a plea deal. Requests to interview OBC executives, representatives of the Dubai royal family, and officials of the U.A.E. government about their involvement in Tanzania went unanswered.

By the time Hassan became president, in 2021, the director was back on the job and the OBC flights had resumed.

Samia Suluhu Hassan was widely embraced by West and East. Her predecessor, John Magufuli, who died in office, had been a populist with an authoritarian streak and became infamous for downplaying the dangers of COVID. He suspended media outlets, banned opposition rallies, and alienated foreign investors, even as many Maasai saw him as a hero for brushing back OBC.

Hassan eased his more repressive policies and embarked on an ambitious plan to bring foreign investment into the country, especially through tourism. She branded herself a forward-looking environmentalist.

And she found willing collaborators. The World Bank had been encouraging more tourism, arguing that it could help Tanzania achieve what official metrics define as middle-income status. One of the country’s main conservation partners, UNESCO, had been pressing Tanzanian authorities for years to implement what it called “stringent policies to control population growth” in Ngorongoro, although UNESCO also says it has never supported the displacement of people. A German conservation group called the Frankfurt Zoological Society, a major partner in managing Serengeti National Park, has expressed concern that traditional Maasai practices are becoming less tenable because of population growth. “There is a risk of overuse and overgrazing that should be addressed,” Dennis Rentsch, the deputy director of the society’s Africa department, told me. “I don’t want to vilify the Maasai. They are not enemies of conservation. But the challenge is when you reach a tipping point.”

In response to these pressures, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism produced a report that blamed rising Maasai and livestock populations for “extensive habitat destruction” in conservation zones. It recommended resettling all of Ngorongoro’s Maasai. It also recommended designating the 580-square-mile Osero tract, farther away, as a more restrictive game reserve, describing the land as an important wildlife corridor and water-catchment area for the Serengeti ecosystem. The designation left the Dubai royal family with an exclusive hunting playground. But none of the Maasai who lived in the area would be allowed to graze their cattle or continue living there.

Maasai leaders countered with two reports of their own—more than 300 pages covering colonial history, constitutional law, land-use law, and international conventions, and providing copies of village titles, registration certificates, and old maps—to prove their legal right to the land as citizens. They blamed habitat destruction on sprawling lodges, roads bisecting rangeland, trucks off-roading across savannas, and “huge tourist traffic.” Overgrazing was a result of being squeezed into ever smaller domains, which kept the Maasai from rotating grazing zones as they normally would. Citing their own surveys, they said the government had inflated livestock numbers, a claim supported by Pablo Manzano, a Spanish ecologist with the Basque Centre for Climate Change, who had conducted research in the region and found that the government was perpetuating a tragic misunderstanding.

Manzano and others pointed to a growing body of scholarly research demonstrating what the Maasai had long known: that their management of the land did not degrade the Serengeti ecosystem but had actually helped sustain and even create it—the grasslands the Maasai had cultivated for hundreds of years were the same grasslands that many wild animals needed to thrive. In that sense, the land had already been conserved before the Germans, the British, and various international groups decided that they needed to save it.

A Maasai moran with his family’s livestock in one of the areas targeted by the Tanzanian government’s latest plans (Nichole Sobecki for The Atlantic)

In their reports, Maasai leaders concluded that the government was engaged in “a calculated process to wipe out animals” and to “devastate their livelihood and culture.” They took a bus to the capital and delivered the two reports in person to government officials.

But there would be no debate, no discussion of complexities. Hassan moved forward with her agenda. She was finalizing the $7.5 billion package with the United Arab Emirates, the fourth-largest (after China, the EU, and the U.S.) investor in Africa. One deal turned over management of roughly two-thirds of Dar es Salaam’s port to DP World, a company owned by the U.A.E. government. Another deal turned over management of some 20 million acres of forest—roughly 8 percent of the nation’s entire territory—to a company called Blue Carbon, which is run by a member of the royal family, Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum, and uses conserved land to generate carbon credits that it sells to other companies. The package also included money for tourism.

Hassan invited travel agents to the country for a “tourism reboot.” She spoke of wanting more five-star hotels. She filmed a promotional documentary called The Royal Tour, which at one point involved helicoptering with a travel reporter over some Maasai villages near the Serengeti.

“All those round things down there are the Maasai bomas,” Hassan says in the film, as several villagers look up into the sky. The reporter then comments in a way that Maasai leaders found ominous: “Over the years, the Tanzanian government has tried to persuade the Maasai to become traditional farmers or ranchers, but they’ve persisted in clinging to their ancient ways. And yet, they may not have a choice now.”

Some 400 miles to the south, in the hotter, flatter farming area of Msomera, bulldozers broke ground on a new development. The military was building 5,000 cinder-block houses intended for Maasai families. Officials had been dispatched to villages in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to present the government’s offer: a free house on 2.5 acres. Electricity. Piped water. New schools. A cash bonus of roughly $4,000 for early takers. At one such presentation, a crowd pelted the officials with rocks.

I requested an interview with Hassan to better understand her decisions. In response, a government spokesperson arranged interviews with several other officials, one of whom was Albert Msando, a district commissioner, who told me, “Whatever I am answering is whatever the president would have answered.” We met in the town of Handeni, near Msomera. Msando’s office was inside a former British-colonial building, where a portrait of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s founding father, hung on one wall and a portrait of Hassan hung on another.

“For the public interest,” Msando said of the Maasai, “we have to relocate them.” A lawyer by training and demeanor, Msando emphasized that any relocation is voluntary, at least for now. He also made it clear that if persuasion fails, the government maintains the legal right to remove the Maasai from conservation areas, by force if necessary. “That’s why there are guys here with their shoulders decorated,” Msando said, pointing around the room to police and military officers.

He told me that anyone in Tanzania would be lucky to get what the Maasai were getting. “We are giving them nice houses, I believe, according to modern standards.” He said that the Maasai currently live in “filthy conditions” and should be helped to “live a better life.”

He and other officials I spoke with said that they disliked even using the term Maasai. They invoked the spirit of Nyerere, saying that Tanzania was supposed to have a national identity, not tribal ones. Msando said he could understand the Maasai’s concern about losing their culture, even if he had little sympathy for it. “Culture is a fluid thing,” he said. “I am Chaga—the Chaga were on the verge of having their own nation. Today look at me. People do not even know I’m Chaga. My kids don’t even speak Chaga.” He was unapologetic: “The Maasai are not exempted from acculturation or cultural acclimatization, or cultural extinction.”

The government’s plans moved forward. In June 2022, a convoy of trucks carrying hundreds of security personnel rolled into the 14 villages bordering Osero, a show of force that the Maasai had never seen before. Soldiers, police, and park rangers set up camps on the outskirts of each village, announcing their intention to demarcate the boundary of the new game reserve. What happened next unfolded sporadically over several days. It has been documented in reports by human-rights groups and was described to me by dozens of witnesses and victims.

First, village leaders summoned to what was billed as a routine ruling-party meeting were arrested after they refused to go along with the demarcation—27 of them in all. The security forces then began planting a long line of three-foot-high rectangular cement markers called beacons along the perimeter of Osero. Villagers came behind them, kicking the markers down before the concrete foundations had set; women hacked at them with machetes. “I felt like I was fighting for myself,” one woman told me later. “I knew if this land goes away, there is nowhere for my children to be, and that forced me to lose my fear.” But the security forces kept beating the villagers back. Elders called more than 1,000 moran to take up positions with bows and arrows in forested areas along a main road where government trucks were patrolling.

