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Alabama

‘There’s People That Are Absolutely Ready to Take on a Civil War’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › trump-duluth-georgia-rally › 680354

Tucker Carlson’s eyes narrowed as he conjured the image. A Donald Trump victory, he said at a campaign event in Gwinnett County, Georgia, last night, “will be a middle finger wagging in the face of the worst people in the English-speaking world.”

Trump maintains that he’s running for president a third time to restore and unite the country. But many Democrats and even some Republicans have expressed profound concern for democracy and overall safety if the former president wins this election. Last night at the Gwinnett County event, sponsored by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, I asked Trump’s supporters to consider the inverse: What do you think will happen if Trump loses?

The more Trump rallies I attended, the more this question had been gnawing at me. He has framed this presidential contest as a “final battle,” and he may well win. But if he doesn’t, I wanted to know if he and his supporters would really go quietly. I heard a range of answers last night, from promises to accept the outcome to predictions of a new Civil War.

I approached the former Trump-administration official Peter Navarro, who was signing copies of his book The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform. Earlier this year, Navarro spent four months in prison. Like another Trump ally, Steve Bannon, Navarro had been found in contempt of Congress after failing to comply with subpoenas from the House Select Committee on January 6. If Trump loses the election, Navarro told me that “the country will disintegrate,” and he warned of “very hard times.” I asked him if he thought something akin to another January 6 might occur. “By asking that question you’re trying to stir up shit, man,” he said. He told me that my query would be better suited for President Joe Biden and the Democrats. “Those assholes put me in prison,” he said. “Do you hear me?”

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

Another former Trump-administration official, Ben Carson, took a more conciliatory approach to my question. “I think we’ll have to regroup and try to figure out how we can save our country,” Carson said. He told me he doubted that another event like the storming of the Capitol would take place. “I think regardless of who wins or loses, we’ve got to tone down the dissension and the hatred that’s going on in our country, or it’s going to be destroyed,” Carson said.

Rank-and-file Trump supporters had varying opinions on the matter. I chatted with one attendee, Joshua Barnes, while he waited in line to buy strawberry smoothies for himself and his wife at a food truck outside the arena. The couple had driven four hours that morning from their home in Alabama to hear Trump speak live for the first time. “If she does become president, as much as I would hate it, you kind of do have to accept it,” Barnes said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He told me he did not want another insurrection to occur, but he acknowledged the possibility of something worse: a period of postelection unrest, or even civil war. (He pointed me to a Rasmussen survey from the spring that had shown a distressingly high percentage of respondents saying the same thing.)

A man from Gwinnett County named Rich who works in construction told me that this was his fourth Trump rally. “I’m a pretty good judge of character, and when people are trying to shovel me a load of garbage, it’s like, No, it stinks, okay?” he said of Harris and the Democrats. He predicted protests no matter who loses, but did not anticipate another January 6, which he referred to as a “situation” and not an insurrection. As for something closer to a civil war? “I think anything’s possible; I don’t think it’s out of the question, and I really can’t elaborate on that,” he said, adding only that he was hoping it wouldn’t happen.

In the parking lot, I met a man named Mark Williams, who told me he ran the biggest political printing business in Georgia. I took a seat in a folding chair behind his table of yard signs and other wares, and he offered me a red-white-and-blue can of Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right 100% Woke-Free American Beer. (“Eat steak, lift weights, be uncensorable, drink a little beer,” read the slogan.) Though Williams supports Trump, he was levelheaded about both the current election and the previous one. He did not believe Trump’s claim that he’d really won in 2020. “I think we’re more accepting than the media gives us credit for,” Williams said of he and his fellow Republicans. “The actions of a few get painted with that big brush,” he said, pointing to January 6. “So, yeah, there’s going to be some crazy people that do some crazy shit; that just happens. But the actions of most of us, I mean, we’ll bitch about it and scream at each other and all that kind of stuff, but we’re not going to break into the Capitol and stuff. I’m as big a Trump supporter as anybody, but I didn’t feel compelled to go breaking into the Capitol. And those people that did that did wrong. And I don’t know that all of them did wrong, but the ones that did, they needed to be punished.”

Williams told me he had never considered a new civil war seriously until he attended Kid Rock’s Rock the Country festival in Rome, Georgia, earlier this year. He described some of the chatter he heard at the festival, such as When we have to go out on the field and fight these people, y’all going to be there with us? “It did surprise me a little bit, the tone that some of these guys were taking; I think there’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war,” he said. “I think that if there was an overwhelming view of a crooked election or something like that—yeah, I could see it happening.”

