Well, it’s that time again: Millions of Americans are stress-eating while clicking “Refresh” on 538’s presidential forecast, hoping beyond hope that the little red or blue line will have made a tiny tick upward. Some may be clutching themselves in the fetal position, chanting under their breath: “There’s a good new poll out of Pennsylvania.”

The stakes of this election are sky-high, and its outcome is not knowable in advance—a combination that most of us find deeply discomfiting. People crave certainty, and there’s just one place to look for it: in the data. Earlier humans might have turned to oracles or soothsayers; we have Nate Silver. But the truth is that polling—and the models that rely primarily on polling to forecast the election result—cannot confidently predict what will happen on November 5.

The widespread perception that polls and models are raw snapshots of public opinion is simply false. In fact, the data are significantly massaged based on possibly reasonable, but unavoidably idiosyncratic, judgments made by pollsters and forecasting sages, who interpret and adjust the numbers before presenting them to the public. They do this because random sampling has become very difficult in the digital age, for reasons I’ll get into; the numbers would not be representative without these corrections, but every one of them also introduces a margin for human error.

Most citizens see only the end product: a preposterously precise statistic, such as the notion that Donald Trump has a 50.2 percent—not 50.3 percent, mind you—chance of winning the presidency. (Why stop there? Why not go to three decimal points?) Such numerical precision gives the false impression of certainty where there is none.

[Read: The world is falling apart. Blame the flukes.]

Early American political polls were unscientific but seemingly effective. In the early 20th century, The Literary Digest, a popular magazine in its day, sent sample ballots to millions of its readers. By this method, the magazine correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1916 until 1936. In that year, for the contest between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alf Landon, the Digest sent out roughly 10 million sample ballots and received an astonishing 2.4 million back (a response rate of 24 percent would be off the charts by modern standards). Based on those responses, the Digest predicted that FDR would receive a drubbing, winning just 41 percent of the vote. Instead, he won 61 percent, carrying all but two states. Readers lost faith in the Digest (it went out of business two years later).

The conventional wisdom was that the poll failed because in addition to its readers, the Digest selected people from directories of automobile and telephone ownership, which skewed the sample toward the wealthy—particularly during the Great Depression, when cars and phones were luxuries. That is likely part of the explanation, but more recent analysis has pointed to a different problem: who responded to the poll and who didn’t. For whatever reason, Landon supporters were far more likely than FDR supporters to send back their sample ballots, making the poll not just useless, but wildly misleading. This high-profile error cleared the way for more “scientific” methods, such as those pioneered by George Gallup, among others.

The basic logic of the new, more scientific method was straightforward: If you can generate a truly random sample from the broader population you are studying—in which every person has an equally likely chance of being included in the poll—then you can derive astonishingly accurate results from a reasonably small number of people. When those assumptions are correct and the poll is based on a truly random sample, pollsters need only about 1,000 people to produce a result with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

To produce reasonably unbiased samples, pollsters would randomly select people from the telephone book and call them. But this method became problematic when some people began making their phone numbers unlisted; these people shared certain demographic characteristics, so their absence skewed the samples. Then cellphones began to replace landlines, and pollsters started using “random-digit dialing,” which ensured that every active line had an equal chance of being called. For a while, that helped.

But the matter of whom pollsters contacted was not the only difficulty. Another was how those people responded, and why. A distortion known as social-desirability bias is the tendency of respondents to lie to pollsters about their likely voting behavior. In America, that problem was particularly acute around race: If a campaign pitted a minority candidate against a white candidate, some white respondents might lie and say that they’d vote for the minority candidate to avoid being perceived as racist. This phenomenon, contested by some scholars, is known as the Bradley Effect, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley—a Black politician who was widely tipped to become governor of California based on pre-election polling, but narrowly lost instead. To deal with the Bradley Effect, many pollsters switched from live callers to robocalls, hoping that voters would be more honest with a computer than another person.

But representative sampling has continued to become more difficult. In an age of caller ID and smartphones, along with persistent junk and nuisance calls, few people answer when they see unfamiliar numbers. Most Americans spend much of their time online, but there are no reliable methods to get a truly random sample from the internet. (Consider, for example, how subscribers of The Atlantic differ from the overall American population, and it’s obvious why a digital poll on this site would be worthless at making predictions about the overall electorate.)

These shifts in technology and social behavior have created an enormous problem known as nonresponse bias. Some pollsters release not just findings but total numbers of attempted contacts. Take, for example, this 2018 New York Times poll within Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District. The Times reports that it called 53,590 people in order to get 501 responses. That’s a response rate lower than 1 percent, meaning that the Times pollsters had to call roughly 107 people just to get one person to answer their questions. What are the odds that those rare few who answered the phone are an unskewed, representative sample of likely voters? Zilch. As I often ask my undergraduate students: How often do you answer when you see an unknown number? Now, how often do you think a lonely elderly person in rural America answers their landline? If there’s any systematic difference in behavior, that creates a potential polling bias.

To cope, pollsters have adopted new methodologies. As the Pew Research Center notes, 61 percent of major national pollsters used different approaches in 2022 than they did in 2016. This means that when Americans talk about “the polls” being off in past years, we’re not comparing apples with apples. One new polling method is to send text messages with links to digital surveys. (Consider how often you’d click a link from an unknown number to understand just how problematic that method is.) Many pollsters rely on a mix of approaches. Some have started using online “opt-in” methods, in which respondents choose to take a survey and are typically paid a small amount for participating. This technique, too, has raised reasonable questions about accuracy: One of my colleagues at University College London, Thomas Gift, tested opt-in methods and found that nearly 82 percent of participants in his survey likely lied about themselves in order to qualify for the poll and get paid. Pew further found that online opt-in polls do a poor job of capturing the attitudes of young people and Hispanic Americans.

No matter the method, a pure, random sample is now an unattainable ideal—even the aspiration is a relic of the past. To compensate, some pollsters try to design samples representative of known demographics. One common approach, stratification, is to divide the electorate into subgroups by gender, race, age, etc., and ensure that the sample includes enough of each “type” of voter. Another involves weighting some categories of respondents differently from others, to match presumptions about the broader electorate. For example, if a polling sample had 56 percent women, but the pollster believed that the eventual electorate would be 52 percent women, they might weigh male respondents slightly more heavily in the adjusted results.

[Read: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

The problem, of course, is that nobody knows who will actually show up to vote on November 5. So these adjustments may be justified, but they are inherently subjective, introducing another possible source of human bias. If women come out to vote in historically high numbers in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, for example, the weighting could be badly off, causing a major polling error.

The bottom line is that modern pollsters are trying to correct for known forms of possible bias in their samples by making subjective adjustments to the data. If their judgments are correct, then their polls might be accurate. But there’s no way to know beforehand whether their assumptions about, say, turnout by demographic group are wise or not.

Forecasters then take that massaged polling data and feed it into a model that’s curated by a person—or team of people—who makes further subjective assessments. For example, the 538 model adjusts its forecasts based on polls plus what some in the field call “the fundamentals,” such as historical trends around convention polling bounces, or underlying economic data. Most forecasters also weight data based on how particular pollsters performed in earlier elections. Each adjustment is an educated guess based on past patterns. But nobody knows for sure whether past patterns are predictive of future results. Enough is extraordinary about this race to suspect that they may not be.

More bad news: Modern polling often misses the mark even when trying to convey uncertainty, because pollsters grossly underestimate their margins of error. Most polls report a plus or minus margin of, say, 3 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval. This means that if a poll reports that Trump has the support of 47 percent of the electorate, then the reported margin of error suggests that the “real” number likely lies between 44 percent (minus three) and 50 percent (plus three). If the confidence interval is correct, that spread of 44 to 50 should capture the actual result of the election about 95 percent of the time. But the reality is less reassuring.

