On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours in a block of Midtown Manhattan—33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues—surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so, the herd shuffled forward 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers up ahead closed again. Whenever we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, only to die as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup were on the bill, stood in view the whole time, a few hundred feet away. Snipers perched on high-rise rooftops, and a pair of drones hovered overhead. A friend had bought two tickets, but word reached us from the front that tickets weren’t being checked—they were a ruse for the campaign to snag fundraising emails. As the sun drifted toward the Hudson River and the sparkling fall day cooled off, the clock was outrunning us.

I’ve been in Trump crowds before, but never in New York City. The familiarly scuzzy and desolate neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political throng wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were a lot more Black and brown people, and a lot more Orthodox Jews, than you’d see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupying force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened all afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. To exit through the crush sideways and climb over metal barriers for a bathroom break or cup of coffee would take a major effort of will. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Next to me stood a solemn-looking man in his 20s who held a tiny American flag in one hand. He said that he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a world-famous, progressively orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lonely dissident. One of about three? No, he said—there were secret comrades in warehousing. I asked if he thought the country could come together after the election, whatever the result. His answer—that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that Democrats alone were guilty of demonizing their opponents, because Republicans were just saying what was true—sounded like a no.

An hour later and 100 feet farther along, I was standing beside Richard and Jason, Trinidad-born men in MAGA caps, who live near me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of high prices—a dozen eggs for $6—and lack of international respect; also, The Apprentice. Richard was certain that Trump would win in a landslide—would even take deep-blue New York City. (There’s a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked if he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him, because the street had become an echo chamber—not the virtual kind, but a physical one—and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it became harder to hold on to the thought that all these thousands of people were wrong.

Around 3 o’clock—after two hours of standing, and no progress for at least 45 minutes—my lower back throbbed. It was becoming clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been an ordinary Manhattan traffic jam, the blare of car horns would have been deafening. But the crowd remained shockingly patient and pleasant, making instant friends in the American way. Promoters for a local betting market tossed out red T-shirts that gave Trump a 57 percent chance to win, and Richard, Jason, and my other neighbors took up a cry of “Bet on Trump! Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator was barking, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone was laughing. Being fellow Americans together, or New Yorkers, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to prevent things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, only a political tribe—the Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street—creates such solidarity.

Close to 4 o’clock, we hadn’t moved in well over an hour. With this motionlessness in the heart of New York City, the crowd congealed into a single thought, and the thought became reality—it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Wedged between the men from Flatbush and a metal barricade, I was living in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful outbreaks of chanting, the helpful calls of “Chair coming through, wheelchair coming”—all these tokens of happiness depended on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible for the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people to be wrong. And if I stayed here any longer, I might go under the spell too, like a lost climber who sits down to rest in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up. I squeezed my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show inside Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes and vulgar insults and profanity directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; at Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and the half of Americans who support Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy-theory mongering, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the grifters and the nepos, the opportunists and the fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t quite have the chops—the dark mirror of the good will outside. I missed seeing what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell ever breaks.

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Charleroi is a small mill town south of Pittsburgh whose dozen blocks, running along the tracks of the Norfolk Southern Railway, are nestled in a valley between the Monongahela River and the worn-down foothills of western Appalachia. Going back more than a century, Charleroi (nicknamed “Magic City”) has made glassware, with a peak population of more than 11,000, a unionized workforce, and a dominant Democratic Party. By the 1970s the factories had begun to disappear, and with them many of the people. By 2020, after half a century of deindustrialization, Charleroi was a town of vacant stores and about 4,200 souls, most of them Republicans. It’s the saga of the Rust Belt, writ small and ongoing.

When I asked Joe Manning, the borough manager, what moved Charleroi from blue to red, he replied: “2016. I know people who were lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool, staunch Democrats who, during that period, went out and changed their registration so that they could vote for Trump.”

Following Donald Trump’s victory that year, academics and journalists embarked on a search for an explanation. Progressives quickly lighted on racism as the sole answer. This conclusion was a costly mistake. Analytically, it ignored important causes that anticipated coming trends; politically, it alienated the unconverted and made discussion more difficult. Kamala Harris appears determined not to repeat the mistake as she downplays identity as a theme in her campaign. Race is only part of the reason for Trump’s persistent base of support, and one that’s grown less significant. The starkest division in American politics is class, as defined by education—the wide gap between voters with and without a college degree—which explains why more working-class Latino and Black citizens have begun to vote Republican. But in a more complex way, political behavior in the Trump era is determined by how class and race interact. The most convincing accounts of the 2016 presidential election found that the leading determinant of support for Trump was residence in a declining white community that had recently seen the arrival of nonwhite immigrants, which brought rapid cultural change and created a sense that the country was becoming unrecognizable.

[Watch: Shifting campaign strategies]

In 2020, Getro Bernabe, an American-trained officer with the Haitian Coast Guard, fled Haiti’s gang violence and arrived in Charleroi looking for work. “It was like a ghost town,” he told me. “It looked like a beautiful place, but now abandoned.” In the past few years Charleroi has gained 2,000 immigrants, mostly Haitians drawn by empty houses and low-wage jobs, raising the town’s population close to its 1970 number. “The newcomers, the new residents in Charleroi, are like a glimmer of light to the economy of this town,” Bernabe said. “I like one of the core values of America—it is on the American coin.” He meant E pluribus unum, which he interpreted as referring to a unified nation of people from different backgrounds and beliefs. “That’s the beauty of America to me.”

