After the second attempt on his life, Donald Trump accused his political opponents of inspiring the attacks against him with their rhetoric. The reality, however, is that Trump himself has a long record—singular among American presidents of the modern era—of inciting and threatening violence against his fellow citizens, journalists, and anyone he deems his opposition. Below is a partial list of his violent comments, from the 2016 presidential campaign until today.

November 22, 2015, in response to a Fox News host asking about a heckler at Trump’s rally in Alabama the day before

February 1, 2016, at a rally in Iowa

February 6, 2016, at a Republican-primary debate

Ethan Miller / Getty

February 22, 2016, about a protester who disrupted a Las Vegas rally

February 22, 2016, at a rally in Las Vegas

March 16, 2016, on what would happen if he wasn’t nominated at the upcoming Republican National Convention

Reuters

August 15, 2017, speaking at a press conference about the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

October 18, 2018, referring to then-Representative Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for physically assaulting a reporter

March 12, 2019, in an interview with Breitbart News

Reuters

May 29, 2020, posted on Twitter during the protests and riots in Minneapolis after George Floyd was murdered

June 2020, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir, which [described] Trump having said this about protesters outside the White House (Trump has denied saying this)

September, 12, 2020, in a Fox News interview, praising police for killing the antifa supporter Michael Reinoehl, who was accused of killing a right-wing protester

Footage by Rise Images / Getty

September 29, 2020, addressing the Proud Boys during a presidential debate

January 6, 2021, just minutes before addressing the crowd at the Ellipse, Trump shouted this to his advance team, according to [testimony] from Cassidy Hutchinson (who served as assistant to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the Trump administration)

January 6, 2021, in a tweet before the election certification took place

Mandel Ngan /AFP via Getty

January 6, 2021, in claiming that the election was stolen and urging supporters to march to the Capitol

January 6, 2021, in a tweet, while rioters at the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence”

Reuters

January 6, 2021, in a video message to the insurrectionists at the Capitol

August 15, 2022, in a Fox News interview about the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence, which uncovered boxes containing classified documents

October 22, 2022, during a Texas rally

November 7, 2022, during a rally in Ohio

March 4, 2023, at the Conservative Political Action Committee summit

March 24, 2023, in a middle-of-the-night rant on Truth Social

Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty

March 25, 2023, during a rally in Waco, Texas

April 27, 2023, during a rally in New Hampshire

August 4, 2023, in a Truth Social post that U.S. prosecutors flagged as an indication that Trump might try to intimidate witnesses in the federal election-subversion case against him

September 22, 2023, on Truth Social, suggesting that General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed

September 29, 2023, speaking at the California Republican Party convention

November 11, 2023, during a Veterans Day speech

December 5, 2023, during a town hall in Iowa, in response to the Fox News host Sean Hannity asking Trump if he could promise not to abuse power or seek retribution if he wins

December 16, 2023, referring to illegal immigrants during a New Hampshire rally

January 9, 2024, to a group of reporters after a court hearing in which his team argued that presidential immunity should protect him from criminal prosecution for attempting to subvert the 2020 election

March 11, 2024, in a Truth Social post promising that he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if elected

March 16, 2024, during a speech about the U.S. auto-manufacturing industry in Ohio (Trump’s campaign later said that he was referencing a “bloodbath” for the automaker industry)

June 6, 2024, in an interview with Phil McGraw, host of Dr. Phil

September 7, 2024, at a rally in Wisconsin, referring to his mass-deportation plans

C-SPAN

September 29, 2024, proposing a violent crackdown by police to deal with crime, during a rally in Pennsylvania

October 13, 2024, in a Fox News interview

October 15, 2024, during a Fox News town hall

October 16, 2024, referring to the January 6 insurrection during a Univision town hall

Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.

It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character. And for what?

Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.  

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

[Read: Elon Musk has reached a new low]

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

There are three major components to this tool. The first is that X exposes its users to right-wing political content frequently, whether they want it or not. To test this theory, I recently created a new X account, which required me to answer a few onboarding questions to build my feed: I told X that I was interested in news about technology, gaming, sports, and culture. The first account the site prompted me to follow was Musk’s, but I opted instead to follow only ESPN. Still, when I opened the app, it defaulted me to the “For You” feed, which surfaces content from accounts outside the ones a user follows. A Musk post was the first thing I encountered, followed quickly by a post from Donald Trump and another from an account called @MJTruthUltra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower: “Vote, arm yourself, Stock up 3-4 Months Supply of Food and Water, and Pray.” After that was a post from a MAGA influencer accusing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of “censoring patriots,” followed by posts from Libs of TikTok (a video from a school-board meeting about girls’ bathrooms), MAGA influencers Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec, and Dom Lucre, a right-wing personality who was once banned from the platform for sharing an explicit image of a child being tortured.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

X is also experimenting with other algorithmic ways to surface rumors and discredited election news. The platform recently launched a new AI-powered “stories for you” feature, which curates trending topics without human review and highlights them prominently to selected users. NBC News found five examples of this feature sharing election-fraud theories, including debunked claims about voting machines and fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona.

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk's right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

The third and final element of X’s bullshit engine is Musk himself, who has become the platform’s loudest amplifier of specious voter-fraud claims. Bloomberg recently analyzed more than 53,000 of Musk’s posts and found that he has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic, garnering roughly 10 billion views. Musk’s mask-off MAGA boosterism has also empowered other reactionaries with big accounts to shitpost in his image. When they do, Musk will frequently repost or reply to their accounts, boosting their visibility. Here’s a representative example: On October 23, the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire posted that he’d heard a rumor from a senator about more ballots being mailed out in California than the number of legal voters. “Can anyone confirm or deny this?” he asked his more than 166,000 followers on X. Musk replied to the post, noting, “I’m hearing one crazy story after another.”

