On Sunday, at a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, Donald Trump and his supporters gave their closing argument. It began with offensive, identity-based jokes straight from the ’80s; continued with a shout-out to a Black man involving watermelon; and at some point implied that Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, was a sex worker. Along the way were sprinklings of anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic comments, including this gem from the Trump adviser Stephen Miller: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

The vitriolic event included some choice lines about Latinos from Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian chosen by the Trump campaign to kick off the event. Hinchcliffe, who is also a podcaster, began with juvenile sex jokes about Latinos—“They love making babies”—before moving on to describe Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

As a Nuyorican—what New Yorkers from the Puerto Rican diaspora affectionately call ourselves—I am keenly attuned to any mention of the island and my people. And for most of this campaign, little has been said. So it was a surprise to see that on the same day that Hinchcliffe spoke at Madison Square Garden, Vice President Harris released a video outlining her plan for Puerto Rico and visited a Puerto Rican restaurant on the campaign trail in Philadelphia.

The coincidence was fortuitous, because it offered Puerto Ricans a real-time split screen. Many saw Harris attempting to learn and address the concerns of Puerto Ricans; Trump showed that he was willing to welcome Latinos to his tent only if they were complicit with his racist worldview. The language used at the Trump rally “was so simple, and it just very genuinely showed how they really feel,” Paola Ramos, the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, told me.

After getting blowback for the “island of garbage” remark, the Trump campaign attempted to distance itself. (As everyone knows, Harris is responsible for everything anyone around her does, but Trump is innocent even of things for which he’s been found guilty.) “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump,” a campaign representative said.

As much as the campaign may try to disavow Hinchcliffe’s joke, it can’t avoid the way that that language merely reinforced the sense of disdain that Puerto Ricans had already experienced from Trump. The insult gave Democrats the perfect opportunity to remind Latino voters—and Puerto Ricans in particular—of something Harris raised in her video: Trump’s anemic, and insulting, response to islanders after Hurricane María, in 2017.

[From the November 2022 issue: Let Puerto Rico be free]

Hurricane Harvey had hit Texas a month earlier; there, FEMA had approved $142 million in individual assistance to hurricane victims within nine days. Nine days after María, FEMA had approved just $6.2 million for Puerto Ricans. In Texas, there were far more helicopters, meals, water, government personnel. When then-President Trump did finally visit the storm-ravaged island—nearly two weeks after the hurricane had passed—he told residents they were lucky they hadn’t endured “a real catastrophe, like Katrina,” and, in lieu of more meaningful assistance, threw rolls of paper towels to the crowd at a media event.

This year, Puerto Rican celebrities including Marc Anthony have already been working to remind voters of all of this while campaigning for Harris. After Sunday’s rally, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez shared Harris’s video and announced that they were voting for her. Lopez will appear with Harris tomorrow.

But none of these endorsements have as much significance as that of the musician Bad Bunny’s. His fan base is enormous and young, and includes both men and women. And unlike many stars who avoid bringing politics to their platforms, San Benito, as he’s known to his fans, has made politics, and particularly the politics of colonialism, central to his art. He’s been active as Puerto Rico has approached its election for governor, also happening on November 5, purchasing billboards arguing that a vote for the ruling party is a vote for corruption. His take has weight.

For months, as megawatt celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have thrown their support behind Harris, I’ve heard people asking where Bad Bunny has been. Why hasn’t Bad Bunny been helping Harris? The answer seemed obvious to me: Despite being a U.S. citizen and a global superstar, Bad Bunny can’t vote in presidential elections.

Bad Bunny is a resident of Puerto Rico, and disenfranchisement is just one of the many inequities that define islanders’ second-class citizenship. But even if Puerto Rican residents can’t vote, they can influence the diaspora on the mainland, which can. And that’s what Bad Bunny is doing.

After Trump’s rally, Bad Bunny shared a segment of Harris’s Puerto Rico video to his 45.7 million Instagram followers several times. Specifically, he selected the segment in which Harris says, “There’s so much at stake in this election for Puerto Rican voters and for Puerto Rico,” and where she reminds people of Trump throwing paper towels to island residents after the hurricane.

Harris’s plan for Puerto Rico involves creating what she calls an “opportunity economy” on the island by shoring up the power grid, providing clean-energy credits to islanders, and developing affordable housing, job-creation incentives, and investment in Puerto Rican entrepreneurs and creators, among several other major initiatives. Her plan noticeably evades the big colonial issues, such as repealing the Jones Act—the 100-year-old tariff on produce and goods shipped to the island that costs residents an estimated $692 million a year. Nor does it address taking up the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act—a bill that Representatives Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have championed, which would allow islanders to vote on Puerto Rico’s status as a commonwealth. However, what Harris’s plan does offer are thoughtful solutions to many of the problems that have afflicted the island, especially in recent years, which is more than anyone can say of Trump.

The more that the “floating garbage” line is repeated—on television, on the radio—the more riled up Puerto Ricans are getting. More Puerto Ricans live on the mainland than on the island now. One result of the botched response to María has been, ironically, the migration of thousands of islanders—many to swing states such as Pennsylvania, where there are now nearly half a million Puerto Rican residents. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans currently reside in Georgia and Arizona as well. The Democratic strategist José Parra told The Hill that what happened at Madison Square Garden might make a real difference: “If Pennsylvania swings toward the Democrats, I think you can look back on this as a pivotal moment.”

Much has been made of the growing support for Trump among Latinos, and this offense is unlikely to sway any of his true believers. But it may motivate some Latinos who’d planned on sitting the election out. Victor Martinez, who owns a local Spanish-language radio channel in Pennsylvania, told Politico that a large portion of the community there had been on the fence about voting at all. The Trump rally shifted that. “If we weren’t engaged before, we’re all paying attention now,” he said.

Puerto Ricans love their island—even those who have never had the chance to go there. Yes, it has stunning beaches, lush green mountains, the sound of the coqui. But what we love most is the warmth of our culture: the music, the dance, the food, the art, our people. It is a place that calls to us when we’re far away and embraces us when we come home. The joke was not just an insult; it was a reminder of the neglect and disrespect the place and its people have faced for decades at the hands of the United States government, and especially during the Trump administration.

Once, when Bad Bunny was asked about his political engagement, he said, “I am not getting involved in politics; politics gets into my life because it affects my country, because it affects Puerto Rico.”

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The way Donald Trump talks about January 6 has evolved over time. Directly after the insurrection, he condemned the rioters, although he added that they were “very special.” For the next few years, he played around with different themes, implying that the protests were peaceful or that the people jailed for their actions that day were “political prisoners.”

But these descriptions are mild compared with the outrageous ways he’s been talking about January 6 in these weeks leading up to the election. Recently, he described the day as “love and peace” and upped the metaphor from political prisoners to Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Why is he leaning so hard into the political revisionism? And what exactly should we be afraid of?

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who has a unique view of that day. Raskin explains what January 6, 2025, might look like and what is historically unique about Trump’s claims. And I ask Raskin the question I’ve been pondering: When might it be appropriate to let January 6 go?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Over the last many months, I’ve been thinking a lot about January 6 and about how memory can become a weapon in an election. Just the other day at an economic forum in Chicago, candidate Donald Trump described that day as “love and peace.” Love and peace! Can you imagine? You wanna hear some sounds of “love and peace” from that day?