Kristin Hopkins-Calcek, the borough-council president, has lived her whole life in Charleroi. “I watched the town deteriorate over time, and it was very hurtful for us that stayed,” she told me when we met in the council chamber. “Coming from owning a house here, watching my son fall into addiction, and seeing the fentanyl and Oxy problem that we had here, and the overdoses, the crime, and even to some extent the prostitution in town, and the ruination and the blight of our property, and the absentee landlords, and, it seems when you’re older, like the instant decline of our town—when the immigrants came in, it was a breath of fresh air. There were people on the streets; there were businesses opening.”

Charleroi is a fragile place: buoyed by the new grocery stores and bakeries of immigrant entrepreneurs, and new renters and taxpayers; strained by insufficient resources, traffic mishaps, and resentment. There’s no prosperous professional class in Charleroi. Its half-deserted streets and sidewalks are shared by two working-class populations: aging white residents whose families have lived here for generations, and younger Black immigrants who arrived in the past few years. This is Trump country—festooned with Trump flags, Trump yard signs, and, on the deck of a trailer in the woods outside town, a Trump banner boasting: IMPEACHED. ARRESTED. CONVICTED. SHOT. STILL STANDING. In a variety shop on Fallowfield Avenue, half the items for sale are Trump paraphernalia.

Last month, two disasters befell Charleroi almost simultaneously. On September 4, the Pyrex factory on the river, which has produced glassware since the 1890s, told its more than 300 union workers that the owners will close the plant by the end of the year and move operations to Ohio. Then Trump heard about Charleroi.

A campaign sign for Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump is seen as an immigrant walks along a street in downtown Charleroi on September 24, 2024. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)

Joe Manning was watching the presidential debate on September 10 when Trump repeated a false story about Haitians eating the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio. “Oh my goodness,” Manning thought, “let it just be Springfield.” His wish went unanswered. On September 12, at a rally in Arizona, Trump locked onto Charleroi. “What a beautiful name, but it’s not so beautiful now,” he said. “It has experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris. So, Pennsylvania, remember this when you go to vote. This is a small town, and all of a sudden they got thousands of people … The town is virtually bankrupt. This flood of illegal aliens is bringing massive crime to the town and every place near it.” At a rally in Pennsylvania on September 24, he repeated the attack on Charleroi: “Has your beautiful town changed? It’s composed of lawless gangs.”

The “2,000 percent” figure was nonsensical. The Haitians in Charleroi came legally, in search of jobs, and found ones that Americans wouldn’t take, such as food preparation on assembly lines in 40-degree temperatures. The town isn’t bankrupt, there are no gangs, and crime has not gone up, according to Hopkins-Calcek, who sits on the regional police board. “The most heinous crime recently was an infanticide,” Manning told me, “and the parents were both arrested, and they’re both as white as us.”

None of this mattered to Trump. He had found a small, tender wound in a crucial swing state and stuck a finger inside. Then he moved on to other targets, but the effect in Charleroi was overwhelming. Manning and Hopkins-Calcek received threats. A flyer addressed to “White Citizens of Charleroi” and signed by “Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” circulated, warning: “Arm yourselves white America, protect your families. White people are the only victims to immigrant brutality.” Passing drivers were emboldened to shout at Haitians, “Trump is coming!” Bernabe, who is the borough’s immigrant-community liaison, heard from people who were afraid to send their children to school and thinking of leaving the state. “All of a sudden, we’ve been seeing a certain fear among the immigrant people, like they feel like they are not welcome, comfortable,” he told me earlier this month. “You see them less and less outside.” Charleroi began to look like the ghost town it had recently been.

For Hopkins-Calcek, Trump’s damage brought back the nightmare of her town’s descent. “It got really quiet, and it got scary again,” she said, beginning to cry. “When they went back in the houses, it felt like it was bad again.” With the imminent departure of Charleroi’s legacy industry, along with its tax revenue, “I feel as if we’re being kicked when we’re down,” she said.

Trump never mentioned the Pyrex factory.

One afternoon earlier this month, I sat with five members of the United Steel Workers Local 53G in a McDonald’s near the Charleroi railroad tracks. They had spent most of the day negotiating the end of their livelihood with lawyers from Anchor Hocking—the glassware company, owned by a New York investment firm called Centre Lane Partners, that plans to close the Pyrex factory. Daniele Byrne, the local’s vice president, and her husband, Rob, an electrician, have worked at the Charleroi plant for a total of 71 years. Before Daniele, her grandfather put in 50 years and set his wall clock by the noon whistle. As severance, the company was offering two months’ health insurance, plus a day’s pay for every year of employment—about $8,000 for two-thirds of Daniele’s life.

She didn’t hide her disgust. “Here you go, be on your way, merry Christmas, happy Kwanzaa,” she said. “What’s the Jewish one?”

Rob asked if I had read Glass House, a book about Lancaster, Ohio, a fading industrial town three hours west, where Anchor Hocking has a glass plant and plans to move the Charleroi factory, along with up to half its workforce. “It’s about the 1 percent economy that started Trumpism,” Rob said. “How they control everything, buying and selling and making all these maneuvers. The billionaires keep getting more and more while everybody else suffers.”

The workers’ hostility toward corporations and billionaires didn’t translate automatically into support for a candidate or party. Their alienation from politics and distrust of elites was too great. The word I kept hearing, in Charleroi and around western Pennsylvania, was care—as in, “They don’t care about us.” It conveyed a deep sense of abandonment.

Half a dozen Haitians work at the Pyrex factory. Daniele, who’s in charge of scheduling, told me they were better workers than the American ones. “I don’t think the problem is the immigrants,” Rob said. But he and the others had complaints about the sudden arrival of so many foreigners in their small town: overcrowded school buses and classrooms, overextended teachers, government benefits the locals didn’t get, and—despite what I’d heard from town officials—higher crime. They claimed that a new immigrant-owned grocery store had put up a sign barring white shoppers. Finding this implausible, I asked Getro Bernabe about it later. He explained that the sign had advertised food from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, while omitting American food. When he rushed to the store and told the owner that local people were complaining, she was aghast: “My God, I didn’t think of that.”

