In 2021, Israel bombed Gaza for 11 days in a campaign known as Operation Guardian of the Walls. At the end of the battle, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, posed for a photograph in broad daylight. Surrounded by rubble, he sat in an armchair. On his face, he wore a defiant smile.

Sinwar—obsessed with operational security, paranoid about Israeli collaborators in his midst—possessed a genius for survival that inflicted death on his own people. For more than a year since October 7, 2023, he eluded the Israeli Defense Forces as they flooded his tunnels, detonated the passages for his escape, and flattened plausible hiding places. Sinwar’s survival was a haunting nightmare. The prospect of the architect of October 7 posing again, with that wicked smirk, was justification for continuing the war.

That he will never smile again means that Israel has achieved a comprehensive military victory in Gaza, albeit at a terrible cost to civilians and to its own reputation. The Hamas hierarchy that unleashed October 7 has been eliminated. The smuggling tunnels that funneled Iranian-supplied arms from Egypt have been destroyed. The rank-and-file soldiers of the terror army have been decimated. Israel’s only remaining significant objective is the release of its hostages.

[Graeme Wood: Yahya Sinwar’s death was preordained]

The question now is whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has enough strategic and moral sense to leverage its military wins into a plausible vision of peace. But before fretting about the future, it’s worth celebrating the fact that one of history’s monsters has met the fate that he deserved.

A suicide bomber destroys himself. Yahya Sinwar strapped the entirety of Gaza to his body. When he unleashed the pogrom of October 7, he did so with the full knowledge that he was provoking a shattering Israeli retaliation. Cutting the border fence and inciting a barbaric orgy of murder, rape, and kidnapping was sure to culminate in Palestinian-civilian deaths. Palestinian death was his goal, and he guaranteed it, by cowardly commingling his army among innocents. In Sinwar’s moral calculus, the more suffering the better, because it hastened the delegitimization of Israel and, in his phantasmagoric view, the arrival of a Muslim state between the river and the sea.

Many nations have pleaded with Israel to end this war. It’s a moral travesty that they didn’t simultaneously direct their pleas to Sinwar. At any moment, he could have attempted to spare his people. He could have surrendered and proposed exiling himself to another country; he could have handed over the hostages and accepted the Israeli terms for a cease-fire, which weren’t that far from his own.

That Sinwar avoided shouldering moral culpability for Palestinian death in broad swaths of Western opinion is testament to his sinister strategic sensibility. Israel possessed superior military technology. But it was Sinwar who possessed the state-of-the-art military brain. He embraced what the Russians like to call hybrid warfare. That is, he studied public perception in Israel and the West—and he calibrated his military strategy to achieve his goals. Around the time that protests erupted on American college campuses, he seemed to harden his negotiating position. U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats told me that they suspected that he didn’t want to end the war, which was advancing his long-term objective of building Western disdain for Israel.

[Franklin Foer: The war that would not end]

One doesn’t need to be a Netanyahu apologist, or even a supporter of this war, to believe that Israel’s critics are applying a perverse moral logic. Israel gets accused of genocide, when Sinwar doggedly implemented an explicitly eliminationist ideology. His army didn’t incidentally kill babies in the course of pursuing an enemy combatant. It did so staring at infants and their parents in the eyes. I keep thinking about the murder of six hostages at the end of August. They were killed even though their lives were valuable bargaining chips in a negotiation to end the war, as those negotiations were headed in the direction of a deal. It was the senseless murder of Jews for the sake of murdering Jews.

Sinwar’s improbable survival gave the Israeli government an excuse to delay thinking about the day after, to deflect the looming questions about Gaza’s future: Who will secure the Strip? Who will govern it? But avoiding these hard questions has only made Israel’s choices worse. Despite the offers of assistance from Sunni Arab states and America, it has not even an inkling of a plan for Gaza. In the short term, the only viable alternatives are anarchy and occupation, both of which are moral catastrophes in the making. But perhaps Sinwar’s death will finally permit a moment of cathartic grief. By easing people’s pain, it could free their minds.

Ryanair (RYAAY) CEO Michael O’Leary is back to bashing Boeing (BA) once again. The outspoken airline executive said that delivery delays from America’s largest planemaker are threatening to wreck a second summer in a row for the carrier.