[Noises from January 6]

Rioter: Start making a list. Put all those names down. And we start hunting them down one by one.

Person on bullhorn inside Congress: We had a disbursement of tear gas in the Rotunda. Please be advised there are masks under your seats. Please grab a mask.

Rosin: In the last couple of weeks of the campaign, Trump has been really digging into this bizarre sentiment. He compared the jailed rioters to Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II. He reposted a meme, saying January 6 would go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up a fraudulent election. He said, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns.”

Now, if you follow the work of Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who was on this show just last week, you know what it means when a leader starts to rewrite history in such a shameless way. It’s a thing that wannabe dictators do and have always done.

But January 6 has also been on my mind because, for the past year, I’ve been spending a lot of time with people who are hard at work doing what Trump has been doing—distorting our memories of that day.

It started like this: Last fall, my partner and I were walking our dogs, and we passed a car in our neighborhood that had a bunch of militia stickers in the back window and a huge j4j6, which means “Justice for January 6ers.” And at first, we had a nasty altercation with the person in the car. And then we decided to get to know her and her friends.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you want to know how that attempt to get to know our neighbors worked out, you’ll have to listen to the podcast series we made about it. It’s called We Live Here Now.

This episode is about the bigger picture. We, in the U.S., have not had a lot of experience with this kind of real-time memory distortion. And there’s only one person I want to talk to about how that might play out in this upcoming election: Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who was a member of Congress’s January 6 committee, and his memories of that day are more potent than most people’s. Raskin’s son, Tommy, had died by suicide about a week before, and in the months of sleepless nights that followed Raskin wrote a book called Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which interweaves his son’s suffering with the nation’s suffering, which he believes drove thousands of people to the Capitol that day.

I started by asking Raskin what was foremost on my mind, which is what we should expect this coming January 6, 2025, which is when Congress will certify the next election. Here’s our conversation.

Jamie Raskin: I mean, I’ve been to Arizona, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, California, Colorado—and everybody is asking about January 6 and whether we will see a repeat.

But we will not see an exact repeat of January 6, 2021. For one thing, Donald Trump’s not president. Joe Biden’s president, which means, if you had a similar scenario unfolding, the National Guard would be there. Joe Biden would not be eating hamburgers and french fries and watching it on TV like an all-pro-wrestling match.

Rosin: And saying, So what?

Raskin: And saying, So what? And in general, we are physically fortified in a way we weren’t. We will have nonscalable fencing, and we’ll be ready for violence like that. But fundamentally, what was January 6, 2021? It was a certification crisis. It was an attempt to block the receipt of Electoral College votes in the so-called certificates of ascertainment sent in by the governors.

And we will see multiple certification challenges by Donald Trump, because they’ve already begun, in essence. They’re already suing. But it won’t happen at the end of the process, which is what January 6 is. They will happen at the beginning. They will be at the precinct level, at the county level, at the state level. They will try to dispute the authenticity and the veracity of the vote, and there will be challenges to, you know, any popular-vote majorities. And I’m assuming and hoping there will be many of them across the country for the Harris-Walz ticket.

Rosin: Okay. You started by saying people ask you, so clearly people are worried. And then you answered by saying it’s not going to be the same. So is your general answer to them, No need to worry? Like, Don’t worry. There won’t be violence? Is that how, like—do you feel secure? It will be okay?

Raskin: It will not be an instant replay of what happened on January 6, 2021. It will look very different. In some sense, the new crisis has already begun, with lies that are being told by Donald Trump about the hurricanes and about FEMA. This is equivalent to the lies he was telling about COVID-19 last time to try to condition his followers to accept his Big Lie about the election. And he’s already trying to undermine people’s faith and confidence in the electoral process in the electoral system.

So that part of it has already begun. When I’m out campaigning around the country, I say we have two urgent tasks: One is to win the election, and two is to defend the election. Because as we saw from the last time around, Donald Trump doesn’t remotely consider it over once the ballots have been tallied if he loses the election. And that, of course, is a hallmark characteristic of an authoritarian, and an authoritarian mindset. Authoritarian political parties don’t accept the results of democratic elections that don’t go their way.

Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, is not running what I would recognize as a real election campaign, which is about canvassing, door knocking, organizing people. I don’t see that happening. I see it happening on the Democratic side everywhere I go. I don’t see it on the Republican side almost anywhere I go. They’re running a campaign of raising a lot of money. A lot of it disappears into different mystery boxes, but basically, they’re running a campaign on TV and then getting ready to attack the election process.

Rosin: Yes. He says, Cheat like hell, in almost every state. If we lose these states, if we lose this state—Wisconsin, Michigan, whatever state—it’s because they cheat like hell.

So I’m trying to give listeners an accurate picture. There’s one picture: Oh, we’re just going to have violence the way we had before. There’s another picture, which is: It’s going to be fine. So I’m just trying to prepare readers, listeners for what is realistically the thing that you should be vigilant and watch out for and what might actually happen.

Raskin: Well, I think it’s going to be a fight to certify the actual election vote. And remember, this is something that, for most of our lifetimes, we’ve taken for granted: simply that people will vote and that the votes will be counted fairly—they will be tallied fairly—and then the majority will be translated through an electoral system that has integrity to it.

You know, the Trump methodology here is to attack the electoral system, to disrupt the electoral system, and then try to blame everything on his opponents. I mean, this is an absolute historical anomaly. And so we need to have clarity about what’s going on.

And we have to, as citizens in a completely nonpartisan way—we have to be defending the integrity of the electoral process against this kind of attack.

Rosin: He has said many times that he would pardon the J6ers. He could pardon the J6ers, right? There’s nothing, if he wins, that would prevent him from doing that.

Raskin: Certainly not under the Supreme Court’s decision. I mean, the pardon power would be a paradigm example of a core function of the presidency that the president could exercise without any fear of criminal prosecution. I mean, when Trump figures that out, he’ll probably end up selling pardons.

They came close to doing it last time, but there’s no reason he wouldn’t go on eBay and just start selling them under that rancid opinion issued by his justices.

Rosin: I didn’t realize you could do that. You probably just gave him an idea.

Raskin: Yeah. (Laughs.) But look—let me say something about that. They call the January 6 insurrectionists convicted of assaulting federal officers or destroying federal property or seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government, “political prisoners.” So they liken them to, you know, [Alexei] Navalny. They liken them to [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn or to Nelson Mandela. These were people who were fighting for freedom and democracy against authoritarian regimes. These people were fighting for an authoritarian coup against a constitutional democracy, and they’ve had every aspect of due process, and they’ve been convicted for their crimes against us.

A lot of the Trumpian revisionist assault on January 6 is internally contradictory. It’s just illogical. Half of the time, they’re saying that the people who attacked the police and who attacked the Capitol were not MAGA—they were antifa dressed as MAGA. Then the other half of the time, they’re down in the D.C. jail demanding the release of these alleged antifa fighters. Why are they demanding the release of the antifa fighters? It makes no sense. So there’s just incoherence replete throughout the propaganda assault on January 6. The point for them is to confuse people and to destroy the moral clarity of what happened, but it was perfectly clear what happened on that day.

There were people of both political parties and all political persuasions standing by the rule of law and acting under the Constitution, and then people trying to destroy the Constitution in order to overthrow an election and put Donald Trump back in power unlawfully.

