Over the weekend, a group of Arab American and Muslim American leaders in Michigan appeared onstage at a Donald Trump rally and urged their communities to vote for him. The outreach might be working: A recent poll showed Trump with a narrow lead among Arab American voters.

This is shocking, but hardly surprising. It’s shocking because Trump’s stated policies—on Palestine, on political freedom, and on the very presence of Muslims in America—are antithetical to so much of what most of these voters believe in. It’s unsurprising because we Arab and Muslim Americans have a long tradition of merciless political self-sabotage.

In 2000, angered by the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq, the use of “secret evidence” in deportation proceedings against Arab and Muslim immigrants, and especially the carnage of the Second Intifada, many liberal Arab Americans—myself included—decided not to vote for Al Gore and turned instead to Ralph Nader, himself a prominent Arab American. If the point was to advance Arab political interests, our protest was a pathetic failure. The election of George W. Bush led directly to the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, a strategic disaster that continues to resonate in the Middle East, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians.

This time around, the primary grievance is the Biden administration’s support of—or, at least, inability to end—Israel’s invasion of Gaza and, now, its widening wars in Lebanon and Iran. Once again, the impulse is to express our anger and “punish” the politicians responsible by withholding a vote for them. In an election with only two viable candidates, however, there is no difference between not supporting Kamala Harris and actively supporting Trump. And a quick review of the most important issues on which there’s a consensus among Arab and Muslim Americans demonstrates that a second Trump term would be dramatically worse than a Harris presidency.

[Read: What would a second Trump administration mean for the Middle East?]

Start with Trump’s signature issue, immigration. Nothing in Harris’s agenda would restrict immigration from Arab or Muslim countries. Trump offers the precise opposite. One of his first acts as president was to institute a “Muslim ban,” flatly prohibiting the entry of nationals from a list of seven majority-Muslim countries. President Joe Biden rescinded that executive order; Trump has vowed to reinstate and possibly expand it.

Moreover, Trump’s likely attack on Temporary Protected Status, especially for Haitian immigrants, is ominous for a number of Arab and Muslim communities whose members currently qualify, including Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Syrians, and Sudanese. With a stroke of Trump’s Sharpie, all of them could find themselves stripped of this protection—and included in his promised “bloody” mass deportations. Efforts to extend Temporary Protected Status to Lebanese nationals, entirely plausible under a Harris administration, would be dead in the water under Trump. Defending his decision to endorse Trump, an imam in Michigan declared that the former president “promises peace.” He plainly does not. The Washington Post has reported that, according to six sources, Trump recently told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” militarily in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The notion that Trump would prioritize the interests of Arab civilians is simply absurd. This is a man who has repeatedly used the word Palestinian as an epithet against his (in many cases Jewish) Democratic political opponents.

Trump already has a long, instructive, and highly discouraging record on these issues. As president, he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and issued a statement recognizing Israel’s sovereignty in the contested holy city. He recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, in direct contravention of the United Nations charter’s rule against the acquisition of territory by war. And he slammed shut the Overton window on Palestinian independence and a two-state solution, which had been a matter of bipartisan consensus since the end of the Cold War. His “Peace to Prosperity” plan, released in January 2020, invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the West Bank. Such a move would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded entirely by Israel, and therefore incapable of meaningful sovereignty. The primary effect of this crude document was to create a permission structure for Republicans to support wide-scale Israeli annexation of the West Bank and dispense with supporting Palestinian independence.

Harris, by contrast, has been categorical in her support of a real two-state solution that would mean the end of the occupation that began in 1967. The vice president has clearly stated that Palestinians and Israelis need to reach a peace agreement that affords them “equal measures of prosperity and freedom.” Trump has never spoken of Palestinians and Israelis enjoying equal measures of anything.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s new racist insult]

Trump’s anti-Palestinian bias extends to the home front. Arab and Muslim Americans have been emigrating to the United States in large numbers since the late 19th century in search of a better life characterized by liberty and democracy. And yet Trump’s whole campaign, and his entire agenda, amounts to an assault on those ideals. He has consistently singled out pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as part of a “radical revolution” that he has pledged to eliminate. According to The Washington Post, he told a group of Jewish donors in May that he is determined to deport pro-Palestinian students and “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”

Our communities are overwhelmingly aghast at the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel’s military campaigns. I share the sentiment. But channeling that anger into support for Trump would be an exercise in the most rarefied gullibility and naivete. Far from promising peace, Trump threatens war on “the enemy from within.” Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, particularly those with pro-Palestinian sentiments, are likely to be high on the list of targets. We need to learn from the lessons of our own history. When we try to punish the politicians who have disappointed us without taking a serious inventory of the likely consequences, we usually just end up hurting ourselves.

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

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

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

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Under the spell of the crowd]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One freezing day this spring, Shammas Malik was slogging through an agenda that would overwhelm anyone. The new mayor of Akron, Ohio, had to meet with a city-council member who was upset over a recent shooting in his ward. The interim police chief stopped by to discuss the incident, which underscored that Malik still had to pick a permanent head for the troubled department. Meanwhile, the council was debating whether to fund his plan—a hallmark promise of his campaign—to open the government up for more direct resident involvement and input. He was planning for his State of the City address, which was due in just a couple of weeks, on his 100th day in office—also his 33rd birthday. Merely contemplating such a schedule exhausted me, and unlike Malik, I had the benefit of sustenance; he was fasting for Ramadan.