[Read: Elon Musk says he would recognize a Harris election victory]

On this point, I believe Musk. The billionaire is inundated with wild election speculation because he is addicted to the rumormongering machine that he helped design. This is the strategy at work, the very reason the volume of alarming-seeming anecdotes about a stolen election work so well. Not only are there too many false claims to conceivably debunk, but the scale of the misleading information gives people the perception that there is simply too much evidence out there for it all to be made up. Musk, whether he believes it or not, can claim that he is “hearing one crazy story after another” and coax his bespoke echo chamber to proffer evidence.

X’s current political project is clear: Musk, his PAC, and his legion of acolytes are creating the conditions necessary to claim that the 2024 election is stolen, should Kamala Harris be declared the winner. But the effects of that effort are far more pernicious. If you spend enough time scrolling through the Election Integrity Community feed and its unending carousel of fraud allegations, it isn’t hard to begin to see the world through the paranoid lens that X offers to millions of its users. It is disorienting and dismaying to have to bushwhack through the dense terrain of lies and do the mental calisthenics of trying to fact-check hundreds of people crying nefarious about things they haven’t even bothered to research. Worse yet, it’s easy to see how somebody might simply give in, beaten into submission by the scale of it all. In this way, even though X is Musk’s project, it may actually be built in the image of the MAGA candidate himself. A $44 billion monument to Trump’s greatest (and only real) trick, as he put it in a 2021 speech: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.”

Developers opposed to repeal of Costa-Hawkins Act have raised more than $124m in California.

Alexza, a Midwest native, struggled with credit-card debt for 10 years, working multiple jobs—as a nanny, bartender, and distillery tour guide—just to meet the minimum payments. Collection agencies called her constantly. She stopped answering, but that wasn’t enough to escape her financial anxiety. She entered an inpatient therapy program in large part because of the stress, which compounded her debts further. (Alexza requested to be referred to by only her first name in order to speak candidly about her finances.)

She had considered bankruptcy, but she was afraid of what it would say about her. “You kind of feel like a failure,” she told me. The cost of filing—in her case, about $1,800 to cover legal fees—was also prohibitive for someone without any savings. But in September 2021, while working at a coffee shop, she decided, “I can’t afford to continue to just barely tread water.” She borrowed the money from a friend and met with a lawyer. Less than two weeks after she filed, the calls from collection agencies stopped. By January, she had erased nearly $20,000 of medical and credit-card debt.

[Read: ‘Nobody knows what these bills are for’]

Debt has long plagued many Americans like Alexza. Today, people in the U.S. carry more debt than they did a few decades ago. Household debt tripled between 1950 and 2022; as of 2020, 14 percent of Americans had so much debt that it outweighed the value of their assets. In this context, you might expect more people to reach for the kind of financial fresh start that bankruptcy can offer. Yet last year, fewer than 0.2 percent of American adults filed. Of course, not everyone in debt would benefit from bankruptcy—but a lot of people might. At a time when so many Americans are struggling, why aren’t more people taking that path to a second chance?

Until the early 19th century, Americans in debt had few mechanisms by which to dig themselves out. But beginning in the 1810s and 1820s, the political scientists Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston write in The Political Development of American Debt Relief, white farmers in the southern and Plains states, who sometimes had to take out loans if their crops failed, began demanding that their political representatives do something to help. Thanks in part to those efforts, legislators began working to create a process by which people could take their creditors to court, with the goal of erasing what they owed; the debtors would be free to start over. (The process was mostly concerned with helping farmers in debt keep their property; it did little for Black sharecroppers, who didn’t own any land to begin with.)

The first federal voluntary bankruptcy law was passed in 1841. It was repealed two years later but reintroduced and expanded in 1867. As one senator who supported the 1867 expansion put it, all the law proposed was that anyone should be able to “escape from [their debts] and be again a man.” That idea was radical: It turned the U.S. into one of the most debtor-friendly countries on earth. Within three years of the American law’s reintroduction, nearly 43,000 debtors had cleared what they owed.

Today, U.S. bankruptcy law looks a lot different. American laws remain more forgiving than those in many other wealthy countries, such as Australia and Austria. But over the past several decades, financial-industry groups in the U.S. have pushed legislators to amend the bankruptcy system in a way that prioritizes creditors over debtors. And with each legal update, “it just gets harder and harder on consumers,” Robert H. Scott III, an economics professor at Monmouth University, told me.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, bankruptcy was more common than it is now, and Americans were successfully canceling $4 billion per year in credit-card debt. But then credit-card lobbyists, worried about all of that lost revenue, began promoting the notion that certain debtors were abusing the system and driving up the cost of credit for everyone. (“What Do Bankruptcies Cost American Families?” one of their newspaper ads asked.) They argued that mass bankruptcies hurt the economy. So, however, does failing to help debtors: Debt is one of the greatest drivers of wealth inequality. Plus, many scholars contend that debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws foster entrepreneurship. But the creditor argument won out, and after much pushing, legislators passed the inelegantly named 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Since then, filing has become riskier, more onerous, and more expensive.