Rosin: I mean, yeah. If you’re a student of autocracy, like The Atlantic is, the point is to say something, in some ways, as an autocratic leader that’s patently untrue and dare you to believe it as a loyalty test. I mean, that’s one, as Anne Applebaum—she’s been doing a series about that. It has really enlightened me on what the lies are about. They’re a test, you know? And so the more absurd they are—like, they’re about Haitians eating pets or whatever—like, the more ridiculous they are and the more you are willing to believe them, the more that seals the lock between the leader and the follower.

So that’s why I sometimes get a little despairing around, like, Well, we’re just going to keep telling the truth, because that’s not the game they’re playing, you know? So what does fact-checking and journalism and, like, recording things really help? Sometimes, you know, I feel that way about it.

Raskin: I mean, Trump’s lies are not about illumination or even contests over the facts. Trump’s lies are about coercion and obedience and submission of his followers.

Rosin: But that’s difficult. That’s difficult to counter. Like, how do you get in between it? The truth doesn’t really get in between it. The truth makes you an enemy.

Raskin: Well, when you look at the way that cult leaders operate, they tell lies all the time. Nobody really feels like it’s necessary to contradict their lies, because they’re so self-evidently ridiculous. And we can see the way that their lives are just meant to regulate and control their followers. And so it’s just a question of naming what’s actually happening.

Rosin: And continuing to do that, with some faith that the majority of people will eventually sort of drift over to the side of truth.

Raskin: Yeah, and also to make sure that a majority of the people are going to stand up for the facts, the truth, and for democratic institutions.

Rosin: Jack Smith’s case. Any thoughts about that?

Raskin: Well, Jack Smith is now paddling upstream because of the Supreme Court’s outrageous ruling that the president has immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits under the rubric of his office.

You would think those would be the worst kinds of crimes, but no. Those are presumptively immune from prosecution, and if they’re within his core functions of office, then they’re absolutely immune.

Donald Trump was never acting in his official capacity as president when he tried to overturn an election, simply because that’s not part of the president’s job. It’s not part of the president’s job to have anything to do with the presidential election. When he’s trying to set up counterfeit elector slates, he’s not involved with the Electoral College. That’s done at the state level, and the state legislatures do it. And then the results are sent in to the House and the Senate and the archivist. They’re not sent to the president.

When he called Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia, and said, Just find me 11,780 votes, or called other election officials to harangue them—that’s not part of the president’s job. He was calling as a candidate, not as a president. And as a candidate, he was acting as an outlaw candidate and really as a tyrant, somebody trying to topple the whole constitutional order.

You know, a tyrant, in the Greek sense of the word, is someone who rises up from outside of the constitutional order to try to attack the constitutional order. And that’s a pretty accurate description and definition of what Donald Trump has done.

[Music]

Rosin: There’s a last thing I want to talk to Raskin about, and it pushed against everything he had just told me: When is it time to start moving on from January 6? That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: In the year I spent reporting my podcast about January 6, I came across a very interesting idea for how to approach the memory of that day differently. It was in an essay by journalist Linda Kinstler called “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion.” Kinstler’s argument—or at least one part of it—is that we are a culture saturated in memories.

We have videos and body cams and security cameras. Almost every inch of January 6 is recorded, which is a good thing for, say, a trial. But also, it makes it harder for us to forgive and forget. Back in the day, American political leaders called it “oblivion.” It was used in certain moments in American history, like after the Civil War, when obsessively remembering might just bring on more and more cycles of recrimination and vengeance.

So I ran this question by Raskin. He’s a constitutional lawyer and also a philosophical thinker. Might there ever be a time when oblivion might be the appropriate strategy for January 6?

[Break]

Rosin: All right—last thing: Whether he wins or loses, we have a culture to deal with, a culture of Americans, 30 percent of whom still think that the election wasn’t fair, was stolen in some way. So that’s with us. That’s the state of our nation right now, whoever wins and loses.

I’ve been reading about a—it’s a philosophical, legal, political theory of oblivion. Like, is there a time when cycles of recrimination or justice have to yield to something else? Is there ever a moment when you’re remembering too much? Does that make any sense to you?

Raskin: Mm-hmm. Well, it will be important for us always to remember these events and the facts of what took place. But I suppose, you know, human beings are made up of a mixture of thoughts and passions and emotions. And just like the passions and emotions have diminished somewhat from the Civil War, perhaps the passions and emotions around January 6 will begin to subside.

But at this point, with the republic still so much under attack, and with so many lies and so much propaganda and disinformation and revisionism out there, I believe that the passions and the emotion surrounding January 6 are still very much there, and they should be there until we can actually dispel this threat of authoritarianism in our country.

Rosin: So a potentially useful idea for healing, but just not yet. Is that where we land? Because I’m very taken—I find this theory interesting, that there’s a history post-Civil War of oblivion. You know, that it’s talked about by politicians: It’s time for oblivion. And right now, you know, we have video memories. Everything’s taped, recorded. So it’s very hard, actually, to do something like that.

Raskin: Well, thank God it’s all taped, and thank God there are videos, because you can see the way they’re lying about it, even in the face of the videos and the absolute factual documentation.

Look—I would say that historical memory is essential to establishing our values and principles for the future. One hopes that in the case of a society or a nation, that we’re not disabled by a memory the way that individuals can be disabled by a memory through post-traumatic stress syndrome or something like that. I’m hoping we’re able to integrate this into the true American story.

But as long as people are out there lying about January 6 and claiming it was really antifa or it was really the FBI or something, it’s going to be important for us to insist upon the facts and bring passion to the project of making people see the truth and remember.

[Break]

Rosin: That was my interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin. My thanks to him for taking the time to chat with me. Now, before we end, I want to share a bit from the other podcast I made recently, We Live Here Now.

I can’t say that we managed to convince our neighbors of our version of the truth. I hope you’ll listen to the entire series to hear what happened. It starts with the ridiculous way we met them, and it moves through a lot of characters in their alternate universe, including some J6ers who’d been just released from prison.

But here, I’m going to share with you something from the final episode of the series because it’s kind of in the spirit of oblivion. Even though we didn’t change their minds, something softened.

The two people you are about to hear are Lauren Ober—she’s my partner, who co-hosted the series—and Micki Witthoeft—she’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the only person shot and killed on that day. Micki is our neighbor. This is from Lauren’s final interview with Micki.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

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

Rosin: You can listen to We Live Here Now anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Music]

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

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Media | YouTube | Pocket Casts

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

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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

[Music]

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

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

Ober: But you should have said hi.

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

I’m Lauren Ober.

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

[Music]

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

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

Rosin: What do you mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: Interesting. Okay. What do you mean?

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

So I went to see that life.

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

Ober: I mean, let’s get out. Let’s—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Yeah.

Witthoeft: Are you ready now?

Ober: Not yet.

Witthoeft: Why?

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

Wilma: Oh, yeah. They do.

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

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

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

Ober: You want me to?

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

Ober: All right.

Wilma: It feels great.

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

Ober: You haven’t? Why?

Witthoeft: I don’t know.

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

Witthoeft: Check this out.

Ober: Wait. This is your Christmas book?

Witthoeft: Yeah.

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

Ober: Okay.

Witthoeft: There’s Ashli.

Ober: Oh my God. Cute.