Many of the Trump supporters I interviewed sounded worried about future political violence. Some identified as pacifists. Others believed that unrest was almost a given. A 23-year-old named Ben told me he had skipped his classes at the University of Georgia to attend yesterday’s rally. I asked him if he thought January 6 could happen again in the event of a Trump defeat. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’ll be real this time.” He told me that he wasn’t sure what he, personally, would do if Trump lost. “I wouldn’t want to act on instinct, but I would be angry,” he said. He volunteered that he believed that Church and state needed to be remarried. “If Trump was dictator, I would support him,” he said. He insisted that he wasn’t trolling me.

[Read: Why are we humoring them?]

When Trump addressed the crowd, he made no secret of his authoritarian aspirations. He raised the possibility of suing 60 Minutes over its editing of an interview with Harris, and made the baffling claim that gang members were taking over Times Square with weapons that the U.S. military doesn’t have. (“But we have guys that want to confront them, and they’re gonna be allowed to confront them, and we’re gonna get ’em the hell out of here.”) Once again, he promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in history. He also said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which would grant him authority to detain, relocate, or deport foreigners deemed an enemy, and called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen.

That last point is a particularly charged issue in Georgia. A 63-year-old attendee I met named Linda told me her daughters had been in the same sorority as Laken Riley, the 22-year-old student who was murdered earlier this year while jogging. Riley’s alleged assailant is a man from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally, and her death has become a conservative rallying cry, especially for Trump, as it was again last night. (“I feel like we’ll be more like Venezuela if the Democrats get in there,” Linda told me.)

After losing Georgia in 2020, Trump tried to overturn the state’s election results. In the four years since, he’s only grown more unstable, and he’s predicated his 2024 campaign on retribution. This time around, Trump has been encouraging his supporters to vote early, and he’s pushing a new catchphrase: “Too big to rig.” He’s not thinking about what happens if he loses; he wants a landslide victory.

There’s No Coming Back From Dobbs

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › health › archive › 2024 › 10 › abortion-roe-dobbs-election-hangover › 680332

In the fall of 2021, Tammi Kromenaker started looking for a new home for her North Dakota abortion clinic. For more than 20 years, Red River Women’s Clinic had provided abortion care to the Fargo area, most of that time as the state’s only provider. But now Kromenaker, the practice’s owner and director, was moving it just across the state line to Minnesota. “We had seen the writing on the wall,” she told me. A few months earlier, the Supreme Court had announced that it would take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and North Dakota had a trigger law that would almost completely ban abortion if the justices ruled in favor of Dobbs.

“We closed on a new building at 3 p.m. the day before they overturned Roe,” Kromenaker recalled. Over the next 47 days, with the help of $1 million raised through GoFundMe, she oversaw a frantic move and remodel, sneaking around in a hat and sunglasses to keep the new location a secret; another planned clinic had just been set on fire in Wyoming. Meanwhile, Kromenaker’s clinic sued the state of North Dakota to block the trigger ban.

Last month, a North Dakota judge struck down the state’s abortion ban in response to Red River’s suit. Kromenaker could now return to providing abortions in Fargo, but she told me she has no plans to. That leaves the state with no dedicated abortion providers.

In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, abortion access has been all but obliterated in 14 states. Perhaps the most obvious consequence is what has happened to brick-and-mortar abortion providers: Clinics have closed, while physicians have fled restrictive states or left medicine altogether. In communities across the country, abortion pills have also been heavily restricted. A push to expand the rights of a fetus has coincided with a rise in pregnancy-related prosecutions, most of which have nothing to do with abortion—210 women were criminally charged in 12 states in the year after Dobbs, the highest number of such cases in a single year since 1973, according to one report.

The backlash has been forceful. Since Dobbs, citizens in six states have voted for ballot measures protecting abortion access. Next month, abortion rights will again be on the ballot, in 10 states. In the first presidential election since Roe was overturned, abortion has become a defining issue. Many Republican politicians, including the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, have attempted to court female voters by wavering on their previous anti-abortion positions. (Trump’s wife, Melania, released a memoir this month, in which she underscored her support for abortion rights.) Meanwhile, Democrats, especially the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, have campaigned heavily on restoring national reproductive rights. But a Democratic woman in the White House or new federal abortion protections won’t turn back the clock to 2021. Call it the Dobbs legacy, or the Dobbs hangover—the effects of America’s eroded abortion access will linger for years, if not decades.