To file, debtors owe an up-front fee that can exceed $1,000—a bizarre catch-22 for someone who can’t afford to pay their bills. The bankruptcy process can also affect your credit score. Although research on exactly what filing does to a score over time is limited, a bankruptcy can stay on your credit report for up to 10 years, potentially limiting your access to rental housing and bank loans. Depending on where you live and what type of bankruptcy you file for, you might also be more likely to have to give up your home or your car to repay your debts. People filing in some states are more fortunate. In states like Rhode Island, which has a generous $12,000 motor-vehicle exemption, the risk of losing what might be your only way to commute to work is low. Alexza, for instance, was able to keep her old car. Texas and Florida homeowners are also lucky, as their houses are essentially protected from creditors. But people living in places with less generous protections may have to accept bigger losses.  

The choice of whether to file gets more complicated when you factor in the different kinds of bankruptcy. While bankruptcy has many permutations, the two most common types for individuals are Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7, which Alexza filed for, erases most eligible debts but also demands that you give up any possessions over a certain value, with a few exceptions. For the poorest Americans, it’s a natural choice; 95 percent of people who file for Chapter 7 keep everything they own, and 96 percent have their debts discharged.

Chapter 13, by contrast, is essentially a long-term repayment plan. It comes with one major benefit—you can keep your assets—but it’s overall much less forgiving. If you miss payments, your whole case could be dismissed, leaving you solely responsible for paying off all of your debts once again. As Zackin and Thurston write in their history of debt relief, Chapter 13 was created in the 1930s not to protect debtors, but as a way to funnel money back to American business owners who worried that bankruptcies were costing them. One contemporaneous study found that few debtors could keep up with payments; today, only about half of people who file for Chapter 13 ultimately become debt free, and some filers wind up in worse financial shape than when they started the process.

However, the legal system pushes a lot of poor people who don’t own much toward Chapter 13. Some of the pressure is structural, as traffic tickets and other court fees, which are disproportionately levied on the poor, can be forgiven only through Chapter 13. But bias in legal representation also plays a role: A study published by the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review found that when advising debtors with identical financial situations, lawyers were more likely to recommend Chapter 7 to white clients and Chapter 13 to Black ones.

In various other ways, bankruptcy does not serve Americans equally. The typical filer is more likely to be middle income, even though low-income Americans have the most debt relative to their earnings—suggesting that the system may not be reaching them. This may be in part because many of the broadest exemptions are targeted at those who already own significant assets. Many states allow homeowners who file Chapter 7 to keep their house if it’s below a certain value, but renters don’t necessarily get to save possessions that most likely cost a lot less than a home. Meanwhile, many debts faced by formerly incarcerated people, such as restitution debts and parole fees, cannot be removed during Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. And student loans didn’t become easier to discharge in bankruptcy court until 2022.

[Read: Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem]

The inequities don’t end there. Even as bankruptcy has failed to reach many of the Americans who need it most, it has morphed into an escape hatch for the wealthy. Chapter 11 was designed specifically for wealthy people and corporations. It lets them pay back creditors over the long term, sometimes in part at a lower interest rate, while their companies operate as usual, in the name of protecting their employees’ jobs. Rudy Giuliani, Francis Ford Coppola, and Donald Trump have filed for Chapter 11—in Trump’s case, six times. Though the process is expensive and complicated, according to the scholar Melissa Jacoby, it is actually much friendlier than the bankruptcies the rest of us use.  

Leaving aside the difficulty of filing, the perhaps more significant barrier to choosing bankruptcy, for many Americans, is the stigma. Some scholars have likened the process to a kind of public penance. During it, a court scrutinizes your finances and choices. And because many people consider debt to be an individual failing, those going through bankruptcy can feel humiliated—even though, in many cases, debt is more properly seen “as a collective misfortune,” Daniel Platt, a legal-studies professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield, told me. In the 19th century, members of the debtors’ movement understood that their struggles were shared. Glimmers of that mindset emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, when many people drew a direct line between corporate exploitation and individuals’ money troubles. But even in the absence of widespread economic catastrophe, when someone declares bankruptcy “there has been a failure,” Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, explained. “A lot of that failure is not on the person but on the system that has no other safety net for you.”

Of course, bankruptcy cannot save individuals from that systemic failure. Expunging your debts cannot, for instance, solve the problem of stagnating wages or rising housing costs. But for people like Alexza, it can offer some breathing room. One moment she couldn’t see a way out of her debts. Then, before she knew it, they were gone.

Many Republicans would say that it is one thing, and quite an awful thing, to withhold a vote from Donald Trump—but that voting for Kamala Harris, a “San Francisco Democrat,” is nothing short of a betrayal, an act of apostasy, impossible for any true conservative to justify.

They’re wrong, though in one respect it’s understandable why they’re wrong. Harris is hardly an avatar of conservatism. She is, after all, a lifelong Democrat who, in her ill-fated campaign for president in 2019, positioned herself as a progressive champion. She embraced positions that I believe ranged from silly to harmful. But it’s a more complicated story than that.

During Harris’s pre-Senate career, when she served as district attorney in San Francisco and then as attorney general of California, her record was generally pragmatic and moderate. In those roles, according to Don Kusler, the national director of Americans for Democratic Action, her record was one “that would have many liberals, particularly our California colleagues, angered or at least rolling their eyes.” Progressives had a much deeper relationship with President Joe Biden than with Vice President Harris; according to The Washington Post, “They fear that under Harris they would lose the unique access they had to the West Wing.” The New Democrat Coalition, a moderate faction in the House, says it’s the part of the caucus most closely aligned with Harris.