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

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

Witthoeft: Yeah, they’re not bad.

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

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

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

Ober: What? Where?

Witthoeft: The little urn.

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

Witthoeft: That was a gift.

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

Witthoeft: Afraid so—’70s, you know.

Ober: Oh my god.

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

Ober: This is awesome!

Witthoeft: I like it.

Ober: This is great.

Ober: But that’s how it happened.

[Music]

Ober: Are these your books? Norah Ephron.

Witthoeft: Uh-huh.

Ober: Sheryl Sandberg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witthoeft: Twenty-four years.

Ober: Ah, ah, ah, ah.

Witthoeft: I’ll be right here.

Wilma: Aye-aye.

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

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

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

Ober: Right. Right. Right. Right.

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

Ober: Oh, get out.

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

Ober: Wait. It goes all the way back?

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

Ober: Jesus. It’s really big.

Ober: The plot of land, not the house.

Ober: Okay.

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

Ober: All right.

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

Witthoeft: You just never fucking know, do you?

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

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

Ober: Oh wow.

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Because the military is—

Witthoeft: Dangerous.

Ober: Dangerous. Right.

Witthoeft: And in particular, at that time.

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

Witthoeft: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Ober: Mm-hmm. Right.

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

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

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

That’s after the break.

[Break]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witthoeft: I think so too.

Ober: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ober: Do you want that?

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

Ober: Why?

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

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

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

Witthoeft: Oh, I’m gonna miss ’em.

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

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

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

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

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

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The women Trump is winning]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Across the country, Donald Trump’s faithful fans sport MAGA merch—much of it emblazoned with antagonistic slogans—and line up to cheer for their candidate in arenas and event centers. His rallies are a cultural phenomenon, giving him a platform to boost violent rhetoric and deliver gibberish tirades. I spoke with my colleague John Hendrickson, who has been writing campaign-trail dispatches, about the differences he’s observed between Trump and Kamala Harris rallies and what draws people to such events.

A Never-Ending Tour

Lora Kelley: What makes attending a Trump rally feel different from other political events?

John Hendrickson: Trump long ago turned political rallies into a dark spectacle. Mitt Romney had rallies; John McCain had rallies; George W. Bush had rallies. But they didn’t have this carnival-type atmosphere.

I think a lot of people go because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Maybe you can trace it to the decline of social organizations and even church attendance. Going to a Trump rally, being part of the MAGA movement, offers a sense of community—for better or for worse.

Trump remains a singular force. There’s such a cult of personality around him. His rallies are technically part of the campaign, but they’re almost unmoored from the traditional confines of a campaign. They’re his lifeblood. It reminds me of Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour, which has been going on since 1988. Trump has more or less been on his own never-ending tour for the past nine years.

Lora: How does that atmosphere contrast with what you see on the Democratic side?

John: Trump paints a dystopian portrait that revolves around this idea of a migrant “invasion” that’s destroying the fabric of the United States. His slogan—“Make America great again”—is predicated on an imagined past. Harris has zeroed in on a simple idea of championing freedom, which, ironically, used to be a Republican talking point. Her campaign rhetoric, as a whole, is far more positive and optimistic than Trump’s, especially when she’s talking about basic things such as the economy. But her tone often changes when she gets to the threats Trump poses to more personal issues, such as abortion rights, or when she called him “increasingly unstable and unhinged” at her recent rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump has internalized that negativity sells. The events held by Democrats don’t necessarily have the same electricity as the MAGA rallies, unless a high-energy surrogate, such as Barack Obama, comes out. For all of the obvious horrors of Donald Trump, he has an ability to create this vortex as a speaker that his fans find enthralling—although he inevitably drones on and people reliably trickle out. And at last night’s town hall in Pennsylvania, he stood onstage and swayed to music for a while—one of the stranger things he’s ever done.

Lora: What kind of merch do you see at these rallies, and what does that tell you about the broader mood of the campaign?

John: Most of the Trump apparel isn’t produced by the actual campaign. It comes from independent vendors, like the people who sell T-shirts outside a concert. At any given Trump rally, I’ll see hundreds of different pieces of merchandise, and the messaging tends to be aggressive. The slogans are often taunting and feature variations of a shared theme: owning the libs. I have endless pictures of these shirts and stickers on my phone—“I Clean My Guns With Liberal Tears” was one I saw recently.

At Harris’s events, you may see a T-shirt with a silhouette of Trump that says “Nope,” or an abortion-rights-themed shirt that says something like “Hands Off My Body.” But in general, the Democratic slogans are far less antagonistic toward Republicans.

Lora: Have you noticed a shift in rhetoric and attitude from Trump or his rally attendees since Harris became the nominee?

John: Right after Harris took Joe Biden’s place, seemingly everyone—Trump, his surrogates, rank-and-file rally-goers—appeared lost as to how to attack her.

In these final weeks before Election Day, Trump and his followers are trying to paint Harris as incompetent, a liar, and someone who can’t be trusted. At the most recent Trump rally I attended, in Pennsylvania, Trump repeated forms of incompetent and incompetence over and over again. But the attacks can also be vague. I’ve heard some of his supporters try to claim that she’s an illegitimate candidate because she didn’t “earn” the nomination. Harris voters, for their part, often say that Trump is a threat to democracy and to their rights.

Lora: What value do these rallies bring to the candidates?

John: The candidates have to fire up their base and hope that the people who show up will go home and convince their friends and neighbors to vote. It takes a special kind of voter enthusiasm to put on a T-shirt, get in the car, and drive to a rally. Those people are more engaged than the average person who won’t take off from work or ditch another obligation to go hear a politician speak.

Harris has held some major rallies in the nearly 100 days of her campaign, drawing big crowds to arenas. But her events aren’t over-the-top like some of Trump’s. Later this month, Trump is going to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan. He’s by no means going to win New York, but holding the event feels like he’s planting a flag: Look at me—I’m headlining Madison Square Garden.

Related:

The Trump-Obama split screen in Pennsylvania On the National Mall with the RFK-to-MAGA pipeline

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump breaks down onstage. Peter Wehner: This election is different. Inside the carjacking crisis

Today’s News

A Fulton County judge ruled that Georgia county election officials cannot decline or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance. In a letter to Israel signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the United States warned that it might restrict military aid if Israel does not take steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within the next month. A man from North Carolina was arrested on Saturday and accused of making threats against FEMA workers.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Here’s how to start your search for a new hobby—and how to deal with the likelihood that you’ll be bad at it initially, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty

Dogs Are Entering a New Wave of Domestication

By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs. With urbanization increasing and space at a premium, the wild, abandoned places where children and dogs used to roam have disappeared from many American communities. Dogs have gone from working all day and sleeping outside to relaxing on the couch and sleeping in our beds. They are more a part of our families than ever—which means they share our indoor, sedentary lifestyle.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why does anyone care about the Nobel Prize? “Dear James”: Should I break up with my Trump-loving partner? Anne Applebaum: The danger of believing that you are powerless The transparent cruelties of Diddy’s entertainment machine Donald Trump’s fascist romp The question hanging over Harris’s campaign

Culture Break

Illustration by Clay Rodery

Watch. In the 25 years since Fight Club’s release, the film (streaming on Hulu) has burrowed deeply into American culture—and its insights remain apt.

