Tim Alberta | The Atlantic

The Operator

2025-12-03T06:00:00-05:00

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It is a rare thing to see Josh Shapiro sweat. For all the grief the Pennsylvania governor gets for imitating Barack Obama—the staggered cadence, the side-of-the-mouth delivery for effect—their essential shared trait is self-possession. If Pennsylvania’s governor has a superpower, it is an unflappability that allows him to stay cool and composed and to communicate precisely what he wants to communicate.

Most of the time.

I sat down to talk with Shapiro earlier this fall, shortly after he held a tough-on-crime press conference near Philadelphia. By that point, I had interviewed him several times. His comments were always polished and predictable: More than once, I would return to variations of a question I’d already asked, hoping to penetrate his practiced commentary, only to get the same responses, word for word. This was especially the case when I raised the subject of Kamala Harris.

I knew, from speaking with people close to Shapiro, that he’d lost some respect for the former vice president during the 2024 campaign—and not simply because she chose someone else as her running mate. In Shapiro’s view, given the near-existential stakes for both the Democratic Party and American democracy, Harris’s lapses during the election—in particular, ignoring Joe Biden’s obvious decline—were unforgivable. But he had been careful not to say so publicly.

Shapiro knew that I would take one more run at his thoughts about Harris. What he didn’t know was that early copies of her book were then making the rounds among reporters. Having obtained the relevant sections of 107 Days that morning, I asked Shapiro if Harris had given him any heads-up about her book. She had not, he said. Then I told him that Harris had taken some shots at him.

Shapiro furrowed his brow and crossed his arms. “K,” he said.

The man I observed over the next several minutes was unrecognizable. Gone was his equilibrium. He moved between outrage and exasperation as I relayed the excerpts. Harris had accused him, in essence, of measuring the drapes, even inquiring about featuring Pennsylvania artists in the vice-presidential residence; of insisting “that he would want to be in the room for every decision” Harris might make; and, more generally, of hijacking the conversation when she interviewed him for the job, to the point where she reminded him that he would not be co-president.

“She wrote that in her book?” he said in response to the claim concerning the residence’s art. “That’s complete and utter bullshit.”

“I can tell you that her accounts are just blatant lies,” he added.

After reading Harris’s book and talking with people from both camps, I found descriptions of the meeting to be mostly consistent. Shapiro arrived in an edgy mood, chafing at efforts among fellow Democrats to sabotage his tryout. (Shapiro, who is Jewish, was especially irked by anti-Semitic innuendo from the left.) The two skipped past any semblance of small talk and Shapiro proceeded to interview Harris, rather than the other way around. “I did ask a bunch of questions,” Shapiro told me, sounding exasperated. “Wouldn’t you ask questions if someone was talking to you about forming a partnership and working together?”

What seemed to bother Shapiro, more than any one detail, was Harris portraying him in ways consistent with the whispers that had dogged him throughout the vetting process and throughout his career: that he was selfish, petty, and monomaniacally ambitious. Given that they’d known each other a long time—“20 years,” Shapiro said with a groan—I asked whether he felt betrayed.

“I mean, she’s trying to sell books and cover her ass,” Shapiro snapped. The governor stared past me now, shaking his head. As I began to ask a different question, he held up a hand. He looked disgusted. With me? With Harris? No, I began to realize: He was disgusted with himself.

“I shouldn’t say ‘cover her ass.’ I think that’s not appropriate,” Shapiro said. His tone was suddenly collected. “She’s trying to sell books. Period.”

One could understand why Shapiro’s facade had momentarily cracked. In the past year, he has feuded with a president who has unleashed the federal government on personal and political opponents; evacuated his wife and children from a residence set ablaze by a would-be assassin; confronted a surge of anti-Semitism from the far right and far left alike; and agonized over the direction of a Democratic Party that appears impotent in the face of an assault on the nation’s governing institutions.

The 52-year-old Shapiro has kept some distance from the fray. He doesn’t host a podcast or spend much time on cable news. Even as he engages in regular skirmishes with the White House over policy matters, the governor goes out of his way to not antagonize the MAGA base. Shapiro, who is expected to run for president in 2028, believes that his party’s prospects of regaining power depend less on combatting Donald Trump than on courting the president’s supporters. He may be onto something: Shapiro’s approval rating in Pennsylvania—the country’s premier battleground state, where he’s spent roughly half his life on the ballot and never lost a race—hovers around 60 percent.

If he does launch the presidential bid that some friends say, only half-jokingly, he’s been plotting for 30 years, it will rest on two basic theories. The first is that competence will soon be the hottest commodity in politics. The second is that exhaustion, more than anything else, will motivate voters in 2028. To take advantage of that—to chisel away at the MAGA coalition—will require more than generic, Biden-esque pledges to restore civility. Shapiro believes that it will demand humility on the part of Democrats, a sincere accounting of how they contributed to the electorate’s fracturing along lines of class and culture.

He knows this isn’t necessarily a popular thing to say. Shapiro’s methodical career climb has been built, to no small degree, on preparation and risk management. Even those who detest the governor acknowledge that he is a master operator, someone with an uncanny ability to diagnose threats and seize opportunities and say the right thing at the right time. In an era of populist disruption, however, it’s unclear whether Shapiro’s carefully calibrated approach to politics is still an advantage.

For a man with such an established public profile—years as a congressional aide, decades in various elected offices, a network as extensive as that of any Democrat in office today—Shapiro remains something of a mystery, a man whose real views and motives are widely debated but ill-defined. In conversations with dozens of people who know the governor, a certain irony is inescapable. Shapiro seems to believe that he is uniquely equipped to run for president and repair the Democratic Party’s deficit of trust and authenticity. Any such campaign, however, would expose deficits of his own.

Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic

Shapiro visits with day campers at the York State Fair, in York, Pennsylvania, July 2025.

The men leaned over the counters of their vendor booths, craning their necks to follow the sight of a VIP and his security entourage as they marched past and turned a corner. “Who was that?” one of them shouted.

A woman in her 50s, retreating in the direction of her mobile root-beer stand, yelled back: “The governor!”

Ann Phillips appeared irritated, even a bit upset. Most of the people I met at the York State Fair, an annual festival of deep-fried culture in South Central Pennsylvania, were Republicans. Phillips was too—a three-time Trump voter. In fact, Phillips told me, she’s never voted for a Democrat in her life. But she wasn’t upset with Shapiro because of his party identification. She was upset when Shapiro passed by her without stopping. She wanted to shake his hand, take a photograph, and tell the governor that he should run for president in 2028.

“I actually respect him. He’s not full of shit,” Phillips said. “Unlike most Democrats, he seems to actually care about regular people.”

Consider this an early prototype of forthcoming “Elect Shapiro” ads: a hardworking white woman against a backdrop of snow cones and saucer-cup rides, in a county Trump carried by 25 points, praising the Democratic governor for defying the pompous stereotypes of his party.

Since his election in 2022, Shapiro has been hard at work building a policy profile—and a political brand—that revolves around helping the forgotten people of Pennsylvania. One of his first actions was to drop the state’s college-degree requirement for nearly all public-sector jobs. He doubled funding for apprenticeship and vocational-training programs. He expanded grants to help farmers while attempting to streamline regulatory and permitting processes for the agriculture industry. He worked with conservative lawmakers to end Pennsylvania’s centuries-old ban on Sunday hunting.

A native of suburban Philadelphia who listens to hip-hop but also loves NASCAR, Shapiro has identified his party’s blind spots the old-fashioned way. He typically spends three days a week on the road, touring main streets across the commonwealth, listening to what locals have to say. Throughout our conversations, Shapiro spoke repeatedly of the “righteous frustration” he encounters when roaming the state. People in small towns have watched their jobs disappear, their children die of overdoses, their communities fall apart in the space of a single generation. All the while, they saw “the perpetrators,” as Shapiro put it, escape accountability at every turn.

Those people might have expected some empathy from the Democratic Party. What they got instead was a sort of contemptuous neglect—elites lecturing and looking down on them, yes, but mostly just looking the other way. By the time Obama left office, Democrats had accepted as gospel the concept of demography as destiny; party officials saw no worth in catering to non-college-educated white voters, whose share of the electorate was rapidly shrinking.

“Democrats lost ground in some of these communities by failing to show up and failing to treat people with a level of respect that they deserve,” Shapiro told me. The chief beneficiary of this turned out to be Donald Trump.

The governor wanted to make something clear: He dislikes the president. Does not respect him, does not agree with most of his policies. “But I do respect his ability to communicate with these constituencies,” Shapiro said. “Donald Trump has been a once-in-a-generation political figure who’s managed to connect on a deeper cultural level.”

The problem, Shapiro added, is that the connection is built on lies. He noted, for example, how during the 2024 election Trump consistently promised never to touch entitlement programs. “His first bill was to gut Medicaid for 310,000 Pennsylvanians, including 154,000—so half—from communities that Donald Trump won,” Shapiro said. “And that pisses me off—that he showed up in these communities, lied to these good people, and then turned around and completely fucked them over by taking away their health care to pay for a tax cut for people in the highest income brackets who”—he punctuated every word—“Do. Not. Need. Them.”

The governor had grown animated. “That,” he said, “is treating people disrespectfully.”

Of course, disrespect comes in many different forms. Shapiro recently visited Potter County to announce a grant that would help a small general store replace its ancient gas-storage tanks; in a remote area with no other refueling options around, this represented a lifeline for a community that caters to snowmobilers, hunters, fishermen, and ATV riders. When he met with the locals—salt-of-the-earth types, he said, who were surprised that a Democrat would come around—he was struck by how low the bar had been set.

Given these voluminous odes to the good, God-fearing folk of the commonwealth, I asked Shapiro about what Obama had said in 2008—his musing that people in small-town Pennsylvania, pummeled by deindustrialization, “get bitter; they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.” The governor winced as I read the words to him.

“I think his understanding of the challenges in those communities was real. But I think instead of offering his prescription for how he’d make it better, he insulted the very folks who were suffering,” Shapiro said.

He pointed out that Obama’s remarks, and Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” comment, were uttered at high-dollar fundraisers (the former in San Francisco, the latter in New York City). This, he seemed to imply, was the root of the problem: Democrats mock the voters in flyover country for the entertainment of their coastal audiences, then act surprised when those same voters turn on the Democratic Party. In fact, Shapiro seemed to suggest at one point, he was sympathetic to voters who’d done so in 2024.

“We can’t ignore the fact that elections are binary choices. And so you’re asking people, at least in the last case, to choose between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump,” he said. “We can have this kind of theoretical conversation about Trump, but, like, it was always Trump versus somebody.”

When I pointed out that many of the people we’d been discussing were not reluctant Trump voters—that, in fact, most were enthusiastic Trump voters—the governor cut me off.

“They’re also a Shapiro voter.”

He reminded me four times during our conversations that polling showed roughly 30 percent of Trump supporters in Pennsylvania also supported him. Shapiro wanted to make a point: Democrats are wrong to dismiss their grievances with blanket caricatures. “It doesn’t mean that there’s not racism and bigotry and anti-Semitism and hate out there,” he said. “But the vast majority of people that I confront every day are really good people and, at least here in Pennsylvania, are willing to split their tickets and are willing to vote for people that they think are gonna get out there and make their lives better.”

I asked him to explain something: Why have all these decent and honest and kind people pledged their allegiance to a president who is indecent and dishonest and cruel?

“I think,” he said, drawing a long breath, “it is a question that’s still not totally answerable.”

This was a rare admission of uncertainty for a man who’s always seemed to have the answers.

[From the January 2025 issue: George Packer on the Trump reaction and what comes next]

Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic

Shapiro made two shots at a basketball carnival game at the York State Fair, July 2025.

Despite standing 5 foot 8, Shapiro was a big man on campus at Akiba Hebrew Academy: a captain of the basketball team, bellower of Billy Joel songs, charmer of female classmates. (His 11th-grade yearbook includes a photo of Shapiro in a hula skirt, a bra, and Nikes.) Everyone attached to the Jewish private school in suburban Philadelphia—teachers, parents, fellow students—seemed to love Shapiro, the son of a prominent pediatrician.

Shapiro enrolled at the University of Rochester, in New York, with plans to follow his father into medicine and walk onto the school’s Division III basketball team. But both dreams fell apart on the same day: Early in the fall semester, Shapiro flunked a premed exam and was cut from the basketball team. Dejected, he returned to his dorm and ran into a classmate looking for someone to represent their hall in student government. Shapiro made a face at the memory of this conversation. “Like, I don’t know why I’d ever want to do that,” he recalled thinking.

The governor loves to tell this story as a lesson in serendipity—that politics came for him, not the other way around—perhaps to neutralize narratives about his ambition. The reality is more complicated. His mother, a schoolteacher who’d marched for civil rights, had steered him toward activism. Shapiro had applied to live in Tiernan Hall, housing set aside for students interested in service and leadership. As a high schooler, he’d launched a long-shot bid for student-body president that he lost. Now, soon after joining the student government at Rochester, he decided once again to run for president—as a freshman—and wound up winning an upset over multiple upperclassmen.

Shapiro was in a hurry. A search of Rochester’s archives turns up dozens of hits detailing his presence on campus; most notable is an op-ed arguing that peace would “never come” to the Middle East, because Palestinians “are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” (Shapiro has since renounced those sentiments.) But he wasn’t all bombast. Rochester’s magazine, for instance, described him attending a multicultural gathering with other students; amid profound differences over ideology and upbringing, the young Shapiro comes across as charitable and unassuming. “We live in a world where Democratic elites are seen as looking down on everyone,” Ami Eden, a childhood friend of Shapiro’s who today is a journalist in New York City, told me. “And here’s Josh. He’s the exact opposite. He doesn’t come off as thinking he’s smarter than anyone. He doesn’t come off as thinking he’s better than anyone.”

For this, Shapiro credits his devout and unpretentious parents. Raised in an observant Jewish household—Shabbat dinner every Friday, synagogue on Saturday mornings—Shapiro felt a measure of liberation when he moved away. He still kept kosher and hung around the Hillel on campus. Yet he was beginning to think about religion less in terms of observance and more in terms of purpose. In time, he would come to find inspiration in the character of Joshua, who led God’s people into the promised land, demonstrating the patience and faithfulness Shapiro wished to emulate as a leader.

Patience did not come naturally. In 1994, he landed a semester-long congressional internship. According to his then-roommate, Adam Keats, Shapiro wasn’t especially interested in the free happy hours and late-night parties that drew other college kids to Capitol Hill. “He had come to D.C. for a reason,” Keats recalled, “and that was to get a full-time job in Washington.”

Even with the political climate growing hotter—Newt Gingrich’s revolution was under way—Shapiro hit it off with Democrats and Republicans alike, collecting names and phone numbers and favors to call in. After graduation, Shapiro worked briefly in the Israeli embassy’s public-affairs division in D.C., then returned to the Hill full-time. In the fall of 1998, Joe Hoeffel was sitting in a temporary office in Washington when a young man showed up and announced, “I’m Josh Shapiro, and I’d like to be your legislative director.” Hoeffel, who had just been elected to Congress, was taken aback—“Who the hell is this kid?” he recalled thinking—but eventually hired him. Three months later, when Hoeffel decided to replace his chief of staff, he promoted Shapiro to the top job. Nobody he’d consulted had ever heard of a 25-year-old chief of staff, yet nobody questioned the decision.

“He was just a natural,” Hoeffel told me.

The congressman remembered one incident that became office lore: When giving an interview to a small Jewish publication, Shapiro went into such detail about his responsibilities, and about his record delivering for the people of Pennsylvania’s Thirteenth District, that “you would have thought we had a one-person office,” Hoeffel said. The congressman’s other staffers made copies of the article and plastered them all around the office, he said, mostly to tease the young chief of staff but also to deliver a none-too-subtle reminder to Shapiro: Politics is a team sport.

What they didn’t realize was that Shapiro was preparing to go solo.

Michael Bryant / The Philadelphia Inquirer / AP

Shapiro, then a Montgomery County commissioner, greets a voter at a diner while running for Pennsylvania attorney general, April 2016.

Mark Peterson / Redux

Shapiro and former President Barack Obama at a campaign rally, November 2022.

Kyle Grantham / The New York Times / Redux

Shapiro addresses reporters outside his official residence on April 13, 2025, after the mansion was lit on fire by an arsonist.

In 2003, Shapiro and his high-school sweetheart turned wife, Lori, who’d worked in the Clinton administration, moved home to the Philadelphia suburbs. They planned to have children, make private-sector money, and catch their breath. Shapiro, who’d earned a law degree from Georgetown via night school, found work at a big firm. But he barely made it through orientation before he started to grow restless.

So Shapiro set a meeting with Democratic power brokers in Harrisburg. “These were still the days of an old machine, where we dealt with veteran politicians who’d climbed the ladder,” Mike Manzo, who served as chief of staff to Pennsylvania’s House Democratic Caucus, told me. “And here comes this young lawyer from Philly, giving us a granular breakdown of every neighborhood in the district and telling us the people he was going to target door-to-door. It was honestly kind of jarring.”

With his wife’s blessing—Lori is known to be the governor’s political consigliere—the longtime staffer became a candidate. He cashed in on D.C. connections to turn his race for the state assembly into a trendy stop for national Democrats, hosting Howard Dean, Steny Hoyer, and others for campaign events. Still, on the stump, Shapiro was his own man. Yard signs listed no party affiliation. Mailers announced, “My plan is neither Democratic nor Republican—it’s common sense.” Tax cuts and tort reform were pillars of his platform.

Newspapers portrayed the 153rd District race as a bellwether, but in the end, it wasn’t close. Shapiro beat his Republican opponent by nearly 10 points—one of just two Democrats in the state to flip a House seat that cycle—and charged into the assembly with designs on upending the place. That didn’t go over well.

“He didn’t have one true friend in the entire fucking assembly,” Bill DeWeese, the legislature’s top-ranking Democrat at the time, told me. “He was a political athlete of the first magnitude—everyone could see that—and Harrisburg was just a way station for him. He was already on his way to running for bigger and better offices, and people resented it.”

DeWeese acknowledged that he is “not a paragon of objectivity” when it comes to Shapiro. After all, the young lawmaker was initially a protégé and later turned on him, calling for his resignation amid a scandal that ultimately sent DeWeese to prison. Still, DeWeese’s assessment wasn’t altogether different from that of others I spoke with about that period. Colleagues recalled how, after refusing a pay raise that had been passed by the legislature, Shapiro raised prodigious amounts of money while bashing members, including his supposed friends, who’d voted for it. They also pointed out how the first-term lawmaker helped orchestrate a power-sharing agreement that elected a Republican speaker—and won himself the newly created post of deputy speaker.

As a legislator, Shapiro was limited by the immutable—being young, short, and Jewish, not quite a recipe for political stardom in a place like Harrisburg. But he compensated with rare political instincts. As the Pennsylvania Democratic establishment was lining up behind Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary, Shapiro endorsed Obama. A few years later, in 2011, he left the assembly—not for a congressional bid, as many had anticipated, but to run locally, in Montgomery County, for a spot on its three-member board of commissioners.

Joe Hoeffel—Shapiro’s former boss—had become board chair in 2011, and was thrilled when he heard that Shapiro wanted to run. But Shapiro didn’t want to be Hoeffel’s sidekick. The two men sat down several times; Hoeffel hoped they could reach an understanding, but Shapiro wouldn’t budge. He wanted the top of the Democratic ticket and the board chairmanship. He wanted Hoeffel to recognize that, at a certain level, politics is not a team sport.

Hoeffel decided to retire. Shapiro was elected commissioner and took over as chairman. But he was gaining an ugly reputation. “You don’t want to turn your back on him,” Hoeffel told The Philadelphia Inquirer in a 2017 interview. “Loyalty is not his strong suit.”

Hoeffel told me he stands by those comments. But he added an important bit of context: He thinks Shapiro is a good man, and furthermore, he believes Shapiro could make an outstanding president. This might have struck me as incongruous—that one could admire the governor, both personally and professionally, yet not quite trust him—if I hadn’t heard the same thing again and again from other members of his own party.

Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic

Shapiro shakes hands with a member of the Air Force, July 2025.

Shapiro has never been easily pegged on the ideological spectrum. To the extent that he has an organizing philosophy, it’s that government can and should be a tangible force for good in people’s lives. (Hence the gimmicky slogan that has become ubiquitous within his political orbit: “GSD,” for Get Shit Done.) Montgomery County was a testing ground. Under Shapiro’s leadership, the board implemented austerity measures, erasing its budget shortfall while increasing salaries and bolstering pensions for county employees. Party affiliation became an afterthought as Shapiro built alliances and gave appointments to prominent Republicans. The fights Shapiro did pick—defying state law in 2013, for instance, by giving marriage licenses to same-sex couples—were rare. Bruce Castor, a Republican who served eight years on the board, including four alongside Shapiro—and who later led Trump’s defense during his second impeachment trial—told me that “the job of commissioner is a total pain in the ass, and Josh was by far the best person I’ve ever seen do it.”

After four years running the county, Shapiro was getting antsy again, and saw an opening to run for Pennsylvania attorney general. He had no prosecutorial experience but plenty of relationships that helped him collect the cash and endorsements necessary to win the 2016 primary. After beating his GOP opponent by three points in November—tallying more votes in Pennsylvania than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton—Shapiro became the commonwealth’s chief law-enforcement officer.

In two terms, Shapiro fought Trump’s 2017 so-called Muslim travel ban, reached a huge settlement with pharmaceutical companies that had profited from the opioid epidemic, prosecuted a handful of elected officials, and secured guilty pleas for several of the Penn State fraternity members responsible for the hazing death of a pledge.

But the case that brought Shapiro the most recognition was one he inherited. Upon taking office, the new attorney general was told of a secret grand-jury probe already under way. Shapiro decided to press forward. Two and half years later, his office published its findings: More than 1,000 minors had been abused over a period of decades by some 300 priests across Pennsylvania. Shapiro fought to publish a full, unredacted report that named every name, even taking his appeals for transparency to the pope himself, and in the process made enemies of powerful Catholics. But he secured justice for survivors and gained a measure of celebrity along the way. A New York Times headline declared: “Meet Josh Shapiro, the Man Behind the Bombshell Investigation of Clergy Sexual Abuse.”

Shapiro had always looked more like a banker than a politician: glasses with thin wire rims, dark hair parted neatly on one side, tie in a prominent knot. Before long, a makeover was in the works. Slicked-back hair covered an emerging bald spot. He began wearing glasses with thick black frames and navy suits with an open collar, no tie, along with clean white sneakers. The change could be heard as well as seen: Shapiro began playing with intonations and dropping the g from the ends of words—sounding an awful lot like a certain friend of his. (“I just don’t hear it,” Shapiro said of the Obama impersonation that has been the source of much ridicule. “I don’t think I’ve changed my cadence or my rhythm or how I speak.”)

This evolution reflected an apparent reality: Shapiro was on his way. Early in his second term as attorney general, the 2022 Democratic nomination for governor was already his. After running unopposed in the primary—something unheard of in a statewide contest—he got outright lucky in the general election. Republicans chose as their nominee Doug Mastriano, a state senator most famous for his fanatical religious identity (he’d prayed that God would help Republicans “seize the power” ahead of January 6, and launched his campaign for governor to the sound of a shofar blowing) and his association with the anti-Semite Andrew Torba, the founder of the far-right social-media platform Gab. (Mastriano eventually distanced himself from Torba and said that he rejected anti-Semitism.)

As an opening salvo, Shapiro recorded a 60-second biographical ad that showed footage of his family observing Shabbat, citing his obligation to make it home every Friday for dinner with his wife and four children. This struck some allies as an unnecessary risk. One prominent Democrat, a liaison to the campaign from Washington, pleaded with Shapiro’s team not to run the ad. But the candidate felt strongly—due in part, perhaps, to the extremist ideology embodied by his opponent—that a proper introduction to voters must include his Jewish identity.

The fall campaign turned into a drubbing. In a state where the past two presidential races had been decided by a combined total of less than two points, Shapiro beat Mastriano by 15 and helped downballot Democrats recapture the state House for the first time in more than a decade.

Sworn into office as Pennsylvania’s 48th governor in January 2023, Shapiro had reason to feel bullish. The midterms had validated his theory that narratives of bigotry and polarization were overstated. Trumpism had just been routed at the ballot box. The former president was isolated and unpopular. The 2016 election was looking more and more aberrant. A return to relative unity seemed possible, and Shapiro embraced a malice-toward-none approach aimed at healing the body politic.

Instead, the wounds only grew deeper.

[From the February 2025 issue: Stephanie McCrummen on the New Apostolic Reformation’s war on the secular state]

One Friday this past spring, Shapiro and Lori took their kids to visit Ellis Island. They stood on a balcony inside the main building, looking down at where their ancestors had taken their first steps on American soil, the parents explaining how the long journey in steerage had been worth it for two poor Jewish families that dreamed of freedom. It was a poignant moment for the Shapiros. And then the next night, after hosting a Passover seder in Harrisburg, Josh, Lori, and three of their children were nearly murdered in their beds when a man named Cody Balmer broke into the governor’s residence and started lighting Molotov cocktails.

As we spoke in the months that followed, Shapiro admitted that he was still struggling with “emotional challenges” stemming from the incident. He’d been informed that Balmer blamed him for the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. Shapiro also learned that his assailant had wielded a hammer and planned to bludgeon him to death. Nothing—not even the guilty plea that will imprison Balmer for up to 50 years—can eradicate the trauma of that night, or the guilt he’s borne in the aftermath.

“If I don’t run for office, if I don’t get elected governor, they’re not sleeping there that night,” Shapiro said at one point, staring off as he relived the episode. He told me later: “My desire to serve put my kids’ lives at risk. And that’s something that I carry around.”

What he began to realize, as he processed his family’s ordeal, is that it actually makes his outreach to Republicans all the more important. “The fact that people view institutions as incapable or unwilling to solve their problems is leading to hyper-frustration, which then creates anger,” he said. “And that anger forces people oftentimes into dark corners of the internet, where they find others who want to take advantage of their anger and try and convert that anger into acts of violence.” Shapiro believes that politicians have a duty to confront this cycle both by making government responsive to voters’ problems and by pressing for dialogue that can “bring down the temperature.”

The first part really does come naturally to Shapiro. Rather than pursuing splashy, base-pleasing initiatives, he has kept a workmanlike focus on issues such as permitting reform and housing affordability. Infrastructure is an obsession: He’d been on the job five months when, in June 2023, an Interstate 95 overpass in Philadelphia collapsed. The governor issued a disaster declaration, set up a 24/7 livestream of the reconstruction project, and reopened the highway with temporary lanes just 12 days after the collapse.

He had hoped that getting beyond the partisan divide would come just as easily. Unlike Obama, who despised the dirty work of politics—“Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?” he famously joked—Shapiro loves the game. He has made a career of forging compromise. He genuinely enjoys the strategic challenge of governing a state with a divided legislature. He wants to mix it up with Republicans. It’s just become harder to find willing partners.

The search has led him to unexpected places. In July, after ending the Sunday-hunting ban, Shapiro found himself on the phone with Ted Nugent, the right-wing ’70s rock star. A Republican lawmaker had connected them after Nugent, who discovered his love of hunting in Pennsylvania, expressed a strange new respect for the governor. That phone call led to Shapiro appearing on an episode of Nugent’s podcast Spirit Campfire—one of the strangest, most conspiracy-laden corners of the MAGA ecosystem—during which Nugent, whose anti-Semitic outbursts are well documented, called Shapiro “my blood brother.”

All of this was a bit mystifying to some Shapiro allies. And it came at a time when, in our own conversations, the governor was warning his fellow Democrats about the dangers of pandering. When I’d asked about two likely 2028 contenders sharing with right-wing influencers their newfound objections to biological men competing in women’s sports—Gavin Newsom to Charlie Kirk and Rahm Emanuel to Megyn Kelly—Shapiro rolled his eyes. “I think you gotta go meet people where they are. I’ve been very clear with that. I’ll go on anything; I’ll talk to anybody. But you also have to, like, remain true to yourself,” the governor said. “Just ’cause you go on a conservative podcast doesn’t mean that you can cosplay a conservative politician. You gotta remain true to your values.”

What are Shapiro’s values when it comes to, say, transgender kids playing sports?

He shrugged off the question, saying his answer had always been consistent. Pennsylvania has a governing body that oversees debates related to scholastic sports, Shapiro said, and the experts of that body, not politicians, are the ones qualified to make these calls. But when I pressed—asking if his personal view was different from his political view—Shapiro said that it was. “Look, I think it’s a tough deal being born into the wrong body. And I don’t think these kids deserve to be persecuted and bullied by the president of the United States. I also don’t think they deserve an unfair advantage on the playing field.”

That’s Shapiro: the consensus-seeker, a self-described “pragmatic progressive” always in search of positions that won’t antagonize either side. The problem with this approach is that it often ends up antagonizing both sides. A longtime champion of organized labor, Shapiro stunned allies in the teachers’ unions by campaigning on school choice in 2022. They hoped it was mere rhetoric. The following year, however, he worked with Republicans to introduce a $100 million voucher initiative in the state budget. Facing wrath from the left, Shapiro assured Republicans that he wouldn’t fold. But he quickly did, using a line-item veto to kill the voucher program. Both Republicans and Democrats felt betrayed.

Another example is the Israeli response to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Progressives accuse Shapiro of censoring anti-Israel activists and academics at the University of Pennsylvania and of expanding the definition of anti-Semitism to include certain rhetoric aimed at delegitimizing the state of Israel. Conservatives, meanwhile, recoil at his criticism of the Israeli government, particularly of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Shapiro has called “one of the worst leaders of all time.”

This presents a conundrum should Shapiro seek the presidency. He has become synonymous with his faith in ways that other Jewish Democrats, such as former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, are not. He lived in Israel for a semester in high school; he loves the country and embraces the term Zionist. (In her book, Harris helpfully reminded readers that left-wing activists dubbed him “Genocide Josh” last year.) Progressives would use all of this against him in a primary, inviting a response from Shapiro that, if not perfectly calibrated, could damage his prospects in a general election.

Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic congressman who gave Shapiro one of his first jobs in politics, crossed over in 2024 and endorsed Trump. When campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, Deutsch told me, he was struck by Shapiro’s popularity among voters there. But he also wondered how much of that owed to a strategic ambiguity—about foreign policy and everything else—that is not sustainable.

“I like Josh very much, and if he runs for president one day, I want to be able to support him,” Deutsch said. “But first, I need to know what he truly believes.”

The worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania politics is that the governor is disliked—in certain cases, loathed—by some of his fellow Democrats. The causes vary: policy disputes, personality clashes, accusations of meddling and sabotaging and ceaseless self-promoting. When Shapiro was being vetted for vice president in the summer of 2024, Erin McClelland, whom Democrats had recently nominated for Pennsylvania treasurer, stunned the state party by suggesting on social media that Shapiro would “undermine” Harris—adding other insults for good measure. In his recent memoir, Senator John Fetterman, whose rise in Pennsylvania has run parallel to the governor’s, recounted their history of feuding while serving together on the state’s Board of Pardons. At one point, when Shapiro opposed clemency in a particular case—a decision Fetterman chalked up to “optics” and political calculation—he called Shapiro “a fucking asshole” on a hot microphone. Fetterman said the two men no longer speak.

The private commentary from Democrats is worse. In 30 years spent climbing the party ladder, Shapiro has acquired a long list of enemies. If he wasn’t already aware, the governor found out the hard way in 2024, when a not-small and not-subtle chorus of Democrats made their misgivings about him known to Harris and her team. (A Pennsylvania lawmaker told me that, at one point, a member of Harris’s vetting operation called him to say that in their decades working in party politics, they had never witnessed so many Democrats turning on one of their own.) If Shapiro chooses to run for president in 2028, Democrats in the state told me, the backlash will be far more visible.

“Right now, Shapiro is insulated because he’s an incumbent and Democrats need him to hold the line,” Annie Wu Henry, a Philadelphia-based political strategist who has worked to elect Fetterman and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, told me. But come 2028, she warned, “a lot of the decisions he’s made are the kinds of things that people will raise when they don’t feel obligated to stay quiet anymore.”

Shapiro hasn’t had a real race in nearly a decade. That could change next year, when he is expected to face off in his reelection bid against Stacy Garrity, a decorated combat veteran who won statewide election twice as treasurer. The national GOP has already telegraphed its intentions to flood Garrity’s campaign with money and manpower, knowing the downballot implications of toppling Shapiro.

Republicans will have no shortage of attack-ad material. Shapiro at one point opposed Japan’s acquisition of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel—infuriating Republicans and industry leaders, who saw it as a lifeline for thousands of workers—but wound up celebrating the sale after Trump announced it. He has also taken tortured stances on energy issues, inviting scorn from all angles. Meanwhile, for a third consecutive year, Shapiro and state lawmakers failed to reach a budget agreement by the statutory deadline—a source of great annoyance for Shapiro insofar as it undercuts his “Get Shit Done” mantra. “Look, I can’t construct the budget, write the budget, vote on the budget, and sign the budget,” the governor told me in September. “At some point, lawmakers need to come to work.”

But the biggest liability for Shapiro might be a former associate named Mike Vereb.

The two men became friends when Vereb, a former Montgomery County cop, was elected as a Republican to the statehouse one cycle after Shapiro. Vereb served as chair of the Montgomery County GOP when Shapiro was head commissioner, and they continued to work together on various initiatives. When Shapiro was elected attorney general, he created a new, six-figure position in his office—director of government affairs—and appointed Vereb. Six years later, when Shapiro became governor, he picked Vereb as his secretary of legislative affairs, one of the most important roles in his new administration.

Vereb lasted less than a year. In September 2023, a press release from Shapiro’s office announced that he was stepping down. No explanation was given, but the wording was warm: “We wish Mike all the best and we’re grateful for his service.”

What the statement didn’t say: Shapiro’s top staffers had learned, six months earlier, of sexual-harassment allegations against Vereb by one of his subordinates. An investigation was launched, and Shapiro’s office eventually agreed to pay $295,000 to the woman who’d brought the complaint. She also signed a nondisclosure agreement. Vereb resigned three weeks later, shortly after details of the incident were leaked to the press. A local news outlet, Broad + Liberty, unearthed perhaps the most troubling detail of all: The complainant’s email account had been wiped from the state servers, raising questions about who deleted the woman’s emails and why.

In August 2024, the governor’s spokesperson Manuel Bonder told The New York Times that Shapiro “was not aware of the complaint or investigation until months after the complaint was filed.” This seems far-fetched, given that the governor is a workaholic—always attached to his phone, intimately engaged with matters of policy and messaging and personnel. Shapiro told me that his chief of staff and general counsel had reviewed the complaint; he also said that he’d been excluded from the process, by design, due to confidentiality policies.

But his opponents aren’t buying it. “You’re telling me that everybody close to the governor knew about this—his entire senior staff, including Mike himself—and nobody ever told him?” says Republican State Representative Abby Major, whom the complainant first approached with the allegation. “The governor knew. Everyone knows that he knew. It just hasn’t been proven yet.”

Shapiro also claimed ignorance when it comes to Vereb’s character. Several people I spoke with, including the governor’s allies, confirmed that Vereb was known as someone who drank heavily and behaved inappropriately around women. (Vereb did not respond to requests for comment.) Given all of this, I asked Shapiro about Vereb’s reputation.

“I didn’t—” the governor began, then paused. “That’s not what I saw.”

So, I asked, the harassment allegation seemed out of character for Vereb?

“It caught me unaware,” he said.

Even though they were buddies?

“I mean, we served together in the House,” Shapiro said, shrugging. He went on to give a cursory review of Vereb’s employment—saying he’d forgotten the exact title Vereb held in the attorney general’s office—and then praised his job performance.

Garrity has already signaled her intention to make this episode a centerpiece of her campaign. That doesn’t mean Shapiro will lose. But it does suggest that, even if he wins, the figure who emerges on the other side could bear little resemblance to the indomitable politician whose reputation rests on perceptions of him as decent and upright.

Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic

The back of one of Shapiro’s T-shirts. Shapiro is the 48th governor of Pennsylvania.

One summer afternoon, as we sat in Shapiro’s office discussing sports and religion and politics, he shared a recent bit of self-discovery.

“Lori and I were talking about this the other day,” he began. “In the last, you know, three, four, five, six years, something like that—I can’t remember, like, a precise beginning point—we’ve attended services far less than at any other point in our lives.”

Shapiro paused, measuring his words. “The sort of ritualistic practices became less of a focus of the way we practice our faith—with the exception, of course, of Friday nights. That’s still a sacrosanct moment for our family,” he said.

He went on: “I feel more connected to my faith today than at any other time in my life. Truly. And I probably pray more now than at any other time in my life. But my connection to an institution of prayer, or a sort of formal structure of that prayer, has dramatically decreased.”

I had noticed, both in our conversations and while watching him from afar, how he preferred to speak in the abstract—using terms such as faith, spirituality, prayer—rather than articulating a specific worldview as it pertains to Judaism.

When I asked whether a Jewish person can get elected president of the United States, he acknowledged that “there aren’t a whole lot of folks who pray like me” in certain communities he’s visited. Still, he said, “I have found that by living openly and proudly with my faith that it’s brought me closer to the people of Pennsylvania. And I think the people of Pennsylvania are pretty indicative of where large swaths of the American people are.”

The Lord works in mysterious ways, I joked to Shapiro at one point. There was a time when the two things he wanted most were to make the Rochester basketball team and to practice medicine; similarly, there was a moment in 2024, people who know the governor say, when he very much wanted to become Kamala Harris’s running mate. Shapiro won’t acknowledge as much today. “This was not getting cut from the basketball team,” he said, when I asked about getting passed over in favor of Tim Walz. I thought he was kidding. He assured me that he wasn’t—that on the scale of life’s disappointments, this one barely registered. Shapiro was not going to cede control of his own neatly packaged narrative.

But in retrospect, Harris snubbing him looks almost like divine intervention. Not only did Shapiro avoid what surely would have been a career-hobbling defeat; he also now stands to benefit, maybe more than any other Democrat, from the electorate’s rejection of the excesses of the left. Maybe the biggest blessing of all: Should he run in 2028, Shapiro will be campaigning in the first election of the post-Trump era—a time when, if his theory proves right, voters will be desperate for a reprieve from the delirium of recent years.

“What this country is gonna need is someone who can actually heal and unify, and someone who can solve problems and get stuff done,” Shapiro said. “I think what Democrats need to do is focus not so much on winning litmus tests but on winning elections. And I know how to win elections here in one of the toughest states in the country.”

Every word is smooth and rehearsed, the raw material of a stump speech coming together. Shapiro looks and sounds ready for what comes next. He speaks about values as if they are shared, truths as if they are settled. He claims to see a cohesion and hear a harmony that other politicians are ignoring. He insists that dialogue—earnest, sustained conversation with the very people from whom we’re most alienated—is the cure for our national sickness.

In short, Shapiro seems to be centering his presidential hopes on a particular sort of stubbornness: He refuses to admit that our politics have changed in ways that might just render his approach obsolete.

Maybe he will be the one to break the spell and help the country find its way back. If not, there will be an element of tragedy. Shapiro has always been a talented enigma, his bright prospects shadowed by questions about motives and intentions and core beliefs. In the end, it may be his deepest conviction—the insistence that America is, in fact, better than this—that proves his undoing.

The Advice Elissa Slotkin Didn’t Take

2025-03-05T18:43:53-05:00

Right around the time that Donald Trump was arriving at the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress—the longest such speech, it would turn out, in the history of the presidency—Elissa Slotkin, the newly elected Michigan senator tasked with delivering the Democratic Party’s rebuttal, was telling me all the things she wouldn’t be talking about.

“You’ve gotta say this! You’ve gotta say that!” Slotkin said, mimicking the outside voices that began bombarding her office moments after her selection was announced last week. “I’m not gonna make my speech a Christmas tree of every single issue of the Democratic Party,” the senator added, shaking her head, “because that’s what helped get us in this position in the first place.”

I have known Slotkin since 2018, when she first ran for Congress as an ex-CIA officer attempting to flip a safe Republican seat in southeast Michigan. Having covered her rise in the years since—including embedding with her operation during the 2020 campaign—I knew that she possessed fundamental, long-festering concerns about the Democratic Party’s brand. Slotkin feared that, to the extent that Democrats stood for anything in the eyes of the electorate, it was a blur of abstract, ideologically charged activism that was hopelessly detached from kitchen-table concerns.

Last November, even as she won her own race for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Slotkin’s worst-case scenario came to pass. Trump reclaimed the White House—this time with wholly subservient Republican majorities in Congress—and Democrats were heading deep into a cold, dark political wilderness. A fight over the future of the party was imminent; when Slotkin, barely six weeks on the job, was chosen to deliver the Democratic response to Trump’s prime-time address, it seemed likely that the first shots would soon be fired. This is how I came to be chatting with Slotkin yesterday, in the hours before the biggest moment of her political career.

A week earlier, when she was summoned to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office, Slotkin wondered whether she was in trouble. She is one of several freshmen in the Democratic caucus who came over from the House, where intra-party politics are a comparative blood sport, and she thought maybe she’d already ruffled some feathers. If she had, Schumer approved: He wanted Slotkin to speak for the party in prime time. She recalls feeling stunned, then honored, and finally somewhat mortified. “It’s typically thought of,” she told me, “as a cursed speech.” Slotkin asked for the day to think it over before ultimately accepting Schumer’s offer.

Escaping quickly thereafter to her family’s farm in Holly, Michigan, the senator holed up with a few trusted staffers to begin preparations. Two decisions needed to be made: substance and setting. Slotkin had no shortage of metaphor-rich locations from which she could stage the event: her farm, representing everyman roots; nearby Detroit, with its diversity and manufacturing iconography; the Canadian border, to underscore the chaos being unleashed by Trump’s new tariffs. But the senator never truly entertained any of those possibilities. To her, the questions of substance and setting were one and the same. Slotkin wanted to showcase a message that was built to do one thing—win tough elections—and that meant going to a place where she’d done just that.

Driving the main drag of Wyandotte, Michigan (population: 24,057), yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the bait shops and dive bars and white dudes with tattoos on their neck. This place would appear, to the typical Democratic consultant parachuting into its downtown, like a lost cause. One of several manufacturing villages clustered along the Detroit River just south of the city, Wyandotte is the kind of place—working class, culturally conservative, racially homogenous—that has turned new shades of red in the Trump era. And yet, this past November, both Trump and Slotkin won here: Each of the candidates carried seven of the city’s 10 precincts, a rare example of ticket splitting in one of the nation’s premier battleground states.

Slotkin’s formula has never been a secret. Her campaign for Senate last year—essentially a scaled-up version of her three heavily contested and tactically celebrated campaigns for the House—was built around one organizing theme: the middle class. Everything she talks about, be it health-care costs or the January 6 insurrection, comes back to the economic security of everyday Americans. Slotkin argues that the surest way to heal the country—to defuse identitarian struggles, pacify the culture wars, uncoil our hypertense politics—is by restoring the confidence of working families. When people feel assured of their financial welfare and of their children’s future, she insists, they become far less receptive to the type of strongman demagoguery that thrives on scapegoats and feasts on anxiety.

[Anne Applebaum: The Democrats’ patriotic vanguard]

This approach sets Slotkin apart from many of her fellow Democrats, though the difference is better measured by degree than kind. She is quite familiar—as a woman, as a Jew, as the daughter of a woman who came out late in life as a lesbian—with the plight of certain constituencies within her party’s coalition. It’s simply a matter of emphasis: Slotkin sees electoral success as the path to addressing America’s injustices, not the other way around.

This is what brought her to a sleepy event space in Wyandotte (the owners, fearing political retaliation, requested that I not reveal the name of the business). It’s also what brought Slotkin to reject all of the suggestions she received about her speech: that she should use it to take up the cause of USAID workers, of undocumented immigrants, of the transgender community, of the environment, of the Education Department, and so on. The problem isn’t with any of these particular causes, she said; the problem is that everyone seemed focused more on the people she might name in her remarks and less on the people who would be at home listening to them.

“There are a lot of people, including in this town, who will never scream on the internet, who will never go to a rally, who will never get involved in partisan politics, but just want their government to run,” Slotkin said. “I’m speaking to them—not to just the hardcore base of the party. And if they wanted someone to speak to the hardcore base of the party, they picked the wrong gal.”

There would be no performative shout-outs, no box-checking patronage. As the envoy for a party that has long operated as a syndicate of identity-based advocacy groups, Slotkin wanted to try something different. Charged with countering 100 minutes of Trump’s trademark fanfaronade, the senator aimed to use the fewest words possible to speak to the largest number of Americans she could. Slotkin would talk, for just 10 minutes, about bringing prices down, holding American values up, and remaining civically engaged.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats’ disjointed rebellion]

None of this would seem a revolutionary approach to rhetoric. Still, it was fraught with risk all the same: Democrats “have been on their heels since the election,” Slotkin told me, and the party faithful have been agitating since January 20 for someone, anyone, to stand up to Trump. The announcement of Slotkin had already been met with grumbling from progressives online; anything short of oratorical firebolts would confirm the complacent, feckless approach of the D.C. governing class.

Slotkin viewed the stakes somewhat differently: This speech could, at least symbolically, commence a new chapter of Democratic Party opposition to a president whose success is inextricable from the tone-deaf ineptitude of Democratic Party opposition. If her team’s resistance to Trump’s first term was marked by hysteria and hashtags—all the land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives—Slotkin saw last night the opportunity to set a different tone.

Naturally, not everyone was thrilled with what they heard. “Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, capturing some of the criticism online. “Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party, because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.”

[Tom Nichols: Democrats are acting too normal]

I suspect that Slotkin might cringe at being lumped in with “Democrats in general.” In truth, I’ve noticed a certain unease she feels with her partisan identity. She struggles to mask her contempt for far-left organizations; she has little patience for colleagues who, she once told me, run Very Online campaigns in safely blue districts that blind them to the reality of what it takes to earn a ticket split from Republicans.

Watching yesterday evening as she rehearsed in front of staffers, I noticed that only once did she identify herself as a Democrat—in the final line of the speech. As we spoke a few minutes later, in a cramped corridor just beyond the set, I asked whether that was intentional.

“I think, at least in this part of the world, there’s real skepticism about Democrats. That they’re weak—” she paused, perhaps noticing her usage of the third-person plural.

Slotkin continued: “That we’re too careful … That we’re …” She trailed off.

“Weird?” I asked.

“Weird,” Slotkin confirmed. She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m just trying to be the opposite of that. You know, my campaign motto was ‘Team Normal.’ And I think that’s still what I’m trying to do. And I think that that represents a bigger part of the country than people actually know.”

The president’s speech would not begin for nearly an hour, but already I could detect a certain angst in Slotkin’s voice. It had nothing to do with her own speech; she had run through it half a dozen times that day, pausing and tinkering and restarting until she knew that it was fully cooked. Instead, like a family member preemptively contrite for what their relatives might say or do at the Thanksgiving table, Slotkin betrayed an apprehension about how her fellow Democrats might respond to Trump.

As it turned out, she was right to worry. Between all the awkward and impotent demonstrations—Representative Al Green of Texas angrily waving his cane at the president; some pink-clad lawmakers protesting silently with popsicle-stick signs, others staging a disordered walkout during the speech—verdicts were rendered about the party’s pitiable state before its messenger could even say her piece.

Not that Slotkin paid that verdict much mind. After her speech, the senator and her team were headed down the street to a Teamster bar, and Slotkin told me the highest praise they hoped to hear from the owner and his patrons was: “That sounded pretty normal.”

Perceptions of her party were never going to shift in one night. Slotkin came into yesterday accepting, if not explicitly addressing, the realities of the brutal two-front war in which she is now a high-profile combatant: opposing Trump’s executive and legislative blitzkrieg while simultaneously battling with other Democrats who have their own visions for returning the party to power.

Slotkin insists that she isn’t “one of the 100 people” preparing to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2028. She was chosen to speak last night for a more compelling reason: She wins, time after time, in places where other members of her party simply cannot. If they want to model her success at the ballot box, Slotkin told me, they should stop ignoring half the country.

“It doesn’t win elections to just speak to the base of the party,” Slotkin said. “If it did, Kamala Harris would be president.”

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign

2024-11-02T08:15:00-04:00

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At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

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Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.

“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”

Trump never did deploy the nickname against Biden in public. Yet the restiveness he felt during that stretch of the race foretold a dramatic shift in the tone and tenor of his campaign. Within weeks, Trump would survive an assassination attempt, Biden would abandon his candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris would replace him atop the Democratic ticket, and polls would show an election that once appeared finished suddenly reverting to coin-flip status. All the while, Trump became more agitated with what he saw as the trust-the-plan, run-out-the-clock strategy of his campaign—and more convinced that this cautious approach was going to cost him a second term.

[Read: This is exactly what the Trump team feared]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

Chris LaCivita, who co-manages Trump’s campaign with Susie Wiles, at an event in Phoenix (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Trump decided it was time to take matters into his own hands.

For the first 10 days following Biden’s departure from the race, Trump had listened dutifully as his campaign co-managers—a pair of longtime GOP consultants named Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita—explained that the fundamentals of their strategy remained solid. Nothing dramatic needed to change with Harris taking over the ticket, they told Trump, because she was inheriting the vulnerabilities they had exploited so successfully against Biden. They argued that whatever burst of money and enthusiasm had accompanied her entry into the race would prove short-lived—and warned him against overreacting. Staying the course, they told Trump, was the surest recipe for electoral success.

[Read: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

He went along with their plan—for a while. But every hour his campaign spent attacking Harris as if she were a credible opponent—rather than bludgeoning her as the airheaded, unqualified, empty pantsuit Trump was sure she was—gnawed at the former president. Finally, he ran out of patience. On July 31, during an onstage interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump publicly unloaded the sort of race-baiting barbs that his aides had, up until that point, succeeded in containing to his private diatribes.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump told the journalists onstage, eliciting gasps from the audience. “I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

In the days after his NABJ appearance—as staffers scrambled to satisfy their boss’s appetite for pugilism without indulging his racist and misogynistic impulses—Trump began to lose confidence in his team. He had long dismissed the warnings from certain friends, such as his former acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, that Wiles and LaCivita weren’t up to the job. But now he had reason to wonder. With Harris climbing rapidly in the polls and his own favorability numbers slipping, Trump was pondering, for the first time, a shake-up of his team. (Cheung said Trump never considered a change to his campaign leadership.)

In early August, Trump started courting two of his longtime allies and former campaign managers from 2016, Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, discussing what it might look like if they rejoined his political operation in a formal capacity. Trump told Lewandowski—who promptly agreed to come aboard—that he missed the “fun,” freewheeling nature of that first run for the White House. He told Conway, meanwhile, that he worried he was being overly “managed” by his current team.

Trump’s conversations with Conway troubled Wiles and LaCivita. They knew that she and Trump were talking more and more frequently; they also knew she loved to take credit for electing him in 2016, and wouldn’t be eager to share accolades with her successors. Conway’s back-channeled criticisms of the 2024 campaign had been subtle but pointed; in an effort to placate her, LaCivita increased her monthly retainer at the Republican National Committee from $20,000 a month to $30,000. But in private conversations, Conway continued to point out the campaign’s shortcomings—especially, in her view, the mistaken selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. When Wiles and LaCivita met Trump at a fundraiser in the Hamptons the evening of August 2—having been tipped off that their boss just spent the day talking strategy with Conway at his Bedminster club in New Jersey—the campaign’s top advisers fretted that their days running the show might be numbered. (As The New York Times was reporting on Conway’s visit to Bedminster, Trump called reporter Maggie Haberman and angrily denied that changes were afoot, saying he was “thrilled” with Wiles and LaCivita.)

In truth, the real threat was Lewandowski.

A tough-talking operative who had famously accosted a female reporter in 2016 and later allegedly made unwanted sexual advances toward a Republican donor’s wife, Lewandowski had promised Trump a return to the “killer” vibes of 2016. But the details of his new role were left open to interpretation. Lewandowski believed—and told anyone who would listen—that he would outrank the existing campaign leadership. Trump himself, meanwhile, assured Wiles and LaCivita that Lewandowski would be a utility man, serving as a key surrogate while helping organize election-security efforts and field operations in swing states.

The honeymoon period was nonexistent. Before Lewandowski worked a single day on behalf of the campaign, he complained to friends that Wiles and LaCivita had leaked the news of his hiring in an unflattering light that downplayed his role—and timed it to coincide with when he was traveling and off the grid, unable to speak for himself.

Determined to assert himself, Lewandowski arrived at Palm Beach headquarters in mid-August with designs on running the place. Wiles accompanies Trump nearly everywhere on the trail, and LaCivita, when not joining them, often works from his home in Virginia, leaving Lewandowski with a free hand in Florida. He began taking aside junior staffers and department heads alike, one at a time, informing them that he spoke for Trump himself. He made it known that he would be in charge of all spending, and that he needed people to tell him what wasn’t working so he could fix it. Meanwhile, he began calling the campaign’s key operatives in the battleground states, probing for weaknesses in Trump’s ground game and assuring them that a strategy shift was in the works.

Even as colleagues grew tired of hearing Lewandowski describe himself as the former president’s personal proxy, they realized he wasn’t wrong. His arrival coincided with a marked shift in Trump’s mood and behavior. Gone, suddenly, was the candidate of 2024, who despite all the inevitable outbursts was at least receptive to direction and aware of consequences; in his place, as the summer progressed, was the alter ego of 2016, the candidate who did and said whatever he wanted and ignored anyone who sought to rein him in.

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the former president shared a social-media post suggesting that Harris had performed oral sex in exchange for career advancement. He denigrated the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for military personnel, as less impressive than the civilian Medal of Freedom. He accused Harris of leading a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president of the United States.” He called into Fox News’s coverage of the convention and rambled so incoherently that the anchors cut his line 10 minutes into the interview. (Trump promptly dialed Newsmax to continue talking.) At a rally in North Carolina, after polling the audience about whether he should “get personal” with his attacks on Harris—the crowd responding rowdily to encourage his invective—Trump mused about firing his campaign advisers.

Around that time, Trump was asked by reporters about the tone of his candidacy. “I think I’m doing a very calm campaign,” he replied. “I have to do it my way.”

Kellyanne Conway at the Republic National Convention in July (Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic)

As Trump was settling on Vance as his vice-presidential pick, one of the arguments he found most persuasive centered on an injection of youthful verve: The freshman senator, then just 39 years old, could complement a running mate four decades his elder with a style and media savvy that broadened the campaign’s appeal. With that promise, however, came a certain peril. Vance maintained an entourage of Very Online influencers who had little experience winning campaigns but lots of owned libs in their social-media mentions. Now some of those right-wing agitators would be joining an operation that was already struggling to keep its principal on message.

Vance’s first two months on the ticket were largely uneventful. His awkward, halting appearances fueled a sense of buyer’s remorse among some Trump confidants, but he made no mistakes of any real consequence. (The talk of “childless cat ladies” preceded his appointment to the GOP ticket, as did his remarks that he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”) And then came September 9. It was one day before Trump would meet Harris in Philadelphia for their first and only debate, and Vance, according to people familiar with the situation, was feeling punchy. Over the past several days, the young senator had marinated in right-wing agitprop stemming from Springfield, Ohio, where it was rumored that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets. When Vance’s allies on the campaign learned that he’d already spoken out about related issues in Springfield—how the influx of thousands of Haitian migrants who came legally to fill jobs had stressed the city—they urged him to seize on this conspiracist catnip and turn it into a crusade for the Trump campaign.

One staffer in particular—a young activist named Alex Bruesewitz—helped convince Vance and his team that this was an opportunity to put his stamp on the campaign. Vance agreed. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” the senator posted on X, catching the Trump campaign’s leaders entirely off guard. Figuring there was no use in half measures, Bruesewitz led Vance’s minions in blasting the social-media post around their networks and urging officials on other GOP campaigns, as well as at the Republican National Committee, to join Vance’s assault on the migrant community of Springfield. (Bruesewitz did not respond to a request for comment about this story.)

Most Republicans refused to go along. But Trump himself found the shtick irresistible. Even as he was sequestered in debate prep, word reached him that Vance had amplified the sensational claims about Springfield. The former president’s advisers were bewildered by Vance’s post. Though they went out of their way to avoid any talk of Springfield for the duration of the debate prep, there was an ominous feeling that Trump wouldn’t be able to help himself.

Yet somehow, by the time Trump charged ahead onstage the following night—“They’re eating the dogs; the people that came in, they’re eating the cats”—his campaign was facing a more serious crisis.

Several days earlier, Trump had fielded a phone call from one of his superfans: Laura Loomer. A right-wing agitator best known for racist and conspiracist bombast—she has celebrated the deaths of migrants and called school shootings fake events put on by crisis actors—Loomer had remained one of Trump’s most loyal and vocal supporters even in the darkest moments of his post–January 6 exile at Mar-a-Lago. That loyalty gave her a direct line to the former president. After she had joined the candidate aboard his plane during crucial trips to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the year, campaign officials discussed ways to sideline Loomer without causing a scene. They neutralized a volatile situation at the convention this summer, for example, by providing Loomer with a front-row seat for Trump’s acceptance speech—putting her in close physical proximity to her idol while keeping her far from the VIP area that cameras would be shooting live.

But now, in the first week of September, Loomer was getting antsy. She called Trump and demanded to know why the campaign had been keeping her at bay; why she hadn’t been allowed back on the plane as the Republican nominee toured the country. Trump told Loomer not to worry: He would personally see to it that she was invited aboard the plane for his next trip. Later that day, when Trump relayed this request to Wiles—who, since the beginning of the campaign, had controlled the flight manifest—she registered disbelief. “Sir, our next trip is to Philadelphia for the debate,” Wiles told Trump, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Trump shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just stick her in the back of the plane.”

Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man “no” one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.

When Trump’s jet touched down in Philadelphia on September 10, and photographers captured Loomer disembarking, some of the former president’s allies were apoplectic. Republican elected officials began texting campaign aides demanding to know why she was traveling with Trump. But outside of Wiles and LaCivita, Trump’s own staffers hadn’t known she was on the manifest. They were as bewildered—and furious—as everyone else. (Why Trump’s employees find Loomer uniquely noxious, when their boss consorts with known racists and traffics in cruel conspiracy theories himself, is a separate question.)

As the night unfolded, with Loomer watching the debate backstage and then joining other GOP surrogates in the spin room, campaign leaders weighed their next move. Yanking her from the plane risked turning the story into something bigger and messier: a jilted Loomer lashing out against corrupt RINO deep-state simps in the aftermath of Trump’s miserable debate performance. Wiles decided that Trump’s special guest would remain on the manifest for the duration of the itinerary. The only problem? They were headed straight from Philadelphia to New York City for a memorial ceremony the next morning, honoring victims of 9/11—which Loomer, naturally, had described as an inside job.

After the cameras showed Loomer standing near Trump at Ground Zero, the former president’s own phone lit up. For the rest of the day, friends and associates and donors dialed his number with a manic urgency. Some read him old tweets that Loomer had sent; others demanded that whoever let this woman aboard the plane be fired. Senator Lindsey Graham asked Trump if he was trying to lose the election. To all of this Trump pleaded ignorance. He began complaining to aides that nobody had ever explained to him, specifically, why Loomer was so toxic. They responded by pulling up Loomer’s most incendiary posts and showing them to the boss. Trump winced at some and seemed unaffected by others. But he agreed, by the end of the trip, that Loomer needed to go. What sealed Loomer’s fate, according to two people who were part of these conversations, wasn’t just her racist diatribes but also her appearance: Trump, who is generally appalled by plastic surgery, was disgusted to learn about the apparent extent of Loomer’s facial alterations. (When asked for comment, Cheung told me, “Laura was a hard worker in the primaries and President Trump appreciates a fighter.”)

Trump regarded the Loomer episode as a one-off nuisance. His advisers, however, feared that something more fundamental had gone amiss. The past month had seen the campaign spiral into a free-for-all. Lewandowski was going rogue. Morale was plummeting among the rank-and-file staff. And Trump himself seemed intent on sabotaging a message—curbing immigration, fighting inflation, projecting strength on the world stage—that had been engineered to win him the election. Privately, Wiles confided to friends that she and LaCivita felt they’d lost control of the campaign.

When she and LaCivita sat down with Trump in the middle of September, Wiles urged her boss to realize just how badly things were going. These recent mistakes could not be repeated; this current path was unsustainable. “We need to step back and think hard about what we’re doing,” Wiles told him, according to several people familiar with the conversation. “Because this can’t go on.”

Trump doesn’t take well to admonishment. Yet the only other time he’d heard Wiles address him like this was in late 2022, shortly after he’d announced his candidacy, when he’d dined with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump seemed to recognize now, as he had then, that he was engaging in self-sabotage. He told Wiles that he agreed: It was time to tighten things up.

Trump thought the conversation was over. But there was one more thing on Wiles’s mind.

Corey Lewandowski at the Republican National Convention (Jim Bourg / Redux)

Days before departing for that doomed East Coast swing through Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan, Lewandowski had told Trump that they needed to talk. There was information, he said, that the candidate deserved to know.

When they met at Mar-a-Lago, Lewandowski laid it all out. He’d spent several weeks digging into the finances of the campaign, he told Trump, and things weren’t adding up. Far too much money was being spent on programs insignificant to his electoral success, and there had been no apparent oversight of contracts and arrangements that created a windfall for certain campaign employees. Lewandowski told Trump that he’d taken the liberty of bringing in a private consultant—personally escorting this outsider into the campaign’s offices—to study the books. This person’s conclusion, Lewandowski said, was: “Your people are either completely incompetent, or they’re stealing from you.”

Trump seemed conflicted. Nothing angered him more than the idea of being taken advantage of. Then again, if there was one person in politics he’d come to rely upon—one person who, he believed, would never steal from him—it was Wiles. Ultimately, Trump instructed Lewandowski to take his concerns to her.

When Lewandowski did so, on a plane ride that same week, things quickly went sideways. He made no accusations about specific individuals, but shared his belief that certain tactical decisions had been made with big paydays in mind. Wiles told him that she took offense at such conjecture—and that she didn’t need to justify anything to him. Still, Wiles spent the next hour walking Lewandowski through the choices made about vendors, contracts, and costs. When he continued to suggest that things weren’t on the level, Wiles ended the conversation, preferring to focus on preparing Trump for the upcoming debate.