“How many are ready to die?” a leader said to the group, and at some point, one of them shot an arrow at a police officer, killing him.

After that, the security forces opened fire. They shot at the legs of elderly women waving grass as a sign of peace. They shot an elderly man, who fell and then was heaped onto a truck “like a sack of maize,” his son told me. He has not been found. The security forces shot at men and women trying to destroy the beacons, wounding them in their arms and legs and backs. They shot tear gas into bomas and burst into one where a traditional ceremony was being held, firing into the crowd. The moran waited for orders to retaliate, but the elders, seeing what the government was willing to do, called them off. “It’s only because we didn’t have guns,” a Maasai elder told me. “If someone helped us with guns, they cannot even fight with us, because they are very cowardly.” Another elder said, “You cannot fight a gun with arrows.”

Dozens of people with bullet and machete wounds, blocked by police from local clinics, limped their way across the border into Kenya for treatment. Several thousand more fled there for safety. Others hid in the forest. Then the burning and bulldozing began. For several days, security forces plowed through circles of stick fences. They crushed houses and corrals and lit the debris on fire, burning more than 300 bomas, including Songoyo’s, and finishing the work before the start of high safari season. In a statement issued a few days after the violence, the Tanzanian government said the new game reserve had “no settlements as it is alleged and therefore there is no eviction” taking place. It described what had happened as “normal practice for all wildlife and forest protected areas in Tanzania”—a necessary step to keep the Serengeti ecosystem from being “disrupted and eventually erased from the face of the Earth.”

Songoyo’s boma had been by a hot spring. His father’s and grandfather’s graves were nearby. In the aftermath of the violence, he moved his family and cattle from Osero to a smaller boma nearer to his village, where he and others returned from hiding to find homes ransacked and skeletons of cows that had been eaten by wild animals.

Security forces roamed up and down the roads. Officials called people into immigration offices and accused them of being Kenyans, requiring them to show up in court for weeks on end, until judges threw out their cases for lack of evidence. Rangers patrolled Osero more heavily than ever, shooting at and beating herders who went anywhere near the new reserve, punishments that now came with a kind of psychological torture—forcing people to consent to the legitimacy of their own dispossession. One young man told me that rangers dragged him to their truck and beat him on his back with a stick for hours, calling him “rubbish” and yelling, “You don’t agree this land was taken? We will punish you until you agree!” They would feed him cornmeal, he said, and beat him some more. But he never did agree. Now he can barely walk.

The Maasai had other problems. One was grass: There was not enough. Everywhere I went, I saw bony cows picking at short clumps of weeds in dry patches of dirt. Out of desperation, some people were taking their cows to graze in Kenya, while others were sneaking into Osero at night. To avoid alerting rangers, cows went in without bells, making them harder to keep track of in the dark. Herders used cheap flashlights for safety, shining them fleetingly in the bush to detect the eyes of lions and other predators. They struggled to keep themselves awake, wearing small radios around their necks, playing tinny music at a low volume only they could hear.

Another problem was worse: Rangers were seizing cattle. Not just a few here and there, but huge herds of them, by the hundreds and then by the thousands. One day, Songoyo got a call from his brother, who had been grazing Songoyo’s 75 cows near Osero with other herders.

He said rangers had chased them down and seized more than 700 cattle, including all of Songoyo’s. He said the rangers had then crossed with the cattle into Serengeti National Park, and were holding them in a pen. Songoyo imagined them staying like that, not eating, not drinking. He imagined his favorite, Kiripa, a brown heifer he could always count on to lead the other cattle to distant grasses and home again, slowly dying, and rushed with the other owners to the park gate.

“I tried to reason with the rangers, but I totally failed—it was like they were ready to shoot us,” he recalled, and so the group contacted a Maasai lawyer, Melau Alais, whose practice had been overwhelmed by such emergency calls in the past year.

After several days, Songoyo learned that the rangers were alleging that the cattle had been illegally grazing inside Serengeti National Park, and that they would all be auctioned off unless the owners prevailed in court. The court was in a town called Mugumu, clear on the other side of the park, a two-hour drive away. The hearing was in a few days. So Songoyo and the other owners scrambled together the park fees and set off in the lawyer’s car past lush green grass and fat, grazing zebras and Land Cruisers full of tourists enjoying the scenery. When they reached the courthouse, the owner whom they had elected to represent all of the owners in the case, a man named Soloi Toroge, was formally charged with illegal grazing and jailed until the hearing.

The next day, Songoyo and the others sat in the gallery as Toroge took the stand. Both Songoyo and Alais recalled for me the day in the courtroom.

“So what happened?” Alais asked Toroge, and as the defendant began telling the story of how the rangers had beaten the herders and taken the cattle, Songoyo said he felt his anger rising.

Alais asked Toroge how he knew the cows were his, and as he described their particular colors and markings, Songoyo thought about his own cows, and became more desperate.

At another point, Alais asked Toroge how many children he had, and as Songoyo thought about his own, he began to feel physically ill.

“So what other business do you do?” Alais continued.

Toroge said he depended only on livestock.

“This livestock, or others?” Alais asked him.

This livestock, he answered. There was no other.

“So if the court decides to auction the cattle, what will happen?” Alais asked.

“All of us will die of hunger,” Toroge answered.

As he continued, Songoyo remembered thinking that this was it. That he really was about to lose everything he’d worked his whole life to achieve—not because of drought or his own foolishness, but because of his government, and the Arabs, and something called conservation. He said he began making noises, and felt himself becoming so disoriented, so altered, that he thought he could kill someone, or that someone might kill him, and soon people were surrounding him, court officers threatening to arrest him. Songoyo was saying, “Then let us die. There is no special death.”

He did not return for the other days of testimony. He was back in his village when Alais called to tell him that the judge had ruled that the cows would be auctioned off unless the owners paid a fine, and that his share—calculated per head of cattle, per day, for more than 30 days and counting—would be roughly $5,000.

He briefly considered what others had done, which was borrow money from a Somali loan shark who was doing a brisk business, but decided that was no solution.

“Let them sell them all,” he told Alais.

He did not leave his boma for days.

Normally, relatives and neighbors would give someone in his position one of their cows to help him rebuild, but nothing was normal any longer. More than 50,000 head of cattle had been taken by rangers, according to a local tally. Between the seized cattle and the fines, a huge transfer of wealth was under way from the Maasai community to the government.

People came by Songoyo’s boma to say they were sorry. They tried to encourage him. He considered what to do. He could be a security guard. He imagined standing still for hours in front of some building in Arusha. Then he began thinking that death would be preferable. Traditional Maasai cosmology includes no afterlife, no reward or punishment in the hereafter, so that would be that. Hanging or poison were the usual methods; hanging was more certain. Then he thought about his children. “And I said no,” he recalled. He told himself what others had told him since his father had died. He was a hard worker. He knew how to struggle. He thought, “Maybe something good is ahead of me.” He thought that if he just kept going, “God will bless me for that.”