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To a casual observer, Donald Trump’s claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs seemed like a bizarre or mistaken claim that ultimately fueled millions of memes, jokes, and racist insults. But to someone who knows what to look for, the story he told read as much more calculated and familiar. Making an outrageous claim is one common tactic of an autocrat. So is sticking to it far beyond the time when it’s even remotely believable. Autocrats often dare their followers to believe absurd claims, as a kind of loyalty test, because “humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes,” says Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist and co-host of Autocracy in America, an Atlantic podcast series.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Pomerantsev and Atlantic staff writer and co-host Anne Applebaum about how to detect the signs of autocracy, because, as they say, if you can’t spot them, you won’t be able to root them out. We also analyze the events of the upcoming election through their eyes and talk about how large swaths of a population come to believe lies, what that means, and how it might be undone.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. There’s something new unfolding in this election, something we haven’t seen in this country on such a grand scale. Kamala Harris said it bluntly at her acceptance speech at the DNC when she talked about how tyrants like Kim Jong Un side with Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris: They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable, because he wants to be an autocrat himself.

[Applause]

Rosin: An autocrat. How do you know if a leader is vying to be an autocrat? It’s an abstract title hard to picture playing out in the U.S. But as I picked up in a new Atlantic podcast, Autocracy in America, if you know what you’re looking for, you can see it pretty clearly.

People who have seen it play out in other countries can tick through the list of autocratic tactics. At work. Right now. In the United States.

Applebaum: That was really the organizing idea of the show, was to tell people that stuff is already happening now.

Rosin: This is staff writer Anne Applebaum. She’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and co-host of Autocracy in America.

Her co-host is Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar of propaganda and misinformation.

After I started listening to their show, I realized I was missing some very basic things—patterns that were easy to spot if someone pointed them out to you. So I wanted to get them to help me to understand the moment we’re in, both in this election and in American history.

Here’s my conversation with Anne and Peter.

[Music]

Rosin: So I think of the two of you as, like, detectives. You see patterns happening in the news and the election that the rest of us either don’t notice or don’t quite put together as patterns. So I want to, through your eyes, look at the current election. Have you detected any patterns or signs of the kind of current autocracy in America bubble up in the dialogue of this election?

Applebaum: So I was very struck by the famous “eating cats and dogs” phrase.

Donald Trump: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets.

Applebaum: And everybody laughed at it, and they said, Ha ha ha. That’s very funny. And this struck me as an example of people lying in a way, even though everybody knows they’re lying, and the purpose of the lie was to demonstrate their power. We can lie. We can do whatever we want. We can say whatever we want about these people, and it doesn’t affect us.

And the fact that they never retracted it, despite the fact that people in Springfield were up in arms, and everybody who’s done any reporting—journalists have been to Springfield, have asked people, Are there any dogs or cats being eaten? And people say no.

It’s a way of showing power—so, We can lie, and everybody else is going to go along with our lie when we win the election.

Pomerantsev: You know, something that’s been much remarked upon in autocratic systems: truth and power sort of switch roles. You know, we think of truth challenging power and holding the powerful by account with the truth. When I lived in Russia—and my first book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, was all about this, how truth didn’t play that role anymore. Truth was about showing your loyalty, showing whose side you’re on—and, you know, subservient to power.

Applebaum: They’re creating around themselves a kind of alternative community, where, If you’re inside our world, we say whatever we want the truth to be, and everybody joins in.

Pomerantsev: And also, rubbishing the idea of truth. I mean, what comes with that is truth stops being about information and analysis. It’s about making a point, saying whose side you’re on. Even the more absurd the lie that you say shows even more, Look at my team. Look at my team. Look whose side I’m on.

And Vance was fascinating. You know, he’s a very fascinating character, something right out of some of the darkest Russian novels, because he kind of intellectualizes this, because he’s also a writer and someone who thinks about language a lot, clearly. And when he went on air and said, Oh yeah. I made this up, and I’ll keep on making things up. Because truth doesn’t matter. You know, something else matters.

J. D. Vance on CNN: If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Rosin: And is it just because I’m (A) an American and (B) a journalist that I can’t catch up? Like, you both have so much foreign experience—living in foreign countries, watching autocracy—so you’ve digested this. Is it because it’s new to me that everything—like, every time Trump does it, I keep wishing for the facts to stop the momentum, and they never do, and somehow I can’t catch up? It’s just because we’re new, right? Because Americans just haven’t seen this before.

Applebaum: It’s not that new. I mean, it’s been going on since 2016. And in fact, I would say almost the opposite is true. I think most people—I mean, you may be an exception.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Pomerantsev: It’s because you’re a journalist, not because you’re an American.

Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s because I’m slow.

