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Samuel L. Jackson strutted out onstage at James R. Hallford Stadium outside Atlanta last night and attempted to lend Kamala Harris some of his lifelong cool: “We’ve heard her favorite curse word is a favorite of mine too!” (Sadly, he restrained himself from saying it—of course you know what it is.)

Harris’s team had curated a star-heavy bill, including Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Bruce Springsteen, and Barack Obama. Thousands of potential voters had come out in support of Harris, but in the end, the evening felt more like an anti-Trump rally. And although Harris was the headliner, she seemed more like a role-player in an ensemble.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released this morning has Donald Trump and Harris dead-even for the popular vote, at 48 to 48. Up close, when you experience them in a live setting, the two campaigns couldn’t be more different. Trump rallies remain dark, campy spectacles: a little Lee Greenwood, some Village People, then a bunch of dystopian hyperbole and chaotic tangents from an aspiring authoritarian. It’s the same show in a different city, night after night, always with cultlike devotion from the MAGA faithful. Democrats, by contrast, keep trying to rekindle that singular Obama essence from 16 years ago, with intermittent success. Harris has found her rallying cry with “We’re not going back!” and she often talks about the future. But the core product being offered by her team might best be described as nostalgia for the pre-Trump era.

You could hear it in the soundtrack last night: Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” plus some Outkast for the local Georgia crowd. It all amounted to a balmy, tranquil evening that unfolded as the sun went down—but it wasn’t fiery. In place of apparel with aggressive slogans, I passed a guy in a shirt that said #PledgeEquality, and another guy in a hat that said, simply, Vibes. I saw people making hearts with their hands and snapping in approval during certain speeches (as opposed to the cadre of Trump supporters hurling middle fingers during his rallies). Springsteen played three songs on acoustic guitar, including a Bob Dylan–esque version of his synth-pop hit “Dancing in the Dark.” All of this was inoffensive—like Jackson refusing to say “motherfucker.” On the one hand, you could say this pivot to “normalcy” is a calculated rejection of Trumpian bombast and bluster, and that’s why, in theory, it should work. On the other hand, it was a little boring.

I was shocked to see some attendees begin to filter out several minutes into Harris’s speech. She touched on the big themes of her campaign—protecting Americans’ rights and individual freedom—but she also perhaps spent a bit too much time discussing plans and policies. To be sure, this may have come in response to critics who have said her campaign is short on substance and specifics. Or maybe it was an act of caution. But the reality is that people pack into a football stadium because they want to roar, not necessarily to hear proposals.

Harris had the unenviable task of following Obama, one of the most gifted political orators alive. With his sleeves rolled up—no tie, no jacket—he was as comfortable and engaging as ever. But he also seemed pissed. As I observed in Pennsylvania recently, he has zeroed in on attacking Trump, whose potential reelection would be a rebuke of all that Obamaism stands for: optimism, and a steadfast belief in the American dream. (It was also striking to witness how much Obama has influenced the generation of Democratic leaders below him; in his remarks, Jon Ossoff, the 37-year-old Georgia senator, mimicked Obama’s inflection, his faraway stare, his knowing half-smile, and his call-and-response method.)

But the most effective speaker of the night, and possibly of the entire Harris campaign so far, was the entertainment mogul Tyler Perry. He connected with the crowd by telling his life story with raw, concrete anecdotes: hiding from his landlord, sleeping in his car or in an extended-stay hotel, dealing with repo men. He spoke of his personal journey of learning the truth about Trump the charlatan, Trump the racist. He carved a clear arc that ended with what a Harris presidency would mean to others like him. He also delivered the line of the year: “It was so important for me to stand with a candidate who understands that we, as America—we are a quilt. And I could never stand with a candidate who wants America to be a sheet.” Perry’s speech sounded like none other I’ve heard over the past two years of campaign-trail events, and that’s why it hit.

