Mike Solana has opinions. Here are a few of them: Building stuff is good. The media are unduly harsh on tech companies. Labeling things as “misinformation” is just an excuse to stifle speech. Donald Trump is “the greatest clown in human history” (though not entirely in a bad way), the court cases against him are “fake show trials,” and J. D. Vance would be “a great guy in the White House.” The siege of the Capitol on January 6 was a “riot” like many others the previous year. Also, the Capitol rioters should have been shot. (He later retracted this one.) Kamala Harris is a joke of a presidential candidate, but it’d be fun to get a drink with her and gossip about members of Congress. The Democrats are “no longer a free-speech party.” Fewer people should vote. Germany is “a very stupid nation,” but France is cool. Marvel movies are good. Cats are bad. The moon should be a state.

Solana has shared these views—and many more—on Pirate Wires, the newsletter turned website that he started in 2020, as well as on his podcast of the same name. He’s also prolific on X, where he lobs takes to his quarter-million followers and trolls his haters—mostly on the left—from behind his distinctive avatar, a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, and where Elon Musk regularly replies to his posts.

I was curious to see if the corporeal Solana matched the online version. When we met up at his favorite dive bar in Miami, where he lives, he did not disappoint, riffing on topics as varied as immigration (we need to slow it down to allow for assimilation), gay identity (it doesn’t make sense as a category), and his theory that the Marvel villain Thanos is a typical “environmentalist” because he wants to eliminate half the human population. Solana delivers his spiels with a sunny, earnest energy; with his large eyes and lively brows, he looks like a friendly Pixar dog. So it’s a bit jarring to hear him hold forth on, say, why liberals hate themselves.

For years, Solana played a supporting role in the tech world, serving as the chief marketing officer for Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture-capital firm. Solana calls Thiel his mentor, and says he owes his career to him.

Solana started Pirate Wires during the pandemic and has built it into a small media company covering tech, politics, and culture. After raising money from Thiel and Founders Fund, among others, in 2023, he hired a handful of staff. The Pirate Wires free daily newsletter now has 100,000 subscribers, mostly young men, according to Solana. (He would not disclose how many readers have signed up for paid subscriptions, which provide expanded access to the site.) It has become a must-read among Silicon Valley’s anti-woke crowd, including some of tech’s most influential figures, and a grudging should-read for journalists and some on the left trying to glimpse the thinking of the masters of the Thiel-verse.

Solana’s rise corresponds with the ascent of a new political ideology in Silicon Valley, one that mixes pro-tech, anti-media, and Trump-curious sentiments. To the extent that Pirate Wires has a thesis statement, it might be Solana’s pinned post on X: “I just want us to be fucking amazing.” From his perspective, the good guys are the ones trying to build stuff, while the bad guys are the ones getting in the way. These bad guys take many forms: regulators, censors, scolds, environmentalists, and “decels.” Solana doesn’t think the stuff the good guys build is always good. They can create phones that addict people, apps that spy on them, or—perhaps worst of all—generative-AI tools that refuse to show white people. But Solana trusts their motivations, and he thinks we should hear them out.  

“Technology is neither good nor bad,” he told me. “I think that it just changes the world, and there’s always a trade-off. And the question is, is it worth the trade-off? And I think most of it is.”

Solana rejects efforts to categorize his political views. He used to be a libertarian, then he was a Marxist, then he became libertarian again, only more so. Now he says he’s open to government taking a role in problem-solving—“I’m fine with taxes,” he said—and considers himself a pragmatist: “I just want things to work. I just want a new rail system. If I have to be left-wing, sure, I’ll be left-wing until the rail is finished. And then what else do I want? I want crime to be illegal. Is that right-wing? Okay, I’ll be right-wing then.” In practice, Solana articulates a politics that could be described as less pro-Trump than anti-anti-Trump. It’s often a matter of emphasis: Whatever the right might be doing wrong, the left’s reaction is worse.

Pirate Wires itself is a mix of opinion essays by Solana and others, interviews with major tech figures such as Jack Dorsey and Palmer Luckey, and reporting on tech and San Francisco politics largely from a left-critical perspective. Solana said his target reader is “a smart guy in tech or business, in his 20s or 30s, who feels a little disaffected by the conversations around him and craves community with like-minded people.” The message seems to be: We’re having more fun than you. Join us.

For now, Solana is juggling Pirate Wires with his day job at Founders Fund. To his detractors, this fact suggests that Pirate Wires is simply the house organ for Silicon Valley billionaires. But Solana stresses that the site is separate from the investment firm—Thiel has no editorial control—and says he wants it to be more than just an “anti-woke New York Times op-ed page.” “I want to be generating real news about the industry,” he said. Whether that’s possible while conducting friendly interviews with allies and taking orders from Thiel by day is an open question.

Solana’s favorite movie is The Matrix. He was 13 when it came out, in 1999, and what resonated most, besides its philosophy, was its portrayal of camaraderie. “I think everybody wants to feel like they’re in this secret crew with special knowledge about the world, right?” he said. “You’re looking at this dystopian environment and you’re thinking, Wouldn’t it be cool if I was there?”

Solana grew up in a cramped house on the Jersey Shore, the son of a teacher and an on-and-off construction worker. He got mediocre grades until senior year of high school, when, he said, he decided to pay attention in class and became an A student. “This feeling of being the smart one in class became super addicting,” he said. “I loved being better than everybody else.”

At Boston University, Solana grew irritated watching other kids coast. “I used to wreck people in class,” he said. This was his Marxist phase. Solana explains himself during that period as “a boy who realized he wanted to date other boys in the Bush years and needed a place to go where people said, There’s nothing wrong with you.” But then one day in class, he was arguing against property rights when he realized that he didn’t believe what he was saying. He turned back to libertarianism.

After college, Solana took an internship at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then a job as an editorial assistant at Penguin Books in New York City. The imprint where he worked, TarcherPenguin, specialized in titles on metaphysics, the occult, and other offbeat topics. Mitch Horowitz, who was then Tarcher’s editor in chief and has written several books on the occult as well as hosting the Discovery series Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction, told me he felt an affinity with Solana. “I knew the experience of feeling like an outsider,” Horowitz said.

In 2009, Solana read an essay by Thiel called “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which Thiel lays out a vision for how to “escape” politics by means of the internet, outer space, and living at sea. (It’s the essay in which Thiel famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”) Solana reached out to the Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute—an organization dedicated to establishing semiautonomous ocean-based communities—and offered to work for free. He began organizing meetups in New York, and Thiel came to the first one. “He said he had a book he was working on but didn’t know anything about publishing,” Solana said. “I was like, ‘Great—I know everything about publishing.’”