[Read: Kamala Harris’s biggest advantage]

This summer, on the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, a coalition of groups including Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that they were committing $100 million to Abortion Access Now, a campaign to pass federal legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion. Harris has floated one potential path: scrapping the filibuster to push reproductive protections through Congress. (That would probably require Democrats to control both chambers, which does not look likely.) If new federal protections were passed, “you would see overnight relief in a lot of places, depending on the nature of the legislation,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, a co-chair of Abortion Access Now and the executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, told me.

New federal protections, however, wouldn’t instantly undo the tangle of abortion restrictions that some states began enacting even before Dobbs was decided. Reproductive health in America is governed by a complex web of laws, regulations, and court decisions at the local, state, and federal levels. When the Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for abortion on June 24, 2022, trigger laws designed to ban abortion went into effect. By the end of the year, states had enacted 50 new abortion restrictions, many of them resulting in near-total bans. No federal law could immediately undo all of these restrictions at once. Around the country, clinics closed, moved, or quit providing abortions; as of March, the U.S. had 42 fewer clinics than in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research and policy group.

With so many barriers in place, some medical providers have decided that living and working in states with restrictions isn’t worth the emotional and professional toll. In one recent study of ob-gyns in Texas, where abortion is banned with few exceptions, 13 percent of respondents said they plan to retire early, 21 percent said they either plan to or have thought about leaving to practice in another state, and 2 percent said they have already left. An analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that applications for ob-gyn residency programs in Alabama, which has a total ban except in cases of “serious health risk” to a pregnant woman, dropped 21.2 percent in the first full cycle after the Dobbs decision.

[From the October 2024 issue: ‘That’s something that you won’t recover from as a doctor’]

None of these policies has reduced the number of abortions performed nationally since Dobbs—in fact, the number has increased—but their consequences have ricocheted far beyond abortion. As obstetricians have fled restrictive states, for example, access to other gynecological care has become strained, too. And this month, Louisiana reclassified the two drugs used in medication abortions as Schedule IV controlled substances, a category typically reserved for drugs with a potential for dependency, such as Xanax and Valium. Mifepristone and misoprostol, which can be prescribed by telehealth, have played a significant role in abortion access since Dobbs. In Louisiana’s bid to further restrict the drugs, the state has potentially limited their use in other routine applications, such as treating miscarriages, inducing labor, and stopping potentially fatal postpartum hemorrhaging.

Even if new federal abortion protections were passed into law tomorrow, restoring nationwide access would still likely take significant time. Clinics, for instance, need real estate and doctors and lots and lots of capital to open or move—that’s partly why, after a 2016 Supreme Court case struck down a Texas law designed to force clinics out of business, the number of providers in the state a year later remained a fraction of what it was before. After Alabama banned abortion in 2022, WAWC Healthcare, in Tuscaloosa, remained open to provide contraception and prenatal care but eventually lost its abortion provider, says Robin Marty, WAWC’s executive director. Such positions might be filled by recent graduates, but the pool of qualified providers in restrictive states will remain small for years thanks to plummeting residency enrollments—most doctors tend to stay in the state where they do their residency.

Recent legal fights in Ohio provide a glimpse of how even sweeping abortion protections don’t automatically undo the effects of restrictions, and could lead to new ones. Last year, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to an abortion. But pro-abortion-rights advocates in the state are still fighting to throw out the state’s six-week ban and a law banning telemedicine in medication abortions, among other restrictions. Meanwhile, a state legislator has introduced a new bill that would withhold state funding from cities and counties that provide funding for local groups that provide abortion-support services such as gas money for patients. The immediate result of any national abortion protection would probably be a protracted legal battle. “Every state has a different assemblage of abortion restrictions,” Inez McGuire said. “A lot of that is going to be fought out through our judicial system. That is a daunting prospect.”

Roe’s downfall also opened up space for anti-abortion activists to renew their battle to recognize the rights of the fetus as a person. In February, when the Alabama Supreme Court found that IVF embryos are legally children, anti-abortion activists widely celebrated the decision as a sign that the country was ready to engage in this debate. As support for fetal rights has grown, pregnant people have found their bodily autonomy curtailed even when they’re not deciding whether to continue a pregnancy: According to the nonprofit group Pregnancy Justice, of the 210 cases of pregnant people who faced criminal charges, just five mentioned abortion. The majority alleged only substance abuse. In one, police charged an overdosing pregnant woman with child neglect after administering Narcan.