[Read: Harris’s best answer to Trump’s resilient appeal]

“Please, put American,” Bernabe urged, but to avoid problems she replaced the sign with one that said simply Queen’s Market. When I visited the store, it was selling live crabs, dried fish, and other products that seemed a little unusual for western Pennsylvania. The owner, an American citizen of Sierra Leonean origin, had put a sign behind the counter that said Trump 2024. This detail, which went against the grounds for local displeasure, hadn’t become a story.

False rumors can be more revealing than true ones, and there are tensions in Charleroi that shouldn’t be either wished away or inflamed. “It’s not hatred so much as—” Daniele began.

“Envy,” Rob said. “Jealousy.”

Longtime residents felt as if they didn’t matter. The Pyrex closing got far less attention than Trump’s commentary on Haitians. Every four years, the political and media class takes an interest in towns like Charleroi for a few autumn weeks. “If Kamala comes here, she’s right now in the battle of the Haitians because she wants the immigrants here and he wants them gone,” Daniele said. “They forget about us and go straight to the immigrants again.” She added, “I don’t pay attention to politics; I’ll be honest. I think they’re all crooks. I’d sooner watch Barney Miller. I can’t wait ’til November’s over so I can watch regular commercials about what razors to buy.” The workers didn’t hate all politicians—just the ones who made promises they didn’t keep and exploited the problems of people like them. Pennsylvania’s Senator Bob Casey is pushing the federal government to examine Anchor Hocking’s acquisition of the factory in a bankruptcy sale earlier this year for a possible violation of antitrust law. This effort won credit even from the scathing Daniele Byrne.

Two nights after we met, Rob and Daniele went to see the Steelers play the Cowboys in Pittsburgh. A friend had gotten me a ticket, and early in the first quarter, people near me suddenly began turning to look behind us and cheer. Thirty feet above, a man in a black blazer and black cap was standing in a luxury box, waving a yellow Steelers towel and grinning. It was Elon Musk—fresh from hopping around onstage at Trump’s return to the scene of his shooting in nearby Butler, now basking in a football crowd’s adoration of wealth and celebrity.

When I told Daniele, she said: “Ah, the fucker.”

A resident chats with an immigrant in downtown Charleroi on September 24, 2024. (Carlos Barria / Reuters)

The convergence of working-class decline, corporate greed, and nativist anger will shape next month’s election in places like Charleroi and throughout the Rust Belt. Northwest of town, Pennsylvania’s Seventeenth Congressional District is represented by Congressman Chris Deluzio. He’s a first-term Democrat, having narrowly won in 2022 in a competitive district of farmland, Pittsburgh suburbs, and mill towns along the Ohio River. Deluzio is a 40-year-old Navy veteran and attorney, neatly groomed, polite, and analytical in a way that doesn’t scream “populist.” But he’s running for reelection on the bet that his pro-labor, anti-corporate positions will prevail over the hostility toward immigrants that Trump and other Republicans are stirring up. (The campaign of Deluzio’s opponent, State Representative Rob Mercuri, didn’t respond to my request for an interview.)

“The Wall Street guys bankrolling Trump and my opponent are the guys who devastated these communities,” Deluzio told me as we drove between campaign events. “They tried to strip us for parts for decades. The mills didn’t just leave; they were taken away by an ideology and a set of policies that said cheaper and weaker labor rules and cheaper and weaker environmental rules is what they’re after. Your family’s hard work and sacrifice didn’t matter to these guys.” After a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed last year in East Palestine, Ohio, just across the state line from Deluzio’s district, he drafted legislation to tighten the regulation of rail freight, which Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance co-sponsored. The Railway Safety Act, opposed by the Koch political network, is currently stalled by Republicans in both houses of Congress. Even though few of Deluzio’s constituents were directly affected by the spill, it’s the kind of issue that he hopes will distinguish Democrats like him from pro-corporate, anti-regulation Republicans.

Deluzio argued that Trump villainizes new immigrants to distract local people—themselves the descendants of immigrants and legitimately anxious about rapid change in their towns—from the true causes of their pain: monopolistic corporations and the politicians they fund. He acknowledged that the national Democratic Party failed for years to make this case and pursued trade policies that undermined it. An idea took hold that college-educated voters would soon outnumber the party’s old base of a moribund working class. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” Senator Chuck Schumer predicted in 2016, shortly before Trump won Pennsylvania, and with it the presidency.

The Biden administration has tried to earn the loyalty of working-class voters with pro-union policies and legislation to create jobs in depressed regions. But people I spoke with in western Pennsylvania seemed to have only a vague idea how the Democratic Party is trying to woo them back. The rising cost of living mattered more to them than low unemployment and new manufacturing and Harris’s tax plans. When underinformed and undecided voters say that they want to hear more details about a candidate’s policies, it usually means they don’t believe that policies will make any difference in their lives. To overcome ingrained skepticism after decades of disinvestment, a politician has to show up, look voters in the eye, shake their hand, and then deliver help—or at least be seen to care enough to try.

Curtis and Annie Lloyd live in Darlington, a rural borough on the Ohio border a few miles from the site of last year’s chemical spill. When the Lloyds saw a gray cloud rise into the sky near their house, they found it almost impossible to get solid information about the freight disaster: The county paper is a ghost of its former self, and social media predictably swarmed with conflicting and false stories. But Trump paid a visit to the area, Annie told me, while President Biden didn’t for more than a year—and that made a stronger impression than Deluzio’s effort, thwarted by Republicans, to pass regulatory reform. “People are living their lives, and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” she said. “All they know is Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s.”