[Barton Gellman: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

Solana moved to San Francisco to work for Thiel, who needed help preparing to teach a Stanford class on start-ups. Solana and another young colleague would stay up late creating slides, download them onto two thumb drives, and commute separately from San Francisco to Palo Alto in case one of them hit traffic. The class was a digest of Thiel’s business philosophy—including the idea that monopolies can be good and “competition is for losers”—and became the basis for his best-selling book, Zero to One.

Solana wasn’t an obvious fit for Founders Fund. He felt intimidated being surrounded by experts in investing and engineering. But the company didn’t have a PR department, so Solana took up the task, in addition to organizing events and running the firm’s branding. He was also doing his own writing. In 2014, he published a sci-fi novel, Citizen Sim, and got a starred review in Kirkus Reviews. But he largely avoided writing about politics. “It felt much bigger than me,” Solana said of his fiction. “I didn’t want to poison that with my own opinions.”

That gradually changed after the 2016 election. “I was like, I’d follow this man to hell,” Solana said, of Thiel. “And then he endorsed Trump, and I did.” Solana was never exactly a Trump fan, but he found the left’s reaction to Trump’s presidency hysterical. “Trump’s purpose was the same as a court jester,” he told me. “He existed to throw the curtain back and point at the reality of what our government is and how it functions and what we’re capable of and what America is right now.” Solana started tweeting more, and his tweets were sharp and unvarnished. (“Imagine being as good at anything as germany is at fascism”; “journalists don’t miss gawker, they miss power.”) His follower count grew.

In March 2020, he created a podcast called Problematic and soon started writing a newsletter. Solana says the name Pirate Wires came to him as if it were a memory. (The protagonist in his sci-fi novel has a similar experience when discovering his powers.) It evokes various antecedents: pirate radio, digital piracy, piracy on the high seas—romantic rule-breaking for fun and profit. He stopped worrying about his political opinions hurting his career as a fiction writer: “I realized that this was my work.”

Illustration by Adam Maida

In June of this year, Solana published a manifesto titled “We Are the Media Now.” In it, he tells the familiar story of how, over the past two decades, news organizations went from comfortable businesses subsidized by classifieds to click-hungry digital-content machines reliant on display advertising. Their mistake, he writes, was a failure to control their distribution, which led to a collapse when Facebook and other social-media companies turned down the traffic spigot.

Solana says he’s designed Pirate Wires around the inbox. “That’s all that matters now,” he said. “If you don’t have distribution, you’re not a media company.” There’s an intimacy to being in a reader’s digital space, he says, which lends itself to a more personal form of writing. The challenge of the inbox is creating enough content without overwhelming the reader. For Solana, that means keeping it brief. The daily newsletter is three quick takes with no outbound links, so a reader can digest it and move on with their day. “You wake up; you read it; you’re like, Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah,” Solana said. Paid subscriptions are $20 a month or $120 annually—fairly steep for the amount of material you get.

The problem with most establishment media, Solana said, is they’re all doing the same thing. “The New York Times has a very distinct style that happens to be very popular,” he said. “The Washington Post, the L.A. Times—they’re just doing New York Times drag worse, much worse.” What makes Pirate Wires distinctive, he says, is its point of view, which leads it to report stories that liberal-leaning outlets might not.

Media coverage of technology goes through cycles. In the 1980s and ’90s, it was largely booster-ish. Steven Levy’s book Hackers valorized the “heroes of the computer revolution,” and Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine portrayed engineers as romantic obsessives. Wired magazine charted the rise of the personal computer and commercial internet with nerdy glee. The dot-com crash induced a brief bout of skepticism, but the following decade and a half saw a return to form as Google, Amazon, and Facebook ascended.

After Trump was elected, journalists turned a critical eye on the industry, and a thousand scandals bloomed: Cambridge Analytica, Uber’s efforts to evade law enforcement, alleged sexual misconduct at Google, the Facebook Papers. Theranos was exposed as a fraud and WeWork as a folly. “Move fast and break things” went from promise to threat, while start-ups pledging to “make the world a better place” became a punch line on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Also, Juicero.

But to many in Silicon Valley, the “techlash” felt like an overcorrection. The solution, according to some tech leaders: “going direct.” That is, bypassing news outlets and communicating directly with one’s audience, be it on X or one’s own website or podcast. Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of the popular All-In podcast, told me in an email that he advises founders not to talk with journalists at “left-leaning publications”: “You’ll get slaughtered if you speak to The Atlantic, The New York Times, or NPR. Going direct allows you to reach more folks and avoid having your message distorted by an angry journalist looking to score points with their paid subscribers.” Calacanis added that he planned to post his responses to my questions on X, lest I misquote him.

Tech-insider media such as Pirate Wires might be considered a half step between the traditional route and going direct. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, says Pirate Wires is taking advantage of the “atomization” of media, in which readers have relationships with specific people rather than institutions. “Solana is a hybrid creature—he’s got one foot in the tech world, but he’s also just an actually good writer with a lot of access,” says Liz Wolfe, an assistant editor at Reason magazine who writes about tech. “A layperson could feasibly read Pirate Wires and understand what a whole bunch of people in Silicon Valley are talking about behind closed doors that I think frankly a lot of the tech press isn’t aware of.”

In “We Are the Media Now,” Solana implores tech workers to “give us information. Why are you sharing scoops with journalists who hate you?”

Mat Honan, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, told me he started following Solana for his media criticism. “Even when he was totally wrong or being an asshole, I thought he was funny,” Honan said. Ben Smith, the editor in chief and a co-founder of Semafor, told me he’s “basically a fan” of Pirate Wires. “It’s a valuable articulation of how a slice of powerful people in Silicon Valley see the world,” Smith said.

Solana does have blind spots, Smith added. “When Mike writes about the media, it reminds me of the way the media writes about Silicon Valley: These are plausible theories if you haven’t had much contact with the workings of an industry you’re writing about.”

As for Solana urging tech-industry readers to share information with him instead of with journalists who “hate you,” Smith said there’s a word for this: access journalism. “That’s a very classic pitch you hear every day in Washington,” Smith said. “I guess he’s really learning.”

“He’s a little bit of a bitch,” Solana told me, claiming that Smith had made condescending comments about him and Pirate Wires online. Smith said he didn’t know what Solana was talking about. “He should report that out,” Smith said.