[Helen Lewis: The women killed by the Dobbs decision]

Abortion advocates, too, are adjusting to the new reality. Abortion access had been whittled away for decades before Dobbs was decided. But now the constitutional right to an abortion in America is no longer being infringed upon; it just doesn’t exist. Several clinic directors told me that it’s clear to them now that no new law will ever provide unassailable protection. When North Dakota’s ban was struck down by a district court last month, it wasn’t the first time; the same judge blocked a nearly identical abortion ban in 2022, eventually prompting the state legislature to repeal it and pass a new one with minor changes. Just this month, Georgia’s Supreme Court restored a six-week abortion ban that a lower court had overturned while it considers an appeal. “There is no finish line here,” says Katie Quinonez-Alonzo, the executive director of Women’s Health Center, which opened a branch of its West Virginia clinic three and a half hours away in Maryland after Dobbs. “This is work that needs to be done forever.” Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of media and policy for Students for Life of America, told me that the group already has a “Roe 2.0 Rollback plan” in place, ready to deploy at the state and federal levels after the election. “We are prepared legislatively and legally to address the human rights issue of the day, no matter which way the election turns out,” she told me.

Some clinics are tired of fighting. “If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said we were completely ready to go should abortion somehow return to Alabama,” Robin Marty told me. Now she’s not so sure. “We worked in extraordinarily hostile conditions” before Dobbs, Marty said. Clinic staff faced daily protesters, in the parking lot and sometimes even at the back door. Anti-abortion activists filed malpractice complaints against them, reported them to the fire department for allegedly having too many people in the clinic, and alleged health-privacy violations after digging through the clinic’s dumpster and finding a piece of paper from a patient’s file. “Having abortion become illegal and then having it return would be even more dangerous right now. If it comes back, they’re going to be even angrier,” Marty said.

When Red River first opened, in 1998, the threat of extinction was already in the air. The previous director had chosen to name the clinic after a body of water that runs between North Dakota and Minnesota, so that the reference would still make sense on the other side of the state border. When Kromenaker finally made the move, her life became easier virtually overnight, because Minnesota was among the states that had passed abortion protections after Dobbs. “We ended up in a state where providing this care is more straightforward, more patient-centered and with less stigmatizing restrictions,” Kromenaker said. “We would never take a step back and re-inflict those restrictions on ourselves.”

[Read: Abortion pills have changed the post-Roe calculus]

The United States cannot easily go back to the pre-Dobbs status quo. In the past two years, too much has changed—more than 100 new legal provisions, dozens of clinics closed, and a cultural gulf that has grown ever wider. For both abortion-rights supporters and opponents, only one possibility remains: to inhabit the reality we all live in now.

The Positions That the Democrats Won’t Defend

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › trump-rachel-levine-trans-issues › 680333

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Under normal circumstances, you would not expect a crowd of regular Americans—even those engaged enough to go to a political rally—to recognize an assistant secretary of health and human services. But the crowd at Donald Trump’s appearance earlier this month at the Santander Arena, in Reading, Pennsylvania, started booing as soon as Rachel Levine’s image appeared on the Jumbotron.

That’s because Levine is the highest-profile transgender official in the Biden administration, and she has become a public face of the American left’s support for medical gender transition by minors. Having heard the Reading crowd’s ugly, full-throated reaction to Levine’s mere image, I understand why the prospect of a second Trump term might alarm transgender Americans—or the parents of gender-nonconforming children. I also more clearly understand Trump’s strategy: to rile up voters over positions that he thinks the Democrats won’t dare defend.

Back in 2016, the Republican presidential nominee portrayed himself as a moderate on trans rights, saying that Caitlyn Jenner was welcome to use whatever bathroom she wanted to at Trump Tower. But Trump’s rhetoric has become steadily more inflammatory, and his positions have hardened. Many commentators have nevertheless been surprised by the ferocity of Republican attacks on this issue. In 2022, the party’s efforts to exploit trans-rights controversies for electoral gain repelled more voters than they attracted, and recent polling in three swing states shows that more than half of respondents agreed that “society should accept transgender people as having the gender they identify with.”

[Read: The slop candidate]

Yet polls have also detected considerable public skepticism on three specific points: gender-related medical interventions for minors, the incarceration of trans women in women’s jails, and trans women’s participation in female sports. In Pennsylvania, one attack ad is on repeat throughout prime-time television. It ends: “Kamala’s for they/them; President Trump is for you.” The Republicans have spent $17 million on ads like this, according to NPR. “Republicans see an issue that can break through, especially with Trump voters who’ve been supporting Democratic candidates for Senate,” Semafor’s Dave Weigel wrote recently.

