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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Warrior,” the crowd repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God is healing your spine.”

“I rebuke cancer in the name of Jesus.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presidents always seem to have a crisis to deal with. George W. Bush had 9/11. Barack Obama had the Great Recession. Donald Trump had the coronavirus pandemic. Joe Biden had the war in the Middle East. For America’s next president, the crisis might be bird flu.

The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented bout of bird flu, also known as H5N1. Since 2022, the virus has killed millions of birds and spread to mammals, including cows. Dairy farms are struggling to contain outbreaks. A few humans have fallen sick, too—mostly farmworkers who spend a lot of time near chickens or cows—but Americans have largely remained nonplussed by bird flu. No one in the U.S. has died or gotten seriously sick, and the risk to us is considered low, because humans rarely spread the virus to others.

On Friday, the fear of human-to-human spread grew ever so slightly: The CDC confirmed that four health-care workers in Missouri had fallen sick after caring for a patient who was infected with bird flu. A few weeks earlier, three other Missourians showed symptoms of bird flu after coming in contact with the same person. It’s still unclear if the workers were infected with H5N1 or some other respiratory bug; only one has been given an H5N1 test, which came back negative.

The CDC says the risk to humans has not changed, but the incident in Missouri underscores that the virus is only likely to generate more scares about human-to-human transmission. The virus is showing no signs of slowing down. In the absolute worst-case scenario—where Friday’s news is the first sign of the virus freely spreading from person to person—we are hurtling toward another pandemic. But the outbreak doesn’t have to get that dire to create headaches for the American public, and liabilities for the next president.

Either Trump or Kamala Harris will inherit an H5N1 response that has been nightmarishly complex, controversial, and at times slow. Three government agencies—the FDA, the CDC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—share responsibility for the bird-flu response, and it’s unclear which agency is truly in charge. The USDA, for example, primarily protects farmers, while the CDC is focused on public health, and the FDA monitors the safety of milk.

Adding to the complexity is that a lot of power also rests with the states, many of which have been loath to involve the feds in their response. States must typically invite federal investigators to assess potential bird-flu cases in person, and some have bristled at the prospect of letting federal officials onto farms. The agriculture commissioner for Texas, which has emerged as one of the bird-flu hot spots, recently said the federal government needs to “back off.” Meanwhile, wastewater samples—a common way to track the spread of a virus—indicate that bird flu is circulating through 10 of the state’s cities.

Government alone can only do so much. Though only 14 Americans have knowingly come down with bird flu, we have a woefully incomplete picture of how widely it is spreading in humans. Since March, about 230 people nationwide have been tested for the virus. Although the federal government has attempted to compel farmworkers to get tested—even offering them $75 to give blood and nasal swabs—it has struggled to make inroads. That could be because of a range of factors, such as distrust of the federal government because of farmworkers’ immigration status, and lack of awareness about the growing threat of bird flu. A USDA spokesperson told me the agency expects testing to increase as it “continues outreach to farmers.”

You should be experiencing some serious déjà vu by now. In 2020, the U.S. was operating in the dark regarding COVID because tests were scarce, many states were not publicly reporting their COVID numbers, and the federal government and states were fighting over lockdowns. The systematic problems that dogged the pandemic response are still impediments today, and it’s unclear whether either candidate has a plan to fix them. Trump and Harris both seem more intent on pretending that the worrying signs of bird flu simply don’t exist. Neither has outlined a plan for containing the virus, or said much of anything publicly about it. (The Trump and Harris campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.) If America is going to avoid repeating our COVID mistakes, things need to change fast. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, highlighted the need for more widespread testing, and vaccinations for those at high risk of catching the virus. (The federal government has a stockpile of bird-flu vaccines, but has not deployed them.)

H5N1 is already showing its potential to spoil both candidates’ promises to lower grocery prices. Poultry flocks have been hit hard by bird flu, and the price of eggs has spiked by 28 percent compared with a year ago. (Inflation also played a role in increased prices, but bird flu is mostly to blame.) The next president will have to spar with America’s dairy industry if they want to get useful data on how widely the virus is spreading. Dairy farmers have been reluctant to test workers or animals for fear of financial losses. But none of this will compare with the disruption that a new president will have to deal with should this virus spread more freely to humans. For Americans, that will likely mean a return to masks, another vaccine to get, and isolation. Some experts are warning that schools could be affected if the virus begins spreading to humans more readily.

Bird flu doesn’t seem like a winning message for either candidate. Talk of preparing for any type of infectious disease triggers the fears of uncertainty, isolation, and inconvenience that Americans are still trying to shake after the pandemic. It’s hard to imagine either Trump or Harris starting their presidency by instituting the prevention measures that so many people have grown to hate. Unfortunately, the next commander in chief may not have a choice.

If you show up to a J. D. Vance campaign event and ask some of the red-hat-wearing attendees whether they’re fans of the senator from Ohio, they will say: No, they are fans of Donald Trump.

Yet Vance is better than his ticketmate at one important job: He can squeeze Trumpism through his own post-liberal-populist tube and produce something that looks like a coherent ideology. While Democrats are fond of mocking Vance for being socially awkward, Trump’s supporters see him as their very own Pete Buttigieg: a man with a theory of the case who is eager to defend it both on television and in real life. He is the sharp TV-soundbite counterweight to Trump’s rambling rally speech:

“There is this Christian idea that you owe the strongest duty to your family, and then you owe the next duty to your community, and then to your country, and then to everybody else,” Vance said at a Christian-revival event on Saturday in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in response to a question about his approach to immigration policy. “It doesn’t mean that you have to be mean to other people, but it means that your first duty as the American leader is to the people of your own country.”