In a 2022 research paper titled “Election Polls Are 95 Percent Confident but Only 60 Percent Accurate,” Aditya Kotak and Don Moore of UC Berkeley analyzed 6,000 polls from 2008 through 2020. They found that even with just one week to go before Election Day, only about six in 10 polls captured the end result within their stated margin of error. Four in 10 times, the polling data fell outside that window. The authors conclude that to justify a 95 percent confidence interval, pollsters should “at least double” their reported margins of error—a move that would be statistically wise but render polling virtually meaningless in close elections. After all, if a margin of error doubled to six percentage points, then a poll finding that Harris had 50 percent support would indicate that the “true” number was somewhere between 44 percent (a Trump landslide) and 56 percent (a Harris landslide).

Alas, the uncertainty doesn’t end there. Unlike many other forms of measurement, polls can change what they’re measuring. Sticking a thermometer outside doesn’t make the weather hotter or colder. But poll numbers can and do shift voting behavior. For example, studies have shown that perceived poll momentum can make people more likely to vote for the surging party or candidate in a “bandwagon” effect. Take the 2012 Republican primaries, when social conservatives sought an alternative to Mitt Romney and were split among candidates. A CNN poll conducted the night before the Iowa caucus showed Rick Santorum in third place. Santorum went on to win the caucus, likely because voters concluded from the poll that he was the most electable challenger.

The truth is that even after election results are announced, we may not really know which forecasters were “correct.” Just as The Literary Digest accurately predicted the winner of presidential races with a deeply flawed methodology, sometimes a bad approach is just lucky, creating the illusion of accuracy. And neither polling nor electoral dynamics are stable over time. Polling methodology has shifted radically since 2008; voting patterns and demographics are ever-changing too. Heck, Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008; recent polls suggest that Harris is losing there by as much as 17 points. National turnout was 55 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2020. Polls are trying to hit a moving target with instruments that are themselves constantly changing. For all of these reasons, a pollster who was perfectly accurate in 2008 could be wildly off in 2024.

In other words, presidential elections are rare, contingent, one-off events. Predicting their outcome does not yield enough comparable data points to support any pollster’s claim to exceptional foresight, rather than luck. Trying to evaluate whether a forecasting model is “good” just from judging its performance on the past four presidential elections is a bit like trying to figure out whether a coin is “fair” or “rigged” from just four coin flips. It’s impossible.

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

The social scientists Justin Grimmer, Dean Knox, and Sean Westwood recently published research supporting this conclusion. They write: “We demonstrate that scientists and voters are decades to millennia away from assessing whether probabilistic forecasting provides reliable insights into election outcomes.” (Their research has sparked fierce debate among scholars about the wisdom of using probabilistic forecasting to measure rare and idiosyncratic events such as presidential elections.)

Probabilistic presidential forecasts are effectively unfalsifiable in close elections, meaning that they can’t be proved wrong. Nate Silver’s model in 2016 suggested that Hillary Clinton had a 71.4 percent chance of victory. That wasn’t necessarily “wrong” when she lost: After all, as Silver pointed out to the Harvard Gazette, events with a 28.6 percent probability routinely happen—more frequently than one in four times. So was his 2016 presidential model “wrong”? Or was it bang-on accurate, but an unusual, lower-probability event took place? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

The pollsters and forecasters who are studying the 2024 election are not fools. They are skilled analysts attempting some nearly impossible wizardry by making subjective adjustments to control for possible bias while forecasting an uncertain future. Their data suggest that the race is a nail-biter—and that may well be the truth. But nobody—not you, not me, not the betting markets, not Nate Silver—knows what’s going to happen on November 5.

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Americans on November 5 will be electing a wartime president. This isn’t a prediction. It’s reality.

Neither major-party candidate has yet spoken plainly enough to the American people about the perils represented by the growing geopolitical and defense-industrial collaboration among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This axis of aggressors may be unprecedented in the potential peril it represents.

Neither candidate has outlined the sort of generational strategy that will be required by the United States to address this challenge. Irrespective of whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, these threats will be the unavoidable context of their presidency. One of them will become the commander in chief at the most dangerous moment in geopolitics since the Cold War—and perhaps since World War II.

In that spirit, the Washington Post columnist George F. Will last week compared the 2024 elections to the 1940 elections, when the United States hadn’t yet formally declared war on Imperial Japan, Hitler’s Germany, or Mussolini’s Italy.

What was different then was that one of the two candidates, the incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, sensed that he was about to become a wartime president and was acting like one. Roosevelt, wrote Will, “was nudging a mostly isolationist nation toward involvement in a global conflict” with his 1937 “quarantine speech” on aggressor nations and through his subsequent military buildup.

Roosevelt’s opponent was the Republican businessman Wendell Willkie, who, like Roosevelt, was more internationalist than isolationist, in the tradition of his party’s elites of that time. “In three weeks,” Will wrote, “Americans will not have a comparably reassuring choice when they select the president who will determine the nation’s conduct during World War III, which has begun.”

The point is that just as World War II began with “a cascade of crises,” initiated by the coalescing axis of Japan, Germany, and Italy, so today a similar axis—of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—is taking shape. Will assesses that our current global crisis began no later than Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea.

Writing in Texas National Security Review this summer, the diplomat-historian Philip Zelikow reckoned that the next president has a 20 to 30 percent chance of being involved in worldwide warfare, which he differentiates from a world war in that not all parties will be involved in every aspect or region.

Zelikow regards the next three years as a moment of maximum danger. Should the U.S. navigate this period successfully, alongside global allies and partners, the underlying strengths of the American economy, defense industry, tech sector, and society should kick in and show their edge over those of the authoritarians.

The problem in the short term is that the U.S. is facing adversaries, in Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who may see a window of opportunity in our domestic distractions, a defense sector not yet capable of meeting the emerging challenges, and an electorate that questions the value and necessity of U.S. international engagement. Both of those foreign leaders might calculate that acting more forcefully now—against Ukraine in Putin’s case, and Taiwan in Xi’s—could produce a greater chance of success than doing so will a few years in the future.

“From Russia’s western border to the waters where China is aggressively encroaching on Philippine sovereignty,” Will wrote, “the theater of today’s wars and almost-war episodes spans six of the globe’s 24 time zones.” This, he says, is what “the gathering storm” of world war looks like, borrowing the title of the first volume of Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs. Will charges the two presidential candidates with “reckless disregard” for failing to provide voters “any evidence of awareness of, let alone serious thinking about, the growing global conflagration.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider Roosevelt’s third inaugural address, in January 1941, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted the U.S. Congress to immediately declare war on Japan. These were his words:

To us there has come a time, in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock—to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of isolation, the real peril of inaction. Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit.

War is not inevitable now, any more than it was then. When disregarded, however, gathering storms of the sort that we’re navigating gain strength.

“In the face of great perils never before encountered,” Roosevelt concluded, “our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America.”

This article was adapted from a recent edition of Frederick Kempe’s newsletter at the Atlantic Council, Inflection Points.

Kamala Harris’s fate in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign may turn on whether she can shift the attention of enough voters back to what they might fear from a potential second White House term for Donald Trump.

Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee this summer, Harris has focused her campaign message above all on reassuring voters that she has the experience and values to serve in the Oval Office. But a consensus is growing among Democratic political professionals that Harris is failing to deliver a sufficiently urgent warning about the risk Trump could pose to American society and democracy in another presidential term.

“Reassurance ain’t gonna be what wins the race,” the Democratic pollster Paul Maslin told me—an assessment almost universally shared among the wide array of Democratic strategists and operatives I’ve spoken with in recent days. “What wins the race is the line from the convention: We ain’t going back. We aren’t going to live with this insanity again. It has to be more personal, on him: The man presents risks that this country cannot afford to take.”

Harris aides insist that she and the campaign have never lost sight of the need to keep making voters aware of the dangers inherent in her opponent’s agenda. But she appears now to be recalibrating the balance in her messaging between reassurance and risk.