Fifteen miles away, in the town of Rochester, I met a woman named Erin Gabriel at the headquarters of the Beaver County Democratic Party. The office was a hive of activity, with canvassers on their way in or out and Harris/Walz signs stacked against the walls. Gabriel told me that politics was personal to her. While working full-time and chairing the county party, she cares for her three disabled children (her teenage daughter, Abby, who suffers from a devastating neurodegenerative disease, was sitting in the next room with headphones on). “Every single government policy affects my children,” Gabriel said. Without the Affordable Care Act, Abby would have no health insurance for the rest of her life. During Trump’s presidency, Gabriel’s congressman, a Republican, promised her that he would do everything he could to protect Abby’s access to health care. Then he voted for Trump’s bill to overturn Obamacare.

“That’s when I got really active,” Gabriel said. “This is visceral to me.”

For a moment, southwestern Pennsylvania has outsize power and attention. Yard signs appeared everywhere; cashiers in bakeries counted sales of their Trump and Harris cookies. National politics is tribal and hardly open to persuasion. Local politics feels different—less hateful and more flexible, with plenty of ticket splitting. Rico Elmore, a young Republican councilman in Rochester, told me, “We have to find the commonalities and say, ‘We may be different on criminal-justice reform, on taxes, on immigration, but we can come together. My streets need paved; you believe they need paved. Let’s get it done. Let’s find those common goals and work towards that.’”

Elmore, a Black Air Force guardsman, was at the rally in Butler where Trump was shot, and rushed to render first aid to Corey Comperatore, the man who was killed; Comperatore’s family then invited Elmore to speak at Trump’s second Butler rally. He’s a rising star in local Republican politics, and in 2022, in an unsuccessful race for state representative, he knocked on 13,000 doors. He found even Democrats willing to listen, and from both sides he heard something that almost everyone I met, even the strongest partisans, also voiced: an overwhelming desire to move past polarization. Elmore wondered whether America is headed for the fate of the Roman empire. “Are we at that point in history? What are we doing to prevent that from happening? We are becoming a nation that is being divided and will fall. We cannot stand divided.”

On a crystalline October afternoon, Chris Deluzio went door-to-door in a new subdivision of Allegheny County. He was wearing a half-zip pullover that said NAVY—a way, it seemed, to let constituents know that his status as their congressman and a former scholar at the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security didn’t mean he wasn’t one of them. Both Democrats and Republicans lived on the cul-de-sac of single-family homes. At one, a young man in a USC cap named Aaron was working on a truck in his driveway. “You already got my vote,” he told Deluzio. Aaron described himself as a moderate Democrat from California who couldn’t stand what Republicans were doing. “I grew up with Latinos my entire life, I love ’em. I actually miss ’em, being out here, and the way they talk about ’em, it bothers me. If I were on the Republican side, I’d be on the Schwarzenegger middle of the road.”

“Does that exist anymore, those guys?” Deluzio asked.

“From what I see on that side, no. I see it in the blues, but just not on that side. It’s just gone too far.”

[Gilad Edelman: The man who’s sure that Harris will win]

The next house had a Trump yard sign, but Deluzio rang the doorbell anyway. A big-bodied older man with a crew cut answered. He was a police officer in Ambridge, a town on the Ohio River. I had driven through Ambridge, where steel was once fabricated for the Empire State Building: another depressed mill town, with dollar stores, vape shops, and a World War II memorial park with a Four Freedoms monument that belongs to an earlier century.

The policeman, whose name was Mike, said that he had met the congressman in Ambridge. Deluzio reminded him that he had the endorsement of the county’s police union. “I keep an open mind,” Mike said. “I just have a problem with the border and the crime, because I see it down in Ambridge. It’s just a big immigration problem.” Most of the town’s immigrants came from Latin American countries like Venezuela, Mike said, and they brought “DUIs, drunkenness, domestics, a lot of fights.” He would vote on crime and border security.

An elderly woman called out something from the back of the house.

“My mom, she’s on Social Security,” Mike said, “and these people are getting $4,000 a month, and that’s more than she gets. She’s upset they get more—and I’m gonna tell you, my mom voted Democratic her whole life. She switched to Republican.”

I’d heard complaints in Charleroi about government handouts to immigrants. Joe Manning, the borough manager, had explained, “I don’t have a line item in my budget for Haitians. They don’t need my resources. They’re all gainfully employed.”

But Deluzio didn’t question Mike’s story, or argue with him about crime and immigration, or try to persuade him of anything. He had made a connection. Maybe that would be enough.

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.

The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire is a particularly prolific poster. And lately, his takes have become almost unavoidable.

Maguire manages Sequoia Capital’s stake in Elon Musk’s various companies, including the social network formerly known as Twitter, and he regularly amplifies and excuses Musk’s extreme political opinions. He’s also fond of sharing his own. Over the weekend, he posted a theory that “antifa” is committing mass voter fraud by having ballots sent by the hundreds to vacant houses; Musk signal-boosted Maguire’s concern with the message “Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?” Last week, Maguire advanced the perspective that “DEI was the most effective KGB opp of all time.” To his more than 150,000 followers, the VC has made it clear that he is “prepared to lose friends” over his choice to spit out the metaphorical Kool-Aid that caused him to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

On X, Maguire shows up in the feed alongside other prominent VCs who support Donald Trump—among them, David Sacks of Craft Ventures and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures. They all express similar opinions in similar ways, and they do so more or less constantly. (Maguire, who did not respond to a request for an interview, posted to X dozens of times this past Saturday alone.) This is an example of, as Paul Krugman recently noted, the “tech bro style in American politics.” It is largely defined by a flat, good-versus-evil worldview. The good? Free speech, which Democrats want to eradicate. The evil? Immigration, which is a plot by Democrats to allow violent criminals into the country and steal the election. San Francisco? A once-great American city purposefully ruined by Democrats. Kamala Harris? Sleepwalking into World War III. Trump? According to Musk, he is “far from being a threat to democracy”—actually, voting for him is “the only way to save it!”