Once the debate was behind them—and with many on the inside fearing that the campaign was falling apart—Wiles sensed that Lewandowski was about to make a move. He had repeatedly gone back to Trump, asking for control over hiring and firing as well as veto power over all spending decisions, which would effectively put him in charge of the campaign. Now he was going all in, telling Trump that Wiles and LaCivita had invested tens of millions of dollars in direct-mail outreach aimed at mobilizing supporters during the early-voting period—money that just so happened to line the pockets of certain campaign staffers, including LaCivita, and that could have been spent instead on television advertising. Lewandowski understood that the only tactical component of campaigning that Trump cared about was TV ads. He was telling Trump not just that he was being stolen from, but that the money in question would have made him ubiquitous on TV.

On September 12, when Wiles told Trump, “This can’t go on,” she added that she wasn’t just talking about Loomer and Springfield. Lewandowski had parachuted into a well-run campaign and rolled grenades into every department, Wiles told Trump, sowing distrust and spreading rumors and making it impossible for her to do her job. “If there’s something you’re skeptical of, something you want answers to, let’s talk about it,” Wiles told her boss. “But if you don’t have confidence in me and Chris, just say so.”

It was an ultimatum. And if Trump struggled with the decision before him—fire Wiles and LaCivita, or keep them and banish Lewandowski—he didn’t let on. Then and there he gave Wiles a vote of confidence. The next day, on the campaign plane, Trump convened Wiles, LaCivita, and Lewandowski around a table in the front cabin, in a meeting first reported on by Puck. He spoke directly to Lewandowski. “We can’t afford to lose these guys,” Trump said, motioning toward Wiles and LaCivita. “They’re in charge.”

Lewandowski knew the fight was lost. “Sir, I’m the only fucking person on this plane who isn’t getting paid to be here right now,” he grumbled, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting. “I’m happy to go back to fucking New Hampshire.”

“No, I want you on TV for me every day,” Trump said. He paused. “And go win me New Hampshire, while you’re at it.”

Lewandowski slapped the table. “You’re not going to win New Hampshire,” he said. “But okay.”

When passengers reboarded the plane for the next leg of their trip, Lewandowski was not on it. Being evicted from the plane is a signature insult in Trump’s political sphere. Lewandowski told friends that he’d planned all along to fly commercial to his next destination; the former president told his traveling aides that Lewandowski’s absence was meant to send the message that dissent would no longer be tolerated. Trump had lost a lot of ground to Harris over the previous month, and victory was possible only if everyone on the campaign fell back in line.

Things appeared to stabilize from there. As September gave way to October, and Harris launched a major media offensive aimed at connecting with voters who still felt no familiarity with her, Trump’s campaign was delighted to cede the spotlight. Wiles and LaCivita believed that every moment Harris spent in front of live cameras translated to more Republican votes. Instead of trying to book Trump onto major networks, where his comments might produce negative news cycles, his team arranged a tour of podcasts, most of them aimed at young men. The effort was led by Bruesewitz, the impulsive young Vance sycophant who maintained an impressive network of right-wing influencers. The strategy appeared to work: For the first three weeks of October, Trump’s internal polling showed Harris’s momentum stalled—measured in both net favorability and vote share—while Trump’s numbers inched upward.

By the middle of October, Trump was being hounded with requests from Republican candidates for joint appearances—requests that had been conspicuously few and far between just a month earlier. Even vulnerable incumbents, such as Representative Ken Calvert of California, tried to grab hold of Trump’s coattails, campaigning with him in his decidedly purple district. Surveying the narrative shift, Trump’s allies marveled at how simple it had all been. Keeping voters’ attention on Harris—while, to the extent they could, keeping Trump out of his own way—had produced the most significant movement in his direction since her entry into the race.

Not that Trump wasn’t doing his best to muck things up. The 40 minutes he spent onstage in Pennsylvania swaying silently to music prompted aides to exchange frenzied messages wondering whether the audio could be cut to get him off the stage. (Ultimately, they decided, letting him dance was less dangerous than letting him rant.) A week later, back in the all-important commonwealth for another event, he left aides slack-jawed by marveling at the ample genitalia of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer.

Even as the political class settled on Trump as the betting favorite, his allies couldn’t shake a pair of very bad feelings. The first was about ground game: With much of their party’s resources being diverted to legal efforts, the GOP’s field operation was struggling to keep pace with the Democrats. The patchwork strategy left Republicans heavily dependent on outside help. But good help is hard to find. Elon Musk’s canvassing program was fast becoming a punch line in Republican circles. Several GOP consulting firms saw young staffers take short leaves to knock on doors for Musk, lured by the enormous commissions he offered. His new system proved easy to game, allowing workers to inflate the number of contacts they reported, and to pocket the rewards. (Musk’s political entity, America PAC, did not respond to a request for comment.)

The more urgent concern, however, was the acrimony that had fractured the Republican nominee’s political operation. Lewandowski had, within a month of his defenestration at 30,000 feet, worked his way back into Trump’s inner circle—and even, at times, onto the plane itself. Wiles had, around the time of their showdown with Lewandowski, told LaCivita that she could no longer deal with the headache of handling the manifest. She charged him with the thankless duty for the remainder of the campaign, making for awkward encounters whenever Trump announced that he wanted Lewandowski to accompany him somewhere.

Even when Lewandowski wasn’t around, his presence was felt. In one instance, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—with whom Lewandowski was reported to have carried on a romantic relationship (they have both denied this)—boarded the Trump plane after an event and joined the former president for a strategy briefing with his aides. As the candidate received a series of positive updates from the ground—early-voting metrics, state-based internal polling—Noem interrupted to say that the campaign was lagging behind the Democrats in terms of voter-registration numbers. Trump’s aides were stunned: Not only was she contradicting their own data, but those present were convinced that Lewandowski had put her up to it in order to make Wiles and LaCivita look bad. (Noem, through a spokesperson, denied this and took offense at the notion that “she needs a man to put her up to anything.”)

As the race moved toward its conclusion—and as the constellation of helpers and hangers-on surrounding Trump began positioning themselves to take credit or deflect blame—more than a few people close to the candidate were shopping dirt on their internal rivals. A sense of foreboding settled in over the campaign. There was so much bad blood, several aides told me, that something was bound to spill out into the open.

Sure enough, on October 15, the Daily Beast published an explosive story alleging that LaCivita had skimmed huge amounts off the top of TV ads, direct mail, and other expenditures, netting him some $22 million from his work on behalf of the campaign and a pair of related super PACs. Multiple campaign sources told me that the nature of these arrangements was exaggerated, and that although LaCivita had made plenty of money—and perhaps more than some people were comfortable with—it was nowhere near that amount. (“Not only is the $22 million number manufactured out of thin air,” LaCivita told me in a statement, “but it’s defamatory.”) His objections hardly mattered: Trump was livid. Even when Wiles tried to calm him down, arguing that Lewandowski had planted the story to eliminate LaCivita, the former president kept fuming, saying the story made him look like a fool and demanding to know why the campaign hadn’t stopped it from being published.

With everyone in the campaign watching to see how their boss would respond to the article, Trump made it known that LaCivita was not welcome on the plane for a planned trip to Georgia that evening. Trump was still beside himself a day later, ranting about the article and telling friends that he’d fire LaCivita—and possibly his entire team—if it weren’t for the PR hit that would cause just weeks out from Election Day. (Cheung denied that Trump was upset by the Daily Beast report, saying, “Everyone recognized it came from disgruntled individuals.”)

LaCivita was abruptly summoned to Trump Tower on the morning of Friday, October 18. There, he found himself climbing into the lead car of the former president’s motorcade, a limousine in which Trump often rides alone to recharge between events. On this occasion, there was another passenger, the businessman Howard Lutnick, who had recently been named a co-chair of Trump’s White House transition team. The three of them made small talk all the way to LaGuardia Airport, as LaCivita waited for the hammer to drop. It felt, LaCivita would later tell several friends, like an episode of The Apprentice: beckoned by the boss, shoved into the limo with a spectator on hand, only to ride in suspense for what seemed like an eternity, believing that at any moment Trump would turn and say, “You’re fired.”

Instead, when they arrived at LaGuardia and boarded the campaign plane, Trump signaled for LaCivita to join him in the cramped, four-seat office at the front of the cabin. As they settled across from each other, Trump reached for a small stack of paper: a printout of the Daily Beast story. LaCivita, in turn, produced a much thicker stack of paper. These were the exhibits for the defense: Federal Election Commission reports, bank-account statements, pay stubs, vendor agreements, and more. For the next half hour, according to several sources with knowledge of the exchange, the two men had it out—profanities flying but voices kept intentionally low—as LaCivita insisted to Trump that he wasn’t ripping the candidate off. Trump, the sources said, seemed to vacillate between believing his employee and seething over the dollar figure, wondering how something so specific could be wrong. Finally, after a couple of concluding f-bombs, Trump seemed satisfied. “Okay, I get it, I get it,” he told LaCivita, holding up his hands as if requesting that the defense rest. He added: “You should sue those bastards.”

The air was more or less cleared: Trump has not raised the issue of LaCivita’s pay since, aides told me, save for several episodes of the candidate teasingly—but conspicuously—calling LaCivita “my $22 million man!” Nevertheless, the alliance remains fragile. Less than a week after the détente, CNN unearthed LaCivita’s Twitter activity from January 6, 2021, including his having liked a tweet that called for Trump to be removed via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita was dead to him—that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.

That was just fine by LaCivita; he had always viewed himself as a hired gun, and his reservations about working for Trump weren’t exactly a secret. Still, the word that Trump had iced one of his two key lieutenants sent a shiver through the rest of the staff. Many had noticed new faces poking around, asking questions about finances and compliance. With Trump’s suspicions piqued, every staffer, as well as every decision, would be under the microscope through Election Day.

Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.

Donald Trump at a rally in Phoenix in June (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Standing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden on the evening of Sunday, October 27, an irate group of Trump staffers, family members, and loyalists was looking for someone to blame.

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous. Elected officials—Democrats, and, before long, Republicans too—blasted the comedian’s remarks. Headlines from the world’s leading news organizations described the event as every bit the hate-fest Republicans had promised it wouldn’t be. Trump aides were blitzed with text messages from lawmakers and donors and lobbyists wanting to know who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign.

In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It didn’t take long to get to the answer: Alex Bruesewitz.

Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves.

Now, with their grand celebration quickly morphing into a public-relations nightmare, Trump’s allies stewed. Two decisions needed to be made, and quickly: whether to inform the man of the hour about this disaster before he took the stage, and whether to issue a statement rebuking Hinchcliffe and his remarks. Some staffers feared throwing Trump off his game at such a crucial moment, and others argued that showing any weakness would just make things worse. But LaCivita dictated a short statement to the communications team that was blasted out to reporters across the arena, distancing the campaign from Hinchcliffe, while Wiles pulled the former president aside and explained the situation. (Trump, aides told me, was merely annoyed at the time; only after watching television coverage the next morning would he rage about how Wiles, LaCivita, and Caporale had “fucked this up.”)

Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.

The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”

Why Mike Lee Folded

2024-09-10T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Justin T. Gellerson

When it was finally his turn to speak during the televised roll call at this summer’s Republican National Convention, Senator Mike Lee wore the canny smile of a man who was selling something bigger than his home state of Utah. “It’s a place where we love freedom, we love the Constitution,” Lee said, “and we despise tyranny.”

Watching Lee from some 20 feet away as he spoke, I felt a twinge of déjà vu. Hadn’t I heard him deliver these same patriotic bromides at a Republican convention before? Yes, I had. It was 2016, in Cleveland. Lee had gone there with a radical agenda: to sabotage Donald Trump’s nomination for president. First, he maneuvered his way onto the convention’s rule-making committee. Then, he led a push by Never Trumpers to unbind the convention’s delegates—that is, to release them from their obligation to vote for Trump as the party’s nominee. I was there, watching the drama up close, talking with Lee and other ringleaders in a cramped corridor just outside the committee room as they schemed and argued and tried every trick imaginable to outsmart the party enforcers who’d been tasked with putting down their rebellion.

In public remarks and private discussions leading up to Trump’s coronation, Lee invoked nothing less than the survival of American democracy. “I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution,” Lee said on Newsmax TV. “That he’s not going to be an autocrat, that he’s not going to be an authoritarian.”

Cleveland was the climax of Lee’s year-long effort to stop Trump. During the primaries, he had implored activist leaders to rally their organizations behind his best friend, Senator Ted Cruz, who had emerged as Trump’s chief rival. With Cruz headed for defeat in the spring of 2016, Lee had tried to broker a meeting between the senator from Texas and their Florida colleague, Marco Rubio, hoping they might form a joint ticket to take down Trump. When the Cleveland plot fell apart, it marked Lee’s third failure. He still refused to endorse the party’s new standard-bearer. Then, that fall, Lee spotted one final opportunity. Hours after the Access Hollywood tape was published, he became one of the first Republicans in Congress to call on Trump to quit the race. “If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person,” Lee said in a Facebook Live video. “I certainly don’t think I’d feel comfortable hiring that person to be the leader of the free world.”

And then Trump was hired as the leader of the free world—triggering an about-face from Lee that rivals even that of J. D. Vance, who once wrote that he feared Trump could be “America’s Hitler” before becoming his running mate.

What began as a reluctant, transactional alliance—advising on judicial picks, working with Trump on criminal-justice reform—soon became personal. Lee grew to relish dining at the White House and flying on Air Force One. He told friends that Trump was funny, charming, kindhearted. Before anyone could make sense of it, Lee emerged as one of Trump’s staunchest defenders. He steered the Senate Republicans’ strategy to acquit the president following his first impeachment. Then, after Trump lost his reelection bid, Lee conspired with right-wing extremists inside and outside the White House to keep the president in office.

Listening to Lee as he addressed the 2024 convention in Milwaukee, I was baffled by the impossible symmetry of it all. Here was the senator speaking about freedom and tyranny—not as a rebuke of the man who he’d feared was an authoritarian, but as an endorsement of him. “Utah, the 45th state admitted to the union,” Lee declared from the convention floor, “today proudly casts all of its 40 delegate votes for President Donald J. Trump!”

To hear Lee’s friends, allies, and former staffers tell it—and they did, by the dozens, though many requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from the senator—Lee is all but unrecognizable. Once a good-natured Latter-day Saint whose idea of edgy was doing corny impersonations of his fellow senators, he now regularly engages in crude conspiracy theories. Once a politician who seemed to be fashioning himself as a modern Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the right, Lee is now a very online MAGA influencer. It’s as if Ned Flanders became a 4chan troll.

Lee will be a top candidate for attorney general if Trump wins in November, according to people close to the former president. This might prove to be the most treacherous position in Washington in 2025: the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, serving at the pleasure of a lawless president who has vowed to wield the justice system against his political opponents as “retribution” for his own criminal prosecutions. Trump has openly toyed with terminating the Constitution. He has also floated subversive ideas—military tribunals for his critics, religious litmus tests for immigrants—that, during his first term, would have been opposed by a remnant of principled Republicans. Today it’s unclear whether any such remnant exists. In our many hours of conversation this spring and summer, Lee did not sound to me like a man interested in holding the line.

The day after his floor speech in Milwaukee, Lee sat down across from me at a small table inside the convention’s security perimeter. When I showed him a photograph—the senator himself, on the convention floor back in 2016, screaming in opposition to a rules package that effectively ended the campaign to free delegates to vote against Trump—Lee grimaced. I asked him whether he’d changed over the past eight years.

“All of us change as times change,” he said, shrugging.

As our conversation went on, however, the senator’s tone shifted. He began to insist that, in fact, he hadn’t changed; that what the world was seeing and hearing from him was no Trump-induced abnormality but rather the realest, rawest version of himself. “Those who know me,” Lee said, “know that privately, this is who I am.”

Everyone I talked with wanted to know the same thing: What happened to Mike Lee? Of all the possible answers to that question, this one—that nothing has changed about the man—is the least satisfying. It may also be the most revealing.

Rex Edwin Lee was a giant of the conservative legal movement. Raised in small-town Arizona, Lee graduated as valedictorian from Brigham Young University and finished first in his class at the University of Chicago Law School. At 36, he was recruited to become the founding dean of BYU’s law school, a position he held until a newly elected president, Ronald Reagan, came calling. Serving as solicitor general during Reagan’s first term, Lee argued before the Supreme Court with “an astonishing rate of success,” according to the New York Times’ obituary, winning a great majority of his cases and earning renown, according to former Justice David Souter, as “the best solicitor general this nation has ever had.”

But Lee’s real legacy is independence as much as intellect. Not long after Reagan appointed him, the Times noted, “White House political aides soon discovered that he was not automatically their man.” Lee was reliably conservative on a host of matters—busing, abortion, prayer in schools—yet he sometimes set aside his own views, and those of the administration he represented, for what he described as “the broad interests of the nation.” The resulting conflicts with Reagan’s Republican Party, and criticism from far-right conservatives, wore Lee down. Resigning his post in June 1985, Lee remarked of the political pressure he faced: “I’m the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general.”

Lee had seven children. His two sons followed him into the legal profession. The elder, Thomas, would emulate his father’s career arc: graduating with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court, and accepting an appointment to the Utah Supreme Court. Six and a half years behind him was Rex’s other son, Michael.

The younger Lee moved at age 10 with his family to the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., and spent his formative years there. His in-home Mormon mentor was a congressman named Harry Reid; his friends and classmates were the children of politicians. Lee still remembers the first time he was allowed to skip school and watch his father litigate before the high court, he told me. The sight of those ancient lawgivers, carved into marble, adorning the courtroom walls. The booming baritone of the marshal. The nine justices emerging from behind a grand red-velvet curtain. The senator doesn’t recall the details of the case his dad was arguing. But he knew that he’d stepped into a realm of the powerful and profound—and, before long, he found himself wanting to be a part of it.

Like his father and brother, Lee attended BYU for his undergraduate degree. Unlike them, he stayed there for his legal studies. There was no shame in this; Rex, who had since returned to BYU, this time as the university’s president, had helped build the law school into one of America’s top-tier programs. Even so, it was apparent that Mike wasn’t a legal prodigy like Thomas. While the older Lee was clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court, the younger brother failed, in his first attempt, to qualify for the BYU Law Review. Classmates described this as a humiliating setback: The Law Review was effectively a prerequisite for earning prestigious clerkships down the line, and Lee was suddenly forced to consider the limitations of his own career.

“I remember having conversations with him. He was disappointed he didn’t get onto Law Review, trying to figure out, ‘Well, where do I go from here?’ ” Elizabeth Clark, Lee’s classmate, said. “He anticipated, you know, having a career more like his father or brother.”

In 1996, during Mike’s second year of law school, his father died of cancer. He was just 61 years old. Rex was eulogized by his eldest son, as well as by two Supreme Court justices—the Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor and Byron White, a retired Kennedy appointee—who celebrated the solicitor general for something far more enduring than his obvious legal genius. “He was,” White said, “the epitome of integrity.”

Mike Lee did eventually qualify for the Law Review and was on staff during his final year in law school, with Clark as editor in chief. By that point, however, his priorities were shifting. Classmates recalled that he seemed more interested in arguing for Republican policies than debating constitutional minutiae. “He started to come across as really partisan—frankly, in a way that stood out, because it was the opposite of his father’s reputation,” Richard Blake, who worked alongside Lee on the Law Review, told me. Clark added: “Mike was trying to sort of form his own identity and way forward. And I think political life was definitely part of that.”

What Lee lacked in achievement—he did not graduate with honors—he made up for with raw ambition. In the decade after he finished law school, he checked the boxes of elite American jurisprudence: prosecuting for a U.S. Attorney’s Office, working in private practice, and clerking for two federal judges, including Justice Samuel Alito. What changed the course of Lee’s career was a stint as general counsel to Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. A wealthy moderate from the state’s most powerful Republican political family, Huntsman took a liking to Lee. Before long, the young lawyer was making a name for himself among Utah’s ruling class of Republicans.

One of those Republicans was Enid Mickelsen, a former congresswoman who would soon become chair of the state party. Mickelsen had the highest regard for Rex Lee—she had taken his constitutional-law class at BYU and “idolized him like everyone else did,” she told me—and had heard great things about his son. But before long, Mickelsen began to develop misgivings about Mike Lee. She remembers thinking: “Something’s off with this guy.”

In 2009, around the time Barack Obama’s presidency sent the GOP spiraling into paranoia and mass folly, Lee began holding pop-up “Constitution seminars” across Utah. Meeting with small groups of activists, he would warn them about the dangerous consolidation of power in the executive branch and the creep of an imperial presidency. There was not yet a visible movement of Gadsden flags and tricorn hats. Yet Lee was every bit the Tea Party prototype, declaring war on a corrupt Republican establishment while raising hysterical alarms about Obama and the Democratic Party. Lee never embraced the “birther” lie—he was too smart for that—but he found ways to wink and nod at the fringe of the new right. Most notable, as he parlayed the popularity of those seminars into a long-shot bid for the U.S. Senate in 2010, Lee promised that, if elected, he would work to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.

“That’s when the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Mickelsen told me. “He was telling people what they wanted to hear, not what was true.”

Lee had the perfect foil in Senator Bob Bennett, an institutionalist and a close ally of the GOP leader Mitch McConnell. Bennett had spent decades cutting deals and keeping Washington working. Now he was the target of a populist uprising led by the unlikeliest of agitators: the Beltway-raised progeny of Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. When GOP delegates voted in the May 2010 nominating convention, Bennett placed third. Lee and the top vote-getter, the businessman Tim Bridgewater, advanced to a runoff.

By that point, the Tea Party wave had begun to crash over the Republican Party—Rand Paul in Kentucky, Marco Rubio in Florida. Suddenly, in the six weeks between the Utah convention and the runoff election, the Senate Conservatives Fund poured money into Lee’s campaign, while FreedomWorks exported a ground game to Utah on his behalf. These organizations were promising to remind a wayward GOP of its foundational small-government ethos. With their help, Lee won the runoff by two points—fewer than 5,000 votes—and, having secured the GOP nomination in safely red Utah, was on his way to Washington.

Lee was now indebted to leaders of a conservative movement who viewed him as their proxy in a brewing war with the Republican establishment. Several of Lee’s contemporaries back then told me that, had the new senator been accepted by McConnell and his allies, he would have fallen in line and become a team player. But he wasn’t—and he most certainly didn’t.

“Had he not gotten caught up in Tea Party movement when he first got elected, he might have had a very different career. He might have been much more of a mainstream Republican,” Spencer Stokes, Lee’s first Senate chief of staff, told me. “But Mike craves respect. Those groups on the right gave it to him. And because there were no accolades from the mainstream, he stayed where the accolades were.” (Lee’s response to this: “I stayed where the truth was.”)

He was certainly convincing. Several of Lee’s colleagues from that era told me they believed that, perhaps more than any other conservative in Congress, Utah’s new senator was the real deal. He spoke the language of limited government—constitutionalism as a check on the executive branch, federalism as a hedge against the abuses of Washington—in a more grounded and less delusional way than many of his Tea Party allies did. Which, they said, is what makes his career arc so baffling.

“If someone told me back then that Mike Lee would sell his soul to Donald Trump, I would have never believed it,” Joe Walsh, the former representative from Illinois who came to D.C. alongside Lee in the Tea Party class of 2010, told me. “I still can’t believe it.”

Lee did not enjoy his first two years in Congress, several of his friends told me. Republicans were in the minority, and he was adrift—not effective enough to be a real problem for the GOP leadership, but not relevant enough, like Rubio and Paul, to garner much attention of his own. Lee passed no meaningful legislation, made few real friends, and built no obviously distinct profile. And then along came Ted Cruz.

Lee first met Cruz in November 2010 at a Federalist Society event in D.C. Lee told the former solicitor general of Texas that he’d seen him argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and was impressed; Cruz told Lee he planned to run for Senate in 2012 and wanted an endorsement. Lee had never given an endorsement before. When Lee decided to back him—“You’re probably the closest thing to my ideological twin that I’m gonna find,” he told Cruz—he envisioned a new dynamic duo in the Senate, a pair of separated-at-birth freedom fighters who would storm McConnell’s castle and revolutionize the GOP.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Lee and Cruz did indeed become inseparable in 2013 as the Republican Party clashed with the Obama administration on spending, a government shutdown, and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Yet while Lee logged countless hours thinking through policy proposals and parliamentary tactics that Republicans might try, it was Cruz who became the front man. The new senator from Texas was less interested in incremental wins than in dramatic standoffs that would prove his never-say-die mettle to the GOP base. Several former Lee staffers described to me his intermittent fury with Cruz for taking legitimate legislative plans and turning them into kamikaze missions ahead of a presidential run in 2016.

Still, Lee could feel the tide shifting in his and Cruz’s direction. Since the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party conservatives had continued to barrage the GOP establishment. Now, with the 2016 presidential cycle drawing near, Lee sensed an opening to seize control of the party—and Cruz appeared best positioned to lead the charge. It didn’t matter, at this point, that Lee was the Robin to Cruz’s Batman; Robin would be in line for a Cabinet post at minimum, or, more likely, either a Supreme Court seat or the role of attorney general.

Of course, Donald Trump had other ideas. After laying waste to the large, talented field of Republican hopefuls in the primaries, Trump wound up in a head-to-head contest against Cruz. The scorched-earth campaign that ensued—questioning Cruz’s citizenship, calling his wife ugly, suggesting that his father had played a part in John F. Kennedy’s assassination—was just as unsettling to Lee as Trump’s philosophical incoherence was. The Republican front-runner had no apparent reverence for the nation’s founding documents; he had, in one meeting with congressional conservatives, promised to protect Article XII of the Constitution—despite the Constitution having only seven articles. If anything, he could come across as a liberal, swearing off entitlement cuts and defending Planned Parenthood during the campaign.

I observed to Lee how, at that point, he seemed bewildered. He nodded.

“Bewildered,” he said, “and frightened.”

This was a disorienting time for Tea Party conservatives. The long-tread-upon GOP base had finally risen up against the domineering party elite, demanding transparency and a return to small-government piety—only to then flock to a thrice-married philanderer for whom lies were a second language and conviction came only in the form of self-glorification.

“This is not how I would’ve predicted things,” Lee told me. “Or wanted things.”

Lee and the Utah delegate Phill Wright shout “No!” to the rules package that secured Trump’s nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention, in Cleveland. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)

The closest he ever came to making sense of it, Lee said, was in conversation one day with a trusted member of his staff. The way the staffer saw it, American politics had turned into a raucous bar fight at a Wild West saloon. “Donald Trump walks up to the bar, and he’s got a beer bottle in his hand, and he breaks the beer bottle in half over the counter and brandishes it,” Lee said, recalling the metaphor. “Immediately, a bunch of people in the room get behind him. Because he’s being assertive. And odds are lower, as they perceive it, that they’ll be hurt if they get behind him.”

Lee didn’t care about getting hurt—at least, not back then. He began taking meetings with fellow conservatives in Washington—elected officials, think tankers, movement leaders—in hopes of preventing Trump’s nomination. The best idea anyone could come up with was an effort to free the convention delegates in Cleveland. This would set a dangerous precedent, effectively disenfranchising the millions of voters who’d chosen him as their party’s nominee. But to Lee, Trump represented enough of a menace to justify such drastic measures.

In the weeks before the convention, both the senator and his wife procured spots on the rules committee that would finalize the bylaws governing the event. The leadership of the Republican National Committee had hand-selected a group of experienced party officials to manage the rule-making process. And the chair of that committee, as luck would have it, was Enid Mickelsen—hardly a Trump enthusiast, yet an enforcer of party norms all the same.

The uprising was a flop. After he failed to fix the rules against Trump in committee, Lee resorted to histrionics. When it came time for the whole convention to vote on the rules, Lee stood at the fore of Utah’s delegation shouting “No!”—a scene captured by media outlets worldwide. The senator then began telling Utah’s delegates that they would still have the chance to oppose Trump’s nomination on the convention floor, because Cruz had carried the state’s primary contest. But this wasn’t true. Cruz was no longer technically a candidate for president, so pursuant to the proceedings of a convention, no state could cast its delegate votes in his favor. Lee knew that—but charged ahead anyway, dramatizing his show of defiance. “He lied to those Utah delegates. He manipulated them,” Mickelsen said. “All so he could get them riled up for this demonstration on the floor to prove how anti-Trump he was.”

Lee insisted then and now that his real mission in Cleveland was to correct long-standing problems in the party’s rule book; that it had nothing to do with resisting Trump. But everyone who was there and who watched his wrangling knew better. Numerous Utah Republicans who spent time with Lee in Cleveland told me he was devastated by the failure to stop Trump’s nomination. One of them was Todd Weiler, a state senator who’d tutored Lee as a teaching assistant in law school. At one point, as Weiler and I compared notes about that mutiny, I mentioned that Lee had been motivated by a belief that Trump represented a threat to American democracy.

“Was he wrong?” Weiler asked.

After the convention fiasco, Lee went dark for a while. He mused to friends about leaving the GOP; about registering as an independent, or perhaps as a Libertarian. Then came the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016. Lee immediately called a meeting with his top staffers. They agreed that it was best for him to keep quiet and let the situation play out. A few hours later—to the shock of his aides—the senator posted a four-minute video online calling for Trump to quit the race.

I had long wondered, given Lee’s foresight in diagnosing the dangers of Trumpism, whether he harbored any regret about allying himself with the man. Instead, the more we dwelled on Lee’s actions during the 2016 campaign—suggesting that Trump was an aspiring autocrat, attempting to sabotage his nomination, calling for him to quit the race—the more contrite Lee sounded for having doubted Trump in the first place.

“I was a jerk,” the senator said. “I was a jerk to him.”

It was a remarkable moment. After all of Trump’s cruel, ad hominem venom throughout that 2016 campaign, I said to Lee, you’re the jerk?

“Fair enough,” the senator said. “But his decisions don’t have to determine mine.”

In the weeks after Election Day 2016, Trump Tower was the world capital of kissing and making up. Republicans who’d spent part of the past year and a half denouncing Trump were now coming to terms with reality: They needed him. This was a tactic of self-preservation, but even more so, it was an opportunity. The incoming president had no perceptible governing agenda. In that vacuum, everyone realized, ordinary lawmakers were about to become extraordinarily powerful. Hence the pilgrimage of countless erstwhile critics—Republicans from every possible rank, including ones who’d called Trump a con artist, a cancer, and worse—who came bearing the gift of surrender.

To hear Lee tell it, he made the trip for a different reason.

“At the request of some mutual friends, I went to Trump Tower after he was elected,” he recalled. The purpose of this summit, Lee said, was to “clear the air.” He described a conversation in which he tried politely to defuse tensions as Trump harped on the senator’s past criticisms. Finally, Lee told me, he ran out of patience.

“I just said, ‘Look, let me be frank. I just got reelected. You just got elected. So, for the next four years, we’re gonna have some interaction. So let me just be very clear about where we stand,’ ” Lee recalled. “ ‘Insofar as you undermine constitutionally limited government … I will be a thorn in your side, a pain in your neck. I will be your worst nightmare. You will wish I was never born.’ ”

Lee was hissing every syllable now, leaning toward me, reenacting this moment of machismo. “ ‘And insofar as you fight to protect those things, I’ll be your friend and your ally, and we can work effectively together,’ ” Lee concluded, offering a practiced scowl that suggested he’d told this story before. “ ‘Do I make myself clear?’ ”

The obvious questions around this account notwithstanding—from what I’ve gathered, never in his life has Lee spoken to anyone this way—he and Trump did seem to broker a peace. His first year in office, Trump traveled to Utah and Lee rode along on Air Force One. “I got to know him as a person. I realized that there’s a lot more to him than people realize,” Lee told me. “He has deep empathy for Americans. You find him to be a genuinely likable person.”

By this point, Republicans controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, and onetime skeptics like Lee were racing ahead, eager to squeeze as many policy and political wins out of this unforeseen presidency as possible. In fairness to Lee, he wasn’t a rubber stamp for the administration—he broke with Trump on raising the debt ceiling, reauthorizing surveillance measures, funding a wall at the southern border, and other issues. (He wanted the border wall, but opposed the funding contrivances Trump pushed for.)

The true test, though, was always going to be what Lee would do when Trump began abusing power. The first impeachment trial was one harbinger. Some Republicans concluded that, although Trump’s actions—withholding aid from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while pressuring him to investigate Joe Biden—were inappropriate, they did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Lee went further. He met with White House attorneys to plot Trump’s defense. He bragged on Fox News that he was going to “embarrass the heck out of the Democratic Party.” He said, in a floor speech before voting to acquit, that the Zelensky phone call was “exactly the sort of thing the American people elected President Trump to do.”

This rationale for Trump’s behavior—that he’d been handed a mandate by pissed-off voters to change the way Washington operates, etiquette and standards be damned—worked for many politicians in many places. Utah was not always one of them. Trump had won the state with just 46 percent of the vote in 2016. And although one wing of the Republican base there became Trumpier during the president’s first two years in office, the other wing became that much more moderate. The result, in 2018, was Utah electing as its newest U.S. senator a man known for being perhaps Trump’s biggest antagonist in the Republican Party: Mitt Romney.

Once again, Lee found himself playing second fiddle. And, according to friends, he could not stand it. His annoyance with Romney exerted a sort of magnetic push on Lee, moving the senior senator closer to the MAGA base with the junior senator’s every motion away from it. “Maybe,” Romney told one confidant, according to my colleague McKay Coppins’s book Romney: A Reckoning, “he just can’t stand being in my shadow.” When Romney became the only GOP senator to vote for Trump’s conviction, it wasn’t enough for Lee to say that Trump had done nothing wrong. He needed to argue that, actually, Trump had done something right.

[From the November 2023 issue: McKay Coppins on what Mitt Romney saw in the Senate]

Lee began to see, his friends told me, something fundamentally unfair about the way the president was treated. The more he studied the man, the more he came to see him as bold, even valiant, taking on all comers and keeping a sense of humor about it. By the time of the president’s reelection bid in 2020, the senator who’d once tried everything to derail Trump’s nomination was now one of his biggest cheerleaders.

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee said at a rally in Arizona in the fall of 2020, pointing to Trump nearby. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”

It was a stunning remark—comparing Donald Trump to one of the LDS faith’s most heroic figures, who symbolizes humility and selflessness—that angered even some of Trump’s most ardent Mormon supporters. Lee had to quickly walk it back.

This episode, however, was about more than an errant turn of phrase. The senator had begun to view Trump as something greater than a president. He was an avatar of masculinity and individuality, a middle finger to the governing class that had shown insurgents like Lee the same disrespect it had shown Trump. Lee was more than smitten; he was spellbound. And it was under that spell that he turned his back on American democracy.

Justin T. Gellerson for The Atlantic

The senator likes to tell a tidy, self-respecting story about his role in Trump’s attempted coup. It goes something like this: Lee began to suspect that the people advising Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and the ideas they were putting into his head, were unhelpful.

The only realistic way to keep Trump in office—the only constitutional way—was if certain states submitted alternative slates of electors to be considered by Congress when the Electoral College votes were cast on December 14. When no states did so, and the votes were tabulated, and Biden was declared the winner, there was nothing left to do but certify those counts on January 6, 2021. And that’s what Lee did.

But this version of events omits certain key details that call into question both his honesty and his allegiance to the Constitution.

In early November, the day the networks called the election for Biden, Lee sent multiple text messages to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, endorsing the work of the attorney Sidney Powell. Lee called Powell a “straight shooter” and asked that she be brought into the White House to advise the president. A couple of weeks later—after Powell had held a press conference at Republican National Committee headquarters during which she spouted wild allegations and claimed that Trump had “won by a landslide”—Lee recommended to Meadows a new lawyer: John Eastman. This was before Eastman wrote his infamous memo arguing that the vice president had the authority to unilaterally overturn the election results on January 6. But Eastman had already gone public with bogus, uninformed statements suggesting that Democrats had cheated to defeat Trump—and Lee called Meadows’s attention to the attorney’s “really interesting research.”

With the December 14 deadline closing in, Lee told Meadows “there could be a path” to overturning the election if states appointed alternative electors. Meadows replied that he was working on it. But when the states cast their electoral votes in favor of Biden on December 14—and sent no competing electors to Congress—it was over. Legally, constitutionally, and otherwise: Trump was defeated. Lee acknowledged as much to me in our conversations, saying repeatedly that there was no recourse for Trump at that point.

Yet in his texts to Meadows, which were obtained by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection and published by CNN, Lee kept pushing. On December 16, he asked Meadows for the White House to provide “some guidance on what arguments to raise” so senators might object to the certifying of Biden’s victory. As late as January 4, he told Meadows, “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow.” The senator said that he was “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend,” adding, “We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote.”

Lee wants credit because, unlike his friends Ted Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, he ultimately voted to certify all the states’ election results. But what he did prior to that was every bit as much an affront to the Constitution, to the peaceful transition of power, and to the institutions of American democracy.

To this day, the senator denies that he—or even Trump—did anything wrong. “Remember,” Lee told me, “he in fact left office.” The senator paused. “Now, sure, he did some unconventional things beforehand—”

I started to laugh. “Unconventional?”

He shot me a look. “Some unorthodox things,” Lee said. “Things that I would not have advised him to do.”

A mob of protesters tried to kill the vice president inside the U.S. Capitol building, I responded, and Trump did nothing to stop them.

Lee smirked. “Who actually tried to kill Mike Pence?” he asked. “Who actually tried to kill him?”

I pointed out that people chanting to hang Pence had come within yards of the vice president. That was surely more than unconventional, right?

“Okay. Let’s strike the word unconventional,” Lee replied. “He handled it in a way that I wouldn’t have advised and didn’t advise.”

When I asked Lee whether he had any regrets about the events leading up to January 6, he thought for a moment.

“Well, you know,” Lee said, “had I known that my texts would be leaked to the public selectively, perhaps I would’ve said less in text messages.”

The senator doesn’t seem to regret actively participating in an attempted coup. He regrets being caught.

As we sat in his Washington office this past spring, I asked Lee whether he still worried about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. He responded by running through the former president’s accomplishments—a reduced regulatory footprint, lower tax rates, the usual—but skirted any reference to January 6.

I reminded Lee of Trump’s specific comments since leaving office—about terminating the Constitution, about using his office to seek retribution against political opponents—and reminded him of his own prescient warnings, back in 2016, about Trump becoming an authoritarian.

So, again, I asked: Is he still worried?

“I worry about [that] with every president, with every person we elect to any office,” Lee replied. “That’s why I believe so strongly in federalism and separation of powers.” He said that every recent president has expanded the powers of the executive branch, and he cited Biden’s unilateral actions on forgiving student loans as the most recent example that concerned him.

I conceded that the expansion of presidential authority in the post-9/11 era was cause for concern. But is there really a comparison between using executive power for loan forgiveness and using executive power to overturn election results and stay in office?

Lee glared at me. “Did he stay in office?” he asked.

This, it seemed, was the best argument that Mike Lee—self-celebrated constitutionalist, sounder of alarms about an “imperial presidency”—could muster. Because Trump had failed in his attempt to subvert the election, it was no big deal.

“You know, both his brother and his father—as the solicitor general and as a judge—they felt bound by precedent. That was their north star,” Blake, Lee’s old law-school classmate, told me. “Mike’s a politician. I’m not sure he feels bound by anything like that.”

In the summer of 2022, Lee launched a new Twitter account: @BasedMikeLee. Allies noticed that the senator’s personal style had begun to evolve rather dramatically, between shaving his head, befriending MAGA figures such as Benny Johnson and Donald Trump Jr., and using saltier language than anything his peers thought was in his vocabulary. But it was the embrace of based—Millennial slang for being one’s unapologetic true self, regardless of what others might think—that signaled a transformation to the broader world. Two of Lee’s friends told me they worried he was having a midlife crisis.

To give a sense of the senator’s new online persona: During one stretch this summer, he used the vulgar sexual phrase raw dogging to describe Mormons’ approach to life; amplified a baseless far-right rumor that Biden was having a medical emergency aboard Air Force One; earned nearly 10 million views by posting a debunked video that purported to show a “badass” Trump golfing one day after he was shot; and insinuated more than once that Biden might in fact be incapacitated or even deceased, suggesting that a “proof-of-life” video be provided by the White House to satisfy his and his followers’ concerns.

I was surprised, then, to discover just how different Lee was in person. There were no taunts, no confrontational insults. The guy who posted on X to his hundreds of thousands of followers about false-flag operations against conservatives was mellow and circumspect in our interactions. At one point, speaking in his office, Lee described the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, as a brilliant and decent man who’d found himself in the untenable position of running an ostensibly nonpartisan Justice Department while facing, Lee believes, pressure from a president who “literally tried through multiple angles to imprison” his political rival.

Lee himself could, ironically enough, soon find himself in that very position. When I asked Lee if he would accept Trump’s offer to become attorney general, he asked to discuss the topic off the record. I declined. After thinking for a moment, Lee told me he’d have “a lot of questions” about the job before accepting it. But then he clarified: The questions would primarily be about himself—about his career, whether it was the right fit—and not about the man he’d serve.

If Trump does in fact win, and does in fact choose Lee as his attorney general, it’s a near certainty that Trump will lean on him—as he did Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions—to use the Justice Department for his political purposes. When I asked Lee about the importance of insulating the attorney general’s office from the self-interested whims of a president, his answer wasn’t reassuring.

“We speak in romanticized terms about depoliticizing this or that arm of the government,” Lee said. “You don’t want a government that operates in a manner that’s detached from the electoral process and from individuals who are elected … If you insulate the Department of Justice—you truly insulate it from political realities altogether—that means they’re subject to no one. And that’s its own kind of problem.”

But what happens when those political realities drive the nation toward catastrophe? Lee knows that the next four years could be crucial for the future of American politics, jurisprudence, and democracy. A former president and his allies have been criminally prosecuted. And Trump has shown every intention of getting revenge.

“I think there are some doors that just shouldn’t be opened,” Lee told me. Now that this one is open, he added, “you ought to do everything you can to slam the door.”

Would Lee actually defy Trump and slam the door? I put that question to Weiler, the state senator who was Lee’s teaching assistant back in law school.

“Umm. I, I, I—I don’t know,” Weiler answered. “Certainly, he’s evolved into a Trump loyalist.”

The senator himself believes that the prosecutions of Trump were motivated by a desire to appease the Democratic Party’s base. If the Republican base demands that Trump deliver on the “retribution” he’s been promising—perhaps against critics such as former Representative Liz Cheney and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley—then, according to Lee’s logic, it might be warranted for the Justice Department to carry out the will of the people.

The first time I visited Lee’s office in Washington, I kept staring beyond him at a bronze statue in a corner of the room. It depicted a man, elegantly dressed and evidently deep in thought, his right hand hovering just below his chin as he looked off in search of answers. It was Rex Lee.

I asked the senator whether he ever wonders what his father would have made of all this.

“All the time,” Lee answered, looking wistful. He closed his eyes. “All the time.”

He didn’t elaborate, and I found myself wondering too.

This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “The Radical Conversion of Mike Lee.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared

2024-07-21T22:18:15-04:00

On the evening of Super Tuesday, March 5, shortly before Donald Trump effectively ended the Republican primary and earned a general-election rematch with President Joe Biden, I asked the co-managers of Trump’s presidential campaign what they feared most about Biden.

“Honestly, it’s less him,” Chris LaCivita told me. “And more—”

“Institutional Democrats,” Susie Wiles said, finishing her partner’s thought.

It was a revealing exchange, and a theme we would revisit frequently. The Democratic Party, Wiles and LaCivita would tell me in conversations over the coming months, was a machine—well organized and well financed, with a record of support from the low-propensity voters who turn out every four years in presidential contests. Ordinarily, they explained, Democrats would have structural superiority in a race like this one. But something was holding the party back: Biden.

LaCivita and Wiles expected the campaign’s narrative to be controlled by Democrats from the beginning: Trump, after all, had sabotaged the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election, incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and, more recently, faced numerous criminal prosecutions and the possibility of jail time. And yet Biden offered an opening. Already the oldest president in American history, he began to show signs of rapid deterioration in 2023. This would make the campaign a game of survival more than skill, each candidate needing to convince voters that he was less unqualified than his opponent.

[Read: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

In the race to clear historically low hurdles, Trump began pulling ahead. Polls showed him making unprecedented gains with those low-propensity demographics, specifically Black and Hispanic voters—not because of anything he was doing particularly well, but because of apathy and disillusionment within the Democratic base. As far back as springtime, the numbers told a straightforward story: Biden was not going to win. Democrats could only look on, powerless, as the president denied the party’s young bench—and its organizational machine—a chance to change the narrative.

“I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” Wiles told me on Super Tuesday. “But I do think Democrats do.”

She and LaCivita were right to worry.

Biden’s departure from the presidential race this afternoon—hours after his top surrogates had insisted that he would carry on—is the culmination of a remarkable pressure campaign, launched after his calamitous June 27 debate performance and aimed at pushing the president into retirement. On the Republican side, it caps a frenetic four-month stretch in which Trump’s campaign went from cocky about Biden’s deficiencies to fearful of his ouster to stunned at the sudden letter from Biden doing the thing Republicans thought he’d never do.

Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”

For months, in talking with Wiles and LaCivita, I was struck by their concern about the potential of a dramatic switch—Democratic leaders pushing out Biden in favor of a younger nominee. They told me that Trump’s campaign was readying contingency plans and studying the weaknesses of would-be alternatives, beginning with Vice President Kamala Harris. By the time of the debate, however, they believed that Democrats’ window had all but closed. Even in the immediate aftermath—as Democratic officials openly called for Biden to quit—Wiles and LaCivita were betting on the status quo. More than anything, Trump’s allies believed that the president’s stubborn Irish ego wouldn’t let him back out of a fight with a man he despised.

But they couldn’t take any chances. Two weeks ago, according to a campaign source who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio went into the field to begin testing the outcomes of a Harris-versus-Trump matchup. These surveys, conducted across several battleground states, represented the most concrete step taken to prepare for the possibility of a new adversary. Still, with the polling a tightly held secret—I couldn’t verify the results—there were no outward signs of Trump’s operation expecting a reset. When convention speakers reached out to the GOP nominee’s campaign, gauging whether to hedge their speeches with attacks on Harris, they were told to keep the focus on Biden.

[Read: Biden’s greatest strengths proved his undoing]

In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too early. Campaigns are marathons measured by changes in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee reveled in what felt like a three-week winning streak, dating back to the debate, in which the daily churn of insider gossip focused ever more on Democratic fatalism and Trump’s seeming inevitability. No Republican I spoke with could remember a longer stretch of uninterrupted forward propulsion. And with Biden appearing to dig in, they left Milwaukee believing that this run of luck might never end.

The president’s abrupt exit dashed any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.

Given the historic volatility of this campaign—Trump survived an assassination attempt just last weekend—there’s no guarantee that Harris will ultimately succeed Biden atop the ticket. The Trump campaign certainly believes she will—understandably so, given the rapid consolidation of Democratic officials around her following Biden’s announcement—and blasted out a statement Sunday afternoon that tied Harris to her unpopular boss. “Kamala Harris is just as much of [a] joke as Biden is,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement. “Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”

This is the essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people. “We’ve talked about strength versus weakness, success versus failure,” LaCivita told me before the convention, summarizing the campaign’s strategic vision for the race. “The great thing about that messaging is that it’s not just unique to Joe Biden.”

But messaging is a secondary concern for Democrats. What they need first is a messenger.

It’s true that Harris will struggle to shed some policy-related criticisms; her appointment early in her vice presidency to handle the southern border, in fact, could make her even more vulnerable to immigration-related attacks than Biden was. It’s also true, however, that policy criticisms aren’t what made Biden unelectable in the eyes of most Americans. In an evenly divided and exceedingly polarized nation, Biden lost ground—with his party’s base as well as with independents—because he was perceived to be too old and infirm to serve another four years in office.

Harris is neither of those things. At 59 years old, she is two decades younger than Trump and will have no trouble keeping up with him on the campaign trail or the debate stage. She is also a former prosecutor who, if anything, is known for being too tough on crime. (Trump allies told me they plan to assault her left flank with accusations of Harris over-incarcerating young men of color when she was California’s attorney general.) At the very least, Trump’s lieutenants realize, Harris’s promotion will provide a desperately needed jolt to Democrats nationwide in the form of fundraising, volunteerism, and enthusiasm. Whatever her flaws as a politician—Harris ran a dreadful primary campaign for president in 2020, marked by organizational infighting and awkward sound bites—she does not possess the one flaw that proved insurmountable for Biden.

[Read: Trump versus the coconut-pilled]

Trump’s campaign insists that nothing has changed. Wiles and LaCivita are telling their team that given the obstacles Trump has already overcome—prosecutions, a conviction, an assassination attempt that nearly killed him—a new nominee for the Democrats is just another log on the 2024 inferno.

But they know it’s more than that. They know that from the moment they partnered with Trump, everything they intended for this campaign—the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the ground game, the mail pieces, the digital engagement, the social-media maneuvers—was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.

The mentality of this Trump campaign, LaCivita once told me, is to spend every day on offense. The team wants to shape the pace and substance of every news cycle and force Democrats to react, ensuring that key battles are fought on the GOP’s chosen terrain. It worked so well that Biden was ruined before his party’s convention. Now the Trump operation is vowing to destroy Harris—if, in fact, she becomes the nominee—in much the same way.

And yet, for a campaign that went to bed Saturday believing that it would dictate the terms of the election every day until November 5, Sunday brought an unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the narrative of 2024.

‘What the Heck Just Happened?’

2024-07-15T19:24:00-04:00

So much for the big reveal. When Republican delegates from across the country walked into the Fiserv Forum this morning, all the buzz was about the pending selection of Donald Trump’s running mate—an announcement they believed would come tonight, in prime time, a climactic conclusion to the first day of the GOP convention.

In fact, many Republicans I spoke with here—party loyalists who have come to expect pageantry from Trump—had anticipated an Apprentice-style grand finale to the so-called veepstakes. Perhaps Trump would bring several of the contenders onstage at once before naming his choice. At the very least, he’d keep everyone in suspense until the last possible moment.

Trump had different plans. Around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, the former president posted on his social-media site that J. D. Vance, the best-selling author turned U.S. senator from Ohio, would be his running mate. Some of the delegates gathered here inside Fiserv Forum received push alerts on their phones, while others overheard neighbors reacting to the breaking news.

But many of the delegates still had no idea about the Vance pick—until they heard it suddenly and unceremoniously from Senator Mike Lee of Utah. Lee, approximately eight minutes after Trump’s post, announced it from the back of the convention hall during the opening roll call. “Utah … today proudly casts all of its 40 delegate votes for President Donald J. Trump,” Lee declared, before adding, “and his newly announced running mate, my friend and colleague J. D. Vance!”

[J. D. Vance: Opioid of the masses]

I hadn’t seen Trump’s announcement online. And, based on the stunned expressions of people standing around me, I wasn’t alone.

“Wait. What the heck just happened?” said Henry Barbour, a Mississippi delegate and member of the Republican National Committee.

Just moments earlier, Barbour and I had been leaning against the railing at the rear of the convention floor and comparing notes on the vice-presidential speculation. Two of Trump’s shortlist prospects—Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum—had already been informed that they were out of the running. That much was known. Meanwhile, the name of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin seemed, in those early-afternoon hours, to be gaining steam.

Barbour was skeptical: He’d just met with Youngkin in the morning, and the governor had seemed casual and relaxed. “If that guy’s really about to be picked as our vice-presidential nominee,” Barbour told me, “he is one cool customer.”

As Barbour and I stood chatting, I spotted Lee standing up at a microphone. Soon it would be Utah’s turn to announce its allocation of delegates, and Lee, who had prepared a short speech for the occasion, would be speaking on behalf of the delegation. As the senator waited his turn, however, a delegate from Maryland walked up beside him: David Bossie.

Bossie is no ordinary delegate; he served as Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016 and remains one of the former president’s closest confidants. So wired into Trump’s political operation is Bossie that he came onto the floor in Milwaukee wearing an earpiece—allowing for direct communication with the campaign’s high command. He’d been prowling the arena’s red carpeting for an hour already. Now, as he finally came to a stop next to Lee, Bossie was receiving word through the earpiece: Vance was the choice.

[David A. Graham: The next Republican leader]

Turning and seeing Lee, Bossie shared the news. Lee was ecstatic. “Is that public?” he asked.

Bossie pulled out his phone. Trump had, mere moments prior, posted the news to Truth Social. “Now it is,” he told Lee, showing him the screen. “You can be the first to announce it here.”

Lee did just that, delivering an early and unexpected jolt to the convention proceedings. Judging by the ensuing ovation, delegates were thrilled with the selection of Vance. Still, surveying the surroundings at that moment—no booming introduction music or flashy choreographed entrance, just an abrupt announcement to a half-empty arena—some Republicans confessed to feeling underwhelmed.

“The whole thing just seemed strange,” José Fuentes, a delegate from Puerto Rico, told me shortly after Lee’s announcement. “I just wonder—is that really how Trump wanted it?”

Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win

2024-07-10T16:08:54-04:00

Photographs by Roger Kisby

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The outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita told me this past Sunday as Democrats questioned, ever more frantically, whether President Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee in November. “That’s pre-debate.”

LaCivita paused to repeat himself: “Pre-debate.”

This could be interpreted as trash talk coming from a cocky campaign: If you thought Biden was in trouble before he bombed at the June 27 debate, imagine the trouble he’s in now. But I heard something different in LaCivita’s voice.

One of the two principals tasked with returning Trump to the White House, LaCivita had long conceived of the 2024 race as a contest that would be “extraordinarily visual”—namely, a contrast of strength versus weakness. Trump, whatever his countless liabilities as a candidate, would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel, less a bad guy than the butt of a very bad joke, America’s lovable but lethargic uncle who needed, at long last, to be put to bed.

As the likelihood of a Trump-versus-Biden rematch set in, the public responded to the two candidates precisely as LaCivita and his campaign co-manager, Susie Wiles, had hoped. The percentage of voters who felt that Biden, at 81, was too old for another term rose throughout 2023, even as the electorate’s concerns about Trump’s age, 78, remained relatively static. By the end of the primaries, the public’s attitude toward the two nominees had begun to harden: One was a liar, a scoundrel, and a crook—but the other one, the old one, was unfit to be president.

In the months that followed, Trump and his campaign would seize on Biden’s every stumble, his every blank stare, to reinforce that observation, seeking to portray the incumbent as “stuttering, stammering, walking around, feeling his way like a blind man,” as LaCivita put it to me. That was the plan. And it worked. Watching Biden’s slide in the polls, and sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars for an advertising blitz that would punctuate the president’s visible decrepitude, Trump’s team entered the summer believing that a landslide awaited in the fall.

Only one thing could disrupt that plan: a change of candidates atop the Democratic ticket.

There was always a certain danger inherent to this assault on Biden’s faculties. If Wiles and LaCivita were too successful—if too many Democrats decided, too quickly, that Biden was no longer capable of defeating Trump, much less serving another four years thereafter—then they risked losing an ideal opponent against whom their every tactical maneuver had already been deliberated, poll-tested, and prepared. Campaigns are usually on guard against peaking too soon; in this case, the risk for Trump’s team was Biden bottoming out too early.

In my conversations with LaCivita and Wiles over the past six months, they assured me multiple times that the campaign was planning for all contingencies, that they took quite seriously the possibility of a substitution and would be ready if Biden forfeited the nomination.

By mid-June, however, not long before the debate, their tone had changed. Trump was speaking at a Turning Point USA rally in Detroit and the three of us stood backstage, leaning against the wall of a dimly lit cargo bay, a pair of Secret Service vehicles idling nearby. When I asked about the prospect of Trump facing a different Democratic opponent in the fall, LaCivita and Wiles shook their heads. They told me it was too late; the most influential players in Democratic politics had become too invested in the narrative that Biden was fully competent and capable of serving another four years.

“We’re talking about an admission that the Democratic Party establishment would have to make,” LaCivita said. “We’re talking about pulling the plug—”

“On the president of the United States,” Wiles interrupted.

LaCivita nodded. “Who they’ve been saying up to this point in time is perfectly fine.”

No, Wiles and LaCivita agreed, the general-election matchup was set—and they were just fine with that.

“Joe Biden,” Wiles told me, allowing the slightest of smiles, “is a gift.”

But now, as we talked after the debate, it was apparent that they might have miscalculated. Elected Democrats were calling for Biden’s removal from the ticket. When I asked who Trump’s opponent was going to be come November, his two deputies sounded flummoxed.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Wiles said.

“Based off of the available public data,” LaCivita added, “he doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere.”

[Ronald Brownstein: The Biden-replacement operation]

Biden quitting the race would necessitate a dramatic reset—not just for the Democratic Party, but for Trump’s campaign. Wiles and LaCivita told me that any Democratic replacement would inherit the president’s deficiencies; that whether it’s Vice President Kamala Harris or California Governor Gavin Newsom or anyone else, Trump’s blueprint for victory would remain essentially unchanged. But they know that’s not true. They know their campaign has been engineered in every way—from the voters they target to the viral memes they create—to defeat Biden. And privately, they are all but praying that he remains their opponent.

I was struck by the irony. The two people who had done so much to eliminate the havoc and guesswork that defined Trump’s previous two campaigns for the presidency could now do little but hope that their opponent got his act together.

A crowd of Trump supporters in Phoenix (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Wiles and LaCivita are two of America’s most feared political operatives. She is the person most responsible for Florida—not long ago the nation’s premier electoral prize—falling off the battleground map, having spearheaded campaigns that so dramatically improved the Republican Party’s performance among nonwhite voters that Democrats are now surrendering the state. He is the strategist and ad maker best known for destroying John Kerry’s presidential hopes in 2004, masterminding the “Swift Boat” attacks that sank the Democratic nominee. Together, as the architects of Trump’s campaign, they represent a threat unlike anything Democrats encountered during the 2016 or 2020 elections.

On the evening of March 5—Super Tuesday—I sat down with them in the tea room at Mar-a-Lago, an opulent space where intricate winged cherubs are carved into 10-foot marble archways. As the sun set behind the lagoon that borders the western edge of Trump’s property, the lights were also going out on his primary challengers. Soon the polls would close and the former president would romp across more than a dozen states, winning 94 percent of the available delegates and effectively clinching the GOP nomination. Trump had just one target remaining.

For an hour and 15 minutes, Wiles and LaCivita presented their vision for retaking the White House. They detailed a new approach to targeting and turning out voters, one that departs dramatically from recent Republican presidential campaigns, suggesting that suburban women might be less a priority than young men of color. They justified their plans for a smaller, nimbler organization than Biden’s reelection behemoth by pointing to a shrunken electoral map of just seven swing states that, by June, they had narrowed to four. And they alleged that the Republican National Committee—which, in the days that followed our interview, would come entirely under Trump’s control—had lost their candidate the last election by relying on faulty data and botching its field program.

In political circles, it’s considered a marvel that Trump won the presidency once, and came within 42,918 votes of winning it a second time, without ever assembling a sophisticated operation. Trump’s loyalists, in particular, have spent the past few years haunted by a counterfactual: Had the president run a reelection campaign that was even slightly more effective—a campaign that didn’t go broke that fall; a campaign that didn’t employ unskilled interlopers in crucial positions; a campaign that didn’t discourage his supporters from casting votes by mail—wouldn’t he have won a second term comfortably?

Wiles and LaCivita believe the answer is yes. Both have imported their own loyalists, making the campaign a Brady Bunch configuration led by the oddest of couples. Wiles, who runs the day-to-day operation, is small and self-possessed, a gray-haired grandmother known never to utter a profane word; LaCivita, a Marine combat veteran who charts the macro strategy, is a big and brash presence, famous for profane outbursts that leave Wiles rolling her eyes. They disagree often—staffers joke about feeling like the children of quarreling parents—but Wiles, who hired LaCivita, pulls rank. What unites them, with each other and Trump, is an obsession with winning. To that end, Wiles and LaCivita have never been focused on beating Biden at the margins; rather, their plan has been to bully him, to humiliate him, optimizing Trump’s campaign to unleash such a debilitating assault on the president’s age and faculties that he would be ruined before a single vote is cast this fall.

At one point that March evening, the three of us sat discussing the era of hyperpolarization that Trump ushered in. Given the trench-warfare realities—a vanishing center of the electorate, consecutive presidential races decided by fractions of percentage points, incessant governing impasses between the two parties—I suggested that Electoral College blowouts were a thing of the past.

They exchanged glances.

“You know, I could make a case—” Wiles began.

“I could too,” LaCivita said. He was grinning.

In the scenario they were imagining, not only would Trump take back the White House in an electoral wipeout—a Republican carrying the popular vote for just the second time in nine tries—but he would obliterate entire downballot garrisons of the Democratic Party, forcing the American left to fundamentally recalibrate its approach to immigration, economics, policing, and the many cultural positions that have antagonized the working class. Wiles and LaCivita wouldn’t simply be credited with electing a president; they would be remembered for running a campaign that altered the nation’s political DNA.

It’s a scenario that Democrats might have scoffed at a few months ago. Not anymore. “The numbers were daunting before the debate, and now there’s a real danger that they’re going to get worse,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two winning campaigns, told me in the first week of July. “If that’s the case—if we get to the point of fighting to hold on to Virginia and New Hampshire and Minnesota, meaning the main six or seven battlegrounds are gone—then yeah, we’re talking about a landslide, both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote.”

Axelrod added, “The magnitude of that defeat, I think, would be devastating to the party. Those margins at the top of the ticket would sweep Democrats out of office everywhere—House, Senate, governor, you name it. Considering the unthinkable latitude the Supreme Court has just given Trump, we could end up with a situation where he has dominant majorities in Congress and, really, unfettered control of the country. That’s not far-fetched.”

In the course of many hours of conversations with the people inside Trump’s campaign, I was struck by the arrogance that animated their approach to an election that most pundits long expected would be a third consecutive cliff-hanger. Yet I also detected a certain conflict, the sort of disquiet that accompanies abetting a man who is both a convicted felon claiming that the state is persecuting him and an aspiring strongman pledging to use the state against his own enemies. People close to Trump spoke regularly of his victimhood but also his own calls for retribution; they expressed solidarity with their boss while also questioning, in private moments, what working for him—what electing him—might portend.

At the center of the campaign, I would come to realize, is a comedy too dark even for Shakespeare: a mad king who shows flashes of reason, a pair of cunning viziers who cling to the hope that these flashes portend something more, and a terrible truth about what might ultimately be lost by winning.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: 24 Atlantic contributors on what would happen if Trump wins]

Chris LaCivita, who manages Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign with Susie Wiles (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Long before Wiles took charge of Trump’s 2024 campaign, she appeared to be caught in a political love triangle. Having helped Ron DeSantis eke out victory in the Florida governor’s race of 2018—no small feat given the “blue wave” that crushed Republicans nationwide—Wiles was presumed to be charting his course as a presidential contender even as she kept ties with Trump, whose Florida campaign she ran in 2016.