Read. Sandra Cisneros, who wrote The House on Mango Street, defied the traditional roles of womanhood.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A curious set of claims has recently emerged from the right-wing corners of the social-media platform X: FEMA is systematically abandoning Trump-supporting Hurricane Helene victims; Democrats (and perhaps Jewish people) are manipulating the weather; Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio. These stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on X carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost—and offers considerable political gain.

Unverified claims that spread from person to person, filling the voids where uncertainty reigns, are as old as human communication itself. Some of the juiciest rumors inspire outrage and contradict official accounts—and from time to time, such a claim turns out to be true. Sharing a rumor is a form of community participation, a way of signaling solidarity with friends, ostracizing some out-group, or both. Political rumors are particularly well suited to the current incarnation of X, a platform that evolved from a place for real-time news and conversations into a gladiatorial arena for partisan fights, owned by a reflexive contrarian with a distaste for media, institutions, and most authority figures.

[Read: November will be worse]

When Elon Musk bought the platform, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he argued that it had become too quick to censor heterodox and conservative ideas. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he said in April 2022, shortly after initiating his purchase, “which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” But Musk quickly broomed out most of the Trust and Safety team that addressed false and misleading content, along with spam, foreign bots, and other problems. As Musk has drifted to the right—his profile picture now features him in a MAGA hat—the platform he rebranded as X has become the center of a right-wing political culture built upon a fantastical rumor mill. Although false and misleading ideas also spread on Facebook, Telegram, and Trump’s own platform, Truth Social, they move faster and get more views on X—and are likelier to find their way into mainstream political discussion.

Many political rumors on social media begin when people share something they supposedly heard from an indirect acquaintance: The false narrative about pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield started when one woman posted to a Facebook group that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost their cat and had seen Haitians in a house nearby carving it up to eat. Others picked up the story and started posting about it. Another woman shared a screenshot of the Springfield post on X, to bolster her own previous claim that ducks were disappearing from local parks.

Unbound by geography, online rumors can spread very far, very fast; if they gain enough traction, they may trend, drawing still more participants into the discussion. The X post received more than 900,000 views within a few days. Others amplified the story, expressing alarm about Haitian immigrants. No substantive evidence of the wild claims ever emerged.

[Juliette Kayyem: The fog of disaster is getting worse]

Rumors alleging that FEMA was abandoning Trump voters after Helene followed the same pattern: Friend-of-a-friend posts claimed that FEMA was treating Trump supporters unfairly. These claims became entangled in misinformation about what kinds of financial recovery resources the government would provide, and to whom. Claims about abandonment or incompetence were sometimes enhanced by AI-generated images of purported victims designed to tug on the heartstrings, such as a viral picture of a nonexistent child and puppy supposedly adrift in floodwaters. The image spread rapidly on X because it resonated with people who are suspicious of the government—and people who share misleading content rather than question it.

The amplification of emotionally manipulative chatter is a familiar issue on social media. What’s more disconcerting is that Republican political elites—with Musk now among them—are openly legitimizing what the X rumor mill churns out when it serves their objectives. X’s owner has claimed that FEMA is “actively blocking citizens” who are trying to help flood victims in North Carolina, and that it “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives.” J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, elevated rumors of pet-eating Haitians to national attention on social media for days; Donald Trump did the same in a presidential debate. Influential public figures and political elites—people who, especially in times of crisis, should be acting as voices of reason—are using baseless, often paranoid allegations for partisan advantage.

History shows that the weaponization of rumors can lead to devastating consequences—scapegoating individuals, inciting violence, deepening societal divisions, sparking moral panics, and even justifying atrocities. Yet online rumormongering has immense value to right-wing propagandists. In the 2020 election, Trump and his political allies set the narrative frame from the top: Massive fraud was occurring, Trump claimed, and the election would be stolen from him. The supposed proof came later, in the form of countless online rumors. I and other researchers who watched election-related narratives unfold observed the same pattern again and again: Trump’s true believers offered up evidence to support what they’d been told was true. They’d heard that impersonators were using other people’s maiden names to vote. A friend of a friend’s ballot wasn’t read because they’d used a Sharpie marker. These unfounded claims were amplified by influencers and went viral, even as Twitter tried to moderate them—primarily by labeling and sometimes downranking them. None of them turned out to be true. Even so, today, 30 percent of the public and 70 percent of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. This simmering sense of injustice is powerful—it spurred violence on January 6, 2021—and continues to foster unrest.

In Ohio recently, claims about supposed Haitian pet-eaters led to dozens of bomb threats, according to state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has attempted to correct the record. Local Republican business leaders who praised their Haitian workers received death threats for their troubles. Similarly, fire chiefs and local Republican elected officials pushed back on Helene rumors after FEMA workers were threatened.  

What of left-wing rumors? They exist, of course. After the assassination attempts on Trump, some commentators insinuated that they were “false flag” attacks—in other words, that his camp had staged the incidents to gain public sympathy for him. But mainstream media called out left-wing conspiracism and fact-checked the rumors. The people expressing them were overwhelmingly censured, not encouraged, by fellow influencers and elites on their side of the political spectrum.

In contrast, when social-media companies stepped in to address false claims of voter fraud in 2020, the political influencers who most frequently spread them clamored for retribution, and their allies delivered. Representative Jim Jordan, one of the House’s most powerful Republicans, convened a congressional subcommittee that cast efforts to fact-check and label misleading posts as “censorship.” (Full disclosure: I was one of the panel’s targets.)

Conservatives have reframed fact-checking as a censorship technique by “woke” tech companies and biased journalists. Musk abandoned the practice in favor of Community Notes—which, in theory, allow fellow users to add their own fact-checks and context to any post on the platform. Musk once described Community Notes as a “game changer for combating wrong information”—he understood, correctly, that opening up the fact-checking process to many different voices could better enable consensus about what the truth is. But Community Notes cannot keep up with the rumors roiling X. Notes are absent from some of the most outrageous claims about pet-eating migrants or FEMA malfeasance, which have millions of views. Even as Musk himself has become one of the most prominent boosters of political rumors, Community Notes on Musk’s own tweets have a way of disappearing.

[Listen: Autocrats win by capturing the courts]

Musk’s original vision for Twitter may have been just to nudge the platform a bit to the right—toward a more libertarian approach that would bolster it as a free-speech platform while preserving it as the best place to go for breaking news. Instead, figuring out what’s really happening is harder and harder, while X is becoming ever more useful as a place for powerful people to source outrageous material for political propaganda.

Many people across the political spectrum are still on X, of course. The platform has a reported 570 million monthly users, on average. However much Musk’s changes annoyed people on the center and the left, network effects have kept many of them on the platform; those who don’t want to lose friends or followers are likely to keep posting. Yet the market is providing alternative options. Bluesky and Mastodon absorbed some of the extremely online left-leaning users who got fed up first. Threads, an offshoot of Instagram, quickly followed; although the others are still small, Threads has more than 200 million monthly active users. People have other places to go. So do advertisers.

Still, today’s emerging alternative platforms are not a replacement for the Twitter of the late 2010s; real-time news is harder to find, and communities on each of the new entrants have gripes about curation and moderation.

Users who miss the golden age of Twitter still have the option of counterspeech—trying to push back against rumors with good information, and hoping that X’s algorithm will lift it. The question is whether doing so is worth the potential personal cost: Why spend time refuting rumors if your efforts are likely to go largely unseen or bring the wrath of an (unmoderated) mob?