In January 2022, Solana organized a summit called Hereticon. Billed as a conference for “thoughtcrime,” the event—held at the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach—featured speakers on topics including UFOs, cyborgs, sex work, hypnosis, polyamory, and eugenics. Mitch Horowitz, Solana’s former boss, gave a talk on why ESP is real. Grimes DJed, while Elon Musk bobbed his head in the background. According to attendees, there was an unofficial rooftop party with Jeffrey Epstein–themed decor. (Solana said he wasn’t aware of this party.)

“Heresy” is a recurring theme in Solana’s work. It’s likely what endeared him to Thiel, whose whole thing, according to Solana and others, is contrarianism. (Thiel did not respond to interview requests.) It also informs Solana’s views on tech. “Technology itself is a little bit heretical,” he said. “It’s fundamentally destabilizing of power.” Even if one form of technology becomes dominant, another will eventually come along to subvert it. And anyway, he thinks the media’s portrayal of Silicon Valley is largely a caricature. “I’ve never met a ‘tech bro,’” he said on his podcast.

Lately, however, the mainstream media has published plenty of positive tech coverage, including a string of sympathetic profiles of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. In this environment, Solana’s plea for scoops from tech workers because the mainstream press “hates” them might not land in quite the same way. Which raises questions about what will make Pirate Wires distinctive going forward.

Solana told me he wants to do more original reporting. He has scored interviews with some of the biggest names in tech, including Jack Dorsey after his exit from Bluesky. Earlier this year, after Solana wrote an acid critique of Google’s Gemini AI image generator, a number of Google employees contacted him, yielding a follow-up article arguing that the company’s DEI-driven “culture of fear” makes it hard to ship good products. The two articles became the site’s most popular ever.

But unlike tech, reporting doesn’t scale—as media outlets have been learning the hard way for decades. It’s expensive and time-consuming. Another possible obstacle: Solana’s boss at Founders Fund. “I hate talking about Peter,” he said once when I mentioned Thiel. (We were sitting in the blindingly sunlit office of Founders Fund in Miami, and one of his Pirate Wires employees was working in a conference room down the hall.) In another conversation, Solana said his affiliation with Founders Fund has upsides and downsides. It opens doors and gives him insight into the worlds of tech and finance that other writers might not have. At the same time, if there were a scandal involving a start-up in the fund’s portfolio, he might not be the one to break the news. He also said he sometimes misses scoops because he agrees not to report on a portfolio company’s new feature. And although Thiel doesn’t have any control over what Pirate Wires publishes, Solana said, he’s not likely to commission a story that reflects negatively on his mentor: “There are a thousand places you can go to write a Peter Thiel takedown,” he said. “Should you expect that from Pirate Wires? No, of course not. He’s a friend of mine.”

Solana points out that he criticizes tech companies plenty. And this is true. But it’s almost always through a cultural or political lens. He mocked Google’s AI for its inability to generate images of white people. He derides attempts to moderate social media as “censorship.” A recent Pirate Wires series highlighted how political disputes among Wikipedia editors sometimes shape the site’s content. Solana seems less bothered by tech companies’ economic power. He has criticized Lina Khan’s crackdown on tech companies for alleged monopolistic behavior—“She really has a problem with people making lots of money,” he said on his podcast—and called VCs’ support for Khan a “self-own.” He dismissed congressional grilling of tech executives as punishment for “winning.”

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: What’s with all the Trumpy VCs?]

He saves his harshest words for the people trying to curb what they describe as “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation,” but which, Solana argues, is really just speech they don’t like. When Trump was kicked off Twitter and Facebook after January 6, Solana equated it to the president being “erased from the internet.” The 2022 suspension of the “manosphere” influencer (and now alleged human-trafficker) Andrew Tate from social-media platforms for misogynistic comments amounted to “Stasi shit.”

Part of the challenge for Solana is that journalism and free-speech crusading, although often aligned, are not the same thing. In June, Solana got a scoop when someone told him that a Trump-themed crypto token called $DJT had the backing of Donald Trump’s son Barron. If a traditional news outlet had been covering this story, it probably would have added some important context—particularly the fact that no one in the Trump family had confirmed on the record that the coin was in fact “official.”

Instead, Solana posted to the Pirate Wires X account: “Per conversations, Trump is launching an official token—$DJT on Solana. Barron spearheading.” (Solana is the name of a crypto blockchain; no relation to the man.) He also posted a link to the token’s location on the blockchain so readers could see that it indeed existed—and, if they wanted, buy it.

After the Pirate Wires post, the coin’s value skyrocketed. A frenzy ensued, as crypto enthusiasts tried to confirm Solana’s claim that Barron Trump was involved; many assumed that Pirate Wires had been hacked. Martin Shkreli, the infamous businessman who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, came forward, announcing that he had helped create the coin along with Barron and a third person, and that the project had Donald Trump’s blessing. But Barron never confirmed his involvement, and the coin quickly tanked.

The whole affair had the trappings of a classic pump and dump. According to analyses of blockchain transactions, insiders—including one wallet that was also invested in another Shkreli crypto project—made millions off the announcement. (Shkreli declined to be interviewed for this article except on the condition that his criminal record not be mentioned.)

Did Solana’s anonymous source use Pirate Wires to profit from the announcement? I asked Solana if he’d considered the motives of the person who’d leaked him the Trump-coin information. “I don’t really care what their motivation was,” he said. To him, it was news because it said something about Donald Trump’s interest in cryptocurrency.

Solana told me that starting a media company has given him a greater understanding of the challenges facing traditional news organizations. “What I try and do is give people their flowers when they deserve them more,” he said. For example, he admired The New York Times’ early reporting on the second assassination attempt on Trump. In response, he started writing a post praising the newspaper for its coverage. “Then they published this piece calling out Trump’s ‘history of violent rhetoric,’ which to my ear implicitly blamed him for the assassination attempt, and I thought, Fuck! Goddamn it, I was wrong.”

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For nearly a year, we’ve been participating in a DIY experiment in civility. We’ve gotten to know our new neighbors, who happen to be supporters of January 6 insurrectionists. One of those neighbors is Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed at the Capitol on January 6. We’ve learned a lot about their family lives, their heartaches, and their two new kittens. We’ve also listened to them—while in both public and private settings—repeat things that we, as journalists, and most Americans know to be blatantly untrue. And for the most part, we’ve followed the rules about how to talk across an epistemological chasm: Stay calm. Don’t try to change anyone’s mind.