But soon after DeSantis’s win, Wiles was suddenly and unceremoniously banished from the new governor’s inner circle. She swears she doesn’t know why. Maybe DeSantis couldn’t stand her getting the credit for his victory. Or perhaps he felt she was ultimately more loyal to Trump. Whatever the case, Wiles told me, working for DeSantis was the “biggest mistake” of her career—and she became determined to make him feel the same way about discarding her.

Her friends had been shocked when she’d agreed to work for Trump the first time around, and relieved when she joined DeSantis a couple of years later. Now, in late 2019, she was adrift—blackballed by the state’s political establishment, recently divorced, and fretting to friends about financial difficulties. (Wiles denied that part, saying, “I was able to pick myself up and get work without too much of a delay.”) She decided to rejoin Trump for the short term, agreeing to run his Florida operations in 2020, but what lay beyond was murky. All she knew, Wiles recalls thinking, is that she couldn’t be “nearly as trusting” going forward.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Wiles faced a defining professional decision. Trump’s holdover political organization, a PAC called Save America, was fractured by infighting and needed new management. Wiles needed the work. But she knew the former president’s operation was a graveyard for political consultants. The only way she would say yes to Trump, she made it known, was if she took total control—answering to him and him alone. Trump agreed to that condition. Within days, the decree reached all corners of the Republican empire: There was a new underboss at Mar-a-Lago. Wiles, LaCivita told me, had established herself as “the real power behind the throne.”

They didn’t know each other back then; LaCivita had been affiliated with a pro-Trump outside group, but not with the candidate himself. He and Wiles had a mutual friend, though, in Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio. When Fabrizio arranged a dinner for the three of them in March 2022 at Casa D’Angelo, an Italian restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, LaCivita figured he was being buttered up to join Save America. But during that conversation, and over another dinner soon after, he realized Wiles wasn’t just looking for help with the PAC; Trump was planning to run again in 2024, and she needed a partner to help her guide his campaign. LaCivita was noncommittal. “You need to come meet the boss,” Wiles told him.

Sitting down with Trump for the first time, on the patio of Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later, LaCivita was overwhelmed. The music was blaring; Trump controlled the playlist from his iPad, sometimes ignoring the conversation at the table as he shuffled from Pavarotti to Axl Rose. Guests approached the table to greet the former president, repeatedly interrupting them. At times Trump seemed less interested in LaCivita’s qualifications than in his thoughts about a competitor, the Republican consultant Jeff Roe, who had sat in “that very chair” LaCivita occupied and shared his own theories about the 2024 election.

LaCivita would later tell me, on several occasions, that he’d had no misgivings about going to work for Trump. But according to several people close to him, that’s not true. These individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships with LaCivita, told me he’d been torn—appreciating the once-in-a-career opportunity before him while also recognizing that Trump was still every bit the erratic, combustible man who’d renounced his own vice president the moment he ceased to be completely servile. Wiles could sense LaCivita’s reluctance. When Trump decided later that year that he wanted to hire LaCivita, and requested his presence at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, she resorted to deception. “I knew if I said, ‘Chris, you’re going to come up here and the president’s going to put the hard sell on you and you’re going to get hired,’ he might not come,” Wiles told me. “So we tricked him.”

LaCivita went to Bedminster believing that Trump wanted to brainstorm ideas for television ads. Instead, two minutes into the conversation, Trump asked LaCivita: “When can you start?” LaCivita froze; he recalls nodding in the affirmative while struggling to articulate any words. “Susie, make a deal with him,” Trump said. “Let’s get this thing going.”

Almost immediately after he came on board in the fall of 2022, LaCivita’s new boss began to self-destruct. In late November, Trump hosted Ye (the rapper formerly known as Kanye West) and Nick Fuentes, a known anti-Semite and white supremacist, for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Then, in early December, Trump proclaimed on social media that the supposedly fraudulent nature of Biden’s 2020 victory “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Adding insult to self-inflicted injury, Trump blamed anti-abortion activists for the GOP’s poor performance in the midterm elections, infuriating an essential bloc of his political base.

“It was rough. Rough,” LaCivita told me.

In those early days, I wondered, did he regret saying yes to Trump?

“You know, I won’t go—” he stopped himself. “Look, on this level, a campaign is never without its personal and its professional struggles. That’s just the way it is.”

LaCivita wasn’t the only one struggling. When I started to ask Wiles to identify the low point of Trump’s campaign, she cut me off before the question was finished.

“Christmas. He was quiet over Christmas,” she said, alluding to the drubbing he took for the Ye-Fuentes dinner and his post about terminating the Constitution. That week, she told me, Trump asked Wiles a question: “Do you think I would win Florida?’”

He could feel his grip on the party loosening. Trump’s losing streak had coincided with DeSantis winning reelection by a million and a half votes in the fall of 2022. Already some major donors, operatives, and activists had defected to the Florida governor as he built a presidential campaign aimed at toppling Trump in the 2024 GOP primary.

“I said, ‘Yes, of course,’” Wiles recalled, biting her lip. “But I wasn’t sure.”

A representative from Blexit, a campaign to encourage Black Americans to leave the Democratic Party. For several years, polling has shown Black and Hispanic men drifting further right. (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Wiles and LaCivita knew that DeSantis would stake his entire campaign on the Iowa caucuses. In 2016, Ted Cruz had defeated Trump there by building a sprawling ground game of volunteers and paid staffers who coordinated down to the precinct level. DeSantis was copying that blueprint, hiring Cruz’s senior advisers from that race while raising loads of money to construct an even bigger organization.

Trump had never gotten over being outmaneuvered by Cruz in Iowa. In fact, long before he declared America’s federal elections illegitimate, Trump had claimed that the 2016 caucuses were rigged. So when Wiles and LaCivita sat him down to discuss strategy in the state—warning him of what DeSantis had planned—Trump told them, matter-of-factly, “That can never happen again.”

Over the next year, two things became apparent. First, thanks to the constant suck of Trump’s legal fees on his political coffers—campaign insiders say that courtroom costs have accounted for at least 25 cents of every dollar raised by the campaign and affiliated PACs, an estimate that tracks with reporting elsewhere—Trump was not going to be able to spend money like DeSantis could in Iowa. Second, he might not need to.

In Florida, Wiles claims, she had discovered that there were roughly a million Trump supporters who had no history of engagement with the state party apparatus. And yet these people, when contacted by the GOP in 2016 and 2020, would sometimes become Trump’s most devoted volunteers. Wiles believed the same thing was possible in Iowa. So did LaCivita. This didn’t exactly represent a bet-the-house risk; Trump was always going to be favored against a big, fractured field, in Iowa and beyond. Still, Wiles and LaCivita saw in the opening act of the 2024 primary a chance to pressure-test a theory that could prove crucial later in the year.

Scouring precinct-level statistics from the four previous times Trump had competed in Iowa—the primary and general elections in 2016 and 2020—they isolated the most MAGA-friendly pockets of the state. Then, comparing data they’d collected from those areas against the state’s voter file, LaCivita and Wiles found what they were looking for: Some 8,000 of those Iowans they identified as pro-Trump—people who, over the previous seven or eight years, had engaged with Trump’s campaign either physically, digitally, or through the mail—were not even registered to vote. Thousands more who were registered to vote had never participated in a caucus. These were the people who, if converted from sympathizers to supporters, could power Trump’s organization.

Political consultants often consider eligible voters on a one-to-five scale: Ones being the people who never miss an election and hand out campaign literature in their spare time, fives being the reclusive types who can’t be canvassed, have never cast a vote, and probably never will. Most campaigns, especially in Iowa, focus their resources on the ones and twos. “There was this other bucket that we identified: low-propensity Trump supporters,” Wiles said. “We sort of took a gamble, but we were really sure that those tier-three people would be participating, that they would be our voters.”

Several times in the summer and fall of 2023, I heard from DeSantis allies who were bewildered by what Trump’s team was (and wasn’t) doing on the ground. “Our opponents were spending tens of millions of dollars paying for voter contacts for people to knock on doors,” LaCivita said. “And we were spending tens of thousands printing training brochures and pretty hats with golden embroidery on them.”

The gold-embroidered hats were reserved for “captains,” the volunteers responsible for organizing Trump supporters in their precincts. Notably, Wiles said, most of these captains came from the third tier of Iowa’s electorate—they were identified, recruited, and then trained in one of the hundreds of caucus-education sessions Trump’s team held around the state. At that point, the captains were given a list of 10 targets in their community who fit a similar profile, and told to turn them out for the caucuses. It was called the “10 for Trump” program. The best way to find and mobilize more low-propensity Trump supporters, the thinking went, was to deputize people just like them.

It appeared to work. On caucus night, as the wind chill plunged to 40 degrees below zero in parts of Iowa—and voter turnout plunged too—Trump won 51 percent of the vote, breaking an Iowa record, and clobbered DeSantis despite being heavily outspent. According to LaCivita, the precincts where the campaign invested heavily in the “10 for Trump” program saw a significant jump in turnout compared with the rest of the state.

That’s the story Wiles and LaCivita are telling about Iowa, anyway. Not everyone believes it. Trump enjoyed a sizable lead in the Iowa polls from the start, thanks in part to his allies blanketing the state with TV ads before his opponents were even out of the gate. Several people who worked on competing campaigns in Iowa said it was Trump’s first indictment, in March 2023—not his campaign’s ground game or anything else—that made him unbeatable. “When the Democrats started using the law to go after Trump, it hardened all of his very conservative supporters, some of whom had softened after 2022,” Sam Cooper, who served as political director for DeSantis, told me. “It was a race the Trump campaign locked up well before caucus day.”

The consensus of the political class post-2020 held that Trump’s base was maxed out; that any MAGA sympathizers who’d gone undiscovered in 2016 had, by the time of his reelection bid, been identified and incorporated into the GOP turnout machine. Wiles and LaCivita disagreed. They built a primary campaign on the premise that an untapped market for Trumpism still existed. But they knew that the true test of their theory was never going to come in Iowa.

Attendees at the Turning Point event in Phoenix (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Six miles inland from Mar-a-Lago, tucked inside a contemporary 15-floor office building that overlooks a Home Depot parking lot, is a presidential-campaign headquarters so small and austere that nobody seems to realize it’s there. When I told the security guard at the front desk that I’d come to visit “the Trump offices,” she gave me a quizzical look; only later, after hanging around for several hours, was I clued in to the joke that nobody in this building—not any of the dozen law firms, or the rare-coin dealer, or apparently even the security guard—has any idea exactly who occupies the second and sixth floors.

In fairness, Trump’s team used to inhabit just one of those floors. It was only after the merger with the Republican National Committee in early March, which eliminated dozens of supposedly duplicative jobs and relocated most of the RNC staff to Palm Beach, that additional space became necessary. Still, that a former president whose 2020 headquarters was something out of a Silicon Valley infomercial—all touch-screen entryways and floor-to-ceiling glass offices with dazzling views of the Potomac—was housing his 2024 operation in a plebeian office park signaled a sort of inverse ostentation, saying much about the personalities and priorities behind this campaign.

From day one, people familiar with internal deliberations told me, Wiles and LaCivita emphasized efficiency. There would be none of the excesses that became a staple of Trump’s 2020 reelection effort, which raised more than $1 billion yet unfathomably ran short of cash in the home stretch of the election. They needed to control all the money. And for that, they needed to control the national party apparatus.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s campaign has lost whatever substance it once had]

The Trump campaign’s takeover of the RNC in March—installing the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as the new co-chair, while establishing LaCivita as chief of staff and de facto chief executive, all of it long before Trump had technically secured the party’s nomination—didn’t sit well with many Republicans. Appearances aside, the imperatives of a presidential campaign are not always aligned with those of the RNC, whose job it is to advance the party’s interests up and down the ballot and across the country. “Party politics is a team sport. It’s bigger than Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump or any one candidate,” said Henry Barbour, a longtime Mississippi committeeman, who has fought to prevent the national party’s funds from going to Trump’s legal defense. “Nobody’s ever going to agree on exactly how you split the money up, but you’ve got to take a holistic approach in thinking about all the campaigns, not just one.”

The RNC under Ronna McDaniel, who chaired the national party from early 2017 until LaCivita’s takeover, had become a frequent target of Trump’s ire. He didn’t like that the party remained neutral in the early stages of the 2024 primary—and he was especially furious that McDaniel commissioned debates among the candidates. But what might have bothered him most was the RNC’s priorities: McDaniel was continuing to pour money into field operations, stressing the need for a massive get-out-the-vote program, but showed little interest in his pet issue of “election integrity.”

“Tell you what,” Trump said to Wiles and LaCivita. “I’ll turn out the vote. You spend that money protecting it.”

The marching orders were clear: Trump’s lieutenants were to dismantle much of the RNC’s existing ground game and divert resources to a colossal new election-integrity program—a legion of lawyers on retainer, hundreds of training seminars for poll monitors nationwide, a goal of 100,000 volunteers organized and assigned to stand watch outside voting precincts, tabulation centers, and even individual drop boxes.

To sell party officials on this dramatic tactical shift, Wiles and LaCivita pointed to the inefficiencies of the old RNC approach—of which there were plenty—and argued that they could run a more effective ground game with fewer resources. “The RNC has always operated on number of calls, number of door knocks, and nobody paid any attention to what the result of each of those was. We have no use for that,” Wiles told me. “It doesn’t matter to me how many calls you’ve made. What matters to me is the number of calls you’ve made and gotten a positive response from a voter … They considered success volume. It’s not.”

Several RNC insiders told me they agreed, at least broadly, with this critique. Yet they also said Trump’s team had grossly exaggerated the party’s past expenditures to serve the campaign’s mission of reallocating resources toward Trump’s election-integrity obsession. For example, LaCivita told me that, based on his review of the party’s 2020 performance, the RNC spent more than $140 million but made just 17.5 million voter-contact attempts. When I challenged that number, he conceded that it might have been closer to 27 million. But according to an internal RNC database I obtained, the party knocked on nearly 32 million doors in competitive states alone, and made another 113 million phone calls, for a total of some 145 million voter-contact attempts.

A wide array of party officials I spoke with said that McDaniel, who declined to comment for this story, had lost the confidence of her members. And none of them disputed that the RNC ground game needed reassessing. But the abrupt directional change announced by Wiles and LaCivita, these officials told me, could only be interpreted as financial triage. It was unfortunate enough that Trump’s legal-defense fund steadily drained the campaign coffers; his insistence on this sweeping, ego-stroking program to “protect the vote” was going to cost an untold fortune. Given these constraints, Wiles and LaCivita knew that they couldn’t run a traditional Republican field program.

Which is how I got to talking with James Blair.

To thousands of cheering supporters, Trump declared that the 2024 election would be “too big to rig.” (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

“In private equity, or investment in general, you look for highest upside at smallest input,” Blair, the 35-year-old political director for Trump and the RNC, told me, trying to justify their cut-rate ground game. “In a very basic sense, you can try to do everything all the time—and often the result is you do nothing particularly well—or you can try to do a few things that deliver high value compared to their relative input level.”

We were sitting in a sterile second-floor conference room, the whiteboard to my left freshly wiped down, at the campaign’s headquarters. The space outside was more colorful, with depictions of the 45th president adorning the walls: an elaborate In Trump We Trust mural; a blown-up birthday poster, signed by some of his spiritual advisers, depicting Trump under the watch of a lamb, a lion, a white horse, and two doves; a framed replica of Trump’s mug shot, in the style of the Obama-era HOPE poster, above the words NEVER SURRENDER. On a stretch of wall outside the conference room, large black letters spelled out the campaign’s mantra: Joe Biden is: Weak, Failed and Dishonest.

Blair wore the expression of a man who knows something the rest of us don’t. He studied finance at Florida State, then accepted an entry-level job at the statehouse in Tallahassee, with plans to eventually pivot toward a career in business. Instead, he ended up running legislative races for the state GOP in 2016, overseeing the DeSantis campaign’s voter-contact program in 2018, and then joining the new governor’s office as deputy chief of staff. As with many Wiles loyalists, Blair’s time in DeSantis’s orbit was brief, and his reunion with Wiles in Trumpworld—her allies on the campaign are known as “the Florida mafia”—was inevitable.

Blair, like Wiles, believes that campaigns have become beholden to empty statistics. “If you chase numbers in terms of top-line output, you make tactical decisions that increase that goal,” he said. “So that would be dense suburban areas where you can hit more doors per hour, right? More doors per body [equals] higher output.” The problem, Blair said, is that most of those doors aren’t worth knocking on: Turnout is already highest in the suburbs, and fewer and fewer voters there remain truly persuadable, for reasons of hardened partisan identification along economic or cultural lines. And yet, since the days of Karl Rove, campaigns have blanketed the country with paid canvassers, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in contacting people who are already going to vote and who, in most cases, already know whom they’re voting for.

This is the crux of Team Trump’s argument: Now that the electoral landscape looks so different—both campaigns fighting over just a handful of states, a finite number of true swing voters in each—shouldn’t the party reassess its strategy? Especially given the campaign’s financial burdens, some Republicans agree that the answer is yes. One of them is Rove himself.

“There are two groups of people to consider: the low-propensity Republicans and the persuadable swing [voters]. Be careful that you’re not antagonizing one with your outreach to the other. You don’t want people knocking on the swing doors wearing ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ shirts,” Rove told me. When it comes to running a ground game in this environment, he added, “the priority should be maximizing turnout among the true believers,” who, if they vote, are a lock for Trump.

This isn’t to say Trump’s campaign won’t be targeting those persuadable voters. It’s just a matter of preferred medium: If Wiles has to drop millions of dollars to engage the suburban mom outside Milwaukee, she’d rather that mom spend 30 seconds with one of LaCivita’s TV spots than 30 seconds with a pamphlet-carrying college student on her front porch. This is the essence of Trump’s voter-contact strategy: pursuing identified swing voters—college-educated women, working-class Latinos, urban Black men under 40—with micro-targeted media, while earmarking ground resources primarily for reaching those secluded, MAGA-sympathetic voters who have proved difficult to engage.

[Stephanie McCrummen: Biden has a bigger problem than the debate]

The campaign, I was told, hopes to recruit somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 captains in each of the seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They won’t all be low-propensity Trump supporters, as they were in Iowa—there isn’t time to be that selective—but they will be trained in the same way. Each will be assigned a roster of people in their communities, 10 to 50 in total, who fit the profile of Trump-friendly and electorally disengaged. “Our in-house program is focused on doing the hardest-to-do but highest-impact thing,” Blair said, which is contacting the MAGA-inclined voters whom previous Trump campaigns missed.

In truth, “hardest-to-do” might be an understatement. Blair was describing this program to me in early June; building it out by the time early voting begins in September is akin to a three-month moonshot. (He declined to share benchmarks demonstrating progress.) Republican officials in key states, meanwhile, have complained for months about the Trump campaign’s practically nonexistent presence on the ground. When they’ve been told of the plan to scale back traditional canvassing operations in favor of a narrower approach, their frustration has at times turned to fury.

“The RNC had promised us a lot of resources, but there’s been a huge pullback. And the Trump team isn’t standing up its own operation, so we’re really behind,” Jason Cabel Roe, a GOP consultant in Michigan who’s handling the state’s most competitive congressional race, told me. “The state party’s a mess; they’re not going to pick up the slack. When I talk to other Republicans here, they say the same thing: ‘Where are the resources for a field operation?’”

Trump officials acknowledge that these concerns are legitimate. Democrats have opened hundreds of field offices and positioned more than 1,000 paid staffers across the battleground map, while the Trump team is running most of its presidential operations out of existing county-party offices and employing fewer than a dozen paid staffers in most states. The great equalizer, they believe, is intensity: Whereas Democrats have struggled to stoke their base—multiple swing-state Biden allies told me that volunteer recruiting has been anemic—Republicans have reported having more helpers than they know what to do with. In this context, Trump’s enlisting unpaid yet highly motivated voters to work their own neighborhoods, while the Democrats largely rely on parachuting paid staffers into various locations, might not be the mismatch Republicans fear.

The Trump campaign’s approach wouldn’t be feasible in most presidential elections. But in 2024, LaCivita told me, there are “probably four” true battlegrounds: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (He said the campaign feels confident, based on public and private polling, as well as its own internal modeling, that Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina are moving out of reach for Biden.) In this scenario, Trump’s team doesn’t need to execute a national campaign. They are “basically running four or five Senate races,” Beth Myers, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign against Barack Obama, told me. “And they can get away with it, because the playing field is just that small now.”

Myers is no Trump fan. Still, she credits Wiles and LaCivita with developing a strategy that recognizes both the “excesses” of past Republican campaigns and the realities of a new electorate. In 2012, Romney and Obama fought over a much larger map that included Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, and even, at least initially, Missouri and Indiana. “Vendors got involved and started telling us that we needed seven ‘touches’—that the number of contacts was more important than who we were contacting,” Myers said. “But we got that wrong. I think the quality of the touch is much more important than the quantity of the touch, and I think that’s what Chris is doing here.”

Notably, thanks to a new Federal Election Commission opinion that allows campaigns to coordinate canvassing efforts with outside groups, there will still be an enormous field operation working on Trump’s behalf. Blair explained that allied organizations such as Turning Point Action, America First Works, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition would handle much of the right’s canvassing effort moving forward, focusing on the “standardized volume plays” as the campaign itself takes a specialized approach. (This isn’t the relief Republicans officials have been hoping for: Turning Point, for example, became a punch line among GOP strategists and donors after it promised to deliver Arizona— where its founder, Charlie Kirk, resides—in the 2022 midterms, only for Democrats to win every major statewide race. Kirk’s group is assuring dubious party officials and major donors that its operation has scaled up, but several told me they aren’t buying it.)

Blair knows the campaign can’t ignore the outcry from local Republicans. As we ended our conversation, he was heading to his office to lead a conference call with county chairs in battleground states, part of an effort to “educate” them about the program and “get buy-in.”

If one thing has calmed Republican nerves, it’s the recent, record-breaking fundraising haul that accompanied Trump’s conviction in the New York hush-money case. A campaign that was once being badly outraised brought in more than $70 million in the 48 hours after the verdict. Suddenly—and to the shock of both campaigns—Trump entered July with more cash on hand than Biden.

But this windfall hasn’t altered the plans of Wiles and LaCivita. Even when the money was pouring in, it was too late, they told me; the campaign’s tactical decisions for getting out the vote had already been made. Around this same time, I noticed that it wasn’t just those swing-state Republicans getting anxious. The day before I visited headquarters, one Trump aide, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, confessed to me that doubts about the field strategy permeate this campaign. This person predicted that Wiles, LaCivita, and Blair will either look like geniuses who revolutionized Republican politics—or the biggest morons ever put in charge of a presidential campaign.

“I accept that framing,” Blair told me, flashing a smirk. “And I live by it every day.”

As Blair and I stood up to leave the conference room, he stopped me. The smirk was gone. He wanted to make something clear: He takes these decisions very seriously. “Because if we lose,” he said, “I think there’s a pretty good chance they’re going to throw us in jail.”

It was a startling moment. I’d heard campaign aides make offhand remarks before about expecting to end up incarcerated for helping Trump. But this was more direct, more paranoid. Blair was telling me that, in a second Biden administration, he expected deep-state flunkies to arrest him for the crime of opposing the president. And he wasn’t alone. Brian Hughes, a campaign spokesperson known for his extensive government work and generally affable demeanor, nodded in agreement as Blair spoke. “I think we all feel that way,” Hughes said.

A sign for Turning Point’s “Chase the Vote” initiative, a door-knocking effort aimed at encouraging mail-in voting. In Arizona, Wiles and LaCivita have outsourced much of the Trump campaign’s canvassing operations to Turning Point. (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Throughout our conversations, Wiles and LaCivita kept insisting to me that something important has changed about Donald Trump. As they tell it, the man who once loathed making donor calls is now dialing for dollars at seven in the morning, unprompted. The man who could never be bothered with the fine print of Iowa’s caucuses finally sat down and learned the rules—and then started explaining them to Iowans at his pre-caucus events. The man who treated 2016 like a reality show and 2020 like a spin-off now speaks of little else but winning.

This may all be the stuff of reverential narratives. Yet there is no denying the consequence of Trump’s evolution on one tactical front: voting by mail. In 2020, the president railed against the practice, refusing to heed the advice of campaign aides who told him, given the shifting nature of consumer behaviors during the pandemic, that absentee votes would almost certainly decide the election. This time around, Wiles led a months-long effort to educate her boss on the practice, explaining how Republicans in Florida and elsewhere had built sprawling, successful operations targeting people who prefer not to vote in person. Wiles pressed Trump on the subject over the course of at least a dozen conversations, stretching from the pre-Iowa season all the way into the late springtime, pleading with him to bless the campaign’s effort to organize a voter-contact strategy built around absentee ballots.

“It wasn’t like we went in there one day and said, ‘Okay, today we’re gonna say we like mail-in ballots.’ It doesn’t happen that way,” Wiles told me at one point. “As he better understood campaign mechanics, he understood, you know, why this—”

“Winning!” LaCivita chimed in, palms raised, growing impatient with the explanation.

Wiles shot him a look. “Why this was important,” she said.

The funny thing, Wiles noted, is that she can’t take credit for convincing Trump. It was “a person who will remain nameless”—someone from outside the campaign, who happened to be kibitzing with the former president about his own reasons for voting by mail—who said something that jolted Trump’s brain. “That’s when the switch flipped. And that is very typical,” Wiles said, chuckling. “You work on something, work on something, work on something, and then in some bizarre, unexpected way, somebody phrases it differently—or it’s somebody that he particularly respects in a particular area who says it—and that’s it.”

The campaign is now engineering a mobilization program aimed at making absentee voting seamless and customizable based on each voter’s jurisdiction. (The initiative, dubbed “Swamp the Vote,” comes with face-saving disclaimers about this being necessary only to defeat the sinister, election-stealing left.) This project might not assuage the Trump-fueled fears of Republican base voters, but that’s hardly the point. His campaign sees the mail-voting push as a path to attracting a slice of the electorate that the Republican Party has spent two decades ignoring: low-propensity left-leaning voters, especially young men of color, who, due to some combination of panic and boredom, turned out for Biden in 2020.

These voters are one explanation as to how Democrats ran up an unthinkable 81-million-vote total in the last presidential election—and, more to the point, increased their margins in places such as Phoenix, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. For the past several years, however, polling has shown Black and Hispanic men drifting further right—a trend sharply accelerated by the Biden-Trump rematch. If the Republican nominee can siphon off any significant chunk of those voters in November—persuading them to mail in a ballot for him instead of sitting out the election—the math for the Democrats isn’t going to work. That could make November a realignment election, much like Obama’s win in 2008: one that shifts perceptions of voter coalitions and sends the losing side scrambling to recalibrate its approach.

Ironically enough, it was Obama’s dominant showings with nonwhite voters in 2008 and 2012—winning them by margins of four to one—that inspired a Republican autopsy report that called for kinder, gentler engagement with minority communities. Now record numbers of Black and Latino men might be won over by the same candidate who prescribes mass deportations, trafficks in openly racist rhetoric, and talks about these voters in ways that border on parody. “He says stuff like ‘The Blacks love me!’’” LaCivita remarked to me at one point. He threw his arms up, looking equal parts dumbfounded and delighted. “Who the fuck would say that?”

Wiles, for her part, wanted to be clear about the campaign’s aims. “It’s so targeted—we’re not fighting for Black people,” she said. “We’re fighting for Black men between 18 and 34.”

[Ronald Brownstein: How Trump is dividing minority voters]

When she told me this, we were standing together backstage—LaCivita, Wiles, and me—at the Turning Point USA event in Detroit. Most of the faces in the crowd were white; the same had been true a few hours earlier, when Trump spoke at a Black church on the city’s impoverished west side. But that didn’t matter much to Wiles and LaCivita. The voters they’re targeting wouldn’t even know Trump was in Detroit that day, much less come out to see him. These aren’t people whose neighborhoods will be canvassed by Republican volunteers; rather, they will be the subject of a sweeping media campaign aimed at fueling disillusionment with the Democratic Party.

As we stood chatting, I remembered something that one of Trump’s allies had told me months earlier—a sentiment that has since been popularized and described in different ways: “For every Karen we lose, we’re going to win a Jamal and an Enrique.” Wiles nodded in approval.

“That’s a fact. I believe it. And I so believe we’re realigning the party,” she told me.

Wiles paused. “And I don’t think we’re gonna lose all the Karens, either. They buy eggs. They buy gas. They know. They may not tell their neighbor, or their carpool line, but they know.”

Just to be clear, I asked: If the Trump campaign converts significant numbers of Black and Hispanic voters, and holds on to a sizable portion of suburban white women, aren’t we talking about a blowout in November?

“We are,” Wiles said.

This is the scenario Trump craves, the one he’s been talking about at all of his recent rallies: winning by margins that are “too big to rig.” I had to wonder, though: What if the campaign’s models are wrong? What if, yet again, the election is decided by thousands of votes across a few key states? Wiles and LaCivita had accommodated Trump’s request to spend lavishly on an “election integrity” effort. But had they accommodated themselves to his lies about the last election—and what might be required of them next?

One afternoon in early June, as we sat in the hallway of an Arizona megachurch—Trump was delivering some fire and brimstone inside the sanctuary, decrying the evils of illegal immigration and drawing chants of “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!”—I asked LaCivita if he felt additional pressure running this particular campaign: Winning meant Trump would avoid further criminal prosecution; losing could mean more convictions and even incarceration. Either way, I suggested, this would be Trump’s last campaign.

“I don’t know,” LaCivita said, a smile spreading across his face. “I read somewhere that he was gonna change the Constitution so he could run again!” He was soon doubled over, howling and smacking both palms on his knees. It was an odd scene. When he finally came up for air, LaCivita told me, “I’m being sarcastic, of course.” Another pause. “I’m joking. Of course I am!”

If he was really joking, I replied, there was no need to keep clarifying that it was a joke.

“No, no,” LaCivita said, straightening his tie. “I just get a kick out of it.”

LaCivita tries to laugh off stress whenever possible. The Trump campaign, he said, is a “360-degree shooting gallery” in which “everybody is coming after you, internally and externally,” all the time. On any given day, he might be cleaning up after a particular staffer who has gone rogue with reporters, or extinguishing rumors he says are being spread about him by Trump’s confidant Richard Grenell (“he just likes to cause trouble”), or refuting supposed policy plans for the second Trump administration being floated by “those quote-unquote allies” on the MAGA right. (“It’s the Project ’25 yokels from Heritage. They and AFPI”—the America First Policy Institute, another think tank—“have their own little groups that raise money. They grift, and they pitch policy,” LaCivita said. “They have their own goals and their own agendas, and they have nothing to do with winning an election.”) In his mind, all the “noise”—Trump’s authoritarian spitballing very much included—is a source of levity.

There was a time, however, when LaCivita didn’t find it so funny. According to several people close to him, he was alarmed by Trump’s rise in 2016. After he came to terms with Trumpism, as so many in the party eventually did, his qualms were rekindled by the January 6 insurrection. Then came the opportunity to help run the 2024 campaign. Once again, LaCivita hesitated. And once again, LaCivita gave in—only to find himself, a few weeks into the job, working for a man who was dining with a neo-Nazi and toying with the idea of terminating the Constitution. After a while, he became resigned to these feelings of dissonance, friends told me, and eventually desensitized to them altogether. His focus was winning: demolishing Biden, electing Trump, ushering in massive Republican legislative majorities. But had he given much thought to what that success might mean?

Not long after our conversation in Arizona, I met LaCivita for breakfast on Capitol Hill, near his office at the RNC. Later that day, his boss would meet with House and Senate Republicans—many of whom, like LaCivita, had been ready to throw Trump overboard a couple of years ago, and who now stood and saluted like the North Korean military. As we sipped coffee, I asked LaCivita about the potential “termination” of the Constitution that the former president floated in 2022.

“I don’t know if he used the word terminate,” LaCivita said, squinting his eyes. “I think he may have said change or something.” (Trump did, in fact, say termination.)

Certainly it’s plausible that a hired gun, someone who cares about winning and winning only, could have genuinely forgotten the language used by his employer. And yet, according to several people familiar with the fallout, LaCivita—a Purple Heart recipient who lost friends in the Gulf War—was so bothered by the social-media post that he confronted Trump about it himself.

LaCivita confirmed to me that he’d called Trump about the post. In his telling, Trump responded that people were twisting his words, then agreed to issue a statement declaring his love for the Constitution. And that was that, LaCivita said, offering a shrug. He likened it to football: When the quarterback throws an interception, the team has to move on. No dwelling on the last play.

As he shoveled over-hard eggs into his mouth, Marine Corps cufflinks were visible beneath his dark suit. LaCivita had sworn an oath to the Constitution; he’d risked his life for the Constitution. Didn’t a part of him, when he read that post, think about the implications beyond political strategy?

“I mean, he took an oath to the Constitution too, as president of the United States,” LaCivita said. “I never put myself in a position of judging somebody.”

LaCivita thought for a moment. He told me that he’d sat in the courtroom on the second day of Trump’s hush-money trial in May. “Listening to the stuff they’re saying, meant for no other reason than to harm the guy politically—it just pissed me off,” he said. “It made me that much more determined.”

Now we were getting somewhere. Do the people who enter Trump’s orbit, I asked, become hardened by the experience? Do they adopt his persecution complex? Do they take the insults to him personally?

“I don’t psychoanalyze myself, and I sure as hell don’t psychoanalyze the people that I work for,” LaCivita told me. “But I truly believe that the things that he can do as president can actually make the country a whole lot better. You don’t do this at this level for transactional purposes.”

No doubt LaCivita is conservative by nature: pro-gun, anti-abortion, viscerally opposed to Democratic orthodoxy on illegal immigration and gender identity. At the same time, he has worked for Republicans who span the party’s ideological spectrum—most of them moderates who, he admits, reflect his own “center right” beliefs.

Just recently, I told LaCivita, I’d read an interview he’d given to his hometown newspaper, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, more than a decade ago. One quote stood out. Reflecting on his appetite for the fray—as a Marine, as a hunter, as a political combatant—LaCivita told the interviewer: “A warrior without war is miserable.”

When I looked up from reading the quote, LaCivita was nodding.

“People hire me to beat Democrats,” he said. “That’s what I do. That’s what Chris LaCivita does. He beats Democrats, period.”

He paused. “And Donald Trump gave me the opportunity of a lifetime.”

That much is true. Political consultants spend their careers dreaming of the day they’re called upon to elect a president, and those who succeed gain a status that guarantees wealth and prestige. I couldn’t help but think of how Wiles, the seasoned strategist who’d been humiliated by Florida’s young hot-shot governor, had hitched her career to Trump during his post–January 6 political exile. “The last time he was in Washington,” she said, “he was being run out of there on an airplane where nobody came to say goodbye.” Now Trump was barging his way back into the White House—and those same Republicans who once accused him of treachery, she noted, were cheering him on.

“He didn’t change,” Wiles told me. “They changed.”

I wanted to know if Wiles had changed. She boasted to me, during one conversation, that she had been somewhat successful in getting her boss to cut back on the rigged-election talk on the campaign trail. (“People want to have hope, they want to be inspired, they want to look forward,” she said.) But in that same conversation, Wiles could not answer the question of whether the 2020 election had actually been stolen. “I’m not sure,” she said, repeating the phrase three times.

And her boss?

“He thinks he knows,” Wiles said.

She paused, seeming to catch herself. “But we know,” Wiles added, “that it can’t happen again.”

Her moment of hesitancy stood out. One of the maxims of this campaign, something LaCivita drills into his staff, is that self-doubt destroys. (“You’re either right or you’re wrong,” he said. But you can’t second-guess decisions “once the bullet leaves the chamber.”) Which, as we sat inside that diner on Capitol Hill, one block from the scene of the January 6 carnage, returned us to the question of Trump’s threat against the Constitution. If LaCivita were to acknowledge his trepidation about the man he’s working for—

“Boom!” he said, interrupting with a faux gunshot noise. “You’re done. You’re done. Hesitation in combat generally gets you killed.”

Even if you’re hesitating for good reason?

“Hesitation in combat gets you killed,” LaCivita said again, leaning across the table this time. He pounded his fist to punctuate every word: “I. Don’t. Hesitate.”

In that moment, the sum of my conversations with LaCivita and Wiles and their campaign deputies began to make sense. For all their lofty talk of transformation—transforming their boss’s candidacy, transforming Republican politics, transforming the electorate, transforming the country—it continues to be Trump who does the transforming.

The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Authoritarianism

2023-12-25T07:00:00-05:00

This Christmas season, I have been reflecting on the words of my favorite author, C. S. Lewis, who once observed: “I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

Speaking about American evangelicalism was never my intention. Having grown up steeped in Christianity’s right-wing subculture—the son of a megachurch minister, a follower of Jesus, someone who self-identified as “evangelical” since childhood—I was a reliable defender of the faith. I rejected the caricatures of people like my parents. I took offense at efforts to mock and marginalize evangelicals. I tried to see the best in the Church, even when the Church was at its worst.

It took the loss of my father, and the traumatic events surrounding his funeral—as I write in the prologue of my new book, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, which is excerpted in our latest issue—to reconsider the implications of that silence.

The corruption of American Christianity is nothing new: Modern-day pharisees from Jerry Falwell Sr. to Paula White have spent 50 years weaponizing the Gospel to win elections and dominate the country, exploiting the cultural insecurities of their unwitting brethren for political, professional, and financial gain, all while reducing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a caricature in the eyes of unbelievers. The resulting collapse of the Church’s reputation in this country—with Sunday attendance, positive perceptions of organized religion, and the number of self-identified Christians all at historic lows—leaves evangelicals estranged from their secular neighbors like never before. Unbelievers might well prefer it this way. They might be tempted to shrug and move along, assuming that the crack-up of evangelicalism isn’t their problem. They are mistaken.

The crisis at hand is not simply that Christ’s message has been corroded, but that his Church has been radicalized. The state-ordered closings of sanctuaries during COVID-19, the conspiracy-fueled objections to Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, the misinformation around vaccines and educational curricula—these and other culture-war flash points have accelerated notions of imminent Armageddon inside American Christendom. A community that has always felt misunderstood now feels marginalized, ostracized, even persecuted. This feeling is not relegated to the fringes of evangelicalism. In fact, this fear—that Christianity is in the crosshairs of the government, that an evil plot to topple America’s Judeo-Christian heritage hinges on silencing believers and subjugating the Church—now animates the religious right in ways that threaten the very foundations of our democracy.

“You sound like a hysterical maniac if you say the government’s coming after us. But I believe they are,” Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor and longtime Trump loyalist, told me in the book. “It happened in Nazi Germany. They didn’t put six million Jews in the crematorium immediately … It was a slow process of marginalization, isolation, and then the ‘final solution.’ I think you’re seeing that happen in America. I believe there’s evidence that the Biden administration has weaponized the Internal Revenue Service to come after churches.” (The “evidence” Jeffress cited in making this leap—bureaucratic regulations clearing the way for concentration camps—was nonexistent. When pushed, he mentioned a single court case that was ultimately decided in favor of religious liberty.)

Mobilizing in response to this perceived threat, the forces of Christian nationalism—those who seek to demolish the wall between Church and state, asserting far-right religious dominion over the government as well as the country’s core institutions—are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party. It is no coincidence that, just recently, Donald Trump began suggesting that he would ban any migrant from entering the United States unless they are Christian. Those who don’t share “our religion,” the famously impious ex-president pronounced, won’t be welcome here if he’s elected again. Many of the people poised to hold high-ranking posts in a second Trump administration don’t view today’s societal disputes through the lens of Republican versus Democrat or of conservative versus progressive, but rather of good versus evil.

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism is authoritarianism infused with religious justification. It hardly matters whether the would-be tyrant is personally devout; Vladimir Putin’s lack of theology didn’t stop him from partnering with the Russian Orthodox Church to frame the bloody invasion of Ukraine as God’s ordained conquest of a satanic stronghold. To believe that it couldn’t happen here—mass conflict rooted in identitarian conviction and driven by religious zeal—is to ignore both 20th-century precedent and the escalating holy-war rhetoric inside the evangelical Church.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe that God took on flesh in order to model servanthood and self-sacrifice; I believe he commanded us to love our neighbor, to turn the other cheek toward those who wish us harm, to show grace toward outsiders and let our light shine so they might glorify our heavenly Father. Not all professing Christians bother adhering to these biblical precepts, but many millions of American believers still do. It is incumbent upon them to stand up to this extremism in the Church.

Yet the responsibility is not theirs alone. No matter your personal belief system, the reality is, we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society—none—without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture. This Christmas, I pray it might be so.

My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

2023-11-28T06:00:00-05:00

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It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.

The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was important. After the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?

As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.

[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson on Trump and the evangelical temptation]

Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism, yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance.

Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. In response to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, had tweeted, “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—the son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense. “Who are you @drmoore?” he replied. “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?”

This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.”

Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air. “Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked.

I stumbled. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus and Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter.

[From the June 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on how politics poisoned the evangelical church]

As the interview ended, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American evangelical Church. Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side bowing to earthly idols of nation and influence and fame—but I was too scared to say so. My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis.

Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues. As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone.

The last time I saw him was nine days earlier. The CEO of Politico, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party for me at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis—but before long he was holding court with diplomats and Fortune 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience.

It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.

“You see all these people?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.

“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.

The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.

“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”

Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was.

Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking Communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept him as his personal savior.

Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ too.

When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad said he felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might have been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling just about every material item they owned, leaving their high-salaried jobs in New York, and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

For the next two decades, they worked in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived, in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped books had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-18th century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and it was there, for the next 26 years, that he served as senior pastor.

Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised in the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high-school dates to Bible study, working as a janitor during a year of community college. I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At 9 years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex.

The last time I’d been there, 18 months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes. Now I would need to give a very different speech.

Standing in the back of the sanctuary, my three older brothers and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we’d arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek-linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away, in 2008, Cornerstone had grown from a couple hundred members to a couple thousand.

Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation.

They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.

It got to the point where I had to take a walk. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.

That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give at Dad’s funeral the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice.

In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who’d taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor.

Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me the day before, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I suggested, with some sarcasm, that if they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh ?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.

A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. Here, I thought, is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these women. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.

Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It had been left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad had called a friend, a man who’d mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life.

He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself.

However, there was still hope. Jesus forgives, and so could this man. If I used my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was supposedly sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.

I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then she flung the piece of paper into the air and, with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

There has never been consensus on what, exactly, it means to be an evangelical. Competing and overlapping definitions have been offered for generations, some more widely embraced than others. Billy Graham, a man synonymous with the term, once remarked that he himself would like to inquire as to its true meaning. By the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of televangelists and political activists, what was once a religious signifier began transforming into a partisan movement. Evangelical soon became synonymous with conservative Christian, and eventually with white conservative Republican.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at reductive analyses of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what he believed an evangelical to be: someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.

From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, less a lifestyle than a hobby, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church.

The author and his father in 2019 (Courtesy of Tim Alberta)

But for all his successes, Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country.

Once a talented young athlete, Dad came down with tuberculosis at 16 years old. He was hospitalized for four months; at one point, doctors thought he might die. He eventually recovered, and with the Vietnam War escalating, he joined the Marine Corps. But at the Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, he fell behind in the physical work. His lungs were not healthy. After receiving an honorable discharge, Dad went home saddled with a certain shame. In the ensuing years, he learned that dozens of the second lieutenants he’d trained alongside at Quantico—as well as a bunch of guys he’d grown up with—were killed in action. It burdened him for the rest of his life.

This experience, and his disgust with the hippies and the drug culture and the war protesters, turned Dad into a law-and-order conservative. Marinating in the language of social conservatism during his time in seminary—this was the heyday of the Moral Majority—he emerged a full-spectrum Republican. His biggest political concern was abortion; in 1947, my grandmother, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage, had almost ended her pregnancy with him. (She had a sudden change of heart at the clinic and walked out, a decision my dad would always attribute to holy intercession.) But he also waded into the culture wars: gay marriage, education curriculum, morality in public life.

Dad always told us that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership. He was so relieved when Bill Clinton’s second term ended that he and Mom hosted a small viewing party in our living room for George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, to celebrate the return of morality to the White House. Over time, however, his emphasis shifted. One Sunday in early 2010, when I was home visiting, he showed the congregation an ominous video in which Christian leaders warned about the menace of Obamacare. I told him afterward that it felt inappropriate for a worship service; he disagreed. We would butt heads more regularly in the years that followed. It was always loving, always respectful. Yet clearly our philosophical paths were diverging—a reality that became unavoidable during the presidency of Donald Trump.

Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.”

To his credit, Dad was not some lazy, knee-jerk partisan. He was vocal about certain issues—gun violence, poverty, immigration, the trappings of wealth—that did not play to his constituency at Cornerstone.

Dad wasn’t a Christian nationalist; he wanted nothing to do with theocracy. He just believed that God had blessed the United States uniquely—and felt that anyone who fought to preserve those blessings was doing the Lord’s work. This made for an unfortunate scene in 2007, when a young congregant at Cornerstone, a Marine named Mark Kidd, died during a fourth tour of duty in Iraq. Public opinion had swung sharply against the war, and Democrats were demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home. My dad was devastated by Kidd’s death. They had corresponded while Kidd was overseas and met for prayer in between his deployments. Dad’s grief as a pastor gave way to his grievance as a Republican supporter of the war: He made it known to local Democratic politicians that they weren’t welcome at the funeral.

“I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander in chief,” Dad thundered from his pulpit, earning a raucous standing ovation. “Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?”

This touched off a firestorm in our community. Most of the church members were all for Dad’s remarks, but even in a conservative town like Brighton, plenty of people felt uneasy about turning a fallen Marine’s church memorial into a partisan political rally. Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow the president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ himself.

I know Dad regretted it. But he couldn’t help himself. His own personal story—and his broader view of the United States as a godly nation, a source of hope in a despondent world—was impossible to divorce from his pastoral ministry. Every time a member of the military came to church dressed in uniform, Dad would recognize them by name, ask them to stand up, and lead the church in a rapturous round of applause. This was one of the first things his successor changed at Cornerstone.

Eighteen months after Dad’s funeral, in February 2021, I sat down across from that successor, Chris Winans, in a booth at the Brighton Bar & Grill. It’s a comfortable little haunt on Main Street, backing up to a wooden playground and a millpond. But Winans didn’t look comfortable. He looked nervous, even a bit paranoid, glancing around him as we began to speak. Soon, I would understand why.

Dad had spent years looking for an heir apparent. Several associate pastors had come and gone. Cornerstone was his life’s work—he had led the church throughout virtually its entire history—so there would be no settling in his search for a successor. The uncertainty wore him down. Dad worried that he might never find the right guy. And then one day, while attending a denominational meeting, he met Winans, a young associate pastor from Goodwill—the very church where he’d been saved, and where he’d worked his first job out of seminary. Dad hired him away from Goodwill to lead a young-adults ministry at Cornerstone, and from the moment Winans arrived, I could tell that he was the one.

Barely 30 years old, Winans looked to be exactly what Cornerstone needed in its next generation of leadership. He was a brilliant student of the scriptures. He spoke with precision and clarity from the pulpit. He had a humble, easygoing way about him, operating without the outsize ego that often accompanies first-rate preaching. Everything about this pastor—the boyish sweep of brown hair, his delightful young family—seemed to be straight out of central casting.

There was just one problem: Chris Winans was not a conservative Republican. He didn’t like guns. He cared more about funding anti-poverty programs than cutting taxes. He had no appetite for President Trump’s unrepentant antics. Of course, none of this would seem heretical to Christians in other parts of the world; given his staunch anti-abortion position, Winans would in most places be considered the picture of spiritual and intellectual consistency. But in the American evangelical tradition, and at a church like Cornerstone, the whiff of liberalism made him suspect.

Dad knew the guy was different. Winans liked to play piano instead of sports, and had no taste for hunting or fishing. Frankly, Dad thought that was a bonus. Winans wasn’t supposed to simply placate Cornerstone’s aging base of wealthy white congregants. The new pastor’s charge was to evangelize, to cast a vision and expand the mission field, to challenge those inside the church and carry the gospel to those outside it. Dad didn’t think there was undue risk. He felt confident that his hand-chosen successor’s gifts in the pulpit, and his manifest love of Jesus, would smooth over any bumps in the transition.

He was wrong. Almost immediately after Winans moved into the role of senior pastor, at the beginning of 2018, the knives came out. Any errant remark he made about politics or culture, any slight against Trump or the Republican Party—real or perceived—invited a torrent of criticism. Longtime members would demand a meeting with Dad, who had stuck around in a support role, and unload on Winans. Dad would ask if there was any substantive criticism of the theology; almost invariably, the answer was no. A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in. Dad told them all to get lost. If anyone had a beef with the senior pastor, he said, they needed to take it up with the senior pastor. (Dad did so himself, buying Winans lunch at Chili’s and suggesting that he tone down the tree hugging.)

Winans had a tough first year on the job, but he survived it. The people at Cornerstone were in an adjustment period. He needed to respect that—and he needed to adjust, too. As long as Dad had his back, Winans knew he would be okay.

And then Dad died.

Now, Winans told me, he was barely hanging on at Cornerstone. The church had become unruly; his job had become unbearable. Not long after Dad died—making Winans the unquestioned leader of the church—the coronavirus pandemic arrived. And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

People at Cornerstone began confronting their pastor, demanding that he speak out against government mandates and Black Lives Matter and Joe Biden. When Winans declined, people left. The mood soured noticeably after Trump’s defeat in November 2020. A crusade to overturn the election result, led by a group of outspoken Christians—including Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, and the author Eric Metaxas, who suggested to fellow believers that martyrdom might be required to keep Trump in office—roiled the Cornerstone congregation. When a popular church staffer who had been known to proselytize for QAnon was fired after repeated run-ins with Winans, the pastor told me, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people Winans counted as confidants and friends.

By the time Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Winans believed he’d lost control of his church. “It’s an exodus,” he told me a few weeks later, sitting inside Brighton Bar & Grill.

The pastor had felt despair—and a certain liability—watching the attack unfold on television. Christian imagery was ubiquitous: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Senator Josh Hawley, explained in a speech the following year, long after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”

That sort of thinking, Winans said, represents an even greater threat than the events of January 6.

“A lot of people believe there was a religious conception of this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”

For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel,” Winans said, referring to the Old Testament narrative of God’s chosen nation. “You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”

Plenty of nations are mentioned in the Bible; the United States is not one of them. Most American evangelicals are sophisticated enough to reject the idea of this country as something consecrated in the eyes of God. But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

Winans chose to be hypervigilant on this front, hence the change of policy regarding Cornerstone’s salute to military personnel. The new pastor would meet soldiers after the service, shaking their hand and individually thanking them for their service. But he refused to stage an ovation in the sanctuary. This wasn’t because he was some bohemian anti-war activist; in fact, his wife had served in the Army. Winans simply felt it was inappropriate.

“I don’t want to dishonor anyone. I think nations have the right to self-defense. I respect the sacrifices these people make in the military,” Winans told me. “But they would come in wearing their dress blues and get this wild standing ovation. And you contrast that to whenever we would host missionaries: They would stand up for recognition, and we give them a golf clap … And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”

This kind of cultural heresy was getting Winans into trouble. More congregants were defecting each week. Many were relocating to one particular congregation down the road, a revival-minded church that was pandering to the whims of the moment, led by a pastor who was preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that sought to merge two kingdoms into one.

As we talked, Winans asked me to keep something between us: He was thinking about leaving Cornerstone.

The “psychological onslaught,” he said, had become too much. Recently, the pastor had developed a form of anxiety disorder and was retreating into a dark room between services to collect himself. Winans had met with several trusted elders and asked them to stick close to him on Sunday mornings so they could catch him if he were to faint and fall over.

I thought about Dad and how heartbroken he would have been. Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this. Clearly, long before COVID-19 or George Floyd or Donald Trump, something had gone wrong at Cornerstone. I had always shrugged off the crude, hysterical, sky-is-falling Facebook posts I would see from people at the church. I found it amusing, if not particularly alarming, that some longtime Cornerstone members were obsessed with trolling me on Twitter. Now I couldn’t help but think these were warnings—bright-red blinking lights—that should have been taken seriously. My dad never had a social-media account. Did he have any idea just how lost some of his sheep really were?

I had never told Winans about the confrontations at my dad’s viewing, or the letter I received after taking Rush Limbaugh’s name in vain at the funeral. Now I was leaning across the table, unloading every detail. He narrowed his eyes and folded his hands and gave a pained exhale, mouthing that he was sorry. He could not even manage the words.

We both kept quiet for a little while. And then I asked him something I’d thought about every day for the previous 18 months—a sanitized version of my wife’s outburst in the living room.

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?”

Winans thought for a moment.

“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”

This article was adapted from Tim Alberta’s new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Church of America.”

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Dean Phillips Has a Warning for Democrats

2023-10-27T09:50:00-04:00

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

To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.

But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a war in Vietnam that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—with which to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.

Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.

“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”

This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.

“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”

Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.

“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”

In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.

“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”

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

Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”

The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”

Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.

Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.

Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”

But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”

Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”

If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?

“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”

Phillips no longer wonders whether there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country. If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.

Over the course of a weekend on Phillips’s farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?

“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”

Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.

Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.

And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.

He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.

It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)

When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuked him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?

[Read: So much for Biden the bridge president]

Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.

Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.

But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.

“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”

Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”

Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”

With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”

[Read: Why not Whitmer?]

By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.

“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”

Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.

Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.

In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he’d met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.

In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.

Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.

No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.

Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.

“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.

“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”

The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.

“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”

Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”

Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.

[Andrew Ferguson: Leave Lincoln out of it]

He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.

“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”

Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.

Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make goodbye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed that he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?

“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”

On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.

When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?

Phillips decided the answer was no.

Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.

“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”

It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.

With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive DEAN-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”

The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.

At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.

Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.

Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.

All of this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?

At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.

“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” He trailed off.

Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.

“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.

He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”

Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.

“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”

The Thrill of Defeat

2023-09-06T06:00:00-04:00

Even now I can still see him, the man in gold and white, streaking down the sideline all alone.

And then the ball was in the air. It hung up there for what felt like my entire childhood, spiraling in slow motion, traveling 50 yards in total. I remember gasping. Just a few minutes earlier, my favorite team—my first true love—the Detroit Lions, had taken a three-point lead over the hated Green Bay Packers. It was the first round of the 1993 NFC playoffs, and it was my first time at a Lions game. The sound of the 80,000 souls crammed into the Pontiac Silverdome—a glorified warehouse in the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit—was deafening, a roar of humanity unlike anything I’d ever heard, the decibel level shaking the cement beneath our bleacher seats. But now, with less than one minute remaining, as the football dropped into the hands of Sterling Sharpe, the man in gold and white, there was silence. The Packers’ unproven young quarterback, Brett Favre, had just made the most spectacular touchdown throw of his career and eliminated the Lions from the playoffs.

I was inconsolable. The Lions had been the better team; even a kid could see that. We’d outgained the Packers, out-converted them, outplayed them. But we’d lost anyway—in dramatic, dream-shattering fashion. It was too much for my 7-year-old emotions to process. So, I wept. First in the stands as time expired, then in the swarming, beer-soaked concourse as my family searched for the exit, and for the entire hour-long car ride home. Finally, as we pulled into our driveway, my dad spun the radio knob leftward, turning down the postmortem show. “It’s just a game,” he said, smiling gently. “We’ll win the next one.”

It was the only lie my dad ever told me.

A year later, the Lions met the Packers again in the playoffs—and, again, the Lions lost. The next time they reached the postseason, they lost. And the time after that. And the time after that. Since falling to Green Bay that ill-fated night, the Lions have appeared in seven playoff games. They have lost every single one. This streak of futility, going more than 30 years without a playoff win, is unmatched in the annals of the National Football League. But the historical context is even worse. Since winning an NFL championship in 1957—a decade before the first Super Bowl was played—the Lions have won just one playoff game, in the 1991 season, against the Dallas Cowboys. That’s right: one playoff victory since the Eisenhower administration.

Every loss I’ve witnessed has been painful, but none more than that Packers game. The Lions were stacked with elite talent: linebacker Chris Spielman, offensive tackle Lomas Brown, return specialist Mel Gray. And of course, the most electrifying player in football, running back Barry Sanders. The team was poised to become one of the league’s best. But that loss to the Packers broke them. Suddenly, Favre and his Green Bay squad were ascendant, racking up division titles and conference championships and winning a Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the Lions fell apart. In the summer of 1999, on the eve of training camp, Sanders floored the football world by announcing his retirement. Despite being in the prime of his career—one season away from breaking Walter Payton’s rushing record—he was worn down by the losing. Two years later, the Lions brought in Matt Millen to rebuild the team as president and CEO. What ensued was the most disastrous tenure the football world had ever seen: The Lions went 31–97 during the eight seasons Millen oversaw the roster, solidifying our reputation as the laughingstock of professional sports. In 2008 we made history, going winless with a record of 0–16.

[Samuel G. Freedman: A football memoir, with tears]

It was the worst season an NFL team had ever played—and I didn’t miss a single snap. Every Sunday that fall, during my last semester at Michigan State University, I watched, yelled, seethed, prayed, and ultimately witnessed the Lions come up short. A few minutes later, as predictable as a late-game turnover, the phone would ring. My dad wanted to check on me. We would commiserate for a little while, then talk about other things. Every conversation ended the same way. “We’ll win the next one,” he would say.

The author and his father during a 2001 visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).

By then I was old enough to realize something: Dad didn’t actually believe we’d win the next one. He wasn’t predicting a breakthrough victory. He was teaching me how to handle defeat; he was urging me not to give up hope. He was assuring me that, no matter what, we’d talk again the following Sunday.

A few summers ago, the day after Dad died, I stood outside a funeral home with my brother Brian. Our father’s passing had been sudden and shocking; both of us were in a daze. After standing there in silence for a while, my brother let out a sigh. “Man,” he said, “Pop never got to see the Lions win.”

Brian was right: For all those decades of fanhood, for all those Sunday-evening pep talks, for all those life lessons drawn from watching his team lose, Dad had never been rewarded with a real winner.

I thought about that when I moved my own family back to Michigan shortly after the funeral. I thought about it when I bought season tickets. I thought about it last summer, when my wife and I took our son Lewis to his very first Lions game. He was almost 7 years old—the age I’d been when my heart was broken that night against the Packers. This was just a preseason game, but it delivered thrill after thrill. The Lions pulled away late; the home stadium, now Ford Field in downtown Detroit, pulsated with cheers. Lewis looked euphoric.

And then a familiar turn of events. The Lions, unforced, fumbled the ball away. The Atlanta Falcons, on a fourth down with 90 seconds remaining, scored a miraculous touchdown. The stadium fell into a hush. Lewis looked up at me. “What just happened?” he asked, his voice quivering. “Did we lose?”

On the car ride home, after we’d pacified Lewis with candy and a stuffed mascot from the stadium, my wife turned to me. Her tone was serious. As a practicing child therapist—and as the wife of a die-hard Lions fan—she knew what emotional trauma looked like. She was worried about our son.

“Are you sure,” she asked me, “that you want to do this to him?”

I had never considered it optional. The Lions were in my DNA. Some of my earliest, most vivid memories—formed at no older than age 3—are of my dad and older brothers erupting with screams inside our cramped living room, often frightening me to tears. I would peek in and find them whooping and high-fiving around the small television set, almost always in response to some laws-of-physics-defying maneuver and subsequent touchdown sprint by Barry Sanders. Dad hadn’t grown up a big football fan. But the year we moved to Michigan was the same year the Lions drafted Sanders; before long he and my brothers were hooked, and eventually I was too. Sundays became sacrosanct: Dad preached at our church in the morning, then raced home to meet us for the afternoon kickoff. We scampered outside afterward to re-create the action, pretending to be our favorite players, then came in for dinner and rehashed the results. I can scarcely remember feeling so content.

Of course that fandom would be passed down to my three sons. A framed photo of Sanders had hung over the crib in our kids’ nursery; the walls of their room were painted Honolulu Blue, the singular shade of Detroit’s home uniform. My boys would grow up obsessing over every draft pick, every free-agent acquisition, every coaching change, just like I had. We would watch the games together when they were young, and once they ventured out into the world, we would talk on Sunday evenings.

The author and his friends at MetLife Stadium in 2014 for “The Mane Event” (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).

My wife knew what she’d signed up for. Back when we started dating, I had to explain to her the moral prerequisite of “The Mane Event,” an annual road-trip extravaganza with three of my closest childhood friends, in which we drained our meager bank accounts to watch the Lions play (and almost always lose) an away game. When my wife and I got married, the place cards for the reception were refashioned Lions tickets. The next day, for our honeymoon, we hosted a massive tailgate outside Ford Field. (In fairness, we lacked the funds to go anywhere else.) She was a great sport about it, wearing a veil to match her Ndamukong Suh jersey, proving that I married the most amazing woman in the world.

Over the years, however, her patience waned. The night Lewis was born, I was glued to the NFL draft inside the delivery room, a distraction that for some reason she found irksome. Minutes after Lewis emerged, I carried him over to the television, swaddled in blankets, and together we watched the Lions select Taylor Decker, an offensive tackle from Ohio State University. It was a polarizing pick: We don’t like Buckeyes much in Michigan, and plus, the Lions desperately needed talent on the defensive side of the ball. I cradled my newborn in one hand and traded angry texts with friends and family in the other, baptizing Lewis into a life he never asked for.

Some seven years later, after that preseason loss to the Falcons, I wrestled with my wife’s question. Rooting for the Lions had given me some wonderful memories, but also some punishing ones. This wasn’t merely about picking a favorite team for my children; this was about passing down a painful existence. Every team wins some games and loses others, but not every team is a national punch line and annual bottom-dweller. Was it really fair, I wondered, to force that on someone?

I decided to back off. If Lewis and his brothers were to become fans, it wouldn’t be their dad’s dictate. They needed to choose the Lions on their own. Frankly, I didn’t see that happening anytime soon. The regime that took over in 2021—head coach Dan Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes—had inherited the worst roster in the league. In their first season, they’d won just three games. In 2022, after my paternal moment of clarity, the team started the year by losing six of its first seven games. At this rate, I figured, it would be easy to abstain from pushing Detroit football on my boys.

But then the strangest thing happened: The Lions started winning.

The offense had shown signs of being explosive; now, midway through the season, it was unstoppable, soaring toward the top of the league leaderboard in yards and points per game. The defense had been dreadful; now it was scrappy, tenacious, improving every week. Campbell, the Hercules-size coach who’d played 10 years in the league as a tight end, had splashed a new, one-word team motto—GRIT—all across the Lions facility, even printing it on hats and shirts for the players to wear. Some fans viewed this as a token rebranding effort. But as the season progressed, our franchise transformed into something unrecognizable. These Lions didn’t give an inch to their opponents. They were mentally tough; they played with swagger, expecting to dominate every time they took the field. Detroit became the most dangerous team in football, winning seven of its last nine games and somehow, despite the awful start, sneaking into playoff contention. It would all come down to the season finale, a prime-time game in Green Bay against the Packers.