A boma at dawn, its days likely numbered, in a region bordering the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Nichole Sobecki for The Atlantic)

He tore down a large corral where he had kept his cattle and built a smaller one for the seven goats he still had, and for the one cow he hoped to buy. He remembered a distant relative, a businessman in Kenya; they got in touch, and the plan was set: Pick up the livestock at a market near his village. Herd them across the border to a market in Kenya, and if he didn’t sell them there, go on to Aitong, a roughly 130-mile circuit every week. He had been doing this for months.

When he got home from Aitong, he would give half the money he’d earned to his wives for food. He would rest, and then start out again. He noticed himself becoming skinnier.

Songoyo headed north with his next herd of sheep, through a clearing with a seasonal stream and smooth rocks. He skirted Serengeti National Park, where he was not allowed to be, then crossed over a low mountain range that marked the Tanzania-Kenya border, his sandals splitting at the soles. At the gates of the park, some of the half a million people who visit every year were lining up in Land Cruisers, the bumpers displaying flag decals representing the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the United States. And as the sun rose one morning, in they went, tourists with bucket lists, anniversaries, dreams, and romanticized images in mind.

They roamed the dirt roads through grassy plains that really did seem to stretch on forever—a rolling sea of greens and yellows and flat-topped trees. They slowed for herds of gazelles and elephants. They sped to a leopard sighting in trucks bearing the wishful names of various outfitters—Sense of Africa, Lion King Adventures, Peacemakers Expeditions—and soon they began gathering along one side of the Mara River.

On the other side, great black herds of wildebeests were massing, waiting for the right moment to dive off a small cliff and swim across. What the animals saw waiting for them was a long line of trucks, a metal fortification.

“I want a picture!” said a woman hoisting her camera.

“My God, I want them to come down!” said her companion.

An hour passed. Another hour. The wildebeests were not migrating. A Maasai driver grumbled that obviously there were too many trucks. A man pressed binoculars to his face.

“See, it looks fine to us, but to them, something’s not right,” he said.

He wondered if it was crocodiles. They waited. A woman took a nap. Then some wildebeests began moving downriver, opposite some gaps in the otherwise solid wall of trucks. And then one hurled itself over the cliff in heroic fashion, and soon they were all diving.

“They’re flying!” someone said.

The animals were flailing, tumbling, and splashing down into the river, swimming for their lives, and now engines were cranking as trucks roared toward the crossing point, wedging into every open gap.

“We got ’em!” yelled a woman holding up a camera, and as far as anyone could see, the view was wildebeests, river, trees, and the grassy savanna beyond—no cows, no goats, no Maasai herders, no people at all, except the ones beholding the spectacle they’d been promised.

What they could not see was a tall man in blue track pants and a pink-and-purple plaid shawl herding sheep across a rocky path, trying not to think about how his knees hurt, his ankles hurt; trying to forget about all that had come before now.

Songoyo reached the first market, where he did not sell the sheep but picked up some more animals for another client and kept going, heading for Aitong.

It was late afternoon when he began crossing the Maasai Mara—the Kenyan national park—with only a stick for protection because bows and arrows are not allowed in the park. He hustled the sheep through the bush, past thorns, under branches, over sharp rocks and soft grass. He saw zebras. He saw giraffes. At one point, he saw a lion, which began following him, then another, coming closer and closer, and as he began to think that this would be how his life ended, a tourist truck came speeding along the road and scared the lion away, and he took off running with the sheep until he came upon elephants—“So, so many elephants,” he said—and managed to dodge those, too.

He kept walking, trying to stay alert. The night was moonless and very dark. After some hours, he reached the edge of the park and saw a boma—a cultural boma, as it turned out, the kind set up for tourists, where Maasai act out versions of the life now being extinguished—and asked if he could sleep there, but the people at the park said that was against the rules, even though welcoming him would have been the true Maasai way. So he waited outside a while and then entered anyway, lying down in a corner. It was cold, and he felt himself becoming sick.

He reached Aitong the next morning but still didn’t sell the sheep, and this meant he would have to press on another 50 miles to a town called Kilgoris. By now he was so exhausted that he decided to sleep, and this was when, as he put it, “evil came during the night,” in the form of a hyena that killed five of his sheep, two of which belonged to the new client. When Songoyo called to tell him, the man told Songoyo that he would have to repay him for the animals. Songoyo told him he didn’t have any money. The man said in that case, he would have to work without pay. Songoyo set off for Kilgoris, now in debt.

Maasai gather at a livestock market, one stop on Songoyo’s 130-mile circuit from Tanzania to Kenya and back. (Nichole Sobecki for The Atlantic)

He walked along a dirt road as trucks blasted him with fumes. He walked across one farm after another. He felt so hungry. At times he knelt on the ground and said, “God, can you see this?,” then got up and kept going. Another farm. A man who gave him water. A man who yelled at him to get off his land. A tree where he took a nap. His dreams lately were of cows grazing in lush grass, and of dying. More hours crossing an area that belonged to a rival pastoralist tribe, sneaking along the edges and behind stands of trees, feeling like a thief, he said, feeling like he had no place to be in this world. He kept going like that, across more land that was not his.

The land Songoyo considered his was now part of the new Pololeti Game Reserve. That was what Osero had become. The government had constructed a gate bearing the name along the main road into the area, not far from where Songoyo’s boma had been, and when the Dubai royal family was not around, tourists could pay a fee and go inside.

“As far as you can see, all this is now Pololeti,” said a Maasai driver who had grown up on the land and been away from it for a year, ever since the violence. “I feel like crying.” The only reason he was able to go inside now was that I had hired him as a guide.

What he saw was miles and miles of a particular grass that was good for cattle, at the moment so tall and golden. “If your cows are weak and they eat this, in two days they will stand,” he said, driving ahead.

He saw the yellowing tops of grasses that zebras favored, and thick, wetter grasses that wildebeests favored. He saw some impalas in the distance and said, “I wish to see my goats there,” because they would usually graze together.

He saw wiry red oat grasses, and thick swirls of cattail grasses, and here was the kind of acacia with bark that helped with nausea and there was the tree with large, rough leaves useful for sanding down a staff. He saw lavender morning glories used for tissues, and a sacred stream whose water was used for ceremonies. He smelled the familiar scent of bush mint in the cool afternoon, and heard such a strange quiet without the bells of cows.

“In this area, in the evening, you’d see so many cows,” the driver said, and soon he reached a clearing where it was possible to see grass pressed into faint circles.

“Over here used to be houses,” he said.

“Over here, there used to be more than 20 bomas,” he said, continuing on.

“Here used to be a boma, because you can tell the difference between this grass and the other grass,” he said. “We always have soft-soft.”

He navigated by trees he remembered and small hills he knew by heart.

“Here was a very large boma—you can see the fence,” he said, pointing to some scattered branches with thorns. He continued on.

“Over here was the Pyando family,” he said, passing a certain spot in the grass.

“The Kairungs were here,” he said, but it was hard to tell.

“Here were the Saing’eus,” he said, pointing to black weeds that grew where cow dung had been.

Here lived the Purengeis and the Ngiyos. The Kutishos, the Oltinayos, the Kikanais, the Mungas. A whole world that would soon be gone with no trace.

The driver turned and headed back toward the gate, noting a road that led up to a compound on the mountain, where the emir could look down and enjoy one of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth, with no cows or bomas or red shawls obstructing the view.

“Just imagine,” the driver said, and soon he was passing a line of white beacons.

“Oh, our land,” he said, exiting through the gate, wondering what would become of all the life that had been here.