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Nor are progressives particularly happy that during the 2024 campaign, Harris has broken with some of her previous liberal stances, such as opposing fracking, decriminalizing border crossing, and ending private health insurance. Harris has spent the closing stretch of the campaign appearing with the likes of Liz Cheney, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has emphasized her support for Ukraine in its war of survival against Russia, and risks losing Michigan because she is viewed by some in her party as too supportive of Israel. During the campaign, Harris has shared that she owns a Glock, said she’d appoint a Republican to her Cabinet, and declared that she’s a “capitalist” who wants “pragmatic” solutions. Her economic focus is on tax breaks for the middle class and on creating opportunities for small businesses. Her economic plan, the Post points out, contained few items on the liberal wish list. Progressive groups say they are finding a “significant enthusiasm deficit” among left-wing voters.

It would be an affectation to say that Harris is a conservative champion, just as it would be a caricature to portray her now as a far-left liberal. She is neither, and if she’s elected president, she is likely to govern from the center-left, at least on most things.

BUT THE STRONGEST CONSERVATIVE CASE for voting for Harris doesn’t have nearly as much to do with her as it has to do with her opponent. Trump remains a far more fundamental threat to conservatism than Harris. Trump has, in a way no Democrat ever could, changed the GOP from within and broken with the most important tenets of conservatism. That’s no surprise, because his desire isn’t to conserve; it is to burn things to the ground. In that respect and others, Trump is temperamentally much more of a Jacobin than a Burkean. He has transformed the Republican Party in his image in ways that exceed what any other American politician has done in modern times.

Start with character. The GOP once championed the central importance of character in political leaders, and especially presidents. It believed that serious personal misconduct was disqualifying, in part because of the example it would send to the young and its corrosive effects on our culture. It lamented that America was slouching towards Gomorrah.  

In 1998, when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president and embroiled in a sexual scandal, the Southern Baptist Convention—whose membership is overwhelmingly conservative —passed the “Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials,” which said, “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” It added, “We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”

Yet for a decade now, Republicans, and in particular white evangelicals, have celebrated as their leader a felon and pathological liar; a person whose companies have committed bank, insurance, tax, and charity fraud; a sexual predator who paid hush money to a porn star; a person of uncommon cruelty and crudity who has mocked the war dead, POWs, Gold Star families, and people with disabilities. Under Trump, the party of “family values” has become a moral freak show.

Trump has also profoundly reshaped the GOP’s public policy. The GOP is now, at the national level, effectively pro-choice, and, due in part to Trump, the pro-life movement is “in a state of political collapse,” in the words of David French, of The New York Times. The Republican Party, pre-Trump, was pro–free trade; Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and referred to tariff as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” (In July, Trump proposed across-the-board tariffs of 10 to 20 percent, and rates of 60 percent or higher on imports from China.) He epitomizes crony capitalism, an economic system in which individuals and businesses with political connections and influence are favored.

For several generations, Republican presidents have, to varying degrees, promoted plans to reform entitlement programs in order to avert fiscal catastrophe. Trump has done the opposite. He has repeatedly said that entitlement programs are off-limits. As president, Trump shredded federalism and made a mockery of our constitutional system of government by his use of executive orders to bypass Congress. He made little effort to shrink government, and lots of efforts to expand it.

On spending, $4.8 trillion in non-COVID-related debt was added during Trump’s single term, while for Biden the figure is $2.2 trillion. Trump added more debt than any other president in history. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 economists found that 65 percent of them see Trump’s proposed policies putting more upward pressure on the federal deficit than Harris’s, and 68 percent said prices would rise faster under Trump than under Harris. And the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Trump’s policies would increase budget deficits by $7.5 trillion over the next decade, compared with $3.5 trillion for Harris.

Pre-Trump Republican presidents celebrated the diversity that immigrants brought to the nation, and the contributions they made to America. “All of the immigrants who came to us brought their own music, literature, customs, and ideas,” Ronald Reagan said in a speech in Shanghai in 1984. “And the marvelous thing, a thing of which we’re proud, is they did not have to relinquish these things in order to fit in. In fact, what they brought to America became American. And this diversity has more than enriched us; it has literally shaped us.” George W. Bush urged America to be a “welcoming society,” one that assimilates new arrivals and “upholds the great tradition of the melting pot,” which “has made us one nation out of many peoples.”

Trump is cut from a very different cloth. He curtailed legal immigration during his presidency. Temporary visas for highly skilled noncitizen workers were reduced. Refugee admissions were slashed. Trump, who peddled outrageous lies against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, says he plans to strip them of their legal status. (At his rallies, Trump has whipped the crowds into a frenzy, getting them to chant, “Send them back! Send them back! Send them back!”)

[Read: Under the spell of the crowd]

Edith Olmsted pointed out in The New Republic that during his first term, Trump rescinded Temporary Protective Status orders for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Nepal, and Honduras, “placing hundreds of thousands of legal residents at risk for deportation.” Trump, who refers to America as an “occupied country” and “a garbage can for the world,” also said he plans to reinstate a ban on travelers from some countries with Muslim-majority populations. And although previous Republicans have attempted to slow illegal border crossings, none has dehumanized those crossing the border by using language from Mein Kampf (“poisoning the blood of our country”). Trump believes American national identity is based not on allegiance to certain ideals but on ethnic and religious background.

It is in foreign policy, though, that Trump may be most antithetical to the policies and approach of modern conservatism. Reagan was a fierce, relentless opponent of the Soviet Union. “The one thing Reagan was more passionate about than anything else was the unsupportable phenomenon of totalitarian power, enslaving a large part of the world’s population,” according to Edmund Morris, a Reagan biographer.