Tonight, Harris will host another large-scale rally, this time in Houston, where she’ll be joined by a native Houstonian and one of the biggest stars on the planet: Beyoncé. Tomorrow, Harris will head to Michigan and campaign with one of her party’s most popular figures, former First Lady Michelle Obama. Harris may be leaving some of the most memorable and compelling closing arguments to her surrogates, and that may not matter to many voters. In the end, though, overly cautious campaigning doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence among those who are undecided. Harris’s messaging against Donald Trump has merit, but the ideas that penetrate deepest are those that strike at one’s personal core—such as the stories that Perry told last night. With 11 days left, it’s unclear whether Harris feels comfortable enough to go down that path.

Related:

“There’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war.” This election is no West Wing reunion.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The Democrats’ Hail Mary “Stop counting votes, or we’re going to murder your children.” The most opinionated man in America Trump is being very honest about one thing.

Today’s News

Hackers associated with the Chinese government targeted the phone data of Donald Trump, Senator J. D. Vance, and senior Biden-administration officials, according to CNN. For the first time since the 1980s, the Washington Post editorial board will not endorse a presidential candidate and will stop endorsing candidates in future elections, per a decision made by the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. President Joe Biden formally apologized for the “sin” of government-run boarding schools that forcibly removed many Native American children from their homes.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Political autobiographies are usually dreck, but some rise above their genre, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: Matteo Wong writes about The Atlantic’s recent story on the schools without ChatGPT plagiarism.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

Election Anxiety Is Telling You Something

By Shayla Love

Type election anxiety into Google, and you’ll find dozens of articles instructing you to focus on aspects of life outside of politics, to spend less time watching the news, or to use relaxation techniques such as breathing exercises to subdue the negative feelings.

But there’s another way to think about election stress: A big event should prompt big feelings.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The death of American exceptionalism “Okay, I will join the Marines.” Taiwan has a Trump problem.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Learn to share. Americans are hoarding their friends—and the practice may be making people feel more lonely, Faith Hill writes.

Explore. These farmers are subletting their fields to become much-needed wetlands for birds, Natalia Mesa writes.

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.

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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is James Parker, a staff writer who addresses readers’ existential worries in his “Dear James” newsletter. He has also written about why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants, how Game Change foretold the current state of American politics, and whether Theo Von is the next Joe Rogan.

James is currently in the mood to rewatch Logan, a superhero movie that he calls “grungy, nasty, expertly done.” He also enjoys attending local pro-wrestling events, reading any of John Sandford’s tense thrillers, and tapping along to Kacey Musgraves’s “Slow Burn.”

The Culture Survey: James Parker

The last thing that made me cry: How many times can I watch Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s 2004 Metallica documentary, the Don’t Look Back of heavy metal? We’ll find out, I suppose. Anyway, I watched it again the other night (always at night, always alone), and James Hetfield’s wobbly speech at San Quentin State Prison, before Metallica plays a set there—and the grateful, encouraging roar he gets from the gathered inmates—made me (as always) cry. “Everyone is born good, everyone’s got the same-size soul, and we’re here to connect with that,” Hetfield tells his wary, hyper-attentive audience. “So we’re very proud to be here in your house and play some music for you.”

My favorite blockbuster: Right now I’m in a Logan mood. Does that count as a blockbuster? It’s a superhero movie—an X-Men movie, to be precise, a Wolverine movie, to be even more precise. It’s grungy, nasty, expertly done. Professor Xavier is demented, his telepathy warped, suffering grand mal seizures that frazzle the brain of anybody who happens to be nearby; Wolverine, always fascinating, is an alcoholic limo driver. [Related: Logan is a fitting farewell to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.]

My favorite art movie: Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. Berlin is full of angels, beautiful, ministering angels in long coats who float unseen among the people, loaded with compassion and consolation but made slightly forlorn by their own immateriality. The scene where Peter Falk, sensing the presence of an especially wistful angel, describes for him the pleasures of a hot cup of coffee in cold weather … magic. (Here’s an uneasy thought, though, prompted by my writing this: If I saw Wings of Desire now, for the first time, would I still be open to it? Or am I too old and coarsened and impatient and Netflix’d-out?)