One answer was taking shape more than 2,000 miles to the northeast, in the United Arab Emirates, at a place called Sharjah Safari park. It had been open a year, a project sponsored by an Emirati royal who wished to re-create the experience of a real African safari. It was an hour’s drive from the Dubai airport, out along a smooth, straight highway lined with green palms and bright-yellow marigolds, past mirrored skyscrapers, many mosques, discount strip malls, a crematorium, camels, and miles of desert.

At the entrance was a concrete elephant. The $75 gold package entitled visitors to tour 12 distinct African landscapes with animals procured from Africa itself, and on a 70-degree December day, tourists climbed into a modified Land Cruiser that whisked them through a series of metal gates.

“Savanna,” the tour guide said as the first gate slid open to reveal some fake termite mounds, some half-dead acacia trees, and a living waterbuck. “Ngorongoro,” she said as another gate slid open, revealing a few gazelles and four white rhinos. “Serengeti,” she said, and on it went.

Soon the tour arrived at the last exhibit: “Boma.” At the end of a curved path lined with grass was a collection of round structures made of cement, not mud and dung, with wooden doors and thatched roofs. There was a corral with goats and donkeys. And here and there were signs with cartoons explaining life in this place. One of them included a drawing of a man. He was wearing a blue-plaid shawl. His features were simply drawn, and he stared blank-faced from the confines of a rectangular wood frame.

When he saw the low mountain range, Songoyo felt a burst of energy, knowing he was near home, such as it was, the place where he was trying to start over. He crossed the clearing with the smooth rocks, and soon he arrived at a grassy slope, and there were the remnants of the larger corral he’d torn down, and there was the smaller one he’d built for the goats and the cow he still could not buy, a circle of sticks with jackets and plaid shawls drying on top. There was a mud-walled house, and a child running out of it.

His wife made him some tea. He gave her money for the market. He’d made roughly $20 on this trip, but of course he was now in debt for the sheep the hyena had killed. They discussed which neighbors were still around. So many had left. Then Songoyo went outside to check on his seven goats.

He looked inside the corral. Four, he counted. Another two were running around outside, so that made six. He kept looking. He walked to where the old corral used to be, then back to the new corral. No goat. He began walking faster, looking around the house. Still no goat. He walked farther out into the grass, seeing nothing, becoming more alarmed.

“Where’s the other one?” he said. “There is one missing!”

His wife came outside and began looking too. He ran out beyond a thorn fence and into the taller grass, now frantic, scanning the landscape for all that he had left of a vanishing life he loved and still wanted.

He kept looking, and finally he spotted the goat. It was sitting in the grass. As he came nearer, he saw that it was injured. A back leg was bloody, and seemed to have gotten stuck in some thorns. Songoyo knelt down to examine the wound more closely. He was a Maasai man without a cow, in debt, getting skinnier, and now he was shaking his head.

“Who did this?” he shouted, expecting no answer.

This article originally misstated the distance between Sharjah Safari park and the Pololeti Game Reserve. It appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Great Serengeti Land Grab.” Stephanie McCrummen can be reached at smccrummen@theatlantic.com.

The Alabama Embryo Opinion Is About More Than Christian Nationalism

2024-03-05T06:00:00-05:00

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Not long before Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker issued an opinion citing the Bible as the basis for declaring that frozen embryos are people, he was a guest on a YouTube show hosted by a self-described prophet named Johnny Enlow. Parker’s appearance on such a program reveals a lot about the rising political power of the country’s fastest-growing Christian movement.

Over the years, Enlow has written about how “a government can potentially function as a virtual theocracy” if leaders faithfully listen to God. He is a top promoter of the idea that Christians need to assert dominion over “seven mountains” of life—government, business, family, education, media, religion, and the arts. In recent months, he has said that Donald Trump could be justified in calling for “revolution” and interviewed a former Army major who runs an Idaho tactical-weapons training camp billed as being for “Christian men who believe the times warrant a high standard of firearms readiness.”

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

Now Enlow was introducing Parker as another “asset,” a “fellow Kingdom lover.” He invited the 72-year-old judge to talk about how God had called him “to the mountain of government.”

“As you have emphasized in the past, we have abandoned those seven mountains, and they’ve been occupied by the opposite side,” said Parker, who was elected to Alabama’s highest court in 2004 and has been chief justice since 2019. “I will say that God created government, and the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others is heartbreaking.” The two went on talking about the Holy Spirit and, quoting the Book of Isaiah, about “restoring the judges as in the days of old.”

This language, which can be mystifying to those not steeped in it, is commonly categorized as fundamentalism or Christian nationalism. But those terms do not adequately capture the scope and ambitions of the rapidly growing charismatic Christian movement with which Parker has publicly associated himself—a world of megachurches, modern-day apostles and prophets, media empires, worship bands, and millions of followers that is becoming the most aggressive faction of the Christian right and the leading edge of charismatic Christianity worldwide.

These are not blue-blazer Southern Baptists. This is the demon-mapping, prophecy-believing, spiritual-warfare, end-times-army, take-the-U.S.-Capitol-for-the-heavenly-Kingdom crowd—a movement that has its own history, its own superstars, and an agenda that goes beyond saving souls, or drawing upon faith to influence policy, as Americans of many religions do.

The movement is often called the New Apostolic Reformation, a phrase coined in the mid-1990s by a theology professor named C. Peter Wagner and once openly embraced by many leaders. Wagner was trying to describe what he said he was witnessing in churches not only in the United States but also in parts of Latin America, Africa, and China: explosive growth, miracles, signs and wonders. He believed that a fresh wave of the Holy Spirit was moving around the globe, obliterating denominational differences, banishing demonic strongholds, raising up new apostles and prophets with new dreams and visions for humanity. A great restoration of the first-century Church was under way, he contended. The end game would be an actual, earthly Kingdom of God.

[Peter Wehner: Where did evangelicals go wrong?]

Wagner himself became a major figure in the movement, taking part in the first international convening of apostles in 2000 and writing books such as Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World. Years later, the movement is supplying an argument for authoritarianism, becoming a political force behind the rise of leaders such as Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. Prophets and apostles are everywhere, describing God-given dreams and visions on their podcasts and social media. The movement is competing with Catholicism in many Brazilian villages; setting up in storefronts in Nairobi, Kenya; and filling moribund churches from California to the Deep South.

I have visited many of these churches across the United States in my reporting. Inside, the walls are usually blank. No portraits of Jesus, no crosses. Some have Broadway-quality lighting. Instead of a pulpit, there is typically a huge screen showing futuristic scenes—spinning stars, crashing waves. Praise bands blast songs with simple chord progressions and mantralike choruses about submission to God. Many people pray lying prostrate on the floor. Sermons explain life as an ever-escalating spiritual battle between the forces of God and Satan, one in which Mr. Splitfoot might take the form of Joe Biden, Democrats, your local librarian, homosexual impulses, drugs, abortion—anything and anyone in the way of God’s Kingdom.

Crucially, followers are urged to join in this great, rolling drama. In sermons, YouTube shows, books, and training academies, leaders in the movement urge people to listen to God and figure out which of the seven mountains is theirs.

A North Carolina apostle named Greg Hood started something called Kingdom University to create what he calls Kingdom citizens. Businesspeople have started “Kingdom-aligned” investment firms. A woman I profiled last year had felt God telling her to buy a mountain in Western Pennsylvania, and she did, aiming to build a retreat center for people to learn their Kingdom assignments.