Trump is the opposite. He admires and is enchanted by the world’s most brutal dictators, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and others. Trump is at best indifferent to the fate of Ukraine in its war against Russia; one suspects that deep down, he’s rooting for his friend Putin. Reagan mythologized America; Trump trash-talks it. Reagan was a great champion of NATO; Trump is a reflexive critic who, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, would withdraw from the alliance in a second term. Reagan made human rights a centerpiece of his foreign policy; during his term, Trump praised China’s forced internment of a million or more Uyghurs as “exactly the right thing to do,” according to Bolton.

Here and there, now and then, Trump is conservative—on court appointments, for example—but it’s something that he’s stumbled into, for reasons of political expediency, and that he’s just as liable to stumble away from. (Trump was pro-choice before he was pro-life before he moved once again toward the pro-choice camp.) Trump is fundamentally a populist and a demagogue, a destroyer of institutions and a conspiracy theorist, a champion of right-wing identity politics who stokes grievances and rage. He has an unprecedented capacity to turn people into the darkest versions of themselves. But he is something even beyond that.

IN RECENT WEEKS, Trump has been called a fascist—not by liberal Democratic strategists, but by people who worked closely with him. They include retired General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff; retired General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump presidency; and Mark Esper, Trump’s former secretary of defense, who has said that Trump has fascistic “inclinations” and is “unfit for office.” In addition, retired General James Mattis, who also served as Trump’s secretary of defense, has said he agrees with Milley’s assessment. And Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, has said he suspects that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin.

The historian Robert Paxton, one of the nation’s foremost experts on fascism, was initially reluctant to apply the term fascism to Trump. The label is toxic and used too promiscuously, he believed. But January 6, 2021, changed all of that.

“The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”

Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” Paxton wrote in Newsweek shortly after Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

Paxton could add to the parade of horribles the fact that Trump encouraged the mob to hang his own vice president, came very close to deploying 10,000 active-duty troops to the streets of the nation’s capital to shoot protesters, invited hostile foreign powers to intervene in our election, and extorted an ally to find dirt on his opponents. Paxton could have mentioned that Trump threatened prosecutors, judges, and their families; referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within”; and called the imprisoned individuals who stormed the Capitol “great patriots.” He could have cited Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution and his insinuation that Milley deserved to be executed for treason.

Trump’s supporters may be enraged by the fascist label, but they cannot erase the words or the deeds of the man to whom the label applies. And the only way for the GOP to become a sane, conservative party again is by ridding itself of Trump, which is why even conservatives who oppose Harris’s policies should vote for her. Harris’s election is the only thing that can break the hold of Trump on his party.

Acquaintances of mine, and acquaintances of friends of mine, say that they find Trump contemptible, but that they can’t vote for Harris, because they disagree with her on policy. My response is simple: The position she once held on fracking may be bad, but fascism is worse. The position she holds on any issue may be bad, but fascism is worse.

[Read: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

A friend told me he won’t vote for either Harris or Trump. If Trump wins a second term, he said, “I suspect he will give more attention to his golf game than to siccing the IRS, FBI, or whoever on his political opponents.” His message to me, in other words, is to relax a bit. Trump may be a moral wreck, but he won’t act on his most outlandish threats.

My view is that when those seeking positions of power promote political violence, have a long record of lawlessness, are nihilistic, and embody a “will to power” ethic; make extralegal attempts to maintain power and stop the peaceful transfer of power; and use the words of fascists to tell the world that they are determined to exact vengeance—it’s probably wise to take them at their word.

If Trump wins the presidency again, conservatism will be homeless, a philosophy without a party, probably for at least a generation. And the damage to America, the nation Republicans claim to love, will be incalculable, perhaps irreversible. The stakes are that high.

Harris becoming president may not be the best thing that could happen to conservatism. But if she becomes president, she will have prevented the worst thing that could happen to conservatism and, much more important, to the country.

Two children were pulled from a back seat only moments before the vehicle was hit by a train in Redlands, California.

In the final week of this election season, the Republican Party is running two different campaigns. One of them is an ugly and angry but conventional political enterprise. Donald Trump and other Republicans make speeches; party operatives seek to get out the vote; money is spent in swing states; television and radio advertisements proliferate. The people running that campaign are focused on winning the election.

Last night, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, we caught a glimpse of the other campaign. This is the campaign that is psychologically preparing Americans for an assault on the electoral system, a second January 6, if Trump doesn’t win—or else an assault on the political system and the rule of law if he does. Listen carefully to the words of Tucker Carlson, the pundit fired from Fox News partly for his role in lying about the 2020 election. Warming up the crowd for Trump, he mocked the very idea that Kamala Harris could win: “It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s so impressive as the first Samoan Malaysian, low-I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

“Samoan Malaysian” was Carlson’s way of mocking Harris’s mixed-race background, and “low-IQ” is self-explanatory—but “85 million” is a number of votes she could in fact win. And how, Carlson suggested, could there be such a “groundswell of popular support” for a person he demeaned as a mongrel, an incompetent, an idiot? The answer was clear: There can’t be, and if anyone says it happened, then we will contest it.

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

All of this is part of the game: the Trump campaign’s loud confidence, despite dead-even polls; its decision, in the final days, to take the candidate outside the swing states to New York, New Mexico, and Virginia, because we’ve got this in the bag (and not, say, because filling arenas in Pennsylvania is getting harder); the hyping of Republican-early-voter numbers, even though no evidence indicates that these are new voters, just people who are no longer being discouraged from voting early. Also the multiple attempts, across the country, to remove large numbers of people from the rolls; the many claims, with no justification, that “illegal immigrants” are voting or even, as Trump implied during the September debate, that illegal immigrants are being deliberately imported into the country in order to vote; Vance’s declaration that he will accept the election results as long as “only legal American citizens” vote.