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: At a local pro-wrestling event (Chaotic Wrestling: guaranteed entertainment!), I saw the amazing Cody Fluffman—a gorgeous, curvy presence amid all that wrestler’s gristle, as light on his feet as a dancer—do his signature move. It’s called the Steamroller: Having rendered his opponent prone in the ring, Fluffman then lies down and rolls his splendid bulk vertically over their body, from the toes upward, at a stately pace, making chuffing engine noises. [Related: A close encounter with wrestling’s most authentic madman]

Best novel I’ve recently read: Anything by John Sandford. I love this guy. King of the airport thrillers, in my opinion; Holy Ghost is the one I’m halfway through right now. His plotting is very rambly and relaxed, but by a strange trick, he keeps the tension twanging, and his descriptions of landscapes, buildings, and weather are extraordinary—lucid and compact to the point of poetry, sometimes.

Best work of nonfiction: I’m really enjoying Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb, by Eric G. Wilson. Lamb, a 19th-century London essayist whose BFF was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a wit and a weirdo, and he celebrated—as Wilson writes—“the transience, variety and crowdedness of metropolitan life, thus challenging his friend Wordsworth’s nature worship.” Sold! For 33 years, Lamb held down a day job as a clerk at the East India Company. “I always arrive late at the office,” he wrote. “But I make up for it by leaving early.”

A quiet song that I love: “Slow Burn,” by Kacey Musgraves. I play the drums, and tapping along to this one inflates me emotionally in ways I dare not express.

A loud song that I love: “Rhino Ket,” by Kneecap: Irish rappers enjoying their ketamine. Which I’ve never taken, but I appreciate a good ravey drug anthem. “I’m k-holed out my head, this shit puts rhinos to bed.” Isn’t that good? Puts rhinos not to sleep, but to bed. Nightlight on, door cracked open, see you in the morning. (And they’re very good live, this lot.)

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Have a Nice Day,” by Spike Milligan:

So the man who was drowning, drownded
And the man with the disease passed away.
But apart from that,
And a fire in my flat,
It’s been a very nice day.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The most opinionated man in America This influencer says you can’t parent too gently. Trump: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

The Week Ahead

Here, a drama film starring Tom Hanks about the families and couples who inhabit the same house over generations (in theaters Friday) Season 2 of The Diplomat, a thriller series about a U.S. diplomat handling international crises and her marriage to a high-profile politician (streaming Thursday on Netflix) Dangerous Fictions, a book by Lyta Gold about the influence of fictional stories and the moral panic they can induce (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Americans Are Hoarding Their Friends

By Faith Hill

Hypothetically, introducing friends from different social circles shouldn’t be that hard. Two people you like—and who like you—probably have some things in common. If they like each other, you’ll have done them a service by connecting them. And then you can all hang out together. Fun!

Or, if you’re like me, you’ve heard a little voice in your head whispering: not fun. What if you’re sweet with one friend and sardonic with another, and you don’t know who to be when you’re all in the same room? Or what if they don’t get along? Worst of all: What if they do—but better than they do with you?

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Six political memoirs worth reading The chronically online have stolen Halloween. Welcome to the trolligarchy. Why Randy Newman is least loved for his best work “Dear James”: The worst insult I ever heard as an opera singer Michael Keaton’s simple trick on SNL

Catch Up on The Atlantic

“There’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war.” The Democrats’ Hail Mary Election officials are under siege.

Photo Album

Replicas of a woolly mammoth and a giant octopus are displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. (The Field Museum Library)

Check out these photos of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where visitors were introduced to new (and relatively new) products, including Cracker Jack, Juicy Fruit gum, and the Ferris wheel.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Karlotta Freier

Couples Therapy, but for Siblings

By Faith Hill

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

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

Read the full article.

Reflections on October 7

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

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

Culture Break

NBC

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

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

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.