In this final episode of We Live Here Now, the outcome of our homegrown experiment comes into focus. Lauren visits Witthoeft at her San Diego home and sees a softer side of her. Hanna talks to Representative Jamie Raskin, who has something essential in common with Witthoeft. And we contemplate what might be coming for us on January 6, 2025.

This is the sixth and final episode of We Live Here Now, a six-part series about what happened when we found out that our new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Lauren Ober: It’s been almost a year now of reporting on our neighbors—their routines, their regrets, their mission. And even though Micki has asked me, on countless occasions, what more I could possibly want to know about them, I had one final interview request. Perhaps the most contentious presidential election of our lives was bearing down on us, and I guess I felt like we should have a little closure beforehand.

[Music]

Ober: Now I’m trained, when I bike pass or drive past, to see: Is there anybody on the porch? And there hasn’t been.

Micki Witthoeft: Well, I saw you and Hanna walking your dogs about three days ago.

Ober: But you should have said hi.

Witthoeft: Well, I wasn’t sure if you wanted to be addressed in public by a wackadoodle cult leader, so I thought I would keep that hello to myself.

Ober: Despite Micki guaranteeing me, in no uncertain terms, that she would not be listening to the podcast, she has—every episode. And no, for the record, I did not call her a wackadoodle cult leader. I’ve just said some of her ideas are wackadoodle, and she sometimes looks like a cult leader. Anyway.

Ober: We are almost—we’re slightly more than a month away from a very consequential election in America. So where’s your brain now, looking at, you know, how close we are?

Witthoeft: Well, I think no matter how the election goes, I think there’s going to be a certain amount of chaos. You know, obviously, there’s going to be one side that is not happy. But our plan is to be here through the election, and then, you know, of course we want to be here to celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration. But beyond that, Lauren, I really don’t know.

[Music]

Ober: Inside my brain are two dueling ideas. For me, for the people I love, for democracy, for our nation’s standing in the world, I want so much for Micki to end up disappointed when the election is all said and done. I want us to move on from the Big Lie. I want America to right its little ship and sail on to smoother seas.

But then there’s this truth: I like Micki. I like Nicole. Perhaps in spite of themselves, they are very lovable. During this year of knowing them, a tiny crack has opened up in us—me and Hanna, Micki and Nicole—and let a little sun in, just a sliver of light, enough to feel that we aren’t meant to live in this darkness forever.

Hanna Rosin: Something I’ve noticed, here at the endgame: Lauren can’t talk about this project anymore without crying. I’m surprised she got through that last section without crying. She knows that our neighbors stand for a version of America that we just don’t understand—one where January 6ers are victims, not traitors, where the government is out to get us all, and where Donald Trump is the one to make it all right. And yet, she can’t help but feel genuine affection for them.

Ober: Right now, our country is in a holding pattern. So Micki and I can live in a suspended reality where, maybe, Americans aren’t totally sunk. We aren’t a lost cause. She and I can go on being friendly and teasing, and we can see each other’s humanity and want the best for each other. But will that hold true the day after the election? And what about beyond? Will our delicate glimmer of connection mean anything then? God, I hope.

I’m Lauren Ober.

Rosin: And I’m Hanna Rosin. And from The Atlantic, this is We Live Here Now.

[Music]

Rosin: Recently, I biked up to Capitol Hill, just a couple miles from our neighborhood. I was going to visit with Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. If you spend too much time with people who are trying to whitewash January 6, as we’ve been doing, Raskin is the person to see for a reality check, because Raskin’s experience with January 6 is personal—under the skin, not unlike Micki’s. His son, Tommy, had died of suicide about a week before. And in the months of sleepless nights that followed, Raskin wrote a book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which is about Tommy and about January 6.

Jamie Raskin: When I finished writing it, people would say to me, Well, I’m glad you did that, but what did those two things have to do with each other? And to my mind, they’re absolutely inextricable. It’s all intertwined.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Raskin: Well, they’re both things that I lived through, but in trying to make sense of it, I suppose I’ve constructed a certain kind of narrative. I hope it’s not a narrative that’s disconnected from reality, but I see a lot of what was taking place in the context of COVID-19 and the darkness of that period and the isolation of that period and the way in which people were so atomized and depressed and isolated. And I certainly know that was the case for Tommy.

Rosin: On January 6, Raskin had planned to give a speech mentioning Tommy, and his daughter came to see it. Then she spent the afternoon hiding under House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s desk while rioters outside yelled, “Hang Mike Pence,” and her father worried about how she’d get out of there. So when anyone tries to say the day was “love and peace,” as Trump did last week, or that rioters are being unfairly punished, Raskin gets intense.

Raskin: He calls them political prisoners, which is a lie. And he calls them hostages, which is a lie.

A hostage is somebody who’s been illegally abducted by a criminal or a terrorist group and held for a financial or political ransom. What does it have to do with hundreds of people who’ve been prosecuted for assaulting officers and invading the Capitol and trying to interfere with a federal proceeding?

And most of them pled guilty. So how are they hostages? What makes them political prisoners? Suddenly they’re like Alexei Navalny, who died at the hands of Vladimir Putin? They’re like Nelson Mandela? I don’t think so.

Rosin: In the last few weeks leading up to this next election, Raskin has been touring the country, and everywhere he goes, he says people ask him, Are we gonna see another January 6? And he tells them, Not exactly. What we will see, he believes, is something less violent but more insidious: in state after state, countless challenges of legitimate election results. Trump, he says, is already laying the groundwork.

Raskin: The new crisis has already begun, with lies that are being told by Donald Trump about the hurricanes and about FEMA, and he’s already trying to undermine people’s faith and confidence in the electoral process, in the electoral system.

Rosin: For Raskin, January 6 was one tragic day. But the long-haul tragedy is the patient and diligent effort to spread misinformation every day and get new people to believe it—to be an evangelist for total falsehoods, which could be a way to describe what Micki’s been up to.

But if this series has taught us anything, it’s that if you look hard enough, you can find the tiny thread of connection between people who are far apart. And in this case, it’s right there. These are two parents who lost children just days apart, and both of their children’s deaths are forever intertwined with the same day in American history. So I brought up Micki with Raskin.

Rosin: We have had such an odd experience, where I would say getting to know them has both increased the humanity and increased the sort of sense of like, Wow, they are deep in, you know. It’s like both of those things at once.

Raskin: I told him about the very particular way she was moving through her grief. And he was reluctant to psychoanalyze, but he had thoughts.