Applebaum: No. I think most people have got used to it. And I mean, the normalization of the lying and the normalization of the gibberish that Trump comes up with—all of that has become part of the background of politics in America and isn’t shocking the way it would have been. And imagine an election 20 years ago. I don’t know—imagine Bill Clinton going up on the stage and talking about sharks and electrocution and Hannibal Lecter. People would have been outraged, and he would have been thrown off the stage, and Who is this crazy person talking to us?

But we’ve now gone down a path where we’re accustomed to that way of speaking in public. More and more people have joined the former president in doing so. More and more people have got used to listening to that, and we’re in a different world now. Maybe you’re just still in the former world.

Rosin: But why are we laughing? I mean, what you’re saying is quite serious. Like, what you’re saying is that they’re using this pet story in order to sort of flex a kind of autocratic power, and we are just making memes and making jokes and laughing at Trump and saying how ridiculous it is that he’s doing this pet thing. But what you’re talking about is quite serious. So that’s where I’m saying maybe the gap is—like, we haven’t quite caught up—that actually it’s dangerous. It’s not funny.

Pomerantsev: I don’t find it funny at all, actually. I find it very, very sinister. One thing that we keep on coming back to in our show is in Eastern Europe, where there’s been a history of this, the response is often to look at the absurdity of it. A lot of the great Eastern European novels about autocracy are absurdist novels. But absurdism is very scary. I mean, in the hands of the sadistic and the powerful, it’s a terrifying tool. So I find humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes.

Applebaum: No. It’s one of the things you do when you’re afraid and also, especially, when you’re powerless. When democracy has failed completely, when you’re living in a completely autocratic society, then what do you have left? You can’t fight back. You can’t hit anybody. So you turn it into jokes.

Rosin: So that’s the level of Trump. I want to talk about this at the level of followers or people listening to Trump or, you know, the general populace, and tell you guys a story.

I’ve been to more Trump rallies in this election than I have in the last election. And one thing that happens is: I was reporting with an Atlantic reporter. His name is John Hendrickson. He covers politics, and he has a pronounced stutter. And this was at the time that Biden was still running, and Trump had declined to make fun of Biden’s stutter, and then Trump crossed that line in a certain rally. He started to make fun of the way Biden talks.

Trump: Two nights ago, we all heard Crooked Joe’s angry, dark, hate-filled rant of a State of the Union address. Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together? Remember, he said, I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-together. I’m gonna bring it together.

Rosin: And John Hendrickson wanted to go with me to a rally. So we thought we would get into some sticky ethical dilemmas, and we would have kind of difficult conversations with people about compassion and morality. And we did have some of that. But a lot of what happened is that people would say to us, That didn’t happen. Trump didn’t do that. Like, I just, again, wasn’t prepared for that.

[Music]

Rosin: The first time someone said it, I just said, Yes. He did, like a baby. And they said, Well, no. We don’t know—he didn’t, and so then I sort of stepped back and called up the video. And then there was a video of Trump doing what we said he had done. So then the next time someone said he didn’t do that, I just showed them the video, and they said, Well, we don’t—I don’t know where that video came from. I don’t know that that’s real.

And so I didn’t know what to do next. Like, when people just say, That didn’t happen, I just wasn’t sure where to go next. So what I did was go home and Google the term psychological infrastructure. And I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but just what has happened to our brains? And I wanted you two to reflect on this.

Applebaum: I mean, one of the things that happened to our brains—and I don’t think it’s only Trump supporters—is that the quantity of information that we all see every day is so enormous. And so much of it is either false or irrelevant, or somehow we learn to exclude it, that I think the old, slow process of thinking about what’s true and what’s not true—it’s hardly even relevant anymore. It’s not just Americans, actually. I mean, I think everybody has started to treat facts and evidence and truth differently. And I think that’s kind of where Trump comes from.

In the way that Hollywood produced Ronald Reagan and TV produced JFK, because they were the new forms of media, and they were the ones who were successful in that media, I think Trump is somebody who’s successful in the world of very fast video clips and takes, where you’re not paying any attention anymore to what’s actually true and what’s not, and what’s AI and what’s not, and what’s staged and what’s not. I think he’s just a beneficiary of that.

Pomerantsev: I always wonder: What is the permission structure that a leader gives their followers, especially when the leader has this really tight emotional bond with their followers?

The permission structure that Trump gives his audience, I think, is: He sticks a middle finger up to reality. It’s very nice to give a middle finger to reality. Reality, essentially, at the end of the day, reminds you of death. I mean, it’s a middle finger to death at some very deep level. That’s what Trump gives people. So he denies reality, so you can deny reality, so when Hanna turns up with her evidence, you can go, Eh, fuck that.