I had held firm on my promise not to indoctrinate the boys. But I couldn’t contain my own exhilaration: After booking our tickets for Sunday night, January 8, 2023, at fabled Lambeau Field, my “Mane Event” crew traveled north.

The Packers had owned this rivalry my entire life. First it was Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback, who had killed us; then it was his successor, Aaron Rodgers, a future Hall of Famer himself. During one stretch, Detroit lost 24 consecutive games in Green Bay, the longest road losing streak in NFL history. Getting beaten was bad enough. Worse still was the “Same Old Lions” narrative we couldn’t seem to escape, owing to legendary choke jobs and unjust endings: the “completing the process” non-catch in Chicago, the 10-second runoff against Atlanta, the picked-up pass-interference flag in Dallas. And no team in the NFL seemed to benefit from our curse quite like the Packers.

Minutes before kickoff in Green Bay, a third playoff contender, the Seattle Seahawks, won their game following several atrocious fourth-quarter calls, eliminating the Lions from playoff contention but keeping Green Bay alive. All the Packers had to do was win, on their home field, to get in. The champagne bottles began popping around us at Lambeau. The Lions, most people assumed, would mail it in.

[Read: Angry football fans keep punching their TVs]

But they didn’t. In the gutsiest performance I’d ever seen from my team, Detroit smacked Green Bay around inside its own house. Despite having nothing to play for but pride—and the chance to keep their nemesis out of the postseason—the Lions hounded Rodgers all night, sacking him twice and sealing his career in Green Bay with an interception on his final drive. As the Packers faithful emptied out of the stadium, my friends and I joined thousands of Lions fans in rushing toward the lower bowl, forming a ring of Honolulu Blue around the field, dancing and singing and hugging strangers in the snow. It was the best moment of my life as a Lions fan.

Riding the momentum from their late-season surge, the Lions became a league darling headed into the 2023 campaign. Several top free agents signed on to play for Campbell. National pundits picked Detroit to win the NFC North—something we have yet to do since the NFL realigned its divisions 20 years ago. Oddsmakers in Las Vegas took more bets on the Lions to make the Super Bowl than they did on any other team in the conference.

This was no longer some cute, try-hard Cinderella story. When the NFL released its 2023 schedule, the opening game of the season—Thursday, September 7, in prime time, all the buildup and all the eyeballs—featured the Kansas City Chiefs, the defending Super Bowl champions, playing at home. Their opponent: the Detroit Lions.

On the first day of training camp this July, Campbell told reporters that the “hype train” surrounding his team was “out of control.” But it wasn’t the hype that scared me. It was something else—a feeling I couldn’t make sense of. With some trepidation, I decided to check out training camp myself.

Barry Sanders doesn’t have the moves he once did. The immortal running back, whose jukes and spins and stop-and-start cuts left a generation of linebackers searching for their jockstrap, couldn’t shake the mob of people seeking an audience. It was a sweltering August afternoon and Sanders, now 55 years old, had dropped in on Lions headquarters in Allen Park. The Lions were hosting the New York Giants for a joint scrimmage ahead of their preseason game later in the week, and a crowd of several thousand fans swarmed the practice facility. When word got around that Sanders was here, everyone—players and coaches from both teams—lined up, pointing and whispering like little kids, waiting to shake his hand. By the time Sanders got to me, under a shaded pavilion next to giant metal tubs filled with ice, he looked exhausted.

Barry Sanders playing against the Green Bay Packers in 1993 (John Biever / Sports Illustrated / Getty).

Nothing was forcing Sanders to be here—no sponsorship agreement, no contractual obligation with the club. He was happy to visit with everyone, to sign autographs and snap selfies. But really, he’d come to watch football. He’d come to see his team.

Given the circumstances of his departure years earlier—the retirement letter he faxed into a newspaper, the buzz around his feud with the organization, the distance he kept in the aftermath—one might assume that he’d want nothing to do with the Lions. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating his retirement was to the franchise. Every hard-core Lions fan can remember where they were when they found out. I was inside a Denny’s, eating eggs with my dad, when a guy sprinted inside, having just heard the breaking news over the car radio. “Barry’s retiring! Barry’s retiring!” he cried. We sat there in disbelief.

Sanders heard these sob stories in the years that followed. But it wasn’t until his children reached a certain age that he truly understood the emotion behind them. He had made southeast Michigan his home, putting down roots and raising his kids there. He had never pressured them to watch any particular sport, cheer for any particular club. Yet they became football fans. They became Lions fans. And so did he. The Hall of Famer could no longer help himself: Every Sunday in the Sanders house now centered on the team he’d left behind. He saw his sons crushed in all the familiar ways; he watched them mourn the shocking retirement of another Lions superstar, wide receiver Calvin Johnson, bringing the experience full circle. Yet all the while, Sanders and his family continued to cheer.

“It’s something that I grapple with, and it’s just hard to explain,” Sanders told me. “This team matters to us. You know what I mean?”

I asked whether he and his sons had ever considered switching allegiances. Sanders cocked his head to the side, rumpling his brow.

“No. No, no, no,” he said. “These people who have been loyal, people who have been there every step of the way—that’s the beauty of the game, I think. There are no guarantees. But they still believe.”

Sometimes that beauty gives way to torment. On the far end of the practice field, a man with a fancy job title—special assistant to president/CEO and chairperson—stalked the sideline with a notepad in his right hand. Most front-office types wear suits and ties. But this man was dressed in all black: workout pants, hooded sweatshirt, 50-pound weighted vest, all of it made more conspicuous by the mid-80s heat. It was Chris Spielman.

The anchor of Detroit’s defense in the 1990s, Spielman played brief stints in Buffalo and Cleveland before retiring because of injuries. He went into the broadcast booth and spent the next two decades providing color commentary for college and NFL games. He was happy, making a fine living, freed from the weekly stresses of a win-loss record. And then the call came. It was late 2020, and the Lions were coming off their third consecutive last-place finish. The team’s owner, Sheila Ford Hamp—great-granddaughter of Henry Ford and daughter of William Clay Ford Sr., who’d purchased the franchise outright in 1964—told Spielman the Lions needed a culture change. She was searching for a new coach and general manager, but first she needed a football consigliere, someone who could help guide those hires, who could connect the front office to the locker room to the X’s and O’s on the field. His mind was made up before she’d finished the pitch.

“Loyalty to this organization was probably the only thing that could have drawn me out of the booth,” Spielman told me.

There was more to it than loyalty, though. As we spoke, and he drifted back to his playing days in Detroit, I sensed a lack of peace about the man. He talked about “letting down the fan base.” He said the losses—especially to Green Bay in the playoffs—“always haunt me.” At one point, he gazed off in the distance, choking back emotion as he muttered, “My career was a failure.”

Professional athletes are sometimes thought to be indifferent to the plight of fans—millionaire mercenaries who collect a paycheck and move on to a new city for an even bigger one. Yet here was Spielman, a god of the gridiron—the first high-school player ever to appear on a Wheaties box; a two-time All American in college; a four-time Pro Bowler in the NFL—still distraught, 30 years later, about what could have been. And it wasn’t simply because he never won. It was because he never won here.

“I have so much respect for the folks who’ve hung in there. I felt I owed them something,” Spielman said of his decision to return to Detroit. He called it “unfinished business.”

Today the budding star of the Lions defense is Aidan Hutchinson, a second-year pass rusher who led all rookies in sacks last season and looks poised to become one of the league’s premier defensive players. He’s a local kid, born and raised in Plymouth, drafted out of the University of Michigan. He calls it “divine timing” that the Lions lost 13 games the season before he turned pro, allowing them to snag him with the No. 2 overall selection in last year’s draft.

There is just one hitch in Hutchinson’s homecoming story: He didn’t root for the Lions as a kid.

“I mean, it was hard to be a Lions fan growing up,” the 23-year-old told me after practice one day, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. “The boys were always struggling.”

Hutchinson knows that the Lions are something of a religion in southeast Michigan. His friends loved them. He grew up 20 minutes from team headquarters. And yet, he chose to cheer for the New England Patriots—the winningest franchise in the modern history of the NFL.

“My dad was never a big Lions fan. That’s where I didn’t get it,” Hutchinson said. “He grew up in Texas; he was always a Houston Oilers fan.” When that franchise moved to Nashville in the late 1990s, the elder Hutchinson—who starred at the University of Michigan himself, then stayed in the Detroit suburbs to raise his family—became a pigskin itinerant. He followed everyone, and although he rarely missed a Lions game, he couldn’t bring himself to invest in the home team. By the time Aidan was old enough to watch alongside him, a fellow Michigan alumnus named Tom Brady was establishing a dynasty in New England. And so the Hutchinsons became Patriots fans, reveling in Super Bowls from afar as their neighbors here hankered for a mere playoff win.

[Mark Leibovich: The quiet desperation of Tom Brady]

I asked Aidan, now that he’s a Lion, if he felt badly about not supporting his home team sooner.

“Not necessarily,” Hutchinson replied, fighting a smirk. “I’m happy I’m on the team now.”

The implication was obvious enough. Nothing was lost by ignoring the Lions all those years—the blooper-reel lowlights and the humiliating headlines—because in sports, winning is what makes fanhood worthwhile.

Lots of people believe that. I used to question my own sanity, wondering why I subjected myself to such assured misery Sunday after Sunday, season after season, decade after decade. More than once I fantasized about rounding up my memorabilia—the jerseys and autographs, the helmets and framed photos, the old programs and saved ticket stubs—then dousing it in gasoline and setting it ablaze, escaping this abusive relationship once and for all.

Why didn’t I?

For the longest time, I told myself it was because I’m cursed. I told myself that the moment I walked away from the Lions, they would start winning and winning big, driving me to an entirely different level of madness.

But that’s not the real explanation. Embedded in the psyche of a sports fan is a belief that these teams say something about us; that even though we can’t influence the outcomes—any more than we can control the weather or an economic downturn or a heart attack stealing a family member—we find in them a personal significance that echoes beyond the box score. There is a reason the Lions—not the Red Wings, or the Pistons, or the Tigers, all of whom have been winners in my lifetime—are the favorite sons of Detroit. In a city that can’t seem to catch a break, people find common cause in rallying around the team that best reflects their own story.

For Lions fans—and, I started to realize, for Lions players—all of the losing has formed bonds that winning never could.

“One hundred percent,” Taylor Decker, the left tackle whom the Lions had drafted when Lewis was approximately 15 minutes old, told me at training camp. “It makes you realize who you can rely on, who has your back, who you can trust.”

Now entering his eighth season—he is the longest-tenured player on the club—Decker told me, “I’ve become a man in the city of Detroit.” Part of that maturation owes to experiencing defeat: Coming from Ohio State, where he won a national championship before turning pro, Decker had never tasted the setbacks that would mark his first six years in Detroit. Strange as it might sound, he seems grateful for those setbacks now.

“In today’s society, I feel like quitting and taking the easy way out has been normalized,” Decker said, citing players who demand trades or refuse to re-sign with a struggling team. “I do think there’s something to be said for seeing it through and going through those hard times.”

[Scott Stossel: Winning ruined Boston sports fandom]

Hanging around the Lions facility this summer, talking with players, officials, and journalists who cover the organization, I thought about the irony of my tortured relationship with the Lions. Would I have talked with my dad every Sunday night if our team was steady, unspectacular, business-as-usual competitive? Would my brother Brian and I dissect every draft pick if our team was coming off back-to-back division titles? Would my friends and I bother with The Mane Event if our team had already won a Super Bowl?

Aidan Hutchinson felt sorry for us long-suffering Lions fans. But I started to feel sorry for him. Losing is hard and often harrowing. But it’s also inevitable. And what we take from these losses is precisely what’s necessary to win: resolve, perseverance, and, yes, grit. That’s what my dad taught me before I lost him. And that’s what I hope to teach my sons, who, one day, are going to lose me.

With the season opener in Kansas City drawing near, and my self-imposed ban on proselytizing the boys still in place, there was an uncomfortable truth to confront. Maybe I wasn’t afraid of them inheriting a loser. Maybe I was afraid of them inheriting a winner.

When I shared my epiphany with Brad Holmes, he was stone-faced at first. And then, slowly, he started to nod.

“I was doing a lot of research recently on heat exposure and cold exposure—like, deliberate heat exposure with your body. And a lot of research says that when your molecules suffer, it actually makes your molecules even stronger,” Holmes, the Lions’ general manager, told me one recent afternoon as the team practiced in a misting rain. “It’s kind of like when you’re growing wine. When the grapes are exposed to intense temperatures, it actually produces a better-quality wine. You know what I mean?”

Yes, I knew what he meant—not about the grapes or the molecules, necessarily, but about the metaphorical point he was making. Holmes had seen his share of adversity. Raised in a football family—his father played for the Steelers, his cousin played for the Rams, and his uncle, naturally, played for the Lions—Holmes became a defensive lineman at North Carolina A&T and briefly harbored NFL aspirations of his own. And then a violent car wreck after his sophomore season nearly killed him. Holmes spent a week in a coma, suffering a ruptured diaphragm and a stroke from the violence of the collision. Even though he battled back, eventually rejoining the football team and playing out his college career, the dream was over.

Holmes still wanted a piece of the NFL. He sent copies of his résumé to every organization, begging for an internship in someone’s scouting department. “And every team told me, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” he recalled. Holmes took a job at Enterprise Rent-A-Car to pay the bills, but kept on pushing. “That’s just kind of how I’m wired,” he told me. “I embrace the darkness.”

After forcing his foot into the door with the Rams—Holmes started as an intern in the public-relations department—he eventually rose to become the director of college scouting, helping to assemble arguably the most talented roster in the league. That roster won a Super Bowl in 2022—but Holmes wasn’t there for it. He had, one year earlier, taken the top job in Detroit. The first move he made was trading the Lions’ all-time leading passer, Matthew Stafford, to the Rams. The torment was poetic: Detroit’s new general manager watched his mates celebrate a championship in his first year removed from his former franchise, while Lions fans watched their former quarterback hoist the Lombardi Trophy one year after requesting a trade from Detroit.

Holmes vowed to use that heartache. He told himself that he would build Detroit’s organization around people who had suffered like him—people who knew how to use that suffering as fuel. He hoped to find a partner who embraced the darkness like he did.

And then he met Dan Campbell.

When he was introduced as Detroit’s new head coach, at a press conference in January 2021, Campbell went viral with a breathless speech promising bodily harm to opponents. “This team’s going to be built on—we’re going to kick you in the teeth. All right? And when you punch us back, we’re going to smile at you,” Campbell said. “And when you knock us down, we’re gonna get up. And on the way up, we’re gonna bite a kneecap off. All right? And we’re gonna stand up. And then it’s going to take two more shots to knock us down. All right? And on the way up, we’re gonna take your other kneecap. And then we’re gonna get up. And then it’s gonna take three shots to get us down. And when we do, we’re gonna take another hunk out of you.”

He concluded: “Before long, we’re gonna be the last ones standing.”

Campbell was rendered a caricature. All the national media could see was a macho former player flexing for the cameras; all they could hear was the Texas twang and the grisly imagery. But Lions fans saw and heard something else. We weren’t enamored of the kneecap spiel. What made us fall in love with Campbell—what turned him into the face of Detroit sports—was what he said immediately preceding that viral moment.

“This place has been kicked, it’s been battered, it’s been bruised. And I can sit up here and give you coach-speak all day long. I can give you, ‘Hey, we’re going to win this many games.’ None of that matters, and you guys don’t want to hear it anyway. You’ve had enough of that shit,” Campbell said. “Here’s what I do know: This team is going to take on the identity of this city. This city’s been down, and it’s found a way to get up.”

How does a guy who grew up in the one-stoplight-town of Morgan, Texas (population 457)—“actually, outside Morgan,” Campbell told me—become an avatar for the defiant spirit of Detroit?

Campbell played here. More to the point, he played here in 2008, when the Lions achieved infamy with their 0–16 season. He came aboard as a free agent with the charge of providing veteran leadership, helping a languid locker room to mature and compete. Instead, in his three years in Detroit the team lost 38 games and won just 10. The 2008 season was especially scarring. Campbell, who nursed injuries throughout training camp, fought his way onto the field in the season opener against Atlanta. In the second quarter, he caught a pass for 21 yards down the seam, getting crunched by three Falcons defenders on his way to the turf. Then he limped off the field.

“That was my last play ever,” Campbell murmured.

Dan Campbell playing against the New York Jets in 2006 (Brian Killian / NFL Photo Library / Getty).

We were sitting on the sidelines of the Lions’ indoor practice field. He closed his eyes, looking wistful. The cumulative toll of injuries sustained playing the game he loved—foot, elbow, knee, hamstring—finally caught up with him. He watched from the sidelines as his team lost every game that season. What happened next was just as excruciating: Campbell signed a one-year deal with the New Orleans Saints, determined to give his body a final go. He tore his MCL in camp and was placed on injured reserve, forfeiting eligibility to play. This time, instead of watching his teammates go winless, Campbell saw the Saints march all the way to a Super Bowl victory. But he didn’t get a ring. He hadn’t played a single down. History would not remember him as a champion. Campbell retired a short time later.

Detroit isn’t a prized destination for football coaches. But for Campbell, who went to work for the Miami Dolphins as an offensive intern the year after he retired, the Lions were his dream job. This wasn’t just a place where he played. This was a place where he hurt, where he grieved, where he lost something he would never get back—and where the fans understood what that meant.

“Man, to endure year after year, your hopes are back up and then it’s that. Your hopes are back up—‘This is gonna be the year’—and then it’s 0–16. But they just keep coming back for more,” Campbell said, shaking his head in amazement.

“The thought of being a part of bringing this place out of the ashes—”

He paused. “Man, it meant something to me.”

Campbell grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan. He watched every game with his dad, a diehard since the 1960s, and idolized the glamorous roster of the 1990s that won multiple Super Bowls. Now that he’s in Detroit, there’s a disconnect that’s hard to ignore. Those Cowboys had been dubbed “America’s Team,” yet most of America couldn’t relate to them. They were a group of hotshot players, led by a cocky coach and bankrolled by an ostentatious owner, who won in ways that were neither surprising nor inspiring. There was no grit about the Cowboys.

[Jemele Hill: The Jerry Jones photo explains a lot]

“That’s been ‘America’s Team,’” Campbell told me, emphasizing the nickname with air quotes. I could tell we were thinking the same thing: Imagine how endearing these Detroit Lions would be to the masses, football junkies and casual viewers alike, if they parlayed their losing past into a winning future.

Campbell motioned toward the field behind us. “Why can’t we be America’s team?”

When the NFL scheduled the Lions-Chiefs season kickoff for September 7, my immediate reaction was to text the Mane Event crew. We began looking at tickets, hotels, flights. Arrowhead Stadium, in prime time, against the champs—this was as close to a Super Bowl as anything we’d ever experienced. We had to go.

It hit me several hours later: September 7 was our wedding anniversary. Our tenth wedding anniversary. As much as my identity is wrapped up in Lions football, it’s even more wrapped up in family. There was no way I could ditch my wife. So I did what any good husband would: I asked her to come to Kansas City, too.

She actually agreed, but between our jobs and kids and logistics, we couldn’t find a way to make it work. She felt terrible about it. But I told her not to worry: The Lions would be playing a lot of big games in 2023. We would have plenty of chances. After all, we have four season tickets.

I thought about those four tickets throughout the summer. Purchasing them a few years ago after moving back to Michigan had been a means of establishing continuity between generations, passing down a family tradition, ensuring that my three boys would make Lions memories—good and bad—with their father the same way I had with mine.

That no longer seemed likely. I had stopped pushing the Lions on them last summer, following that awful preseason loss to Atlanta, and I hadn’t heard a word from them about football since. That was just fine. My sons and I would discover a different identity together, a different way of bonding. Sure, if I’m being honest, it was a disappointment. But I’ve learned to deal with those.

A few days before I finished writing this story—two weeks out from the season opener—my 7-year-old, Lewis, approached me, apropos of nothing.

“Dad,” he asked, “can we go to a Lions game this year?”

I was reminded of another virtue of losing: It makes victory that much sweeter.

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

2023-06-02T09:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Mark Peterson

Editor’s Note: On June 7, 2023, five days after this article was published, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery announced that Chris Licht would be leaving CNN immediately.

Updated at 11:34 a.m. ET on June 7, 2023.

“How are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me. “It’s very simple.”

It was the fall of 2022. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.

“The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” Licht said.

Sensing my surprise, he grinned.

“I really do,” Licht said. “I think they know that he’s playing them—at least, the people in my organization. We’ve had discussions about this. We know that we’re getting played, so we’re gonna resist it.”

Seven months later, in Manchester, New Hampshire, I came across Licht wearing the expression of a man who had just survived a car wreck. Normally brash and self-assured, Licht was pale, his shoulders slumped. He scanned the room with anxious eyes. Spotting me, he summoned a breezy chord. “Well,” Licht said, “that wasn’t boring!”

We were standing in the lobby of the Dana Center, on the campus of Saint Anselm College. Licht, the 51-year-old chair and CEO of CNN Worldwide, had spent the past hour and a half inside a trailer behind the building, a control room on wheels from which he’d orchestrated a CNN town hall with Trump. Licht had known the risks inherent to this occasion: Trump had spent the past six years insulting and threatening CNN, singling out the network and its journalists as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” rhetoric that had led to death threats, blacklists, and ultimately a severing of diplomatic ties between Trump and CNN leadership.

But that had been under the old regime. When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters—and with their leader. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker, that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed that their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.

One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company. Licht had accepted the position with ambitions to rehabilitate the entire news industry, telling his peers that Trump had broken the mainstream media and that his goal was to do nothing less than “save journalism.” But Licht had lost the confidence of his own newsroom. Because of this, he had come to view the prime-time event with Trump as the moment that would vindicate his pursuit of Republican viewers while proving to his employees that he possessed a revolutionary vision for their network and the broader news media.

Trump had other ideas.

For 70 minutes in Manchester, the former president overpowered CNN’s moderator, Kaitlan Collins, with a continuous blast of distortion, hyperbole, and lies. The audience of Trump devotees delighted in his aggression toward Collins, cheering him on so loudly and so purposefully that what began as a journalistic forum devolved into a WWE match before the first voter asked a question. Vince McMahon himself could not have written a juicier script: Trump was the heroic brawler—loathed by the establishment, loved by the masses—trying to reclaim a title wrongly taken from him, while Collins, standing in for the villainous elites who dared to question the protagonist’s virtue, was cast as the heel. “She’s not very nice,” Trump told the studio audience, pointing toward Collins while she stood just offstage during the first commercial break.

Trump could be excused for thinking this was exactly what Licht wanted. The famously transactional ex-president had wondered aloud to his top aides, during their negotiations with CNN executives, what the network stood to gain from this production; when CNN made the decision to stock the auditorium with Republicans, the only thing Trump could figure was that Licht wanted a prime-time spectacle to resuscitate the network’s moribund ratings. The two men spoke only briefly backstage. “Have fun,” Licht told him. Trump obliged. He demeaned the woman, E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury had one day earlier found him liable for sexually abusing. He repeated disproved fictions about election fraud and suggested that he would separate families at the southern border again if given the chance. He insulted Collins, calling her “a nasty person” as the crowd hissed in agreement. At one point, when she and Trump assumed their marks onstage after another commercial break, Collins politely reminded him not to step past the giant red CNN logo in front of them. Trump responded by gesturing as though he might stomp on it. The crowd roared in approval.

[Listen: An interview with Tim Alberta about his time with Chris Licht]

Licht had not wanted this. Sure, he was chasing ratings; in nearly 20 years as a showrunner, ratings had been his currency. But Licht had come to Manchester with bigger ambitions than lifting CNN out of the viewership basement for a single evening in May. He believed that Trump owed his initial political ascent in part to the media’s habit of marginalizing conservative views and Republican voters. That needed to change ahead of 2024. Licht wasn’t scared to bring a bunch of MAGA enthusiasts onto his set—he had remarked to his deputies, in the days before the town hall, about the “extra Trumpy” makeup of the crowd CNN was expecting—and he damn sure wasn’t scared of Trump. The way to deal with a bully like Trump, Licht told his journalists, was to confront him with facts.

Collins tried to do just that. She was, however, no match for the environment she’d been thrust into. Squaring off one-on-one against the country’s most accomplished trickster is difficult enough, but this was 300-on-one. The result was a campaign infomercial: Trump the populist champion, slaying his old nemesis and asserting to televised fanfare his claim to the presidency.

“Does CNN count that as an in-kind campaign donation?” the longtime broadcaster Dan Rather tweeted.

Rather’s comment was gentle compared with the torrent of criticism aimed at CNN. “Ready to call it: This was a terrible idea,” the conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru tweeted, just nine minutes into the event. “CNN should be ashamed of themselves,” tweeted Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “This is an absolute joke,” tweeted former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger. “Chris Licht is rapidly becoming the Elon Musk of CNN,” tweeted The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes.

When Licht found me in the lobby, commenting on how not boring the night had been, it wasn’t clear how much of the blowback he’d already seen. What was clear was that Licht knew this was bad—very, very bad. Republicans were angry at CNN. Democrats were angry at CNN. Journalists were angry at CNN. The only one who wasn’t angry, it seemed, was Trump, most likely because he’d succeeded in disgracing the network on its own airwaves.

I felt for Licht. Having spent long stretches of the past year in conversation with him as he attempted to build “the new CNN,” I often found myself agreeing with his principles of journalism. Some media figures had trashed Licht for hosting the town hall in the first place, arguing that nothing good could come from “platforming” a man who’d tried to sabotage the peaceful transition of power. Licht disagreed—and so did I. Trump was the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination and a decent bet to occupy the White House in two years. The media had every obligation to scrutinize him, interview him, and, yes, platform him.

As I’d settled into my seat in the Saint Anselm auditorium, however, I had been startled by my surroundings. This was no ordinary collection of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, as CNN had claimed it would be. Most of them were diehards, fanboys, political zealots who were likelier to show up at a rally with a MAGA flag than come to a coffee shop with a policy question. These folks hadn’t turned out to participate in some good-faith civic ritual. They were there to celebrate Trump’s continued assault on the media.

Licht’s theory of CNN—what had gone wrong, how to fix it, and why doing so could lift the entire industry—made a lot of sense. The execution of that theory? Another story. Every move he made, big programming decisions and small tactical maneuvers alike, seemed to backfire. By most metrics, the network under Licht’s leadership had reached its historic nadir. In my conversations with nearly 100 employees at CNN, it was clear that Licht needed a win—a big win—to keep the place from falling apart. The Trump town hall was supposed to be that win. It had to be that win. And yet, once again, the execution had failed.

Pulling me into a darkened corridor just outside the auditorium, Licht tried to compose himself. He and I had spent many hours discussing what he described as “the mission” of CNN. I asked Licht whether the town hall had advanced that mission. He bit his lip.

“Too early to say,” Licht replied.

Listen to Tim Alberta discuss this article on Radio Atlantic:

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During our first interview, over breakfast last fall, Licht made a point of assuring me: David Zaslav had his back.

Licht was off to a slow start—understandably so. CNN was still staggering from the forced resignation of Zucker, a beloved figure who had been defenestrated for sleeping with his second in command, and the firing of Chris Cuomo, the prime-time star who, in addition to shattering ethical standards by advising his politician brother, had a #MeToo problem. (Zucker declined to comment for this article; Cuomo has denied allegations of sexual misconduct.) Meanwhile, the ownership change that preceded Licht’s arrival—AT&T spun off WarnerMedia, which then merged with Discovery Inc. to create Warner Bros. Discovery—had been messier than expected. Thanks to shaky balance sheets, followed by an inflation crisis, Warner Bros. Discovery saw its stock price drop by half within months of its launch. Days before Licht assumed control of CNN, its new parent company announced the termination of CNN+, a streaming platform that had been hailed as the future of the company.

There was never going to be much goodwill between Warner Bros. Discovery and the journalists at CNN. In November 2021, not long after the corporate takeover was announced, John Malone, a right-wing billionaire who stood to become a major shareholder on the new Warner Bros. Discovery board, said that CNN could learn a few things from the reporters at Fox News. “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” Malone told CNBC. After Zucker was sacked, Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, exacerbated these tensions by choosing Licht without interviewing any of CNN’s internal candidates. Zaslav told numerous people that he needed an outsider to revamp CNN’s journalistic practices because Republican politicians had told him they were no longer willing to come on the network—a rationale that worried staffers there.

The CNN rank and file were nonetheless excited by the arrival of Licht, who had earned the reputation of a boy-genius producer from his work on Morning Joe and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. But things went sideways fast. A few weeks into his tenure, Licht instructed his producers to downplay the first hearing of the January 6 committee—an event that MSNBC treated like a prime-time special, earning monster ratings that infuriated the CNN staff. Licht expressed regret to some top editorial personnel the day after the hearing. Still, the incident proved unnerving. Journalists at the network already had reason to question the motives of Malone and Zaslav; now they were wary of Licht, too. When the new CEO began making public confessions of CNN’s past sins—which sometimes came across like an endorsement of Trump’s attacks on the network—the wariness gave way to wrath. Top talent began to turn on Licht. Rumors of a spoiled honeymoon spread through the industry. By the time Licht announced forthcoming layoffs to his employees—there would be more than 300 in total—in an email sent two days before our October breakfast, CNN was spiraling.

Drinking from a glass of iced coffee, Licht shrugged it all off: the internal leaks, the external media swarm, the printed columns and whispered anecdotes accusing him of remaking CNN into Fox News Lite. “This is too important for me to be worried about what someone’s calling me or suggesting I’m trying to be,” Licht said. “This is so mission-driven and so important. I genuinely am—I get mad, I get frustrated, but it doesn’t, like, affect me. Does that make sense?”

It didn’t make sense. Matt Dornic offered to translate. Dornic, who was accompanying us in his capacity as CNN’s senior vice president of communications—and, I would learn, as a mainstay of Licht’s small entourage—explained that what upsets the new boss isn’t harsh coverage of him personally, but rather bad press about CNN’s journalists. Dornic cited recent reports about how Jake Tapper’s experimental show in the 9 p.m. hour—the slot vacated by Cuomo, which had yet to be permanently filled—was drawing anemic numbers. Licht pointed a finger at Dornic.

“What drives me nuts,” he said, “is that has the potential to throw my group off the mission.”

I asked Licht to explain that mission to me, as plainly as possible.

“Journalism. Being trusted. Everyone has an agenda, trying to shape events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute truth,” he told me. “There’s good actors, there’s bad actors, there’s a lot of shit in the world. There has to be something that you’re able to look at and go, ‘They have no agenda other than the truth.’”

Journalism was Licht’s first love. Raised in Connecticut, the son of a doctor and a physician assistant, he anchored make-believe newscasts in his basement as a grade-schooler. He studied broadcasting at Syracuse University then moved to Los Angeles, where, after a right-place, right-time chance to cover the O. J. Simpson trial, he got hooked on producing news. With a boyish tousle of blond hair and that bottomless supply of self-confidence, Licht talked his way into bigger and more consequential jobs, eventually finding himself back on the East Coast.

It was Licht’s relationship with Joe Scarborough, the onetime Florida congressman turned television personality, that opened the biggest doors. First on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, a prime-time success that featured sharp conservative punditry on all things political and cultural, and then on Morning Joe, Licht distinguished himself as a top-notch executive producer, someone known to run through walls (and run over people) to make great television. Mike Barnicle, a Morning Joe contributor, nicknamed Licht “Captain Intense.” But the intensity caught up with him. Licht suffered a brain hemorrhage at 38 and began to reassess his life and career. A few years later, Licht left MSNBC to run the morning show at CBS, and then left the news business altogether, joining Stephen Colbert as the showrunner of The Late Show.

Licht had a superlative arrangement with Colbert: more money, fewer headaches, better hours. Only one job, he told me, could have justified leaving that life and returning to the grind of journalism. And then the offer came: Zaslav, who had been courting Licht informally long before the WarnerMedia–Discovery merger was complete, asked him in early 2022 to lead the new CNN.

Licht knew “immediately” that he had to accept. Yet he was not oblivious to the challenges that awaited. His wife, Jenny Blanco, had worked for CNN as a producer. He knew some of the premier on-air talent. Both Colbert and Scarborough warned him not to take the job, and Licht understood their reservations. He had watched, over the previous five years, as the network became more polarizing. When I asked Licht what he’d thought about CNN—as a viewer, and as a seasoned journalist himself—while working on Colbert’s show, he hesitated, searching for the words.

“I thought, I’m having a tough time discerning between ‘How much are we getting played as an audience by Trump?’ and how much of it’s actually …” He trailed off.

Licht said Trump had done “really bad shit” as president that reporters sometimes missed because they were obsessing over more sensational stories. Trump had goaded the media with “outrage porn,” provoking journalists to respond with such indignation, so often, that audiences began to tune out. “When everything is an 11” on a scale of 10, Licht said, “it means that when there’s something really awful happening, we’re kind of numb to it. That was a strategy. And I felt like the media was falling for that strategy.”

Licht recalled how, early in the Trump administration, a particular reporter hadn’t been allowed into a press gaggle because of a feud with the White House. During a subsequent meeting with his fellow board members at Syracuse’s Newhouse school of journalism, one of them suggested taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing this affront to the First Amendment. “And I’m like, ‘Guys, keep your powder dry. This is nothing. It’s gonna get much worse,’” Licht said.

“I felt that there was such a mission—” He stopped himself.

“The mission was to go after this guy—” He stopped again.

“Right or wrong. I’m not saying he’s a good guy. He’s definitely not,” Licht said of Trump. “But, like, that was the mission … Sometimes something should be an 11; sometimes it should be a two; sometimes it should be a zero. Everything can’t be an 11 because it happens to come from someone you have a visceral hatred for.”

I told Licht that while I agreed with his observation—that Trump had baited reporters into putting on a jersey and entering the game, acting as opposing players instead of serving as commentators or even referees—there was an alternative view. Trump had forced us, by trying to annihilate the country’s institutions of self-government, to play a more active role than many journalists were comfortable with. This wasn’t a matter of advocating for capital-D Democratic policies; it was a matter of advocating for small-d democratic principles. The conflating of the two had proved highly problematic, however, and the puzzle of how to properly cover Trump continued to torment much of the media.

Licht didn’t understand all the fuss. “If something’s a lie, you call it a lie. You know what you’re dealing with now,” he said. “I think he changed the rules of the game, and the media was a little caught off guard and put a jersey on and got into the game as a way of dealing with it. And at least [at] my organization, I think we understand that jersey cannot go back on. Because guess what? It didn’t work. Being in the game with the jersey on didn’t change anyone’s mind.”

The new boss told people inside CNN that Tapper’s 4 o’clock show, The Lead, was the model: tough, respectful, inquisitive reporting that challenged every conceivable view and facilitated open dialogue.

Licht emphasized certain exceptions to this approach. He would not give airtime to bad actors who spread disinformation. His network would host people who like rain as well as people who don’t like rain. But, he said, CNN would not host people who deny that it’s raining when it is. This was no small caveat: More than half of Republicans in Congress had voted to throw out the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania based on lies. Meanwhile, plenty of Republicans who weren’t election deniers didn’t want to come on CNN anyway. Sensing this predicament, Licht had traveled to Capitol Hill early in his tenure, meeting with Republican leaders and promising them a fair shake under his leadership.

What Licht viewed as a diplomatic visit, his skeptics portrayed as an apology tour. The narrative taking hold in elite media circles—that CNN’s new boss was a scheming, ruthless Roger Ailes wannabe—went into overdrive. Licht was amused at first. But he soon lost his sense of humor. He called Robert Reich and rebuked him after the former labor secretary wrote a Substack post criticizing CNN. He vowed to friends that he would “destroy” Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, for a disparaging Los Angeles Times column. Licht seethed about what he saw as a coordinated attack from liberals who feared long-overdue journalistic scrutiny of their ideals.

“You have a certain segment of society that has had an unfettered megaphone to the leading journalistic organization in the world,” he said. “And at the slightest hint that that organization may not be just taking things that are fed to them from that segment of the population, it must be that a fascist is running the network and he wants to move it to the right … The fact that I want to give space to the [argument] that this thing everyone agrees with might be not right doesn’t make me a fascist right-winger who’s trying to steal Fox viewers.”

Licht was no fascist. But he was trying to steal viewers from Fox News—and from MSNBC, for that matter. To succeed, Licht said, CNN would need to produce more than just great journalism. Reporting the news in an aggressive, nonpartisan manner would be central to the network’s attempt to win back audiences. But television is, at its essence, entertainment. Viewers would always turn on CNN in times of crisis, Licht told me. What he needed to find out was how many would turn on CNN for fun.

[From the March 2023 issue: Megan Garber on how everything became entertainment]

A CNN studio in New York (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)

Licht frowned and folded his arms, irritation curdling his voice.

“I’m going to tell Don, the biggest mistake is commenting after every single story for the sake of commenting after every single story,” he said, talking to no one and everyone all at once. “Don’t tell me, ‘Oh, that’s horrible.’ We know it’s horrible. If you’ve got a specific insight into something, if you can add something, tell us. But don’t comment on every single fucking story.”

Licht had wedged a rolling office chair in between the first and second rows of Control Room B, a darkened space that featured scores of monitors being manipulated by two dozen people in hooded sweatshirts and headsets. Everyone looked tense. They were 96 hours from Election Day 2022, when they would launch CNN This Morning, Licht’s first big swing as the network’s head honcho, and the show looked terrible.

“I want more movement. Lots of movement,” he told Eric Hall, the new program’s executive producer, who sat in the center of the first row. “What do I hate the most?”

Hall and a younger producer named Zachary Slater responded in unison: “Boxes.”

Licht nodded. “Boxes,” he said, referring to the Brady Bunch look on cable-news screens. “I don’t want it to be frenetic, but please make sure there’s movement. We need to see these people.”

Making good TV is difficult under even the best of conditions. These were not the best of conditions. Eager to put his imprint on CNN, Licht had started with what he knew best—mornings—and hounded his team to get the program ready for Election Day. Rehearsals had been rushed. The co-hosts—Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow, and Kaitlan Collins—were struggling to gel, in part because they had practiced so little together. (On this day, Collins was reporting in Georgia.) Licht had created this trio, created this new show, in hopes of injecting some flavor into CNN’s lineup. He thought partnering Lemon, the opinionated, gay, Black southerner, with a pair of hard-hitting female news reporters could be the “fun” viewers needed. But Licht, I sensed, was not having fun.

When the rehearsal went to break, a collective exhale gusted through the room. Licht leaned back, took out his phone, and started scanning a Variety story about his decision to eliminate the CNN documentary unit in the layoffs. After he uttered a few choice phrases—but before we could discuss the article—the show started back up, with the cameras centered on Lemon. He had changed into a white jacket, the collar made of fur, with a turtleneck underneath.

“What the fuck is he wearing?” Licht blurted out. Nervous chuckles echoed around us.

The shot began zooming out, slowly at first to incorporate the guests, and then rotating around the glass table in the middle of the set. “Good. I love that,” Licht told Hall. “Just slow it down, make it steady.”

A little while later, the younger producer spoke into Lemon’s earpiece: “Don, uhh, we’re not too crazy about the jacket in here.” Lemon looked miffed. Licht fought back a smirk. “Why are you guys so mean to Don?” he asked.

The joke wasn’t lost on anyone. Clearly, Licht had dwindling patience for Lemon—his outfits, his ad-libbing, his opinions. None of this should have come as a surprise. Lemon was one of the most polarizing figures in media, someone with undeniable talent and unregulated instincts. Given Licht’s down-the-middle mantra, people inside the network were mystified by his decision to hitch the success of the new morning show to CNN’s chief provocateur. Some believed that Licht had been ordered by Zaslav to remove Lemon from his 10 p.m. slot (Licht denied this). Others sensed that Licht, who had already gotten rid of other “off mission” staffers, including the media reporter Brian Stelter and the White House correspondent John Harwood, would have axed Lemon too, if not for his being one of the lone Black voices on a very white network. Whatever the particulars, the careers of these two men were now intertwined.

As the show emerged from another break, Lemon, sans jacket, took his place in front of an enormous studio display. At the center were the words An Inconvenient Truth. Licht asked Hall what this segment was about. Hall replied that Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, had been saying crazy, hateful things for a long time, but corporate America had never abandoned him; only now, after his anti-Semitic rantings, were companies like Adidas dropping him. Lemon was going to ask: Why did those sponsors stick with Ye after his offensive remarks about slavery and other topics, but choose to bail now over his anti-Semitism?

Licht looked skeptical. “Where would you envision this running?” he said.

“Probably the back half of the show,” Hall replied.

“Do you think if I’m on my way to work, at 7:40 in the morning, I have time to absorb this?” Licht asked.

Just then, the segment began—and Lemon straightaway butchered the opening line. Hall let out an exasperated grunt. “How does that happen?”

Licht grimaced. “Read the fucking prompter,” he said.

After steering the segment by whispering instructions to Hall—“full … move left … back out …”—Licht glanced over at Ryan Kadro, a top executive who’d worked with Licht at CBS and knew him better than anyone else in this room. Kadro was shaking his head. “Way too long,” he said.

“Way too long—and it’s fucking morning time,” Licht said, motioning toward the screen, which had displayed a graphic image of a tortured slave next to Lemon during his monologue. “This is morning television.”

The rehearsal wrapped, and Licht quickly made his way onto the set, cornering Lemon at the anchor desk. Licht gave his candid feedback—some things had worked, but the Ye segment had not. He wanted less commentary. Above all, he wanted Lemon—and the others—to keep things light in the mornings. Lemon looked hesitant. “I don’t want to be preachy in the morning, but I do want to hold people accountable,” he said. Licht nodded and said he understood. Then he repeated himself: The Ye idea had missed the mark.

When Licht left, I sat down with Lemon and Harlow—as well as Dornic, the omnipresent communications executive. Sensing some lingering tension from the earlier exchange, I asked Lemon whether his approach to news meshed with Licht’s. Specifically, I mentioned our “outrage porn” conversation. Lemon squinted at me.

“Some people may want to qualify it as ‘outrage porn.’ But there was a lot to be outraged for these last few years,” he said. “There was a tweet or a statement or an action or something that was outrageous a few times a day for five, six years … What we were doing is, we were fighting for democracy. We were fighting to set the record straight on us being attacked and called ‘fake’ … That may have put us back on our heels and made us a bit more aggressive with calling it out, but it doesn’t mean that it was ‘outrage porn.’”

Harlow saw things somewhat differently—perhaps because of her straight-news background—but Lemon wasn’t having any of it.

“A lot of people are Monday-morning-quarterbacking about what happened” at CNN, Lemon told me. “You have to remember the time that we were in. Every single day, we were being attacked by the former administration. And that’s not hyperbole … We had bombs sent to this very network.”

In fact, Harlow was live on the air when the bomb was detected. She had to evacuate to the street, where she continued broadcasting. It was a traumatic ordeal for all of CNN—and that was Lemon’s point. He had been swamped with threats during Trump’s presidency, followed down the street by menacing figures, given a 24-hour security detail at certain points. Not that it was all about him. What of the unceasing vitriol against women and minorities, public officials and private citizens? It was all outrageous. Was he supposed to pretend to not be outraged?

Dornic jumped in. “I don’t think that’s what Chris is even saying—” He paused.

“This is not about you versus Chris,” Dornic continued. “I think his perspective is: Under a normal administration, those would have been 11s. But you had to recalibrate, because if you make the outrageous thing about women an 11, then what happens when he actually does something completely insane and undermines democracy?”

Harlow, now cast in the role of peacemaker, told Lemon that this seemed like a legitimate point. Just recently, she said, she had told her children the story of the boy who cried wolf. She did worry about Trump’s destruction of norms, but she also worried about a lack of self-awareness displayed by some in her profession. Lemon looked ready to contest that point. Then, perhaps in deference to Harlow, he decided to drop it.

As we continued chatting, the bond between Lemon and Harlow was evident. She said her husband had advised her to switch roles only if it would mean becoming partners with Lemon; Lemon said he wouldn’t have moved to the mornings alongside anyone else. Less clear was where Collins fit into this mix. Barely in her 30s, Collins had in a few years’ time zoomed from entertainment writer at The Daily Caller to chief White House correspondent at CNN. She had serious reporting chops and a deep roster of sources. Everyone at the network could see that Collins was the future of the brand—a next-generation star who could be synonymous with CNN for decades to come. So why take away her prized reporting post and sit her behind a desk with two co-anchors?

No one really knew. Licht spoke of chemistry and character, of dynamic personalities and geographic diversity. (Lemon is from Louisiana, Harlow from Minnesota, and Collins from Alabama, making them symbolic of a forgotten America that Licht was determined to reach.) But this was mostly game theory. The truth is, Licht didn’t know if it would work. What he did know was that CNN was falling farther behind in the ratings, and that without a daring move, something that could rouse a lethargic network, the discontent would grow louder. Licht remembered what Joe Scarborough used to tell him: “Scared money never wins.”

Licht was ready to gamble. He asked Lemon to take the lead, trusted Harlow to be the stabilizer, and hoped Collins could adjust in a hurry. Licht’s formative experience in television had come from watching Scarborough learn to check his ego and build an inclusive, engaging, highly entertaining program. He hoped Lemon could do the same.

“I feel like the senior of the group,” Lemon told us, sitting on the set. He instantly sensed that this was unwise to say out loud. “Yeah, yeah,” said Harlow, giving him a look. “But lift us up.” Lemon grabbed her hand: “I’m going to lift you up. I’m not going to try to bigfoot you.”

She smiled politely. “There’s none of that on this show.”

It was 6:07 a.m. and sweat dripped from Licht’s nose.

He pumped his arms and legs on a machine inside a workout studio two blocks from the Hudson River. Joe Maysonet, a former boxer who wore polka-dot pajama pants, a green oxford shirt, and a peach-colored beanie, stood with his arms crossed, chirping at his client: “Did I say stop? No, I did not!”

Three years ago, Licht weighed 226 pounds. Worried that he was losing control of his lifestyle, he went all in. No more breakfast. No drinking during the week. No more carbs or sweets. (“I’m a fucking machine,” Licht told me one day, when I asked why he was skipping a meal.) He also found Maysonet, whose gym, J Train, caters to New York’s elite—actors, athletes, business tycoons. On this morning, in March 2023, the CNN boss was down to 178 pounds.

Licht jumped off the machine. At Maysonet’s instruction, he squatted down to grab a long metal pole lying flat on the ground. “Zucker couldn’t do this shit,” Licht said through clenched teeth, hoisting the pole with a grunt.

Working in the shadow of Jeff Zucker, a hugely popular figure who had overseen the highest-rated, most profitable years in CNN’s history, was never going to be easy. But Licht had made it harder than it needed to be. Among the first things he did, after taking over, was turn Zucker’s old office on the 17th floor—across from the bullpen, right near key studios and control rooms—into a conference room. Then he decamped to the 22nd floor, setting up in a secluded space that most staffers didn’t know how to find. It became symbolic of Licht’s relationship to his workforce: He was detached, aloof, inaccessible in every way.

The comparisons with Zucker were inevitable, and Licht hated them. Whereas the old boss was gregarious and warm, giving nicknames to employees and remembering their kids’ birthdays, Licht came across as taciturn, seemingly going out of his way to avoid human relationships. At a holiday dinner for his D.C.-based talent, Licht went around the private room at Café Milano, shook hands and spoke briefly with each of the journalists, then sat down and spent much of the dinner looking at his phone. Not only did he say nothing to address the group—as they all expected he would—but Licht barely interacted with the people seated near him. It became so awkward that guests began texting one another, wondering if there was some crisis unfolding with an international bureau. When a pair of them caught a glimpse of Licht’s phone, they could see that he was reading a critical story about him in Puck.

Chris Licht at CNN’s New York headquarters (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)

The negative press had been building—and Licht, whatever his insistence to the contrary, had become consumed by it. Leaks from inside his own house especially angered him. Licht knew that many people remained loyal to his predecessor; some of his top executives, as well as on-air personalities, spoke with Zucker regularly. That hadn’t particularly bothered him at first. Over time, however, it became obvious that those conversations were finding their way into media stories scrutinizing his leadership of CNN. Licht told friends he was convinced that Zucker—whose legacy he was undermining daily with rhetorical recriminations about past damage to CNN’s brand—was retaliating by pushing hit pieces on him. In particular, Licht felt certain that Zucker was using Puck’s Dylan Byers, an ex-CNN employee who was pummeling Licht multiple times each week in his newsletter, to foment narratives of a mutiny at the network.

Licht and Zucker knew each other, having worked together at NBCUniversal. Zucker told friends that he’d found it unusual—but hardly threatening—when, a few years earlier, with buzz building around a potential WarnerMedia–Discovery merger, Licht began attending David Zaslav’s annual Labor Day party, an exclusive gathering in the Hamptons. Licht wasn’t exactly the type of VIP who attended these events. When the merger began to appear inevitable, in the fall of 2021, Zucker got a call from Zaslav. He assured Zucker that his position atop CNN was secure. Then he asked his opinion of Licht. Zucker would later recall to friends that, at that moment, the endgame was clear. Within a few months, Zucker was out, Licht was in, and a cold war was under way. Attempts were made to broker a peace. In August 2022, Jay Sures, an agent who represents some of CNN’s top talent, arranged a meeting at Zucker’s vacation home. It was cordial enough, but suspicions ran deep between the two men. Both soon began peddling competing versions of what had gone down.

However self-serving his criticisms of Zucker, Licht had legitimate reasons to be wary of his predecessor’s approach. CNN had produced some terrific reporting during the Trump years, but it had also embarrassed itself, and the industry as a whole, on more than a few occasions. The use of paid contributors such as Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski, the latter of whom appeared on air while still being paid by the Trump campaign, served no defensible journalistic purpose. The incurious tone of the network’s COVID-19 coverage—its steady deference to government officials, paired with its derision toward those who held heterodox opinions on school closings and other restrictions—did a disservice to viewers. All the while, Zucker’s buddy-buddy rapport with the talent bred a lack of accountability that ultimately created rogues. Chris Cuomo smashed ethical norms and repeatedly lied to management about it. Jim Acosta routinely made himself the story while covering Trump’s White House, specializing in lectures and snarky commentary instead of questions and source reporting. (One viral exchange with Trump, in which Acosta refused to surrender the microphone to a press aide, then stood to interrupt a colleague’s question, came to epitomize the late stages of the Zucker era.) Licht had inherited a culture of loose rules and lax standards. For this, justifiably, he blamed Zucker.

Licht could not, however, blame Zucker for what had become his biggest problem: Don Lemon.

In the middle of February, several weeks before I joined Licht for his morning workout, Lemon set social media ablaze—and infuriated Harlow and Collins, his co-hosts—by asserting that 51-year-old Nikki Haley “isn’t in her prime.” A woman is only in her prime, Lemon explained, “in her 20s, 30s, and maybe her 40s.” This was just the latest in a string of offenses. For months, Lemon had been making the control room cringe with half-baked opinions, irritating Harlow and Collins by forcing his way into every segment, and angering Licht by adding the sort of superfluous commentary the boss had explicitly warned against. Tensions were already high when, one day in December, Collins started to interrupt Lemon during a news report. Lemon continued speaking and held up a finger to shush her—“stand by, one second,” he said—and then, after the segment, berated her in front of the crew. Their relationship would never recover. By the time Lemon made the “prime” remark, Licht was confronting the reality that his morning show might be a bust.

CNN

There was no neat solution to the Lemon problem. Top executives urged Licht to fire him; Licht, knowing it would be seen as a response to the Haley episode, worried about setting a harsh precedent. Lemon pitched an attempt at damage control—a prime-time special on misogyny, which he would host with a roundtable of women—and Licht rejected it. Then, a staffer close to Licht told me, Lemon began telling allies that Al Sharpton, Ben Crump, and other Black leaders would rally to his defense if he were fired, making his dismissal a referendum on CNN’s whiteness. (A spokesperson for Lemon denied this and accused Licht’s team of spreading rumors about him to distract from Licht’s failures at CNN.)

The burden of this—of everything—made Licht’s workouts at J Train indispensable. Licht called Maysonet his “therapist” and “coach” and “one-man focus group.” He was among the few people Licht trusted. This gym was Licht’s sanctuary; nothing and no one was allowed to disrupt him here. Except Zaslav. To the annoyance of his trainer, Licht told me, Zaslav liked to call him at 6:30 a.m. Sometimes those calls came when Zaslav was on the West Coast, meaning it was 3:30 a.m. for him. When Licht told me this, he twisted his face into a pained expression.

Assuming a side-plank position, Licht told me that Maysonet “is super fucking liberal” and not sold on his plans for CNN. Maysonet pressed his foot into Licht’s shoulder. “Rachel Maddow, now that’s my chick,” he said.

Licht rolled his eyes. Maysonet kept goading him. “By the way, you see my boy Jamie Raskin on MSNBC the other day?” he asked, referring to the Democratic representative from Maryland. Maysonet began shuffling his feet like a prizefighter. “Wiping the floor with your Republican boys!”

“They’re not my boys,” Licht groaned, collapsing onto his back.

Maysonet motioned for Licht to flip onto his other side. Then he turned to me, his voice abruptly becoming serious. “I’ll tell you what I do like about his vision,” Maysonet said. “He wants to create a conversation where we can talk to each other again. We can debate anything, but not if we’re not talking to each other.”

I asked him to elaborate. Maysonet explained that after countless hours of conversation with Licht over the past few years—through the murder of George Floyd, the spread of COVID-19, the election of Joe Biden, the siege of the Capitol—he came away convinced that his client was uniquely capable of facilitating a national dialogue on some of the country’s toughest, most divisive issues. Perhaps Licht had spent too much time promoting the return of Republicans to CNN, and not enough time advertising that forum for conversation. “I think that’s the part people don’t know about him, and that’s the part that could make CNN thrive,” Maysonet said.

Licht, now half-standing, hands on his knees, started to clarify that this was precisely what he’d attempted to do with his morning show. Maysonet pretended not to hear him, instructing Licht to go across the room and fetch a large, weighted sleigh. A minute later, as his client pushed the hulking object across the room, growling with every forward lurch, Maysonet mentioned some news from the sports world: The Brooklyn Nets, who had built their franchise around three all-star players, had just traded away the last of them, a catastrophic end to a once-promising experiment.

“All that talent,” Maysonet said, “but no chemistry.”

A studio audience of Licht’s employees looked on as Audie Cornish, CNN’s top audio journalist, probed her boss with questions that he didn’t seem keen on answering.

The purpose of this springtime company town hall was for Licht to quell concerns and rally the troops, laying out his plan for the new CNN. Addressing a few dozen staffers who sat in black stackable chairs—and thousands more watching from their cubicles, couches, and reporting outposts around the world—Licht stressed the opportunity at hand. Americans were starving, he argued, for a network without perceived partisan loyalties; for a source of authoritative, follow-the-facts reporting; for a place that could foster a “national conversation.” CNN could be all of that. But first, Licht suggested, people had to fall in line. They needed to recognize that “the brand has taken a hit over the past few years” and unite around his editorial strategy as “one team.”

What made unity so elusive was that CNN’s newsroom had splintered into at least three factions. Some of Licht’s journalists were dead set against him, believing his approach was a recipe for false equivalency. Others were lukewarm, open to a change in direction yet confounded by his ill-defined denunciations of the work they’d done in recent years. Even those who were fully on board—people who had hailed Licht’s theoretical objective for the network—expressed bewilderment at his lack of specifics. He had talked a big game when he came aboard 10 months earlier, but since then—and especially after CNN’s botched coverage of the first January 6 hearing—had largely kept out of sight, leaving producers and hosts to reimagine their programs off interpretations of Licht’s innuendo. His move to the 22nd floor had become a serious liability. CNN staffers didn’t just wonder where the boss was; they wanted to know what, exactly, he was doing. There was still no permanent host for the lucrative 9 p.m. hour. Licht’s signature initiative—Lemon and the morning show—had become an industry punch line.

Every employee I spoke with was asking some variation of the same question: Did Licht have any idea what he was doing?

Cornish seemed determined to find out. In a Q&A session that grew slightly uncomfortable, she quizzed Licht on these issues and more: the “culture and morale” of the company, the confusion over his plans, the “tough decisions” pertaining to certain employees who hadn’t gotten with his program. Licht began to look and sound restless. At one point, highlighting his recent guidance to refrain from bashing Fox News—and his wooing of Republicans to come on air—Cornish asked Licht about the perception that CNN was tacking deliberately to the right.

He fought a smirk. The network’s coverage of the Fox News story to date had been textbook, he said, presenting the damning facts of what had emerged from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit—namely, that Fox had knowingly misled its audience—and sparing viewers the hysterical analysis found on CNN’s chief rival, MSNBC. As for platforming Republicans, “I think it’s incredibly important, if we’re going to understand the country,” Licht said. “I actually want to hear from these Republicans. And to do that, it has to actually be a place where they know they’re going to get a tough interview, but it’s going to be respectful.”

After underscoring the “fears” people had internally—that CNN was enabling bad actors with a both-sides approach to journalism—Cornish asked him about the company’s reputation. She, like so many of her colleagues, wanted to know what Licht meant by that nebulous word: brand.

Cutouts of Christiane Amanpour and Fareed Zakaria at CNN headquarters in New York (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)

“What I believe has happened in the past, to put it bluntly, is that sometimes the tone of our coverage has undercut the work of our journalism. And we’re just trying to eliminate that and win that trust back,” Licht said. “Trust is that you’re getting to the truth without fear or favor. We have seen the data that shows there’s been a marked erosion of trust—”

Cornish cut him off. “Because of tenor and tone?”

“Yeah,” Licht said.

In the hallway a few minutes later, as we waited for an elevator, Licht asked what I thought of his performance. I told him that he looked on edge—like he was struggling to remain diplomatic in the face of questions that annoyed him.

“Yeah. At one point, I wanted to just say, ‘We’re not going to turn into BuzzFeed, okay?’” Licht said. “But that probably wouldn’t have helped.”

Probably not. Settling into a conference room—his assistant ordered us Sweetgreen salads for lunch—I asked Licht whether he understood the anxiety that permeated his organization.

“I think wherever there’s uncertainty, there’s anxiety,” he said. “These are journalists, so there really isn’t anything you can say that will ease anxiety. You have to show them. So the whole purpose of today really is like, ‘Hey, there is a plan. This is what we’re going to be doing. This is how it’s going to involve you. This is the sense of purpose. This is the strategy.’”

The company, he said, had been reeling ever since the firing of Chris Cuomo, which had set in motion the ousting of Jeff Zucker. “This uncertainty and anxiety, you don’t want it to become the new normal,” Licht told me. “And it has, to a certain extent.”

Much of this angst at CNN, Licht argued, stemmed from skepticism about whether his vision would succeed in bringing back viewers. He acknowledged that it very well might not—or, at least, that it might take a long time. Licht was visibly bothered whenever someone brought up the network’s bad ratings. But, he assured me, David Zaslav cared more about other metrics. Success would be measured differently at CNN than it had been in the past. “This is a reputational asset for the company. It is not a profit-growth driver,” Licht said.

I asked him to define “reputational asset” in the context of an enormous, publicly traded, for-profit corporation.

“CNN, for Warner Bros. Discovery, is a reputational asset,” he said, emphasizing the phrase. “My boss believes that a strong CNN is good for the world and important to the portfolio.”

Even if it’s not making nearly the money it once did?

“So I’m told,” he said.

This sentiment struck me as particularly guileless coming from a newsman. Whatever Zaslav’s worldview, steering CNN toward the center was a business decision. In an age of fragmented media, Zaslav was convinced by Licht, among others, that broadening the network’s appeal to reach an exhausted majority of news consumers was good for the bottom line (and, perhaps as a bonus, good for America). It’s unclear whether Zaslav still believes that model is viable. There had been doubts from day one as to whether Warner Bros. Discovery planned to keep CNN; plenty of industry insiders believed Zaslav’s plan was to stabilize the network, cut costs to stop the bleeding of revenue, then flip it for a gain.

In any event, the health of CNN’s business was but one source of anxiety. I told Licht—based on my conversations with his employees, as well as the questioning from Cornish earlier in the day—that there seemed to be even greater insecurity about the journalistic ethos itself. When he’d warned Cornish about taking a “condescending tone” toward Republicans, surely it sounded to some reporters like he wanted them to coddle the crazy right-wingers who would use their platform to destabilize the country’s democratic institutions.

Licht looked annoyed. “We are not an advocacy network. And if you want to work for an advocacy network, there are other places to go,” he told me. “You can find any flavor of advocacy in a news organization that suits your need. We are providing something different. And when the shit hits the fan in this world, you’re not gonna have time for that advocacy anymore. You need an unbiased source of truth.”

I told him that some journalists, myself included, believe that truth itself needs to be advocated for.

“No one is suggesting in any way that we shy away from the truth,” he replied.

“Do you believe in absolute truth?” I asked.

“That’s a weird question,” he said, rumpling his brow.

It wasn’t that weird. He had used the phrase in one of our prior interviews, but, it seemed, hadn’t given much thought to its usage in the context of modern media. “Absolute truth. Hmmm,” he said, stroking his chin. Finally, he shrugged. “It’s that analogy again, right? Some people like rain; some people don’t like rain. You can’t tell me it’s not raining [when] it’s raining.”

If only it were that simple. A few weeks earlier, The New York Times had descended into open conflict after a group of contributors and staffers signed a letter condemning the paper’s alleged “editorial bias” in its coverage of the transgender community. Another letter, signed by a number of prominent Times reporters, rebuked what they saw as an effort to silence legitimate journalistic inquiry. Both parties, I told Licht, believed that they were standing for the truth.

He leaned across the table. “Your beliefs can be different, but there’s only one truth,” he said. “And we have to be able to ask questions and have conversations that help people understand what’s happening … We have completely lost the ability to have difficult conversations without being demonized or labeled. It’s okay to ask questions, to have difficult conversations. You can strongly believe in something at your core, but that doesn’t affect the truth.”

Licht emphasized that although he would show employees grace for certain missteps, he had no tolerance for efforts to chill reporting on controversial topics. He noted that Zucker, fearing the COVID-19 “lab-leak theory” was a xenophobic gambit that endangered Asian Americans, had essentially banned discussion of the topic on the air. This was not dissimilar, Licht suggested, to the surgeon general of the United States telling citizens at the beginning of the pandemic that wearing masks wouldn’t help them—not because it was a fact, but because the government wanted to prevent a run on the masks needed for first responders.