Raskin: I don’t think that grief is an emotion that, in its unadulterated form, has any real political content or meaning or motivation. And so I think what you’re talking about is something that is post-grief, which is trying to make meaning of a loss.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay. What do you mean?

Raskin: I mean, I assume she experienced just overwhelming grief and despondency and shock and sorrow to lose her daughter. Then after that shock is somehow metabolized, I assume she has to figure out what her daughter’s death means. What is the loss?

[Music]

Rosin: Raskin’s idea cracked something open for me. If we understand Micki as being in this process of figuring out what her daughter’s death means, well, it’s probably a long process, and it can shift.

Right now, Micki is painting one kind of picture of her daughter’s death—on a really huge, national canvas—where her daughter is a martyr, and millions of people are angry and grieving along with her.

Ober: But I get the sense that could be changing. On October 10, which would have been Ashli’s 39th birthday, Micki went to lay some flowers outside the U.S. Capitol. But unlike previous years, when Micki made it a public thing and announced that she’d be commemorating Ashli’s birthday, and then the haters came to troll her, this year was more quiet, private—no real fanfare, at least not until the Capitol Police came out and shooed her away. This time, Ashli wasn’t a symbol; she was just Micki’s daughter.

That makes me wonder if, instead of forever situating Ashli’s memory against the backdrop of January 6, Micki might be able to sketch a much smaller, more intimate portrait of her daughter, one that draws from Ashli’s life before she came to D.C. And then maybe she could use that smaller, more familiar portrait of Ashli to ease into a new future for herself, one that draws from Ashli’s life before she came to D.C.

So I went to see that life.

Wilma: Do you still wanna put your toes in the sand, sister?

Ober: I mean, let’s get out. Let’s—

Wilma: Yeah. Let’s—okay. Hold on. I’m gonna—

Ober: A couple of months ago, I invited myself to Micki’s hometown, San Diego, where she was staying with her best friend, Wilma. Micki told me she had to go back home to deal with some family issues—her father had recently died—and I asked if I could go visit her there for a few days. She unenthusiastically consented.

Wilma: I’ll pull over right here. Let’s see. Let’s see. Well, well—what the hell.

Ober: This is so wild that you can drive right up to the beach. Okay!

Ober: You might remember Wilma from a couple of episodes ago, the Wilma who pulled Micki from her grief cave and took her on a Mother’s Day road trip. After Ashli’s death, Wilma and Micki spent a lot of time on a blip of land in San Diego’s Mission Bay called Fiesta Island.

Wilma: There she blows. I’m going to roll the windows down, let some fresh air in here where we put our feet in the sand.

Ober: It’s a man-made landmass in a man-made bay popular with cyclists and dogs and people who like to fish. In this little dot of paradise, ospreys dive for their lunch and shaggy dogs chase frisbees.

Witthoeft: And then we’re turning these mics off, right?

Ober: Yeah.

Witthoeft: Are you ready now?

Ober: Not yet.

Witthoeft: Why?

Ober: Because I want to record the fish flopping out of the water there, and then I can be done.

Wilma: Oh, yeah. They do.

Witthoeft: There are some jumpers, now that you mentioned it. Do you see it right there?

Ober: Micki’s just watching the striped mullets leap out of the water and listening to Wilma encourage me again to stick my toes in the sand.

Wilma: Are you taking your shoes off and trying the sand out in the water?

Ober: You want me to?

Wilma: You’re going to go, Oh my gosh. This water is so warm.

Ober: All right.

Wilma: It feels great.

Ober: The Micki on this island isn’t wearing an Ashli Babbitt T-shirt or talking about politics. She’s tan, and she’s dressed for the beach. If January 6 or the “Patriot Pod” or the vigil are on her mind, she’s not saying. She seems calm, maybe even at peace. She seems like she fits here.

So now I know, this other Micki does exist. Could this version of Micki grieve her daughter’s death in a different way, a way that’s not mostly anger? The potential to exist in some lighter way might live here, on this coast.

[Music]

Ober: Lakeside, California, is a small cowboy town outside of San Diego. The high school mascot is a vaquero—“cowboy” in Spanish—and the town has a rodeo ring. It’s where Micki and Wilma lived nearly their whole married lives and raised their kids. Wilma’s still there, in a low-slung house on a loud street, with a trailer parked in the backyard that serves as Micki’s home away from D.C.

Ober: All right, so what is this here? What do we have? Layton by Skyline.

Witthoeft: It’s really weird that I name everything, but I haven’t named this.

Ober: You haven’t? Why?

Witthoeft: I don’t know.

Ober: Micki loves this place. She said doesn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her because she stays in a trailer home. It’s cozy, and it’s a source of comfort. Plus, it holds all her treasures.

Witthoeft: Check this out.

Ober: Wait. This is your Christmas book?

Witthoeft: Yeah.

Ober: She pulled out a photo album with Santa photos over the years.

Ober: Okay.

Witthoeft: There’s Ashli.

Ober: Oh my God. Cute.

Witthoeft: That’s Ashli, Roger, and Joey.

Ober: (Laughs.) Wait. Hold on. Oh my God. Wow. Oh my god. Good-looking kids.

Witthoeft: Yeah, they’re not bad.

Ober: I continued my self-guided tour and landed in the bedroom.

Ober: Did you decorate this? Did you put all these little bits and bobs in here? Little tchotchkes?

Witthoeft: Yeah. And that’s Ashli in the urn.

Ober: What? Where?

Witthoeft: The little urn.

Ober: Oh, next to the mini American flag and the MAGA—I have my sunglasses on.

Witthoeft: That was a gift.

Ober: Okay. All right. And then, wait. What’s—oh, that’s a mirror.

Witthoeft: Afraid so—’70s, you know.

Ober: Oh my god.

Ober: It felt weird that we just glanced at the urn and kept on chatting.

Ober: This is awesome!

Witthoeft: I like it.

Ober: This is great.

Ober: But that’s how it happened.

[Music]

Ober: Are these your books? Norah Ephron.

Witthoeft: Uh-huh.

Ober: Sheryl Sandberg.

Witthoeft: [I Feel Bad] About My Neck I started to read.

Ober: Oh, great book. Yeah. [I Feel Bad] About My Neck, Nora Ephron—classic.

Ober: Anyway, I wanted to see more than just the inside of Micki’s trailer and the memories it held. So on one of the days I was visiting, Micki and Wilma took me on a little driving tour of Micki’s old life.

Ober: All right, I’m gonna record right now.

Witthoeft: Okay. Oh, my seat belt is right on the microphone.