Without a concerted push to defend truth—by leaders, institutions, and the public—the rumor mill will continue to churn, and its distortions will become the foundation of an irreparably divided political landscape. As Hurricane Milton roared across Florida, social-media users were fantasizing, absurdly, about government control of tropical cyclones and making death threats against weather forecasters. Whether Milton-related conspiracy theories will enter the national political discussion isn’t yet clear. But the broad cycle of rumors and threats is becoming depressingly familiar.

Rumors have always circulated, but the decision by Republican politicians and Musk to exploit them has created a problem that’s genuinely new. In the modern right-wing propaganda landscape, where facts are recast as subjective and any authority outside MAGA is deemed illegitimate, eroding trust in institutions is not an unfortunate side effect—it is the goal. And for now, the result is a niche political reality wherein elites on the right, including the world’s richest man, amplify baseless claims without legitimate pushback.

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

[Read: November will be worse]

Some of the lies and obfuscation are politically motivated, such as the claim that FEMA is offering only $750 in total to hurricane victims who have lost their home. (In reality, FEMA offers $750 as immediate “Serious Needs Assistance” to help people get basic supplies such as food and water.) Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Fox News have all repeated that lie. Trump also posted (and later deleted) on Truth Social that FEMA money was given to undocumented migrants, which is untrue. Elon Musk, who owns X, claimed—without evidence—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”

The result of this fearmongering is what you might expect. Angry, embittered citizens have been harassing government officials in North Carolina, as well as FEMA employees. According to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an extremism-research group, “Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government,” including “calls to send militias to face down FEMA.” The study also found that 30 percent of the X posts analyzed by ISD “contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the FEMA Director of Public Affairs; and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.” The posts received a collective 17.1 million views as of October 7.

Online, first responders are pleading with residents, asking for their help to combat the flood of lies and conspiracy theories. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said that the volume of misinformation could hamper relief efforts. “If it creates so much fear that my staff doesn’t want to go out in the field, then we’re not going to be in a position where we can help people,” she said in a news conference on Tuesday. In Pensacola, Florida, Assistant Fire Chief Bradley Boone vented his frustrations on Facebook ahead of Milton’s arrival: “I’m trying to rescue my community,” he said in a livestream. “I ain’t got time. I ain’t got time to chase down every Facebook rumor … We’ve been through enough.”

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.

This has all been building for more than a decade. On The Colbert Report, back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which he defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. But the misinformation crisis is not always what we think it is.

[Read: Florida’s risky bet]

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

In one sense, these attacks—and their increased desperation—make sense. The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era, one that will reverberate to Election Day and beyond. Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.

As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language. As he amplifies these attacks, Trump has also explicitly embraced the kind of eugenicist arguments that were used to justify huge cuts in immigration after World War I, such as his claim this week that Democrats are allowing in undocumented immigrants whose “bad genes” incline them toward murder.

“Certainly, in my lifetime nobody as prominent as Trump has been this intentional, this racist, so consistently—and this all-inclusive in terms of scapegoating,” Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, told me. “We have certainly seen flare-ups in the past, with governors in different states—and even with Trump, of course, in his first term. But this is on another level. And it begs the question of what comes next.”

Harris so far has responded to this Trump onslaught cautiously, and in a tone more of sorrow than of anger. She has often labeled Trump as divisive in general terms. But when talking about immigration, she has focused mostly on presenting herself as tough on border security. She has almost entirely avoided any direct discussion of Trump’s most militant immigration ideas—particularly his proposal to carry out the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants.

But Harris will very likely face pressure to offer a more frontal response to Trump’s mass-deportation plan in a town hall she’s holding with Univision in Nevada. With most polls still showing Trump making gains among Latinos since 2020, many Democratic activists and interest groups focused on that community believe that a more forceful rejoinder from Harris to Trump’s intensification of his anti-immigrant rhetoric can’t come too soon.

“We are in the last four weeks of the election, and she needs to be really clear about showing the contrast,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.”

Leon Neal / Getty

Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue. This debate among Democrats about Harris’s approach to immigration is part of a larger internal conversation that is quietly gathering momentum. Some senior party operatives are privately expressing concern that Harris is spending too much time trying to reassure voters about her own credentials, and not enough making a pointed case against a possible second Trump term. This pattern was starkly apparent in her series of friendly media interviews this week. “Bring a bazooka to a gunfight, please, not a BB gun,” one worried Democratic pollster told me yesterday. Today’s Univision town hall will provide another revealing measure of whether Harris is advancing her case forcefully enough in the campaign’s final stages.

[Watch: The candidates’ policy differences]

Hostility to immigrants and immigration has been integral to Trump’s political brand from the outset. Yet, even by his standards, the volume and venom of Trump’s attacks on immigrants have amped up sharply during this campaign.

In recent weeks, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, have insisted that migrants are: stealing jobs from native-born Americans, spurring a national crime wave, driving up housing costs, spreading disease, committing voter fraud, and consuming so many Federal Emergency Management Agency resources that the government doesn’t have enough money to help hurricane victims in North Carolina and Florida. Despite protestations from local officials that the story is a fabrication, Trump and Vance have also insisted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating residents’ pets.

The other claims have also been debunked. FEMA’s big reserves for responding to natural disasters are held in a congressionally appropriated account that is separate from the funds the agency has for resettling migrants. Violent crime, which rose immediately after the onset of the pandemic, has been declining, and some research suggests that undocumented migrants commit offenses at lower rates than native-born Americans. Despite Vance’s additional claim that Springfield, Ohio, has seen a “massive rise” in communicable disease, local records show that the county-wide rates of such diseases have declined over the past year.

Equally specious is the GOP candidates’ claim that all of the nation’s job growth is accruing to foreign-born workers. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided by the White House show that nearly 4.5 million more native-born Americans in their prime working years (defined as ages 25 to 54) are employed today than when Trump left office. Contrary to the Trump-Vance claim, this demographic group has added more jobs during President Joe Biden’s term than foreign-born workers have; the share of native-born workers ages 25 to 54 participating in the labor force is higher now than at any point in Trump’s presidency. The latest unemployment rate for native-born Americans in these prime working years is lower than for comparable foreign-born workers.

More ominous even than the multiplying allegations against migrants may be the language Trump is using to describe them. He has said that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a formulation used by Adolf Hitler. In Ohio, he said of undocumented migrants, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Later in the same speech, he called them “animals.” In Wisconsin last month, he said of undocumented immigrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Removing some of the undocumented migrants, Trump mused last month, during another Wisconsin visit, “will be a bloody story.”

Earlier this week, Trump resorted to unvarnished eugenics, twisting federal statistics to argue that the Biden administration has let into the country thousands of murderers. “You know now, a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes,” Trump told the conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Hewitt chose not to challenge this toxic assertion.

Witnessing this cascade of allegations from Trump and Vance, Erika Lee, a Harvard history professor and the author of America for Americans, told me that she feels a weary sense of “déjà vu” about their anti-immigrant theme—“as if they have dusted off the well-worn playbook that generations of xenophobes have used before.” Nearly every major argument Trump is making, she says, has been made before by nativist campaigners during periods of anti-immigrant backlash.