“They didn’t tell us the truth about something, because they were worried about an outcome,” Licht said.

He leaned back in his chair. “So, yes, I believe in absolute truth.”

Later that day, while riding the Acela from New York to Washington, Licht expanded on his media polemic. Specifically, he wanted to keep talking about COVID-19. Like Trump’s presidency, Licht told me, the pandemic had exposed the degree to which his network had lost touch with the country.

“In the beginning it was a trusted source—this crazy thing, no one understands it, help us make sense of it. What’s going on?” he said. “And I think then it got to a place where, ‘Oh wow, we gotta keep getting those ratings. We gotta keep getting the sense of urgency.’”

He slapped his palms on the table between us, mimicking the feverish pace of an imaginary broadcaster. “COVID, COVID, COVID! Look at the case numbers! Look at this! Look at this!” Licht said. “No context. And, you know, the kind of shaming. And then people walked outside and they go, ‘This is not my life. This is not my reality. You guys are just saying this because you need the ratings, you need the clicks. I don’t trust you.’”

Were they wrong?

“They were not,” he said.

For a man widely perceived to be carrying out the orders of his bosses on the board of Warner Bros. Discovery, Licht held some awfully strong views of his own. Certainly, he was under pressure to conform CNN to the whims of Zaslav; Licht told top staffers that he was continually fighting to “protect” them from editorial interference at the corporate level. Licht had heard the talk about his being a glorified errand boy. Perhaps because it contained some trace of truth, he seemed determined in our conversations to map out his own distinct worldview.

Licht insisted that his media critiques were not ideological; that he was rebuking not a liberal slant on the news, per se, but rather a bias toward elite cultural sensibility, a reporting covenant in which affluent urban-dwelling journalists avoid speaking hard truths that would alienate members of their tribe. When we returned to the question of covering transgender issues—specifically, the science around prepubescent hormone treatments and life-altering surgeries—he suggested that the media was less interested in finding answers and more worried about not offending perceived allies.

“We’ve got to ask tough questions without being shouted down for having the temerity to even ask,” Licht said. “There is a truth in there, and it may not serve one side or the other. But let’s get to the truth. Some of this is right, some of this is wrong; some of this is wrong, some of this is right.”

He paused. “And I will add, this is where words matter. You immediately force some people to tune out when you use, like, ‘person capable of giving birth.’ People tune out and you lose that trust.” He took another pause. “Do not virtue signal. Tell the truth. Ask questions getting at the truth—not collecting facts for one side or collecting facts for another side. Ask the tough questions. It’s an incredibly sensitive, divisive issue of which there is a Venn diagram that this country can agree on, if we get there with facts.”

Licht argued that the media’s blind spots owe to a lack of diversity—and not the lack of diversity that he sees newsrooms obsessing over. He wants to recruit reporters who are deeply religious and reporters who grew up on food stamps and reporters who own guns. Licht recalled a recent dustup with his own diversity, equity, and inclusion staff after making some spicy remarks at a conference. “I said, ‘A Black person, a brown person, and an Asian woman that all graduated the same year from Harvard is not diversity,’” he told me.

A minute later—after noting how sharing that anecdote could get him in trouble, and pausing to consider what he would say next—Licht added: “I think ‘Defund the police’ would’ve been covered differently if newsrooms were filled with people who had lived in public housing.” I asked him why. “They have a different relationship with their need with the police,” he said.

Licht glanced over at his assistant. “Now I’m in trouble,” he said.

I wondered if he wanted to get in trouble—if he savored barreling through the boundaries of mannerly media conversation. It had become apparent, from my reporting, that Licht’s circle was small and getting smaller. He obviously felt that he couldn’t trust some of the people around him—folks who were loyal to Zucker, or leaking to undermine him, or both. That distrust begot a certain foreboding—yet also a certain liberation. Whereas he was guarded with CNN employees, our many hours of conversations began to feel like therapy sessions for Licht, safe spaces in which he vented grievances and admitted fears and chased an elusive breakthrough.

I had heard from former colleagues how, in the early days of Morning Joe, when the C-suites at NBC treated his start-up show like a joke, Licht had adopted a me-against-the-world mentality, hunkering down and swearing to make the 30 Rock establishment pay for its contempt. It occurred to me that Licht was doing the same thing now. The difference, of course, was that he no longer represented the ragtag rebel alliance. He was the chair and CEO of CNN Worldwide. He was the empire.

As we cruised past Wilmington, Delaware, I asked Licht if there were people at CNN who wanted him to fail.

“I’m sure,” he said, nodding, visibly weighing what to say next. He opted to play it safe. “But it’s certainly a very small part, a very small pocket of the organization. So I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”

Then his voice changed. Suddenly, Licht was animated. “But I would say that for anyone who does want me to fail—what are you going for? Who would you want in this seat? You want a journalist? You want someone who has a direct line to the corporation and can make a phone call and go, ‘Hey, what the fuck?’ Do you want someone who’s done the job? Who’s done a lot of the jobs? Who understands exactly what it takes to do what I’m asking? Someone who believes that our future is based on executing great journalism? Maybe they don’t like my style or whatever, but I’m not quite sure what you’re going for—if you want me to fail.”

Licht looked out the window. “So I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” he repeated.

Focusing on his “style” seemed like a cop-out. I told Licht that in my conversations with his employees, they had three main beefs. The first was that he relentlessly attacked the previous iteration of CNN without ever really specifying—as he’d been doing in our interviews—what he disliked about the coverage or what he would have done differently. Licht countered this criticism by explaining that he didn’t want to call out particular journalists, especially “when they were being rewarded for that behavior by the boss before me.”

Licht told me that bad behavior had been addressed with certain individuals directly. Without identifying Jim Acosta by name, Licht said: “There was one person I had dinner with who was very much perceived as [having] the wrong tone, the old way of doing it. People just assumed they didn’t fit in my world. And I had dinner with that person, and I said, ‘Can I assume that this was fog of war? That sometimes we do things during war that isn’t who we are?’ And he said, ‘You absolutely can assume that. What do you need from me?’ We haven’t had an issue.”

This brought us to the second beef with Licht: His approach seemed consistently inconsistent. Acosta was spared while Brian Stelter got axed; John Harwood was pushed out because he didn’t fit the “brand,” but Don Lemon was given a huge new contract and a promotion to anchor Licht’s morning show. After disrespecting his colleague and making asinine comments on the air, Lemon still had his job—for the time being—confounding even those CNN employees who considered him a friend.

Behavior and branding aside, Lemon’s morning show was bad. Hence the third beef Licht’s employees had with him: Wasn’t he supposed to be a producer extraordinaire? A television genius? How was it that so much of the content he put on the air was so unwatchable? I reminded him of what Joe Maysonet, his trainer, had said about the Brooklyn Nets: Big stars and big egos had ruined the team’s chemistry, leaving management no choice but to trade them away and start over. I asked Licht if, four months into the morning show, he was nearing that point.

“Jury’s out,” he replied.

And then I asked Licht if, looking back, there were things he wished he had done differently. He said yes—“100 percent”—but seemed reluctant to say more. When I pressed, Licht conceded that his biggest mistake had been blazing into the place, determined to prove he was in charge, bellowing, in his own synopsis, “I’m gonna be a much different leader than Jeff,” rather than learning the place, including what Zucker had gotten right.

“I was intent on trying to draw a line of difference between the old regime and the new regime,” Licht said. “I should have just sort of slowly come in, without making these grand pronouncements of how different I was going to be.”

Those grand pronouncements had alienated Licht from much of his workforce. He now realized as much. But, he promised me, there was time to turn it all around. His mission was accelerating. Big moves were in the works. Soon, he said, the world was going to get a look at the new CNN.

A newsroom at CNN’s New York headquarters (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)

“Chris was absolutely, positively, without question the right choice for CNN,” the teacher told his students, motioning toward the man seated in front of them. “There is nothing more important in America today than trust. I’m praying that Chris is successful. I want him to have this job for 10 years. Because anything less than 10 years will not give him the opportunity to make the most important changes to the most important news source on the face of the Earth. I have every faith that he will succeed, and every fear for this country if he doesn’t.”

He turned to face Licht. The teacher’s eyes were watery. His voice was choked with emotion. “My hopes and dreams are embodied in you,” he said.

This was quite an introduction, especially considering the man who gave it: Frank Luntz.

For 30 years, Luntz, the pollster and focus-group guru, had been the maestro of messaging for a Republican Party that systematically attempted to delegitimize the news media. Luntz had no particular regrets about this. Though he broke from his party over its subjugation to Donald Trump, he still believed the press had done as much damage to the country as any politician in his lifetime, which explained his exuberance over the selection of Licht to run CNN. Since meeting him more than a decade ago, back in the Morning Joe days, Luntz had become certain that Licht was especially well equipped to frame the sort of smart, fair, nuanced discussions the voting public deserved. With Zucker out of the picture, Luntz went into lobbying mode, pleading with Licht to pursue the job, unaware that it had already been offered and accepted.

Licht had never gotten a fair shake, Luntz told the group of University of Southern California students sitting in a semicircle in his D.C. apartment. The critics had come for him within weeks of his taking the job.

“Days!” Licht said, cutting him off. Luntz nodded in agreement. Licht told him that was just fine. His boss, David Zaslav, thought in terms of years, not months. Licht had a plan to see CNN through to the other side of its identity crisis—and Zaslav possessed the patience to let that plan work. Luntz winced. He noted that NFL owners were famous for saying this very thing about their coaches—that there was a vision in place, that it would take time—before firing them. He told Licht he was praying that would not happen.

That CNN’s chieftain would enjoy such enthusiastic support from a famed Republican operator—and that Licht would pay this early-spring visit to Luntz’s home, a place where House Speaker Kevin McCarthy keeps a bedroom—likely confirms the left’s worst fears about him. (When I asked Licht if he is a conservative, he replied, “I would never put myself into a category. I think it depends on what we’re talking about.”) In truth, Licht wasn’t here for Luntz. The night before, when the old friends had run into each other at an event honoring Ted Turner, Luntz had sprung an idea. He was teaching a class to visiting USC students and would be hosting them at his apartment the next day; what if Licht made a surprise appearance to answer their questions about the media?

Most executives would never entertain such a haphazard scheduling request. To his credit, Licht—now very much in the barrel at CNN, rumors about job security shadowing his every move—did so and then some. The next day, he showed up at Luntz’s apartment and spent an hour with the group of 16 students. It struck me, yet again, as exactly the type of open interaction he’d been avoiding with his own employees. With the students, Licht was blunt and authentic to a fault; once, during a word-association game, when a young woman called CNN “liberal,” Licht made no effort to mask his irritation, quizzing her for specifics until she admitted defeat, confessing that her answer was more about perception than reality.

One of her classmates raised his hand. He asked Licht how CNN could recover from being the face of “fake news.” Licht replied that the network needed to “double down” on a facts-only approach. “It’s so easy to ruin a reputation—and it just takes a lot of time to win it back,” he said. Licht told the students that his organization had little margin for error: Every story on the CNN website, every chyron on the airwaves, every comment on his reporters’ social-media accounts was going to be scrutinized. “It all matters,” he said. “Because the second you give ammunition to the other side, they exploit it.”

And then Licht said something I’d never heard before. “I don’t want people to think of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC in the same sentence,” he said.

Licht told students that MSNBC was using the all-outrage, all-the-time model that CNN had invented; “one show in particular,” he noted, seemed to use a BREAKING NEWS banner on virtually every segment. (He was referring to Nicolle Wallace’s program at 4 p.m., a competitor to Jake Tapper’s show in that time slot.) That tactic produces a bump in ratings, Licht said—but he called it irresponsible on the part of his former employer.

He was—justifiably, but still surprisingly—much harder on Fox News. After all, Licht had repeatedly warned his staff not to “get over their skis” while covering Rupert Murdoch’s network. He stressed that they were “not in the business of freaking out over everything Laura Ingraham says,” because “it’s not news.” What we were witnessing now, Licht said, was news. Tucker Carlson had been trashing Trump in text messages while providing him cover in prime time. Ingraham and Sean Hannity had dismissed the election-fraud crusade in private while selling it to the base. In fact, the evidence that had emerged from the Dominion lawsuit showed that “a major media organization was knowingly misleading people, and it had actual real-world consequences,” Licht said.

Using this example, Licht sought to differentiate CNN from both networks—slamming Fox News for being a duplicitous propaganda outfit, and rebuking MSNBC for trafficking in hysteria. “If every day we were hammering Fox, it all sounds like noise,” Licht told the students. “But if you’re watching CNN right now, you’re going, ‘Wow, this is actually important, because they never talk about Fox.’”

Right on cue, one of Luntz’s students asked Licht about the trap of false equivalency. She seemed less interested in litigating the respective crimes of Fox News and MSNBC—though that played into her question—and more concerned with Licht’s overall attitude toward the news. There is, she reminded him, “one truth” on some fundamental questions facing the country. Trump had lost the 2020 election; Barack Obama had been born in the United States; we know how many deaths have been caused by COVID.

Licht pounced. “Wait a second. We don’t know how many deaths there were from COVID,” he said.

She frowned at him.

“No, really, we don’t,” Licht said. As the son of a doctor, he believed there were “legitimate conversations” to be had about the death toll attached to COVID-19. Perhaps some patients had been admitted to hospitals with life-threatening illnesses before the pandemic began, then died with a positive diagnosis, Licht postulated. “Where we run into trouble is when you say, ‘No. Come on. We’re not even having that conversation,’” he told the students. “That goes to trust as much as anything else. If you’re solid on your facts, then you should be able to entertain that discussion.”

Licht conceded that mollifying the right with a both-sides approach was “the biggest concern in my own organization.” But he wasn’t backing down. It had been unfair, he said, to paint everyone who had questions about the accuracy of death counts as “COVID deniers.” It was dishonest to frame the final pandemic-era bailout as “You’re either for this rescue bill, or you hate poor people.” He gave them his favorite analogy: We can debate whether we like rain or we don’t like rain, as long as we acknowledge when it’s raining outside.

The final question was straightforward. A young woman asked Licht how, given his harsh critiques of CNN’s past performance, the network planned to cover Trump this time around.

“I get asked that question all the time,” Licht said, looking bemused. “I will give you a very counterintuitive answer, which is: I am so not concerned about that.” He explained that Trump was now a recycled commodity; that his “superpower” of dominating the news cycle was a thing of the past. If anything, Licht added, he would love to get Trump on the air alongside his ace reporter Kaitlan Collins.

The students appeared startled by his nonchalance.

“You cover him like any other candidate,” Licht told them.

The next time I saw Licht was two months later in Manchester.

The CNN newsroom had been stunned by the news of the May 10 town hall. Internally, questions about whether the network would platform Trump in the run-up to the 2024 campaign had felt very much unanswered. Almost no one—not even CNN’s leading talent, people who had long-standing relationships with Trump and his top aides—knew about the negotiations to host a town hall. When it was announced, Licht made a forceful argument to his employees about the merits of a live event. The campaign was under way; Trump was the front-runner and needed to be covered. Rather than giving him unfiltered access to their viewers via rallies, Licht said, CNN could control the presentation of Trump with its production decisions, its questioning, its live fact-checking. To varying degrees, his skeptics told me, they bought in.

But anxieties grew as the town hall approached. Employees found it strange that none of the CNN anchors who’d interviewed Trump—Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Wallace—was invited to play a role in preparing for the event, whether by shaping questions, suggesting best practices, or simply advising Collins. Trump speculated on social media about the town hall turning into a disaster, prompting fears among executives that he might stage a stunt by walking off the set, which in turn prompted fears among staffers about what, exactly, the network would do to keep Trump on the set. In the final days before the event, concerns about the audience makeup spiked as Licht’s description of the crowd—“extra Trumpy”—wound its way through Slack channels and text-message threads.

All of these concerns, it turned out, were warranted. Preparation was clearly an issue. Collins did an admirable job but was steamrolled by Trump in key moments; her questions, which came almost entirely from the candidate’s ideological left, served to effectively rally the room around him. Not that the room needed rallying: The crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Trump, and because CNN wanted an organic environment, it placed few restrictions on engagement. The ensuing rounds of whole-audience applause—I counted at least nine—disrupted Collins’s rhythm as an interviewer. So did the ill-timed bouts of laughter, such as when Trump mocked E. Jean Carroll, and the jeering that accompanied Collins’s mention of the Access Hollywood tape. By the end of the event, it was essentially indistinguishable from a MAGA rally. People throughout the room shouted, “I love you!” during commercial breaks and chanted “Four more years!” when the program ended.

CNN

As attendees emptied into the lobby, it felt as though fans were celebrating the home team’s victory over a hated rival. People I talked with lauded Trump and loathed CNN in equal proportion. Christopher Ager, the state party chair, captured their sentiments best: “We knew that CNN had new leadership. It seemed like they had a different tone, like they were going to be fair to Trump, fair to Republicans. But I didn’t see that tonight,” he said. “This was the old CNN.”

Two hundred fifty miles away, on the set in New York, CNN staffers were perplexed. The initial plan had called for Scott Jennings, a Republican who is less than enamored of Trump, to join his familiar grouping of pundits on the postgame show. CNN had flown Jennings to New York for the occasion. However, hours before the town hall, a switch was announced internally: Byron Donalds would be substituted for Jennings (who wound up coming on the air with another panel much later that night). Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida, is an election denier—someone who, to use Licht’s language, says it’s not raining in the middle of a downpour. It was enough of a problem for some CNN staffers that Trump, the original election denier, was flouting Licht’s oft-repeated standard. But why was Donalds on CNN’s postgame panel?

This wasn’t the only peculiar personnel move. Sarah Matthews, a Trump-administration official who’d turned critical of her former boss, had been slated to appear on the pregame show. But she was abruptly nixed in favor of Hogan Gidley, a former White House staffer who remained devoted to Trump.

Live television is a volatile thing. People and sets and scripts are always being changed for all kinds of reasons. Still, CNN employees had reason to be suspicious. They wondered if some sort of deal had been cut with Trump’s team, promising the placement of approved panelists in exchange for his participation in the town hall. At the least, even absent some official agreement, it seemed obvious that CNN leaders had been contorting the coverage to keep Trump happy—perhaps to prevent him from walking offstage. At one point during the pregame show, when the words SEXUAL ABUSE appeared on the CNN chyron, one of Licht’s lieutenants phoned the control room. His instructions stunned everyone who overheard them: The chyron needed to come down immediately.

When the town hall ended, two postgame panels kicked off concurrently, giving network executives the flexibility to switch between reporting and analysis. One panel, anchored by Tapper, was a roundtable of journalists picking apart Trump’s lies. The other, led by Cooper, featured partisan pundits—including Donalds—debating one another. According to the mission that Licht had articulated for me, Tapper’s panel should have starred that night. But it didn’t. Licht made the call to elevate Cooper’s panel (a fact first reported by Puck). This decision may or may not have come from the very top: In the days after the town hall, Zaslav told multiple people that Tapper’s Trump-bashing panel reminded him of Zucker’s CNN. Yet even that MAGA-friendly version wasn’t good enough for Donalds. After criticizing the network on-air, the congressman stepped off the set and then, in full view of the crew as well as his fellow panelists, grabbed his phone and started blasting CNN on Twitter.

Licht was still coming to terms with the ferocity of the backlash later that night when CNN’s popular Reliable Sources newsletter landed in his inbox. He read the opening line in disbelief: “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Licht’s own media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote.

Licht could handle being ridiculed by his media rivals. But being publicly scolded by someone on his own payroll—on the biggest night of his career—felt like a new level of betrayal. Licht, who just hours earlier had expressed ambivalence to me about how the event played, went into war mode.

The next morning, he began the 9 o’clock editorial call with a telling choice of words: “I absolutely, unequivocally believe America was served very well by what we did last night.”

Lots of CNN employees on that morning call disagreed with Licht. They thought his execution of the event had been dreadful; they believed his tactical decisions had essentially ceded control of the town hall to Trump, put Collins in an impossible position, and embarrassed everyone involved with the production. These opinions were widely held—and almost entirely irrelevant. Everyone at CNN had long ago come to realize that Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought.

I was looking forward to finding out. For months, Zaslav’s head of communications, Nathaniel Brown, had been shielding his boss from participating in this story. He first told me that Zaslav would speak to me only without attribution, and any quotes I wanted to use would be subject to their approval. When I refused—telling Brown that quote approval was out of the question, and that I would meet Zaslav only if he allowed on-the-record questioning—he reluctantly agreed to my terms, but then tried running out the clock, repeatedly making Zaslav unavailable for an interview. Finally, after false starts and a painstaking back-and-forth, the interview was set. I would meet Zaslav on Wednesday, May 17—one week after the Trump town hall—at his office in New York.

On Tuesday evening, less than 24 hours before that meeting, Brown called me. “We’re going to keep this on background only, nothing for attribution,” he said. This was a brazen renege on our agreement, and Brown knew it. He claimed that it was out of his hands. But, Brown tried reassuring me, “with everything going on,” Zaslav thought “he could be most helpful to you by explaining some things on background.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised. Over the previous year, people who knew Zaslav—and who had observed his relationship with Licht—had depicted him as a control freak, a micromanager, a relentless operator who helicoptered over his embattled CNN leader. Zaslav’s constant meddling in editorial decisions struck network veterans as odd and inappropriate; even stranger was his apparent marionetting of Licht. In this sense, some of Licht’s longtime friends and co-workers told me, they pitied him. He was the one getting mauled while the man behind the curtain suffered nary a scratch. I declined Brown’s offer. I told him this was Zaslav’s last chance to make the case for Licht’s leadership—and his own. If he wanted to explain things, he could do so on the record, as we had agreed. Zaslav refused.

The night before the publication of this story, Zaslav sent a statement through Brown saying “while we know that it will take time to complete the important work that’s underway, we have great confidence in the progress that Chris and the team are making and share their conviction in the strategy.” Brown also offered his own statement alongside it, saying that he’d only canceled our on-record interview because “it became clear over a period of months between the initial request and the planned meeting that the premise of that meeting had changed.” (It had not; in an email two days before the scheduled meeting, Brown had written that they would see me Wednesday for an “on record” conversation.)

The day after that canceled meeting, I sat down with Licht for the final time, at a restaurant overlooking Hudson Yards. I told him about the perception that Zaslav doesn’t let him do his job. Licht looked temporarily frozen.

“I don’t feel that at all,” he said. “I feel like I have someone who’s a great partner, who has my back and knows a lot about this business.”

“Do you feel like you’ve been able to be yourself on this job?” I asked.

“Where does that question come from? What are you getting at? Like, myself?” he asked, looking incredulous. Licht chewed on his lip for a moment. “I think it’s very different—a CEO job is just very different. Every word you say is parsed. Every way you look at someone is parsed. It’s just different. So I try to be as much of my authentic self as possible within the natural confines of the job.”

I explained where the question was coming from. People at CNN think he’s “performative,” I told Licht, as though he’s projecting this persona of a bulletproof badass because that’s what Zaslav wants to see. His staffers also think he’s become so bent on selling this image that it’s crushed his ability to build real, meaningful relationships with key people there who want him to succeed.

CNN employees had asked me, again and again, to probe for some humility in their leader. If nothing else, they wanted some morsel of self-awareness. They hoped to see that he knew how poorly his tenure was playing out, and why. But Licht would not bite. At one point, I asked him whether he regretted moving his office to the 22nd floor. Licht sat in silence for more than a minute—cracking his neck, glancing around, appearing at one point as though he might not answer the question at all.

Finally, he exhaled heavily. “I didn’t mean for it to become a thing. And it became a thing. So, sure.”

“Only because it became a thing?” I asked.

“Sure,” he replied.

Licht wasn’t going to give me—or, more accurately, his employees—the satisfaction of admitting this error. He certainly wasn’t going to acknowledge everything else that had gone wrong. Even with CNN falling behind Newsmax in the ratings two nights after the town hall, Licht was unperturbed. Even with his employees in open revolt—a week after Darcy’s newsletter, Christiane Amanpour, perhaps the most accomplished journalist in CNN’s history, chided Licht in a speech at Columbia’s journalism school—he was staying the course.

Chris Licht observes a broadcast (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)

I asked Licht whether there was anything he regretted about the event. The “extra Trumpy” makeup of the crowd? (No, Licht said, because it was representative of the Republican base.) Devoting the first question to his election lies? (No, Licht said, because nothing else, not even the E. Jean Carroll verdict, was as newsworthy as Trump’s assault on the ballot box.) Allowing the audience to cheer at will? (No, Licht said, because instructing them to hold their applause, as debate moderators regularly do, would have altered the reality of the event.) The lone point he ceded was that the crowd should have been introduced to viewers at home—with a show of hands, perhaps, to demonstrate how many had voted for Trump previously, or were planning to support him in 2024.

He gave no ground on anything else—not even the presence of Representative Donalds on the postgame show. Licht told me it probably didn’t make sense to seat a congressman on the pundits’ panel, but said he otherwise had no regrets, even after I pointed out that Donalds was an election denier who used his place on that panel to question the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.

Had CNN struck a deal with Trump’s team, I asked, that required seating guests like Donalds and Gidley?

“Absolutely not,” Licht replied. “I can unequivocally say there was no agreement, no deal. Nothing.”

I shared with him a more popular theory of what had gone down. Lots of CNN employees believed there’d been no formal agreement, but rather an understanding: If Trump showed good faith in coming on CNN, the network needed to show good faith in booking some unusually pro-Trump voices for the pregame and postgame shows. I noted to Licht that many of his people believed this would have been agreed to without his knowledge, because he was focused on the bigger picture of producing the town hall. Was it possible, I asked, that his lieutenants might have reached that understanding with Trump’s team?

“Nnnno,” he said, dragging out the word, buying himself some time. “But I can—I mean, anything’s possible. But I would imagine it’s more along the lines of ‘If we are completely one-sided in our analysis, then that doesn’t serve the audience.’” He paused. “Like, [one] of the biggest misconceptions about that town hall is that I did it for ratings. It’s a rented audience”—that is, most viewers were not CNN regulars—“so I didn’t do it for ratings. I certainly didn’t do it for a profit, because it cost us money. And I certainly didn’t do it to build a relationship with Trump. So that would by definition preclude a lot of the conspiracy-theory dealmaking.”

Maybe it was a conspiracy theory. But over the past year, so many things that Licht’s employees had predicted—speculation he’d dismissed as wrong or shortsighted or unhinged—had proved true. Lemon was a disaster on the morning show. (Licht finally fired him in April.) Collins wasn’t better co-anchoring in New York than starring at the White House. (Licht gave her the 9 o’clock hour beginning this summer.) Licht had been fixated on the negative press about him. (He confronted Dylan Byers at a party in March, Licht admitted to me, and raged at the reporter about his coverage.) Zaslav did turn out to be comically intrusive. (In one incident, a day after the New York Post reported that Licht might soon be fired, Zaslav dropped into a CNN managerial meeting and declared to Licht’s underlings, “This is our rendezvous with destiny!”)

Licht had told me that he and Zaslav figured the “gut renovation” of CNN would require two years of work. But there was reason to believe that timeline was accelerating: Not long after our final interview, Warner Bros. Discovery announced the installation of CNN’s new chief operating officer, David Leavy, a Zaslav confidant whose hiring fueled talk of an imminent power struggle—and potentially, the beginning of the end for Licht.

In fairness, Jeff Zucker’s first few years at CNN were also brutal. There were layoffs and programming flops, and viewership was in decline. It wasn’t until Zucker found a rhythm with what CNN staff called his “swarm strategy,” which threw reporting resources at the hottest trending stories—disappearing planes, the “Poop Cruise,” and, ultimately, Trump’s candidacy—that CNN became a ratings behemoth. Licht’s poor start did not preclude a comeback. There was, he and his stalwarts told me, still time for him to be successful.

And yet, little in Licht’s first-year record indicated that success was on the way. His biggest achievement—luring Charles Barkley and Gayle King to co-host a show—was hardly going to revive CNN’s prime-time lineup. The program, “King Charles,” would air only once a week, leaving Licht still in search of the win he needed to juice CNN’s ratings—and perhaps save his job.

Near the end of our interview, I asked Licht to put himself in my shoes. If he were me, could he possibly write a positive profile of CNN’s leader?

He spent a long time in silence. “Absolutely,” Licht finally said.

If the answer was “absolutely,” I asked, why did he need so long to think about it?

“I wanted to be very sure,” he replied.

This was not the same man I’d met a year earlier. Once certain that he could tame Trump single-handedly, Licht still tried to act the part of an indomitable CEO. Yet he was now stalked by self-doubt. That much was understandable: Licht lived on an island, surrounded by people who disliked him, or doubted his vision for the company, or questioned his competency, or were outright rooting for his ruin. He had hoped the Trump town hall would make believers out of his critics. Instead, it turned his few remaining believers into critics. I had never witnessed a lower tide of confidence inside any company than in the week following the town hall at CNN. Some staffers held off-site meetings openly discussing the merits of quitting en masse. Many began reaching out to rival media organizations about job openings. More than a few called Jeff Zucker, their former boss, desperate for his counsel.

As we sipped our coffee, Licht tried to sound unflappable.

“I don’t need people to be loyal to Chris Licht. I need people to be loyal to CNN,” he said.

The only person whose loyalty he needed, I pointed out, was Zaslav.

Licht nodded slowly, saying nothing. Then, just as he started to speak, his wrist began buzzing and flashing. Licht glanced down at his smartwatch. Zaslav was calling him. He looked up at me. Seeing that I’d noticed, Licht allowed a laugh—a genuine laugh—then stood up from the table and answered his phone.

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.

This story has been updated to incorporate details of a statement from David Zaslav and his spokesperson.

Donald Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Religious Right

2023-03-24T07:30:00-04:00

The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.

“I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”

It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.

[Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots]

Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.

According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.

But he isn’t the only one.

Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.

The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.

“I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.

At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.

“Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”

It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)

It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.

“A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”

The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.

“He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”

[Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement]

Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.

“Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”

Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.

Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.

There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.

In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.

There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]

Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.

“So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”

She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”

This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.

DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.

“He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.

Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.

Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.

Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?

“It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”

[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”

In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.

Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.

Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

“The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.

Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.

Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.

“He fights,” Byrd replied.

Requiem for the Spartans

2023-02-15T06:00:00-05:00

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

On the banks of the Red Cedar, a modest tributary that winds through the heart of one of America’s magnificent college campuses, there’s a school that’s known to all. Its specialty is winning: Michigan State University boasts numerous programs that rank among the world’s best, including supply-chain management, agricultural engineering, and graduate education. Oh, and those Spartans play good ball, on the gridiron and the hardwood and beyond, racking up Big Ten titles and churning out professionals, all-stars, Hall of Famers. It’s the home of overachievers and underdogs, an ideal place for someone with a point to prove. The official mantra, “Spartans Will,” is more than a deft motto; it’s a defiant mentality that makes the school exceptional.

Despite its imposing scale—50,000 undergrads fanned out across 5,200 acres of campus—Michigan State is an intimate place, a public school that feels like a private club, an institution that nurtures notions of shared values. Anyone, anywhere, who ventures into the world wearing a Spartan logo on their hat or jacket is prone to be saluted with “Go Green,” and as reflexively as breathing, they respond, “Go White.” This is the ritual by which perfect strangers become extended family. This is the culture that welcomes pimple-faced teenagers to campus—that immaculate, bucolic campus—and then welcomes their children and grandchildren.

But the Michigan State campus was different yesterday. The chime of Beaumont Tower’s grand clock echoed across empty quads, empty benches, empty buildings. A place that should be buzzing on a Tuesday morning midway through spring semester was all but abandoned. Only the flapping of yellow police tape in the February breeze broke the awful stillness.

Twelve hours earlier, a coward had menaced the people of Michigan State. Spraying bullets into the Berkey Hall research building and the nearby Student Union, this coward—a criminal with previous gun charges; a known troublemaker who reportedly took target practice in his urban backyard; a manifest threat who, this being America, still managed to legally possess a firearm—murdered three Spartan students and sent another five to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. The crime scene I encountered was surreal. Here, in the center of campus, spectators not old enough to buy a six-pack watched from behind police lines as a man in protective wear scrubbed the blood of their fellow students off the sidewalk.

I was shocked, though I had no right to be. In the 15 years since I graduated from Michigan State, there have been scores of deadly mass shootings in academic settings. No place has been off limits: Gunmen have terrorized small elementary schools and big universities alike, leaving parents and students and educators with an unresolvable sense of helplessness. Did I think it would happen to my school? Of course not.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Coming undone in the age of mass shootings]

“You’re at Michigan State. There’s a trust here. You think it’s safe. I mean, look around,” Connor Villeneuve, a junior majoring in human biology, as he swept his hand across the landscape, told me.

Villeneuve had left the library at 7 o’clock Monday night. Walking face-first into a blistering wintry wind, his apartment still some distance away, he had nearly stopped into the Student Union to grab a coffee and warm up. Instead, he hustled home, only to learn of the horror unfolding at the location he’d just brushed past.

“That’s always going to be in the back of my mind,” Villeneuve said. “I think MSU will come back from this. This is a strong school, and we’ll come back stronger than ever. But that trust—” he paused. “I don’t know if that comes back.”

My heart ached for him. Raised an hour away, much closer to that other university, the one in Ann Arbor, I never entertained the idea of living in East Lansing. And then I visited the campus. Most products of the youthful imagination are eventually rejected, cruelly and unceremoniously, by the realities of maturation. But every dream that came to my child’s mind when conceiving of college—the stately buildings and the sprawling green spaces, the roaring football stadium and the whispering river, the camaraderie and the conviviality and the bottomless school spirit—was a reality at Michigan State. Suddenly, all I wanted was to become a Spartan.

As I walked the campus yesterday, nearly 20 years later, every sight evoked a memory. There was the library where I pulled all-nighters studying for finals. There was the field where I spent spring afternoons lounging on a beach towel, smoking cigarettes, listening to Led Zeppelin, reading about war and religion. There was the dorm where I met my first real girlfriend; the patio where I declared my love for her; the bar where we hugged, cried, and broke up. Each of these memories is a treasure. Every experience I had at Michigan State—even the immature mistakes and the horrible hangovers—is something for which I’m deeply grateful.

Today’s Spartans might never know that luxury. Standing outside Berkey Hall, gazing upward at square grids of glass, I found myself thinking about the hundreds of young people who had come and gone from this place one day earlier. I studied the windows facing East Circle Drive—one decorated with athletic-department decals, another with stick-on ornaments that shimmered in the sunlight—and wondered what they must have represented to the people who had been trapped on the other side. I thought about the five kids fighting to stay alive at the hospital. I thought about their friends who survived but who will carry scars for the rest of their lives. Mostly, I thought about the three people—cherished children, dear friends, beloved Spartans—who had been slain: Arielle Anderson. Brian Fraser. Alexandria Verner.

College is something more than classes and keggers, caps and gowns. It is a process of ripening, of discovering the outer world but also one’s inner self. It is a collection of experiences and memories that shape a foundation for life. It is a gift. That gift was snatched away from Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser, and Alexandria Verner on Monday.

Walking the campus a day later, I had to question what that gift would mean to the survivors. Would it be a gift at all? Everyone I spoke with counted themselves as fortunate. But the more time I spent with these students—as they wept in a prayer circle, as they hugged their parents in a pickup line, as they laid flowers in front of the place where their classmates had just been slaughtered—the more it became apparent that something special had been spoiled for them. These Spartans would forever associate Michigan State with fear as much as fun, death as much as a new phase of life.

[Read: The club that no one wants to join]

“This place is changed now,” said Madi LaJoice, a sophomore music major who lives in the Campbell dormitory. She spends most weeknights at the Student Union; it’s right across the street from Campbell. But Monday was a rare exception. When she received the email alert from campus authorities with a set of prioritized instructions—“Run, Hide, Fight”—LaJoice and her friends turned off the lights in her dorm room. They barricaded the door by stacking trash cans on top of furniture. And then they sat on the floor in silence for the next five hours.

LaJoice described the scene while leaning against her red sedan, wiping tears from her eyes. She was in the Campbell parking lot, preparing to drive home to the Detroit suburbs after classes had been canceled. Nearby, kids were stuffing duffel bags and laundry baskets into their parents’ vehicles. LaJoice wasn’t sure when she would be ready to return to campus.

“Everyone is always telling you, ‘College is the best time of your life. You better make it count,’” she said. “I love Michigan State. I’ve made the best friends here. It’s my home. It’s my favorite place. And I don’t want to let this guy ruin that for me; I don’t want to give him that power.”

She collected herself. “But it’s never going to be the same, you know? We can try to move on, show how strong we are, and all that. But it’s never going to be the same.”

As we spoke, a young woman ran up and hugged LaJoice. It was her close friend Penny Devine. After a long embrace, they began swapping stories. Devine was in the Student Union on Monday night. She heard three gunshots but felt frozen by the sudden chaos. Finally, seeing the stampede toward the exits, she bolted from her study table, shuffling to keep her slippers from falling off, and merged with the panicked masses streaming down the dark streets outside. Devine called her dad, who told her to stay with people. But she was surrounded by strangers. Two young women, overhearing the call and sensing her desperation, grabbed Devine and brought her to their friend’s apartment.

“That’s Michigan State,” LaJoice said. “For such a big school, it’s such a small community.”

Devine vowed to fight for that community. She hadn’t survived this ordeal to wallow. If February 13, 2023, was going to define Michigan State, she said, it would be because of the response to the tragedy, not the tragedy itself. LaJoice was visibly inspired listening to her friend. Her disposition changed. She and Devine began drawing up a list of tasks that awaited them. Like every other student I met yesterday, they reminded me that they were resilient, that they were Spartans.

The losses of Monday night, they swore to me, would not prevent a victory for MSU.

Mike Pence Refuses to Connect the Dots

2022-11-15T12:04:28-05:00

On the morning of January 1, 2021, Mike Pence awoke after a terrible night’s sleep, poured a cup of coffee, and started his new year with a tongue-lashing from the president of the United States.

Donald Trump’s angry phone call didn’t come as a surprise. The vice president had gone to bed the night before “with a growing foreboding about the days ahead,” he writes in his new book, So Help Me God, which is part memoir, part soft launch of a 2024 campaign, and part eyewitness account of the lies, betrayals, and abuses of power that roiled the nation during Trump’s final days in office. For weeks, the president had been subtly suggesting to Pence that, as vice president, he could act unilaterally on January 6 and prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. Pence had continually resisted, explaining that his only authority under the Constitution was to tally the electoral votes after Congress certified them. Now the proceeding was just days away, and Trump was done being subtle.

Tearing into Pence over the phone—“hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts,” the president told him—Trump was vexed about one thing in particular. A few days earlier, Louie Gohmert, the far-right representative from Texas, had joined other Republican officials in filing a federal lawsuit that would have given Pence “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to decide which electoral votes would be counted on January 6. Pence, in turn, had enlisted lawyers from the Department of Justice to defeat the “frivolous” lawsuit, which he considered an affront to the Constitution. The president could not comprehend his reasoning. “If it gives you power,” Trump asked Pence, “why would you oppose it?”

The anecdote speaks to what makes Pence’s book utterly captivating—and equally unsatisfying.

In the growing library of Trump White House tell-alls published by staffers, family members, and grifters of a general sort, Pence’s could have been the most intimate. It does offer a truly distinctive window into the Trump phenomenon, from unlikely election winner to unwilling election loser, recounting conversations and deliberations to which he alone was privy. And yet, the book is also singularly frustrating, tortured in its appraisal of so many history-making moments and reluctant to reflect meaningfully on the author’s view of them.

The New Year’s Day phone spat is illuminating, because it’s the moment Pence finally sees the light. Once nonchalant about Trump’s refusal to concede defeat—Pence makes no mention of ever encouraging him to do so—he came to realize just how determined the president was to remain in office. Trump didn’t just want to subvert our system of self-government; he wanted Pence to make it happen. Here, the vice president hopes the reader will be as shocked and horrified as he was. The problem is, Trump’s egomaniacal fixation on thwarting a peaceful transition of power is not some anomaly to be understood in a vacuum; rather, it is the continuation of a long pattern of selfishness, deception, and even treachery that long foretold such a crisis. That it took Pence four years—or, in this case, 446 pages—to reach the startling conclusion that the president cares more about himself than about the country robs the book of the visceral authenticity that flashes throughout the opening and closing passages.

[Read: Mike Pence owes the country an explanation]

The author’s caginess is hardly surprising. Pence, a onetime talk-radio host who communicates as deliberately as any politician I’ve ever met, had no choice but to acknowledge his bad blood with Trump as it relates to January 6. There was no brushing it aside or wishing it away, not after the public had seen the gallows and the noose and heard the mob’s chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” Whatever suspense accompanied the news, then, that Trump’s once-loyal sidekick was writing a memoir pertained to the rest of their relationship. It was widely understood that Pence, a scripture-annotating family man from southern Indiana, has little in common with the Manhattan playboy turned president. Because of the literally violent nature of their falling out, it was fair to wonder whether Pence, who had been insistent on keeping their disagreements private, might finally provide an open, honest assessment of the totality of Trump’s presidency.

Anyone who hoped so—anyone who figured that having a seditious mob sicced on you and your family by the president of the United States might be cause for public introspection—is going to be disappointed. It’s not clear whether Pence’s stubbornness on this front is to protect his own presidential ambitions, which remain very much alive, or to safeguard his vice-presidential legacy, which is already under assault. Either way, it makes for a maddening read: Pence surely has thoughts on Trump beyond the book’s carefully crafted, made-for-promotional-material talking points, but he won’t give them to us.

Here, for transparency’s sake, I should pause to clarify two things. First, I have some history with Pence; he once lost his (typically well-concealed) Irish temper in response to a story I wrote detailing his turbulent partnership with Trump and his own designs on the presidency. Pence believes I’ve unfairly picked on him, holding him to a higher standard than I have other people in Trump’s orbit. The second thing is: I have. Why? Because I believe that unlike so many other Trump associates—Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn—Pence is a decent human being. (Any number of high-profile Democrats, including Joe Biden and the late Representative John Lewis, have said the same.) The former vice president isn’t another craven, self-indulgent schemer bent on domination; he’s a humble, civil person who takes his faith seriously and knows the difference between right and wrong.

For decades, Pence has introduced himself to audiences in the same way: “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican. In that order.” To lead with that identifier—to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Pence and his team of longtime loyalists would often bristle at that scrutiny, especially when it stemmed from his silence in the face of some blatant offense committed by Trump. They would remind people that he was the vice president, that his job was to support the boss, not undermine him by opining publicly on the president’s honesty or integrity or judgment.

That defense was plausible, if not always convincing, while Pence was helping Trump lead the free world. But given that he no longer is—and given the rupture in their relationship, which Pence suggests in the book’s closing pages is now permanent—a reader might hope to ascertain how the former vice president truly felt about the controversies that will be debated for decades to come. This is not a journalist’s lazy game of gotcha, hoping to pin down Pence on every policy judgment or political statement the president ever made (although it would be nice to know the author’s innermost thoughts about, say, Trump siding with Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community in Helsinki; Pence shares only that he encouraged Trump a day later to “clarify his remarks”). At the very least, because Pence orients much of the book around his Christian faith—assigning scriptural subtitles to each of the 52 chapters, plus the epilogue—it is fair to expect that he would at least acknowledge the moral dilemma that gripped many Christians who observed Trump only from afar. What to think of the administration separating children from their parents at the southern border? Whom to believe when convincing evidence surfaces to show that Trump paid hush money to a porn star during his presidential campaign? How to reconcile the example of Christ with Trump’s swaggering insults and unrepentant falsehoods and constant, merciless marginalization of those who are the least among us?

Pence makes a conscious decision not to engage with these questions. There is an argument, certainly, that politics requires even the most pious of public servants to make compromises that are justified by some greater good. But Pence does not make this argument. In fact, he flatly refuses to recognize the existence of any such compromises. He wants to impress upon the reader that no soul searching is required. He cannot even bring himself to deal with the perceptions of Trump that span ideological divides. When navigating the sea of buzzwords that substitute for any description of Trump’s manifest vulgarity—the former president is repeatedly described as “brash” and “blunt”; his “freewheeling manner” and “hardball approach” are not for “the faint of heart”—the reader can almost see Pence’s face contorting into that quizzical, far-off look he gives when confronted with questions about Trump’s decorum.

Making this even more conspicuous—at times, almost comical—is Pence’s earnest attempt to communicate his own moral code. The only non-insurrection-related private tiff with Trump that he describes is when, after the then–Republican presidential nominee ridiculed the Gold Star parents who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, he registered his “disagreement” with Trump’s “tactics.” He concludes, “I think he got the message.” Trump did not get the message, but you wouldn’t know it from Pence’s recollection of the following four years, which speeds past so much of Trump’s hateful, deceptive, dehumanizing commentary but stops often to dwell on Pence’s own persecution at the hands of the Democratic Party.

[Read: Mike Pence is an American hero]

Some of Pence’s grievances are legitimate. The mocking of his personal relationship with God, by Joy Behar of The View, among others, was repulsive. And the snickering coverage of “the Pence Rule” (borrowed from the evangelist Billy Graham), which prohibits him from being alone with any woman who is not his wife, was embarrassing.

Still, the extent to which Pence portrays Trump as a martyr, a good and virtuous man who suffered gallantly for the sake of his supporters, makes his lecturing of the left ring hollow. There is harsh judgment of many Democrats—Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Adam Schiff, and, of course, Joe Biden—and their scheming, but abundant grace and bottomless benefit of the doubt for Trump himself.

In fact, Pence goes out of his way to depict all critiques of Trump as partisan and therefore politically motivated, ignoring the fact that plenty of his fellow Republicans, including close, longtime friends such as Jeff Flake, were among the most outspoken critics of the administration. Naturally, Pence does not mention Trump’s cruel ad hominem attacks on Flake—a man who was once like a brother to Pence when they served together in Congress—or on the other former senator from Arizona, John McCain, whom Pence considered a friend and mentor. That the sitting president of the United States was not invited to McCain’s funeral, while former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush delivered eulogies, is the subject of zero analysis.

It’s true that the political warfare had become more conventionally partisan by the end of Trump’s term, because he purged so many of his critics from the party (a fact that Pence does not mention). But it’s also true that 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump after the attack on the Capitol, and that another seven Senate Republicans voted to convict and bar him from running for president again (another fact Pence does not mention).

This is the fundamental failing of the book. Pence has been known to lament to friends the myopic examination of Trump and his presidency, complaining that journalists like me and disaffected Republicans like Flake focus only on the negatives and ignore anything constructive that was accomplished. But in writing such a selectively edited history of the Trump era, Pence has done exactly the opposite: He focuses almost exclusively on the positives of those four years and declines to validate any of the trepidation Americans felt long before the Capitol was overrun on January 6.

Pence wants readers to believe that the carnage of that day came out of the blue, that we could not possibly have foreseen any of it. It’s an insult to the reader’s intelligence. So many dots along the way—the defense of “very fine people” in Charlottesville; the demeaning of anyone who dared, as Defense Secretary James Mattis did, to question his judgment; the quid pro quo with Ukraine and the obstruction of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—collectively pointed to how Trump’s approach to governance was shaped by vanity and self-interest. But Pence refuses to connect those dots. Even now, with the full benefit of hindsight, nearly two years after fleeing for his very life, Pence refuses to consider the connection between the manipulative propaganda of Trump’s administration and the people wearing Make America Great Again hats who wanted to murder him for doing his constitutional duty.

It’s a shame for many reasons, chief among them the fact that Pence acted so admirably on January 6. Not only did he stand up to the mafioso tactics of Trump and his henchmen—more than could have been expected of, say, a Vice President Newt Gingrich—but Pence also refused to leave the Capitol that day, defying his own Secret Service detail and insisting that the work of Congress to certify the election results be completed in the face of bloodshed and death.

Pence deserves the gratitude of every American for his courage and conviction in that moment. Unfortunately, with the moment now passed, he has chosen to revert to vice-presidential form, excusing and ignoring the authoritarian impulses that incited a mob long before the election of 2020 was lost.

Trumpism Is Toxic

2022-11-10T10:53:30-05:00

The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?

The answer, it turns out, is neither.

As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.

Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024.

1. Democratic turnout is going to boom in the post-Dobbs era.

For 50 years, Republicans raged against the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to an abortion, arguing that the ruling should be struck down and abortion policies should be determined by individual states. When it finally happened—when Politico in early May published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization striking down Roe v. Wade—I warned the evangelical leader Russell Moore on his podcast that Republicans, and especially conservative Christians, were about to deal with some devastating unintended consequences.

Up until the 2022 election, most voters had engaged with the abortion issue as an every-four-years, very-top-of-the-ticket decision. Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, after all, and only a Supreme Court ruling could fundamentally change abortion policies in the country. (This was essential to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016: Nearly a quarter of his voters said the Supreme Court was their top issue in the election, after he’d promised to appoint “pro-life judges.”) Given that abortion rights were protected by Roe, the voters who identified abortion as their top priority always skewed Republican, and they were primarily mobilized by presidential campaigns and the prospect of Supreme Court vacancies.

We have now entered a different political universe.

More than a quarter of all voters named abortion as their top priority in this election. That number would be astonishing in any cycle, much less in a midterm campaign being waged against a backdrop of historic inflation and a looming recession. (The only issue of greater salience to voters overall—and not by much—was the economy, which 31 percent named as their top priority.) Even more surprising was the gap in partisan enthusiasm: Among the 27 percent of voters who prioritized abortion in this election, 76 percent supported Democratic candidates, according to exit polling, while just 23 percent backed Republicans.

This is a direct result of the Dobbs ruling, which left individual states scrambling to figure out their own abortion regulations. With Republicans pushing a menu of restrictive measures across the nation, Democrats running for office at every level—Congress, state legislature, governor, attorney general—suddenly had ammunition to mobilize a party base that was, until that time, looking complacent. (When Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in deep-blue Virginia last year, only 8 percent of voters named abortion as their top priority.) At the same time, Dobbs gave Democrats a tool to reach moderates and independents, particularly suburban women, who’d rejected the Republican Party in 2020 but were beginning to drift back toward the GOP because of concerns about inflation and crime.

Democrats I spoke with throughout the summer and fall were hopeful that the abortion issue would be sufficient to prevent a Republican rout. It did that and much, much more. The Dobbs effect on this election is almost impossible to exaggerate. All five states that featured a ballot referendum on questions of abortion saw the pro-choice side win. (This includes Kentucky and Montana, states that President Joe Biden lost by 26 points and 16 points, respectively.) In those states alone, dozens of Democrats, from the top of the ballot to the bottom, received a potentially race-deciding boost from the abortion referendum. Even in the 45 states where abortion wasn’t literally on the ballot, it was clearly the issue that carried the day for a host of vulnerable Democrats.

By every metric available—turnout, exit polling, individual races, and referendum results—abortion was the dominant motivator for Democrats, particularly younger Democrats, who have historically skipped midterm elections. It was also the dominant motivator for moderates and independents to stick with an unpopular president. The story of this election was that millions of voters who registered dissatisfaction with Biden and his economic policies voted for his party anyway. Why? Because they were more concerned about Republicans’ approach to abortion than Democrats’ approach to inflation.

This is very bad news for the GOP. Democrats now have a blueprint for turning out the vote in a punishing political environment. In each of the two midterm elections under President Barack Obama, Democrats hemorrhaged congressional and state legislative seats because the party lacked a base-turnout mechanism—not to mention a persuasion tactic—to compensate for voters’ concerns over a sluggish economy. Politics is a copycat business. Now that Democrats have found a winning formula, you can expect to see entire field programs, messaging campaigns, microtargeting exercises, and ballot-initiative drives built around abortion access.

A winning issue today is not necessarily a winning issue tomorrow. Abortion rights will rise and fall in terms of resonance, depending on the place, the party in control, and the policies that govern the issue locally. We’ve seen Democrats overplay their hand on abortion in the past, as in 2014, when Republicans flipped a U.S. Senate seat because the Democratic incumbent, Mark Udall, campaigned so myopically on abortion rights that even the liberal Denver Post editorial board ridiculed him as “Senator Uterus.” If Democrats rely too much on the issue—or, maybe the greater temptation, if they use their legislative power to advance abortion policies that are just as unpopular with moderates and independents as some of what Republicans campaigned on this cycle—their advantage could evaporate quickly.

Still, the “Senator Uterus” episode came in the pre-Dobbs era, back when Americans still viewed the Supreme Court as the most immediate arbiter of abortion rights, and local candidates didn’t have nearly the reason (or incentive) to engage with the issue. This is now the post-Dobbs era. Voters who care about abortion are thinking less about Supreme Court justices and more about state legislators. The political advantage, at least for now, belongs to a Democratic Party that just weaponized the issue to turn out its base in a major and unexpected way.

2. Bad candidates are an incurable (and fast-spreading) cancer.

In Michigan, “Prop 3,” the ballot proposal enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution, drove enormous voter participation. Democrats were the clear beneficiary: They won all three statewide campaigns as well as the state’s most competitive congressional races. But Democrats did even more damage at the local level, ambushing Republicans in a number of off-the-radar local contests and winning back control of both state legislative chambers for the first time since 1983.

But if you ask Republicans in the state, Prop 3 wasn’t the biggest contributor to the down-ballot massacre. Instead, they blame the terrible GOP candidates at the top of the ticket.

Whereas Republicans in other states nominated one or perhaps even two far-right candidates to run in marquee statewide races, Michigan Republicans went for the trifecta. Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial nominee, was a political novice who had made extreme statements about abortion and gun control in addition to casting doubts on Trump’s 2020 defeat. Matt DePerno, the nominee for attorney general, was best known for leading a crusade to investigate and overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Kristen Karamo, the nominee for secretary of state, was a like-minded conspiracy theorist who manifestly knew nothing about the way Michigan’s elections are administered, and even less about the other duties of the job she was seeking.

“You just can’t ignore the question of candidate quality,” Jason Roe, who ran Republican Tom Barrett’s campaign against Elissa Slotkin, one of the nation’s premier congressional contests, in Michigan’s Seventh District, told me. “We had a fundraising disadvantage, we had Prop 3 to overcome, but candidate quality—that was our biggest headwind. Tom ran about seven points ahead of the statewide ticket. I’m not sure what else he’s supposed to do.”

The same pattern was visible in different parts of the country. In Pennsylvania, Democrats seized back control of the state House chamber for the first time in more than a decade. How? Two words: Doug Mastriano.

In the campaign to become Pennsylvania’s next governor—what was once expected to be one of the nation’s tightest races—Mastriano, the GOP nominee, proved particularly unpalatable. It wasn’t just Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in that state, who stayed away; most GOP state lawmakers, even those who shared some of Mastriano’s fringe worldview as it pertains to election legitimacy or Christian nationalism, kept their distance.

But it hardly mattered. The smoldering crater left by Mastriano’s implosion (he trailed by nearly 14 points as of yesterday evening) swallowed up Republicans all around him. Not only did Democrats improbably win back control of the state House; they also won all three of the state’s contested congressional races.

Time and again on Tuesday, bad candidates sabotaged both their own chances of victory and also the electoral prospects of their fellow partisans on the ticket. And for most of these bad candidates, a common quality stood out: their views on the legitimacy of our elections.

3. Voters prefer “out of touch” to “out of their mind.”

For Republicans, a central charge against Democrats throughout 2022 has been that Biden and his party are out of touch with ordinary Americans. A distilled version of the argument went like this: Democrats, the party of social and cultural elites, can’t relate to the economic pain being felt by millions of working people.

That message penetrated—to a point.

According to exit polls, 20 percent of voters said inflation has caused their families “severe hardship” over the past year. Among those respondents, 71 percent supported Republicans, and 28 percent supported Democrats. This is broadly consistent with other findings in the exit polling, as well as public-opinion research we saw throughout the summer and fall, showing disapproval of Biden and his stewardship of the economy. This would seem damning for Democrats—that is, until you consider the numbers in reverse and ask the obvious question: Why did three in 10 people who said they’ve experienced “severe hardship” decide to vote for the party that controls Congress and the White House?

The simplest explanation is that although many of these voters think Democrats are out of touch, they also think Republicans are out of their minds. And it seems they prefer the former to the latter.

“This is what I would see in our focus groups all summer, and it makes more sense now in retrospect,” says Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who produced a podcast series this year narrating her sessions with undecided voters. “We would have these swing voters who would say things are going bad: inflation, crime, Biden’s doing a bad job, all of it. And then you say, ‘Okay, Gretchen Whitmer versus Tudor Dixon. Who are you voting for?’ And even though they’re pissed at Whitmer—she hasn’t fixed the roads, she did a bad job with COVID—they were voting for her. Because they all thought Dixon was crazy.”

It was the same thing, Longwell told me, in her focus groups all over the country—but particularly in the Midwest. She said that Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, kept getting the same benefit of the doubt as Whitmer: “They didn’t like a lot of his policies, but they thought Tim Michels”—his Republican challenger—“was an extremist, a Trumplike extremist.” Her conclusion: “A lot of these people wanted to vote for a Republican; they just didn’t want to vote for the individual Republican who was running.”

For many voters, the one position that rendered a candidate unacceptable was the continued crusade against our elections system. In Pennsylvania, for instance, 34 percent of voters supported Democrats despite experiencing “severe hardship,” significantly higher than the national average. The reason: 57 percent of Pennsylvanians said they did not “trust” Mastriano to oversee the state’s elections.

Another strategy Republicans used to portray Democrats as “out of touch” was to focus on rising crime rates in Democratic-governed cities and states. This was an unqualified success: Exit polling, both nationally and in key states, showed that clear majorities of voters believe Republicans are better suited to handle crime. In Michigan, 53 percent of voters said they trusted Dixon to deal with crime, as opposed to just 42 percent for Whitmer. But it barely made a difference in the outcome: Despite trailing by 11 points on that question, Whitmer actually won the race by 11 points. To understand why, consider that 56 percent of Michigan voters characterized Dixon as “too extreme.” Only 38 percent said the same about Whitmer.

In the exit polls, perhaps the most provocative question was about society’s changing values relative to gender identity and sexual orientation. Half of all voters—exactly 50 percent—said those values are changing for the worse. Only 26 percent, meanwhile, said those values are changing for the better. (The remaining 24 percent did not have a strong opinion either way.) This is another data point to suggest that Democrats, by championing an ultraprogressive approach to LGBTQ issues, come across as out of touch to many Americans. And yet, even among the voters who expressed alarm over America’s values in this context, 20 percent voted for Democrats. This is a revelation: Given the ferocity of rhetoric in this campaign about drag shows, transgender athletes, and sexualized public-school curricula, one might have predicted virtually zero people would both decry the LGBTQ agenda and vote Democratic. But two in 10 voters—more than enough to tip any close election—did exactly that. Why?

Again, the simplest explanation is probably best: Plenty of voters are worried about unchecked progressivism on the left, but they’re even more worried about unchecked extremism on the right.

That extremism takes many forms: delegitimizing our elections system, endorsing the January 6 assault on the Capitol, cracking jokes and spreading lies about the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And all of this extremism, which so many swing voters spurned on Tuesday, is embodied by one person: Donald Trump.

4. Trumpism is toxic to the middle of the electorate.

Here’s the scenario many of us were expecting on Election Day: The president, still the titular head of his party despite a growing chorus of questions about his age and competence, suffers a series of humiliating defeats that reflect the weakness of his personal brand and cast doubt on his ability to lead the party moving forward.

And that’s precisely what happened—to the former president.

If Tuesday felt strange—“the craziest Election Night I’ve ever seen,” as the elections-analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted—it’s because so many races revolved around someone who wasn’t running for anything. The reason that practically every first-term president in modern history has gotten pummeled in the midterms is that the opposition party typically cedes the stage and makes it all about him. The idea is to force the party in power to own everything that’s unsatisfactory about the country—its economic performance, military failures, policy misfires. It’s a time-honored tradition: Make the election a referendum on the new guy in charge.

Until now.

In each of the three states that saw major Democratic victories—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—25 to 30 percent of voters said they had cast their vote in opposition to Trump. To reiterate: This is a quarter of the total electorate, consistently across three of the nation’s most polarized battleground states, acknowledging that they were motivated by the idea of defeating someone who wasn’t on the ballot, and who currently holds no office. It’s easy to see why they succeeded: In these states, as well as nationally, the only thing worse than Biden’s approval rating was Trump’s. In state after state, congressional district after congressional district, voters rejected the Trump-approved candidate, for many of the same reasons they rejected Trump himself two years ago.

Looking to 2024, GOP leaders will attempt to address the missed opportunities of this election. They will, no doubt, redouble their efforts to recruit strong candidates for statewide races; they will prioritize proven winners with mainstream views on abortion and democratic norms and the other issues by which moderates and independents will assess them. Whatever success party officials might find on a case-by-case basis, they will be treating the symptoms and ignoring the sickness. The manifest reality is that Trumpism has become toxic—not just to the Never Trumpers or the RINOs or the members of the Resistance, but to the immense, restless middle of the American electorate.

We’ve long known that Trumpism without Trump doesn’t really sell; the man himself has proved far more compelling, and far more competitive, than any of his MAGA imitators. But what we saw Tuesday wasn’t voters selectively declining certain decaffeinated versions of Trump; it was voters actively (and perhaps universally, pending the result in Arizona’s gubernatorial race) repudiating the core elements of Trump’s political being.

This trouncing, on its own, might have done little to loosen Trump’s chokehold on American conservatism. But because it coincided with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s virtuoso performance—winning reelection by an astonishing 1.5 million votes; carrying by double digits Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points; defeating his Democratic opponent by nearly 20 points statewide—there is reason to believe, for the first time in six and a half years, that the Republican Party does not belong to Donald Trump.

“I’ll tell you why Tuesday was a bad night for Trump: Ron DeSantis now has 100 percent name ID with the Republican base. Every single Republican voter in the country knows who he is now,” says Jeff Roe, who managed Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign and runs the nation’s largest political-consulting firm. “A lot of these people are gonna say, ‘All these other Republicans lost. This is the only guy that can win.’ That’s really bad for Trump. Republicans haven’t had a choice in a long time. Now they have a choice.”

Trump’s intraparty critics have long complained that his brutally effective takeover of the GOP obscures his win-loss record. This is someone, after all, who earned the 2016 nomination by securing a string of plurality victories against a huge and fragmented field; who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million; who gave away the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020; who lost the popular vote to Biden by 7 million and handed over the White House; and who just sabotaged the party’s chances of winning key contests in a number of battleground states.

Earlier this week, Trump pushed back the expected launch of his 2024 presidential campaign. This was done, in part, so that he could appropriate the narrative of a grand Republican victory against Biden and the Democrats. Given his humiliating defeats, and how they’re being juxtaposed against the victories of his emerging young rival from Florida, Trump might want to move the announcement back up before a very different narrative begins to take hold.