Ober: I asked them if we could drive past the Witthoefts’ old house, the house where Micki raised Ashli. Micki was fine with it, but she didn’t want to come with us. She asked to get out of the minivan.

Witthoeft: I’m going to get out of the car at 7-Eleven, and Wilma will take you by the house. I just don’t have any desire to go by the house.

Ober: Mm-hmm. And this is the house that you lived in for how long?

Witthoeft: Twenty-four years.

Ober: Ah, ah, ah, ah.

Witthoeft: I’ll be right here.

Wilma: Aye-aye.

Ober: We dropped Micki off at the 7-Eleven, and Wilma and I continued driving towards the old Witthoeft homestead, which Micki lost in 2018 as the result of a family situation she didn’t want to get into.

Ober: So why do you think Micki doesn’t want to see the house?

Wilma: Because she really didn’t want to move from there. That was, you know—she lived there forever. Whoever wants to move out of a house you’ve been in for 20-plus years?

Ober: Right. Right. Right. Right.

Wilma: So, you know, I get it. I’m just gonna pull over there even though it says, “No Parking.” And this was Mick’s house right here.

Ober: Oh, get out.

Ober: The house was a narrow rambler with a small, brick porch and a giant California fan palm out front.

Ober: Wait. It goes all the way back?

Wilma: Uh-huh. It’s a fairly big piece of property.

Ober: Jesus. It’s really big.

Ober: The plot of land, not the house.

Ober: Okay.

Ober: It’s not a house you’d ever notice if you weren’t looking for it.

Ober: All right.

Ober: We swung around the block and headed back towards the 7-Eleven to collect Micki. I hadn’t turned her wireless microphone off, so I heard her say to herself as she stood in the parking lot—

Witthoeft: You just never fucking know, do you?

Ober: It’s true; you don’t. Because here I was, getting a driving tour of Ashli Babbitt’s childhood stomping grounds from her mother and her mother’s best friend.

Witthoeft: Okay. So yeah, the white house up on the hill—we lived there when Ashli was in kindergarten.

Ober: Oh wow.

Ober: We drove past the family home where Ashli kept the hog she had raised for ag class, and the high school where Ashli played water polo, and the middle school where Ashli once got made fun of for being poor. This tour of the old haunts allowed Micki to show me a different version of Ashli than the one I had in my head. I would have to try to see the Ashli that Micki saw.

There was Ashli the little kid gymnast, and Ashli the Brownie, and Ashli the flutophone player—whatever that is. And there was Ashli the tomboy, who roughhoused with the boys in their dusty cow town. Micki got a kick out of telling me how Ashli had no fear.

Witthoeft: She’ll go out there and snatch up that lizard that I don’t want to get, you know, and be out there playing hockey with the boys and riding motorcycles with the boys and never letting herself be second in line.

Ober: Then there’s the Ashli who loved her grandpa so much, she wanted to follow in his footsteps and join the military. Micki was so proud of her daughter’s bent towards service. But—

Witthoeft: I was always praying that she wouldn’t, because—

Ober: Because the military is—

Witthoeft: Dangerous.

Ober: Dangerous. Right.

Witthoeft: And in particular, at that time.

Ober: Mm-hmm. You were worried because that would have been in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Witthoeft: Yeah.

Ober: Right. So you were worried that she would join the military and then get deployed.

Witthoeft: Yes. And then she joined the military and got deployed.

Ober: Right. Right. What is making you emotional right now, can I ask?

Witthoeft: (Breath shudders.) I think it’s all the irony of all the time I spent worried about her safety and that it never crossed my mind that she would be killed in the way she was.

Ober: Mm-hmm. Right.

Witthoeft: To have her killed at a Trump rally at the Capitol was really just, to me—it’s surreal.

Ober: So one minute, you can be putting your toes in the sand, and the next minute, you’re drowning in the despair. This pendulum is punishing. It swings back and forth: San Diego Micki, D.C. Micki.

Maybe, over time, these two versions come closer together. But right now, they still feel miles apart. Today, D.C. Micki prevails. She’s not quite ready to leave the “Eagle’s Nest.” She has an election to see through.

That’s after the break.

[Break]

Ober: A few months ago, the Eagle’s Nest got some new residents. The two recent arrivals are much less political than Micki and Nicole, and they don’t have anything to do with the vigil—because they are cats.

Rosin: We can see the pair on the screened-in porch when we walk the dogs past the house: Two little, ginger-striped kittens scrambling up the porch furniture or peering out the screened window.

Ober: The kittens are called This One and That One, which, honestly, is better than Barron and Don, or George and Martha—the other names in the running. They came from a J6 supporter in rural Pennsylvania, and they seem to be fitting in well. Oliver, the dog, lets them climb all over him, and the Eagle’s Nest’s resident mouse seems to be cowed by their presence. Now, they have interrupted more than a couple of my interviews with Micki, but I’m willing to let that slide.

Witthoeft: That’s the reason we share a room. It’s because both of us have spent—that’s going to show up on here. You’re gonna hear that.

Ober: Are your kittens—do they need to come in here?

Witthoeft: They know I’m in here, and everybody else is upstairs, and their bag of food is in here, but there’s food in their dish, so I don’t know. They just want you, Lauren.

Ober: I doubt that. But what I don’t doubt is the power of a baby animal to soften even the hardest of hearts.

Ober: I feel like maybe these cats are good for you, these kittens.

Witthoeft: I think so too.

Ober: Yeah.

Witthoeft: Even though I told myself I’m never going to get attached to anything on purpose again.

Ober: Wait. Why not get attached to something again?

Witthoeft: Just—it’s messy. When Fuggles died, it was really hard for me. And I just decided that maybe I don’t want to go through that anymore, ever.

Ober: Hmm. But it feels like maybe a pet’s a good thing.

Witthoeft: Yeah. Well, they’ve been good for the house, really, other than the fact that—I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but—I’m a little neurotic, and I’m like, Oh, look out. Look out. Look out. Look out. And I’m the one that propped the door open, because I have this horrible—like, this door’s going to swing down, and that door’s heavy, and you only get to make that mistake once when they’re this size.

So I think it’s going to be actually even a little bit more enjoyable when they put on a little stability.

Ober: I’ve often asked Micki and Nicole how long they plan on staying in D.C. I never get a straight answer. They have money to stay through Election Day and possibly Inauguration Day, depending on which way the vote goes. That’s largely thanks to a $50,000 donation from Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com and perpetuator of the Big Lie.