In 1917, for instance, a Missouri journalist named James Murphy Ward wrote that the great wave of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century was taking jobs from Americans and threatening the nation’s religious traditions. Calling it a “foreign invasion,” he saw their importation as a Catholic plot to undermine the political influence of white American Protestants—this was the Great Replacement theory of his age. The title of Ward’s book would not seem out of place in a political debate today: The Immigration Problem; or, America First. And the most damning example of the immigrant menace that Ward claimed to find has an even more resonant contemporary echo.

“The Chinese laborers who have come to this country, we have been told, are not at all averse to a diet of rats,” Ward wrote, while “the writer himself has heard at least one of these aliens speak of little ‘pups’ as making ‘a fine soup.’”

[Adam Serwer: The real reason Trump and Vance are spreading lies about Haitians]

Harris’s response to Trump’s harsh turn on immigration has been constrained by the Biden administration’s difficulties with the issue. After Congress refused to consider Biden’s legislative proposal to combine tighter border security with a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s population of about 11 million undocumented immigrants, the administration struggled to respond to an unprecedented surge of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border.

The political pressure on Biden ratcheted up last year after Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started transporting tens of thousands of migrants to northern cities, straining local resources and prompting loud complaints from some Democratic mayors and governors. Finally, in January, Biden endorsed a bipartisan Senate plan led by the conservative James Lankford of Oklahoma that proposed to severely restrict opportunities to seek asylum.

When Lankford’s Republican colleagues abandoned the plan after Trump denounced it, Biden moved in June to use executive action to implement some of its key provisions that narrow opportunities for asylum. The new rules have reduced the number of migrants seeking asylum by as much as three-fourths since late last year, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. But the political damage was done. Polls consistently showed that Americans: disapproved of Biden’s performance on the border in larger numbers than on any other issue except inflation; by a big margin, trusted Trump more than Biden to handle the problem; and were growing more open to Trump’s hard-line solutions, including building a border wall and carrying out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants already in the country. In July, Gallup found that the share of Americans who wanted to reduce immigration had reached 55 percent, the highest level since soon after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Republican groups, sensing a Democratic vulnerability, have spent heavily on ads portraying Harris—whom Biden early on appointed to deal with the root causes of migration—as weak on the border.

These headwinds have encouraged Harris to center her immigration messaging on convincing the public that she would be tough enough to secure the border. She has emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and as California’s attorney general pursuing “transnational gangs,” as well as promising to tighten Biden’s limits on asylum even more. She has also hugged the bipartisan Senate compromise that Trump derailed—similarly to the old political analysts’ joke about Rudolph Giuliani and the 9/11 terror attacks, a typical sentence on immigration for Harris is Noun, verb, Lankford.

Harris has coupled these promises of tougher enforcement with the traditional Democratic promise to “create, at long last, a pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been here for years,” as she put it in Arizona last month during a set-piece speech on immigration. Yet she has almost completely avoided discussing Trump’s mass-deportation plan.

Implicitly, Harris’s agenda rejects any such scheme, because the longtime residents for whom she would provide a path to legalization are among those Trump would deport. Apart from a passing reference in a speech last month to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, however, she has not explicitly criticized the Trump plan; nor has Harris discussed at any length how the proposal would disrupt immigrant communities and harm the economy. When her running mate, Tim Walz, was asked directly about Trump’s deportation agenda during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month, he responded by talking almost entirely about the Lankford bill himself. Walz has called the language from Trump and Vance about immigrants “dehumanizing,” but Harris has tended to wrap Trump’s attacks on immigrants into a more generalized lament about his divisiveness.

[Paola Ramos: The immigrants who oppose immigration]

Amid the campaign sparring on immigration, Trump has seemed to be enjoying a double dividend: He has energized his core support of culturally conservative whites with vehement anti-immigrant language and has gained ground, according to most polls, with Latino voters, even as Latino communities would be the principal targets of his deportation plans. Although polls show Harris recovering much of the ground Biden had lost among Latinos, she is still lagging the level of support he had in 2020, particularly among Latino men.

Supporters at a rally for Donald Trump in the Bronx earlier this year.

Polls of the Latino community have consistently found that, like other voters, they are more concerned about the economy than immigration. Surveys also show a slice of Latino voters who, departing from the view among advocacy groups, feel that recent asylum seekers are, in effect, jumping the line—and this has moved them toward Trump’s hard-line approach.

But Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says surveys show that support for mass deportation plummets among not only Latinos but also other voters when “people learn that Trump’s plans are to deport [undocumented] people who have been living and working here for decades.” So Trump is holding his elevated Latino support despite that opposition to mass deportation, Odio told me, in large part because most Latinos “don’t actually believe any of this stuff is going to happen”; they expect that the courts, Congress, or business groups would prevent him from pursuing widespread removals.

Odio, the senior vice president for research at the polling firm Equis, believes that Harris has run an effective campaign to regain much of Biden’s lost ground among Latino voters, but he thinks she could benefit from more forcefully targeting Trump’s enforcement agenda, including mass deportation and his refusal to rule out again separating migrant children from their parents at the border. (Given that nearly 4 million U.S.-citizen children have at least one undocumented parent, Trump’s deportation agenda could be said to amount to a mass family-separation policy as well.) “There has been such a desire to tamp down the border debate [that] there’s been less of an ability to pivot to other parts of the immigration debate that could be helpful,” Odio told me. Even conservative Latinos who moved toward Trump, he notes, overwhelmingly opposed his family-separation policies in an Equis post-2020 election survey.

Castro likewise thinks Harris’s overall approach to Latino voters has been sophisticated, but he worries that the reluctance that she, along with almost all other prominent Democrats, shows to challenging the mass-deportation proposal is “moving the Overton window” and normalizing the plan. “There’s not enough pushback on it,” Castro told me. “The consequence of not pushing back is that more people believe that something like mass deportation is a reasonable, moral policy choice, which is completely wrong.”

The history of immigration politics is that it tends to be what political scientists call a “thermostatic” issue, meaning that public opinion moves left when a president moves right (as happened under Trump) and right when a president moves left (as happened for most of Biden’s presidency). That pattern underscores the likelihood that enforcement of a Trump mass-deportation program—complete with TV images of mothers and children herded onto buses, even detained behind the barbed-wire fences of internment camps—would face much more public resistance in practice than polls suggest today.

Yet Lee, the Harvard historian, says that the previous eruptions of anti-immigrant agitation show how great a challenge the more explicit xenophobia that Trump has catalyzed could present in the years ahead. Although many scholars believe that xenophobia flourishes primarily during periods of economic distress, Lee says that a more common factor in the past “has been the effectiveness of the messenger and the medium.” For instance, she told me, the first great wave of 19th-century anti-Catholic agitation “spread through newspapers and newly available cheap novels”; then the anti-Chinese propaganda a few decades later “spread through even more newspapers and illustrated magazines.”

Those distribution systems for anti-immigrant ideas pale next to what we’re seeing today, Lee believes. “Now we have a 24/7 news cycle, organized networks pushing content, plus social-media platforms that broadcast xenophobia around the world as it happens,” she told me. “As a result, xenophobia today feels both frighteningly familiar and devastatingly more widespread and violent than other periods in history.”