Why Democrats Are Losing Hispanic Voters

2022-11-03T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Philip Montgomery

Have you ever met someone who’s watching their life’s work—their very legacy—fall apart in front of their eyes? I’m talking to two of them right now.

Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox spent the morning juggling plates of chorizo and shouting orders in Spanish toward the kitchen behind them. Now they’re catching their breath in a corner booth at El Portal, the South Phoenix restaurant they’ve run for two decades. They point out the members of their family depicted in a mural on the nearby wall, retracing the mission that brought them to this place and wondering aloud how it all went wrong.

I came to Arizona looking to answer the question of why, over the past few years, so many Hispanics have fled the Democratic Party. This exodus is evident across numerous counties, congressional districts, and battleground states, but the stakes seem highest in Arizona, where Republicans are promoting a slate of extremist candidates and counting on Hispanic voters to help put them in office.

What I found is Earl and Mary Rose, a couple in their mid-70s and the twin bosses of a Phoenix political machine, reckoning with the same awful conclusion I have heard from so many Hispanics, both here and around the country. “The party doesn’t care about us,” Mary Rose tells me. “They pretend to care every two years.”

When Earl and Mary Rose bought El Portal in 1999, in the working-class barrio of Grant Park, they didn’t know much about running a kitchen. Earl had been one of few Hispanic lawmakers in the state legislature; Mary Rose broke barriers twice, as the first Hispanic woman ever elected to the city council and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. But the Wilcoxes envisioned the cramped, dusky dining room of El Portal as more than a place for cheap tacos and tequila; it would be a de facto headquarters for the city’s Hispanic Democrats. There weren’t many of them. But Earl and Mary Rose knew that was about to change.

The Hispanic population was just beginning to boom, and the potential of these voters to tip elections toward Democrats—nationally, but particularly in states like Arizona—was becoming more apparent with every campaign. Hispanics are not a monolith, even if the political class treated them as such. The Wilcoxes wanted to harness the political promise of their community. What they didn’t want was to be taken advantage of. They felt that Democrats were prone to patronizing Hispanics, offering noble rhetoric but never a seat at the table. Earl and Mary Rose decided that the only way to advance their interests was to start organizing, creating a base of power separate from the party’s, making the Hispanic vote so essential that no Democrat could win without it.

The Wilcoxes staged protests, hosted candidate events, ran voter-registration drives, transported voters to the polls. Yet the next two decades brought little but defeat: Two losing battles over comprehensive immigration reform. The signing of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s law codifying racial profiling. Perpetual conflict with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who terrorized Hispanic neighborhoods with “round-ups” and targeted his political opponents. (He once indicted Mary Rose; she and Earl sued him and the county for violating their civil rights, resulting in a $975,000 settlement.) And then there was Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.

Mary Rose and Earl Wilcox, (top) co-owners of El Portal (bottom), a restaurant in South Phoenix (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

Finally, in 2020, a breakthrough: Joe Biden didn’t just win the election, he won Arizona, only the second time since Harry Truman’s administration that a Democrat had carried the state. Given Biden’s winning margin—three-tenths of a percentage point—and the unprecedented turnout of Hispanic voters, there could be no disputing who had delivered Arizona to the president-elect.

The state’s Hispanic population had tripled since 1990, but Republicans had spent those years doubling down on the harsh policing and immigration policies that appealed to their white conservative base. Earl and Mary Rose had spent decades waiting for the GOP’s bill to come due. On Election Night 2020, they toasted to a new era.

And then the strangest thing happened. People started coming into El Portal to vent their frustrations and unload their grievances—against the Democratic Party.

“Our community, we may not be educated at the highest levels, but we have a lot of street smarts. We know when people are bullshitting us,” Earl tells me, motioning to the people sitting around us. “You know what they say to Democrats now? ‘Es pura cábula.’ Bunch of bullshit.”

Over the past few years, Hispanics have begun abandoning the Democratic Party, defying generations of political patterns and causing varying degrees of panic on the left. In the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, they won the Hispanic vote by 40 points nationally. In 2020, Democrats still carried the vote by an estimated 33 points against Trump himself, though the party’s margin against GOP candidates nationwide shrank to 27 points. This summer, numerous polls showed Hispanics splitting in a statistical tie between the two parties. Even if such findings are exaggerated—several recent surveys have shown Democrats reestablishing an advantage among these voters—it’s evident that Republicans are poised next week to win their biggest share of Hispanics in the modern era.

Whether this translates into outright GOP victories is harder to predict, given the party’s continued hemorrhaging of white suburban voters. Indeed, this is what makes the implications of a Hispanic partisan realignment so profound: At a moment when Democrats have begun to dominate the affluent, college-educated vote that for decades formed the cornerstone of the Republican coalition, perhaps the only thing that can keep the GOP competitive is an infusion of support from the very middle- and working-class Hispanics who were, at this moment in history, supposed to deliver the Democrats a foolproof majority.

Given the ferocity of the criticisms Earl relays to me from his patrons—Democrats are insufficiently patriotic; they are elitist in their cultural sensibilities; and they are oblivious to the struggles and priorities of working people—I ask the obvious question: How durable is his party’s hold on the Hispanic vote?

Guests gather for an anniversary party at the American Legion post next door to El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

He thinks for a moment. There’s a professor from Arizona State, he tells me, who comes by often. One recent morning, after overhearing some of Earl’s regulars sounding off on the Democratic Party over breakfast, the professor pulled him aside. He could sense that Earl was anxious, and told him not to worry. Whatever gains the GOP was making were bound to be temporary. Hispanics, the professor told him, would never abandon the Democratic Party.

Earl shakes his head. “I’m not so sure anymore,” he says.

The Democrats’ predicament today is 20 years in the making.

It’s almost hard to remember now, but in 2002, Democrats were deep in the minority. The president, George W. Bush, was immensely popular, and the GOP was about to win strong congressional majorities in the midterms. There was no easy path back to power for Democrats. Salvation arrived in the form of a book, written by the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John B. Judis, called The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, which analyzed evolving social structures relative to voting behaviors, argued that because America was becoming more educated, more urban, more secular, and more diverse, Democrats were “on the verge of establishing the same kind of ‘lock’ on the electoral college that the Republicans enjoyed in the 1980s.”

On the left, the book was treated as something akin to divine prophecy. Though Teixeira and Judis took pains to avoid having their work reduced to an end-of-white-America analysis, it was inevitable: The book documented how, every election cycle, minorities were increasing as a share of the overall electorate while non-college-educated white voters were decreasing at an even faster clip. A phrase that appeared nowhere in the book—“Demographics are destiny”—became a kind of support-group mantra for progressives whose consolation after Bush’s reelection in 2004 was the assurance of a long game that was already being won.

“It took hold because, let’s face it, this was something Democrats really wanted to hear,” Teixeira, a Democrat himself, told me this summer. “And so, of course, when Obama got elected in 2008, it was viewed as a validation of that analysis—even though Obama’s election was more complicated than that.”

Democrats had won big among nonwhite voters since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. What set apart Barack Obama’s victory wasn’t necessarily his margins—he carried two-thirds of Hispanics, per exit polls, and 95 percent of Blacks—but the mass mobilization of these and other groups that had historically gone underrepresented. Obama assembled “a coalition of the ascendant,” as my colleague Ron Brownstein put it, cornering the demographics—young people, women with college degrees, and minorities, particularly Hispanics—that were emerging as the future of the electorate. By emphasizing these groups, by elevating them and celebrating their inclusion in the party’s coalition, Democrats were portraying themselves as the party of a new America.

When Obama put that same winning coalition back together in 2012, running up the same crushing margins among nonwhite voters, “Demography is destiny” became conventional wisdom, and not just on the left. Two days after Mitt Romney’s defeat, Fox’s Sean Hannity called for comprehensive immigration reform, complete with a path to citizenship, lest Hispanic voters usher Republicans into permanent minority status. The national GOP commissioned an autopsy report focused on repairing the relationship with Hispanics. Senator Lindsey Graham, who led a team of Republicans on a doomed mission to fix the nation’s immigration laws, warned that his party was entering “a demographic death spiral.”

But neither the left nor the right really understood Hispanics, who were motivated by different issues than were Blacks—to the extent that they could be accurately categorized at all. In Florida alone, Cubans are generally more conservative than Colombians, who are generally more conservative than Puerto Ricans; the Mexicans who live across the Southwest have distinct ideological profiles that depend on how long they’ve been in the United States. All the emphasis on nonwhites, and the GOP’s inability to win them, made it hard to see the very different reasons that different blocs had for supporting Democrats—or their different degrees of partisan loyalty.

Josue Gomez, Alejandro Villa, and Brandon Gomez canvass a neighborhood in South Phoenix, encouraging residents to register to vote. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

“In my opinion, the Latino vote has always had a swing dimension to it,” says Carlos Odio, a former Obama aide who specialized in Hispanic outreach and in 2019 co-founded the Miami-based firm Equis Labs. “Now, it just so happened to swing the same way over a series of elections. It’s like a coin flip landed on heads, over and over again, for a variety of reasons. But we keep thinking the coin will always land on heads. I think it’s a mistake.”

There are two ironies at work. The first is that it required the presidency of Donald Trump—he of the “I love Hispanics!” caption on a Cinco de Mayo tweet, fork digging into a Trump Tower taco bowl—for some Democrats to question their own dogma. Trump was supposed to be uniquely unacceptable to minorities, and to Hispanics in particular, given his assessment of Mexicans as, among other things, “rapists.” Yet Democrats didn’t see major gains with Hispanics during his four years in office. Instead, their margins shrank.

“In the end, the 2020 election wasn’t won by the ‘ascendant’ nonwhite voters at all,” Teixeira told me. “It was the college-educated white voters who won the election for Biden.”

Hence the second irony: The very thing that breathed life into the Democratic Party 20 years ago—the focus on identity and inclusion—is making it more popular with white voters, and less popular with Hispanic voters. (This is what far-right fear merchants like Tucker Carlson fail to grasp: The immigrants demonized by his “Great Replacement” rhetoric are now, in some respects, likelier to vote Republican than the people they are supposedly replacing.)

Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights. Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.

Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said, whether his fellow Democrats want to accept it or not. “The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats. According to Pew Research, the U.S. Hispanic population has grown to 62 million from fewer than 10 million in 1970. (Hispanics accounted for more than half of America’s population growth from 2010 to 2020.) In the last election, Hispanics eclipsed African Americans in terms of raw eligible voters. Hispanics are not yet a national force—their numbers are still diluted in the upper Midwest, for instance—but in several key battleground states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, they have become the most essential, and most coveted, demographic.

“We’re in a game of tug-of-war. There are two sides,” Odio told me. “Democrats are going to lose where they let go of the rope.”

I asked him where Democrats are in the most trouble with Hispanic voters, and Odio didn’t hesitate. It’s the place where he lives: Miami, Florida.

Juan Cuba can still remember the moment he began to worry.

It was 2013, and Democrats were euphoric after Obama’s back-to-back victories. Not only had the president carried Florida in both elections, but he had made a statement in Miami-Dade County, a place crowded with Cuban Americans, who, due to historic distrust of the Democratic Party dating back to John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, have aligned more with the GOP than have other Hispanics. Obama won the state’s most populous county by 16 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012. In a place where Republicans had spent a generation building relationships with Hispanic voters—much of it thanks to Jeb Bush, the popular bilingual governor, whose brother ran two ultracompetitive presidential campaigns in Miami-Dade—Obama’s triumphs felt like a watershed.

Campaign volunteers rally primary voters in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

And yet Cuba, who assumed the role of executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party after Obama’s reelection, started seeing red flags. As the 2014 midterm campaign got under way, Democrats spoke with a certainty—bordering on arrogance—about the Hispanic vote being locked up. Those who had turned out for Obama, Cuba told me, were now considered part of the party base. Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for governor, campaigned as if Hispanics were a sure thing. They would vote, and they would vote for Democrats.

Crist lost the governor’s race by about 64,000 votes. And although he won Miami-Dade by a sizable margin, turnout lagged relative to both parties’ expectations. “Had we engaged more voters, especially Hispanic voters, we would have won that race,” Cuba said.

When Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination in 2016, Democrats in South Florida stressed to her team the importance of not repeating that mistake. Clinton poured resources into Miami-Dade, running a ground game that located existing voters, registered new ones, and tracked both to make sure they were casting ballots. Cuba’s concerns about the party’s complacency were assuaged. He had a new worry, however. The messages used by Clinton and her Democratic allies to mobilize Hispanic voters were nothing like what they’d used in the Obama campaigns. There was little about hope and change. It was mostly about fear and victimhood.

“I’m an immigrant myself, and when I think back to what worked on those Obama campaigns, it was really that he spoke to the aspirations of Hispanics. He talked about the American dream. He gave people a sense of how the Democratic Party was about social mobility through hard work,” Cuba said. “But by 2016, we’d become less the party of the American dream, and more the party of anti-Trump.”

It worked, at least initially: Clinton carried Miami-Dade by nearly 30 points against Trump—an unprecedented margin in Florida’s biggest county. But Cuba, who rose to the position of county party chair in 2017, recalls how quickly the anti-Trump message began losing potency. The economy was roaring to life after eight sluggish years of post-recession recovery at the same time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in 2016, was espousing an open distrust of capitalism and questioning the existence of opportunity and upward mobility in America.

“I’ll never forget, we did a focus group with Hispanic voters in 2019,” Cuba said. “It was clear that a lot of these Hispanics voted against Trump in 2016 because they were scared of him. And by 2019, they weren’t scared anymore.”

María-Elena López has held a variety of positions within the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

María-Elena López, who held a variety of positions under Cuba in the county party, saw this shift taking place in real time. She believes that there is no real mystery to it: While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.

“We’re not a political party; we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”

López is a former Republican who, in the mid-1990s, became estranged from the GOP of her youth. She became an avid Democrat during Obama’s first run, got deeply involved with local party politics, and today serves as first vice chair of the county party. She counts herself as a progressive on nearly every issue. But, López said, many of her fellow progressives don’t appreciate how fundamentally conservative the Hispanic community is—more religious, more entrepreneurial, more working class—relative to the other cogs in the Democratic coalition.

At one point in our conversation, I mentioned to López how the overturning of Roe v. Wade seemed to be muddying forecasts of a Republican romp at the polls in November; how some Democrats, particularly those running in wealthy white suburbs, were gaining momentum in their campaigns by hammering the GOP’s anti-abortion platform. López, who had been quite animated, suddenly lowered her voice.

“You see, that’s a perfect example. I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” López said. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land—but they are against it morally. They may not be, quote-unquote, pro-life, but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”

To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?” she said, throwing up her arms. “Now we’re inventing language?” (This was but one of the many unsolicited rants I heard against the term Latinx.)

Campaign volunteers surround Maria Dominguez and her children as she goes to vote in the Florida primary. Originally from Nicaragua, Dominguez recently obtained U.S. citizenship; this was her first time voting in the country. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

López said it’s all about opportunity cost: Every minute Democrats spend on topics that appeal to small portions of their existing base is time that could have been spent speaking to a single theme that preoccupies voters across the ideological spectrum: jobs, opportunity, upward mobility. “You can still be the party of all those other things,” she said. “Just don’t talk about them so much.”

Of course, the challenge for Democrats isn’t just modulating the message; it’s also combatting the right-wing misinformation machine.

When I sat down with Joe Garcia on the narrow, concrete-slabbed patio of a Miami Beach café, the former congressman spoke in fatalistic tones. A political party is only as good as its rhetoric, Garcia told me, and in South Florida, “Democrats are losing the rhetoric war to Republicans—badly.”

Garcia, who was elected alongside Obama in 2012 and represented his native Cuban neighborhoods in western Miami-Dade, said Republicans have always been craftier in delivering their messages on Spanish-language TV and radio. What’s new, he said, is the way conservatives have swarmed the most popular social-media pages and WhatsApp chat groups in his community, relentlessly circulating half-sourced posts that portray the Democratic Party as weak on crime and soft on socialism.

Former Representative Joe Garcia smokes a cigar outside Pinecrest Bakery in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

“Look at Biden’s new Cuba policies, for instance,” Garcia said. What the administration announced in the spring—the relaunching of a family-reunification program, increased flights to the island, an easing of restrictions on the money Americans can send and invest there—“should actually be more popular with Cubans than Trump’s hard-line policies,” Garcia said.

But the White House—according to numerous Democrats on the ground—did nothing to coordinate a messaging strategy around these policy changes. Nobody here could get booked on a local news program, or write a social-media post defending the new policies, because they found out about them at the same time everyone in the general public did. As a result, Garcia told me, puffing a massive Cuban cigar, “Democrats are getting killed, every single day, on Spanish-language media here, even though it’s an argument we should be winning.”

This episode reflects a broader intellectual arrogance, Garcia said. The conviction that history and demography are on the Democrats’ side dulls the political instinct of persuasion. “Look, I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. But he turned our party into a religious order,” he said. “When you think you’re right—no, when you know you’re right—everybody should just get it. You stop making the argument.”

Garcia pointed to 2018, when Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum for governor—a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Garcia and his fellow Democrats in Miami could already recite the attacks on Gillum as a sleeper socialist. When those attacks came, Gillum didn’t do much to dispel them. (When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he was a socialist, Gillum replied simply, “No, I’m a Democrat.”) He wound up winning Miami-Dade by 21 points—down from Clinton’s 30-point margin two years before—and lost the election by 32,463 votes statewide. “Let’s face it,” Garcia said. “We lost the governorship to Ron DeSantis because our nominee wouldn’t come out and say, ‘I’m not a goddamn socialist.’”

Democrats here say the national party should have learned a hard lesson from that campaign. Instead, after 2018, the party’s ranks began to swell with influential young progressives, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who championed far-left policies while openly embracing the socialist label. Moderate Democrats were reluctant to push back. It was a Republican dream come true. By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the GOP had scaled up the socialism attacks nationwide. The reward was clearest in South Florida: Republicans knocked off two Democratic congressional incumbents, and Trump closed the gap in Miami-Dade to seven points, a 23-point swing from the 2016 election.

The name “AOC” came up in dozens of my conversations with Hispanic Democrats around the country, many of whom are struggling to neutralize the socialism charge in their own communities. By turning the young representative into a boogeyman, Garcia told me, Republicans forced Democrats to play defense over labels and abstractions while rendering the left’s version of 21st-century populism unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate that might otherwise be receptive to it.

Campaign volunteers shout their support for candidates outside the Westchester Regional Library in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

“She is not Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao, or anything like that. She’s a classic northeastern liberal who’s pushing a social agenda that, in many respects, has real viability at a time like this,” Garcia said of Ocasio-Cortez. “So, how do you shut down the debate? You engage in name-calling. You use propaganda to scare us from acting on the issues most important to our base.”

He also acknowledges, however, that the Democratic base is changing. Progressive policies—around climate, or guns, or even immigration—might poll well with the liberal, college-educated wing of the party. But they might also continue to alienate the working class, including the Hispanic working class, from the Democratic brand. Days before I sat down with Garcia in Miami Beach, a poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed, for the first time in the survey’s history, that “Democrats had a larger share of support among white college graduates than among nonwhite voters.”

This is what Carlos Odio meant when he told me national Democrats have “let go of the rope” in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t that his party would no longer compete for votes down there; rather, it was that his party was acknowledging a new reality, in which affluent white voters are a higher political priority than are working-class Hispanics. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. I asked Garcia if he was comfortable with such a trade-off.

He shrugged. “That’s how we won last time.”

In Bruno Lozano’s blue pickup truck, the air-conditioning whistling through every vent, we stopped and gazed at the Del Rio International Bridge. It was here, Lozano told me, that in September 2021 tens of thousands of Haitian migrants gathered underneath the bridge and set up camp for several days in extreme heat. Del Rio had dealt with migrant waves before, but nothing like this. The city could not handle the influx; its border-processing facilities were at capacity, its humanitarian workers past their breaking point. The community was panicked. Lozano, then the mayor, was desperate. Some of these migrants, he thought, were going to die.

“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said.

Bruno Lozano (left), a former mayor of Del Rio, Texas, says his warnings to Democratic leadership about a deteriorating situation at the southwest border went largely unheeded. An abandoned bus in Del Rio (right), where migrants discarded clothing after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

Lozano told me he reached out to every Democratic official he could think of, in Texas and beyond, pleading for any help or resources they could offer. When that failed, he asked them to come visit Del Rio, to at least shine a light on what was happening at the border. “They looked the other way,” Lozano said. “They just pretend it’s not happening.”

[Caitlin Dickerson: Democrats’ free pass on immigration is over]

When he was elected mayor of Del Rio in 2018, Lozano, just 35 years old at the time, fit the profile of a rising star in the Democratic Party. An openly gay Hispanic military veteran, Lozano “checked every box” for the party. Since he had defeated a Republican incumbent just as his county was beginning to turn red, Lozano said, “you would figure Democrats might listen when I’m telling them something is wrong.”

Lozano said he began sounding the alarm almost as soon as Biden took office. He told his fellow Democrats that, for all the damage done by Trump’s cruel border-security policies, a relaxed approach to border enforcement could prove even more disastrous. He warned them of a potential humanitarian or national-security crisis. He told high-ranking party officials in Austin and in Washington—including during a visit to the White House for an LGBTQ pride event—that Hispanics in his community were turning on the Democratic Party, in part because of its indifference to the chaos at the southern border.

He told me they refused to listen. And today, Lozano said, pulling into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn a few miles from the border, the problem is worse than ever.

The Ramada is where locals host wedding receptions, where businesspeople and politicians meet for breakfast, and where, on a blazing July afternoon, the Del Rio Chamber of Commerce was holding its monthly luncheon. There was no vacancy at the hotel; rooms were booked for Border Patrol agents who had flooded into the area to reinforce a sector that was being overrun.

“This is the biggest wave of illegal immigration in American history, and we’re at the epicenter of it here in Del Rio,” Jason Owens, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, announced at the luncheon. “In the last 24 hours, we’ve apprehended 2,240 people in this sector alone.”

The room buzzed. Forty or so people, local entrepreneurs, most of them Hispanic and many of them lifelong Democrats, exchanged looks of dismay. A few expletives could be heard. Owens wasn’t done.

“In fiscal year 2021, we apprehended nearly 260,000 people in the Del Rio sector. That was more than the previous nine fiscal years combined,” Owens said. “This fiscal year … we are already in excess of 330,000 people apprehended in this sector. Last year was record-breaking; this year, we’ve already shattered it.”

Deputy Jaime Guzman searches for migrants just off the shore of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

Part of this can be attributed to the continued enforcement of Title 42, a COVID-era policy that suspended asylum requests and authorized the automatic expulsion of single adult migrants who hailed from certain countries; many of those migrants have been apprehended and expelled more than once, driving the number of crossings higher. Because of the known gaps in America’s immigration policy, Owens said, many migrants in this area follow a trail to where they know Border Patrol will be waiting. Those who are allowed to stay in the U.S.—because they are not subject to expulsion, or because they have no criminal record—are typically processed, then detained or released, with orders to appear at a future court date.

Owens said it’s the migrants who go out of their way not to get caught—he cited data from video monitoring suggesting that roughly 140,000 people have crossed unmolested in this sector in fiscal year 2022—who worry him the most. Those 140,000 who got away combined with the 330,000 apprehensions makes for 470,000 illegal crossings from October through July—in the Del Rio sector alone. “And there are nine sectors along the southwest border,” Owens said.

When he opened the meeting to questions, person after person demanded to know how this could be happening, who was to blame, and what they could do to punish the political actors responsible.

“How do you feel,” Sarita Perales, an administrator from the local hospital, asked, “about the Biden open-border policy?”

Owens fought a smirk. “The administration will tell you that the border’s not open,” he replied, eliciting groans from the audience.

Technically, the border is not open. But you wouldn’t know it from spending a few days in Del Rio. People I spoke with down there said they’d never seen anything like the mass of humanity moving across the border since Biden became president. In fairness, apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in the spring of 2020 and continued to climb throughout Trump’s final year as president. But the numbers spiked much higher after Biden took office. It’s difficult to examine the policies of his administration—which, according to the left-leaning Migration Policy Institute, “narrowed the scope of immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior” and “adopted something of a new approach to border enforcement”—and dispute the conclusion that Democrats have made it easier for migrants to attempt and complete an unlawful crossing into the U.S., making a historically bad problem much worse.

This is exactly what Perales, a mother of four, feared would happen. Born in Mexico, Perales came to the U.S. legally when she was 7 years old and became a naturalized citizen in 2017. Her first opportunity to vote in a presidential election was in 2020, and she felt “so disappointed with my choices.” Perales grew up in Del Rio, a place with deep Democratic roots. She has progressive sensibilities on many social issues. She hated some of the hard-line policies of the Trump administration, including the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the more she listened to activists and elected officials on the left, the more worried she became that Democrats would embrace the other extreme—refusing to secure the border at all.

Left: The fence that separates the United States and Mexico in Val Verde County. Right: Abandoned backpacks inside a residential home used by migrants while the owner was away. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

Perales ended up voting for Trump. Despite disagreeing with him and the Republican Party on a host of issues, she told me, she plans to vote a straight-GOP ticket in 2022, because of the chaos Democrats have brought to her community.

“Where is our respect for laws? Where is our respect for the people already here?” Perales said. “I’m an immigrant; I’m also an American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”

Studies and polling suggest that Hispanics who entered the U.S. legally tend to be more conservative on questions of immigration. Some progressive Hispanics have bemoaned this, likening it to selfishly slamming shut a door behind you. Perales insisted that she doesn’t feel threatened, economically or otherwise, by new immigrants. She understands the hopeless circumstances that drive so many people from impoverished and conflict-ridden countries to make the journey north. What worries her is the perception of “crossing without consequences.” She wants the U.S. to broadcast a stricter approach to immigration, not just for the sake of the rule of law and for the stability of her community, but also for the well-being of those thinking of coming here.

“They’re being treated so inhumanely,” Perales said of the migrants traveling to America. “But it’s the open-borders policy that is leading to that inhumane treatment.”

Joe Frank Martinez, the sheriff of Val Verde County, photographed along the U.S.-Mexico border wall (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

Joe Frank Martinez, the sheriff of Val Verde County, told me the same thing when I visited his office in Del Rio. A strong show of deterrence at the border, he said, is the decent thing to do. Not a week went by this summer, Martinez said, that he and his deputies didn’t discover a body of someone who had either drowned in the river or perished in the heat. Shortly before my visit, he told me, they recovered four corpses in the span of three days. (I checked the weather app on my phone. It was 106 degrees outside.)

Like most of the sheriffs in South Texas, Martinez is a Democrat. But definitions are a funny thing down there. Many of the residents have ancestral roots in both old Mexico and present-day Texas; they identify as “Tejanos.” In the same way Tejanos here don’t identify with, say, Mexican Americans in Arizona, Democrats here don’t identify with Democrats just about anywhere else. Martinez is pro-life, pro-gun, and generally conservative in ways that don’t mesh with the modern Democratic Party.

He believes that both parties deserve blame for failing to fix a broken immigration system and “put something in place that can reasonably allow people to make a legal entry.” But, Martinez insisted, this present crisis is one of his own party’s making. “Right now, these migrants feel like they’ve got a standing invitation from this administration to cross the border,” he said.

It wasn’t long ago that Democrats ruled South Texas. Today, Martinez told me, “the Democratic strongholds in Del Rio aren’t real Democratic anymore.” Val Verde County, which Democrats carried by an average of eight points in the previous three presidential elections, went for Trump by 10 points in 2020. The Twenty-third Congressional District, which covers Val Verde, is held by a Republican. Just weeks before I arrived in Del Rio, Mayra Flores, a Mexican-born Republican, flipped the Thirty-fourth District—farther to the east, in the Rio Grande Valley—in a special election. (A Democrat had carried the district by double digits in every election since it was redrawn after the 2010 census.) The GOP is favored to flip the neighboring Fifteenth District next week and represent a majority of Texas’s border districts; less than a decade ago, Democrats controlled every single one.

Martinez said most of the Democrats he’s known over the years have become skeptical of the party. For longer than he can remember, he’s had a weekly breakfast with the same group of seven or eight guys at the Ramada. They were always Democrats—all of them. Now, he said, there’s only one holdout. The rest have switched sides.

In the sheriff’s view—and he said it’s part perception, part reality—his party has become too progressive for Hispanics in a community like his. “This talk of defunding the police, it’s had a real impact,” Martinez said, describing the local Hispanic community as ardently pro–law enforcement. Meanwhile, he added, the moderates in his party at the state and national levels aren’t doing enough to push back on the left. Over the past three years, Martinez estimated, he’s given tours of the border to more than 100 members of Congress. “I haven’t had a single Democrat here. Not one,” he said. “And trust me—I’ve invited them.” (Not long after we spoke, Martinez finally welcomed his first congressional Democrat, Darren Soto of Florida, to the border.)

Left: The Rio Grande. Right: Wet clothing discarded by a migrant on the river’s Del Rio–side bank. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

In Lozano’s truck, as we drove on a narrow road that runs parallel to a stretch of border fence—started by the George W. Bush administration, continued under Obama—he was still seething. Progressives exploit the suffering at the southern border to raise money or get booked on television shows, he said, but they won’t actually come see it for themselves. I asked him why.

“Because it’s a romanticized ideology,” Lozano said. “It’s easy for them to romanticize this whole situation. ‘They’re struggling! They need help! They’re coming here for a better life!’ It’s harder for them to come look at bodies of people who died in 107-degree heat. Kids who drowned. Border Patrol agents—who they’re so opposed to—trying to help pregnant mothers. None of this fits their narrative.”

I asked Lozano what he wants Democrats to do about the border crisis. He laughed.

“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said. He ran through a list of requests: more funding for Border Patrol; better technology to monitor movement; more support for humanitarian groups on the ground; stricter processing policies to deter would-be migrants; and, yes, in certain places, reinforced physical barriers. Above all, he wants Democrats to stop signaling that America has an open border. Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, he noted, the party’s aspiring leaders took a host of positions—on decriminalizing border crossings, or providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants—that broke with decades of orthodoxy, to appease the progressive base.

“I’m all about the American dream. But this is unsustainable, just totally unsustainable,” Lozano said. “Government is supposed to be about stability. But this party, my party, is inviting all this instability. I’ve had enough.”

Lozano is no longer the mayor of Del Rio. This summer, just a few weeks before I came to town, he served his last day in office. Once a promising young prospect in the Democratic ranks, he quit electoral politics, walking away from a job he loved. Now, he’s thinking about quitting the Democratic Party, too.

Danny Ortega is a legend in local progressive circles and a member of Arizona’s Democratic Party Hall of Fame. As an activist and civil-rights attorney, he has spent decades working in households and neighborhoods where voting is a foreign behavior, and where fear of filling out government forms runs deep, pleading with first- and second-generation Hispanics to get involved with politics. Around the time Obama was first elected, Ortega told me, he sensed a turning point. The GOP’s overt targeting of the Hispanic community—via legislation and law enforcement, rhetoric and rumormongering—helped embolden citizens to finally turn out to vote, and to vote for Democrats. The floodgates had opened. Demography, at last, was going to be destiny.

Until it wasn’t.

“The past few years, our young people have been registering as independents. More than 50 percent of them. We have the data,” Ortega said. “These voters, the future of our community, they are abandoning us. And honestly,” he paused, with a grimace, “I don’t blame them.”

The activist and civil-rights attorney Danny Ortega (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

We sat in Ortega’s first-floor law office in Phoenix, now the nation’s fifth-largest city thanks to a mass influx of immigrants, most of whom are Mexican. Surrounded by framed awards and photos with politicians, Ortega was leaning across his desk, sweating through his Hawaiian shirt, shouting mostly at himself. For too long, Ortega said, Democrats have refused to spend real time and resources in the Hispanic community, checking a box during campaign season but rarely engaging between elections. When Democrats do come calling, he said, they treat Hispanics like children: speaking in paternalistic tones about what’s good and bad for them economically; assuming simple and monolithic views on social issues; pandering shamelessly on immigration and promising sweeping reforms that never materialize.

More and more, Ortega told me, Hispanics are suspicious of his party. They question whether Democrats want to solve a problem like immigration; whether they would rather continue to wield themes of racism and xenophobia to mobilize voters against the GOP; whether moral outrage is simply the means to a political end. In his view, the Democratic Party has a credibility crisis, and it’s not specific to immigration. Ortega said that so many adjacent Democratic causes—voting rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights—are viewed skeptically, particularly by younger Hispanics, who perceive Democrats as manipulative at worst and tone-deaf at best. Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.

“A lot of Latinos, they’re just not moved by these issues,” he said. “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”

César Chávez hears it all the time. A member of the Arizona House who represents the most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state, Chávez finds himself engaged in a daily struggle to hold the line for the Democratic Party.

“It’s very hard for an individual to vote for somebody who leans more on social justice than on the economy,” Chávez told me in a coffee shop not far from the state capitol. “When a person has to choose between paying for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas, every other issue goes out the window.”

Chávez was born in Mexico. When he was 3 years old, he and his pregnant mother crossed the desert and found their way to Pennsylvania, where his father, who had also immigrated illegally, was working on a mushroom farm. Chávez was raised alongside Amish children and “fell in love with America,” cherishing the traditional values of his community. Because it was Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program that eventually granted his father citizenship—allowing the rest of the family to eventually follow suit—Chávez felt a kinship with the GOP. It wasn’t until his family moved to Phoenix that Chávez experienced real discrimination. He came to feel that the Democratic Party, with its emphasis on inclusion, was the natural home for people like him.

César Chávez represents Arizona’s most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state legislature. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

Chávez told me this experience speaks for many of his constituents. The Democratic Party “has always been their safe haven,” he said. But today, he continued, progressives have adopted a “no-holds-barred mentality” on social issues that leaves many Hispanic voters—religious, patriotic, culturally conservative voters—questioning whether they still belong.

“There are individuals in my party who believe these voters are always going to be there for us. They take them for granted,” Chávez said. “That’s why I think this could get a lot worse.”

For all the baggage saddling the state GOP—a proud conspiracy theorist as chair; a trio of prominent election deniers running for statewide office—the party’s consultants and strategists are making real inroads in the Hispanic community. They are hiring Hispanic staffers, spending money on Spanish-language media, investing heavily in grassroots infrastructure. This matches descriptions I heard everywhere else: Republicans can sense that the door is opening, and they are preparing to barrel through it.

“I’m telling you,” Chávez said, “if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to lose a big part of this vote.”

Back at El Portal, Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox’s restaurant in South Phoenix, the warnings are the same. One woman, a longtime progressive activist named Petra Falcon, tells me that Hispanics “have no idea what Democrats really stand for anymore.” Anita Ritter, who serves as the secretary of the American Legion post next door, says she doesn’t know of many of her members who still vote for Democrats.

And then there is Luis Acosta. A respected Democratic campaign consultant, Acosta is also a so-called Dreamer. His mother brought him to the U.S. when he was 2; his earliest memory is crawling under the chain-link border fence. Inspired by Obama’s candidacy, Acosta threw himself into Democratic politics. He helped elect numerous candidates to office. But now, he tells me, he’s “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections.

Luis Acosta, a Democratic campaign consultant, says he is “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

“People are tired of being taken for granted. Tired of being ignored for two years and then pandered to when it’s election time. Tired of being in the shadows. Just tired,” Acosta says. “There’s no other way to put it. We’ve supported the Democrats my whole life. Now, we want to know: Are we more than a talking point to you?”

In the corner booth, Earl and Mary Rose look distressed. Earl tells me this kind of talk has been pervasive in his restaurant and his neighborhood since Biden took office. And now they’re even hearing it at home: Two of Earl’s grandsons voted for Trump in 2020. One of them, Earl says, got hooked by the pandemic-era fights over public-education policy and is now a Tucker Carlson devotee; the other grandson, he says, is “less dogmatic” but exasperated by the left’s fixation on social justice.

Mary Rose confesses to feeling a certain pessimism. She and Earl spent a generation building a community, organizing a vote, working to translate raw Hispanic numbers into real political influence. Yet they are confronting the same harsh realities today, about power and patronage, that they fretted over 23 years ago. Wins and losses are not the measure; Democrats could sweep Arizona’s statewide races against an unpalatable bunch of Republicans this fall, but it won’t quiet the feeling that the Wilcoxes’ dream is slipping away. They have so much of what they wanted—an engaged base, a hard-won 11 electoral votes, a Democrat in the White House—and so little to show for it.

“Maybe the best we can hope for is that these voters”—Mary Rose nods toward one of her adult grandsons nearby—“become independents, and we fight for them on a race-by-race basis,” she says. “And honestly, that’s a win for Republicans.”

Ruby Bernal discusses politics over breakfast at El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

Bad Losers

2022-10-03T07:00:00-04:00

Chris Thomas has made democracy his life’s work. A 73-year-old attorney, Thomas spent nearly four decades leading the elections division in the office of Michigan’s secretary of state. He served under Republicans and Democrats alike, and his mandate was always the same: protect the ballot box. He trained local election workers; sought out and fixed weaknesses in the voting system; investigated errors committed while ballots were collected and tabulated; and, ultimately, ensured the accuracy of the count. Thomas was one of 10 people named to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2013. He earned a reputation as a nonpartisan authority on all things elections, and took pride in supervising a system that was stable and widely trusted.

Which is why 2020 shook him so badly. Thomas had retired from the secretary of state’s office a few years earlier, confident that Michigan’s elections were in good hands. Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived, prompting changes to election protocols nationwide, and President Donald Trump began warning of a Democratic plot to steal the election. As Michigan rolled out new voting rules—some that had been decided prior to 2020, others that were implemented on the fly during the pandemic—rumors and misinformation spread. Wanting to help, Thomas accepted a special assignment to supervise Election Day activities in Detroit, the state’s largest voting jurisdiction.

What followed was surreal—a scene that Thomas could scarcely believe was playing out in the United States. Michigan had recently expanded absentee voting, allowing any resident to vote by mail for any reason. Because Democrats are likelier than Republicans to vote absentee—and because Detroit is predominantly Democratic—Thomas and his colleagues had to process an unprecedented number of absentee ballots. Complicating matters further, Republican lawmakers in Michigan refused to let election workers start counting absentee ballots until Election Day.

The effect was predictable. Because of the backlog of absentee ballots, Trump took a big lead on Election Night. As Thomas and his team worked into the early hours, Trump’s lead shrank. By Wednesday afternoon, it was clear that Joe Biden would overtake him. “That’s when things got out of hand,” Thomas told me.

Incited by Trump’s acolytes in the state party, hundreds of Republican voters swarmed the event center in Detroit where Thomas and his workers were tabulating votes. Republicans had their allotted number of poll watchers already inside the counting room, but party officials lied to the public, saying they had been locked out. So people busted into the event center, banging on the windows, filming the election workers, demanding to be let into the counting room. Fearing for their safety—and for the integrity of the ballots—the people inside covered the windows. Thomas says the decision was necessary. But within minutes, video was circulating on social media of the windows being covered, and before long, it was airing on Fox News with commentary about a cover-up.

[Read: The Michigan Republican who decided to tell the truth]

Trump was alleging a national plot to steal the election, and now Detroit—and Chris Thomas—were right in the middle of it.

The GOP assault on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory has led to death threats against election workers and a lethal siege of the United States Capitol. But perhaps the gravest consequence is the erosion of confidence in our system. Late this summer, a Quinnipiac poll found that 69 percent of both Republicans and Democrats believe that American democracy “is in danger of collapse.” They hold this view for somewhat different reasons. Republicans believe that Democrats already rigged an election against them and will do so again if given the chance; Democrats believe that Republicans, convinced that 2020 was stolen despite all evidence to the contrary, are now readying to rig future elections. It’s hard to see how this ends well. By the presidential election of 2024, a constitutional crisis might be unavoidable.

I’ve met men and women like Thomas in small towns and big counties, public servants who have devoted their career to safeguarding the infrastructure of our democracy. Over the past two years, they have been harassed, intimidated, and in many cases driven out of office, some replaced by right-wing activists who are more loyal to the Republican Party than to the rule of law. The old guard—the people who, like Thomas, committed their career to free and fair elections—are witnessing their life’s work being undone. They are watching the rise of Trump-mimicking candidates in this year’s midterm elections and wondering if anything can stop the collapse of our most essential institution. “This election,” Thomas said, “feels like a last stand.”

The irony is that America’s voting system is far more advanced and secure than it was just two decades ago.

The 2000 election was a catalyst for reform. Mass confusion surrounding the showdown between Al Gore and George W. Bush in Florida—butterfly ballots, punch cards, hanging chads—demonstrated that murky processes and obsolete technology could undermine public confidence in the system. Recognizing the threat, Congress passed a law to help local administrators modernize their voting machines and better train their workers and volunteers. Elections officials from around the country began collaborating on best practices. Several states introduced wholesale changes to their systems that allowed ballots to be cast more easily, tracked more accurately, and counted more efficiently.

There were hiccups, but the results were overwhelmingly positive. One study conducted by MIT and Caltech showed that the number of “lost” votes—ballots that because of some combination of clerical rejection and human error went unrecorded—had been cut in half from 2000 to 2004. Florida, once synonymous with electoral dysfunction, now has arguably the most efficient vote-reporting program in the U.S.

At the same time, the machinations that Americans observed—poll workers studying ballots through a magnifying glass, teams of party lawyers and CNN camera crews looking on—bred a public skepticism that never quite went away. In the years following Bush v. Gore, the number of cases of election litigation soared. The small chorus of congressional Democrats who objected to the certification of Bush’s 2000 victory swelled to several dozen following the president’s reelection in 2004, with 31 House Democrats (and one Democratic senator) voting to effectively disenfranchise the people of Ohio. Republicans could not return the favor in 2008—Obama’s margin of victory was too wide—so they sought to delegitimize his presidency with talk of birth certificates and mass voter fraud, introducing measures to restrict voting access despite never producing evidence that cheating was taking place at any meaningful scale.

Much of this can be attributed to what Richard Hasen, a law professor and an elections expert, has called “the loser’s effect”: Studies have shown that voters report more confidence in our elections after their party or candidate has won. But partisan outcomes are no longer the decisive factor: In October 2020—weeks before Trump lost his bid for reelection—Gallup reported that just 44 percent of Republicans trusted that votes would be cast and counted accurately, “a record low for either party.”

This isn’t entirely surprising, given Trump’s crusade to undermine our democratic institutions, which began well before he was ever elected. In 2012, he called Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney “a total sham,” adding: “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” In early 2016, after losing the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz, Trump called the chair of the Iowa GOP and pressured him to disavow the result; when that failed, he took to Twitter, denouncing the “fraud” in Iowa and calling for a new election to be held.

By the time November 3, 2020, arrived, Trump had already constructed his elaborate narrative of a rigged election. Republican leaders did little to keep their voters from falling for the president’s deception. In fact, most of them enabled and even participated in it. What began as a fringe movement after Bush v. Gore has spread into the GOP mainstream: Polls continue to show that more than half of all Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

They are acting on Trump’s lies, flooding into local party offices, demanding to be stationed on the front lines of the next election so they can prevent it from being stolen. They have nominated scores of candidates who deny the legitimacy of Biden’s victory; seven are running to become the chief elections official in their state. Several of these Republicans—Mark Finchem in Arizona, Kristina Karamo in Michigan—are hinting at administrative actions that would reverse decades of progress in making elections more transparent and accessible, in turn leaving our system more vulnerable.

The great threat is no longer machines malfunctioning or ballots being spoiled. It is the actual theft of an election; it is the brazen abuse of power that requires not only bad actors in high places but the tacit consent of the voters who put them there.

This makes for a terrifying scenario in 2024—but first, a crucial test in 2022.

In August, when Michigan held its primary elections, all eyes were on the Republican race for governor. It had been a volatile contest; two of the perceived front-runners had been disqualified for failing to reach signature thresholds. Most of the remaining candidates were champions of Trump’s Big Lie, but none more so than Ryan Kelley, who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and was arrested this past June by the FBI on misdemeanor charges. (Kelley pleaded not guilty in July.)

When the returns came in and Kelley lost, he refused to concede. Instead, he called for a “publicly supervised hand recount to uphold election integrity.” But Kelley had a problem: He had finished in fourth place, capturing just 15 percent of the vote and losing to the Republican nominee by 25 points.

It was a similar story in another closely watched Michigan race. State Senator Lana Theis, a Republican who’d co-written a committee report debunking Trump’s voter-fraud allegations after the 2020 election, defeated a MAGA conspiracy theorist, Mike Detmer, by 15 points in their primary contest. Detmer’s response? “When we have full, independent, unfettered forensic audits of 2020 and 2022 I’ll consider the results,” he wrote on his Facebook page. This pattern has played out in races all across the country, with sore Republican losers doing their best Trump impressions, alleging fraud to explain a drubbing at the ballot box.

“This gives me real hope,” Thomas told me in early September. “Because people understand, when there’s a margin like that, you lost. And if you’re going to insist you didn’t lose, well, now people are going to be skeptical of what you’ve been telling them all along. Is the sky really falling? You can only tell a lie so many times before people stop listening to you.”

His optimism struck me as misplaced. For one thing, these were just primary elections. Tudor Dixon, the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, is herself a 2020 conspiracy theorist. In fact, all three Republicans on top of the statewide ticket this fall—Dixon, as well as the nominees for attorney general and secretary of state—have claimed that Democrats stole the election. Michigan’s GOP lawmakers have not allowed changes to vote-processing laws despite the chaos of 2020. In the event of close Democratic victories in November, we can expect another “red mirage,” in which the Republican nominee jumps out to a big lead soon after the polls close, only to fall behind as the backlog of absentee ballots is counted. The conspiracy theories will practically spread themselves.

Sensing my skepticism, Thomas told me there was additional cause for hope. Two years ago, the Republican volunteers who monitored the vote-counting in Detroit on behalf of the party were completely out of their depth; most had never worked an election, and thus confused standard protocols for what they swore in affidavits were violations of the law. Following the grassroots outcry of November 2020, the Michigan GOP recruited hordes of new volunteers who have since received enhanced training. Thomas says his first encounter with this new class of Republican poll watchers came this summer, on primary day in Detroit, where he was once again tasked with overseeing the count. “It was night and day from 2020. They were respectful,” he said. “There were no issues.”

Hours after I finished speaking with Thomas, CNN published a report exposing a Zoom training seminar in which Republican leaders in Wayne County, Michigan—home to Detroit—instructed poll watchers to ignore election rules and smuggle in pens, paper, and cellphones to document Democratic cheating. That seminar was held on August 1—the day before Michigan’s primary.

I want to believe our system of self-government is durable enough to withstand all of this; I want to believe Thomas, that everything will be all right. But as we spoke, it struck me that, despite his expertise, and despite his ringside seat to the unraveling of our democracy, Thomas is like millions of other Americans who can’t quite bring themselves to face what’s happening. Like so many of them, he clings to fleeting hints of a return to normalcy and ignores the flood of evidence suggesting it will not come. He still trusts a system that is actively being sabotaged.

Thomas has never belonged to a party. He remains proudly nonpartisan. But he acknowledges what must happen in 2022 for America to swerve off the road to national calamity. The Republicans who have made election denying the centerpiece of their campaign must lose, and lose badly. They will cry fraud and demand recounts and refuse to concede. They will throw tantrums sufficient to draw attention to their margins of defeat. At that point, Thomas says, maybe a critical mass of GOP voters—the very people who supported these candidates in the first place—will finally realize that they’ve been duped. Maybe they will abandon the lies and choose a different path before it is too late.

But based on the number of candidates who sold a lie to earn their spot on the November ballot, in Michigan and beyond, I fear it may already be.

This article appears in the November 2022 print edition with the headline “Bad Losers.”

What Comes After the Search Warrant?

2022-08-09T19:43:15-04:00

If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.

So why did I feel nauseous yesterday, watching coverage of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?

Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.

Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.

[David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic]

It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.

But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.

It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.

I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”

Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”

[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]

This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.

On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME … THEY’RE AFTER YOU,” read the caption. “I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”

As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.

“They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”

I asked her to elaborate.

“The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”

This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.

What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

“The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”

“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

“If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”

[Adam Serwer: Conservatives believe Trump is above the law]

It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.

Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”

And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.

We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church

2022-05-10T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Jonno Rattman

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.

“Before I turn to the Word,” the preacher announces, “I’m gonna do another diatribe.”

“Go on!” one man yells. “Amen!” shouts a woman several pews in front of me.

Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I’ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship. Pastor Bill Bolin calls it his “diatribe.” The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: “Headline News.”

Bolin, in his mid-60s, is a gregarious man with thick jowls and a thinning wave of dyed hair. His floral shirt is untucked over dark-blue jeans. “On the vaccines …” he begins.

For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines. “A local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time—she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.” Bolin pauses dramatically. “They have 103 vaccine-complication patients.” The crowd gasps.

“How about this one?” Bolin says. He tells of a doctor who claims to know that “between 100 and 200 United States Congress members, plus many of their staffers and family members with COVID, were treated by a colleague of his over the past 15 months … with …” Bolin stops and puts a hand to his ear. A chorus of people responds: “Ivermectin.” Bolin pretends not to hear. “What was that?” he says, leaning over the lectern. This time, they shout: “Ivermectin!” Bolin nods.

This isn’t my first time at FloodGate, so none of what Bolin says shocks me. Yet I’m still struggling to make sense of the place.

Bolin in February. After he held indoor Easter services at FloodGate in 2020, in defiance of Michigan’s emergency shutdown orders, attendance at his church soared. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

Having grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pastor at another church in town, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”

Brighton is a small town, and I knew the local evangelical scene like it was a second reporting beat. I knew which pastors were feuding; whose congregations were mired in scandal; which church softball teams had a deacon playing shortstop, and which ones stacked their lineups with non-tithing ringers. But FloodGate? I had never heard of FloodGate. And neither had most of the people sitting around me, until recently.

For a decade, Bolin preached to a crowd of about 100 on a typical Sunday. Then came Easter 2020, when Bolin announced that he would hold indoor worship services in defiance of Michigan’s emergency shutdown orders. As word got around the conservative suburbs of Detroit, Bolin became a minor celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit to promote right-wing interests. FloodGate’s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadside church. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.

On this particular fall Sunday, Bolin riffs on everything from California forcing vaccines on schoolchildren to the IRS proposing more oversight of personal banking accounts. He promotes a new book that tells of “how the left has done a power grab to systematically dismantle religion and banish God from the lips, minds, and hearts of believers,” prompting the couple in front of me to make a one-click Amazon purchase. He suggests there is mounting evidence of a stolen election, concluding, “With the information that’s coming out in Arizona and Georgia and other places, I think it’s time for there to be a full audit of all 50 states to find out the level of cheating and the level of manipulation that actually took place.” The people around me cheer.

At one point, Bolin looks up from his notes.

“We had a visitor this morning who said, ‘You know, it’s really refreshing to hear a pastor talk about issues like this.’ ” Basking in the ovation he’s just invited, Bolin adds: “I’m okay talking about these things.”

He asks if he can keep going. The crowd answers with more applause.

Listening to Bolin that morning, I kept thinking about another pastor nearby, one who approached his job very differently: Ken Brown.

Brown leads his own ministry, Community Bible Church, in the Detroit suburb of Trenton. I got to know him during the 2020 presidential campaign, when I was writing dispatches from around the country and asking readers about the stories and trends they thought weren’t receiving enough attention. Brown wrote to me explaining the combustible dynamics within the evangelical Church and describing his own efforts—as the conservative pastor of a conservative congregation—to keep his members from being radicalized by the lies of right-wing politicians and media figures.

[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson’s cover story on Trump and the evangelical temptation]

When we finally met, in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment”—one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth—“is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.” A stocky man with steely blue eyes and a subdued, matter-of-fact tone, Brown struck me as thoroughly disheartened. The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.

He made a compelling case. So I began checking out his sermons, podcasts, and blog posts.

Brown (right) in February. When COVID arrived, he launched a podcast to combat misinformation among his congregants. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

Every time I heard Bolin preach, I could also hear Brown, the pastors’ voices dueling inside my brain. Brown is polished and buttoned-down; Bolin is ostentatious and loud. Brown pastors a traditional church where people wear sweaters and sing softly; Bolin leads a charismatic church where people dress for a barbecue and speak in tongues. Brown is a pastor’s kid and lifelong conservative who’s never had a sip of alcohol; Bolin is an erstwhile “radical liberal” who once got “so high on LSD” that he jumped onstage and grabbed a guitar at a Tom Petty concert.

But in leading their predominantly white, Republican congregations, Brown and Bolin have come to agree on one important thing: Both pastors believe there is a war for the soul of the American Church—and both have decided they cannot stand on the sidelines. They aren’t alone. To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.

How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement—the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.

“Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.

Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem. He understands their reluctance. They would rather keep the peace than risk alienating anyone. The irony, Brown said, is that by pretending that a clash of Christian worldviews isn’t happening, these pastors risk losing credibility with members who can see it unfolding inside their own church.

There is one person Pastor Brown doesn’t have to convince of this: Pastor Bolin.

“The battle lines have been drawn,” Bolin told me, sitting in the back of his darkened sanctuary. “If you’re not taking a side, you’re on the wrong side.”

If this is a tale of two churches, it is also the tale of churches everywhere. It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.

The first piece of scripture I memorized as a child—the verse that continues to guide my own imperfect walk—is from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece. As with most of his letters, the apostle was addressing dysfunction and breakage in the community of believers. “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Paul’s admonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orient themselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of humanity.

For much of my lifetime, however, American Christians have done the opposite. Beginning in the 1980s, white evangelicals imposed themselves to an unprecedented degree on the government and the country’s core institutions. Once left to cry jeremiads about civilizational decline—having lost fights over sex and sexuality, drugs, abortion, pornography, standards in media and education, prayer in public schools—conservative Christians organized their churches, marshaled their resources, and leveraged their numbers, regaining the high ground, for a time, in some of these culture wars.

Short-lived victories, however, came at a long-term cost. Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

When Trump was elected thanks to a historic showing among white evangelicals—81 percent voted for him over Hillary Clinton—the victory was rightly viewed as the apex of the movement’s power. But this was, in many ways, also the beginning of its unraveling. The “battle lines” Bolin described as having emerged over the past five years—cultural reckonings over racism and sexual misconduct; a lethal pandemic and fierce disputes over vaccines and government mandates; allegations of election theft that led to a siege of the U.S. Capitol; and, underlying all of this, the presidency, prosecution, and martyring of Trump himself—have carved up every institution of American society. The evangelical Church is no exception.

[Peter Wehner: Evangelicals made a bad bargain with Trump]

The nation’s largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is bleeding members because of ferocious infighting over race relations, women serving in leadership, accountability for sexual misconduct, and other issues. The United Methodist Church, America’s second-largest denomination, is headed toward imminent divorce over irreconcilable social and ideological divisions. Smaller denominations are losing affiliate churches as pastors and congregations break from their leadership over many of the same cultural flash points, choosing independence over associating with those who do not hold their views.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Christians, like Americans from every walk of life, are self-selecting into cliques of shared habits and thinking. But what’s notable about the realignment inside the white evangelical Church is its asymmetry. Pastors report losing an occasional liberal member because of their refusal to speak on Sunday mornings about bigotry or poverty or social injustice. But these same pastors report having lost—in the past few years alone—a significant portion of their congregation because of complaints that they and their staff did not advance right-wing political doctrines. Hard data are difficult to come by; churches are not required to disclose attendance figures. But a year’s worth of conversations with pastors, denominational leaders, evangelical scholars, and everyday Christians tells a clear story: Substantial numbers of evangelicals are fleeing their churches, and most of them are moving to ones further to the right.

Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views. One rarely needs to read to the bottom of a poll to learn that the religious group most opposed to vaccines, most convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, most inclined to subscribe to QAnon conspiracy theories is white evangelicals.

[From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how QAnon is more important than you think]

Many right-wing pastors have formed alliances—with campaign consultants, education activists, grassroots groups, even MAGA-in-miniature road shows promoting claims of an assault on American sovereignty—that bring a steady flow of fresh faces into their buildings. From there, the fusion of new Republican orthodoxy with old conservative theology is seamless. This explains why, even during a period of slumping church attendance, the number of white evangelicals has grown: The Pew Research Center reports that more and more white Trump supporters began self-identifying as evangelicals during his presidency, whether or not they attended church.

Meanwhile, other pastors feel trapped. One stray remark could split their congregation, or even cost them their job. Yet a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.” His command of scripture is less relevant than suspicions about how he voted in the last election.

“A pastor asked me the other day, ‘What percentage of churches would you say are grappling with these issues?’ And I said, ‘One hundred percent. All of them,’ ” Russell Moore, the public theologian at Christianity Today, told me. “I don’t know of a single church that’s not affected by this.”

Once the president of the Southern Baptist policy arm, Moore quit the denomination in 2021 after enduring years of “psychological warfare” for his opposition to Trumpism and advocacy for racial reconciliation. In the time since, as he’s traveled the country and counseled pastors on the intensifying divisions within their congregations, Moore has become convinced that the problem of political fanaticism inside the Church poses real threats outside it.

[Peter Wehner: The scandal rocking the evangelical world]

“Honestly, I’m more concerned than I was a year ago—and that’s saying something,” Moore said. “It may sound like Chicken Little. But I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this ‘two countries’ talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.”

Moore is not exaggerating. More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice.

The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.

“I was a card-carrying member—literally, a card-carrying member—of the Moral Majority,” Brown told me.

It was 1981. Brown was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and for the first time, the Christian kid who’d graduated from a Christian high school was outside his bubble. He felt threatened by what he saw all around him: moral relativism, shameless sexuality, far-left professors who openly disparaged his faith. Brown found an identity in the nascent evangelical movement that aimed to restore the religious values of America’s founding. He read the books, watched the videos, listened to the radio programs. Brown committed himself not just to the dogma of the religious right, but to the precepts of political conservatism. For many years—while getting married, starting a career in technology, having children—he remained rooted in both.

When Brown felt called to join the clergy, he enrolled at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. It was there that he began to question the union of his politics and his faith. The more he studied scripture, the less confident he felt in the people he’d listened to for so long. Some of the Christian right’s leading voices—people like Paul Weyrich, of the Heritage Foundation, and James Dobson, of Focus on the Family—promoted visions of “postmillennialism,” a controversial interpretation of scripture that encourages amassing political power as a means of building a kingdom in this life parallel to that in heaven.

“I started to realize that a lot of these religious-right guys weren’t actually trained theologians. A lot of them didn’t know what they were talking about, biblically,” Brown said. “I worried that could come back to haunt us.”

[Alan Jacobs: The word evangelical has lost its meaning]

Just when Brown’s passion for politics was beginning to abate, Bill Clinton was elected president. “The apocalypse,” Brown recalled, laughing. Like so many evangelicals, the pastor viewed Clinton as the manifestation of America’s moral decline. He obsessed over the president’s every scandal and deception.

But Brown was growing equally disillusioned with Christian conservatives and their tactics. Some of the same people who tormented Clinton and lectured on morality were just as ethically compromised as he was—but because they played for what was ostensibly God’s chosen political team, they faced little scrutiny. “Back when I believed there was an honorable alliance between Republicans and evangelicals, it was because I believed that our values would ultimately prevail, come what may on this Earth, whether we win or lose some election,” Brown said. “But over time, there was a shift. Losing was no longer an option. It became all about winning.”

Late in Clinton’s tenure, Brown, who was serving as an associate pastor in Flat Rock, Michigan, was commissioned to plant a new church down the road in Trenton. He would have his own flock to look after. He didn’t have time to worry about politics. Aside from preaching against abortion—an issue Brown sees as inherently biblical—he kept politics out of his sermons. George W. Bush, whom evangelicals claimed as one of their own, was popular with Brown’s congregants. It was a period of harmony inside the church.

“And then,” Brown said, “came Barack Obama.”

It felt silly at first—jokes about Obama’s birth certificate, comments about his faith. But over time, the discourse inside the church became more worrisome. One day, a longtime member told Brown something that at the time sounded shocking: The president wore a secret Islamic ring. Brown demanded to know the woman’s source. “And she sent me this fake, Photoshopped thing. It didn’t take long to debunk,” Brown told me. “So I wrote her back and said, ‘Hey, here’s the deal: If you have forwarded this to anyone, you have an obligation to go back to them and correct it. Because Christians cannot foment falsehood. We are people of truth.’ ”

[Adam Serwer: Birtherism of a nation]

The woman never replied. She still attends Community Bible; the two have not spoken about the incident since. But it was a watershed moment for Brown. “That was the beginning of a new ministry for me,” he said.

Brown wasn’t faced with just Obama-centric conspiracy theories. People were beginning to confront him with questions and concerns he couldn’t comprehend. Once, when he visited Washington, D.C., for a pastors’ conference, he returned home to learn that people in the church had been entertaining a rumor started by one of its members. Having read blog posts about a FEMA program that recruited clergy to help calm communities after natural disasters, this man believed that Brown had gone to D.C. for covert training—and that he and other pastors were preparing to help the government enforce martial law.

“Good people were taken in by this stuff,” Brown said. “They really wondered whether I was a part of this secret government plot.”

Even as Brown became more vocal, he knew he was being drowned out. Fear, the pastor says, was taking root inside Community Bible. Some of it was explainable: The cultural climate was getting chilly for evangelicals; the Great Recession was squeezing his blue-collar congregation. But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and Fox News had them every single night.” Brown kept reminding his people that scripture’s most cited command is “Fear not.” But he couldn’t break through. Looking back, he understands why.

“Biblically, fear is primarily reverence and awe. We revere God; we hold him in awe,” Brown told me. “You can also have reverence and awe for other things—really, anything you put great value on. I think, in conservative-Christian circles, we place a lot of value on the life we’ve known. The earthly life we have known. The American life we’ve known … If we see threats to something we value, we fear—that is, we revere, we hold in inappropriate awe—those who can take it away. That’s Barack Obama. That’s the left.”

An urgency—bordering on panic—could be felt inside the Church. For white evangelicals, the only thing more galvanizing than perceptions of their idealized nation slipping away was the conviction that their favored political party was unwilling to fight for the country’s survival.

“There was this sense that America is under siege, that the barbarians were at the gates,” Brown said. “Then along comes Donald Trump, who says he can make America great again. And for evangelicals, it was time to play for keeps.”

When I first walked into the sanctuary at FloodGate, I didn’t see a cross. But I did see American flags—lots of them. There were flags on the screens behind the stage, flags on the literature being handed out. There was even a flag on the face mask of the single person I spotted wearing one. It was May 2021, and the church was hosting an event for Stand Up Michigan, a group that had formed to protest pandemic shutdowns, masking, and, most recently, vaccine mandates. This was the launch of the group’s Livingston County chapter.