In Alabama, Justice Tom Parker decided that his mountain is government.

“When the judges are restored, revival can flow,” he said on a prayer call convened last March by a prominent apostle named Clay Nash, one of 50 such calls in 2023 that routinely featured state legislators, members of Congress, judges, and other officials reporting on their progress building the Kingdom. “So, I have been laboring. I’m part of it in Alabama … At least as chief justice, I can help prepare the soil of the hearts, exposing the judges around the state to the things of God. I want to ask that we focus, going forward, on judges as one of the components to revival in this nation.”

On the steps of the Alabama capitol building last year, Parker—who declined to be interviewed for this article—introduced Sean Feucht, a popular singer in the movement who was touring state capitals and who told one crowd, “We want believers to be the ones writing the laws! Yes!” and “We want God to be in control of everything!” Parker prayed for “a comprehensive awakening across the state that will be so powerful that it will bring forth reformation in government that will affect the nation.”

On Enlow’s show, the host asked Parker to talk about how he felt doing his job.

“Do you feel angels are attentive?” Enlow asked him. “Do you feel warfare?”

“We know God equips those he calls,” Parker said. “And I am very aware he is equipping me with something for the specific situation I am facing.”

“So you do feel like the Holy Spirit is there?” Enlow asked him.

“Yes,” Parker said.

The judge went on to explain his legal philosophy. He said that there is natural law and God’s law, and that God’s law is necessary because man cannot trust his own reason. “Because of the impact of the fall of man in the Garden, man’s reason became corrupted and could no longer properly discern God’s law from nature,” Parker said. “So he had to give them the revealed law. The holy scripture.”

[Read: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

Not long after recording the show, the judge issued his concurring opinion in the in-vitro-fertilization case, eschewing secular sources to cite the Books of Genesis, Exodus, and Jeremiah as the ultimate authority in defining “the sanctity of human life.” The backlash has been swift, and the Alabama legislature voted Thursday to protect doctors doing IVF from criminal or civil liability if embryos are destroyed. But the New Apostolic Reformation remains a gathering force in American politics.

“The Parker point of view, the NAR point of view, is deep and complicated,” Frederick Clarkson, a research analyst who has been studying the Christian right for decades, told me. He considers the NAR to be one of the most important shifts in Christianity in modern times. “Christian nationalism is a handy term, but it is a box into which NAR does not quite fit,” Clarkson said—the movement is “so much bigger than that.”

The people who advanced the notion that God was using Trump were not merely Christian nationalists. They were prominent apostles such as Dutch Sheets, who is as familiar to those in the movement as Billy Graham once was to your average Southern Baptist.

Sheets was a key figure in the run-up to January 6, exhorting his followers to go to Washington, D.C., to take the Capitol not just for Trump but for God. They came by the busload, bearing the Revolutionary War–era flag that Sheets popularized and repurposed as a symbol of the Kingdom movement.

The flag is white with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven, and it is now posted outside the district office of House Speaker Mike Johnson. As wild and hyperbolic as the movement can seem to outsiders, believers continue to prove their seriousness, in Alabama and beyond.

The Woman Who Bought a Mountain for God

2023-06-20T07:30:00-04:00

Photographs by Olivia Crumm

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

On the day she heard God tell her to buy a mountain, Tami Barthen already sensed that her life was on a spiritual upswing. She’d recently divorced and remarried, an improvement she attributed to following the voice of God. She’d quit traditional church and enrolled in a course on supernatural ministry, learning to attune herself to what she believed to be heavenly signs. During one worship service, a pastor had even singled her out in a prophecy: “There’s a double door opening for you,” he’d said.

But it was not until two years later, in June of 2017, that she began to understand what that could mean, a moment that came as she and her husband were trying to buy land for a retirement cabin in northwestern Pennsylvania. They’d just learned that the small piece they wanted was part of a far larger parcel—a former camp for delinquent boys comprising 350 acres of forest rising 2,000 feet high and sloping all the way down to the Allegheny River. As Tami was complaining to herself that she didn’t want a whole mountain, a thought came into her head that seemed so alien, so grandiose, that she was certain it was the voice of God.

“Yes, but I do,” the voice said.

She decided this must be the beginning of her divine assignment. She would use $950,000 of her divorce settlement to buy the mountain. She would advance the Kingdom of God in the most literal of ways, and await further instructions.

What happened next is the story of one woman’s journey into the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country—a movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House, that fueled his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and that is becoming a radicalizing force within the more familiar Christian right.

It is called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a sprawling ecosystem of leaders who call themselves apostles and prophets and claim to receive direct revelations from God. Its congregations can be found in cities and towns across the country—on landscaped campuses, in old supermarkets, in the shells of defunct churches. It has global prayer networks, streaming broadcasts, books, podcasts, apps, social-media influencers, and revival tours. It has academies, including a new one where a fatigues-wearing prophet says he is training “warriors” for spiritual battle against demonic forces, which he and other leaders are identifying as people and groups associated with liberal politics. Its most prominent leaders include a Korean American apostle who spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the January 6 insurrection and a Honduran American apostle whose megachurch was key to Trump’s evangelical outreach. Besides Trump, its political allies include school-board members, county commissioners, judges, and state legislators such as Doug Mastriano, a retired Army intelligence officer whose outsider campaign for Pennsylvania governor last year was widely ridiculed, even as he won the GOP nomination and 42 percent of the general-election vote.

The movement is seeking political power as a means to achieving a more transcendent goal: to bring under biblical authority every sphere of life, including government, schools, and culture itself, establishing not just a Christian nation, as the traditional religious right has advocated, but an actual, earthly Kingdom of God.

For that purpose, the movement has followers, each expected to play their part in a rolling end-times drama, and that is what Tami Barthen, who is 62, was trying to do.

I called her recently and explained that I was in Pennsylvania trying to understand where the movement was headed, and had found her on Facebook, where she follows several prominent prophets. She said that she was willing to meet but that I should first do three things.

One was to go see a film called Jesus Revolution, and this I did that afternoon, the 2 o’clock showing at an AMC Classic outside Harrisburg. As the lights dimmed, scenes of early-1970s California washed over the screen. What followed was the story of a real-life pastor named Chuck Smith, who opened his church to bands of drugged-out hippies who became known as “Jesus freaks,” a transformation depicted in scenes of love-dazed catharsis and sunrise ocean baptisms—young people rejecting relativism for the warm certainty of God’s one truth. The film, a full-on Hollywood production starring Kelsey Grammer and produced by an outfit called Kingdom Story Company, has earned $52 million so far.

The second thing was to visit a church in Harrisburg called Life Center, whose senior pastor had been among the original California Jesus freaks and now held the title of apostle. I arrived at a glass-and-cement former office building for the midweek evening service. In the lobby, screens showed videos of blue ocean waves. The books on display included Now Is the Time: Seven Converging Signs of the Emerging Great Awakening and It’s Our Turn Now: God’s Plan to Restore America Is Within Our Reach. The apostle was out of town, so another pastor showed visitors into the sanctuary, a 1,600-seat auditorium with no images of Jesus, no stained-glass parables, no worn hymnals, no reminders of the 2,000 years of Christian history before this. Instead, six huge screens glowed with images of spinning stars. On a stage, a praise band was blasting emotional, surging songs vaguely reminiscent of Coldplay. Rows of spotlights were shining on people who stood, hands raised, and sang mantra-like choruses about surrender, then listened to a sermon about submitting to God.