Harris and other Democrats have tactical incentives to avoid a full-on confrontation with those sentiments in the final weeks before next month’s election. But the history of America’s experience with xenophobia indicates that Trump’s lurid attacks will only find a larger audience unless Harris, and others who believe in a more inclusive society, challenge them more directly than they have so far.

In the night hours after Hurricane Milton smashed into Siesta Key, a barrier island near Sarasota, Florida, high winds and a deluge of water pummeled the state’s coastal metropolises. In St. Petersburg, a construction crane toppled from its position on a luxury high-rise, meant to soon be the tallest building on the flood-vulnerable peninsula. The crane crashed down into the building across the street that houses the newspaper offices of the Tampa Bay Times. High winds ripped the roof off a Tampa stadium set to house emergency workers. Three million homes and businesses are now without power.

As this morning dawned, Hurricane Milton was exiting Florida on its east coast, still maintaining hurricane-force winds. The storm came nerve-rackingly close to making what experts had feared would be a worst-case entrance into the state. The storm hit some 60 miles south of Tampa, striking a heavily populated area but narrowly avoiding the precarious geography of Tampa’s shallow bay. Still, the destruction, once tallied, is likely to be major. Flash flooding inundated cities and left people trapped under rubble and cars in the hurricane’s path. Multiple people were killed yesterday at a retirement community in Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, when one of the many tornadoes whipped up by Milton touched down there.

The barrier islands, if they’ve done their job, may have protected Sarasota from the worst of the storm surge, but those vulnerable strips of sand have their own small civilizations built on them, too. This stretch of southwestern Florida happens to be one of the fastest-growing parts of the state, where people are flocking to new developments, many of them on the waterfront. Milton is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida this year, in an area that has barely had time to assess the damage from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago. Because it skirted a direct strike of Tampa Bay, the storm may soon be viewed as a near miss, which research has found can amplify risky decision making going forward. But this morning, it is a chilling reminder of the rising hazards of living in hurricane-prone places as climate change makes the most ferocious storms more ferocious.

The threat of catastrophic inundation has for years loomed over that particular cluster of cities—Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater—and on some level, everyone knew it. About a decade ago, Karen Clark & Company, a Boston-based firm that provides analysis to the insurance industry, calculated that Tampa–St. Petersburg was the U.S. metropolitan area most vulnerable to flooding damage due to storm surge. Even Miami, despite all the talk of its imminent climate-fueled demise, is in a better situation than Tampa, where the ocean is relatively shallow and the bay “can act almost like a funnel,” leading to higher peak storm surge, according to Daniel Ward, an atmospheric scientist and the senior director of model development for Karen Clark. The regional planning council has simulated the impacts of a Category 5 storm, including fake weather reports that sound eerily similar to those of Milton; estimates of the losses, should a storm hit directly enough, were on the order of $300 billion.

The region’s building spree has only upped the ante, adding to the tally of potential damages. Siesta Key, the barrier island where Milton hit first, had been locked in a battle over proposed high-density hotel projects for years; Sarasota is adding people at one of the fastest rates in the county. Farther south, Fort Myers is expanding even faster (and in recent years has been battered by storms, including this one). Tampa in particular has been a darling of Florida development. Billions of dollars in investment remade its waterfront districts with glassy condo towers, and the traditional retirement city was reborn as a beacon for young people. The population of the Tampa metro area, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, swelled to more than 3.2 million; median home values nearly doubled from 2018 to June of this year, according to Redfin data cited by The Wall Street Journal.

Like everyone in Florida, people who live on the southwestern coast understand that hurricanes are a risk, perhaps even one that climate change is accentuating. (More than Americans on average, Floridians believe that climate change is happening.) But “every coastal area has a mythology about how they’re going to escape climate change,” Edward Richards, a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School, told me. “We have a culture of downplaying risk.” The last time Tampa Bay was directly affected by a major hurricane was in 1921, when a Category 3 storm hit the metro area, then home to about 120,000 people. It sent an 11-foot storm surge crashing into houses, wiped out citrus fields, and killed eight people. The possibility of another hit was always a real danger, even before the effects of global warming started setting in. “Climate change absolutely makes the storms worse,” Richards said. “But we focus so much on how they will get worse, we haven’t paid attention to how bad they’ve already been.”

Most days, Tampa has plenty of benefits to beckon people, and a century-old storm is likely not on their minds. “The amenities of jobs and economic opportunities and, quite honestly, just the amenity of being close to the beach oftentimes outweigh the disamenity of climate exposure,” Jeremy Porter, the head of climate-implications research at the analytics nonprofit First Street, told me. Getting a mortgage in a FEMA-designated flood zone requires flood insurance, which is mostly supplied by the National Flood Insurance Program, but plenty of people drop it after a year or two, either because they don’t feel they need it or because they can’t pay the bill, Porter said. If your home is paid off, there’s also no requirement to carry flood insurance. Developers pass future risk on to the people who buy their condos; city managers generally welcome developments, which are good for the local economy, as long as they’re still standing. If they’re destroyed, the federal government helps pay to rebuild. “Any time you disassociate the profit from the risk, you get these catastrophic problems,” Richards said. Attempts to undo any of this—by making people face the actual risk of the places they live—can also be a trap: Raise flood-insurance rates to market price, and suddenly plenty of people can’t afford it. Continue subsidizing insurance, and you keep people in dangerous places.

Even before Milton’s blow, though, the region’s great real-estate boom was faltering. Homeowners in the floodplain zone were watching their insurance prices go up dramatically, after FEMA rolled out new adjustments to make its highly subsidized National Flood Insurance Program premiums better reflect the true cost of risk. Thanks to rising insurance costs and repetitive flood incidents in recent years, more homeowners are now looking to sell. But they’re finding that difficult: Supply of homes in Tampa is rising, but demand is falling, and roughly half of the homes for sale—the third-highest share of all U.S. major metropolitan areas—had to cut their asking price as of September 9, according to The Wall Street Journal. That was before Hurricane Helene sent six feet of storm surge into the city and Milton crashed through, damaging properties and likely undercutting chances of a good sale. Plus, Florida passed a flood-disclosure law this year, which took effect on October 1. That means homeowners who try to sell their home after this storm will have to tell prospective buyers about any insurance claims or FEMA assistance they received for flood damage, no matter when they sell.

In the short term, both Richards and Porter predict that people will simply rebuild in the same place. No levers currently exist to encourage any other outcome, Richards said. FEMA has a buyout program for homes in frequently damaged areas, but the process takes years. In the meantime, homeowners have little choice but to rebuild. And even knowing the risk of floods might not dissuade people from coming back, or moving in. A report on New Orleans, for instance, found that almost half of homebuyers surveyed did not consult risk-disclosure statements required after Hurricane Katrina: When people can afford to live only in a flood-prone part of a city, knowing the risk doesn’t change their options.

In the longer term, “from a geologic point of view, we know what’s going to happen,” Richards told me. Over the course of the next century, parts of Florida’s coast will be suffering from regular floods, if not permanently underwater. Hurricane flooding will reach farther inland. Living in certain places will simply no longer be possible. “Eventually we’ll hit a tipping point where people will begin to avoid the area,” Porter said. But he doesn’t think Milton will be it.

Common sense would tell you Floridians concerned about Hurricane Milton would turn to the news and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to stay informed about the storm’s impact. But there’s a third source that many in the South are using that may come as a surprise.

Read more...