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday night, Harris had a video clip play of some of Trump’s most extreme declarations—including his insistence in a Fox interview on Sunday that he would use the National Guard or the U.S. military against what he called “the enemy from within.” Then, in stark language, she warned: “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and he is out for unchecked power.” In her combative interview on Fox News last night, Harris again expressed outrage about Trump’s indication that he would use the military against “the enemy from within,” accurately pushing back against Bret Baier and the network for sanitizing a clip of Trump’s reaffirmation of that threat at a Fox town-hall broadcast earlier in the day.

Many Democratic strategists believe that the party has performed best in the Trump era when it has successfully kept the voters in its coalition focused on the risks he presents to their rights and values—and his latest threat to use the military against protesters is exactly one such risk to them. Using data from the Democratic targeting firm Catalist, the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer has calculated that about 91 million different people have come out in the four elections since 2016 to vote against Trump or Republicans, considerably more than the 83 million who have come out to vote for him or GOP candidates. To Podhorzer, the vital question as Election Day looms is whether the infrequent voters in this “anti-MAGA majority” will feel enough sense of urgency to turn out again.

“The reason [the race] is as close as it is right now is because there’s just not enough alarm in the electorate about a second Trump term,” Podhorzer, who was formerly the political director of the AFL-CIO, told me, “and that’s what is most alarming to me.”

Harris is pivoting toward a sharper message about Trump at a moment when his campaign appears to have seized the initiative in the battleground states with his withering and unrelenting attacks on her. National polls remain mostly encouraging for Harris; several of them showed a slight tick upward in her support this week. But Republicans believe that after a weeks-long barrage of ads portraying Harris as weak on crime and immigration and extreme on transgender rights, swing voters in these decisive states are inclined to see her, rather than Trump, as the greater risk in the White House.

Although Harris is describing Trump as “unstable,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for his campaign, says that at this point more voters see him, over her, as a potential source of stability amid concerns that inflation, crime, the southern border, and international relations have at times seemed out of control under Biden. “They think [Trump] is the one who will give us that peace and prosperity they look for in a president,” McLaughlin told me. “They want somebody who is going to take charge and solve their problems, and that’s what Donald Trump is really good at.”

Democrats are not worried that large numbers of voters outside Trump’s base will ever see him as a source of stability. But they acknowledge that the Republican ad fusillade—particularly the messages about Harris’s support, during her 2019 presidential campaign, for gender-conforming surgery for prisoners—has caused some swing-state voters to focus more on their worries about her (that she’s too liberal or inexperienced) than their fears about Trump (that he’s too erratic, belligerent, or threatening to the rule of law).

The clearest measure that voters’ concerns about a second Trump presidency are receding may be their improving assessments of his first term. A Wall Street Journal poll conducted by a bipartisan polling team and released late last week found that Trump’s retrospective job-approval rating had reached 50 percent or higher in six of the seven battleground states, and stood at 48 percent in the seventh, Arizona.

An NBC poll released on Sunday, which was conducted by another bipartisan polling team, found that 48 percent of voters nationwide now retrospectively approve of Trump’s performance as president; that rating was higher than the same survey ever recorded for Trump while he was in office. A Marquette Law School national poll released yesterday similarly showed his retrospective job approval reaching 50 percent. (Trump was famously the only president in the history of Gallup polling whose approval rating never reached 50 percent during his tenure.)

Views about Trump’s first term are improving, pollsters in both parties say, because voters are mostly measuring him against what they like least about Biden’s presidency, primarily inflation and years of disorder on the southern border (though it has notably calmed in recent months). “Trump’s retrospective job rating is higher because of the contrast with Biden,” Bill McInturff, a longtime Republican pollster who worked on the NBC survey, told me. “Majorities say the Biden administration has been a failure. A plurality say Biden’s policies hurt them and their families, while Trump’s policies helped them.”

Harris could still win despite voters becoming more bullish about Trump’s first term, but it won’t be easy: The NBC poll found that, in every major demographic group, the share of voters supporting Trump against Harris almost exactly equals the share that now approves of his performance as president.

Because of the unusual circumstances in which Harris secured her party’s nomination, voters probably knew less about her at that advanced stage in the presidential campaign season than they did about any major-party nominee since Republicans plucked the little-known business executive Wendell Willkie to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Few political professionals dispute that her late entry required her campaign to devote much of its initial effort to introducing her to voters.

In her speeches, media appearances, and advertising, Harris has placed most emphasis on convincing voters that she is qualified to serve as president, tough enough on crime and the border to keep them safe, committed to supporting the middle class because she comes from it, and determined to govern in a centrist, bipartisan fashion. This sustained effort has yielded important political dividends for her in a very short period. Polls have consistently showed that the share of Americans with a favorable view of her has significantly increased since she replaced Biden as the nominee. Harris has gained on other important personal measures as well. A recent national Gallup poll found that she has drawn level with Trump on the qualities of displaying good judgment in a crisis and managing the government effectively. Gallup also found that she has outstripped him on moral character, honesty, likability, and caring about voters’ needs.

The question more Democrats are asking is whether Harris has squeezed as much advantage as she can out of this positive messaging about her own qualifications. That question seemed especially acute after she raced through a swarm of media interviews earlier this month, appearing on podcasts aimed at young women and Black men, as well as on The View, 60 Minutes, CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and a Univision town hall.

Across those interviews, Harris seemed determined to establish her personal “relatability,” demonstrating to voters, especially women, that she had lived through experiences similar to their own and understood what it would take to improve their lives. But she offered no sense of heightened alarm about what a second Trump term could mean for each of the constituencies that her appearances targeted.

One Democratic strategist, who is closely watching the campaign’s deliberations and requested anonymity to speak freely, worries that Harris has not been airing a direct response to Trump’s brutal ad attacking her position on transgender rights, or pressing the case against him aggressively enough on what a second Trump term might mean. “We’ve been trying to fight this negative onslaught with these positive ads,” this strategist told me. “We’re bringing the proverbial squirt gun to the firefight here in terms of how we are dealing with the most vicious negative ad campaign in presidential history.”

Harris’s emphasis on reassurance has also shaped how she’s approached the policy debate with Trump. Her determination to display toughness on the border has, as I’ve written, discouraged her from challenging Trump on arguably the most extreme proposal of his entire campaign: his plan for the mass deportation of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Likewise, her determination to stress her tough-on-crime credentials has apparently discouraged her from challenging another of Trump’s most draconian plans: his pledge to require every U.S. police department to implement so-called stop-and-frisk policies as a condition of receiving federal law-enforcement aid. In New York City, that policy was eventually declared unconstitutional because it resulted in police stopping many young Black and Latino men without cause. Yet, for weeks, Harris never mentioned Trump’s proposal, even in appearances aimed at Black audiences.

“For low-propensity Black voters, Donald Trump’s just atrocious policy proposals for the civil rights agenda and policing is one of the main motivators that moves them toward the Democrats,” Alvin Tillery, a Northwestern University professor who founded a PAC targeting Black swing voters, told me. “Forget Bidenomics, forget all the kind of race-neutral things she is trotting out today. Mentoring for Black men? Really? That is not going to move a 21-year-old guy that works at Target who is thinking about staying home or voting for her to get off the couch.” Tillery’s PAC, the Alliance for Black Equality, is running digital ads showing young Black men and women lamenting the impact that stop-and-frisk could have on them, but he’s operating on a shoestring budget.

More broadly, some Democrats worry that Harris’s priority on attracting Republican-leaning voters cool to Trump has somewhat dulled her messages about the threat posed by the Trump-era GOP. Harris has repeatedly offered outreach and reassurance to GOP-leaning voters, by promising, for example, to put a Republican in her Cabinet and establish a policy advisory council that will include Republicans. (She held another rally in the Philadelphia suburbs yesterday to tout her Republican support.) That could help her win more of the Nikki Haley–type suburban moderates—but at the price of diluting the sense of threat necessary to motivate irregular anti-Trump voters to turn out.