A “vibe shift” is under way in Silicon Valley, Michael Gibson, a VC and former vice president of grants at the Thiel Foundation, told me. Eight years ago, the notorious entrepreneur Peter Thiel was the odd man out when he announced his support for Trump. The rest of the Valley appeared to have been horrified by the candidate—particularly by his draconian and racist views on immigration, on which the tech industry relies. This year, J. D. Vance, a Thiel acolyte and former VC himself, is Trump’s running mate. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, came out in full support of Trump in a podcast episode released just before Joe Biden dropped out of the election. (Last Friday, Axios reported that Horowitz informed Andreessen Horowitz staff members that he and his wife, Felicia, will donate to support Harris “as a result of our friendship” with the candidate. “The Biden Administration,” his note continues, “has been exceptionally destructive on tech policy across the industry, but especially as it relates to Crypto/Blockchain and AI,” mirroring language from the podcast during which he and Andreessen endorsed Trump.)

[Read: Silicon Valley got their guy]

It’s doubtful that the thoughts of these prominent VCs reflect a broader change in the electorate—tech workers generally support Harris, and barring an unbelievable upset, California will go blue on November 5, as it has for decades. (Though as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has pointed out, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was 23 percent in 2020—small, but higher than the 20 percent he received in 2016.) And many well-known VCs back Harris, including Rabois’ colleague and Khosla Ventures’ namesake, Vinod Khosla, along with Mark Cuban and the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. This time around, Thiel has not thrown his weight behind Trump but has instead indicated that he would choose him over Harris if there were a gun to his head.

But it is nonetheless significant that a number of influential—and very rich—men are eager to go against the grain. Silicon Valley has historically prided itself on technological supremacy and a belief in social progress: Now many of its loudest and most well-resourced personalities support a candidate who espouses retrograde views across practically every measure of societal progress imaginable. “We are talking about a few people, but I think this also reflects the political economy of the Valley right now,” Margaret O’Mara, an American-history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, told me. “There’s a great deal of money and power and influence concentrated in the hands of a very few people, including these people who are extremely online and have become extremely vocal in support of Trump.” (Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

If Trump wins, there is a nonzero chance that he would give some of these people major roles in his second administration—Musk is already lobbying for one, with apparent success. If Trump loses, the Harris administration will have highly visible and vehement critics to whom a lot of people listen. Silicon Valley’s main characters are entering the culture war and bringing their enormous fan bases with them.

To some extent, this is just business as usual. O’Mara noted that although the tech industry used to claim to be apolitical, it has always had its fair share of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., like every other industry. More than anything else, the industry’s interests have simply followed the money. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan supported defense spending and big contracts with the California tech companies. The result was that “Silicon Valley leaned Republican,” she said. “Silicon Valley started leaning Democratic in the Clinton years, when Clinton and Gore were big proponents of the internet and the growth of the internet industries.”

Now many of these venture capitalists are holding on to huge bets on cryptocurrency. They fear—or enjoy suggesting—that Harris is plotting to destroy the industry entirely, a perception she’s trying to combat. Some of them have circulated an unsourced rumor that she would appoint to her Cabinet Gary Gensler, who has pursued strict regulations against the crypto industry as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Meanwhile, Trump has promised to save the crypto industry from “living in hell.”) Many in the tech industry worry about Harris’s plans to raise the top capital-gains tax rate. And her support for taxing centimillionaires’ unrealized investment gains has been particularly unpopular. Gibson argued that it would destroy the VC industry completely: “We would see the innovation economy come to a halt.” Even Harris’s supporters in the tech world have pressured the campaign not to pursue the tax; “There’s optimism that this can’t possibly be real,” Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told The New York Times in August.  

Also at issue is the labor movement. The tech industry came up during an era of lower regulation and declining union power, O’Mara pointed out. Nonunionized workforces have been essential to many of these companies’ business models, and collective action used to be more rare in their perk-filled offices. Yet during and after the pandemic, contractors and employees of major tech companies expressed dissatisfaction en masse: They wanted more diversity in the workforce, fairer treatment, and protection from the layoffs sweeping the industry. Some of them unionized. The companies faced, as O’Mara put it, “discontent among a group of people who had never been discontented.” The new labor movement has clearly rankled prominent tech figures, Musk among them. He is challenging the nearly century-old legislation behind the National Labor Relations Board, with the goal of having it declared unconstitutional.  

[Read: Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm]

But business doesn’t explain everything. The American public’s attitude toward the tech industry has curdled since 2016, in large part because of critical reporting—about labor abuses, privacy problems, manipulative algorithms, and the bizarre and upsetting experiences one might have on social platforms at any given time. When I spoke with Gibson, he suggested that declining revenue in the digital-media business may have created some “rivalrous envy” on the part of journalists. (And it’s true that the media industry can and does cite the whims of tech platforms as a source of its financial problems.) “We are being lied to,” Andreessen wrote in his widely read and rueful Techno-Optimist Manifesto last year. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.” This, he suggested, was not just wrongheaded but harmful. Andreessen Horowitz, at one point, launched a media publication with the stated mission of publishing writing that was “unapologetically pro-tech.”