The last thing was to attend a touring event called KEY Fellowship, which stands for “Kingdom Empowering You.” So I headed to a small church in State College, Pennsylvania, the 44th city on the tour so far. On a Saturday morning, 100 or so attendees were arriving, a crowd that was mostly white but also Black, Latino, and Korean-American. They all filed through a door marked by a white flag stamped with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven—a Revolutionary War–era banner of the sort that rioters carried into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. “We thank you, Father, that you have chosen us,” said the woman who’d organized the event, explaining that its purpose was to “release spiritual authority” over the region. And then the releasing began. The band. The singing. The shouting: “Lord, have your dominion.” Several men stood and blew shofars, hollowed-out ram’s horns used in traditional Jewish worship, and meant in this context to warn demons and herald the gathering of a modern-day army of God. Out came maracas and tambourines. Out came long wooden staffs that people pounded against the floor. Others waved American flags, Israeli flags, more pine-tree flags. The point, I learned, was to call the Holy Spirit through the prefabricated walls of the church and into the sanctuary, all of this leading up to the moment when a local pastor, a member of the Ojibwe-Cree Nation, came to the stage.

She was there to declare the restoration of the nation’s covenant with Native American people, which, in the movement’s intricate end-times narrative, is a precondition for the establishment of the Kingdom. A sacred drum pounded. “Father, we pray for a holy experiment!” someone shouted. A white man cried. Then people began marching in circles around the room—flags, tambourines, maracas, staffs—as a final song played. “Possess the land,” the chorus went. “We will take it by force. Take it, take it.”

Once I had seen all of this, Tami said I could come.

The view from Tami’s house (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

The road to the mountain runs through the small town of Franklin, an hour or so north of Pittsburgh, then winds uphill and through the woods before branching off to a narrower road marked private. At the entrance is a Mastriano sign, left over from when Tami served as his Venango County coordinator.

“We don’t really do politics,” she was saying, riding onto the property with her husband, Kevin. “But then we heard God say, ‘You need to do this.’”

She had raised and homeschooled three children, been the dutiful wife of a wealthy Pennsylvania entrepreneur who traded metals, but as I came to learn over the next few weeks, so many new things had been happening since she started following the voice of God.

“All this is ours,” Kevin said, passing old cabins, a run-down trailer, and other buildings from the property’s former life.

“And right up here is where it all happened,” Tami said.

They parked and went over to a wooden footbridge, part of the only public path through the property. This is where they’d been walking when Tami had first seen the spot for their retirement cabin, at which point she had looked down and seen three blue interlocking circles stenciled onto the bridge, some sort of graffiti that she took as a sign.

“I said, ‘Kevin, we’re at the point of convergence,’” she recalled.

Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971.

That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in Bolivia, where he had noticed churches growing explosively and where he claimed to have seen signs and wonders, healings and prophecies. A professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Wagner began studying what he believed were similar forces at work in the underground house-church movement in China and certain independent Christian churches in African countries, as well as Pentecostal churches in the U.S. He eventually concluded that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way across the globe—a supernatural force that would erase denominational differences, banish demonic spirits, and restore the offices of the first-century Christian Church as part of a great end-times battle. By the mid-1990s, Wagner and others were describing all of this as the New Apostolic Reformation, detailing the particulars in dozens of books.

The reformation meant recognizing new apostles—men and women believed to have God-given spiritual authority as leaders. It meant modern-day prophets—people believed to be chosen by God to receive revelations through dreams and visions and signs. It meant spiritual warfare, which was not intended to be taken metaphorically, but actually demanded the battling of demons that could possess people and territories and were so real that they could be diagrammed on maps. It meant portals: specific openings where demonic or angelic forces could enter—eyes or mouths, for instance, or geographic locations such as Azusa Street in Los Angeles, scene of a seminal early-20th-century revival. It meant the rise of the Manifest Sons of God, an elite force that would be endowed with supernatural powers for spiritual and perhaps actual warfare. Most significant, the new reformation required not just personal salvation but action to transform all of society. Christians were to reclaim the fallen Earth from Satan and advance the Kingdom of God, and this idea was not metaphorical either. The Kingdom would be a social pyramid, at the top of which was a government of godly leaders dispensing biblical laws and at the bottom of which was the full manifestation of heaven on Earth, a glorious world with no poverty, no racism, no crime, no abortion, no homosexuality, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one God: theirs.

Wagner helped convene the International Coalition of Apostles in 2000. It became the model for what remains the loosely networked structure of a movement that is both decentralized and inherently authoritarian. Apostles would lead their own ministries and churches, sometimes with the counsel of other influential apostles. The movement grew rapidly, creating its own superstars whose power came from the following they cultivated, and who were constantly adding prophecies that sought to explain how current events fit into the great end-times narrative.

Broad-brush terms like Christian nationalism and white evangelicals have tended to obscure these intricacies. NAR’s growth has also gone largely undetected in conventional surveys of American religiosity, with their old categories such as Southern Baptist and Presbyterian. It is most clearly reflected in the rise of nondenominational churches—the only category of churches that is growing in this country—though not fully, because many followers do not attend church. A recent survey by Paul Djupe of Denison University hints at its scope, finding that roughly one-quarter of Americans believe in modern-day prophets and prophecies. Those who have tracked and studied the movement for years often say it is “hiding in plain sight.”

Yet Trump-allied political strategists, such as Roger Stone, understand the power of a movement that offers the GOP a largely untapped well of new voters who are not just old and white and Bible-clinging, but also young and brown, urban and suburban, and primed to hear what the prophets have to say. Recently, Stone told one interviewer that he saw a “demonic portal” swirling over Joe Biden’s White House. “There’s a live cam where you can actually see, in real time,” Stone said. “It’s like a smudge in the sky, almost looks like a cloud that doesn’t move.”

Like Many in the movement, Tami doesn’t use the phrase New Apostolic Reformation, but she first encountered its kind of Christianity in 2015, when a friend gave her a book called Song of Songs: Divine Romance. It is part of a series called The Passion Translation, described by its author, a pastor named Brian Simmons, as a “heart-level” version of the Bible.

At the time, Tami had just extracted herself from what she described as a long and difficult marriage. She had left the traditional evangelical church she’d attended for years, where she said the pastor tended to side with her wealthy husband. She was estranged from some of her family. She was alone and at a vulnerable point in her life when she opened Simmons’s book and began reading passages such as “I am overshadowed by his love, growing in the valley,” and “Let him smother me with kisses—his Spirit-kiss divine,” and “So kind are your caresses, I drink them in like the sweetest wine!”

She had never felt so loved in her life, and she wanted more. The friend who’d given her the book attended Life Center, and Tami signed up for a conference at the church called “Open the Heavens,” where she learned more about prophecy, spiritual warfare, and the idea that she herself had a role to play in advancing the Kingdom of God, if she could discern what it was.