“I do think some sacrifices have been made in the spirit of trying to win over a certain segment of voter, who is a Republican,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a senior vice president at Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing minority voters, told me.

The Republican pollster Greg Strimple told me that last month’s presidential debate hurt Trump so much not only because Harris was strong, but also because his scattered and belligerent performance reminded voters of everything they didn’t like about him in office. “Now it feels to me like her momentum is gone, and Trump is steadily advancing, almost like the Russian army, in the center of the electorate,” Strimple told me. “I don’t know how she can muster enough throw weight behind her message in order to change that dynamic right now.”

Even among the most anxious Democrats I spoke with, hardly anyone believes that Harris’s situation is so dire or settled. They were widely confident that she possesses a superior get-out-the-vote operation that can lift her at the margin in the pivotal battlegrounds, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Still, Harris this week seemed to acknowledge that she needs to sharpen her message about Trump. In an interview with the radio host Roland Martin, she forcefully denounced Trump’s long record of bigoted behavior. With Charlamagne tha God, Harris came out of the gate criticizing Trump’s stop-and-frisk mandate more forcefully than I’ve heard before, and condemning the former president for, as Bob Woodward reported in a new book, sending COVID-19 test kits to Vladimir Putin “when Black people were dying every day by the hundreds during that time.” Later, she agreed with the host when he described Trump’s language and behavior as fascist, a line she had not previously crossed.

Harris’s campaign also rolled out a new ad that also highlighted his comments about deploying the military against the “enemy from within,” and featured Olivia Troye, an aide in his administration, speaking on camera about how he’d discussed shooting American citizens participating in protests when he was president.

McLaughlin, the Trump pollster, says a big obstacle for Democrats trying to stoke fears of returning him to the White House is that voters have such an immediate point of comparison between their economic experiences in his tenure and Biden’s. Democrats “can try” to present another Trump term as too risky, but to voters, “what is it going to mean?” McLaughlin said. “I’m going to be able to afford a house because, instead of 8 percent mortgage rates, I’m going to have less than 3 percent? I’m going to have a secure border?”

Like many Democratic strategists, Fernandez Ancona believes that enough voters can be persuaded to look beyond their memories of cheaper groceries and gas to reject all the other implications of another Trump presidency. That dynamic, she points out, isn’t theoretical: It’s exactly what happened in 2022, when Democrats ran unexpectedly well, especially in the swing states, despite widespread economic dissatisfaction.

“If the question in 2022 was: Do you like the Biden administration and the state of the economy? We lose,” she told me. “But that wasn’t the question people were responding to. They were responding to: Your freedoms are at stake, do you want to protect your freedoms or do you want them taken away?”

Democratic voters are understandably dumbfounded that Trump could remain this competitive after the January 6 insurrection; his felony indictments and convictions; the civil judgments against him for sexual abuse and financial fraud; the strange lapses in memory, desultory tangents, and episodes of confusion at rallies; and his embrace of more openly racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian language. Yet nearly as remarkable may be that Harris is this competitive when so many more voters consistently say in polls that they were helped more by the policies of the Trump administration than those of the Biden administration in which she has served.

The definitive question in the final stretch of this painfully close campaign may be which of those offsetting vulnerabilities looms larger for the final few voters deciding between Harris and Trump or deciding whether to vote at all. Nothing may be more important for Harris in the remaining days than convincing voters who are disappointed with the past four years of Biden’s tenure that returning Trump to power poses risks the country should not take. As a former prosecutor, Harris more than most candidates should understand the importance of a compelling closing argument.

Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments—his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington’s most important contribution to the nation he liberated.

“He went home,” Kelly said.

The message was unambiguous. After leaving the White House, Kelly had described Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.” At Mount Vernon, he was making a clear point: People who are mad for power are a mortal threat to democracy. They may hold different titles—even President—but at heart they are tyrants, and all tyrants share the same trait: They never voluntarily cede power.

The American revolutionaries feared a powerful executive; they had, after all, just survived a war with a king. Yet when the Founders gathered in 1787 to draft the Constitution, they approved a powerful presidential office, because of their faith in one man: Washington.

Washington’s life is a story of heroic actions, but also of temptations avoided, of things he would not do. As a military officer, Washington refused to take part in a plot to overthrow Congress. As a victorious general, he refused to remain in command after the war had ended. As president, he refused to hold on to an office that he did not believe belonged to him. His insistence on the rule of law and his willingness to return power to its rightful owners—the people of the United States—are among his most enduring gifts to the nation and to democratic civilization.

Forty-four men have succeeded Washington so far. Some became titans; others finished their terms without distinction; a few ended their service to the nation in ignominy. But each of them knew that the day would come when it would be their duty and honor to return the presidency to the people.

All but one, that is.

Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.

Today, America stands at such a moment. A vengeful and emotionally unstable former president—a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, an admirer of foreign dictators, a racist and a misogynist—desires to return to office as an autocrat. Trump has left no doubt about his intentions; he practically shouts them every chance he gets. His deepest motives are to salve his ego, punish his enemies, and place himself above the law. Should he regain the Oval Office, he may well bring with him the experience and the means to complete the authoritarian project that he began in his first term.

Many Americans might think of George Washington as something like an avatar, too distant and majestic to be emulated. American culture has encouraged this distance by elevating him beyond earthly stature: A mural in the Capitol Rotunda depicts him literally as a deity in the clouds. In the capital city that bears Washington’s name, other presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are represented with human likenesses; Franklin D. Roosevelt even smiles at us from his wheelchair. Washington is represented by a towering, featureless obelisk. Such faceless abstractions make it easy to forget the difficult personal choices that he made, decisions that helped the United States avoid the many curses that have destroyed other democracies.

For decades, I taught Washington’s military campaigns and the lessons of his leadership to military officers when I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. And yet I, too, have always felt a distance from the man himself. In recent months, I revisited his life. I read his letters, consulted his biographers, and walked the halls at Mount Vernon. I found a man with weaknesses and shortcomings, but also a leader who possessed qualities that we once expected—and should again demand—from our presidents, especially as the United States confronts the choice between democracy and demagoguery.

The votes cast in November will be more consequential than those in any other American election in more than a century. As we judge the candidates, we should give thought to Washington’s example, and to three of Washington’s most important qualities and the traditions they represent: his refusal to use great power for his own ends, his extraordinary self-command, and, most of all, his understanding that national leaders in a democracy are only temporary stewards of a cause far greater than themselves.

I

A CITIZEN, NOT A CAESAR

Popular military leaders can become a menace to a democratic government if they have the loyalty of their soldiers, the love of the citizenry, and a government too weak to defend itself. Even before his victory in the Revolutionary War, Washington had all of these, and yet he chose to be a citizen rather than a Caesar.

It is difficult, in our modern era of ironic detachment and distrust, to grasp the intensity of the reverence that surrounded the General (as he would be called for the rest of his life) wherever he went. “Had he lived in the days of idolatry,” a Pennsylvania newspaper stated breathlessly during the war, Washington would have “been worshiped as a god.” He was more than a war hero. In 1780, when Washington passed through a town near Hartford, Connecticut, a French officer traveling with him recorded the scene:

We arrived there at night; the whole of the population had assembled from the suburbs, we were surrounded by a crowd of children carrying torches, reiterating the acclamations of the citizens; all were eager to approach the person of him whom they called their father, and pressed so closely around us that they hindered us from proceeding.

Washington was addressed—by Americans and visiting foreigners alike—as “Your Excellency” almost as often as he was by his rank. In Europe, a French admiral told him, he was celebrated as the “deliverer of America.” Alexander Hamilton, his aide-de-camp during the war, later described Washington as a man “to whom the world is offering incense.”