Rosin: Oh my God. That—

Pomerantsev: And that gives you a high.

Rosin: Peter, that’s so—I mean, that feels correct, because there is such a hostility towards the media in a Trump rally. And it is very fun for people in a Trump rally, because often the media has the power. Like, I have equipment. I have a microphone. I have a lot of things. It is such a high for people to give us the middle finger and just say, like, You have no power. You’re nothing. That is very much in that dynamic. So I wonder if there is just some pleasure in telling us that didn’t happen. And it doesn’t matter if you knew it happened or saw it happen or anything like that.

Pomerantsev: We know about the hostility to the media as a kind of, like, sociological strategy, but also, I wonder, actually, it’s deeper than that. By telling the people who represent knowledge and facts a big middle finger, it’s part of this bigger rebellion against reality.

Applebaum: You know, Trump, from the very beginning of his political career—one of the central things he was doing was attacking the idea of truth. Remember how he broke into our consciousness in the political world as a birther. You know, Barack Obama is not really the president. He’s an illegitimate president. He was born in Kenya.

Trump on The View: Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? I think he probably—

Barbara Walters on The View: Why does he have to?

Trump on The View: Because I have to and everybody else has to.

Trump on The Today Show: I thought he was probably born in this country, and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I had before.

Meredith Vieira on The Today Show: But based on what?

Applebaum: And the fact that he could build a community of trust around that idea was a beginning, for a lot of people, of a break with, as you say, the idea that facts are real and that there’s some structure of truth, fact-finding, journalism, etcetera that can back it up.

So I think this has been a deliberate thing that he’s done for a decade, is to try to undermine people’s faith in truth and faith in journalism and faith in all kinds of other institutions, as well. But he is aided by the nature of the modern conversation and debate, which has only become more chaotic, you know, with every passing year.

Rosin: Do you two think of the American mind as broken in some way? No. I’m serious. Like, where we journalists are playing a losing game, and the American mind is corroded?

Applebaum: I’m not sure it’s just the American mind.

Pomerantsev: That was a very diplomatic answer, Anne. Damn, that was good. That was good.

Rosin: I actually wonder about this. I actually wonder about this. I mean, that is a very unmelodic phrase I Googled, psychological infrastructure. But I did start to think of the world in this way. Like, Okay, there’s a transportation infrastructure. There are all these, you know—but then there’s a collective-consciousness infrastructure, and it’s being corrupted, you know. In the same way you can sort of hack into an electrical grid, you can hack into a collective consciousness. And it just seems terrifying to me.

Applebaum: It matters a lot who the leaders of your country are. I remember an Italian friend of mine telling me a long time ago, after Berlusconi had been the leader of Italy for a number of years, it actually changed the way men and women related to each other in the country, because Berlusconi was famous for having lots of young girlfriends and so on.

Suddenly, it became okay for married men to have much younger girlfriends, in a way that it hadn’t been before. So he kind of changed the morality because he was the top dog, so whatever he did was okay. And that suddenly meant it was okay for a lot of other people too. And I think Trump did something like that too.

He made lying okay. You know, If Trump does it, and he’s the president—or he was the president—then it’s okay for anyone to do it. We can all do it. And so I do think he had an impact on the national psyche, or whatever term you want to use.

Pomerantsev: Yeah. I think the question isn’t whether it’s broken or not. Clearly, something has snapped if 30 percent of the country think the last election rigged in some way.

So the question, Is it broken irrevocably? is actually the question. And the only thing I would say from seeing this in authoritarian regimes or regimes that go authoritarian-ish: It’s very shocking when you see people openly choosing to live in an alternative reality. It’s not that they got duped. They’re doing that because it’s part of their new identity.

It can also be thin because it is a bad identity. And actually, in their personal lives, they’re still completely rational. You know, they need facts as soon as they’re looking at their bank account. So it’s not all pervasive. This is just something you do for your political identity, for the theater of it, which means that it can change very fast, again, and change back again. So there is a thinness to it.

Rosin: But that’s hopeful.

Pomerantsev: That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean. So is it irrevocable? Not necessarily, is what I would say. But clearly something’s broken.

Rosin: After the break, Anne and Peter play out our near future—that is, what happens after the election—and Anne tries her hardest not to sound too dark.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay. So broaden out a little bit. What’s at stake in the election, as you two see it? This election.

Applebaum: I have to be careful not to sound apocalyptic, because it’s kind of my trademark tone, and I’m seeking to—

Rosin: It’s your brand. You’re trying to change your brand. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I’m trying to tone it down. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay.

