The two candidates offer insights into the trends and forces on the rise in the Democratic and Republican parties.

And we may ask ourselves (to quote Talking Heads—it’s never not a good time to quote Talking Heads): Well, how did we get here? How did we bring ourselves to this place of howling jeopardy? On the eve of the 2024 vice-presidential debate, with the stakes so terribly high, can we get a bit of context? And could it be presented entertainingly, so we don’t get bored? Allow me to recommend a viewing or re-viewing of Game Change.

But first: Let’s go back. Back through the germ clouds and the sulfur swirls and the windows getting broken with the butts of flagpoles, to a time when we were only half-crazy. Three-quarters crazy, maybe. Let’s go back to the summer of 2008.

Remember 2008? John McCain was the Republican candidate for president. The Democratic candidate was Barack Obama. The Great Backlash was yet to be unleashed; the foaming tides of grievance awaited their arch whipper-up.

McCain versus Obama. Interesting pair of characters, interesting binary moment for the nation: cranky old McCain the war hero, unpredictable, unsteady perhaps, rumbling around the country on the Straight Talk Express (his bus)—and handsome young Obama, the anointed, the noble profile with his arena-swelling cadences. “We are a people of improbable hope … with an eye toward the future!” (Cue hysteria, flashbulbs.) Did he have a bus? Surely he simply hovered, weightless, from rally to rally. And as the summer wore on and convention time neared, it became apparent that Obama was creaming McCain. The polls, they jigged and jagged, the mood of the electorate swung this way and that, but McCain was always behind. Always losing. He had to make a move. He had to shake it up. He had to do something … game-changing.

Game Change dramatizes the reckless hour when McCain picked Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his running mate (“This is a woman with a gun, John!” burbles one of his advisers: “I mean, c’mon! The base is gonna be doing backflips”) and was then obliged to deal with the fallout as it emerged that she didn’t know much about foreign countries or what the Federal Reserve was. Woody Harrelson plays the McCain strategist/bouncer Steve Schmidt, all shoulders and gleaming cranium; Ed Harris plays a rambunctious, foulmouthed, wide-eyed McCain; and Julianne Moore, from a place of truly Strasbergian inwardness, plays Palin.

At the time of its release—2012—Game Change seemed a fairly earnest and didactic, if very well made, piece of entertainment. Framed at beginning and end by Schmidt’s interview with Anderson Cooper (in which a sweating Schmidt is asked, “If you had it to do over again, would you have her on the ticket?”), it seemed pretty clear on the idea that the Palin pick was a disaster, a Faustian bargain with the forces of American irrationality. McCain loses, of course, but right after his super-dignified concession speech, the crowd starts lowing: “Sa-RAH! Sa-RAH!” Something is happening. Palin glows, a radioactive glow. The soundtrack drones with foreboding; the McCain team look around nervously. They can feel the lion’s breath of history on their necks.

[From the June 2011 issue: Joshua Green on the tragedy of Sarah Palin]

Watched now, it feels more complex. Because it’s a movie, a good movie, with an obligation to character and narrative arc and so on, Game Change, almost in spite of itself, gives us a Palin who is rounded and human and likable. Plucked from her Alaskan habitat by the unscrupulous jocks of the McCain campaign, small-town Sarah struggles in the jangling world of prime time. She keeps her family nervously close—even including in her entourage the young man who recently impregnated her daughter out of wedlock. (“Thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Palin.” “Thank you for cutting your mullet, Levi. I really appreciate it.”) Her speech at the Republican National Convention is a smash—she kills it!—and the people out on the road love her, but her political persona is brittle. It does not retain information. It was not built for scrutiny. To the liberal media, she becomes quarry, and you feel for her in the big interviews. You dislike Charlie Gibson and his schoolmasterly frown. Katie Couric circles with a predatory glitter: “When it comes to establishing your worldview, I was curious: What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this?” (“Name one fucking paper!” groans Schmidt.)

Verbally, the movie has two registers, which serve as two opposing discourses. One is the homespun idiom of folksy Sarah: “Hey, Bristol? You hold Trig. I’m gonna take Piper on the roller coaster.” The other is the ultra-secular, sub-Sorkin politico-speak used by the hacks and flacks around McCain. “The data shows we have four things we have to do. We have to win back the independents, we have to excite the base, we have to distance ourselves from the Bush administration, and we have to close the gender gap.” If the “deep state” exists, this is how it talks.

So Game Change, pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre–January 6, unknowing as it obviously was of all the weirdness that was coming down the pike, saw quite clearly the cleavage in the American psyche out of which the future—our present!—would emerge. On the runway somewhere on the campaign jet, before the pick is announced, brutal Steve Schmidt is struck by Palin’s equanimity. (She is gazing blissfully out the window.) “You seem totally unfazed by this,” he says. She turns to him: “It’s God’s plan.” And despite the slight glaze of fanaticism on Moore’s face as she says this, and the flash of panic on Harrelson’s, you’re kind of with her. Schmidt, about to ascend to 30,000 feet, doesn’t know that he’s in the hands of God. But Palin does!

McCain-Palin was a tragedy: A great statesman, desperate for the win, succumbed to vanity and made a pact with darkness. That’s one way to look at it. McCain-Palin was a comedy: A flailing candidate, wrecked on his own ego, made a ludicrous decision, and it all blew up in his face. That’s another way to look at it. Game Change sort of splits the difference: McCain-Palin was a movie, soapy but terribly consequential, and we still don’t know how it’s going to end.

Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz is going head-to-head against his Republican counterpart JD Vance in New York.

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This weekend, at his rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump descended into a spiral of rage and incoherence that was startling even by his standards. I know I’ve said this before, but this weekend felt different: Trump himself, as my colleague David Graham wrote today, admitted that he’s decided to start going darker than usual.

At this point, voters have everything they need to know about this election. (Tomorrow, the vice-presidential candidates will debate each other, which might not have much of an impact beyond providing another opportunity for J. D. Vance to drive down his already-low likability numbers.) Here are some realities that will likely shape the next four weeks.

Trump is going to get worse.

I’m not quite sure what happened to Trump in Erie, but he seems to be in some sort of emotional tailspin. The race is currently tied; Trump, however, is acting as if he’s losing badly and he’s struggling to process the loss. Other candidates, when faced with such a close election, might hitch up their pants, take a deep breath, and think about changing their approach, but that’s never been Trump’s style. Instead, Trump gave us a preview of the next month: He is going to ratchet up the racism, incoherence, lies, and calls for violence. If the polls get worse, Trump’s mental state will likely follow them.

Policy is not suddenly going to matter.

Earlier this month, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote about very specific policy questions that Kamala Harris must answer to earn his vote. Harris has issued plenty of policy statements, and Stephens surely knows it. Such demands are a dodge: Policy is important, but Stephens and others, apparently unable to overcome their reticence to vote for a Democratic candidate, are using a focus on it as a way to rationalize their role as bystanders in an existentially important election.

MAGA Republicans, for their part, claim that policy is so important to them that they’re willing to overlook the odiousness of a candidate such as North Carolina’s gubernatorial contender Mark Robinson. But neither Trump nor other MAGA candidates, including Robinson, have any interest in policy. Instead, they create cycles of rage: They gin up fake controversies, thunder that no one is doing anything about these ostensibly explosive issues, and then promise to fix them all by punishing other Americans.

Major news outlets are not likely to start covering Trump differently.

Spotting headlines in national news sources in which Trump’s ravings are “sanewashed” to sound as if they are coherent policy has become something of a sport on social media. After Trump went on yet another unhinged tirade in Wisconsin this past weekend, Bloomberg posted on X: “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Well, yes, that’s one way to put it. Another would be to say: The GOP candidate seemed unstable and made several bizarre remarks during a campaign speech. Fortunately, Trump’s performances create a lot of videos where people can see his emotional state for themselves.

News about actual conditions in the country probably isn’t going to have much of an impact now.

This morning, the CNN anchor John Berman talked with the Republican House member Tom Emmer, who said that Joe Biden and Harris “broke the economy.” Berman countered that a top economist has called the current U.S. economy the best in 35 years.

Like so many other Trump defenders, Emmer didn’t care. He doesn’t have to. Many voters—and this is a bipartisan problem—have accepted the idea that the economy is terrible (and that crime is up, and that the cities are in flames, and so on). Gas could drop to a buck a gallon, and Harris could personally deliver a week’s worth of groceries to most Americans, and they’d probably still say (as they do now) that they are doing well, but they believe that it’s just awful everywhere else.

Undecided voters have everything they need to know right in front of them.

Some voters likely think that sitting out the election won’t change much. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein pointed out in a recent article, many “undecided” voters are not really undecided between the candidates: They’re deciding whether to vote at all. But they should take as a warning Trump’s fantasizing during the Erie event about dealing with crime by doing something that sounds like it’s from the movie The Purge.

The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told: If you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension; you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car … One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It’ll end immediately.

This weird dystopian moment is not the only sign that Trump and his movement could upend the lives of wavering nonvoters. Trump, for months, has been making clear that only two groups exist in America: those who support him, and those who don’t—and anyone in that second group, by his definition, is “scum,” and his enemy.

Some of Trump’s supporters agree and are taking their cues from him. For example, soon after Trump and Vance singled out Springfield, Ohio, for being too welcoming of immigrants, one of the longtime local business owners—a fifth-generation Springfielder—started getting death threats for employing something like 30 Haitians in a company of 330 people. (His 80-year-old mother is also reportedly getting hateful calls. So much for the arguments that Trump voters are merely concerned about maintaining a sense of community out there in Real America.)

Nasty phone calls aimed at old ladies in Ohio and Trump’s freak-out in Erie should bring to an end any further deflections from uncommitted voters about not having enough information to decide what to do.

I won’t end this depressing list by adding that “turnout will decide the election,” because that’s been obvious for years. But I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump.

Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.

Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.

For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.

Related:

Trump is taking a dark turn. Peter Wehner: The Republican freak show

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

North Carolina was set up for disaster. Will RFK Jr.’s supporters vote for Trump? Hussein Ibish: Hezbollah got caught in its own trap.

Today’s News

Israeli officials said that commando units have been conducting ground raids in southern Lebanon. Israel’s military is also planning to carry out a limited ground operation in Lebanon, which will focus on the border, according to U.S. officials. At least 130 people were killed across six states and hundreds may be missing after Hurricane Helene made landfall last week. A Georgia judge struck down the state’s effective six-week abortion ban, ruling that it is unconstitutional.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: The decision to have kids comes down to a lot more than “baby fever”—and it may be about more than government support too, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Director Bartlett Sher, star Robert Downey Jr., and writer Ayad Akhtar OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Playwright in the Age of AI

By Jeffrey Goldberg

I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Ayad Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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