At the war’s outset, Washington had believed that defeat and death—whether on the battlefield or on a gibbet in London—were more likely than glory. He worried that his wife, Martha, might also face threats from British forces, and was so concerned about her reaction to his appointment as commander of the Continental Army that he waited days before writing to tell her about it. Patrick Henry described a chance encounter with Washington on the street in Philadelphia, shortly after the vote approving Washington’s command. Tears welled in the new general’s eyes. “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you,” Washington said. “From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”

Instead, Washington’s reputation grew. Yet despite his surprising successes as a general and his rise as the symbol of American liberty, he never allowed the world’s incense to intoxicate him. Although he was a man of fierce ambition, his character was tempered by humility and bound up in his commitment to republican ideals: He led an American army only in the name of the American people and its elected representatives, and he never saw that army as his personal property. His soldiers were citizens, like him, and they were serving at his side in a common cause. “When we assumed the soldier,” he said to a group of New York representatives shortly before he took command, “we did not lay aside the citizen,” a sentiment that he repeated throughout the war.

In the 18th century, Washington’s deference to the people’s representatives and the rule of law would have seemed almost nonsensical to his European counterparts. Most military officers of the time served for life, after swearing allegiance to royal sovereigns whose authority was said to be ordained by God. Often drawn from the ranks of the nobility, they saw themselves as a superior caste and found little reason to assure civilians of their good intentions.

Washington, however, insisted that his men conduct themselves like soldiers who tomorrow would have to live with the people they were defending today. Despite continual supply shortages, he forbade his troops from plundering goods from the population—including from his Tory adversaries. Washington’s orders were prudent in the short term; his army needed both supplies and the goodwill of the people. But they also represented his careful investment in America’s future: Once the war was over, the new nation would depend on comity and grace among all citizens, regardless of what side they’d supported.

The painter John Trumbull’s depiction of George Washington resigning his military commission to Congress in 1783 (World History Archive / Alamy)

Most American presidents have had some sort of military experience. A few, like Washington, were genuine war heroes. All of them understood that military obedience to the rule of law and to responsible civilian authority is fundamental to the survival of democracy. Again, all of them but one.

During his term as president, Trump expected the military to be loyal—but only to him. He did not understand (or care) that members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, and that they are servants of the nation, not of one man in one office. Trump viewed the military like a small child surveying a shelf of toy soldiers, referring to “my generals” and ordering up parades for his own enjoyment and to emphasize his personal control.

Trump was more than willing to turn the American military against its own people. In 2020, for instance, he wanted the military to attack protesters near the White House. “Beat the fuck out of them,” the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. “Just shoot them.” Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper (a former military officer himself) talked their boss out of opening fire on American citizens.

[From the November 2023 issue: How Mark Milley held the line]

Senior officers during Trump’s term chose loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to Donald Trump and remained true to Washington’s legacy. Such principles baffle Trump—all principles seem to baffle Trump, and he especially does not understand patriotism or self-sacrifice. He is, after all, the commander in chief who stood in Arlington National Cemetery, looked around at the honored dead in one of the country’s most sacred places, and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

A year ago, Trump suggested that Milley should be executed for actions he’d taken in uniform, including reassuring China of America’s political stability both before and after January 6, 2021. Esper has said that he thinks he and Milley, along with other senior defense officials and military officers, could be arrested and imprisoned if Trump returns to office. In a second term, Trump would appoint senior military leaders willing to subvert the military and the Constitution to serve his impulses. He already tried, in his first term, to bring such people to the White House, naming Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, for example, as his national security adviser. Flynn was fired after only 23 days for misleading White House officials about lying to the FBI and now travels the country promoting outlandish conspiracy theories. Trump has praised Flynn and promised to bring him back in a second term.

Trump is desperate to reclaim power, and he is making threats about what could happen if the American people refuse to give it to him. Washington, even before he became president, was offered an almost certain chance to take ultimate power, and he refused.

In 1783, Washington was camped with most of the Continental Army in Newburgh, New York. Congress, as usual, was behind on its financial obligations to American soldiers, and rumbles were spreading that it was time to take matters into military hands. Some men talked of deserting and leaving the nation defenseless. Others wanted to head to Philadelphia, disband Congress, and install Washington as something like a constitutional monarch.

Washington allowed the soldiers to meet so they could discuss their grievances. Then he unexpectedly showed up at the gathering and unloaded on his men. Calling the meeting itself “subversive of all order and discipline,” he reminded them of the years of loyalty and personal commitment to them. He blasted the dark motives of a letter circulating among the troops, written by an anonymous soldier, that suggested that the army should refuse to disarm if Congress failed to meet their needs. “Can he be,” Washington asked, “a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country?”

Then, in a moment of calculated theater meant to emphasize the toll that eight years of war had taken on him, he reached into his pocket for a pair of eyeglasses, ostensibly to read a communication from a member of Congress. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Some of the men, already chastened by Washington’s reproaches, broke into tears. The Newburgh conspiracy, from that moment, was dead.

The presidential historian Stephen Knott told me that Washington could have walked into that same meeting and, with a nod of his head, gained a throne. “A lesser man might have been tempted to lead the army to Philadelphia and pave the way for despotism,” Knott said. Instead, Washington crushed the idea and shamed the conspirators.

Nine months later, Washington stood in the Maryland statehouse, where Congress was temporarily meeting, and returned control of the army to the elected representatives of the United States of America. He asked to be granted “the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country” and handed over the document containing his military commission. Washington, in the words of the historian Joseph Ellis, had completed “the greatest exit in American history.”

Jean-Antoine Houdon’s sculpture of George Washington makes explicit reference to the Roman military leader Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who relinquished power and returned to his farm after delivering victory on the battlefield. (iStock / Getty)

Decades ago, the scholar S. E. Finer asked a question that shadows every civilian government: “Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise.” The answer, at least in the United States, lies in the traditions instituted by Washington. Because of his choices during and after the Revolution, the United States has had the luxury of regarding military interference in its politics as almost unthinkable. If Trump returns to office with even a handful of praetorians around him, Americans may realize only too late what a rare privilege they have enjoyed.

II

A MAN IN COMMAND OF HIMSELF

Washington’s steadfast refusal to grasp for power was rooted not only in his civic beliefs, but also in a strength of character that Americans should demand in any president.

When he returned to Mount Vernon after the war, Washington thought he was returning permanently to the life of a Virginia planter. His mansion is small by modern standards, and his rooms have a kind of placidity to them, a sense of home. If you visited without knowing who once lived there, you could believe that you were wandering the property of any moderately successful older gentleman of the colonial era, at least until you noticed little details, such as the key to the Bastille—a gift from Washington’s friend the Marquis de Lafayette—hanging in the hall.

The estate is lovingly cared for today, but in 1783, after nearly a decade of Washington’s absence, it was a mess, physically and financially. Its fields and structures were in disrepair. Washington, who had refused a salary for his military service, faced significant debts. (When Lafayette invited him in 1784 to visit France and bask in its adulation, Washington declined because he couldn’t afford the trip.)

[Barton Gellman: What happened to Michael Flynn?]

But Washington’s stretched finances did not matter much to the people who showed up regularly at his door to seek a moment with the great man—and a night or two at his home. Customs of the time demanded that proper visitors, usually those with an introduction from someone known to the householder, were to be entertained and fed. Washington observed these courtesies as a matter of social duty, even when callers lacked the traditional referral. More than a year would pass after his return to Mount Vernon before he and Martha finally enjoyed a dinner alone.

Like many of the other Founders, Washington embraced the virtues of the ancient Stoic thinkers, including self-control, careful introspection, equanimity, and dispassionate judgment. He tried to overcome petty emotions, and to view life’s difficulties and triumphs as merely temporary conditions.

In the words of his vice president, John Adams, Washington had “great self-command”—the essential quality that distinguished him even among the giants of the Revolution and made him a model for future generations of American political and military leaders. Like anyone else, of course, he was beset by ordinary human failings. As his letters and the accounts of friends and family reveal, he was at times seized by vanity, anxiety, and private grievances. He was moody. His occasional bursts of temper could be fearsome. He never forgot, and rarely forgave, personal attacks.