At Madison Square Garden, Trump doubled down on that rhetoric. He repeated past claims about the “invasion” of immigrants; about “Venezuelan gangs” occupying American cities, even Times Square; and he offered an instant solution: “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get these criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail.” But he left open the question of who exactly all these “criminals” might be, because he seemed to be talking about not just immigrants but also his political opponents, “the enemy within.” The United States, he said, “is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer … November 5, 2024, nine days from now, will be Liberation Day in America.”

The insults we heard from many speakers at Madison Square Garden, including the description of Puerto Rico as “garbage” or of Harris as “the anti-Christ” or of Hillary Clinton as a “sick son of a bitch”—insults that can also be heard in a thousand podcast episodes featuring Carlson, Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, and their ilk—are part of the same effort. Trump’s electorate is being primed to equate his political opposition with infection, pollution, and demonic power, and to accept violence and chaos as a legitimate, necessary response to these primal, lethal threats.

As I wrote earlier this month, this kind of language, imported from the 1930s, has never before been part of mainstream American presidential politics, because no other political candidate in modern history has used an election to undermine the legal basis of the American political system. But if we are an occupied country, then Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president of the United States. If we are an occupied country, then the American government is not a set of institutions established over centuries by Congress, but rather a sinister cabal that must be dismantled at any price. If we are an occupied country, then of course the Trump administration can break the law, commit acts of violence, or even trash the Constitution in order to “liberate” Americans, either after Trump has lost the election or after he has won it.

[Read: Trump’s tariff talk might already be hurting the economy]

This kind of language is not being used accidentally or incidentally. It is not a joke, even when used by professional comedians. These insults are central to Trump’s message, which is why they were featured at a venue he reveres. They are also classic authoritarian tactics that have worked before, not only in the 1930s but also in places such as modern Venezuela and modern Russia, countries where the public was also prepared over many years to accept lawlessness and violence from the state. The same tactics are working in the United States right now. Election workers, whose job is to carry out the will of the voters, are already the subject of violent threats and harassment. At least two ballot boxes have been attacked.

The natural human instinct is to dismiss, ignore, or downplay these kinds of threats. But that’s the point: You are meant to accept this language and behavior, to consider this kind of rhetoric “baked in” to any Trump campaign. You are supposed to just get used to the idea that Trump wishes he had “Hitler’s generals” or that he uses the Stalinist phrase “enemies of the people” to describe his opponents. Because once you think that’s normal, then you’ll accept the next step. Even when that next step is an assault on democracy and the rule of law.

We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who was the evening’s first speaker.

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,” he joked. “Just like they did to our country.” A minute later: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It took a few more minutes before he got to the joke about Black people loving watermelons. Novel, edgy stuff—for a minstrel show in 1874.

Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”) Melania Trump delivered a rare public speech that served mostly as a reminder of why her speeches are rare.

[Read: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally. (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.)

“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This—all of this—is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness

[Adam Serwer: J. D. Vance’s empty nationalism]

Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland. (The Trump campaign said that Hinchcliffe’s routine “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” which is also absurd. He was invited by Trump to appear at a rally for Trump’s campaign, and made the joke standing at a lectern emblazoned with Trump’s name.)

The Trump campaign itself may be perfectly happy with how it all went down. Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in Manhattan, a place that still enthralls him, was packed to the rafters for him. Counterprotests were muted, even as speakers at the rally boasted about entering the beating heart of liberalism. (As The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, New York City has moved somewhat toward him, though any hopes of his winning the city or the state remain far-fetched.)

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s dog whistles are unmistakable]

The whole point of the rally was provocation. Trump has long demonstrated a view that it’s better when people are talking about him—even if they’re outraged—than talking about anyone else. The record is murky: Trump won in 2016 but lost the popular vote, lost in 2020, and led his party to poor performances in 2018 and 2022. But he appears to believe that this year could be different. Trump calculates that if people are thinking about immigration and race, they will move toward him, even if they disapprove of the policy solutions he’s offering (or just don’t believe he’ll implement them).

Some Democrats agree, and fret that the Harris campaign’s recent turn toward attacking Trump is a missed opportunity for the Democrat to make a positive case for herself or refocus on economic issues. The pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward warns in an email that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” while Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a Harris surrogate, warned that the rally was “bait.”

As a matter of electoral calculation, focusing on the offensive remarks last night may be unhelpful for Harris. But as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message.

In this extremely tight presidential race, the big surprise of the fall campaign has turned out to be the failure of two major newspapers to deliver expected endorsements of Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. With voting well under way in many states, the Los Angeles Times’ owner and The Washington Post’s publisher made inexcusably late announcements that they had become suddenly disenchanted with the entire notion of endorsing presidential candidates.

Withholding support for Harris after everything that both newspapers have reported about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office looks to me like plain cowardice. Although I served on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board for 18 years, I believe one can reasonably question the value of endorsements. Still, the timing here invites speculation that these papers are preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it.

At each paper, the editorial board had readied a draft or outline of a Harris endorsement and was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for final approval. On Wednesday, the L.A. Times editorials editor, Mariel Garza, told her team, including me, that the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would not permit any endorsement to run. She then resigned in protest.

As thousands of angry Times readers canceled their subscriptions, Soon-Shiong publicly claimed on X to have asked the editorial board to write an analysis of “all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” during their respective White House tenures. But he said the board “chose to remain silent.”