Pomerantsev: Just as things get really apocalyptic, Anne’s like, I’m going to be all self-helpy. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I think whether the United States continues to be a democracy in the way that we’ve known it up until now—or at least since the Civil War or maybe since the civil-rights movement—is at stake.

I think, for example, the question of whether we will go on having, you know, a Justice Department that adheres to the rule of law and government institutions who act in the interests of the American people—rather than the interest of the president, personally, and his friends, personally—I think all of that’s at stake.

So the thing that I’ve seen happen in other countries is the politicization of the state and the politicization of institutions. And that’s what I think is very, very likely to happen if Trump wins a second term. And once that begins, it is very hard to reverse. It’s very hard to bring back the old civil servants who are, for better or for worse—I mean, maybe they’re ineffective or incompetent, but at least they think they’re acting in the interests of Americans.

Once you don’t have that culture anymore, it’s difficult to rebuild, and I’m afraid of that.

Pomerantsev: Look—America’s meaning in the world goes beyond its borders. It is the only superpower that’s also a democracy and talks a lot about freedom, though we unpack what it means by “freedom” in the show. There’s a real risk that a Trump victory is the end of America’s role doing that. For me, actually, the most sinister moment in the debates was when Trump looked to Viktor Orbán, the leader of Hungary, as his role model.

Orbán is not of great importance geopolitically. Hungary is a tiny country, but he’s a model for a new type of authoritarian-ish regimes inside Europe. And if America cuts off its alliances, if America makes possible a world where Russia and China will dominate—and there’s a real risk of that—then we’re into a very, very, very dangerous and turbulent future.

This is a moment when democracies really do hang together. The other side is very focused and very ruthless. Something that didn’t make it into the show was a quote from an interview that we did with Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist. He’s in Episode 2. But there was one line that didn’t make it into the show for editing reasons. But he sort of told us: What do the Kremlin elite call Trump?

And they call him Gorbachev, America’s Gorbachev, by which they don’t mean he’s a liberal reformer. They mean he’s going to bring the whole thing crashing down. It’s the end of America, and it’s Russia and China’s moment to dominate.

Applebaum: Yeah. And not just the end of America as a democracy but the end of American leadership in the world, the way that Gorbachev ended—

Pomerantsev: The project’s over.

Applebaum: The project’s over. That’s what they think.

Pomerantsev: Oh, they’re licking their lips.

Rosin: Let’s say Trump doesn’t win. Do all your worries fade away?

Applebaum: Some do. I mean, not having Trump as the leader—having him having been defeated in an election, especially if that election result holds and there is not another rebellion—that will force at least some part of the Republican Party to try to move on and find different language and different leaders.

But there will be a long legacy, even if he loses—so the legacy of people who’ve come to accept his way of speaking and his way of dealing with the world as normal, the legacy of people who believe that Kamala Harris is a Marxist revolutionary who’s out to destroy America, the legacy of violence in politics and the language of violence in politics. I mean, we’ve always had it, actually, in U.S. history. You can find lots of moments where it’s there, kind of rises and falls depending on the times. But we have a continued high level of threat, I think.

Rosin: Right. So it still requires a vigilance. It’s clear from this conversation why you two were motivated to make this series, Autocracy in America. Why does going back in history and doing this broad sweep—why is that useful? Why approach it in that way?

Pomerantsev: America is incredibly exceptional. But also, the things that play out here, you know, they have their precedence internationally and in history. And sometimes stepping back from the immediate moment is the way to sort of both understand it and also start to deal with it. You know, sometimes when you’re just in this—you know, the latest rage tweet or the latest, like, horrific TikTok video or something—stepping back, seeing the context, seeing the larger roots, seeing that it happens elsewhere is a way of then starting to deal with it.

I mean, that’s what a therapist will always get you to do. He says, Step back from the crisis, and let’s talk about the context. And the context is both uplifting in the sense that there have been ways to deal with this before but also—I mean, for me it was fascinating to understand how the story of autocracy in America is not just about Trump at all.

It’s a stable thing that’s been there all the time. The series, for me, was transformative in the sense that—I entered it, and I’m still in the process of making sense of it—I entered it very much with this idea that the story of America is the story of America outgrowing its lacks of freedoms and rights and getting better and better.

And by the end, I was kind of inching towards a revisioning, where it seems a country where the autocratic instincts and the democratic instincts are constantly competing, constantly at war with each other, and mitigated by things like foreign-policy. I mean, you know, Episode 4 is all about how America’s foreign policy choices in the Cold War, being for freedom, made it improve civil rights at home.