But Washington was “keenly aware” of his own shortcomings, Lindsay Chervinsky, the director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, told me, and this self-knowledge, bolstered by his sense of personal honor, governed nearly all of Washington’s actions. He rarely allowed his pride to congeal into arrogance, nor his insecurities to curdle into self-pity. He refused to carry on public feuds—or to tilt the power he held against those who had slighted him.

Washington’s embrace of Stoicism helped him to step outside himself and confront the snares of his own ego and appetites, and especially to resist many of the temptations of power. His favorite play, Cato, was about Cato the Younger, a noted Stoic thinker and Roman senator who opposed the rise of Julius Caesar. Washington studied the examples of the great Roman republicans, particularly the story of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman military leader who saved his nation on the battlefield and then returned to his farm. (Washington would later serve as the first president of the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War veterans.) As the president and CEO of Mount Vernon, Douglas Bradburn, told me during a visit to the estate, Washington genuinely regarded the Roman general as an example to be followed.

The Stoic insistence on merciless honesty, both with oneself and with others, is what allowed Washington to act with vigor but without venom, to make decisions without drama—another of the many grim differences between the character of the first president and that of the 45th. The Washington biographer Ron Chernow writes that “there was cunning in Washington’s nature but no low scheming. He never reneged on promises and was seldom duplicitous or underhanded. He respected the public” and “did not provoke people needlessly.” He desired recognition of his service, but hated boasting.

Americans have long prized these qualities in their best presidents. Trump has none of them.

Washington’s personal code had one severe omission. I had to take only a short walk from the mansion at Mount Vernon to see the reconstructed living quarters of some of the 300 enslaved people who worked his fields. Like other southern Founders, Washington did not let his commitment to freedom interfere with his ownership of other human beings. His views on slavery changed over time, especially after he commanded Black troops in battle, and he arranged in his will to free his slaves. But to the end of his life, Washington mostly left his thoughts on the institution out of public debates: His goal was to build a republic, not to destroy slavery. He did not right all the wrongs around him, nor all of his own.

But Washington did set the standard of patriotic character for his successors. Some failed this test, and long before Trump’s arrival, other presidents endured harsh criticism for their belligerence and imperious ego. Andrew Jackson, for example, was a coarse and rabid partisan who infuriated his opponents; the New York jurist James Kent in 1834 excoriated him as “a detestable, ignorant, reckless, vain and malignant tyrant,” the product of a foolish experiment in “American elective monarchy.”

Many presidents, however, have emulated Washington in various ways. We rightly venerate the wartime leadership of men such as Lincoln and FDR, but others also undertook great burdens and made hard decisions selflessly and without complaint.

When a 1980 mission to liberate American hostages held in Iran ended in flames and the death of eight Americans in the desert, President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation. “It was my decision,” he said, both to attempt a rescue and to cancel the operation when it became impossible to continue. “The responsibility is fully my own.” Almost 20 years earlier, John F. Kennedy had taken the heat for the disastrous effort to land an anti-Communist invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, when he could have shifted blame to his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, from whom he’d inherited the plan. The day after JFK was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson began his tenure as president not by affirming his new power, but by convening Kennedy’s Cabinet and affirming instead the slain president’s greatness. He asked them all to stay on. “I rely on you,” he said. “I need you.”

Gerald Ford ended up in the Oval Office due to the failures of Richard Nixon, unelected and with no popular mandate to govern. And yet, at a time of great political and economic stress, he led the nation steadily and honorably. He pardoned Nixon because he thought it was in the nation’s best interest to end America’s “long national nightmare,” despite knowing that he would likely pay a decisive price at the polls.

President Joe Biden displayed a common sentiment with these leaders when he declined to run for reelection in July. Biden, reportedly hurt that he was being pushed to step aside, nonetheless put defeating Trump above his own feelings and refused to exhibit any bitterness. “I revere this office,” he told the nation, “but I love my country more.”

None of these men was perfect. But they followed Washington’s example by embracing their duty and accepting consequences for their decisions. (Even Nixon chose to resign rather than mobilize his base against his impeachment, a decision that now seems noble compared with Trump’s entirely remorseless reaction to his two impeachments, his inability to accept his 2020 loss, and his warnings of chaos should he lose again.) They refused to present themselves as victims of circumstance. They reassured Americans that someone was in charge and willing to take responsibility.

Trump is unlike all of the men who came before him. Among his many other ignoble acts, he will be remembered for uttering a sentence, as thousands of Americans fell sick and died during a pandemic, that would have disgusted Washington and that no other American president has ever said, nor should ever say again: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

III

A PRESIDENT, NOT A KING

One of the defining characteristics of Washington’s approach to the presidency was that he was always trying to leave it. He had been drawn back into public life reluctantly, attending and presiding over the 1787 Constitutional Convention only after a violent tax revolt in Massachusetts, known as Shays’s Rebellion, convinced him that the republic was still fragile and in need of a more capable system of government. Washington returned to Mount Vernon after the meeting in Philadelphia, but he already knew from discussions at the convention that he would be asked to stand for election to the new presidency as America’s only truly unifying figure. His 1789 victory in the Electoral College was unanimous.

Washington had no intention of remaining president for the rest of his life, even if some of his contemporaries had other ideas. “You are now a king under a different name,” Washington’s aide James McHenry happily wrote to him after that first election, but Washington was determined to serve one term at most and then go back to Mount Vernon. In the end, he would be persuaded to remain for a second term by Hamilton, Jefferson, and others who said that the new nation needed more time to solidify under his aegis. (“North and south,” Jefferson told him, “will hang together if they have you to hang on.”)

An 1895 engraving of Shays’s Rebellion. The violent tax revolt convinced Washington that the United States was still fragile and drew him back into public life. (M&N / Alamy)

As he assumed the presidency, Washington was concerned that even a whiff of kingly presumption could sink America’s new institutions. Lindsay Chervinsky told me that Washington doubted the judgment and prudence of Vice President Adams not only because the vocal and temperamental Bostonian generally irritated him—Adams irritated many of his colleagues—but also because he had proposed bloated and pretentious titles for the chief executive, such as “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.” Washington preferred the simpler title adopted by the House of Representatives: “President of the United States.”

The American people trusted Washington, but they didn’t trust an embryonic government created in a matter of months by a small group of men in Philadelphia. (When Washington took office, Rhode Island and North Carolina hadn’t even ratified the Constitution yet.) The first president sought to allay these suspicions by almost immediately undertaking a kind of reassurance tour, traveling throughout the states—the Virginian shrewdly chose to start in New England—to show Americans that the Constitution and the nation’s commander in chief were not threats to their liberties.

Donald Trump also traveled America once he was elected. After one of the most divisive presidential contests in modern American history, Trump embarked on a kind of victory tour through the states that had voted for him, and only those states. His campaign called it a “thank you” tour, but Trump’s speeches—praising his supporters, bashing his enemies—left no doubt about his intentions. “We are really the people who love this country,” he told a crowd in Mobile, Alabama. He was assuring his followers that although he now had to govern the entire nation, he was their president, an insidious theme that would lead directly to the tragic events of January 6.

In his first years in office, Washington could have shaped the new presidency to his liking. His fellow Founders left much in Article II of the Constitution vague; they disagreed among themselves about the powers that the executive branch should hold, and they were willing to let Washington fill in at least some of the blanks regarding the scope of presidential authority. This choice has bedeviled American governance, allowing successive chief executives to widen their own powers, especially in foreign policy. Recently, the Supreme Court further loosened the constraints of the office, holding in Trump v. United States that presidents have immunity for anything that could be construed as an “official act.” This decision, publicly celebrated by Trump, opens frightening opportunities for presidents to rule corruptly and with impunity.