Trump’s supporters will tell you that they appreciate this ability to articulate their values. Maybe they didn’t like Vance at first, but now they believe that he is smart. He brings a wholesome substance to their movement, like a bowl of leafy greens before the red-meat entrée. “He balances Trump out,” Diane Ernest, a retiree from Southampton, Pennsylvania, told me at a Vance event on Saturday in Bucks County. “He’s a good speaker, and he doesn’t run off—just gets right to the facts.”

“In the beginning, I wondered why Trump picked Vance,” 77-year-old Carol Cavanaugh told me at the same event. But she gets it now. Unlike Trump, “Vance keeps his composure,” she said. She’s proud that Trump “went out of his comfort zone and didn’t pick someone just like him.” For voters like these, the symbiotic relationship makes the two men stronger.

Among MAGA voters, no real equivalence exists between the two men. On the trail, Trump gets Beatlemania; Vance receives polite applause. Retail politics requires a level of regular-guy-ness that Vance does not appear to possess. (Exhibit A: his painful interaction with a worker at a Georgia doughnut shop.) This is partly because Vance is not, strictly speaking, a regular guy: Vance is a Yale grad turned venture capitalist with a reputation for ruthless ambition. He also comes off as far more cerebral, and more conservative, than his running mate. He and his intellectual allies view America as being in a state of “civilizational crisis,” and employ phrases like “postmenopausal females” and “replacement fertility rate” in everyday parlance. He once wrote a 7,000-word essay about his conversion to Catholicism in which he quotes theologians and philosophers at length.

Every Vance event follows roughly the same trajectory. He’ll start with a few jabs at Kamala Harris and her reluctance to do media interviews. Then, once the crowd has been worked into a mild froth, Vance will turn to inflation, gas prices, and housing. He will suggest that the solution to these problems involves more energy and more deportations. He’ll say, “Drill, baby, drill!” and everyone will clap. Then he’ll declare that it’s time to send the “illegal aliens” home, and people will clap even harder. To wrap up, he’ll take a handful of questions from the media.

The stump speech does contain a few moments of cringe. When Vance talks about the price of eggs, for example, he likes to replay a bit about his three kids, who love eggs. In Traverse City, Michigan: “My kids eat a lotta eggs!” In Monroeville: “A lotta eggs in my family!”

But the awkward moments seem not to stick with Trump’s base. What matters to them, these supporters say, is how Vance eloquently articulates their positions—and makes them feel righteous for holding them. Harris, Vance often tells his audience, believes that the people complaining about illegal immigration in places like Springfield, Ohio, are racist. “Kamala Harris, stop telling the people of your own country that they’re bad people!” he said on Saturday, to cheers. “You’re a bad person for not doing your job!”

Vance’s biggest strength, though, may be his eagerness and ability to engage with the media. He will announce, at the end of each rally, that it’s time for a few questions from reporters, and every head in the audience will swivel to gawk at the press pen. They will boo and jeer at each question, regardless of its content, and Vance will smile at them like a proud parent, dispelling the tension with something ostensibly magnanimous: “This is America, folks! She has a right to ask the question, and you have a right to tell her how you feel about it.”

Vance seems most at ease in these moments, because he has shifted the focus away from his personality and back toward his well-studied message. He, like most lawyers, is comfortable with debate and confrontation, turning the media’s questions into opportunities to get back to the issues: inflation and immigration. He will not lose the thread as Trump does, when he gets lost in his own stories about Hannibal Lecter and electric boats. Vance will answer the question, or at least provide an elegant-sounding nonanswer. Asked in August if he and Trump would support raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, Vance made a quick pivot: “Whether you have a higher minimum wage or a lower minimum wage, the way to destroy the wages of American workers is to import 20 million illegal aliens and let them stay here with work visas,” he said.

His willingness to do this sets him apart from Harris, who has mostly refused to grant interviews. Vance’s supporters recognize this. “He’s good unscripted, which a lot of people in this race aren’t,” Milo Morris, an opera singer at the Bucks County event, told me.

Vance has been a political shape-shifter, changing his views on politics, Trump, and even the lessons of his own 2016 book. But that slipperiness is easy for MAGA supporters to ignore when he’s applying a gloss of coherence to their movement. If Vance performs well in tonight’s debate with Harris’s vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, it will be because he has what Trump voters see as talents. A debate isn’t a doughnut-shop photo op or a glad-handing line-walk requiring baby-kissing and charm. A debate is a contest of ideas—something that Vance has spent his whole life preparing for.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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.

More From The Atlantic

Putin can’t keep his private life private. The abandonment of Ukraine America needs a disaster corps, Zoë Schlanger argues. “Dear Therapist”: I ran into the man who raped me.

Culture Break

Amanda Marsalis / Trunk Archive

Remember. Kris Kristofferson’s songs couched intimate moments in cosmic terms, pushing country music in an existentialist direction, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Debate. Twenty years after Lost’s premiere, the mistreatment of Hurley on the show (streaming on Netflix and Hulu) has become only more obvious, Rebecca Bodenheimer writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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