Trump has always used his audiences as an editor, refining his talking points based on the raw feedback of boos and cheers. At the rally in Reading, the image of Levine—pictured in the admiral’s uniform she wears as head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps—was part of a montage dedicated to condemning what Trump called the “woke military.” This video juxtaposed clips from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—meant to represent good old-fashioned military discipline—with more recent footage of drag queens lip-synching to Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam.” Never mind that Full Metal Jacket is an anti-war film showing how sustained brutalization corrodes the soul.

This video is part of Republicans’ larger argument that their opponents are big-city elitists who have attempted to change the culture by imposing radical policies from above and then refused to defend them when challenged—and instead called anyone who disagreed a bigot. Many on the left see transgender acceptance as the next frontier of the civil-rights movement and favor far-reaching efforts to uproot discrimination. Yet activists and their supporters have waved away genuinely complex questions: Some claim, despite the available evidence from most sports, that biological males have no athletic advantage over females—perhaps because this is an easier argument to make than saying that the inclusion of trans women should outweigh any question of fairness to their competitors.

Others default to the idea that underage medical transition is “lifesaving” and therefore cannot be questioned—even though systematic evidence reviews by several European countries found a dearth of good research to support that assertion. According to emails unsealed earlier this year in an Alabama court case, Levine successfully urged the influential World Professional Association for Transgender Health to eliminate minimum-age guidelines for gender-transition hormones and surgeries.

The Republicans are using trans issues as a symbol of “wokeness” more generally—what conservatives paint as a rejection of common sense, and as a top-down imposition of alienating values by fiat. In right-wing online echo chambers, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is known as “Tampon Tim” for signing a state law calling for menstrual products to be placed in both girls’ and boys’ bathrooms. Throughout the speeches in Trump’s Reading event, talk of “men playing in women’s sports” and an exhortation to “keep men out of women’s sports” reliably drew the biggest cheers of the night. (Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for Senate, brought up the issue, as did Trump himself.) The former president’s 90-minute speech had an extended riff on underage transition—and how schools might avoid telling parents about their child’s shifting gender. “How about this—pushing transgender ideology onto minor children?” Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”

Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed. In the presidential debate, many commentators laughed at the bizarre phrasing of Trump’s claim that Kamala Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” But the charge was basically true: While running for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Harris replied “Yes” to an ACLU questionnaire that asked her if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”

This year, Harris has mostly avoided such issues. She has tacitly moved her position from the left toward the center without explaining the shift or answering whether she believes she was previously wrong—a microcosm of her campaign in general.

As with abortion, a compromise position on gender exists that would satisfy a plurality of voters. Essentially: Let people live however makes them happy, but be cautious about medicalizing children and insist on fair competition in female sports. But Harris has been unwilling or unable to articulate it, and candidates in downballot races have followed her lead. You can see why: Even as polls suggest that many voters are more hesitant than the median Democratic activist, any backsliding by candidates from the progressive line alienates influential LGBTQ groups. In Texas, the Democrat candidate for Senate, Colin Allred, has faced such a barrage of ads about female sports from the Ted Cruz campaign that he cut his own spot in response. “Let me be clear; I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports,” Allred says in the clip. The LGBTQ publication The Advocate wrote this up as him having “embraced far-right language around gender identity.”

[Read: The improbable coalition that is Harris’s best hope]

Like Allred, the Harris campaign has realized, belatedly, that silence is hurting the candidate’s cause. When the vice president was interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News last week, she made sure to raise a New York Times story about how the Trump administration had also offered taxpayer-funded gender medicine in prisons. “I will follow the law,” Harris said. “And it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed.”

Is that enough to neutralize the attacks? Seems unlikely: The Republican ads have not disappeared from the airwaves, because they bolster the party’s broader theme that Harris is more radical than she pretends to be. Which is the real Kamala Harris—the tough prosecutor of the 2010s or the ultraprogressive candidate of 2019 and 2020?

Presumably her campaign believes that every day spent talking about gender medicine for teens is one not spent discussing Trump’s mental fitness or disdain for democratic norms. In the absence of her articulating a compromise position, however, the Republicans are defining the contours of the debate in ways that could prove fateful—for Harris, for trans people, and for the country as a whole.