Washington fought for the office rather than its occupant. Sharply cognizant that his every action could constitute a precedent, he tried through his conduct to imbue the presidency with the strength of his own character. He took pains not to favor his relatives and friends as he made political appointments, and he shunned gifts, fearing that they might be seen as bribes. He mostly succeeded: Those who came after him were constrained by his example, even if at times unwillingly, at least until the election of 2016.

Washington believed that the American people had the right to change their Constitution, but he had absolutely no tolerance for insurrectionists who would violently defy its authority. During his first term, Congress passed a new tax on distilled spirits, a law that sparked revolts among farmers in western Pennsylvania. What began as sporadic clashes grew into a more cohesive armed challenge to the authority of the United States government—the largest, as Ron Chernow noted, until the Civil War. In September 1794, Washington issued an official proclamation that this “Whiskey Rebellion” was an act of “treasonable opposition.” The issue, he declared, was “whether a small portion of the United States shall dictate to the whole Union.” He warned other Americans “not to abet, aid, or comfort the insurgents.”

In a show of force, Washington took personal command of a militia of more than 12,000 men and began a march to Carlisle, Pennsylvania—the only time a sitting president has ever led troops in the field. He had no wish to shed American blood, but he was ready to fight, and the rebellion dissipated quickly in the face of this military response. Later, in the first use of the pardon power, Washington spared two of the insurgents from the death penalty, but only after the legal system had run its course and they had been convicted of treason.

As the president’s second term neared its end, his advisers again implored him to remain in office, and again argued that the republic might not survive without him. Washington, his health fading and his disillusionment with politics growing, held firm this time. He was going back to Virginia. As with his retirement from military life, his voluntary relinquishment of power as head of state was an almost inconceivable act at the time.

In his farewell to the American people, the retiring president acknowledged that he had likely made errors in office, but hoped that his faults would “be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.” In March 1797, the man who had sacrificed so much for his country that he had to borrow money to get to his first inauguration left Philadelphia as a private citizen. Less than three years later, he was dead.

IV

WASHINGTON BETRAYED

In a 2020 book about the first president, the historian Peter Henriques wrote that Washington “proved that his truest allegiance was to the republic by voluntarily surrendering power. It was the first of many peaceful transfers of power in the unprecedented American experiment.” Less than a year after the book’s publication, however, Trump would subvert this centuries-long tradition by summoning a mob against the elected representatives of the United States, after refusing to accept the result of the vote.

Trump stood by as insurrectionists swarmed the House offices and even the Senate chamber itself on January 6, in an attempt to stop the certification of the election by Congress. Hours later, after one of the worst single days of casualties for law-enforcement officers since 9/11, Trump finally asked his supporters to go home. “I know your pain,” he said, his words only emphasizing the delusional beliefs of the rioters. “I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us.” He has since referred to the people convicted in American courts for their actions on January 6 as “patriots” and to those held in prison as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon them.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Trump’s next coup has already begun]

Washington’s character and record ensured that almost any of his successors would seem smaller by comparison. But the difference between Washington and Trump is so immense as to be unmeasurable. No president in history, not even the worst moral weaklings among them, is further from Washington than Trump.

Washington prized patience and had, as Adams put it, “the gift of silence”; Trump is ruled by his impulses and afflicted with verbal incontinence. Washington was uncomplaining; Trump whines incessantly. Washington was financially and morally incorruptible; Trump is a grifter and a crude libertine who still owes money to a woman he was found liable for sexually assaulting. Washington was a general of preternatural bravery who grieved the sacrifices of his men; Trump thinks that fallen soldiers are “losers” and “suckers.”

Washington personally took up arms to stop a rebellion against the United States; Trump encouraged one.

Some Americans seem unable to accept how much peril they face should Trump return, perhaps because many of them have never lived in an autocracy. They may yet get their chance: The former president is campaigning on an authoritarian platform. He has claimed that “massive” electoral fraud—defined as the vote in any election he loses—“allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He refers to other American citizens as “vermin” and “human scum,” and to journalists as “enemies of the people.” He has described freedom of the press as “frankly disgusting.” He routinely attacks the American legal system, especially when it tries to hold him accountable for his actions. He has said that he will govern as a dictator—but only for a day.

Trump is the man the Founders feared might arise from a mire of populism and ignorance, a selfish demagogue who would stop at nothing to gain and keep power. Washington foresaw the threat to American democracy from someone like Trump: In his farewell address, he worried that “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction” would manipulate the public’s emotions and their partisan loyalties “to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

Many Americans in 2016 ignored this warning, and Trump engaged in the greatest betrayal of Washington’s legacy in American history. If given the opportunity, he would betray that legacy again—and the damage to the republic may this time be irreparable.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Washington’s Nightmare.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In an otherwise confident debate performance on Tuesday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, conspicuously dodged questions from the CBS moderators about his views on health care. For weeks, Vance has made clear his desire to dismantle one of the central pillars of the Affordable Care Act: the law’s provisions that require the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick. On Tuesday, though, Vance refused to elaborate on his plans to reconfigure the ACA, instead pressing the implausible argument that Donald Trump—who sought to repeal the law, and presided over a decline in enrollment during his four years in office—should be viewed as the program’s savior.

Vance’s evasive response to the questions about health care, on a night when he took the offensive on most other subjects, exposed how fraught most Republicans still consider the issue, seven years after Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. But Vance’s equivocations should not obscure the magnitude of the changes in the program that he has signaled could be coming in a second Trump presidency, particularly in how the law treats people with significant health problems.

The ACA provisions that mandate risk-sharing between the healthy and sick underpin what polls show has become its most popular feature: the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage, at comparable prices, to people with preexisting conditions. In numerous appearances, Vance has indicated that he wants to change the law to restore to insurance companies the ability to segregate healthy people from those with greater health needs. This was a point that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accurately stressed during the debate.

The political paradox of Vance’s policy is that the trade-off he envisions would primarily benefit younger and healthier people, at a time when most young people vote Democratic. Conversely, the biggest losers would be older adults in their last working years before they become eligible for Medicare. That would hit older working-class adults, who typically have the biggest health needs, especially hard. Those older working people are a predominantly white age cohort that reliably favors the Republican Party; in 2020, Trump won about three-fifths of white voters ages 45 to 64, exit polls found. The threat that the GOP’s ACA alternatives present to these core Republican voting groups represents what I called in 2017 “the Trumpcare conundrum.”

“Going back to the pre-ACA days of segregated risk pools would lower premiums for young and healthy people, but result in increased cost and potentially no coverage at all for those with preexisting conditions,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), told me.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign hopes to exploit that tension by launching a major advertising campaign across swing states this week to raise an alarm about the plans from Trump and Republicans to erode the ACA’s coverage. Support for the ACA—in particular, its provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions—may be one of Harris’s best assets to hold support from older and blue-collar white women, who may otherwise be drawn to Trump’s argument that only he can keep them safe from the threats of crime and undocumented immigration.

[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]

The efforts of Republicans like Vance to roll back the ACA this long after President Barack Obama signed it into law, in 2010, are without historical precedent: No other major social-insurance program has ever faced such a lengthy campaign to undo it. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, Alf Landon, the GOP presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing it. But when he won only two states, no other Republican presidential candidate ever again ran on repeal. And no GOP presidential candidate ever ran on repealing Medicare, the giant health-care program for the elderly, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1966.

By contrast, this is the fourth consecutive election in which the GOP ticket has proposed repealing or restructuring the ACA—despite polling that shows the act’s broad popularity. During Trump’s first year in office, House Republicans passed a bill to rescind the law without support from a single Democrat. The repeal drive failed in the Senate, when three Republican senators opposed it; the final gasp came when the late Senator John McCain voted no, giving a dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.

Most health-care analysts say that, compared with 2017, the ACA is working much better today. At that point, the ACA exchanges had begun selling insurance only three years earlier, following a disastrously glitchy rollout of the federal website that consumers could use to purchase coverage. When congressional Republicans voted on their repeal plans, about 12 million people were receiving coverage through the ACA, and the stability of the system was uncertain because insurers feared that too many of those buying insurance on the exchanges were sicker people with more expensive health needs.