While covering presidential campaigns, I had attended political rallies at churches across Iowa, South Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere. But I’d never seen anything quite like this. The parking lot swarmed with vehicles covered in partisan slogans. The narthex was jammed with people scribbling on clipboards. (I thought they were doing preemptive COVID contact tracing; they were actually enlisting volunteers for political activities.) Inside the sanctuary, attendees wore MAGA caps and Second Amendment–related shirts. I didn’t see a single person carrying a Bible.

For the next three hours, the church became a coliseum. The executive director of Stand Up Michigan decried the “evil” Democrats in charge of the state; said there was “probably some truth” to QAnon, which holds that satanic liberal elites are cannibalizing children for sustenance; and warned that Christians are too “nice.” The chair of the county board of commissioners railed against diversity training and critical race theory. A state senator tried to play to the base—joking that she’d asked God why he’d allowed Gretchen Whitmer to become governor—but then cowered when the base turned on her, with people standing to demand that she answer the question of whether Trump had won Michigan in 2020. Visibly shaken, she refused to answer.

The table had been set by Bill Bolin himself. Introduced at the beginning of the program as the “rock star” who disobeyed the government, Bolin took the stage and wasted no time before showing his visitors just how uncouth one could be in the pulpit. He began by suggesting that COVID-19 was “possibly being manipulated with the funding and blessing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who put us in masks.” When he heard scattered boos, Bolin said: “That’s right, go ahead!” The sanctuary filled with jeers. A minute later, the pastor was boasting about how far he’d taken his insults of Whitmer. “Probably the most egregious thing I ever did,” Bolin said, chuckling, “was I did do a Nazi salute and called her ‘Whitler.’ ”

Bolin praying with FloodGate congregants in February. The pastor initially opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy, but he says he came to “love” the former president. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

In my ensuing visits to FloodGate, and in long conversations with Bolin, it became clear that this type of extreme political expression is central to his church’s identity, and to his own.

Bolin told me that after a troubled childhood in Southern California—he said he began drinking and doing drugs at age 9—he discovered an interest in political activism. He became infatuated with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., committing himself to the art of protesting: marches, sit-ins, hunger strikes. He was a “proud hippie” more interested in the occult than in any organized religion.

Then, when he was 20 years old, he was packing for a cross-country hitchhiking trip and discovered a Bible that had been given to him years earlier. “I lifted it up—and remember, I’m a supernaturalist—and felt like my arm was on fire,” Bolin told me. “And I heard a voice: ‘Return to me, or you will die.’ ”

Bolin got a ride to Reno, Nevada, where he had a Christian cousin. They went to church together. “There was an altar call, and I went down and got baptized that same afternoon,” Bolin said. “I’ve never been the same. It changed who I am.”

That change included his politics. Setting out on his Christian journey—working as a substance-abuse counselor, attending Bible college, pastoring in churches from California to Pennsylvania—Bolin found that many of his old stances were incompatible with his new faith. In particular, his views of abortion and religious freedom were turned upside down. One thing didn’t change. “I have always been prone to protesting,” Bolin told me. “Then and now.”

Much like Pastor Brown, Bolin married conservative theology to conservative ideology. But whereas Brown became disillusioned by the religious right’s hypocrisy and political ruthlessness, Bolin believes that evangelicals didn’t go far enough. “Christians have languished with their participation in politics,” he said, “which is one of the reasons we’re in this dire position as a nation.”

When Bolin arrived at FloodGate in 2010, the church—founded in 1972 and formerly called the Father’s House—was mostly apolitical. Bolin changed that. “Pastors used to be the primary influencers in their communities in determining who we elected,” Bolin said. He aimed to restore that tradition in his own ministry.

Some people left the church; others joined. All the while, his congregation hovered right around 100 people. He leaned into plenty of political controversies—including Trump’s candidacy—but his membership stayed flat. Looking back, it’s fair to wonder whether that’s because he was on the wrong side of that particular issue. “Donald Trump was the last person I wanted elected president,” Bolin said, letting go of a belly laugh. He thought Trump was a charlatan, a lifelong Democrat who was defrauding conservative voters.

“He proved me wrong,” Bolin said. “He turned out to be the most pro-life president we’ve ever had. His influence on the courts will change the country for the next 50 years.” Bolin sounded ashamed of having ever doubted Trump. He rattled off the former president’s accomplishments. He rolled his eyes at the “condescending” Christians who criticized Trump’s ethics. He defended the January 6 insurrection, which “was not a big deal.” In fact, Bolin himself nearly traveled to Washington that day “because a lot of people from our church were going, and because I love Donald Trump.”

The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation. And yet, it reflects a phenomenon greater than Trump himself. Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to act with desperation and embrace what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.

In the fall of 2016, Ken Brown informed his congregants that he planned to vote for Trump. His choice came down to abortion, he explained, and the Supreme Court appointments in the balance. Still, the pastor emphasized Trump’s personal failings and warned against political idolatry. He reminded his people that Christians aspire to a higher standard than “the lesser of two evils.” Brown felt confident they understood him.

His confidence was misplaced. Over the next four years, the pastor watched as many of his people became MAGA disciples. They were glued to Fox News. Some posted ugly, combative messages on social media. A few were devotees of Alex Jones, the internet-radio host famous for his hateful conspiracy theories.

When COVID arrived—bringing with it “a new flood of misinformation”—Brown and his leadership team wrote a letter to the congregation laying out their reasons for closing the church and specifying the sources they were relying on. Brown also launched a blog and a podcast, vying for his members’ attention at a moment when so many were suddenly stuck at home and swimming in hearsay and innuendo.

[From the October 2018 issue; The tiny blond bible teacher taking on the evangelical political machine]

Jen Furkas, who began attending Community Bible in 2003, wondered if Brown’s efforts were coming too late.

“There are people at the church, people who I’d consider friends, who would have said very hurtful, very unbiblical things,” Furkas, the assistant principal of a local public school, told me. “And it didn’t just start during COVID.”

Furkas describes herself as a moderate Democrat—which, she joked, “makes me the most liberal person at our church.” When Trump became the Republican nominee and Pastor Brown shared his intention to vote for him, Furkas was so disappointed that she left the church.

She spent a year shopping around. But none of the other congregations felt right. One Sunday, Furkas came back to Community Bible and noticed something different about the place. “It was Ken,” she said. “He had changed. This wasn’t the same guy who was sold out to this mindset of Well, it all comes back to abortion and the courts. It was clear that he’d seen how this fanaticism had infected the church.”

Furkas recalled how, a few years ago, Brown delivered a sermon reminding everyone whom Jesus had come to save. Clicking through a PowerPoint on the sanctuary’s projector screens, Brown showed pictures of well-known faces. It was good for some laughs and lighthearted commentary. Then he put up a photograph of Ilhan Omar, the Democratic representative from Minnesota and a Muslim, wearing her hijab. “What about her?” Brown asked. “Did Jesus come for her?” The room was silent.

“I love the evolution from Ken,” Furkas said. “But I know it’s come at a cost.”

Every person I spoke with from Community Bible brought up the fact that some longtime members had quit the church. Brown acknowledged that his tactics had pushed some people away, but he shrugged off the number, saying “four or five families” and “a few individuals” had left. “Sometimes, when someone leaves,” he said, “that means you’ve been successful in protecting the rest of your flock.”

But not everyone who’s dissatisfied with a church leaves—at least, not right away. At a place like Community Bible, with a core of members who have been together for years, the concern isn’t necessarily a mass exodus. It’s a mass estrangement, in which people stop listening to the pastor or stop trusting one another—or both—and the church slowly loses its cohesiveness.

“What I worry about is people tuning Ken out—people who don’t like his politics, and because of that, they stop letting him be their pastor,” Bob Fite, a high-school history teacher who has attended Community Bible for more than a decade, told me. “And honestly, he’s making me nervous. I have tried to tell him, ‘Stay in your lane.’ ”

Fite said that Brown is “losing people” with his political agenda. One of those people is B.J. Fite—Bob’s son. B.J. was raised evangelical, graduated from Bob Jones University, and believes it’s his responsibility to be active in the Church. He’s just not sure anymore that Community Bible is a good fit for someone like him—deeply conservative, a Trump voter, a consumer of right-wing media.

When I met B.J. it was apparent that he was wrestling with whether to leave Community Bible. In fact, he said he’d been engaged in a weeks-long text exchange with Pastor Brown. B.J. was upset that Brown had released multiple podcast episodes vilifying the people responsible for the January 6 insurrection. He also resented the fact that Brown had written blog posts endorsing COVID vaccines and, B.J. felt, had minimized the concerns of people—like himself—who worried they would lose their jobs for refusing the shot.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on Peter Meijer and what the GOP does to its own dissenters]

“There are different truths in politics—Trump’s truth, Biden’s truth, whatever,” B.J. told me. “But in church, there’s supposed to be one truth. Why aren’t we just sticking to that truth?”

Bob Fite said he addressed these concerns in a letter to Pastor Brown and the leadership team. But nothing changed. Bob can’t imagine leaving the place he loves, the place where he and his wife, Valerie, teach Sunday school. But he also can’t imagine standing by while Brown pushes B.J. out the door.

“I’ve been going to church with a lot of apprehension,” Bob said. “I told Valerie, ‘One day, if Ken says the wrong thing, I might have to stand up and leave.’ ”

Bill Bolin knows something about people leaving. About 90 percent of his Sunday crowd at FloodGate has migrated from other congregations over the past two years. Almost all of them, he says, came bearing grievances against their former pastors. Yet most had never considered looking elsewhere. It took a pandemic, and the temporary closing of their churches, for them to sever ties.

As of the spring of 2020, Jeff and Deidre Myers belonged to Oak Pointe Milford, a suburban-Detroit church. Though they were frustrated that the preaching wasn’t more overtly political, they were highly engaged: leading a marriage ministry, active with other homeschoolers. They were even friends with the pastor, Paul Jenkinson, and his wife.

And then COVID hit. When the church closed, rumors flew about the board of elders holding contentious late-night meetings to debate pandemic protocols. The longer the church remained locked, the more people speculated on who was casting the deciding votes. Around that time, George Floyd was murdered. Oak Pointe Novi, the parent church, introduced a video series called “Conversations,” which featured interviews with Black pastors and social-justice activists.

“I thought I was going to vomit,” Deidre told me, recalling her reaction to one episode. Jeff added: “It was the pastor’s son”—who, he claimed, is said to be a member of antifa in Canada—“lecturing on white privilege and critical race theory.” (I could not confirm that the pastor’s son is, in fact, a member of antifa in Canada; several people who know the family laughed when I asked the question.)

After an outcry, the pastor apologized for “the ruptures that have occurred,” while the elders issued a separate statement denouncing critical race theory. According to Jeff and Deidre, they were just two members in a stampede out of Oak Pointe.

Deidre saw friends from other congregations, also displaced by shutdowns, posting on Facebook about FloodGate. The first service she attended—in which Pastor Bolin unapologetically advocated for people, like Jeff and Deidre, who felt cheated by their old churches—brought her to tears. Jeff was equally moved. They had found a new home.

When Jeff and Deidre met with Jenkinson to inform him that they were leaving the Milford church, tensions ran high. Their worst fears had already been confirmed: A friend on the elder board had told them that Jenkinson—their pastor, their friend—had argued to keep the church closed. Jeff and Deidre pressed Jenkinson on the church’s refusal to engage with politics. When they asked the pastor why, despite being personally pro-life, he had never preached on abortion, they got the response they’d dreaded. “He said, ‘I’d lose half my congregation,’ ” Jeff recalled.

Jenkinson remembers the conversation somewhat differently. Jeff and Deidre, he tells me, weren’t just pushing him on abortion; they were challenging the pastor’s policy of political neutrality from the pulpit, and accusing him of taking the easy way out of the debates fracturing his church.

“And I remember telling them, ‘The harder thing to do is what I’m doing,’ ” the pastor says. “This is how you lose people. How you gain people is, you pick a tribe, raise the flag, and be really loud about it. That’s how you gain a bunch of numbers. That is so easy to do. And it cheapens the Gospel.”

Whatever the specifics of their exchange, to Jeff and Deidre, Jenkinson’s stance amounted to cowardice. “I realize these are hard conversations, but the reason we left Milford is they were never willing to have the conversation,” Jeff said. “They were just trying to keep everybody happy. Paul is a conservative, but his conservatism has no teeth.”

Tony DeFelice is another new arrival at FloodGate—and another Christian who got tired of his pastor lacking teeth. At his previous church, in the Democratic-leaning Detroit suburb of Plymouth, “they did not speak a single word about politics. Not on a single issue,” he told me. “When we got to FloodGate, it confirmed for us what we’d been missing.”

DeFelice, a building inspector, had been attending the Plymouth church for 14 years when the pandemic began. He and his wife, Linda, had friends and family there; one of their daughters still works on the church staff. Tony and Linda had their share of complaints—the church was too moderate and “too seeker-friendly,” catering more to newcomers than longtime Christians—but they had no plans to leave.

And then, in March 2020, everything fell apart.

“We didn’t leave the church. The church left us,” Tony told me. “COVID, the whole thing, is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity that we’re ever going to see in our lifetime. And they fell for it.”

Tony and Linda say FloodGate’s style—and Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud—has changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said.

With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, Tony no longer distinguishes between the political and the spiritual. An attack on Donald Trump is an attack on Christians. He believes the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he’s confident that righteousness will prevail: States are going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he says, and Trump will be returned to office.

“The truth is coming out,” Tony told me.

When I pressed him on these beliefs—offering evidence that Joe Biden won legitimately, and probing for the source of his conviction—Tony did not budge. He is just as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, he said, as he is that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago.

Nestled in a wooded stretch of exurban Wilson County, Tennessee, the campus of Greg Locke’s Global Vision Bible Church feels more like a compound. Heaps of felled oak trees border the property, evidence of hurried expansion. A rutted gravel parking lot climbs high away from the main road. At the summit stands an enormous white tent. A sign reads This Is A MASK FREE Church Campus.

The old Global Vision building (right) held about 250 people. Now the congregation gathers in a tent that fits 3,000 (left). (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

Inside, men wearing earpieces and camouflage pants guard the entrance. Behind them, many hundreds of people jump up and down on a floor of cedar chips. Locke salutes them as “soldiers rising up in God’s army.” Some hear this more literally than others: I spot a few folks carrying guns.

Most evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. The pastor has suggested that autistic children are oppressed by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He has called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”

If this all sounds a bit strange—ominous, or even “dangerous,” as one local pastor warned me the night before I visited—well, sure. But strange compared to what? Having spent my entire life in and around the evangelical Church, I had in recent years become desensitized to all the rhetoric of militarism and imminent Armageddon. The churches that host election-fraud profiteers and weeknight speakers denouncing the pseudo-satanic agenda of Black Lives Matter—churches that consider themselves mainstream—were starting to feel like old hat. It was time to visit the furthest fringes. It was time to go see Greg Locke.

Not long ago, Locke was a small-time Tennessee preacher. Then, in 2016, he went viral with a selfie video, shot outside his local Target, skewering the company’s policies on bathrooms and gender identity. The video has collected 18 million views, and it launched Locke as a distinct evangelical brand. He cast himself on social media as a lone voice of courage within Christendom. He aligned himself with figures like Dinesh D’Souza and Charlie Kirk to gain clout as one of the Christian right’s staunchest Trump supporters. All the while, his congregation swelled—moving from their old church building, which seated 250, into a large outdoor tent, then into an even bigger tent, and eventually into the current colossus. The tent holds 3,000 people and would be the envy of Barnum & Bailey.

Which is fitting—because what’s happening at Global Vision can feel less like a revival than a circus.

One Sunday morning in November, Locke, prowling the stage in a bright-orange tie, asks how many people have traveled to his tent from outside Tennessee. Scores of people stand up. “And this is every weekend!” Locke cries in his hickory drawl. Eager to put on a show for the visitors, Locke announces that his special guest—he tries to book one every Sunday—is the actor John Schneider, who played Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. The crowd erupts and everyone hoists their phone in the air, heralding Schneider’s arrival like Catholics awaiting the pope.

Schneider has come to speak and sing. There’s such energy that even some very serious-looking men—dressed in paramilitary gear, firearms strapped to their sides—bounce on their toes and clap along. Between songs, Schneider offers a different catalog of greatest hits. He talks about the flu shot making someone sick. He decries the Christian elites who look down on people like him. He hints at a potential violent uprising.

“We are born for such a time as this. God is calling you to do something,” Schneider says. “We have a country to get back. And if that fails, we have a country—yes, I’ll say it—to take back.”

Locke’s sermon is about the Philistines of the Old Testament stealing the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites, because they sensed that the only way to defeat God’s chosen people was to separate them from God. The same thing is happening in America today, Locke warns. Liberals have devised a plot to separate Christians from God. And all too many Christians—under the guise of a “plandemic”—are allowing it to happen.

Worshippers at Global Vision Bible Church, in Tennessee, in April (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

“Let me tell you something,” Locke says, his voice rising. “I ain’t never had a prostitute mad at me for keeping this church open! I ain’t never had a wino or a drunkard [come] in here and say, ‘I can’t believe you!’ I ain’t never had a crackhead mad for keeping this church open! But I get letters from preachers all the time: ‘Oh, Brother Locke, you just need to take a chill pill. We feel like you’ve shamed us.’ ”

Locke starts nodding. “I have! Every last one of them cowards, I’ve shamed all of them!” The audience leaps to its feet again. “Shame, shame, shame!” he shouts, wagging a finger.

Listening to Locke that morning, I felt a peculiar sort of disappointment. There was nothing sui generis about the man or this Sunday service. Locke said nothing I hadn’t heard from other pastors. Atmospherics aside—it’s not every day you worship inside a tent next to an armed man wearing an Alex Jones shirt—the substance was familiar and predictable to the point of tedium.

Let’s be clear: Locke belongs to a category of his own. He recently accused multiple women at his church of being witches (his source: a demon he encountered during an exorcism). That makes it easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own church and ponder its logical end point. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been dismissed as a blip on Christianity’s radar. These days, Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and has posed for photos with Franklin Graham at the White House.

Walking out of Global Vision, I asked myself: How many pastors at smaller right-wing churches—pastors like Bolin—would have felt uneasy sitting inside this tent? The answer, I suspect, is very few. Global Vision and FloodGate may be different in degree, but they are not different in kind.

This mission creep inside evangelicalism is why some churches have taken an absolutist approach: no preaching on elections, no sermons about current events.

“The second you get into any of the political stuff, you start losing focus,” Michael Bingham, the lead pastor at Aldersgate United Methodist Church, in Greenville, South Carolina, told me during a visit last fall. “Some people say, ‘Well, you have to preach on abortion.’ Okay. But then something else happens in the culture—and if you preached on abortion, well, you better preach on voting rights. Or gun rights. Or immigrants. I’ve just decided I’m not touching any of it.”

Bingham has been a pastor in the UMC for nearly 25 years. Over that time, he says, he’s watched as political disputes have traveled from the periphery of church life to the heart of it. Despite being personally conservative on most issues—and estimating that two-thirds of the church agrees with him—Bingham has maintained a posture of unflinching neutrality from the pulpit.

He has two reasons. First, Bingham simply does not believe that pastors should contaminate the Gospel with political talk. Second, and of more immediate relevance when we spoke, the United Methodist Church was finalizing plans for a denominational divorce over core social divisions, including whether to ordain gay ministers. Under the tentative plans, individual churches will vote on whether to break away and join the new conservative denomination or side with the liberals and remain under the existing UMC umbrella.

With rumors of this imminent split roiling Aldersgate, Bingham told me, the last thing he wanted was to exacerbate tensions within his church. Plenty of people there know that he’s a conservative. They also know that his deputy, Johannah Myers, is a committed progressive. But the pair were working diligently to keep any trace of those political disagreements out of church life. “We are doing everything we can to hold this place together,” Myers told me.

But what is left to hold together? When I visited, the church—an elegant structure with room for 500 in the sanctuary—was hosting maybe 150 people total across two Sunday services. Bingham is proud to say that he hasn’t driven anyone away with his political views. Still, membership has been in decline for years, in part because so many Christians today gravitate toward the places that are outspokenly aligned with their extra-biblical beliefs.

For all their talk of keeping Aldersgate unified, Bingham and Myers acknowledged that in a few years’ time, they would belong to different churches. The same went for their members. When I met with some of the longest-tenured laypeople of the church, almost everyone indicated that when the UMC divorce was finalized, they would follow the church that reflected their political views. It didn’t matter that doing so meant, in some cases, walking away from the church they’d attended for decades.

“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.”

Ken Brown knows plenty of pastors like Bingham, who refuse to talk about the very things tearing their churches apart. He knows they have their reasons. Some don’t know what to say. Others fear that speaking up would only make matters worse. Almost everyone is concerned about job security. Pastors are not immune from anxiety over their mortgage or kids’ college tuitions; many younger clergy members, in particular, worry that they haven’t amassed enough goodwill to get argumentative with their congregation.

Brown is grateful that, after 20 years leading Community Bible, he gets lots of latitude from his congregation. He hears the grousing that his political commentary takes the focus off Jesus, but his entire rationale rests on the belief that Jesus long ago became a secondary focus for some in the church. “I need to do better explaining why I’m dropping these comments in such a volatile cultural environment. Some people feel like I’m just dropping random anti-Trump bombs,” Brown said. “But if I didn’t see Trump—and Trumpism—as a danger to our mission, they would never hear me say anything about Trump.”

Brown has informed the church that he’s headed toward retirement. He’s searching for a successor and hopes in a few years to transition into a support role. He says the new lead pastor doesn’t necessarily need to share his approach to the crises of discernment and disinformation. But this only adds to the urgency of fortifying Community Bible.

The pastor is pushing harder than ever, and he feels, for the first time, that momentum is on his side. Many of his members, Brown said, have told him over the past year that they swore off cable news or deleted their social-media accounts; not coincidentally, some of them seem more engaged with scripture than ever before. There are still holdouts, Brown said, people who’d prefer the church to go in another direction. But that only validates his approach: Without this intervention, how much worse off might Community Bible be? “I can’t prove what would have happened,” Brown said, “but my guess is that our church would have descended into the sort of war zone that other churches have become.”

There are days when Brown envies his colleagues from other churches who haven’t waded into this fight. It would be simpler to spend his final years as a lead pastor sticking to scripture. But whenever he considers that temptation, Brown says he is reminded of a favorite passage. In the Book of John, Chapter 10, Jesus warns of the “hired hand” who puts his own safety ahead of the flock’s: “So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away.”

Brown believes he’s been called to be a shepherd. The hired hand, he says, is no better than the wolf.

Sitting inside a cramped office at the back of FloodGate, Bill Bolin is second-guessing himself.

We’ve talked at length about extremism in his church—the people who were certain that Trump would never leave office, the people who swear by QAnon—and Bolin seems, at some level, to genuinely be reckoning with his role in it. He says he’s worried about Christians getting their priorities mixed up. He tells me he doesn’t want his rants about Biden or the 2020 election—which are “nonessentials”—to be taken with the seriousness of his statements about Jesus, which are the “essentials” people should come to church for.

“I do make a separation between our religious perspective and our political perspective,” Bolin tells me. “I don’t view political statements as being infallible.”

That’s putting it generously. In the time I spent listening to Bolin preach, sitting with him for interviews, and following his Facebook page, I recorded dozens of political statements that were either recklessly misleading or flat-out wrong. When I would challenge him, asking for a source, Bolin would either cite “multiple articles” he had read or send me a link to a website like Headline USA or Conservative Fighters. Then he would concede that the claims were in dispute, and insist that he didn’t necessarily believe everything he said or posted.

It seemed a dangerous practice for anyone, let alone someone trusted as a teacher of truth. Many of the backwater websites and podcasts Bolin relies on for political information were the same ones cited to me by people from his church. In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers. But this is something new—and something decidedly nonessential.

At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.

[The Atlantic Interview: Why this evangelical got fired for promoting vaccines]

“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)

Doesn’t he worry that if people see him getting the easy things wrong, they might suspect he’s also getting the hard things wrong? Things like sanctity and salvation?

“I really don’t. No. Not too much. I don’t,” Bolin says, shaking his head. “Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating—like in a post like that.”

Still, Bolin seems rattled. He begins telling me about a couple of Democrats who attend FloodGate and have rebuked him for his political rhetoric—but who reassure him, Bolin says, “When it comes to the Word, you’re rock-solid.” Then he tells me something surprising: He’s thinking of scaling back “Headline News” on Sunday mornings. Maybe he’ll just read news clips verbatim, he says, without adding commentary. Or maybe he’ll cut the political headlines in half, adding some “feel good” news to balance the mood. The more he thinks about it, Bolin says, he might just cut the segment altogether, posting those political musings on Facebook but keeping them out of worship.

“We’re now going from pandemic to endemic. Our culture will change. There will no longer be this massive division over COVID,” Bolin says. “The fervency is going to die down.”

Except there will always be something new. Literally moments before he talked about the fervency dying down, Bolin previewed a shtick he was going to deliver on Sunday morning about Apple adding a “pregnant-man emoji” to the iPhone.

Bolin had diagnosed in some detail “the sorting” within evangelicalism—the scramble of Christians switching congregations, churches rising and falling, pastors adapting or heading for the exits. It occurs to me, while he discusses these potential changes, that no church is guaranteed anything. The moment Bolin stops lighting fires from the pulpit at FloodGate, how many of its members—who are now accustomed to that sort of inferno, who came to FloodGate precisely because they wanted the heat—will go looking for them elsewhere?

That’s not a risk he seems willing to take. Bolin tells me the church has sold the building we’re sitting in—where the congregation has met since the 1970s—and purchased a sprawling complex down the road. The pastor says FloodGate’s revenue has multiplied sixfold since 2020. It is charging ahead into an era of expansion, with ambitions of becoming southeast Michigan’s next megachurch.

Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.

God isn’t biting his fingernails. But I sure am.

This article appears in the June 2022 print edition with the headline “How Politics Poisoned the Church.”

The Revenge of the Normal Republicans

2022-03-28T06:00:00-04:00

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

HELOTES, Texas—Last spring, having just retired from Congress, Will Hurd was feeling adrift. He had agreed to write a book, telling his remarkable life story and diagnosing a malfunctioning political system, all while teasing out a run for the presidency in 2024, but Hurd struggled with an underlying anxiety. For the first time in his adult life, the guy who’d climbed so quickly—from college class president to star CIA operative to lone Black Republican in the House—didn’t know his next move. Finally, Hurd sat down with his nearly 90-year-old father and shared his concerns.

“William, I can’t give any advice on what you should do, because I don’t understand any of these things,” Bob Hurd told his youngest son. “But I know what you shouldn’t do. Don’t be desperate. Because when you’re desperate, you make bad decisions.”

The former congressman tells me this story on the back patio of El Chaparral restaurant, one of his favorite haunts, in suburban San Antonio. We’re drinking Ranch Water—tequila and lime juice over ice, with a splash of mineral seltzer—and comparing notes on his book, American Reboot, which splices together riveting tales that help illuminate his views of a Republican Party that’s rotting from the top down. But the book doesn’t contain the story about this father-son talk. Rather, the anecdote surfaces organically when I ask Hurd about his brutal indictment of the GOP and how that has changed his relationships with the likes of Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, party leaders whom he once considered close personal friends.

“Some of my friends, some of my former colleagues, they are desperate,” Hurd tells me. “They are so desperate to hold on to their positions, to hold on to their power, that they make really bad decisions.”

[Read: Will Hurd picks a side]

Those bad decisions are evident when it comes to big, history-forming events, such as the party’s enabling of Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy. But the bad decisions are also made subtly, in response to smaller episodes every single day, often to accommodate the party’s ugliest impulses. (The third chapter of Hurd’s book, written as an open letter to the Republican Party, is titled “Don’t Be an Asshole, Racist, Misogynist, or Homophobe.”)

The desperation—lawmakers catering to the loudest voices in the party base—is not healthy, Hurd says. It’s the by-product of safely partisan districts that provide more incentive to light fires than put them out. It’s the consequence of the public’s collapsing faith in the core institutions of civic society, which invites national politicians to weaponize disputes that should be addressed at the local level. It’s the expression of a country in decline—a country convinced that its existential concerns are not Chinese sabotage and Russian disinformation, but face masks in public and vaccines for a virus.

“We’re in a competition. If we don’t win it, we’re going to be a former superpower,” Hurd says. “We need to treat it as a competition—us versus the world. But we can’t, because our politics are so messed up. We’re too busy fighting with ourselves.”

Hurd’s book is notable for many reasons—his personal and professional journeys are legitimately compelling—but most of all for its rebuke of America’s proportionality problem. Drawing on his diverse experiences, from chasing down intelligence overseas to parsing classified documents in Congress to working with groundbreaking tech companies today, Hurd argues that we are woefully unprepared for what is coming our way. Quantum computing has the potential to break every form of encryption that guards our money and our secrets. Artificial intelligence could cut the service-based workforce in half—every two years. Biomedical advances will force questions about the ethics of rewiring our brains and halting the degradation of human cells. In the meantime, China will continue its siege of the American economy—swiping our intellectual property, snatching up our real estate, sabotaging our investments—while Russia will intensify its decades-old campaign to delegitimize our systems of government and turn Americans against one another.

His subtext is plain enough. To confront these challenges, Hurd’s colleagues in the Republican Party might need to rethink their fixation on transgender athletes and critical race theory.

“Everyone treats everything these days like it’s some damn emergency. And it’s got to stop,” Hurd says. “We’re going to be dealing with issues that are so complicated, and so life-altering, that they make the stuff we’re dealing with right now look like tickle fights.”

Hurd proposes a wholesale reorientation of our politics—away from the dopamine-inducing cultural conflicts of the day, and toward the generational trials that will shape American life in the 21st century. To pull it off, he says, we’ll need both a groundswell of reasonable people reclaiming the political discourse from absolutists and ideologues, and innovative, unifying leadership at the highest levels of government.

Hurd knows that these two conditions are codependent: A leader can’t emerge without a movement, and a movement manifests only with the inspiration of a leader. He also knows that some people view him as uniquely qualified to meet this moment: a young, robust, eloquent man of mixed race and complete devotion to country, someone whose life is a testament to nuance and empathy and reconciliation.

What Hurd doesn’t know is whether America is ready to buy what he’s selling. The nation has been lulled into long-term complacency by elected officials and special interests and media personalities that have short-term motivations. The most engaged voters in his party—the people likeliest to cast ballots in a presidential primary—are, to varying degrees, addicted to the fear and grievances being peddled by people clinging to relevance. Hurd realizes that breaking this addiction won’t be easy. In fact, it might prove impossible.

He does, however, see another path forward—one that depends less on persuading those hardened partisans and more on mobilizing a different kind of voter. The overwhelming majority of conservative people in this country, Hurd says, are not watching Fox News every night or imbibing conspiracy theories online. They are not politically neurotic. In fact, they may have never voted in a primary to choose a nominee for president—and that’s the point. “They have been busy trying to put food on their table, put a roof over their head, take care of the people they love,” he says. “But now they’re getting fed up. They are tired of everybody. They are ready for something different.”

Like what?

“Something normal,” Hurd says.

Every politician has an origin story. But I’ve never listened to one as telling—and infuriating—as Will Hurd’s.

In 2008, the young CIA operative was stationed in Afghanistan. He had been an unlikely recruit to the agency; having majored in computer science at Texas A&M, Hurd once dreamed of making a fortune in the tech world. But serendipitous encounters with CIA veterans on the A&M faculty had transformed his curiosities, and several years into the War on Terror, Hurd had emerged as a vital asset in the Middle East. After a bombing near the CIA compound, Hurd was tasked with briefing a group of lawmakers from the House Intelligence Committee, who happened to be visiting Afghanistan. When he began to explain the nature of the local rivalries between Sunni and Shia factions in the region, one of the congressmen interrupted. He asked Hurd what the difference was between a Sunni and a Shia.

[Read: Will Hurd could be the canary in the coal mine]

Hurd thought it was a joke. He waited for the punch line. But it never came. The congressman’s expression made it apparent that he, as well as others in the room, did not understand the basic distinctions at the heart of this war zone. Here were federal lawmakers—members of the intelligence committee—who could not be bothered to understand the place where they were sending trillions of dollars to fund wars in which young Americans would fight and die.

The episode confirmed Hurd’s worst suspicions about American politicians: that they were lazy, ignorant, and selfish. (Some of the members of Congress he spoke to that day, he writes in his book, grumbled that the briefing was keeping them from shopping for local rugs.) Hurd was so enraged that he decided to quit the CIA, move home, and run for Congress.

The workhorse reputation Hurd earned on Capitol Hill is best viewed through this prism: the endless weekend drives through the loneliest corners of his district, the obsession with basic constituent services, the determination to gain expertise on every issue before him, the reflex to ignore partisan squabbling and pass legislation on a bipartisan basis. It also explains Hurd’s impatience with far-right and far-left partisans who hail from safe districts where no meaningful work is required to win reelection every two years—and who, in between social-media feuds and cable-news speeches, disparage people like him as languid “moderates.”

“The moderates are the ones who behave the same way regardless of whether their party is in power or not. The moderates are critical to crafting and passing legislation that actually gets signed into law. The moderates are the ones who work the hardest,” Hurd writes in his book. “And we are the ones who get shit done. Extremists do the most bitching and get the least accomplished.”

It’s true that Hurd has never been driven by any particular ideology. He hired a number of Democrats for key positions in both his D.C. and local offices—a practice that’s virtually unheard of on Capitol Hill—and, when in search of legislative partners, defaulted to looking across the aisle before recruiting fellow Republicans. Once, while we were driving together across a barren stretch of West Texas, I spent an hour pressing Hurd to explain why he considered himself a Republican. He rambled a bit, recalling that his first-ever vote was for Bob Dole (but only because of Dole’s military service). He talked about Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves. Then he pivoted to standard fare about too much government impeding human progress. Finally, he shrugged. “Look, my hypothesis is that 80 percent of Americans are around the center—40 percent left of center, 40 percent right of center,” Hurd told me. “And they’re all persuadable. The letter next to my name should matter less than my message.”

Hurd’s book—and to an extent, his prospective presidential candidacy—should not be read as an attempt to erase the differences between the two parties. Rather, it is a rejection of their fringes, and of the false choices that frame much of our political debate. Even when it comes to subjects as fraught as abortion or Second Amendment rights or the definitions of human sexuality, Hurd argues that there are broad areas of agreement obscured by the incessant demagoguing of partisans who stand to benefit from sowing narratives of zero-sum division.

Take the issue of immigration. The nadir of Hurd’s time in Congress came in early 2019, when the federal government shut down for a record-setting 35 days because of a stalemate over which policies to fund—and how much money should be spent—at the southern border. For 35 days, Hurd watched the leaders of both parties scheming, wrangling their rank-and-file members, figuring out how to emerge victorious from the standoff. Never once in those 35 days did anyone, in either party’s leadership, solicit an opinion from Hurd—a national-security expert, the member who represented more of the U.S.-Mexico border than anyone else in Congress, a guy who’s studied the issue inside and out.

Why wouldn’t they want Hurd’s input? Simple. Because they knew he wasn’t going to tell them what they wanted to hear. They knew Hurd would offer a set of solutions—the mass streamlining of legal immigration for both high-skilled workers and low-skilled laborers; the construction of a cutting-edge “virtual wall” utilizing cameras and fiber-optic cables to monitor illegal crossings; the granting of citizenship to millions of “Dreamers”; the surge of funding to local agencies dealing with a mass influx of asylum seekers—that would antagonize the loudest voices in both party bases.

“So, nothing gets done,” Hurd says. “Because politicians would rather use it as a bludgeon against each other, as opposed to solving a problem that most Americans, Republicans and Democrats, agree on the solutions to.”

The beating heart of Hurd’s book is a call to Americans to consider the most contentious issues of our times more holistically. He’s not under any illusion that consensus will magically appear. But he does believe that most voters—what he describes as the 80 percent clustered within range of the middle—are tired of being presented with binary choices when it comes to big, complicated questions.

In one passage, Hurd describes his anguish over the murder of George Floyd. It was made that much worse by the reductive scrutiny of his own actions in the volatile aftermath: As the lone Black Republican in the House of Representatives, Hurd felt as though anything he said or did—such as marching with protesters in Houston, over the objections of his staff—was perceived as picking a side. In his view, there were no sides.

“I wanted to show solidarity with Black America. I wanted to explain it was okay to be simultaneously outraged by a Black man being murdered in police custody, thankful that law enforcement puts themselves in harm’s way to enable our First Amendment rights, and pissed off that criminals are treading on American values by looting and killing police officers,” Hurd writes.

“These emotions,” he concludes, “aren’t mutually exclusive.”

None of this means Hurd wants to be a great reconciler of the two parties. Just because he can envision leading a post-partisan movement, does not mean he expects—or hopes for—some cease-fire between Republicans and Democrats. He believes that competition between two healthy parties is essential to a functioning democracy. He just doesn’t believe we have two healthy parties.

Hurd makes no secret in the book of his scorn for the ascendant progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Its crusade against oil and natural-gas production, he says, endangers hundreds of thousands of good-paying American jobs and would make the U.S. dependent on some of the world’s worst actors to supply our energy. Its stigmatization of law enforcement—calls to defund the police, or abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or slash the budget of the U.S. Border Patrol—invites an era of lawlessness and violence and death, particularly along the southern border. These two issues alone, Hurd says, explain why Latino voters are rapidly disaffiliating with the party.

[Read: The Texas Republican asking his party to just stop]

“When I was in Congress, I was the only Republican on the entire U.S.-Mexico border. Now there’s the potential that three of the five [Texas] border seats are going to vote Republican. The border district in Arizona is probably going to flip too. Why?” Hurd tells me. “Because you have Democratic mayors and sheriffs and county judges that are sick and tired of national Democrats talking down to them. For those Latino communities, border security is a public-safety issue. Oh, and by the way, most of those folks on the border know somebody who works in the energy sector. So they feel like Democrats aren’t just putting them in danger; Democrats are trying to dismantle their way of life.”

That said, Hurd saves his harshest commentary for his own party.

Republicans have become comfortable “saying or doing anything to win an election,” Hurd writes. The party of family values champions cruel policies and hateful politicians while lecturing the left on morality. The party of fiscal discipline and personal responsibility blows holes in the budget, then blames Democrats for their recklessness. The party of empowerment and opportunity systematically attempts to disenfranchise voters who are poor and nonwhite. The party of freedom and liberty keeps flirting with authoritarianism.

Hurd’s most pressing concern for his party is that it’s become an agent of disinformation. This is not a uniquely Republican phenomenon, he emphasizes—the book contains a blistering critique of Democrat Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, for leaking faulty information regarding Trump colluding with Russia—but it’s the Republican Party’s embrace of lies and propaganda that most immediately threatens our system of government. Hurd says that watching the January 6 assault on the Capitol, just three days after his retirement from Congress, felt like he was watching a sequel to 9/11—extremism infiltrating America in a new form.

It was “an example of the kinds of internal threats many of our military leaders have cautioned our political leaders to take as seriously as external threats,” Hurd writes. “To prevent future manifestations of this threat from materializing, the Republican Party must drive out those who continue to push misinformation, disinformation, and subscribe to crackpot theories like QAnon.”

But that’s not happening. Just as Hurd was shipping his book to the printer, the Republican National Committee met in Salt Lake City. Its 168 members—three from each of the 50 states and six territories, elected at the local level by party activists—adopted a resolution censuring the two House Republicans working on the January 6 investigation. The resolution also called the insurrection “legitimate political discourse.”

Hurd was dumbfounded. He believed that Trump deserved to be impeached—not just for inciting the violence at the Capitol but also for his recorded phone call with the Georgia secretary of state, in which the president asked a top election official to falsify ballots. (Hurd says these circumstances differ from Trump’s first impeachment, which he agonized over and ultimately voted against, because there was “a clear violation of the law” in the run-up to January 6.) Letting Trump off the hook, Hurd says, was bad enough. For the Republican National Committee to gather more than a year after the insurrection and pass a resolution justifying the death and destruction at the U.S. Capitol was a “new level of crazy”—and, to him, proof that the party needs an intervention.

The irony, I tell him, is that these are the people—the best-connected local Republican leaders—who will play an outsize role in determining whether an intervention is successful. These are the people who do the most influencing and organizing and favor-trading in their state parties. These are the first hands he’ll have to shake in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina if he decides to run for president.

Hurd stares at me blankly. Finally, he arches an eyebrow. “Why?”

Because, I explain to him, these are the gatekeepers to the presidential process. Even Trump, who ran the most unconventional campaign in modern history, had to kiss some rings and grease some palms.

Hurd is still blank-faced. “That’s how things have always been done in the past,” he says. “But why does it have to be that way?”

I ask Hurd what he would propose instead.

“Look, there’s some people I’m not going to appeal to—the right-wingers. That’s okay. But there’s more of the other people. The normal people. And I’m going to find them,” he says. “It will be hard. The cost per acquisition of those voters is higher than it is for the traditional Republican primary voter—you know, the people who have voted in the last four primaries. That’s why most people don’t bother trying to find them or turn them out.”

Wouldn’t it be easier, I ask, to just concentrate on wooing those existing likely voters?

“Maybe,” he says. “But if you want to change the party, you need to change the primary electorate. This isn’t rocket science. If you want to get back to normal, you need to get more normal people to vote in primaries.”

It’s a provocative notion. Hurd isn’t just hinting at a campaign against Trumpism; he’s suggesting an assault on the structural realities of the Republican Party.

Contemplating this sort of insurgency is one thing when the GOP is locked out of power. But come November, Republicans are likely—based on all the available evidence—to rout Democrats in the midterm elections. If that happens, the loudest and most radical elements of the Republican Party will be emboldened, and any incentive to moderate the party’s identity will seem lost.

Hurd acknowledges this. But if past is prologue, he says, Republicans will do little with their newly won power in 2023. Congressional leaders will struggle to corral their rambunctious majorities; the party will succeed in frustrating Joe Biden’s agenda but fail to provide any governing vision for the country; and by 2024 the country will be forced to choose between two dug-in, do-nothing parties.

“At that point,” Hurd says, “Maybe people will feel like it’s time to get off this crazy train.”

It’s possible, Hurd tells me, that such continuing dysfunction will push voters deeper and deeper into their partisan silos. His hope rests on a belief that they’ve been pushed too far—and that sooner or later, they’ll push back.

“Look, if you’re a left-wing nut or a right-wing nut, you’re probably not going to smell what I’m cooking,” he says. “But most people aren’t nuts. They want to solve problems. They want to make this century an American century. They are normal people who want normal leaders.”

Hurd is putting the pieces in place. His friends say he wants to run for president in 2024. He may not have universal name recognition or a behemoth political operation, but he does have a vision. He has a loyal and growing donor base. He has the biography and the charisma and the God-given political chops to put the Republican Party—and the rest of the country—on notice.

People close to Hurd thought he was crazy to abandon a future corner office at the CIA to run for Congress. (Bob Gates, the former defense secretary and CIA director, lobbied furiously to keep Hurd from leaving the agency; then, pitying his former Texas A&M pupil, Gates did something he’d never done in his life: He wrote a campaign check.) The young candidate said the same thing to every donor and party official he met: “You don’t need to think I can win; you just need to think it’s not crazy.” That’s the same approach the 44-year-old bachelor envisions taking in a campaign for national office.

Hurd is the definition of a boom-or-bust candidate. He could go all the way to the White House; he could also go nowhere fast. Everything we know about politics in the Trump era suggests that the second outcome is far likelier than the first. But Hurd says he’s not worried about that. Because the only thing worse than being defeated is being desperate.

What the GOP Does to Its Own Dissenters

2021-12-07T06:00:00-05:00

Late at night on the second Tuesday of January, Peter Meijer, a 33-year-old freshman congressman from West Michigan, paced the half-unpacked rooms of his new rental apartment in Washington, D.C., dreading the decision he would soon have to make.

Six days earlier, Meijer had pulled a smoke hood over his face and fled the U.S. House of Representatives as insurgents broke into the lower chamber. They were attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Meijer had been on the job for all of three days. Once the Capitol was secured, he cast his vote to certify the election results. It was his first real act as a federal lawmaker—one he believed was perfunctory. Except that it wasn’t. The majority of his fellow House Republicans refused to certify the results, launching an assault on the legitimacy of American democracy.

That entire day—the vote, as much as the attack—had caught Meijer unprepared. His party’s leadership had provided no guidance to its members, leaving everyone to navigate a squall of rumor and disinformation in one-man lifeboats.

The next week, when Democrats introduced an article of impeachment and promptly scheduled a vote, seeking to hold President Donald Trump accountable for inciting the mob’s siege of the Capitol, Meijer steeled himself for some tough conversations within his party. But those conversations never happened: Most of Trump’s staunchest defenders were too shell-shocked to defend him, even behind closed doors, and the Republican leadership in the House was once again AWOL. There were no whipping efforts, no strategy sessions, no lectures on procedure or policy. Barreling toward one of the most consequential votes in modern history, everyone was on their own.

For Meijer, the stillness was unsettling. He felt that impeachment was warranted—“The vice president and the next two in the line of succession were inside the Capitol as it was being assaulted,” he says, “and for three hours the president was nowhere to be found”—but he longed for a dialogue. Growing up, he’d heard the legend of how a family friend, President Gerald Ford, had pardoned Richard Nixon in an act of mercy after Nixon had resigned to avoid the humiliation of being impeached and removed. Meijer’s first political memory was made watching the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Even as a kid, he sensed that it was trouble for the country. Now, after just over a week in office, he was bracing himself to vote to impeach the president of the United States—a president from his own party—without so much as a caucus meeting where competing cases might be presented.

Meijer felt angry and betrayed, “like I’d seen something sacred get trampled on.” He told himself that Trump needed to pay. But he worried that a rash impeachment of the president might unleash an even uglier convulsion than the one he’d just survived. And he knew that by voting to impeach he might be committing “career suicide before my career ever began.” In the days leading up to the vote, Meijer says, he barely slept.

“It was the worst 96 hours of my life,” he says.

Whatever his final decision, Meijer didn’t want to blindside the people back in his district. So he began making calls. The conversations did not go well. Meijer remembers one man, “a prominent business leader in Grand Rapids,” arguing that the election had been stolen, that Trump was entitled to a second term, that Meijer was a pawn of the “deep state.” The man went “full QAnon,” spouting conspiracy theories and threatening him with vague but menacing consequences if he voted to impeach. Meijer was well acquainted with that kind of talk; one of his own siblings was fully in the grip of right-wing conspiracies. Even so, the conversation “shook me to my core,” Meijer says, “because the facade had been stripped away. It showed me just how bad this had gotten.”

After Meijer hung up, he leafed through a copy of The Federalist Papers, hoping for an epiphany. He texted with friends. He talked with his wife. Finally, he consulted a list he’d compiled of like-minded members with whom he wanted to compare notes. It was a short list, and Meijer had already talked with most of them: Liz Cheney of Wyoming; Adam Kinzinger of Illinois; Fred Upton, who represented a neighboring district in Michigan. But there was one he had yet to connect with: Anthony Gonzalez, a second-term congressman from Ohio.

When Meijer reached Gonzalez on the phone, the call turned into a therapy session. Meijer kept debating with himself; meanwhile, Gonzalez, who had also been ambivalent, grew ever more adamant that Trump must be impeached. Meijer asked his colleague to explain the source of his certainty. “I can convince myself not to vote for impeachment,” Gonzalez said. “But if my son asks me in 20 years why I didn’t vote for impeachment, I couldn’t convince him.”

The next morning, January 13, Meijer received an encrypted message just as he was arriving at the Capitol. It was from a senior White House official, someone who’d heard he was on the fence, urging the new congressman to vote for impeachment. Meijer was stunned, but he’d already made up his mind anyway. Later that day, he joined Gonzalez and eight other House Republicans in voting to impeach Trump. Meijer was the only freshman among them—and the only freshman in U.S. history to vote to impeach a president of his own party.

“Of the 10, I’ve got the most respect for Peter—because he was brand-new,” Kinzinger, one of the GOP’s anti-Trump ringleaders, told me. “There were other freshmen who talked a big game, but the pressure got to them. Honestly, on the day before the vote, I thought we’d have 25 with us. Then it fell apart; I’m surprised we wound up with 10. But what I recognized with Peter, during our conversations, was that he never talked about the political implications. And that was rare. If someone brought up the political implications, that was a good indicator that they weren’t going to vote with us. But the people who never brought it up, I knew they would follow through. And Peter was one of them.”

Meijer figured there could be no turning back. And he was fine with that. The country needed a come-to-Jesus conversation about political extremism. The Republican Party needed an intervention over its addiction to Trump. He was going to help facilitate both—even if it meant forfeiting his career. He might lose his next election, he thought, but at least his group of 10 could offer “hope for some who wanted to [see] the Republican Party get past the darkness and the violence and that sense of foreboding and doom.”

Meijer (right) with Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota (left) and Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma (center) in the gallery of the House chamber shortly before rioters attempted to break in on January 6 (Tom Williams / Getty)

After the vote, Meijer’s congressional office—still barely staffed—was inundated with calls and messages. His cellphone throbbed with furious texts and emails. Meijer knew he had to get away. January 6 had ushered in a new era of political mayhem, and one week later, he had put a bull’s-eye on his own back. He rented a small place off the grid, packed his bags, and departed Washington with his wife. As he left town, something he’d said to Gonzalez earlier that day echoed through his mind.

“We’re in this together,” Meijer had told him.

Peter Meijer didn’t run for Congress to fight for the sanity of the country or the soul of the Republican Party. If anything, he’d hoped to represent a cease-fire. Justin Amash, the congressman who represented Michigan’s Third District for a decade, had by virtue of his constant criticism of Trump worn out his welcome with many Republican voters. When Amash made it known in the summer of 2019 that he’d be leaving the party to become an independent, Meijer announced that he would seek the Republican nomination. Convinced that Trumpism was a distraction from the country’s most pressing problems, Meijer ran a campaign that reflected a certain strategic detachment. He pledged to work with the president wherever possible, and ignore him whenever necessary. He denounced Amash’s calls for Trump’s first impeachment—for soliciting Ukraine’s assistance in his reelection campaign—telling a local news outlet, “I think the American people deserve better than political theater in the House of Representatives.”

Meijer had been born into nearly universal name recognition in Michigan: His great-grandfather Hendrik Meijer had founded the Meijer grocery-store chain there, which his grandfather and father grew into a behemoth, with nearly 250 stores throughout the Midwest. As a teen, he tried to avoid the attention and expectations that came with his last name by spelling it Meyer at East Grand Rapids High School. He left home for Columbia University, where he interrupted his undergraduate studies to deploy to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist. Later, after spending 18 months in Afghanistan as a conflict analyst, he finished graduate school at NYU and found work doing urban redevelopment in Detroit. By then—and, he swears, without meaning to—he’d compiled quite the political résumé.

[Read: The Michigan Republican who decided to tell the truth about election fraud]

When he was elected with a six-point margin in November 2020, Meijer had no plans to become a troublemaker. He hoped to prioritize economic competitiveness with China. He wanted more oversight and accountability for troop deployments. He saw himself as a sober-minded person, someone who wasn’t heading to Congress for the culture wars or the tribal showdowns.

And then he got to Washington. Freshman orientation was a blur of propaganda and innuendo and state-sanctioned conspiracy mongering. Meijer watched, from a hotel lounge, as the president’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a deranged press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. New members listened to powerful lawmakers leveling accusations that had no apparent basis in fact. They compared the crazed voicemails they were getting from friends and family members and swapped stories of the intimidation they were subjected to by voters demanding that they overturn the presidential-election result.

Dismayed, a group of freshman Republicans asked for a meeting with Kevin McCarthy shortly after their swearing-in. According to multiple people who attended that meeting, the House minority leader refused to give them advice, explicit or implicit, about how to vote on the election certification. Whereas Mitch McConnell was whipping furiously for certification in his Senate caucus, McCarthy left his new House members without a clue as to the party’s position on whether Congress should obey the Constitution. When they pressed him—one of the freshmen asked whether Trump was crazy enough to believe that decertification would somehow keep him in office—McCarthy replied, “The thing you have to understand about Donald Trump is that he hasn’t been in government that long. He doesn’t know how these things work.”

As word got around that the freshmen were up for grabs, a lobbying blitz commenced. Some of the House hard-liners who sought to block certification—Mo Brooks, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz—shared discredited YouTube testimonies and Fox News clips to emphasize how the issue was playing with the conservative base. Countering that influence were the likes of Kinzinger and Cheney, who sat down with rookie lawmakers for one-on-one conversations, warning them of the precedent they would set by objecting to the election results. Meijer remembers one longtime member—who confessed that he did not believe the election had been stolen but said he would vote against certification anyway—telling him: “This is the last thing Donald Trump will ever ask you to do.”

Meijer knew that some Republicans had sincere concerns about election integrity; he himself feared that Democratic officials had taken advantage of the coronavirus pandemic and exceeded their authority to enroll absentee voters. But whatever issues he had with the way certain states had administered the election, those states had since ratified their results and submitted slates of electors to Congress to be counted. Under the Constitution, there was nothing left to do but count them and certify the final tally. Meijer says his colleagues chose to embrace a bad-faith interpretation of basic law; rather than a ministerial duty, the certification vote became “just another way to make your base happy” and humor the president, he says. “A lot of these people were just shrugging. But, I mean, we’d be basically destroying the Electoral College.”

On January 6, when both bodies of Congress convened in the House chamber, Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked most of the lawmakers to move up to the gallery as the proceedings began. Not long after that, Representative Paul Gosar announced his objection to the results in his home state of Arizona, the third in the alphabetical roll call. The senators adjourned to their side of the Capitol to deliberate, and Meijer excused himself for a bathroom break. Wandering, lost on his third day at work, he eventually found an elevator, which took him all the way down to the sub-basement, where he discovered a restroom. When he walked out a few minutes later, he saw a Capitol Police officer sprinting down the corridor, yelling into his radio: “Hallway clear!”

Meijer’s gut told him something was very wrong. But his brain dissented. This is the United States Capitol, he told himself. Nobody’s getting in here. Walking back with barely a brisker pace to the gallery, he discovered another officer guarding the door. “You want to be locked in,” he asked Meijer, “or locked out?” That seemed like an easy call. “I said to myself, There’s no safer place to be than inside the chamber,” Meijer remembers. It was his final moment of political innocence. Inside, members were fielding panicked calls from staff and sharing reports of the complex being breached and of tear gas in the Rotunda. As the rioters approached the chamber, their chanting now audible, Capitol Police shouted warnings for members to stay away from the windows.

The sergeant at arms had been pleading for calm, but suddenly his tone changed. He announced that smoke hoods were under the chairs and told members to put them on. Then he ordered an evacuation of the chamber. As Meijer helped a colleague with her hood, the mob was banging on the doors. Then a window shattered. While they looked down on some of their senior-most colleagues being rushed off the floor, Stephanie Bice, a fellow Republican freshman from Oklahoma, told Meijer that they were witnessing history. Stunned, she suggested that he take a photo. Meijer was already recording video on his iPhone. “Sad, sad, sad fucking history,” he told her.

Photo from Meijer’s iPhone: The House chamber being evacuated (Peter Meijer)

The Capitol Police herded members into elevators and sent them down to the sub-basement. For a few minutes—it felt much longer—they were on their own. “What’s going through my mind is, what happens if we turn the corner and see a group of rioters? We’re a large percentage of the House of Representatives, and we have no police presence with us. We’re wandering through a tunnel system that connects to buildings that have been evacuated,” Meijer recalls. “Nobody was in control of the situation.”

They found their way to a cafeteria in the Rayburn Building. But as soon as Capitol Police discovered them and noticed the windows facing out to the ground floor, they ordered another evacuation. This time, Capitol Police escorted them into the Longworth Building, to the Ways and Means Committee room, and set up a security perimeter outside. Catching his breath, Meijer felt like he was back in a war zone.

Inside the committee room, there was “a lot of tension, a lot of suspicion” among the members. There was no fraternizing across party lines; Democrats huddled with Democrats and Republicans with Republicans. But there was a shared sense of dread. “The folks who whipped up [the violence] were just as terrified as everyone else; they fled like everyone else,” Meijer says. “That was not ‘Oh, our plan worked!’ That was ‘Oh, good God.’ ”

Meijer remembers straining to hear Nancy Pelosi giving a speech through a thick mask. He remembers raiding a refrigerator in the office of Kevin Brady, the ranking Republican on the committee, and drinking a beer to pass the time. And he remembers walking into a small side room and encountering two House Republican colleagues. “They were discussing the Twenty-Fifth Amendment—talking about phone calls they made to the White House, encouraging officials to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” Meijer says. “Neither of them voted for impeachment a week later.”

When the Capitol was finally secured and members returned to the House chamber, Meijer expected an outraged, defiant House of Representatives to vote in overwhelming numbers to certify the election results, sending a message to the mob that Congress would not be scared away from fulfilling its constitutional obligations. But as he began talking with his colleagues, he was shocked to realize that more of them—perhaps far more of them—were now preparing to object to the election results than before the riot.

On the House floor, moments before the vote, Meijer approached a member who appeared on the verge of a breakdown. He asked his new colleague if he was okay. The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. “Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,” Meijer says. “If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?”

Meijer glanced down at his phone. It was crackling with messages from people in his district—some checking on his well-being; others warning him not to blow the insurrection out of proportion, arguing that it was little more than a spontaneous tour of the Capitol. He swiped past most of the missives. But one, from a longtime activist he’d gotten to know, caught his eye. “You better not buckle and wimp out to the liberals,” the man wrote. “Those who stormed the Capital today are True American Heroes. This election was a fraud and you know that’s true. Peter, don’t sell us out!!!”

“Those who stormed the Capitol attacked our republic today,” Meijer replied. “They trampled on the Constitution. We have a rule of law, courts, and peaceful means of resolving disputes.”

“No Sir. They are showing their God Given America Right,” the man texted back. “When the truth is being hidden, the Second Amendment gives every one of those people the right to do what they did today.”

Meijer silenced his phone and cast his vote to certify the election.

Listen to an interview with William J. Walker, sergeant-at-arms of the U.S. House of Representatives, on The Experiment.

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For all the negatives that defined Meijer’s first weeks on the job—the incompetence and the cravenness, the violence and the threats—he emerged from the gantlet relieved that at least now he was liberated to speak his mind about the GOP’s decay.

Meijer had never been a Trump guy. Like so many Republican candidates seeking to pass muster with the president’s base, he had been careful to say the right things. He’d touted Trump’s economic record. He’d ignored, or downplayed, much of his extreme rhetoric. But all the while, Meijer had studied Trump with trepidation. He viewed the 45th president as a manifestation of America’s psychological imbalance, someone who reflected our anger and insecurities instead of our confidence and aspirations. He feared Trump’s authoritarian instincts, but clung to a belief that the president’s grip on the American right would soon loosen.

Photo from Meijer’s iPhone: The January 7 newspapers delivered to his office, where he slept on the couch after voting to certify Biden’s victory (Peter Meijer)

After the impeachment vote, Meijer felt he was positioned to advocate for what he believed would be an imminent, sweeping overhaul of the party. He threw himself into the public debate surrounding January 6. He became a fixture on national news programs. He accepted every invitation—especially those that seemed hostile—to address local party chapters. At every stop, in every setting, Meijer forced the issue, believing that he was on the right side of history, and that an awakening was at hand.

“As of late January,” he says, “I thought there was the opportunity to have a harsh confrontation with reality. It was going to be a very unpleasant 18 months, 24 months, but maybe we would do the necessary soul-searching and reconstruction.”

His optimism didn’t last long. In February, two of the county-level Republican Parties in Meijer’s district—Calhoun and Barry—voted to formally censure him. (Calhoun’s leaders accused Meijer of having “betrayed the trust of so many who supported you and violate[d] our faith in our most basic constitutional values and protections.”) The next month, as other local parties across Michigan were debating similar reprimands of both Meijer and Fred Upton, the state GOP chair joked with party activists that “assassination” was one remedy for dealing with the two of them.

[Listen: The Ticket podcast interview with Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer: ‘There’s Going to Be a Horrible Cost’]

By April, Meijer had a primary challenger. The criticism back home was unceasing; the only praise he received was whispered. National polls showed that tens of millions of Republican voters still believed the election had been stolen. Looking around, Meijer saw that he was a leader without any following and realized how Pollyannaish he’d been. “It’s like, ‘All right, this is going to be a longer, deeper project than I thought,’ ” he says.

Meijer’s sense of urgency gradually gave way to self-doubt. He began to wonder whether his appeals to decency and democracy came across as “pearl clutching.” He could tell he was rubbing some of his constituents the wrong way—they could stomach a disagreement with their congressman; what they couldn’t tolerate was the lecturing and the finger-wagging. He sensed that he might be doing more harm than good with his high-minded rhetoric. “I’ve come to realize the limitations of performative outrage,” he says.

So he backed off. He took voters’ earfuls in stride. He says he decided that “by actively trying to correct them, I may have been inadvertently postponing the self-correction” that would come with some distance from Trump’s presidency.

Over time, the threats ebbed, the antagonistic encounters subsided, and Meijer got some semblance of his life back. He was able to spend more time on the policy issues he cared about. For most of his constituents, discussions of election integrity and January 6 and Meijer’s vote for impeachment had become redundant—and boring. “We had a moment in one of our town halls [when] there were all these people who said, ‘Can we talk about something else now?’ ” Meijer recalls.

In August, when I accompanied Meijer on a swing through his district during the congressional recess, something strange happened. A woman raised her hand, after Meijer’s luncheon talk at a Grand Rapids country club, and asked him about “the insurrection” on January 6. Everyone fell still; the room full of old friends who’d been buying raffle tickets and cracking jokes was suddenly on edge. Meijer had once offered lively commentary on the matter. But on this day, he was restrained, giving a brief synopsis of his whereabouts when the Capitol was overrun.

In the parking lot a few minutes later, Meijer turned to me. “I haven’t gotten that question in a long time,” he said. Sure enough, in more than a dozen stops across his district over the summer and fall, this was the only one where I saw anyone ask Meijer about the madness of January. Most of the questions he got were about the “socialist” Democratic agenda, the GOP’s prospects for taking back control of Congress in 2022, and President Joe Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan. (This last topic allowed Meijer numerous victory laps for the unauthorized trip he took to Kabul during the U.S. evacuation. Having been in the crosshairs of his own party for so long, Meijer was delighted to be rebuked by the White House.)