Micki and Nicole don’t feel ready to leave yet—the job isn’t done. But they’re beginning to assess their time here in D.C. Recently, Nicole told me she’s had some reservations. She suggests that there’s been a futility to all this, or maybe worse than futility.

Nicole: I don’t want to really get up and get out a lot anymore. I just feel like everything I’ve told everybody is just kind of a lie—that if you just keep fighting, that our system is going to work.

Ober: She means, specifically, that in the early days of January 6 prosecutions, when they were in fight mode, she steered families towards trials rather than plea deals. She counseled people that they should fight their cases and never give in, just like her family did.

Nicole: And so I feel like a big, fat liar. And I feel like I’ve persuaded people, maybe, to make wrong decisions when they could be at home, but instead they’re in jail. And I feel real culpable in that. And the only thing I still know to say is that, Well, yeah. We’re going to take this punch, but you still got to put your head down, and you just got to bowl forward.

Ober: This whole Eagle’s Nest operation—the vigil, the rallies, the constant presence in court and on Capitol Hill—it’s all the result of just bowling forward, head down, eyes clear. Nicole has told Micki she won’t leave her. Even when her husband, Guy, gets out of prison, Nicole and Micki will always be ride or die.

But at some point, don’t they get to live a normal life where some happiness can creep in here and there?

Ober: Do you want that?

Witthoeft: I think everybody wants that. I just don’t know if I see it for myself.

Ober: Why?

Witthoeft: It’s because I’m just too damaged, angry. I don’t really know. Maybe one day I’ll be picking flowers and smelling daisies. I don’t know.

Ober: Before we parted ways, I felt like it was necessary to give Micki a chance to react to anything Hanna and I reported. Up to this point, Hanna and I had been guiding the conversations, trying to get at the information we felt was important. It seemed only right to try and even the scales a bit.

Ober: Is there anything that I don’t get? Is there anything that you need to clarify? Is there any critique or anything that you need to say before, you know, we’re done with our interviews forever?

Witthoeft: Oh, I’m gonna miss ’em.

I think the only thing I can say that I haven’t said to death, because this has been an ongoing—it’s been quite something. I don’t know—you might know more about me than—

But no. I think that people like you and people like me that admittedly come from completely different places in our upbringing, geography, experience, and way of looking at things—I think that if we can sit down and have a civil conversation and just see that you can meet in the middle, at least somewhere, you know, people don’t have to stand on opposite sides of the fence and throw stones. I didn’t mean to cry when I said that. Let’s do—(Claps.) take two!

Ober: I mean, why are you trying to pretend like you’re a hard-ass? (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: No, but it’s just—people don’t want to hear that shit all the time. Eww. (Mock cries.) Nobody likes that.

Ober: Well, I beg to differ. (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

Ober: I beg to differ. I know I agree with you.

[Music]

Ober: When I’ve told people that Ashli Babbitt’s mother is my neighbor, the first question is often, “What’s she like?” And I can answer that in a lot of different ways. I can say that she’s a conspiracy theorist who believes that the government is capable of anything. Or I can say that she’s a heartbroken mother whose grief has fueled a troubling movement. Or I can say she’s just like any other neighbor—she’s annoyed by the construction on the corner and the ear-splitting police sirens. Me too.

Recently, I had surgery, and she texted a few times to see how I was doing. When her son got jacked up in a motorcycle crash, I texted her to see how he was doing. Basic neighbor stuff.

Rosin: When we walk past the Eagle’s Nest now, we can see the kittens, who are now nearly full-grown cats, wrestling on the porch. Nicole’s Chevy has a new sticker on the back window—a stars-and-stripes “hang loose” symbol. And last month, one, two, and then three Trump-Vance signs appeared on their lawn. And I’m pretty sure I saw two in the windows also.

Ober: The neighborhood chatter about it has been civil, so far. This neighborliness, this connection—it’s fragile. I know that. But at least today, right now, it’s holding. And that’s not nothing.

[Music]

Ober: We Live Here Now is a production of The Atlantic. The show was reported, written, and executive produced by me, Lauren Ober, and Hanna Rosin. Our managing producer is Rider Alsop. Our senior producer is Ethan Brooks. Original scoring, sound design, and mix engineering by Brendan Baker.

Rosin: This series was edited by Scott Stossel and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Art direction by Colin Hunter. Project management by Nancy DeVille.

The Atlantic’s executive editor is Adrienne LaFrance. Jeffrey Goldberg is The Atlantic’s editor in chief.

An extra special thanks to John Coplen and Dan Zak, without whom this series would not have been possible. And thank you for listening.

A little over 12 years ago, Melania Trump logged on to Twitter, uploaded a picture of a cheery-looking beluga whale, and added the caption, “What is she thinking?” The tweet was classic Melania, which is to say that it was cryptic, minimalist, and only lightly in focus. Unlike her husband, Melania Trump undershares on social media—if she isn’t there to hawk baffling NFT collectibles or patriotic Christmas ornaments, she doesn’t typically have much to say. But over the past few weeks, as she’s soft-launched her new memoir, Melania has been posting a series of short videos, each one its own inscrutable puzzle. Mistily obscured through what seems to be a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, she gives brief statements on subjects including cancel culture, her immediate attraction to “Donald,” and her apparent belief in a woman’s right to choose. Her head is stiffly tilted, her gaze steadfast. As she talks, a string section in the background pulses with momentum, as though these clips are actually trailers for the climactic final season of a show called America!

What is she thinking? First ladies, by the cursed nature of the role, are supposed to humanize and soften the jagged, ugly edge of power. The job is to be maternal, quietly decorative, fascinating but not frivolous, busy but not bold. In some ways, Melania Trump—elegant, enigmatic, and apparently unambitious—arrived in Washington better suited to the office than any other presidential spouse in recent memory. In reality, she ended up feeling like a void—a literal absence from the White House for the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency—that left so much room for projection. When she seemed to glower at her husband’s back on Inauguration Day, some decided that she was desperate for an exit, prompting the #FreeMelania hashtag. When she wore a vibrant-pink pussy-bow blouse to a presidential debate mere days after the Access Hollywood tape leaked, the garment was interpreted by some as a statement of solidarity with women, and by others as a defiant middle finger to his critics. Most notoriously, during the months in 2018 when the Trump administration removed more than 5,000 babies and children from their parents at the U.S. border, Melania wore a jacket emblazoned with the words I really don’t care, do u? on the plane to visit some of those children, the discourse over which rivaled the scrutiny of one of the cruelest American policies of the modern era.