“In 2017, not only did we have rising premiums because insurance companies were worried the market was getting smaller and sicker, but we also had insurance companies exiting markets and raising the risk that parts of the country would have nobody to provide coverage,” Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told me.

Today, however, “we are in a very, very different place,” she said. “I would argue that the ACA marketplaces are thriving and in a very stable” condition. The number of people purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges has soared past 21 million, according to the latest federal figures. Premiums for plans sold on the ACA exchanges, Corlette said, are rising, but generally not faster than the increase faced by employer-provided insurance plans. And enough insurers are participating in the markets that more than 95 percent of consumers have access to plans from three or more firms, according to federal figures.

Despite Vance’s portrayal of Trump as the program’s savior, the number of people receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges actually declined during Trump’s term, to 11.4 million, after he shortened the enrollment period and cut the advertising promoting it. The big leap forward in ACA participation came when the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 passed a major increase in the subsidies available to people for purchasing insurance on the exchanges. That made a mid-range (“silver”) insurance plan available for people earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level at no cost, and ensured that people earning even four times that level would not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.

“The biggest criticism of the ACA from the start, which in many ways was legitimate, was that the coverage was not truly affordable,” Levitt said. “The enhanced premium subsidies have made the coverage much more affordable to people, which has led to the record enrollment.”

Neera Tanden, the chief domestic-policy adviser for President Joe Biden, told me that the steady growth in the number of people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges was the best indication that the program is functioning as intended. “A way to determine whether a program works is whether people are using it,” Tanden said. “No one is mandated to be in the exchanges, and they have grown 75 percent in the past four years. This is a program where people are voting with their feet.”

Conservative critics of the law nonetheless see continuing problems with the system. Michael Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that many insurers participating in the ACA exchanges limit their patients to very narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, a trend acknowledged even by supporters of the law. And Cannon argues that the continued rise in premiums for plans sold on the ACA show that it has failed in its initial ambition to “bend the curve” of health-care spending, as Obama often said at the time.

The ACA “has covered marginally more people but at an incredible expense,” Cannon told me. “Don’t tell me it’s a success when it is exacerbating what everyone acknowledges to be the main problem with the U.S. health sector”—the growth in total national health-care spending.

Other analysts see a more positive story in the ACA’s effect on coverage and costs. The insurance exchanges established by the ACA were one of the law’s two principal means of expanding coverage for the uninsured. The second prong was its provision providing states with generous grants to extend Medicaid eligibility to more working, low-income adults. Although 10 Republican-controlled states have still refused to extend eligibility, nearly 24 million people now receive health coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

Combined with the roughly 21 million receiving coverage through the exchanges, that has reduced the share of Americans without insurance to about 8 percent of the population, the lowest ever recorded and roughly half the level it was before the ACA was passed.

Despite that huge increase in the number of people with insurance, health-care spending now is almost exactly equal to its level in 2009 when measured as a share of the total economy, at slightly more than 17 percent, according to KFF figures. (Economists usually consider that metric more revealing than the absolute increase in spending.) That share is still higher than the equivalent figure for other industrialized countries, but Levitt argues that it counts as an overlooked success that “we added tens of millions of people to the health-insurance rolls and did not measurably increase health-care spending as a result.”

[David Frum: The Vance warning]

The ACA’s record of success underscores the extent to which the continuing Republican opposition to the law is based on ideological, rather than operational, considerations. The GOP objections are clustered around two poles.

One is the increase in federal spending on health care that the ACA has driven, through both the generous premium subsidies and the costs of expanding Medicaid eligibility. The repeal bill that the House passed in 2017 cut federal health-care spending on both fronts by a total of about $1 trillion over a decade. This spring, the conservative House Republican Study Committee released a budget that proposed to cut that spending over the same period by $4.5 trillion; it also advocated converting Medicaid from an entitlement program into a block grant. Every serious analysis conducted of such proposals has concluded that they would dramatically reduce the number of Americans with health insurance.

Even if Republicans win unified control of Congress and the White House in November, they may not be able to muster the votes for such a sweeping retrenchment of federal health-care spending. (Among other things, hospitals in reliably red rural areas heavily depend on Medicaid.) At a minimum, however, Trump and congressional Republicans would be highly unlikely to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of 2025, a move that could substantially reduce enrollment on the exchanges.

The other main Republican objection is the issue that Vance has highlighted: the many elements of the ACA that require risk-sharing between the healthy and the sick. The ACA advanced that goal with an array of interlocking features, including its core protection for people with preexisting conditions.

In varying ways, the GOP alternatives in 2017 unraveled all of the law’s provisions that encouraged risk-sharing—by, for instance, allowing states to override them. That triggered the principal public backlash against the repeal effort, as Americans voiced their opposition to rescinding the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. But Vance has made very clear that a second Trump administration would resume the effort to resurrect a pre-ACA world, in which insurers sorted the healthy from the sick.

“A young American doesn’t have the same health-care needs as a 65-year-old American,” Vance argued recently on Meet the Press. “A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health-care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.” Although “we want to make sure everybody is covered,” Vance claimed, “the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Supporters of this vision, such as Cato’s Cannon, argue that it would allow younger and healthier people to buy less comprehensive plans than the ACA now requires, at much lower cost. As those more affordable options become available, Cannon says, cutting Medicaid spending to the degree Republicans envision would be more feasible, because people currently covered under that program could instead purchase these skimpier but less expensive private-insurance policies. Government-subsidized high-risk pools, the argument goes, could provide affordable coverage for the people with greater health needs whom insurers would weed out from their new, slimmed-down plans.

“If you want to make health care universal, you need to give insurers and consumers the freedom to agree on the prices and terms of health-insurance contracts themselves,” Cannon told me. “You need to let market competition drive the premiums down for healthy people as low as possible so they can afford coverage.”

Supporters of the ACA generally agree with the first point: that a deregulated system would allow insurers to create less expensive plans for young, healthy people. But they believe that all the arguments that follow are mistaken. Initial premiums might be lower, but in a deregulated system, even young and healthy families might find comprehensive policies, including such coverage as maternity benefits, unaffordable or unavailable, Georgetown’s Corlette told me. And when, before the ACA, states sought to establish high-risk pools for people with greater health needs, those efforts almost uniformly failed to provide affordable or adequate coverage, she pointed out.

Even if a reelected Trump lacks the votes in Congress to repeal the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements, he could weaken them through executive-branch action. In his first term, Trump increased the availability of short-term insurance plans that were free from the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Biden has shut down such plans, but if Trump won a second term and reauthorized them, while ending the enhanced subsidies, that could encourage many healthy people to leave the exchanges for those lower-cost options. Such actions would further the goal of Vance and other ACA critics of separating the healthy and sick into separate insurance pools.

Vance’s most revealing comment about this alternative vision may have come during a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, when he said that his proposed changes to the ACA would “allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.” But—as many health-policy experts noted to me, and Walz himself observed last night—that notion rejects the central purpose of any kind of insurance, which is to spread risk among as many people as possible—which, in fact, may be the point for Vance and other conservative critics of the ACA.

“The far right,” Tanden told me, “has always believed people should pay their own way, and they don’t like the fact that Social Security, Medicare, the ACA are giant social-insurance programs, where you have a giant pooling of risk, which means every individual person pays a little bit so they don’t become the person who is bankrupted by being sick or old.”

To date in the presidential race, health care has been eclipsed by two other major issues, each foregrounded by one of the nominees: immigration for Trump, and abortion for Harris. Under the glare of the CBS studio lights on Tuesday night, Vance was tactical in saying very little about his real health-care ideas. But the arguments he has advanced aggressively against crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act have made clear that its future is still on the ballot in 2024.