Among the speakers she heard was a rising apostle named Lance Wallnau, a former corporate marketer whose social-media following had grown to 2 million people after he prophesied that Donald Trump was anointed by God. Tami had voted for Trump in 2016, but her interest in Wallnau at this point had more to do with what he’d branded as “the Seven Mountains mandate,” or 7M, the imperative for Christians to build the Kingdom by taking dominion over the seven spheres of society—government, business, education, media, entertainment, family, and religion. Wallnau gives 7M courses and holds 7M conferences, and that is how Tami learned about convergence: the notion that there are moments in life when events come together to reveal one’s Kingdom mission, as Wallnau writes, “like a vortex that sucks into itself uncanny coincidences and ‘divine appointments.’”

That was exactly how Tami felt as she considered buying the mountain. Divine appointments everywhere. At Life Center, a man told her that he’d had a vision of God “pouring onto the mountain” everything she would need. Someone else shared a vision of Tami as a princess riding a horse, which she found ridiculous but also, as a woman who’d always felt under the thumb of some man, compelling. And then she herself heard the voice of God telling her what to do.

“See that?” she said now, back in the car, passing a rusted oil tank where someone had spray-painted what appeared to be a yellow Z.

“I’ll explain that later,” Tami said.

An oil tank on Tami’s property (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

She and Kevin drove to the former camp director’s home where they now lived. Inside was a piano with a shofar and two swords on top, which Tami had bought to remind herself that she is a triumphant warrior for Christ. On a wall hung a portrait she had commissioned, which depicted her clad in medieval armor. An Appeal to Heaven flag was draped over a chair. She opened a sliding-glass door to a deck overlooking the Allegheny River, and explained what happened after she and Kevin had closed on the mountain: how they began to envision building a “Seven Mountains training center.” How that led to someone from Life Center introducing her to an apostle from the nearby city of New Castle, who visited the mountain and wrote Tami a prophecy—that what was happening was “bigger than whatever you could dream or imagine.” How he introduced her to a group of five men who claimed to be connected to anonymous Kingdom funders, and how, not long after that, the group came to the mountain, where Tami, full of nerves, presented a plan that included a lodge, a conference center, an outdoor stage, and some yurts along the river.

“The main thing they asked is whether we were Kingdom,” Tami said.

She told them that she and Kevin were Kingdom all the way; they told her that God wanted her to double the size of the project, and then told her to “add everything you can possibly dream of,” Tami recalled.

So they did—adding plans for an outdoor pistol range, an indoor pistol range, a tactical pistol range, and a rifle range, along with a paintball course, a zip line, and other recreational facilities. They printed brochures for the Allegheny River Retreat Center, which, Tami said, was now a $120 million project.

As they waited and waited for funding, the 2020 presidential election arrived. Tami again voted for Trump, this time in concert with prophets who said he was an instrument of God. She soon began listening to an influential South Carolina apostle named Dutch Sheets, who had for years advocated an end to Church-state separation and co-authored something called the “Watchman Decree,” a kind of pledge of allegiance that included the phrase “we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth.” Sheets was among a core group of apostles and prophets spreading the narrative that the election had been stolen not just from Trump, but from God. He began promoting daily 15-minute YouTube prayers and decrees, which were like commandments to those in the Kingdom. He branded them “Give Him 15,” or GH15, and at their peak, some videos were getting hundreds of thousands of views.

Tami began reading Sheets’s decrees aloud at sunrise every morning, videotaping herself on the deck overlooking the Allegheny River and posting her videos to Facebook.

“Lord, we will not stop praying for the full exposure of voter fraud in the 2020 elections,” she read on November 12.

“We refuse to take our cue or instructions from the media, political parties, or other individuals,” she read on November 17. “We believe you placed President Trump in office, and we believe you promised two terms. We stand on this.”

She started receiving lots of friend requests and was getting recognized around town. She bought an Appeal to Heaven flag, which Sheets had popularized as a symbol of holy revolution. She kept seeing signs that made her wonder whether the mountain might have a specific purpose in what she was coming to see as a global spiritual battle.

One day the sign was a dove flying across the sky as she read the morning decree, and the dove feathers she found on her doorstep after that. Another day, two women who’d seen her videos showed up at her door with bottles of water from Israel, saying they needed to pour it in “strategic” places along her riverfront that God had revealed to them. Another day, Sheets himself announced that he was holding a prayer rally at the headwaters of the Allegheny River—two hours north of Tami—part of a swing-state prophecy tour as Trump challenged election results.

Tami went. And when Sheets and other apostles and prophets urged followers to convene at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, she felt God telling her to go there, too. So she and Kevin boarded a bus that a friend had chartered to Washington, D.C., where she read the daily decree, the Washington Monument in the background, as Kevin held the Appeal to Heaven flag.

“Let the battle for America’s future be turned today, in Jesus’s name,” she said. From what she described as her vantage point outside the Capitol, the big story of the day was not that a violent insurrection had occurred but rather that a movement of God was under way, another Jesus Revolution. “It was one of the best days of my life,” Tami said.

When she got back to the mountain, she kept recording the daily decrees from her deck, in front of a pink flower pot with an American flag.

“We refuse to allow hope deferred and discouragement to cripple the growth of your people in their true identity—the army you intended them to be,” she read after Joe Biden took office.

She flew to Tampa, Florida, for a stop on the “ReAwaken America” tour. She drove to another one a few hours away from her home, then watched others online, events featuring a roster of prophets alongside the headliner, retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, who was now declaring the nation to be in a state of “spiritual war.” She always came home with a cellphone full of new contacts. She began introducing herself as “Tami Barthen, the one who bought a mountain for God.”

Tami and Kevin in a demonstration of prayer (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Left: The flag that Tami hangs on her deck, where she reads prayers from Dutch Sheets at sunrise. Right: Tami shows a visitor the feathers that she found on her doorstep. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Occasionally she said this with a note of sarcasm, because the Kingdom funding had yet to come through, and at times she was not sure where all the signs were ultimately pointing. In those moments, she sought more prophecies.

She messaged a prophet who’d appeared on a Dutch Sheets broadcast, asking him what God might tell him about her project. “This is what I hear the Lord saying,” he wrote back. “God says this came forth from His heart and He has already orchestrated the completion.”

At a Kingdom-building conference in Oregon, she asked Nathan French, a prominent prophet, what God was telling him and recorded the answer on her iPhone: “I feel like that mountain is like Zion, and I feel like God is even saying you can name it Mount Zion … I see the Shekinah coming,” he said, using the Hebrew term for God’s presence, “the shock and awe.”

Tami had rolled her eyes at this grand new prediction, but when she got home, another sign appeared.

“The Z on the oil tank,” she said now, sitting on her porch.

It was spring. She took the Zion prophecy, which she had transcribed and printed on thick paper, and slipped it into a binder, where she archived the most meaningful ones in protective plastic covers. She was trying to figure out what it was all adding up to.

“Why was Dutch Sheets at the headwaters of the Allegheny? Why is there a Z on the oil tank? Why am I meeting all these people? There are all these pieces to the puzzle, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to be yet,” Tami said.

A new piece of the puzzle was that Trump had been indicted in New York on charges of falsifying business records related to payoffs to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Tami had watched coverage on an online show called FlashPoint, which has a cable-news format, except that the news bulletins come from prophets.

“This is not just a battle against us; this is a battle against the purposes of God,” one had said about the indictment, and Tami understood this to be an escalation. A few days later, an apostle named Gary Sorensen called. He was an engineer who had been among the group claiming to represent the Kingdom funders. He was calling to invite Tami on a private spiritual-heritage tour of the Pennsylvania capitol, which was being led by one of the most powerful apostles in the state.