Nonsense. We made no such choice. We were ready to endorse Harris, and Soon-Shiong’s post on X was the first time I or my fellow editorial writers had heard anything about a side-by-side analysis. Having been so casually thrown under the bus, I resigned Thursday. My colleague Karin Klein also announced that she would step down.

On Friday, the Post publisher and CEO, William Lewis, published a statement that his paper, too, would not endorse in the presidential race, now or ever again. A member of the Post editorial board resigned. Subscribers canceled.

[Read: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

Remember, this is the same news organization that, during the first Trump administration, adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” It can also die in broad daylight. In this year’s race, a non-choice ignores Trump’s singular unfitness for office, demonstrated time and again through his dishonesty, his false claims to have won the 2020 election, his criminal convictions, his impeachable offenses, his race-baiting, his threats of retaliation against his opponents, and many other features that make him a danger to the nation.

Lewis and Soon-Shiong both explained that they wanted to let voters make their own decisions.

I hear some version of that irritating statement every four years, although it typically comes from readers who ask why editorial boards don’t just deliver the facts, the way news stories are supposed to, leaving judgment up to readers. Publishers and newspaper owners ought to know better.

Editorials express a newspaper’s institutional viewpoint, based on a clearly articulated set of values and expressed by logical (and sometimes emotional) arguments supported by evidence. In a process unique in journalism, they are shaped by daily back-and-forth discussions among editorial writers. The editorial board is separate from the newsroom, where reporters are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves.

Endorsements and other editorials are a lot like a lawyer’s closing argument to a jury after a long trial with numerous witnesses and exhibits. They remind readers of everything they’ve read, seen, and heard, and then they assemble it all in a persuasive presentation. They make a case. And then readers decide.

The Times editorial board went more than three decades without endorsing in presidential races, largely because readers and the newsroom were so outraged by the endorsement of Richard Nixon for reelection in 1972 that publishers were too cautious (or rather, too chicken) to again take a stand. But soon after I arrived at the Times, the editorial board promised to start endorsing for president again in the 2008 primary. We argued—in an editorial, of course—that if we purported to support transparency, voter engagement, and civic participation, then we had an obligation to make a decision and vigorously defend our choice.

In a pre-endorsement series of editorials, we invited readers to examine a set of foundational ideas such as “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” and to question how those and other principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to current challenges. Then we measured the primary candidates against those values, and made our case for the relatively unknown Barack Obama.

Some critics argue that editorials don’t change anyone’s vote, but that’s not the point. Even voters who already have made up their mind often look for a well-reasoned explanation of why their choice is the right one. And let’s not be so certain that a strong argument on an editorial page, even one from California or the District of Columbia, won’t affect the outcome of a close race that could be won or lost by just a few votes in one precinct in Pennsylvania.

[Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?]

Soon-Shiong’s alternative, a non-choice pro-and-con matrix, wouldn’t be an editorial. It would be as if an attorney decided not to bother with a closing argument and said instead, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are some reasons you should rule for my client, and also a bunch of reasons to rule against him.” Nor does the proposed side-by-side analysis of Trump’s and Harris’s policies make much sense on its own terms. Trump as president was the top policy maker during his time in office. Harris, as vice president, has not been a policy maker at all, so the comparison would be inept. An editorial board would identify that flaw immediately. Soon-Shiong may have missed it, but I find myself wondering whether he wanted to direct the outcome of the endorsement.

In short-circuiting the Times editorial board, Soon-Shiong’s message has become only more incoherent. He said Thursday that his goal was to avoid political division. But his adult daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, said in a series of X posts and in a Saturday New York Times story that the family met and collectively decided against endorsing Harris to protest the vice president’s support for Israel. Not true, Patrick Soon-Shiong told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday.

“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion,” but not for the Times, he said.

Instead of a forthright, well-argued editorial, readers are left with an indecipherable message and journalistic failure. Someone ought to write about it. It might make a good editorial.

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have a story to sell you: Amid a scramble for housing in the United States, the real problem is the presence of immigrants.

Americans “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” Trump argued at the Economic Club of New York’s luncheon in September. Vance has made this argument even more fervently—on X, in recent interviews, and in other venues. During the vice-presidential debate, Vance declared that “25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” adding, “It’s why we have massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal-alien populations under Kamala Harris’s leadership.”

Key elements of this story are false. For one thing, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States is likely about 11 million, less than half of Vance’s estimate. Furthermore, when the economist Ernie Tedeschi compared places that experienced a surge in foreign-born populations with places that saw large increases in housing prices for native-born Americans, he couldn’t even find a simple correlation. But Trump and Vance correctly understand one thing: Making the American public believe that immigrants are drawing down limited resources is an effective way of bringing out illiberal sentiments that could fuel the GOP ticket’s victory.

[Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran: The Malthusians are back]

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way right now: Housing is scarce in big, liberal, productive cities such as San Francisco and Boston, which have generated high-paying jobs but refused to build enough housing to accommodate all the new workers. And if 25 million people suddenly vanished from the United States, pressure on home prices and rents would abate somewhat, all things being equal.

But all things wouldn’t be equal. The kinds of events that crush housing demand—such as collapsing birth rates, a massive recession that wipes out many workers’ incomes, a virus that kills a tenth of the population, and, yes, the sudden expulsion of tens of millions of undocumented immigrants—tend to have traumatic consequences, economic and otherwise.