In October, Meijer stood inside a classroom at his alma mater, East Grand Rapids High School, taking questions from constitutional-studies students. This was the very class that had fueled Meijer’s political imagination as a teenager. The sophomores and juniors he stood before were studying the same curriculum that had informed his core beliefs about America and the responsibilities of government. The students listened to Meijer warily. Finally, George, a shy-sounding student in the back of the room, raised his hand and announced that he had a question on behalf of his friends. “What we’re wondering,” George said sheepishly, “is how do you define what it means to be a Republican right now?”

Meijer thought for a moment. Then he launched into a soliloquy about how local control of political institutions produces more accountability, more efficiency, and better results. This was the answer to a question that George was not asking. The young man clearly wanted to understand how Meijer’s version of Republicanism differed from the Trumpist one, how the congressman might distinguish his vision for the party from the current MAGA model. George told me, after class, that he was frustrated by Meijer’s evasive response.

Later, over beers at a nearby pub, I reminded Meijer of his burden in the aftermath of the impeachment vote: He and the other nine dissenters were supposed to be “the hope” for their party’s future. He had just spoken to a group of soon-to-be voters whose notions of Republicanism were formed by red hats and angry chants and crazed tweets. Meijer had just looked the party’s future in the eye and acted as though all of that was normal. “How do you explain to George,” I asked, “the difference between the Republican Party that fills his imagination and that scares him, versus the Republican Party that you want to represent?”

“Well, my Republican Party wouldn’t scare him,” Meijer said with a shrug.

I asked if he understood why George and his friends might be scared right now. He smirked. “The inability to affirmatively and consistently reject anti-Semitism and white supremacy?”

The fundamental problem, Meijer said, is that Republicans are offering no plans for improving lives and making the future a more promising place. Instead, the party continues to rely on grievance and fear—and misinformation—to scare voters into their ranks. But he didn’t say any of this to George.

After our interview, Meijer went upstairs to a private lounge at the pub to mingle with small-business owners. For a guy who talks a lot about the “militants” in his party, he doesn’t engage with them much. Meijer benefits from representing wealthy and well-educated pockets of West Michigan, an area where pious Dutch sensibilities tend to dull the partisan discourse. This means that he’s relatively insulated from the hysteria some of his colleagues deal with daily. Meijer insists he’s not numb to the enduring threat—he can still picture the man at a fairgrounds screaming “Motherfucking traitor!” at him—but he does believe, at least in his district, that the worst has passed.

“For a lot of people here, they swore that impeachment vote was the end for Peter Meijer,” says Ben Geiger, the chair of the Barry County Republican Party, which voted in February to censure the congressman. “But I’ll tell you, it hasn’t come up much since [February]. He’s been working hard on a lot of other things. I don’t know if he’s trying to make people forget—he’s doing his job. But I do think some people have let it go.”

This might be the best-case scenario for Meijer’s own career—Republican voters forgiving and forgetting, politely moving on, putting January 6 behind them. It might also be the worst-case scenario for America.

Here’s the thing: Some people have not let it go. Large pluralities of Republican voters—depending on the poll, sometimes outright majorities of them—believe that the election was stolen. Thousands of demonstrators have protested at state-capitol buildings, demanding forensic audits of the 2020 results. Scores of local election officials nationwide have been run out of office, many of them replaced by people who insist that the system they’re now charged with overseeing is rigged.

Meijer knows lots of people who can’t let it go. There’s one he thinks of every day: his sister.

Haley Meijer is two years older than her brother. Along with a younger sister, they were close as children but grew into very different people: Peter the quiet, straitlaced rule follower; Haley the rebel. She was a hippie who bashed the family’s conservative politics, then an avid Trump supporter eager for culture wars with the elitist left. More recently, she’s become a QAnon follower and devout conspiracy theorist.

When Meijer announced his run for Congress, he said, Haley was enthusiastic. Which stood to reason: He was running against a Democrat—to the QAnon crowd, the party of pedophiles and cannibals—while promising to partner with Donald Trump to make America great again. Not long after his victory in November, however, Haley became fixated on the idea that the election had been rigged. She peppered him with bad stats and debunked rumors and thirdhand accounts of cheating. Meijer had checked with local officials in Michigan to confirm that everything—registration numbers, voter turnout, down-ballot patterns—added up. He tried telling her as much. “But she was down the rabbit hole, watching all the testimony from these cases brought by Rudy Giuliani. I’m watching the same hearings, trying to find anything that resembles sanity,” he says. “And she’s addicted.”

When the mob invaded the Capitol on January 6, Meijer received a text message from his sister: “Sending love and prayers.” He thanked her and confirmed that he was safe. But she was silent after he voted to certify the election that night, and after he voted to impeach Trump and was deluged with death threats. Soon after, Haley, a singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, began commenting favorably on the Facebook posts of Tom Norton, who announced a campaign to defeat Meijer in the 2022 Republican primary. (Haley Meijer said in a statement that she loves and admires her brother, though they “have differing beliefs on certain subjects.”)

In her worldview, Meijer says, “there’s no room for disagreements. It’s good versus evil. You have the side of light and the side of dark. You have God and you have Satan. And if you’re not on the side of God, then what side are you on?”

This has been perhaps the most trying aspect of Meijer’s job. While grieving his sister’s obsession with conspiracy theories, he has to work alongside the very people, like fellow freshman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are pushing those lies. “They make folks like my sister think they’re on her team,” Meijer says. “And that’s what pisses me off. They aren’t the ones paying the price when the consequences come due. Paul Gosar wasn’t shot on January 6—Ashli Babbitt was.”

I was surprised to hear Meijer mention Gosar, the conspiracy-spreading, white-nationalist-sympathizing congressman who in November was censured by the House for sharing an animated video that depicted him murdering Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In our many hours of conversation, Meijer had declined to call out any of his colleagues by name. (Watching him contort himself to avoid criticizing Kevin McCarthy was the closest I’ve come to seeing a man tortured.) This reticence, he explained, is his way of trying to bring down the temperature. Meijer is convinced that there are more Republicans like him—rational, pragmatic, disgusted by the turn the party has taken—than there are like Gosar. Because they have the numbers, he says, there’s no need to engage in guerrilla tactics. They can reason and debate like adults. They can take the high road. They can play the long game.

Maybe he’s right. Or maybe this will prove a ruinous miscalculation. Whatever the numbers, the reality is that Meijer’s side is getting quieter while the other side is getting louder. His side is letting go while the other side is digging in. His side is unilaterally disarming while the other side is escalating every day.

In the middle of September, Anthony Gonzalez announced that he was retiring from Congress. Describing the strain on his family—his wife and children required a police escort due to the threats against him—Gonzalez told The New York Times that seeking reelection wasn’t worth it. I texted Meijer about the news. “Gutting,” he wrote back.

When we spoke next, a few weeks later, Meijer sounded defeated. Although Gonzalez was the first of the 10 House Republican impeachment supporters to fall by the wayside, he wouldn’t be the last. The stress of the past nine months had ground down the others in the group—which, he argued, is exactly what Trump and his cronies wanted. “What that faction is banking on is exhaustion,” Meijer said. “They want life in the shoes of the 10 of us to be miserable.” The question he and his friends now ask of themselves isn’t just “Can I win reelection?” Instead, he said, “It’s ‘Am I going to have to talk for the next few years about Italian military satellites and bamboo ballots and whatever [MyPillow CEO] Mike Lindell says?’ ”

In the days after January 6, Meijer believed he was part of a mission to rescue the Republican Party from itself. Now he laughs at his own naïveté. Ten people isn’t a popular movement. And in truth, only two of them—Cheney and Kinzinger—have shown the stomach for the sort of sustained offensive that would be required to rehabilitate the GOP. The other eight, having glanced over their shoulders and seen no reinforcements on the way, chose varying degrees of retreat.

“I don’t blame them. They did their tour in Vietnam; why would they want to go back?” Kinzinger told me in mid-October. “The responsibility for fixing the party isn’t on the 10 of us; it’s on the 180 who didn’t do anything. It’s kind of like Flight 93: If only a few people fight back, that plane hits the Capitol. But because everyone fought back, it didn’t.”

Two weeks after we spoke, Kinzinger announced his retirement from Congress.

In light of his side’s attrition—Cheney kicked out of the GOP leadership, Gonzalez and Kinzinger quitting Congress—I asked Meijer how he now thinks about the divisions in his party. “There are people who are part of the problem,” he said. “There are people who are actively trying to fight the problem. And then there are people who have become acutely aware of the problem, but don’t know how to fight it.”

Meijer wants to believe that he’s in the second group. But more and more, he belongs in the third. He can see the foundational threats facing American self-government—but he can’t decide how best to counteract them. If he now views the struggle to rebuild his party as a long-term proposition, then part of his job is “just surviving,” he says, sticking around long enough to recruit allies and gain momentum to take back control of the GOP. It’s a common instinct, and a dangerous one, because the party is playing its own long game.

In the fall, a bundled donation of $25,000 was deposited into Meijer’s campaign account, courtesy of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which named him to its “Patriot Program.” It was an honor not bestowed upon some of the others who’d voted for impeachment. Maybe this was Kevin McCarthy and the party leadership mending fences, signaling to Meijer that they value him despite his breaking rank. Or maybe it was the party rewarding his recent good behavior—and reminding him of the benefits of being a team player.

Meijer will face multiple primary challengers in 2022, including a Trump-administration official, John Gibbs, who already has the former president’s endorsement against “RINO Congressman Peter Meijer.” Because of the district’s moderate makeup and his ample finances, Meijer is favored to win reelection. What comes next is murkier. It’s already rumored in Michigan Republican circles that Meijer will run for U.S. Senate in 2024. Rising that quickly in today’s GOP—from unknown Millennial to statewide nominee in the space of four years—will demand playing to the party base. That won’t necessarily require the overt delegitimization of American democracy. A blind eye here, some radio silence there, will do the trick.

This is the essence of Meijer’s struggle. He still wants to do the right thing; this fall, he was one of just nine House Republicans to vote to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena issued by the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. But Meijer also wants a future in a party that is controlled by the president he voted to exile. GOP elders have told Meijer that because he barely overlapped with Trump, he may not be on Mar-a-Lago’s radar like some of the Republican stalwarts who voted to impeach. It’s better not to poke the bear, they tell him; better to let Trump and his loyalists forget the name Peter Meijer altogether.

In this sense, the Republican Party is embracing that old definition of insanity. Its leaders believed they could wait out Trump’s candidacy in 2016. Then they believed they could wait out his presidency. Now they believe they can wait him out yet again—even as the former president readies a campaign to reclaim his old job and makes clear his intent to run not just against a Democratic opponent but against democracy itself.

Meijer says he’s “pretty much” resigned to Trump winning his party’s nomination in 2024, and worries that the odds of Trump returning to the White House are growing stronger as Biden’s presidency loses steam. Meijer knows the strain Trump’s candidacy might place on a system that nearly buckled during the last election cycle. What’s worse: Meijer sees Trump inspiring copycats, some of them far smarter and more sophisticated, enemies of the American ideal who might succeed where Trump failed.

“The real threat isn’t Donald Trump; it’s somebody who watched Donald Trump and can do this a lot better than he did,” Meijer says.

The powerlessness in his voice when he says this is unnerving. In the space of a year, he transformed from a political romantic to an emboldened survivor to a daunted skeptic. He tried to force a reckoning on his party; now the reckoning is coming for Republicans like him.

At one point, Meijer described to me the psychological forces at work in his party, the reasons so many Republicans have refused to confront the tragedy of January 6 and the nature of the ongoing threat. Some people are motivated by raw power, he said. Others have acted out of partisan spite, or ignorance, or warped perceptions of truth and lies. But the chief explanation, he said, is fear. People are afraid for their safety. They are afraid for their careers. Above all, they are afraid of fighting a losing battle in an empty foxhole.

Meijer can’t blame them. “I just feel lonely,” he told me, sighing with exasperation.

Most of his colleagues, Meijer believes, want to be with him. They pat him on the back and whisper encouragement into his ear. They say they’re rooting for his side. But they don’t think his side can win. So they do nothing, convincing themselves that the problem will take care of itself, while guaranteeing that it will only get worse.

This article appears in the January/February 2022 print edition with the headline “The Freshman.”

‘I Was Responsible for Those People’

2021-09-10T09:45:00-04:00

Photographs by Devin Oktar Yalkin

Updated at 11:30 a.m. on September 10, 2021.

On the evening of September 4, 2021, one week before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Glenn Vogt stood at the footprint of the North Tower and gazed at the names stamped in bronze. The sun was diving below the buildings across the Hudson River in New Jersey, and though we didn’t realize it, the memorial was shut off to the public. Tourists had been herded behind a rope line some 20 feet away, but we’d walked right past them. As we looked on silently, a security guard approached. “I’m sorry, but the site is closed for tonight,” the man said.

Glenn studied the guard. Then he folded his hands as if in prayer. “Please,” he said. “I was the general manager of Windows on the World, the restaurant that was at the top of this building. These were my employees.”

The man glanced over Glenn’s shoulder. “Which ones?”

Glenn didn’t say anything. Slowly, he turned and swept his open palm across the air, demonstrating the scale of the devastation: All 79 names were grouped together. The guard closed his eyes. “Take as much time as you need,” he said softly.

Here, I should pause to explain something: Glenn is my cousin. I was a high-school sophomore in September 2001; my mother was driving me to an orthodontist appointment when the North Tower collapsed. She thought her nephew was dead, only to find out hours later that he wasn’t. For the next two decades, Glenn and I scarcely saw each other, and when we did, I never asked about 9/11. But we grew closer these past couple of years—sparked by my father’s death, and a bar scrap we got into a few nights before the funeral, with multiple guys holding Glenn back from pummeling some drunken loudmouth—and I grew more curious. When I asked if I could spend time with him in early September, Glenn, who is 61, responded enthusiastically. “Maybe it will help me,” he said. I wanted a story. He wanted catharsis.

[George Packer: 9/11 was a warning of what was to come ]

Glenn’s mother and my father were born into a broken, dysfunctional Sicilian clan in Bergen County, New Jersey. The patriarch, our grandfather, Frank Alberta, ran an eponymous restaurant that was a hangout for mafiosos, businessmen, and the occasional ballplayer. Glenn wanted nothing to do with the family legacy of violence and rage and alcoholism. But he loved restaurants. So he started at Frank Alberta’s when he was 14—washing dishes and busing tables, then serving and bartending—and decided to make it a career. Glenn couldn’t afford college or culinary school; all but abandoned by his father, and tasked with helping raise his younger brother, Greg, he knew the only way to become a real restaurateur was by outhustling his competition.

Related podcast: Grief, conspiracy theories, and a family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

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And that’s what he did. Studying food like a religion and cultivating an expertise in fine wines—to pair with his effortless charisma—Glenn churned through promotions, running one top-rated establishment after another. In 1997, M. H. Reed, the New York Times restaurant critic, called Glenn “the best front-of-the-house manager in the business.” A year later, he accepted an offer to become the general manager of Windows on the World, the two-floor behemoth that, despite boasting the best views of any restaurant in New York, was bleeding money and earning forgettable reviews. “It was like being asked to play center field for the Yankees,” Glenn told me, “and everyone’s counting on you to turn around the franchise.” By 2000, Windows on the World was the highest-grossing restaurant in America. “Every day was surreal,” he told me. “From the day I walked in until the day I watched it burn.”

Surreal, Glenn notes, is a word overused in describing 9/11. But somehow, it’s the only one that fits. When he first heard that a plane had crashed into the North Tower—while listening to Howard Stern, cruising down the West Side Highway in his Saab convertible on “the most perfect fall morning in New York”—Glenn assumed it was a costly accident. Just the week before, he said, his staffers had leapt from their chairs and run to a window as a small plane roared past the building. Clearing multiple police checkpoints with his World Trade Center security credentials, Glenn parked at the corner of Vesey and West Streets. All he could think of was the 1993 truck bombing and how long it had taken to reopen the restaurant; this plane crash could prove far more damaging to the enterprise. Glenn figured his employees would be frightened. So before exiting the car, he paid special attention to his tie, checking the knot in the rearview mirror. He put on his suit jacket and strode toward the North Tower. He was ready to take control.

And then he reached the lobby.

The exquisite entry doors and windows had been blown out. Alarms and sirens pierced the morning air. Teams of firefighters were descending on the scene, rushing past him and taking up positions inside the foyer. As glass crunched beneath his feet, Glenn climbed gingerly through one of the empty windows and made for the elevators. One of the firemen stopped him, looking incredulously at the gentleman in the fancy suit. Glenn explained that he ran Windows on the World and needed to get upstairs to his employees. The man shook his head. “You need to get out of this building. Right now.”

Glenn backpedaled, puzzled and a bit irritated. Then the first body landed—“like a bomb going off”—on the portico just above him. Moments later, another body, this one hitting the ground nearby. And then another. Bystanders shrieked. The sirens grew louder. The sensory overload was such that Glenn didn’t hear a second airplane smashing into the skyscraper next door. It was only when he stumbled away from the lobby of the North Tower, finally heeding the fireman’s directive, that he noticed the South Tower was burning. He pulled out his cellphone, but there was no signal. Standing next to a couple of cops, he heard one of the police radios: “Watch out for a third plane inbound.”

Panicked, Glenn sprinted over to Battery Park. He wanted a better view of the North Tower—and specifically, of Windows on the World. When he arrived, he encountered two indelible images, scenes that will replay in his mind for the rest of his days. The first was a fireman curled into the fetal position on the ground, sobbing. The second, as he raised his eyes to the top of the North Tower, was white handkerchiefs flying from broken windows. Except they weren’t handkerchiefs. They were white table linens. And Glenn could tell, based on their location, that the people waving them were his employees. Clouds of black smoke cascaded from the building; more and more bodies plummeted toward the earth. In that moment, Glenn thought to himself: They’re all going to die.

[From the September 2021 issue: What Bobby McIlvaine left behind]

“I’m floating through Lower Manhattan like a ghost,” Glenn said. “It was so loud, it was actually quiet.” He was in shock, staggering through the streets in a daze. Clarity arrived in the form of a chance encounter with Bob Van Etten, a top Port Authority official who frequented the Windows bar. “Glenn!” Bob yelled. “Get the fuck out of here! Go home!”

He did what he was told. Retreating to his car, Glenn maneuvered between fire trucks and pulled onto West Street. There were hardly any vehicles on the road, but hundreds of people were running parallel to him, a horde of humanity thundering northward. When he reached Chambers Street, six blocks from the towers, Glenn was stopped by a traffic cop who was trying to make some sense of the mass exodus. A few moments later, after the cop whistled him forward, Glenn heard a collective noise he struggles to describe—gasping, wailing, howling. He looked in his side-view mirror and saw the South Tower crumpling into the streets of New York City. Driving northbound on the Henry Hudson Parkway half an hour later, he listened as Howard Stern announced that the North Tower had fallen too.

“That’s when I shut off the radio,” Glenn said.

To tell Glenn’s story—to convey his perspective on life and death, pain and purpose—is to share an uncomfortable truth: 9/11 was not the worst day of his life.

Twelve years before the towers fell, Glenn was driving home after a long shift waiting tables at Montrachet, a French restaurant in Tribeca. It was almost midnight on October 4, 1989, and he was sweaty and exhausted. All he wanted was a shower and clean sheets. It was Greg’s 21st birthday and Glenn, who was nine years older, felt guilty about not seeing his baby brother to mark the occasion. But Glenn headed home, deciding they would celebrate together the next day.

That night, Greg returned home from a night out with friends, lay down in bed, and lit a cigarette. The apartment caught fire. Greg never woke up. Investigators explained to Glenn that his brother likely died quickly, of smoke asphyxiation, before the flames engulfed his bedroom. But this was of no comfort. Glenn was fixated on the idea that he could have been there; that he should have been there. He descended into what he calls “the darkest place of my life.” In the days following Greg’s death, Glenn could not comprehend how he was supposed to carry on; how he was supposed to live without “my best friend, the kindest, most gorgeous kid you’d ever want to meet.” Glenn is not a religious man. But during the funeral—as my father, a young minister, eulogized Greg and prayed over his soul—Glenn heard these words echoing through his mind: You need to keep going.

[Amy Zegart: None of my students remember 9/11]

“Life takes these crazy twists and turns. And when a terrible thing happens—when a tragedy hits—you can feel like it’s the end of your story,” Glenn told me. “But it’s not. And that’s what hit me when we buried Greg. I needed to keep going, because there’s more to my story. It probably sounds cliché. But I just remember thinking that people needed me. People I didn’t even know yet. And I had to keep going for them.”

Vogt’s brother, Greg, who died in a fire on his 21st birthday. “Had I not gone through Greg’s death,” Vogt says, “9/11 probably would have broken me.”

When the service ended, Glenn told his wife, Merry Anne, about his epiphany. Their interpretation was the same: They wanted a son. And so, 10 months later, the couple welcomed a baby boy. Taylor Vogt—named for the New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor, Greg’s and Glenn’s favorite player—became his father’s shadow. They bonded over everything—books and sports, music and food. Even as a young child, Taylor would wait up late until Glenn came home from his restaurant jobs, and the two would talk and tell stories into the early morning hours. Glenn couldn’t hope to be the same after his brother died; an edge, a quiet and veiled hostility, settled over him, often surfacing without warning. Nevertheless, the joys of fatherhood validated everything Glenn came to believe after Greg’s death—that instead of wallowing in anguish, he could will himself forward with a belief in long arcs and winding roads.

Glenn believes this redemptive cycle—the despair associated with Greg’s death, followed by the delights of bonding with Taylor—prepared him for September 11. Thrust into the public eye after such an unthinkable calamity, Glenn expected to feel outmatched and overwhelmed. Instead, he told me, “I had this weird equilibrium. It was horrible, obviously. I lost so many friends. But nothing could ever take me lower than I was when Greg died. And when you’ve been at your lowest and survived it, you walk away with this ability to help other people get through their low points.”

Glenn thought for a moment. “Had I not gone through Greg’s death, 9/11 probably would have broken me.”

There’s a more fateful way of looking at it.

On the morning of September 11, Glenn had a scheduled 9 a.m. meeting with his assistant, Christine Olender, to plan for the restaurant’s New Year’s Eve celebration. Glenn was a stickler for being early; a 9 o’clock meeting meant he belonged in his office by 8:45. That morning, however, Taylor—having stayed up the night before, talking with his dad—was late for school. As Glenn walked out the door of their home in Westchester County, Taylor, a sixth grader, yelled for him to wait. He needed a ride. It was that unplanned 15-minute detour that placed Glenn on the West Side Highway at 8:46 a.m., when the North Tower was hit, rather than inside his office on the 106th floor.

“You can’t make it up,” Taylor told me, sipping a stout inside RiverMarket Bar & Kitchen, the stylish spot Glenn owns in Tarrytown, an hour north of where the towers stood. “My father couldn’t save Greg. My parents had me to replace Greg. And then I wind up saving my father.”

Every name evokes something: a story, a biographical quirk, sometimes even a laugh. As Glenn drifted along the wall, tracing the letters with his fingers, he seemed to have a vignette ready for each person.

HOWARD LEE KANE. (“He actually had Crohn’s disease, so he was never feeling great, but he was just so kind to everyone. So sweet. He was on the phone with his wife when the plane hit.”) VIRGIN LUCY FRANCIS. (“She worked in the ladies’ bathrooms, making sure they were clean, restocking items. Always had a smile … Her son worked here too. But he was off that morning.”) STEPHEN GEORGE ADAMS. (“He came in at eight in the morning, picked up the bar requisitions … If he worked fast, he would have the bars stocked by four in the afternoon. It wasn’t a glamorous job. I doubt we paid him very much. But man, he was so proud of working at Windows.”) ROSHAN RAMESH SINGH and KHAMLADAI KHAMI SINGH. (“Brother and sister. We had a couple of those … When I went to their temple in Queens, their mom came over, grabbed me, made me sit down on a pillow with her, and she just prayed and cried. She lost her only two kids.”)

Glenn talked to me and Taylor uninterrupted for nearly 40 minutes, rattling off obscure factoids about dozens of the departed. He spoke of the undocumented immigrant whose small children asked if Glenn was Jesus when he took them to a church to arrange for social aid. (This, he noted wryly, was long before he grew out his hair.) He grinned while telling me about the big, intimidating, Harley-riding beverage manager who was gay—a fact that stunned colleagues at his funeral. He went into detail about the servers who picked up last-minute shifts that morning and the brand-new parents whose children are now adults. Whenever emotion choked his voice, Glenn was quick to compose himself and carry on.

With one exception: CHRISTINE ANNE OLENDER.

Glenn couldn’t manage any words as he leaned over the name. He didn’t need to. If I knew one part of his 9/11 story, it was the part about Christine, his assistant, his dear friend and right hand in running the restaurant. When Glenn pulled up to his home around 11 a.m. on the morning of the attacks, the first thing Merry Anne sobbed—after bolting from the house to embrace him—was “I thought you were dead!” And then, moments later: “Christine kept calling. I told her you’d be there any minute.”

Their living room was bustling. Family friends had picked up Taylor and his younger sibling from school. Neighbors had brought food. It had all the makings of a wake; the only thing missing was a corpse. Bothered by the scene—and by the sights and sounds coming from the television—Glenn escaped to the front porch with Merry Anne. They wept together as she relayed the phone calls from Christine, from the first call, wondering why Glenn’s cellphone wasn’t working, to the final call, telling Merry Anne they were suffocating and asking if she thought it was okay to break a dining-room window. For everything he had just witnessed, Glenn realized, his wife had endured something every bit as traumatic, speaking to a friend for whom a ghastly death was rapidly approaching.

Glenn didn’t sleep that night. He’s not even sure that he lay down. He needed to act. He needed to keep going.

He called the dozens of managers who reported to him and organized a meeting the next morning at Beacon, a sister restaurant in the city, where they could establish a record of the Windows staff. When they gathered, David Emil, a co-owner of both restaurants, stood to deliver remarks but quickly broke down in tears. So did the rest of the room. “These people in the building, they were our friends,” Glenn told me. “People we saw every day. And suddenly, they were gone. There were no remnants. There were no bodies. They were dust. It was so sad. But it was also just overwhelming. We didn’t have the cloud back then; most of our information was on computers that were destroyed. And we’re trying to account for 500 employees. It’s like, where do we even start?”

With Beacon as their operating base, Glenn and his managers launched a round-the-clock effort to identify victims and survivors within the Windows family. They pieced together shift cards and vacation schedules. They aired a special hotline number on every news station in New York and took turns answering phones. Every employee they contacted offered clues about colleagues who hadn’t been located. It took three weeks, but finally, Glenn and his team had a full accounting of their staff. The awful bottom line: 72 Windows on the World employees died in the attacks, plus another seven contractors who worked in security, renovations, and maintenance.

[Read: What New York looked like after 9/11]

With all the victims identified, Glenn stepped forward to serve as the restaurant’s liaison to the surviving families. He visited spouses and children and siblings and parents, sharing workplace memories of the deceased. He talked with national newscasts and small-town newspapers, offering reflections on the restaurant and its staff. He attended so many funerals—40? 45?—and shook so many hands and hugged so many grieving people in the fall of 2001 that he would occasionally lose track of where he was and to whom he had come to pay respects.

At a certain point, Glenn said, “it became too much.” He had tried to project the sort of grace and empathy people demand from leaders in times of crisis. But he was weary, haggard, desperate for something to interrupt the months-long spiral of grief.

Funeral notices for some of Vogt’s employees. He estimates that he attended at least 40 funerals in the days and weeks after 9/11.

His salvation—at least for a time—was Windows of Hope. The restaurant’s head chef, Michael Lomonaco, had suggested a charity to support the families of their fallen colleagues. When Michael Bloomberg offered to underwrite the operation, Glenn jumped in, helping spearhead a fundraising campaign that eventually generated more than $25 million. The money was dispersed continuously—no questions asked—to 110 families of food-service workers who died in the attacks. (Glenn is most proud that the aid was not exclusively for Windows employees; he recalls bawling on the phone with the wife of a Halal-cart operator, an undocumented immigrant, who had been crushed by falling debris, leaving her widowed and penniless.)

“People in my situation ask, ‘Why me? Why did I survive when so many others died?’” he said, staring into the reflecting pool of the North Tower. “The only time I felt like I had an answer was when I was helping those families.”

Taylor interrupted. “It wasn’t just them, Dad,” he said. “What if your name was on this wall? I wouldn’t be here. There’s no way.”

Pulled out of his sixth-grade class by the school principal on 9/11, Taylor was told that there had been a fire at the World Trade Center—and that his mother needed him at home. “And I’m thinking, right away, My dad is dead. There was no doubt in my mind,” Taylor told me. Ninety minutes later, when Glenn walked in the front door, Taylor went numb. As they embraced, the stoic child uttered words that both father and son still recite to this day: “As long as you’re okay, then I’m okay.”

But Taylor wasn’t okay. He had always been intelligent but high-strung, prone to bouts of fitful behavior. The post-traumatic stress disorder he believes he experienced after 9/11 added a volatile element to his personality. Then, as a teenager, he was diagnosed as manic bipolar.

When it became clear to Glenn and Merry Anne that he needed to be hospitalized, Taylor fought them, cursed them, told them he would never talk to them again if they put him in a psychiatric ward. Merry Anne, who had been emotionally scarred by 9/11, could not bear it. But Glenn could. He visited Taylor every day, at each one of his hospital stops. He brought food. He told stories. He kissed his son’s forehead and promised him that they would keep going—together.

And they did. Taylor, who is now 31, has two master’s degrees and a loving girlfriend, and has been episode-free for the better part of a decade. For all the family folklore of him saving his father on 9/11, Taylor told me, it was his father who saved him in the years that followed.

Our conversation at the memorial underscored how much Glenn had done for others—and how little he had done for himself. Just as in the years following Greg’s death, Glenn committed himself to charging ahead at high speed in the aftermath of 9/11, believing the only antidote to heartache was forward momentum.

The result was a sort of existential divergence. On the surface, Glenn was providing so much help, so much inspiration; one layer beneath, he was suffering a slow-motion breakdown. He did more drinking than eating. He did not sleep. He did not seek help. (After a single session of therapy, he called the shrink a “pompous asshole” and never returned.) All the lights were blinking red, warning Glenn to slow down. But he just kept going.

Vogt’s datebook, opened to the week of September 10, 2001. He was late for a meeting on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, a delay that saved his life.

Glenn bounced between restaurant ventures in Manhattan for some years after 9/11. But it never seemed right. Having played center field for the Yankees, he felt like he was suddenly pinch-hitting in the minor leagues. Underwhelmed by his opportunities—and haunted by the altered skyline of Lower Manhattan—Glenn quit the city’s culinary scene a decade ago. He retreated to Westchester and took on several projects for wealthy benefactors. Finally, in 2013, Glenn opened RiverMarket, achieving a lifelong dream of owning his own restaurant.

He still works a dining room with the best of them, kissing cheeks and pulling up chairs and picking up the tab for regulars or newcomers he takes a liking to. But there are some patrons he doesn’t take a liking to—and he’s not afraid to tell them so. Glenn does not have lukewarm opinions or casual disagreements. He has always been a passionate guy—it’s part of what’s made him so successful—but he used to know how to keep things in perspective. That, he admitted to me, is no longer the case. He seethes over a negative Yelp review. He tells unhappy customers not to return. Recently, after someone left a server a 10 percent tip—“No mask?” the customer wrote on the receipt—Glenn posted an expletive-laden Instagram rant that included an image of the receipt, complete with the person’s name and signature. “Hoping only the worst for you always,” Glenn wrote in the caption.

On Saturday night, after we returned from our visit to Ground Zero, RiverMarket was bustling. Glenn’s regulars didn’t seem to sense that anything was amiss. But I did. His eyes betrayed a deep melancholy; his voice carried an unfamiliar twitchiness. At one point, he came to the bar, where I was sitting, and told me that a couple on the patio had complained to him about not being served proper silverware with their appetizers. “We had to eat oysters with our regular forks,” he whined in a mocking tone. We both rolled our eyes. He let out a long sigh. Then he told me he was thinking about taking an oyster fork to the patio and stabbing it into the man’s forehead.

I knew he was joking. But there was something unsettling in his tone. Glenn has become every bit the old-world Sicilian he grew up despising—a loyal guy, a loving guy, and a guy with a frighteningly short fuse. Earlier this year, when a disgruntled ex-employee flipped him off during a terse exchange at a local bar, Glenn choked the man and nearly bit off one of his fingers during the ensuing brawl. The criminal charges were dropped when Glenn agreed to attend anger-management classes. He said it was the best thing that could have happened to him. “I found some ways to cope. You know—breathing techniques, keeping a dialogue in your head, that kind of stuff,” he told me. “I really did feel less angry for a while.”

On Sunday morning, during a scenic drive through the Hudson Valley, I asked Glenn about the oyster-fork threat. Suddenly, his eyes welled with tears. “Why am I so mad all the time?” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

My heart dropped in that moment. Glenn is one of the most generous humans I’ve ever met, and he’s endured more than most people can imagine—a lifelong series of tragedies and near-tragedies that makes you wonder how many times a single man can cheat death. Earlier this year, a freak lightning strike burned down half of his house. Then, the night before I arrived in Tarrytown, flash flooding from Hurricane Ida trapped Glenn in his pickup truck in a gully. As the water rose to his stomach and the cops tossed a rope ladder to his rescue, he wondered if his time was finally up.

“None of that is an excuse,” he told me. “And 9/11 isn’t an excuse. But, you know, yesterday …” He paused. “Yesterday was hard.”

“What,” I asked him, “was the hardest part?”

“There were names that I couldn’t remember,” Glenn said, his voice quivering. “And that makes me feel horrible. It hit me really hard. When we got back to the restaurant, that’s all I could think about. I was responsible for those people, you know? And I couldn’t even remember some of their names.”

We rode in silence for a minute. Then he went on. “The only secret to life that I’ve discovered is that you’ve got to keep going. Right? That’s what I’ve always subscribed to. If you keep going, you find happiness, because people will need you,” Glenn said. “And honestly, as terrible as 9/11 was, I found some happiness afterward because I could help those people. People needed me—”

He stopped and swallowed hard. “It’s been 20 years. They don’t need me anymore. And I can’t even remember some of their names.”

Glenn has frequent dreams that he’s inside the North Tower, inside Windows on the World, on September 11. There are competing versions. In one dream, he is pulling a massive hang glider from his office closet, hitching it to his employees, and flying them to safety. In another, he is caught inside with them, choking on the deadly fumes, hugging them tight and preparing to die the same death as Greg. And then there is a third dream—one with no fire, no plane crash, no attack on New York City. The restaurant is intact. But it’s filled with strange faces; the employees are people he does not recognize, and they are ignoring him. At the beginning of my conversations with Glenn, this seemed quite obviously to be the least distressing of his visions. By the end of our time together, I had come to realize that it was his worst nightmare.

“I had a purpose after Greg died. I had a purpose after 9/11. And now—I just don’t know,” Glenn told me, gripping the wheel so tightly that I could see the blood draining from his knuckles. “I hope there’s something else for me, something else that’s fulfilling, before it’s my turn to leave. I always felt like I needed to be strong for others who can’t be strong for themselves. But I don’t feel so strong anymore.”

Once the clean-cut Manhattan backslapper with a five-figure wardrobe and a Rolodex full of New York City’s elite, Glenn would go unrecognized in Tribeca these days. His daily uniform is a black T-shirt with blue jeans. He sports thick black glasses, a scruffy goatee, and hair down to his shoulders. It’s usually in a ponytail, but as we talked in the car, thinning wisps of white stuck to the corners of his eyes, damp with tears.

I reminded Glenn that he had welcomed my visit—and my probing of his life—to help him find some peace. So I asked him the obvious question: In order to keep going, isn’t it necessary to leave certain things behind?

“Greg has been dead for 32 years,” Glenn replied. “I still think about him every day. I still pull out this tiny box of his things and look at these old photographs. I still cry. I want that pain right here”—he tapped on his chest—“so I don’t forget him.”

For the longest time, Glenn told me, he took the same approach to 9/11. He would reread obituaries every anniversary; he would watch documentaries and look up old news clips. He would try to hold his former employees—and the pain of their loss—as close as possible, for fear of forgetting. But as the years slipped away, his dedication waned. New priorities emerged. And sure enough, he began to forget.

Glenn said he would spend this September 11 feeling guilty about that. But I could already tell, by the time he dropped me off at the airport, that his burden was lighter. He asked if we could keep talking about all of this, after my story was published, and I promised that we would. I’m hoping he feels a little less guilty next September, and even less guilty the September after that. Because moving forward isn’t the same as moving on.

This article originally misidentified the Windows on the World co-owner who spoke at the meeting at Beacon restaurant. It also said RiverMarket opened in 2003; in fact, it opened in 2013.

The Nicest Man in Stand-Up

2021-09-08T07:00:00-04:00

Lauren Tamaki

Once the limousine door closed, a dozen of Nate Bargatze’s closest friends and family members began reciting their favorite jokes from the sold-out show he’d just finished in Reno, Nevada. There was the one about never asking a fitness junkie for advice on losing weight, lest they warn you about eating too much fruit. (“Let’s get to that point, all right?” Bargatze had said. “I don’t think I’m at where I’m at because I got into some pineapple last night.”) And the one about his hometown of Old Hickory, Tennessee, being named after Andrew Jackson, and a reporter informing him that the seventh president had been a bad person. (“You know, we didn’t know him or anything,” he’d deadpanned.)

As we rode through Reno on a 100-degree July night, I asked Bargatze what moment from the show stood out to him. It was the bit, he said, about the woman at a comedy club in Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose siren of a laugh was so distracting that the staff had to ask her to keep silent for the rest of the show. The joke skewered her parents for not correcting this when she was young, then segued into Bargatze’s lament about carrying his own bad habits into adulthood. It was one of the high-decibel points of the show, but that’s not why Bargatze brought it up.

“I just need to be super careful with anything that could be seen as making fun of someone,” Bargatze said. “Maybe she had a disability or something.” In fact, as his joke tactfully made clear, she did not appear to have a disability—just an unbearable laugh. And yet he seemed nervous. “I’ve seen shows where comedians cracked about someone not clapping, then realized they’ve only got one hand, or joked about someone wearing sunglasses inside, then realized they’re blind,” he said. “I never want to put myself in that situation. I never want to be mean.”

Bargatze, 42, who spent years toiling in front of single-digit crowds, had just kicked off the biggest headlining tour of his career. He was on his way to board a chartered plane to Las Vegas for two more sold-out shows. Some of his dates were selling out 10 months in advance, and he and a team of Hollywood writers were in discussions with Netflix about an eponymous sitcom. Yet here he was, spending his post-launch limo ride worrying that he may have inadvertently offended someone who wasn’t there with a story that was meant to highlight his own deficiencies.

The legends of stand-up, from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle, were subversive, antagonistic, troublemaking. Bargatze is none of those things. He worries constantly about alienating his audience or hurting someone’s feelings. His act is slow, almost soothing, as he plods through nonthreatening tales of his own mediocrity. He comes across as a walking Xanax, helping audiences slow down and, as he says, “shut off their brains for an hour.”

[From the January/February 2013 issue: Monty Python, the Beatles of comedy]

If comedy is a proxy for the mood of American society, Bargatze’s sudden popularity suggests that he’s tapped into something powerful: the discontent with our discontent. He insists that stand-up can be a great unifier, bridging the divides that have emerged within families, among friends, between red states and blue states. “People are worn out,” he told me. “It seems like every form of entertainment these days has to have a message, and it’s gotten old.”

Bargatze broke out during Donald Trump’s presidency with the first of two hour-long Netflix specials. A college dropout who insists he’s too dumb to make informed decisions for himself, let alone lecture anyone else, he never talks about politics. He goes nowhere near race or identity issues. He maneuvers so gingerly around other subjects—religion, gender roles, the fracturing of America—that they feel untouched.

The comedian to whom Bargatze is most often compared is Jim Gaffigan, the churchgoing family man from Indiana whose punch lines revolve around parenting and food. But even Gaffigan picked a side in the summer of 2020, when he called Trump a fascist on Twitter and suggested that his voters were part of a hapless cult. Gaffigan was denounced in the Wall Street Journal opinion section and sworn off by countless fans across Red America.

When I mentioned this episode to Bargatze, he exhaled hard and gazed skyward, like a bystander asked to describe a car wreck. “I don’t have the stomach for that stuff,” he said. “I don’t have it in me to make people uncomfortable.”

[From the September 2015 issue: Caitlin Flanagan on how comics have to censor their jokes on college campuses]

Instead Bargatze takes his audiences on strange, circuitous journeys that rarely conclude with an obvious punch line. He tells stories about sleeping in a hotel room with the lights on because he couldn’t find the switch, and being intimidated by his 9-year-old daughter’s homework, and accidentally ordering coffee with whipped cream instead of “with cream.”

Gaffigan told me that from the first time he saw Bargatze perform, he was impressed that Bargatze could be so unhurried, so inoffensive—and yet also rollickingly funny. “Comedy is all about authenticity and point of view,” he said. “Nate is your buddy from a small town. Being so unaware, and discovering through his observations, that’s what makes Nate funny. His jokes don’t make a judgment.”

Raised by strict Southern Baptist parents, Bargatze was the class clown who never got in trouble, the life of the party who never went to parties. But he was never academically inclined, either. After high school, he bounced from job to job. He worked construction. He sold cellphones at a Walmart kiosk. He delivered furniture. He put on drunk-driving simulations at high schools. Finally, he did some remedial coursework at a community college, then enrolled at Western Kentucky University. He promptly flunked every course—even bowling, despite having once rolled a 266. “He just didn’t show up,” his father, Stephen, told me.

When he came home, Bargatze told his parents that he wanted to pursue comedy. (They took the news well; his father made a living as a clown and a magician, a source of material for his son’s future act.) At his first open-mic event, Bargatze squirmed watching his parents sit through hours of expletive-laden acts before he went on. “I knew then and there I was going to be clean,” Bargatze told me. “I just couldn’t imagine my parents coming to watch a show and I’m up there being dirty.”

He spent two years in Chicago without landing a single paid gig, then moved to New York, where he caught a break at the famed Boston Comedy Club. He was a “barker,” handing out flyers in Greenwich Village, compensated with free stage time at night’s end. (He walked dogs and drove a FedEx truck during the day to pay the bills.) For years, Bargatze would take the stage after 1 a.m., when only four or five people were left in attendance. But he got to watch stars like Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. hone their craft, and he studied up-and-comers such as Bill Burr and Patrice O’Neal.

Bargatze also began drinking hard, and his act became edgier. He started swearing from the stage, and told stories about getting blackout drunk. He poked fun at overweight people, and introduced an eyebrow-raising bit about sex workers being murdered in New York City.

Bargatze told me he “got very close to that edge” of sabotaging his career because of alcoholism. He no longer drinks, and he hasn’t cursed onstage in more than a decade. And the bit about sex workers? It became something of an inflection point. “I had a girl message me on Twitter. She was a prostitute. And she was really, really hurt by it,” Bargatze told me. “And I just felt horrible. Like, here’s this person who’s really sad because of something I said. You know? I told myself I would never do that again.”

Before every performance, in the dressing room backstage, Bargatze pulls out an index card and writes down his set list. The one- or two-word prompts spill down in columns from left to right, usually 30 to 40 in total. The habit reinforces his memorization while also offering a final chance to reshuffle the act.

On his last night in Las Vegas—as his father warmed up the crowd with a magic act—Bargatze told me there would be some changes to the show. His joke about a scientific proposal to dim the sun, one he’d giddily previewed just before the Reno show, was out. Instead, he was inserting new material—at the very top of the show, something his comedy hero, Jerry Seinfeld, calls “a rookie mistake”—that he’d written hours earlier while bleeding money at a blackjack table. The gist was that Vegas dealers flipped cards too fast, so rather than trying to keep up, he would watch their facial expressions the way someone studies a flight attendant’s reactions on a bumpy flight: “Am I going to be okay here?”

The blackjack bit won roaring approval. Blackjack dealers do move too fast, and he does seem too dumb to do such speedy math. The sun-dimming joke had failed for the very reasons the blackjack joke succeeded. Bargatze was roasting the scientists floating the idea, rather than turning the joke inward, suggesting that it’s the kind of solution to climate change you’d expect him to come up with.

What makes Bargatze so effective during these fraught times, Gaffigan told me, is his embrace of “victimless comedy.” But this isn’t quite right. What Bargatze does is make himself the victim of his jokes, turning anecdotes into uncharitable assessments of his own intelligence.

The irony is that his comedy is really smart. His yarn about driving past a dead horse lying on the side of the road, which sent him racing down mental side streets—How heavy is a dead horse? Would friends help move it? Which body part is easiest to lift?—is so entertaining that it distracts from the joke’s ultimate destination. The horse was alive, Bargatze discovered on the drive back. He just didn’t know horses could lie down to sleep.

Burr, one of the most successful comics working today, told me that Bargatze’s humor stems from his capacity to embody a certain type. “There’s always the stereotype of the southern guy with the thick accent and they’re not smart. It’s such a dumb stereotype,” Burr said. “But Nate knew how to make that work for him.”

Burr recalled how he and Bargatze bonded years ago over their shared disdain for New York’s cultural self-importance: “Some of these badasses from Brooklyn used to make fun of the South, and Nate would take them on and destroy them. It was just amazing to watch.”

That might sound out of character for the understated comedian. But if there’s one subject that gets Bargatze worked up, it’s coastal condescension. In the time I spent with him, he kept flashing irritation with how places like his hometown are portrayed in popular culture. “I do hate the way people in New York and L.A. talk about the South—we’re all a bunch of rednecks running around screaming the N‑word,” he said.

It was a hint that Bargatze does have strong opinions about divisive subjects—opinions that would undermine his unifying image and, very possibly, damage his commercial appeal if he expressed them onstage. Reading my mind, he added: “I’m trying to ride the line here. Because I want to be able to sell out a theater in San Francisco one week and Mobile, Alabama, the next week. You know?”

After his show, as we looked out across the shimmering Las Vegas skyline, I asked Bargatze whether he worried that his onstage persona as an aw-shucks southerner might contribute to a caricature of the people and places he loves. He seemed puzzled by the question. “Look, I am dumb,” he said. “That’s not the South being dumb; that’s just me.”

Maybe he is dumb. Or maybe, I suggested, he’s smart enough to see how coming across as simpleminded could work to his advantage.

Bargatze allowed a knowing smirk. “I just want to be funny,” he said. “That ought to be enough.”

This article appears in the October 2021 print edition with the headline “The Xanax of Stand-Up.”

The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth

2021-06-30T13:10:07-04:00

VULCAN, Michigan—Right around the time Donald Trump was flexing his conspiratorial muscles on Saturday night, recycling old ruses and inventing new boogeymen in his first public speech since inciting a siege of the U.S. Capitol in January, a dairy farmer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula sat down to supper. It had been a trying day.

The farmer, Ed McBroom, battled sidewinding rain while working his 320 acres, loading feed and breeding livestock and at one point delivering a distressed calf backwards from its mother’s womb, before hanging the newborn animal by its hind legs for respiratory drainage. Now, having slipped off his manure-caked rubber boots, McBroom groaned as he leaned into his home-grown meal of unpasteurized milk and spaghetti with hamburger sauce. He would dine peacefully at his banquet-length antique table, surrounded by his family of 15, unaware that in nearby Ohio, the former president was accusing him—thankfully, this time not by name—of covering up the greatest crime in American history.

A few days earlier, McBroom, a Republican state senator who chairs the Oversight Committee, had released a report detailing his eight-month-long investigation into the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The stakes could hardly have been higher. Against a backdrop of confusion and suspicion and frightening civic friction—with Trump claiming he’d been cheated out of victory, and anecdotes about fraud coursing through every corner of the state—McBroom had led an exhaustive probe of Michigan’s electoral integrity. His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense.

“Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,” McBroom wrote in the report. “There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.”

For good measure, McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

This reflected a pattern throughout the report—a clear and clinical statement of facts, accompanied by more animated language that expressed disgust with the grifters selling deception to the masses and disappointment with the voters who were buying it. Sitting at his dinner table, I told the senator that his writing occasionally took a tone of anger. He smirked. “I don’t know that I ever wrote angry,” McBroom replied. “But I tried to leave no room for doubt.”

So much for that. Soon after the report was released, Trump issued a thundering statement calling McBroom’s investigation “a cover up, and a method of getting out of a Forensic Audit for the examination of the Presidential contest.” The former president then published the office phone numbers for McBroom and Michigan’s GOP Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, urging his followers to “call those two Senators now and get them to do the right thing, or vote them the hell out of office!”

[David A. Graham: Republicans’ phony argument for election audits]

McBroom had grown up a “history nerd.” He idolized the revolutionary Founders. He inhaled biographies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt. He revered the institution of the American presidency. And here was the 45th president, calling him out by name, accusing him of unthinkable treachery.

“Surreal,” McBroom said quietly. He leaned back, running his hands through a mess of sweaty blond hair. Then he folded his thick arms, which bulged from a red cutoff button-up shirt, staring heavenward in search of the words. Some 30 seconds went by. “Just … surreal.”

Perhaps trying to cheer himself, McBroom told me he doubted whether Trump had personally written that statement. He doubted even more whether Trump had actually read the report. (If he had, Trump would understand why an Arizona-style “forensic audit” would be pointless.) But this was cold comfort. In many ways, Trump was a stand-in for the constituents McBroom knew who insisted that the election was stolen, who raged against the scheming Democrats and the spineless Republicans, who believed that America was succumbing to an illegitimate leftist takeover. Most of them, McBroom realized, would not read the report, either. And he wasn’t sure what more he was supposed to do for them.

“I can’t make people believe me,” McBroom said, an air of exasperation in his voice. “All I can hope is that people use their discernment and judgment, to look at the facts I’ve laid out for them, and then look at these theories out there, and ask the question: Does any of this make sense?”

McBroom admitted to being a bit discouraged. It’s hard enough for an elected official to convince the public of something it doesn’t want to accept. Yet here he was, a lowly state lawmaker from the pastures of Dickinson County, struggling to win the hearts and minds of Trump voters while engaged in a zero-sum showdown with Trump himself.

“All politicians lie. That’s what people believe, right?” McBroom said. “Well, somebody is lying. It’s either me or—”

He stopped himself. “Somebody else.”

McBroom didn’t ask for any of this.

A fourth-generation farm boy from the U.P., he studied music education and social studies at Northern Michigan University, harboring dreams of being a teacher and leading a church choir. (He went one-for-two. McBroom is the music director at nearby First Baptist of Norway.) When several of his siblings passed on the opportunity to take over the family farm, McBroom assumed responsibility. He moved his wife, Sarah, whom he’d met at a college choir outing, and their young family to the farm. Joining them were McBroom’s younger brother, Carl; his wife (and Sarah’s sister), Susan; and their children. Together, Ed and Carl planned to grow the family business and raise their two clans as one on the sprawling McBroom compound.

[Quinta Jurecic: Nihilism is destroying our democracy]

Before long, however, Ed came to a detour. Having joined a host of farm-related civic organizations in the region, he found himself networking with politicians, and soon, unwittingly, being groomed to run for office himself. (Michigan has some of the tightest term limits in the nation and churns through legislators, which presents a constant demand for neophyte recruits.) McBroom had his doubts. Politics seemed an ugly, undignified game for a pious young farmer. And yet, he glowed with certain passions—outlawing abortion, preserving family values, fighting bureaucrats on behalf of the little guy—that could not be championed in the stables.

With the blessing of Carl, who committed to carrying the load on the homestead, McBroom ran for the state House of Representatives in 2010. Harnessing the energy of the Tea Party to defeat an incumbent Democrat—back when Democrats still represented rural northern Michigan—McBroom arrived in Lansing with visions of being a great conservative reformer.

They didn’t last. The Tea Party movement, he realized, was more interested in union-busting and ideological one-upmanship than in achieving tangible results. Meanwhile, his perch on the Agriculture Committee was proving ineffectual; state agencies so regularly pushed around the policy makers that McBroom wondered why he was even bothering to pass legislation. Feeling outmatched, he contemplated quitting the legislature. Only in the twilight of his time in the House did McBroom discover what seemed like his salvation, and what could later be considered his curse: the Oversight Committee. Realizing that the panel had the power to touch all areas of policy while holding the executive branch and Lansing bureaucracy to account, McBroom recommitted himself to politics. He picked the right horse for speaker of the House, maneuvered onto the committee, and positioned himself to continue oversight work if promoted to the Senate.

It was no foregone conclusion that he would seek higher office; in fact, McBroom took two years off from Lansing after his term-limited retirement in 2016. But by 2018 he was ready to resume his legislative career, running for a Senate seat that was his for the taking. Then tragedy struck: On July 7 of that year, Carl was killed in a car wreck near the farm. McBroom froze his campaign. He was now responsible not only for the entirety of a massive agricultural enterprise, and for his own five children, but for Carl’s seven children—plus the one Susan was carrying. He wasn’t sure how the farm would function with him being gone four days a week. But even if he worked the farm full-time, he wasn’t sure it could stay afloat. A Senate salary might offer a bridge to survival.

Having prayed and prayed on the decision, McBroom continued with the campaign. He felt God telling him he was needed in Lansing. After winning the seat, McBroom was promptly named chair of the Senate Oversight Committee. This offered an ideal work-life balance, granting him the autonomy to work odd hours that accommodated his 400-mile commute. It was a dream job—until the nightmare of November 2020.

“Two days after the election, Mike Shirkey calls me, and he says, ‘What do you think about all of this?’” McBroom recalled. “And I said, ‘I think people deserve answers.’”

At that moment, Michigan had emerged as America’s epicenter of electoral dysfunction. Despite boasting a wider margin than other contested states—Joe Biden led Trump by roughly 155,000 votes in the unofficial tally—Michigan was plagued by a series of episodes that lent themselves easily to misinformation and outright conspiracy. There was the reporting error in rural Antrim County, a Republican stronghold, that showed Biden trouncing Trump by an impossible margin. There was the late-night ballot dump at the TCF Center in Detroit, where poll workers covered the windows to prevent harassment from unsanctioned visitors. There were the widespread rumors about excess mail ballots floating around the state, a notion that found traction because of the historic swarm of voters taking advantage of a newly adopted no-excuse absentee-voting law. There was, above all, mass confusion about why the vote was taking so long to tabulate—and why Biden appeared to be the beneficiary.

[Read: Inside William Barr’s breakup with Trump]

“At the beginning, even before the investigation, I had a lot of those questions in my own heart,” McBroom told me. “Like, you watch the news or look on Facebook, and some of this seems really strange. What was going on over there? How did those votes get switched? Where did all those ballots come from in the middle of the night? These are legitimate questions, and it would have been unfair to just toss them aside.”

On November 6, McBroom announced that his committee would convene an investigation, beginning the next day, into allegations of misconduct in Michigan’s election. “Many of you have asked me to weigh in on the current election turmoil. I’ve been getting it from both sides who are fervent for the victory of their candidate,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “I guess I haven’t been inclined because my fervent desire is for a fair and honest result.”

Not everyone in Lansing knew what to make of McBroom and his investigation. Some Democrats saw a Trump-supporting, anti-abortion zealot from a deep-red district where failure to wave the “Stop the Steal” flag might be fatal. Some Republicans saw an unfailingly earnest, devoutly religious man who was offended by the president’s antics and wouldn’t hesitate to wield a righteous hammer against his own party. As the committee got to work, and concerns piled up across the ideological spectrum, one person never doubted where McBroom’s conclusion was headed. “He is a good and honest person,” said Aaron Van Langevelde, a longtime friend of McBroom and the former GOP canvassing official who received death threats after voting to certify Biden’s statewide victory. “[He] is always going to put his service to the people above politics.”

When he began investigating Detroit’s late-night dump of absentee votes—ballots that are uniquely numbered and require signature verification—McBroom said his mental cinema played scenes from The Italian Job. “You know, someone climbs up into the truck through a manhole cover underneath, puts new boxes in, takes old boxes out,” he said. “And so, you ask yourself, Is that even possible?”

He continued: “Okay, sure. Somebody could break into the truck, whether it’s through the manhole cover, or the driver's complicit, or whatever. But then what? What are you switching the ballots with? Is somebody going to go to find thousands of ballots, match the numbers and signatures on all of them, then swap them out, all in a very limited amount of time, just to push Trump down to 10 percent, instead of 12 percent? … As I ran through all the possible calculations, I was able to reassure myself, like, This is not how you would steal an election.”

In his report, McBroom made clear that other conclusions were even simpler to reach.

What about dead voters? The committee reviewed a list of 200 deceased Wayne County residents who allegedly voted from the grave; it found two instances in which ballots were cast under those names, and both cases were clerical errors. (One man mistakenly voted under the identity of a dead relative who had the same name; one woman returned her absentee ballot, then died four days before the election.)

What about jurisdictions with more votes than registered voters? There were none to be found.

[Julian Sanchez: Trump is looking for fraud in all the wrong places]

What about absentee ballots being counted multiple times? Nope—the poll books would have registered a disparity. (It’s not uncommon for poll books to be out of balance by a handful of votes; anything more would invite scrutiny and a recount that would invalidate ballots counted twice.)

What about tabulators being hacked with vote-switching software? Impossible, the report found, because the tabulators, no matter what Mike Lindell claims, were not connected to the internet to begin with.

While McBroom’s report crackled with annoyance at certain far-flung beliefs, he saved his saltiest language for the Antrim County saga. To recap: On the morning after Election Day, with all 16,044 votes in the county tallied, an unofficial count showed Biden leading Trump by 3,200 votes. The county clerk quickly determined that an inputting error was publishing the candidates’ totals in the wrong database fields; then, in the race to correct that mistake, officials made an additional inputting error. All of this was resolved within 24 hours, and the county’s updated totals reflected exactly what the tabulators had counted—a 3,800 vote lead for Trump. But this net swing of some 7,000 votes, and the underlying confusion about computer inputs, spawned a nationwide campaign to uncover codes in Dominion voting machines, like the ones used in Antrim County, that changed Trump votes to Biden votes.

The only problem? Dominion’s tabulators had counted the vote accurately, as confirmed by subsequent canvassing efforts and a hand recount. Human inputting error was responsible for the initial bad numbers, a fact obvious to everyone except those who stood to benefit from pretending otherwise. “All compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further,” McBroom wrote in the report. “The Committee finds [that] those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.”

He didn’t stop there. Galvanized by the shameless grifting he’d encountered during the course of his investigation, McBroom stunned his GOP colleagues by referring to Michigan’s attorney general for possible prosecution “those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

This represented the one plot twist in McBroom’s report. (Some Democrats expressed surprise at McBroom’s recommending enhanced election-security policies, but most of his proposals are not new, and he has distanced himself from some of his party’s more restrictive new measures.) Concluding that the election wasn’t stolen is one thing. Suggesting that certain people who alleged a stolen election ought to be prosecuted—by a progressive attorney general who is loathed by the conservative base—is another thing entirely.

McBroom is aware of the risks. He will be accused of trying to silence conservatives, of censoring his own constituents, of punishing anyone who dares to question the legitimacy of the Biden administration and the U.S. elections system. But he makes no apologies. “Fraud is fraud,” he shrugged. “If they lied to people to make money off people, that’s a crime.”

I asked McBroom whether, under that standard, Trump—whose affiliated entities raised enormous sums of money under the guise of a legal strategy to overturn the election results—might be vulnerable to prosecution. He laughed nervously. “We didn’t investigate Trump. The report didn’t investigate him. So I have to stick to what the report says.”

Whatever the report says, its findings make evident that Trump, in concert with an unruly apparatus of right-wing personalities and causes, systematically tricked large portions of the American public into believing something that simply is not true. And yet, even while he recommends possible prosecutions, the urgency McBroom feels at this moment has less to do with going after bad actors and more to do with reaching “the good people who are buying this junk.” This includes people in his own district, friends and community members McBroom has known his entire life who refuse to accept what he is telling them.

“It’s been very discouraging, and very sad, to have people I know who have supported me, and always said they respected me and found me to be honest, who suddenly don’t trust me because of what some guy told them on the internet,” McBroom said. “And they’re like, ‘Yeah, but this is a good guy too.’ And I’m like, ‘How do you know that? Have you met him? You’ve met me. So why are you choosing to believe him instead of me?’”

[David A. Graham: The frightening new Republican consensus]

After having kept quiet for much of the day—cooking, sweeping, applying Band-Aids, directing traffic, shooing the children outside to complete their chores—Sarah McBroom spoke up.

“That’s what has struck me. It’s seeing people that we know—some of them we know very well—who are choosing not to believe Ed, because they believe someone on Facebook they’ve never met,” she said. “I just don’t understand. Like, really? You believe that person over Ed?”

A little while earlier, when discussing the scourge of social media, Ed McBroom joked about quitting Facebook to keep his sanity. Then he rattled off the incoming fire he’s been dealing with daily—not just social-media posts and messages, but angry emails and texts from random numbers. Some people accuse him of being in league with Biden; others claim that China bought him off. Occasionally the screeds get nasty and downright threatening, though he said the most disturbing communications of that nature are delivered in middle-of-the-night phone calls. The senator knows that people can locate his farm easily enough, and worries about being gone so much during the week, leaving Sarah and Susan alone with the 13 children. (Both women, he noted, are trained and highly qualified to operate the collection of rifles that hung in a cabinet behind us.)

Still, whatever fleeting dread he feels about personal backlash is diminished by his concern for the country’s sudden epistemological crisis. Not long ago, McBroom said, he would have defaulted to dismissing any notions of mass societal irrationality. He is not dismissive anymore. He sees large portions of the voting public rejecting the basic tenets of civic education and sequestering into “this alternate world” of social media. He hears from constituents about “enemies” on the other side of political disputes and a looming civil conflict to resolve them. And he wonders, as an amateur historian, whether the “very real trouble” we’re in can be escaped.

“It’s easy to look at the current status of American culture, American politics, the American church, and be really apoplectic right now. It’s very easy to give in to that sense of panic,” McBroom told me. “But we go through different cycles in this country. I’m hoping we’re in a cycle of riots and demonstrations on and off, [and not] the cycle where we end up in civil war. I’ve encountered some folks who are like, ‘Maybe it’s time to rise up’—you know, ‘refreshing the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots,’ that stuff. And I say to them, ‘Are you seriously going to go looking for people with Biden signs in their yards? I mean, is that what you’re going to do? Make a list? Is this what this is coming to? You’re ready to go out and fight your neighbors? Because I don’t think you really are. I think you’re talking stupid.’”

McBroom closed his eyes and took a heavy breath. “These are good people, and they’re being lied to, and they’re believing the lies,” he said. “And it’s really dangerous.”