Tami took it as another sign, and she and Kevin drove to Harrisburg.

She was slightly nervous. The apostle was a woman named Abby Abildness, who heads a state prayer network that was part of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, a fixture of the religious right. During the legislative session, she convened weekly prayer meetings with state legislators along with business and religious leaders. She had a ministry called Healing Tree International, which claimed representatives in 115 countries, and focused on what she described as “restoring the God-given destinies of people and nations.” She was just back from Kurdistan, where she had met with a top general in the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military. To Tami, Abildness was like a high-ranking Kingdom diplomat.

“So,” Abildness began. “The tour I do is about William Penn’s vision for what this colony would be. And it starts—if you look up, we have the words he spoke on the rotunda.”

Tami looked up at the gilded words beneath a fresco of ascending angels.

“There may be room there for such a Holy Experiment,” Abildness read. “And my God will make it the seed of a nation.”

“Wow,” Tami said.

They were the kind of words and images found in statehouses all over the country, but which Abildness understood not as historical artifacts but as divine instructions for the here and now.

They headed down a marbled hallway to the governor’s reception room.

“So this is William Penn,” Abildness said, pointing to a panel depicting Penn as a student at Oxford, before he joined the Quaker movement. “He’s sitting in his library and a light comes into the room, and he knows something supernatural is happening.”

They moved on to the Senate chamber.

“Here you are going to see a vision of what society could be if the fullness of what Penn planted came into being—a vision of society where all are recognizing the sovereign God,” Abildness said as they walked inside.

Tami looked around at scenes of kings bowing before Christ, and quotes from the Book of Revelation about mountains.

“You see here, angels are bringing messages of God down to those who would write the laws,” Abildness said.

They moved on to the House chamber.

“This is The Apotheosis,” Abildness said, referring to an epic painting that included a couple of Founding Fathers, and then she pointed to a smaller, adjacent painting, depicting Penn making a peace treaty with the Lenape people.

Tami listened as Abildness explained her interpretation: God had granted Native Americans original spiritual authority over the land; the treaty meant sharing that spiritual authority with Penn; later generations broke the covenant through their genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, and now the covenant needed to be restored in order to fulfill Penn’s original vision for a Holy Experiment. Nothing less than the entire Kingdom of God was riding on Pennsylvania.

Tami listened, thinking of something she’d always wondered about, a sacred Native American site across the river, visible from her deck, known as Indian God Rock. It is a large boulder carved with figures that academic experts believe have religious meaning. As the tour ended, she kept thinking about what it all could mean.

“People I hang with think we’re moving from a church age to a Kingdom age,” Sorensen was saying.

“It’s like, what are all these signs saying?” Tami said.

Left: Tami’s King Solomon sword. Right: A wall in her living room features a painting of her as a spiritual warrior. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Sorensen was involved in various organizations devoted to funding and developing Kingdom projects. There was Reborne Global Trust, and New Kingdom Global, and Abundance Research Institute, among others. He told Tami not to worry about her benefactors coming through. He said $120 million was peanuts to them. He said one funder was an Australian private-wealth manager. He said others were “international benefactors,” as well as “sovereigns,” people he described as “publicly known royal and ruling families of well-known countries.”

“We are looking into establishing a Kingdom treasury,” he said, elaborating that some of the funders were setting up offshore banking accounts. “Outside the central banking system—so we can’t get cut off if we’re not voting right.”

Everything would be coming together soon, he told her.

Driving back to the mountain, Tami and Kevin listened to ElijahStreams, an online platform that launched after the 2020 election. It hosts daily shows from dozens of prominent and up-and-coming prophets, and claims more than 1 million followers.

There were so many apostles and prophets these days—the old standards like Dutch Sheets, and so many younger ones who had podcasts, apps, shows on Rumble. By now Tami followed at least a dozen of them closely, and what she had noticed was how politically involved they had become since the 2020 election and how in recent months, their visions had been getting darker.

Lance Wallnau, whom Tami thought of as fairly moderate, had spoken on Easter Sunday about hearing prophecies of “sudden deaths,” and he himself predicted that “the disciplinary hand of God” would be coming down.

Now, as she and Kevin were winding through the woods, she was listening to a young prophet from Texas named Andrew Whalen, who was being promoted on popular shows lately. He described himself as “close friends” with Dutch Sheets, and on his website, characterized the moment as a “context of war,” when “a new generation is preparing to cross over into ‘lands of inheritance’—places that Christ has given us authority to conquer.”

“I’m boiling on the inside,” he was saying, describing a dream in which he saw the angelic realm working with “earthly governments and militaries.” He continued, “I just say even today, let Operation Fury commence, God. We say let the fury of God’s wrath break forth against every evil work, against systems of demonic and satanic structure.”

Tami listened. And in the coming weeks, she kept listening as Operation Fury became a page on Whalen’s website where people could sign up to help “overthrow jezebel’s influence from our lives.” She kept listening as Trump was indicted a second time, for mishandling classified documents, and a prophet on FlashPoint described the moment as a “battle between good versus evil.”

She sometimes felt afraid when she imagined what was coming.

“It’s going to get bad. It’s going to get worse,” she said. “It’s spiritual warfare, and it’s going to come into the physical. What it’s going to look like? I don’t know. God said to show up at Jericho, and the walls came down. But there are other stories where David killed many people. All I can say is if you believe in God, you’ve got to trust him. If you’re God-fearing, you’ll be protected.”

The morning after her tour in Harrisburg, Tami went out on her deck and recorded the daily decree.

“We use the sword of our mouths just as you instructed,” she read. “The king’s decree and the decrees of the king are hereby law in this land.”

After that, she went to her office.

On her desk were bills she had to pay. On a table were towers of books she’d read about spiritual warfare, demon mapping, the seven mountains. In a file were all the prophecies she’d tried to follow, all the signs.

She thought about Operation Fury, and what Abby Abildness had said about Pennsylvania, and Indian God Rock, and as she began putting all the signs together, she had a thought that filled her with dread.

“I don’t want this job,” she said. “What if I mess up? Why me?”

She pulled out a 259-page book called The Seed of a Nation, about what William Penn envisioned as a “Holy Experiment” in the colony of Pennsylvania, opening it to the last page she had highlighted and underlined.

“See?” she said. “I only got to page 47.”

She thought that maybe the funding was not coming through because she had missed a sign. Maybe she had not been obedient enough. Maybe she, Tami Barthen, was the one delaying the whole Kingdom, and now instead of listening to the voice of God, she was listening to her own voice saying something back: “I’m sorry.”

She thought for a moment about what would happen if she let it all go, if instead of being a Christian warrior on a mountain essential to bringing about the Kingdom of God, she went back to being Tami, who had wanted the peace of a retirement cabin by the river.

Tami in her driveway (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

“I can’t think of a Plan B,” she said, so she reminded herself of how she had gotten here.

She had been living her life, trying to pull herself out of a dark period, when she felt the love of God save her, and then heard the voice of God tell her to buy a mountain. And who was she to refuse the wishes of God?

So she had bought a mountain, 350 acres redeemed for the Kingdom. Now she would wait for word from the prophets. She reminded herself of a favorite Bible verse.

“He says, ‘Occupy until I come,’” Tami said. “Like the Bible says, ‘Thy kingdom come.’”