So all these factors influence the progress of democracy, the upholding of rights and freedoms. And it’s not some simple line. And that, for me, was actually quite—I don’t know. That was very new for me.

Applebaum: I think it’s also important that people stop thinking about history the way I was, essentially, taught in school, which is that it’s some kind of line of progress.

You know, The arc of history bends towards justice, or whatever way you want to put it—that we’re on some kind of upward trajectory, you know, and that sometimes we back down but, Never mind. It’ll keep going, because history isn’t determinative like that. It’s, in fact, circular. Things happen. We grow out of them. But then they come back. You know, ideas return. Old ways of doing and thinking—they don’t get banished forever. They reemerge.

And when you look at American history, just like when you look at the history of any country, actually, you find that. You find that old ideas come back, and I thought it was worth it, in this series, since we were talking about the present and the future, to also look at the way some of the same ideas and arguments had played out in the past.

Rosin: Well, Anne, Peter, thank you so much for making this series and for talking to us about it today.

Applebaum: Thank you.

Pomerantsev: Thank you for listening.

Rosin: Listeners, I urge you to check out the whole series, Autocracy in America. You’ll learn to spot the signs of autocracy in our past and right now. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience. “FEMA was so good with me,” he said at one point. “I defeated ISIS,” he added later. “I’m the father of IVF,” he claimed, with no further explanation.

The former president set a boastful tone early. The Fox News moderator, Harris Faulkner, told Trump that the Democrats were so worried about the town hall that the party had staged a “prebuttal” to the event, featuring Georgia’s two Democratic senators and the family of Amber Thurman, who died after having to leave the state to access abortion care. “We’ll get better ratings, I promise,” Trump replied, smirking. (Finally, someone willing to tell grief-stricken relatives to jazz it up a little.)

This event was supposed to involve Trump reaching beyond his comfort zone, after he had spent the past few weeks shoring up his advantage with men by embarking on a tour of bro podcasts. But these women were extremely friendly—suspiciously so. CNN later reported that Republican women’s groups had packed it with Trump supporters. Still, even in this gentle setting, the former president blustered, evaded questions, and contradicted himself.  

[Read: The women Trump is winning]

This election cycle has been dominated by podcast interviews with softball questions, but the Fox town hall reveals that the Trump campaign still believes that the legacy media can impart a useful sheen of gravitas, objectivity, and trustworthiness. If a candidate can get that without actually facing tough questions or a hostile audience, then so much the better. Why complain about “fake news” when you can make it? Thanks to Fox, Trump could court female voters without the risk of encountering any “nasty women”—or revealing his alienating, chauvinist side. (Fox did not respond to CNN’s questions about the event.)

This has been called the “boys vs. girls election”: Kamala Harris leads significantly among women, and Trump among men; in the final stretch of the campaign, though, each is conspicuously trying to reach the other half of the electorate. Hence Harris’s decision to release an “opportunity agenda for Black men”—including business loans, crypto protections, and the legalization of marijuana—and talk to male-focused outlets such as All the Smoke, Roland Martin Unfiltered, The Shade Room, and Charlamagne Tha God’s radio program.

For Trump, the main strategic aim of the Georgia town hall was surely to reverse out of his party’s unpopular positions on abortion and IVF. The former drew the most pointed question. “Women are entitled to do what they want to and need to do with their bodies, including their unborn—that’s on them,” a woman who identified herself as Pamela from Cumming asked. “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”

This was the only time the former president made an attempt at being statesmanlike, focusing on the topic at hand rather than his personal grievances or dire warnings about immigration. The subject had been rightfully returned to the states, Trump maintained, and many had liberalized their regimes thanks to specific legislation and ballot measures. Some of the anti-abortion laws enacted elsewhere, he allowed, were “too tough, too tough.” He personally believed in exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. This unusual clarity suggests that his strategists have hammered into him that the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has repelled swing voters. He took credit, though in a peculiar way, for saving IVF in Alabama after that state’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos should be regarded as children. In his telling, he was alerted to the situation by Senator Katie Britt, whom he described as “a young—just a fantastically attractive person—from Alabama.” He put out a statement supporting IVF, and the legislature acted quickly to protect it. “We really are the party for IVF,” he added. “We want fertilization.”