Meanwhile, the federal government has pursued antitrust action and bipartisan efforts to regulate social media, while state governments have won huge settlements for workers. This has been a major shock: Silicon Valley was celebrated by previous Democratic administrations and was particularly welcome in both the Obama campaign and White House. Now some tech leaders are being treated like villains—which seems to have led some of them to embrace the label. “These are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and they are presenting themselves, in a way, like Trump is,” O’Mara observed. They’re positioning themselves in public based on their grievances and their feeling that they’ve been unjustly targeted and maybe even embarrassingly spurned.

Venture capitalists are public figures in a way they didn’t used to be. Many of them were famous founders first, and they have their own brands to maintain. “It’s part of the job to promote yourself,” Lee Edwards, a general partner at Root Ventures, told me. “I think you get in the habit of just tweeting your thoughts.”

That might have hurt business not too long ago. In 2016, when Thiel endorsed Trump, Gibson had to worry about losing seats at dinners or speaking slots at events. That’s not the case now, he told me. He pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efforts to distance himself from Democrats. Although he has had a terrible relationship with Trump in the past—one that reached its nadir when the former president was temporarily banned from Facebook over the inflammatory comments he made during the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—he has made tentative overtures to the candidate recently. The two have reportedly spoken one-on-one a couple of times this year, and Zuckerberg complimented Trump on his “bad ass” reaction (a fist pump) after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Zuckerberg hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but it’s a sign of change that he would talk about Trump in these terms at all. “The chill in the air has warmed up,” Gibson said.

When I spoke with Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at UC Davis and the author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism, she said she’d be interested to hear whether this turned out to be a California story or “a very rich-person” story that happened to be taking place in California. Maybe it wasn’t so much about Silicon Valley or the tech industry as it was about billionaires. From another perspective, it could be a really rich-person story taking place on a social-media platform owned by one of those really rich people. And those people, despite their increasing public vociferousness, might actually be cloistered in their own world—isolated and deluded enough to believe that migrants are somehow a threat to their livelihood and that radical leftists are really going to steal the election.  

“What I’m seeing from VCs around the country is different from what I’m seeing amongst the Twitter VCs,” Candice Matthews Brackeen, of Lightship Capital, told me. “Some of us live … off of there.” Others I spoke with pointed to an effort called VCs for Kamala, a loose organization with hundreds of signatories on a letter supporting Harris’s candidacy. That group was organized by Leslie Feinzaig, a venture capitalist and registered independent who says she has never before made a political donation.

The recent media coverage of Silicon Valley “was creating the impression that the entire industry, that all of venture capital, was going MAGA,” Feinzaig told me. “In my conversations, that was just not the case.” She wanted someone to step up and say that a lot of VCs were supporting Harris and that it wasn’t because they were on the far left. Many of them were registered Republicans, even. They simply had different priorities from the rich, angry guys posting on X. “I’m at the beginning of my career,” she said. “A lot of these guys are at the pinnacle of theirs.” She couldn’t say exactly what had happened to them. “There’s a cynicism at that point that I just don’t share.”

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A Donald Trump rally is always a strange spectacle, and not only because of the candidate’s incoherence and bizarre detours into mental cul-de-sacs. (Journalists have faced some criticism for ignoring or recasting these moments, but The New York Times, for one, has finally said that the candidate’s mental state is a legitimate concern.) Trump’s rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, was a hall-of-fame entry in political weirdness: Few survivors of an attempted assassination hold a giant lawn party on the spot where they were wounded and someone in the crowd was killed.

The candidate’s tirades are the most obviously bizarre part of his performances, but the nature of the gathering itself is a fascinating paradox. Thousands of people, mostly from the working and middle class, line up to spend time with a very rich man, a lifelong New Yorker who privately detests the heartland Americans in his audience—and applaud as he excoriates the “elites.”

This is a political charade: Trump and his running mate, the hillbilly turned multimillionaire J. D. Vance, have little in common with most of the people in the audience, no matter how much they claim to be one of them. The mask slips often: Even as he courts the union vote, Trump revels in saying how much he hated having to pay overtime to his workers. In another telling moment, Trump beamed while talking about how Vance and his wife both have Yale degrees, despite his usual excoriations of top universities. (He always carves out a glittering exception for his own days at the University of Pennsylvania, of course.)

Trump then welcomed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to the stage. Things got weirder from there, as Musk—who, it should be noted, is 53 years old—jumped around the stage like a concertgoing teenager who got picked out of the audience to meet the band. Musk then proceeded to explain how democracy is in danger—this, from a man who has turned the platform once known as Twitter into an open zone for foreign propaganda and has amplified various hoaxes. Musk has presented himself on his own platform as a champion of the voiceless and the oppressed, but his behavior reveals him as an enemy of speech that isn’t in his own interest.

What happened in Butler over the weekend, however, was not some unique American moment. Around the world, fantastically wealthy people are hoodwinking ordinary voters, warning that dark forces—always an indistinct “they” and “them”—are conspiring to take away their rights and turn their nation into an immense ghetto full of undesirables (who are almost always racial minorities or immigrants or, in the ideal narrative, both).

The British writer Martin Wolf calls this “pluto-populism,” a brash attempt by people at the top of the financial and social pyramid to stay afloat by capering as ostensibly anti-establishment, pro-worker candidates. In Britain, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissed the whole notion of Brexit behind closed doors, and then supported the movement as his ticket into 10 Downing Street anyway. In Italy, a wealthy entrepreneur helped start the “Five-Star Movement,” recruiting the comedian Beppe Grillo to hold supposedly anti-elitist events such as Fuck-Off Day; they briefly joined a coalition government with a far-right populist party, Lega, some years ago. Similar movements have arisen around the world, in Turkey, Brazil, Hungary, and other nations.