What makes arguments like Trump and Vance’s seem plausible is a widespread failure to think in terms of systems. In reality, immigrants are not just consumers of housing; they’re also consumers of various other products, stimulating demand for more jobs for all Americans. And, of course, immigrants are not only consumers but also producers who help build housing and contribute to technological innovation.

Yet the fear of fighting over a fixed pool of resources runs deep in human thinking. In 1798’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, the English economist Thomas Malthus warned that population increases would impoverish everyone: “The food therefore which before supported seven millions must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress.”

The tendency to turn against outsiders in the face of critical shortages is not restricted to a basket of deplorables. It’s in all of us. Most people see others as a threat to their resources, whether it’s immigrants coming for your housing, yuppies pushing up rents, other students taking slots at all the good schools, or just more people on the road, adding to congestion.

A recent poll in Massachusetts—which in 2020 supported Joe Biden over Trump two to one—revealed that many people are convinced by Trump/Vance illiberalism. A plurality (47.2 percent) agreed with the statement “Migrants are taking up affordable housing that should go to Americans first.” Trump’s rhetorical skills aren’t what’s turning significant numbers of Massachusetts liberals against their own principles. They are witnessing scarcity conditions that have been perpetuated for decades by their state’s Democratic policy makers.

The mismatch between job and housing creation across the wealthiest blue states caused prices to skyrocket, led some people to forgo good jobs because housing was too expensive, and strained entire communities, turning neighbor against neighbor. Unwittingly, liberals have seeded the conditions for illiberal politics to take root in some of the most progressive jurisdictions in the country.

There are fundamentally two ways to respond to scarcity. There is Malthusian thinking—a fierce defense of the existing resource pool, a politics that demands ever more scapegoats and leaves everyone poorer in the long run. Then there is liberalism, which demands a growing pie. It argues that we can make more: more housing, more schools, more good jobs, enough for everyone.

This wasn’t always possible. Scarcity used to be the depressing fact of human existence. Malthus was looking back at an era of human history during which GDP per capita was extremely low and population growth meant strain on existing resources, eventually leading to population decline. It was a horrible, depressing cycle that pitted family against family, tribe against tribe. There really wasn’t enough food to feed everyone, or enough energy to warm everyone. Rising populations meant new mouths to feed; new mouths to feed meant declining living standards for all.

But the Industrial Revolution changed all of that. In the late 17th and early 18th century, economies such as England’s began to escape the Malthusian trap. A burst of productivity and economic growth outpaced the growth in new people. New people weren’t just new mouths to feed; they were positive-sum additions to society. Even as the population grew exponentially, GDP per capita continued rising, lifting people out of poverty. People learned how to make more food with fewer resources (steam engines!), built structures that could house more people with less land (density!), and created technologies that could move lots of people around quickly (horse-drawn omnibuses on rails! cable cars! automobiles!). In a world of soaring economic growth, population growth no longer implied self-sacrifice. Welcoming newcomers with open arms no longer required a messianic level of magnanimity. A politics based on tolerating others, even celebrating others, became possible.

[Read: A brief economic history of time]

The political logic of tolerance works only once society is out of the scarcity trap. Anti-immigration hawks insist on zeroing in on increased short-term demand for housing because of immigration. They refuse to zoom out and see the whole picture: American economic growth is predicated on higher levels of immigration. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, “International migrants were the sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022 … A shrinking working-age population can easily lead to economic stagnation or even falling standards for a nation.” Fewer people mean less innovation, fewer goods and services produced, and higher prices and shortages. Yet liberals have forgotten the central importance of fighting against scarcity, and the logic of Malthusian thinking has crept back in.

In the world’s wealthiest country, scarcity is now a choice. There are no technological barriers to building enough housing for all. We know how to build homes; we’ve done it before. But I fear liberals have forgotten that their desire for a more welcoming, inclusive world rests on society’s ability to prove there is enough to go around. We cannot rely on altruism to redistribute resources to the most needy, to provide more for the poor, to pursue egalitarian principles. We live in a fallen world. People need more than abstract ideals; they need to feel secure.

[Listen: Who’s responsible for the housing crisis?]

Tensions rose during the pandemic, as home-price growth shocked expensive suburbs and sleepy towns alike. Graffiti in Boise, Idaho, telling newcomers to “Go back to Cali” reflected the frustrated mood of longtime residents as big-pocketed Californians moved in. But scarcity doesn’t just aggravate differences; it also creates them. When I report on homelessness, I hear people argue that unhoused residents are being bused in from out of state, a myth researchers have worked tirelessly to debunk—one comprehensive study showed that 90 percent of homeless people in California had lost their last housing in the Golden State. Most of the remaining 10 percent had been born there or had familial or employment ties to the state.

Rhetoric like Vance and Trump’s tends to resonate with people who assume that they’re the ones defending against interlopers—that the outsider will always be someone else. But history reminds us that stranger has never been a fixed concept. During the Great Depression, California passed an anti-migrant law targeted at Oklahomans and other Americans fleeing the Dust Bowl, making it a crime to “knowingly assist a pauper in entering the state.” How confident are you that no economic or natural disaster will strike your community? No recession? No hurricanes? No wildfires? If you’d like to gamble on that, lead the way. But the best hedge against future catastrophes is investing in liberalism and growth today.

Still, it’s not enough to simply expect better of people. Liberalism has to provide real, tangible proof that it can combat scarcity. Otherwise, people will do what’s natural. They’ll do what their ancestors did, and what Trump and Vance are enticing them to do: They’ll turn against outsiders. And once they’ve run out of outsiders, they’ll turn against one another.