[Read: The people waiting for the end of IVF]

Others dispute Trump’s account, and his claims to moderation on reproductive issues yesterday weren’t entirely convincing. (Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term that was compiled by many of his allies, calls for a raft of restrictions on abortion.) But at least it was something close to a direct answer. The first questioner, Lisa from Milton—whom CNN later identified as the president of Fulton County Republican Women—asked Trump about the economy. She got the briefest mention of the “liquid gold” underneath America, which will allegedly solve its economic problems. Then Trump segued into musing about his “favorite graph”—the one on illegal immigration that supposedly saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

To give Faulkner some credit, she did try to return the conversation to reality at several points, with vibe-killing questions such as “And we can pay for that?” (That was in response to Trump’s suggestion that he would cut tax on benefits for seniors. Trump sailed on without acknowledging it.) He told Linda, also from Milton, that transgender women competing in female sports was “crazy,” ruefully shaking his head. “We’re not going to let it happen,” he added.

“How do you stop it?” Faulkner asked. “Do you go to the sports leagues?”

Nothing so complicated! “You just ban it,” he said. “The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.” Now, the U.S. commander in chief might oversee the world’s biggest military and its largest economy, but he or she is not currently charged with setting the rules of Olympic boxing.

Next up was a single mom, Rachel, struggling with the cost of daycare. She was visibly emotional as she stood at the mic. “You have a beautiful voice, by the way,” Trump said, to put her at ease. In response to Rachel’s question about how her child tax credit had decreased, he mentioned his daughter Ivanka, who, he said “drove me crazy” about the issue. “She said, Dad, we have to do tax credits for women. The child tax credits. She was driving me crazy.” (Typical woman, always banging on about economic freedom this and reproductive rights that.) “Then I did it, and I got it just about done, and she said: Dad, you’ve got to double it up.” He noted that fellow Republicans had told him he would get no gratitude for this, and then promised Rachel that he would “readjust things.”

[Read: Trump called Harris ‘beautiful.’ Now he has a problem.]

Audience members seemed not to mind that there was only the vaguest relationship between many of their questions and the former president’s eventual answers. (Contrast that with Bloomberg News’s interview the day before, in which the editor in chief, John Micklethwait, rebuked Trump for referring to “Gavin Newscum” and dragged him back from a riff about voter fraud with the interjection: “The question is about Google.”) Some solid objects did appear through the mist, however. Trump promised an end to “sanctuary cities” and a 50 percent reduction in everyone’s energy bills, and he defended his “enemies from within” comments as a “pretty good presentation.”

Much like a toddler, Trump occasionally said something insightful in a naive and entirely unselfconscious manner. Talking about Aurora, Colorado, where he and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have claimed that Venezuelan gangs are running rampant—a claim that the city’s mayor has called “grossly exaggerated”—a brief cloud of empathy passed across the former president’s face. “They’ve taken over apartment buildings,” he said. “They’re in the real-estate business, just like I am.” (So true: The industry does attract some unsavory characters.) Later, talking about the number of court cases filed against him, Trump observed, “They do phony investigations. I’ve been investigated more than Alphonse Capone.” Sorry? Had someone left a pot of glue open near the stage? Did the former president really just compare himself to a big-time criminal who was notoriously convicted only of his smaller offenses?

And then, all too soon, the allotted hour was up. Fox, according to CNN, edited out at least one questioner’s enthusiastic endorsement of Trump. Even so, it was obvious that the ex-president’s many partisans at the event enjoyed themselves. Before asking about foreign policy, the last questioner, Alicia from Fulton County, thanked Trump for coming into “a roomful of women that the current administration would consider domestic terrorists.” (“That’s true,” he replied.) But had undecided women watching at home learned anything more about Trump that might inform their vote? No. Did they at least have a good time? Probably not.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

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Donald Trump’s recent comments on abortion have been evasive and contradictory. He takes credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, but says his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He first refused to commit to vetoing a national abortion ban, but later said he would. He criticized Florida’s six-week ban as too early, but only a day later said that he would vote against a ballot measure there that would expand abortion rights.

He has, however, been consistent on one position: his opposition to what he calls abortion “after birth,” something he claims his Democratic rivals support. For example, at the September presidential debate, he declared that Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, support the “execution” of babies after they are born. Trump brought up Democratic support for “execution of a baby after birth” again in an X post later that month.

As a debate moderator noted, killing a baby after birth is illegal in all states. What Trump appears to have in mind, and to be disparaging, is perinatal palliative care (PPC)—a crucial medical service aimed at improving quality of life for women and their babies after a severe fetal diagnosis or extreme prematurity. Established ethics guidelines govern who is eligible based on the specifics of a diagnosis, a baby’s chance for survival, and what complications the baby is likely to suffer. PPC can begin at diagnosis during pregnancy, and include standard prenatal care in addition to psychological, emotional, and mental-health support for the parents. If the baby is born alive, the care continues until the infant’s death.