These movements are all remarkably alike: They claim to represent the common voter, especially the “forgotten people” and the dispossessed, but in reality, the base voters for these groups are not the poorest or most disadvantaged in their society. Rather, they tend to be relatively affluent. (Think of the January 6 rioters, and how many of them were able to afford flights, hotels, and expensive gear. It’s not cheap to be an insurrectionist.) As Simon Kuper noted in 2020, the “comfortably off populist voter is the main force behind Trump, Brexit and Italy’s Lega,” a fact ignored by opportunistic politicians who instead claim to be acting on behalf of stereotypes of impoverished former factory workers, even if there are few such people left to represent.

One of the pioneers of pluto-populism, of course, is the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a rake and a grifter who stayed in office as part of staying out of jail. That strategy should sound familiar to Americans, but even more familiar is the way the Italian scholar Maurizio Viroli, in a book about Italian politics, notes how Berlusconi deformed Italian democracy by seducing its elites into joining the big con against the ordinary voter: Italy, he wrote, is a free country, but Viroli calls such freedom the “liberty of servants,” a sop offered to people who are subjects in a new kind of democracy that is really just the “court at the center of which sits a signore surrounded by a plethora of courtiers, who are in turn admired and envied by a multitude of individuals with servile souls.”

The appeals of the pluto-populists work because they target people who care little about policy but a great deal about social revenge. These citizens feel like others whom they dislike are living good lives, which to them seems an injustice. Worse, this itching sense of resentment is the result not of unrequited love but of unrequited hate: Much like the townies who feel looked down upon by the local college kids, or the Red Sox fans who are infuriated that Yankees fans couldn’t care less about their tribal animus, these voters feel ignored and disrespected.

Who better to be the agent of their revenge than a crude and boorish magnate who commands attention, angers and frightens the people they hate, and intends to control the political system so that he cannot be touched by it?

Musk, for his part, is the perfect addition to this crew. Rich beyond imagination, he still has the wheedling affect of a needy youngster who requires (and demands) attention. Like Trump, he seems unable to believe that although money can buy many things—luxury digs, expensive lawyers, obsequious staff—it cannot buy respect. For people such as Musk and Trump, this popular rejection is baffling and enraging.

Trump and those like him thus make a deal with the most resentful citizens in society: Keep us up in the penthouses, and we’ll harass your enemies on your behalf. We’ll punish the people you want punished. In the end, however, the joke is always on the voters: The pluto-populists don’t care about the people cheering them on. Few scores will truly be settled, and life will only become harder for everyone who isn’t wealthy or powerful enough to resist the autocratic policies that such people will impose on everyone, regardless of their previous support.

When the dust settles, Trump and Vance will still be rich and powerful (as will Musk, whose fortune and power transcends borders in a way that right-wing populists usually claim to hate). For the many Americans who admire them, little will change; their lives will not improve, just as they did not during Trump’s first term. Millions of us, regardless of whom we voted for, will have to fend off interference in our lives from an authoritarian government—especially if we are, for example, a targeted minority, a woman in need of health care, or a member of a disfavored immigrant community.

This is not freedom: As Viroli warned his fellow citizens, “If we are subjected to the arbitrary or enormous power of a man, we may well be free to do more or less what we want, but we are still servants.”

Related:

Elon Musk bends the knee to Donald Trump. Elon Musk has reached a new low.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What going on Call Her Daddy did for Kamala Harris How Jack Smith outsmarted the Supreme Court Third-trimester abortions are rare—but they are happening in America. October 7 created a permission structure for anti-Semitism, Dara Horn argues.

Today’s News

Hurricane Milton has strengthened into a Category 5 storm. It is expected to make landfall on Wednesday near the Tampa Bay, Florida, region. The Supreme Court allowed a lower court’s decision on Texas’s abortion case to stand; the decision ruled that Texas hospitals do not have to perform emergency abortions if they would violate the state’s law. Philip B. Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety in New York City and one of Mayor Eric Adams’s top aides, has resigned. His phones were seized by federal investigators last month as part of a probe into bribery and corruption allegations.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: In a new short story, Lauren Groff captures the precise moment when a friendship changes forever, Walt Hunter writes. The Wonder Reader: Henry David Thoreau once argued in The Atlantic that autumn doesn’t get enough attention. “This season, I’m wondering whether Thoreau had a point,” Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Karlotta Freier

Couples Therapy, but for Siblings

By Faith Hill

Cam and Dan Beaudoin’s three-decade-old problem began when they were kids. Dan would follow his big brother around. Cam, who’s about three years older, would distance himself. Dan would get mad; Cam would get mad back. Although their mom assured them that they’d be “best friends” some day, nothing much changed—until about three years ago, when a fight got so bad that the brothers stopped talking to each other completely. Dan left all of their shared group chats and unfriended Cam on LinkedIn.

But the brothers, who didn’t speak for about a year and a half, started to understand the gravity of this separation.

Read the full article.

Reflections on October 7

Today marks one year since Hamas’s attack on Israel and the start of the subsequent Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Below, we’ve compiled some of our writers’ recent reporting, analysis, and reflection:

The war that would not end: In the year since October 7, the Biden administration has focused on preventing the escalation of a regional war in the Middle East, Franklin Foer reports. But it has failed to secure the release of Israeli hostages or end the fighting in Gaza. Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented: “In my brother’s story, you can get a small glimpse of what the most destructive war in Palestinian history has meant in human terms,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes. “How my family survived the October 7 massacre”: “We heard shouting in Arabic outside our house—a commander telling one of his men to try to break in. We had woken up to a nightmare: The border had been breached. Hamas was here,” Amir Tibon writes in an article adapted from his new book, The Gates of Gaza. A naked desperation to be seen: In books about the aftermath of October 7, Israelis and Palestinians seek recognition for their humanity, Gal Beckerman writes. The Israeli artist who offends everyone: Long a fearless critic of Israel, Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation’s suffering since October 7, Judith Shulevitz writes.