[Read: On pitying Melania]

Would-be Melaniaologists have had mere scraps to work with over the years, which is why the announcement of her memoir in July was a surprise. Like the British Royal Family, the former first lady prefers to never complain, never explain, and instead glide imposingly through crisis, a swan in a swamp. Does she care? Having read the roughly 200 pages of Melania that aren’t given over to photos, I think I can say that she does not. In fact, she appears to have turned not caring into its own superpower, focusing rigidly on who or what pleases her (beauty; her son, Barron; blockchain ventures) and filtering out virtually everything else. The book contains no mention of Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, the Access Hollywood tape, E. Jean Carroll, the felony conviction of her husband for falsifying business records. Trump’s first impeachment gets about one page, compared with about four devoted to Melania’s failed caviar-based skin-care brand from 2013. Her stepchildren merit just one direct mention. If the book contains any insight into Melania, it’s in how meticulously she seems to have curated a reality for herself that’s free from trouble, anxiety, or introspection. She’s untouchable, insulated from care and responsibility by her extremely selective focus and distractingly ornamental prose.

So why write a book at all? My guess would be: As someone who seems to so dislike other people profiting from her name that—according to the former CNN journalist Kate Bennett’s book, Free, Melania—souvenirs sold in her hometown are reportedly branded only with M or first lady to deter lawsuits, she wanted her own monetized effort on shelves next to the unauthorized biographies and torrid tell-alls. “As a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation,” she writes in the brief introduction, “I feel a responsibility to set the record straight and to provide the actual account of my experiences.” What follows is—with the exception of her writing on abortion rights—highly predictable, and as airbrushed as a Vogue cover. Her memories of Election Night 2016 are of her husband emerging as “a unifying leader … [who] recognized the need for healing and unity in America.” Her childhood in Slovenia is idyllic, with two loving parents, a private nanny who bakes cakes frosted with “handmade sugar flowers,” and “cherished” family holidays on the Dalmatian coast. The prose is lavish by way of LinkedIn: Melania’s grandfather, a shoemaker and an onion farmer, “wasted no time in pursuing his passion for agriculture”; her mother, a patternmaker in a children’s-clothing factory, “was the artisan behind the scenes … thriving in the world of fashion.”

The Trumpian embellishment of Melania’s life prior to her husband’s election can feel deadening to read; if everything is unique and remarkable and thrilling, nothing is. Her time as a model, a fairly uneventful career whose highlight before she met Trump was a single Camel ad, is reinvented as a plucky girl’s triumph, a “testament to my firm determination, courage, and resilience.” In her first meeting with Trump, she’s struck by his “polished business look, witty banter, and obvious determination.” She feels immediately “as if our souls had known each other for a very long time”; pragmatically, she ignores the reality of his messy second divorce, “choosing instead to enjoy his company.” Their early commitment to each other is based on their shared preference for “a healthy life, evident in our abstinence from alcohol and tobacco.” (Big Macs and Coca-Cola would like a word.) When the tabloids label her a “gold digger,” she insists that she’d already “earned my fortune” but decides that “to engage in such matters—to dignify each and every untruth—would be squandering my time and energy.”

What is fascinating about the book—if you can bear being beaten over the head with adjectives—is how early on Melania learns that the art of selective attention will set her free. She opts to not concern herself with Trump’s chaotic romantic history, to not trouble herself with what people say about her. “While I may not agree with every decision or choice expressed by Donald’s grown children, nor do I align with all of Donald’s decisions, I acknowledge that differing viewpoints are a natural aspect of human relationships,” she writes. “Rather than imposing my views or critiquing others, I have aimed to be a steady presence—someone they can rely on.” Over time, as the stakes rise, this aversion to conflict starts to feel pathological. When the crisis at the border becomes global news, with shocking reports of hysterical children being snatched from their families, Melania describes being “blindsided” and “completely unaware of the policy.” On January 6, 2021, as protestors storm the Capitol, Melania is busy “taking archival photographs” for a record of White House renovations. She’s perplexed, then, when her press secretary at the time, Stephanie Grisham, asks her by text message if she wants to “denounce the violence.” (As Grisham reminded us at the Democratic National Convention this year, Melania’s reply was just one word: “No.”) When, Melania thinks, “had I ever condoned violence?”

The only thing that really seems to aggravate Melania is when her willful ignorance is disrupted in ways she can’t dismiss—which is perhaps why almost all of her enmity here is directed at the media. When it’s revealed that sections of her speech supporting her husband at the 2016 Republican National Convention were near-identical to sections from a speech by Michelle Obama, she’s furious that “my words, which articulated a hopeful vision for the nation, were overshadowed by a barrage of personal attacks.” As her I really don’t care jacket—a dig at the media, she writes—becomes a scandal, she’s enraged at how “the media’s distorted reporting on the jacket overshadowed the importance of the children,” as though the jacket had simply fallen on her shoulders by accident, its message inscribed by invisible fairies.

This adamant refusal to engage with anything she doesn’t want to think about does become harder and harder to maintain. When Melania writes of her steadfast, lifelong belief that women should “have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the flashing neon elephant in the room is her own husband, his three Supreme Court appointments, and his successful pitch to evangelicals that he would be America’s most pro-life president. After Melania’s home at Mar-a-Lago is raided during the FBI’s investigation over Trump’s alleged misuse of classified documents, she’s appalled that the FBI goes through her and Barron’s bedrooms, even though, she insists, “I had no confidential documents in my possession, no involvement with the West Wing.” Americans, she emphasizes, “need to understand the dangers posed by a federal government that feels entitled to invade our homes and our lives.” What’s missing is any acknowledgement of the approximately 13,000 documents the government found at Mar-a-Lago, more than 100 of which were classified and some of which related to information about national defense. (It’s much easier to call something a “witch hunt” if you mulishly ignore the cauldron, spellbook, and broomstick in your own basement.)

But fact-checking her memoir is, in some ways, beside the point, given how impervious Melania and her husband seem to be to the concept of “truth.” Both understand how crucial attention can be, whether you’re drawing it to yourself or focusing so intently on some things that you can’t be criticized for all the other things you’ve missed. As I read other books about Melania Trump over the past week, I thought it seems likely that she is, in private, a gracious and fun woman who genuinely loves children, finds great pleasure in her own self-presentation, and cares not one single degree about what people think of her. In that sense, she is truly free, liberated from the pains of empathy and anxiety that plague the rest of us. She really doesn’t care, and if we do, that’s our problem.