The thing to understand about perinatal palliative care is that no health-care provider or parent ends the baby’s life before or after birth. It’s not an execution, regardless of Trump’s claims. Parents who choose perinatal palliative care are choosing to forgo life-extending interventions, which can inflict or extend their child’s suffering, seeking instead to maximize quality of life for their child when survival is impossible or unlikely.

[Emma Camp: Yes, third-trimester abortions are happening in America]

The bitter irony of Trump’s attacks is that anti-abortion advocates have long pushed PPC as the alternative to abortion for such pregnancies. For instance, Americans United for Life created a policy guide and model legislation called the Perinatal Hospice Information Act in 2018. Following that model legislation, numerous states passed laws requiring abortion seekers to be notified of options for perinatal palliative care before they could receive an abortion. These laws essentially advertised PPC as protecting women because, proponents argued, PPC is less psychologically damaging than abortion. An anti-abortion advocate told a local newspaper in Missouri that “the grieving process is actually better for the woman by actually going ahead and giving birth,” rather than having an abortion. (Research suggests that the psychological outcomes and feelings of regret are the same.)

With PPC available as an option, some anti-abortion leaders shamed women for choosing abortion. For instance, Pope Francis blamed a “culture of rejection” that labels children as “incompatible with life” when they should really be “welcomed, loved, and nurtured.” Perinatal palliative care became the answer for what “good” mothers do when faced with such a diagnosis: not “forsake the child but allow the little one to feel human warmth and love,” and appreciate the “gift of time” with their baby first during pregnancy and later when he or she dies.

That sentiment was on display late last year when Kate Cox sued Texas, seeking a declaration that the state abortion ban’s life-of-the-mother exception applied to her. Cox’s baby had a fatal condition known as Trisomy 18; continuing the pregnancy could have destroyed her chances at having another living child, because of her health risks and prior Cesarean sections. But the Texas Supreme Court rejected her claim, and Cox left the state to obtain abortion care. Texas Right to Life, a prominent anti-abortion group, disparaged Cox’s lawsuit, saying that her child was “uniquely precious” and that the “compassionate approach to these heartbreaking diagnoses is perinatal palliative care, which honors, rather than ends, the child’s life.”

In the post-Dobbs era, most states that had once used PPC as a tool to dissuade women from abortion don’t need to do so anymore; those states have banned abortion. Most states with abortion bans lack an exception for fetal anomalies, and when such an exception exists, it is only for a tiny subset of diagnoses. Thus, people in these states are now being forced to continue their pregnancies, enduring the risks and burdens of pregnancy only to watch their child die.

This means that the need for perinatal palliative care is growing dramatically. A recent study found a 13 percent rise in infant mortality in Texas in 2022, after its six-week abortion ban went into effect in late 2021. (The rest of the country saw a 2 percent increase during that same period.) The biggest jump was in infant deaths due to congenital abnormalities, which rose by nearly a quarter. But many of the states that have restricted abortion have done little or nothing to expand access to PPC for those desiring it. And now that state abortion bans have eliminated the need to pressure families to not choose abortion, the anti-abortion movement may be rethinking its support for palliative care.

[Read: Abortion isn’t about feminism]

Trump, for his part, portrays perinatal palliative care as something callous and murderous. As he put it at a 2019 rally, “The baby is born and you wrap the baby beautifully and you talk to the mother about the possible execution of the baby.” At least according to Trump, parents who choose perinatal palliative care are killing their child, acting just as reprehensibly, in his view, as someone who chooses an abortion.

Trump’s comments make clear that in the post-Dobbs world, there is no right answer for pregnant people facing a devastating fetal anomaly. A mother, apparently, should not only put her body on the line to grow and birth a child who will die in her arms, but force that child into aggressive interventions that may only cause and prolong the child’s suffering.

The most empowering solution for families in such a situation is to provide them with accurate, neutral, and comprehensive counseling regarding their options—abortion, perinatal palliative care, and life-prolonging care. Each path can be justified by a parent’s compassion and love, and each has been chosen by good parents, doing the best they can for their families in an incredibly difficult situation. Donald Trump’s decision to use his platform to stigmatize and berate families in crisis shows how deeply he misunderstands the issue—and, more appalling, his failure to muster any compassion at all for the people living through it.