Culture Break

NBC

Watch. The return of Nate Bargatze and his now-classic George Washington sketch points to what really works about Saturday Night Live, Amanda Wicks writes.

Grow up. Rather than sneak your greens into a smoothie, it’s time to eat your vegetables like an adult, Yasmin Tayag writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Have you ever watched a crowd go wild for a PowerPoint slide? After a few introductory hellos yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gestured to a screen showing the same graph on illegal immigration that he had been talking about when he was nearly assassinated in July and delivered his real opening line: “As I was saying …”

The audience loved that. The rallygoers had waited in line for hours in the hot sun to get into the field, and this was their reward. They had made it through warm-up speeches by J. D. Vance, Lara Trump, and Scott Presler, the last of these being the founder of Gays for Trump and the March Against Sharia, who promised any Amish people watching that Trump would “protect your raw milk … protect your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.” (One of the wonders of the MAGA movement is how it absorbs other political positions—in this case, crunchiness and pro-natalism—into one seamless mythology.) After that came the crowd’s moment to rejoice in the defeat of, as Trump put it, “a cold-blooded assassin [who] aimed to silence me and silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country.” An opera singer even performed “Ave Maria.”

Famously, the Gettysburg address was just 271 words long. Trump’s speech went on for 90 minutes. The contrast between the bits of the speech he read from the teleprompters, which covered “hallowed places” and monuments to valor, and the ad-libbed sections, which featured digressions about potholes and the Olympic boxing controversy, was stark. How can we say that America has an attention-span “crisis” when people are volunteering to listen to this stuff?

[Charlie Warzel: Elon Musk has reached a new low]

The real highlight of the show, however, was when the former president brought Elon Musk onstage. The billionaire had been posting excitedly all day about his endorsement of the former president—yes, a man who prides himself, Cartman-like, on refusing to cede to any outside authority was positively giddy about the chance to publicly swear fealty to Trump.

Musk used to claim that he was a disappointed Democrat, and that he wanted X to reflect the breadth of American opinion. “​​For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he posted in April 2022, as he was in the middle of buying it. Three months later, he argued that Trump was too old to run for president again: “It’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

The former president took that about as well as you would expect. “When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” he posted on Truth Social in July 2022.

Musk did not drop to his knees and beg in Butler, but he didn’t have to—he has already made his MAGA loyalism very clear on X. Yesterday he capered behind Trump. Honestly, credit to his 53-year-old knees for being so limber. He gamboled. He frolicked, frisky as a spring lamb, fertile as a spawning salmon, executing a series of small jumps behind the ex-president and exposing a few inches of pallid stomach as his OCCUPY MARS T-shirt rode up. “He saved free speech,” said Trump, who nonetheless looked slightly alarmed at Musk’s exuberance. “He created so many different great things.”

Musk took the mic and gestured to his MAGA hat—black on black instead of the usual white on red. “As you can see,” he told the crowd, “I’m not just MAGA. I’m dark MAGA.”

Earlier in the proceedings, Vance had painted Trump as the victim of inflammatory rhetoric rather than one of its main proponents. Musk now tried a similar Uno reverse card, arguing that Trump was the only candidate who could be trusted “to preserve the Constitution, to preserve democracy in America.” He showed no awareness that Trump, as the latest court filings suggest, tried to intimidate his vice president out of certifying the 2020 election results and then reacted with callous indifference when a mob threatened Mike Pence’s life as a result. (“So what?” Trump is alleged to have said.) In between repeatedly apologizing for repeating himself, Musk also managed to say that if Trump did not win, “this’ll be the last election. That’s my prediction.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: A legendary American photograph]

After Musk took his seat again, Trump lavished more praise on the billionaire. He had no idea what the satellite network Starlink was, he said, but he had heard from those affected by Hurricane Helene that they wanted it, and he had called Musk. Just like that—while the two men were still on the phone—Starlink was on its way to North Carolina and Georgia. This was the purest essence of strongman politics, implying that anything can be solved by the right guy talking to the right other guy. No holdups, no bureaucracy, no need even for the leader to understand what’s going on. Just simple problems and simple solutions.

At this, the crowd started to chant: “Elon! Elon! Elon!”

This was probably the reception that Musk had hoped for when he bought Twitter. He didn’t find it then, of course: Many of his best engineers have quit, foreign judges have ruled against him, advertisers have deserted him, and prominent people have left the platform. No matter. In Butler, Pennsylvania, was the adoration Musk seems to crave. He must believe that Trump will let him do whatever he wants—including, as the ex-president put it, “reach Mars before the end of my term.” And why not? That wasn’t the most ludicrous thing uttered onstage in Butler.

The pact between Musk and Trump gives both men something they want—a megaphone for their ideas, a conduit to their fans, an ability to shape the political conversation. Yesterday was supposed to be a celebration of the former president’s miraculous survival and a tribute to the brave Americans who risked their lives to help others in the shooting. Instead it marked an unpredictable alliance between the world’s richest man and the politician who has successfully bullied and flattered him into bending the knee.

Trump spoke of surviving his first assassination attempt, and of election opponent Kamala Harris. We verify his claims.

Visit comes a month before November 5 election, as Trump seeks to boost support in key state.

The mood in Butler, Pennsylvania, is a mixture of guilt and grief ahead of Trump's return.