Malik, however, was plowing through it with the almost annoying equanimity of an ascendant political star. He is the youngest mayor and the first mayor of color in the city’s history, placing him among a crop of young, ambitious Democratic mayors of color in the Buckeye State, including Cleveland’s Justin Bibb, age 37, and Cincinnati’s Aftab Pureval, who is 42, both of whom were elected in 2021. In an election cycle where the top of the Republican national ticket—including Ohio’s junior senator, J. D. Vance—has offered up wild fabrications about immigrants eating pets in nearby Springfield, they offer a different version of Buckeye State politics.

Barack Obama won Ohio twice, but whether a young brown man with a “funny name” can still win statewide there is unclear. The state’s mix of impoverished rural precincts and aging, decaying Rust Belt bastions have tipped toward Republicans. Senator Sherrod Brown, the most recent Democrat elected statewide, is in the fight of his political life against the Republican Bernie Moreno. Malik, Bibb, and Pureval could represent a new generation of Ohio leaders, not only in their backgrounds and ages but also in their approach. They could, however, find their paths to higher office blocked by the country’s hyperpartisanship—a fate that has shortened the careers of countless promising Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states, an invisible loss of talent that America pays for in ways immeasurable but profound.

[Stuart Stevens: I thought I understood the GOP. I was wrong.]

Malik, who is biracial, with a Pakistani father and a white mother, is young for the role and looks younger. With a high, reedy voice and a baby face only barely disguised with a beard, he usually wears a suit—“If I’m going to be a 32-year-old mayor, I can at least look the part,” he told me—but that just makes him seem a little like a kid dressed up for a special occasion. In fairness, Malik will always seem like a kid to me: I first met him as a teenager, when he was friends with my little sister. When I told J. Cherie Strachan, a political scientist at the University of Akron, that high-school friends used to joke that he was getting ready to be mayor, she laughed. “And now he's getting ready to be governor,” she said. “I can’t imagine that someone who is as ambitious as he is is going to stop at Akron.”

The real surprise might be that Malik is in Akron at all. Once, the city was the prosperous center of the nation’s tire industry, but its population has shrunk steadily since 1960. Firestone, Goodrich, and General Tire all left town; only Goodyear remains. The weather is bad. Any Akronite can reel off the names of many famous people from the city who left once they had a chance.

Malik could have been one of them. He excelled at Ohio State, graduated from Harvard Law School cum laude, and collected prestigious internships in Washington. He had no remaining family connections in Akron. Regardless, he decided to go home and take a job with the city’s lawyers in 2016, figuring he could always move to D.C. later. He found himself depressed and lonely, and when a friend asked if he’d be happier in the capital, he immediately answered yes. So why don’t you move? she asked.

“I think what I’m doing means something here, and I’m trying to find meaning here,” he said, recounting the conversation to me. “If I’m not [in Washington], probably somebody who thinks very similar to me, who’s going to work kind of the same as me, who’s going to do pretty much the same thing [will be]. If I’m not here, that’s not necessarily the case.”

The answer conveys a lot about Malik: his earnestness, his diligence and sense of responsibility, his openness around topics like mental health. Obama—another biracial, Harvard Law–educated politician—is an obvious model, evident in Malik’s pragmatic approach to politics, his seriousness of purpose, and his speaking style. A shelf in his sparsely decorated office captures the range of his influences: The New Jim Crow, Robert’s Rules of Order, Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball, and the Quran.

Malik’s character was shaped profoundly by both of his parents—but in very different ways. The greatest influence on his life was his mother, Helen Killory Qammar, a beloved chemical-engineering professor at the University of Akron. She instilled a sense of service, a love of vocation, and a focus on education. “She always was trying to do the right thing,” Malik  told the Akron Beacon Journal. “She was always treating people with kindness and dignity and respect and honesty.” Qammar died of cancer when Malik was 21.

Malik speaks frequently about her, but less so about his father, at least until the mayoral campaign. After Malik’s parents separated when he was 10, his father, Qammar Malik, a Pakistani immigrant, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, extortion, and impersonating a U.S. official in a blackmail scheme. During a mayoral debate in April 2023, Malik was asked how he thought about integrity. He shifted uncomfortably behind his lectern, as though wrestling with himself, then began to speak in a tremulous voice.

“I’m going to talk about something I never talked about in public before,” he said. “I have a father who’s a very dishonest guy, and this impacted me a lot as a kid. I talked to my dad through prison glass, and I don’t talk about it a lot because it’s something that is difficult to talk about, but it has guided my life to live every day with honesty.”

Despite his initial unhappiness upon returning to Akron, Malik stuck it out. When he learned that the city-council seat for the ward he grew up in was opening, he moved there and entered the race. Malik won the 2019 election in a stroll. (Driving around this spring, he was still new enough to his job that he was instinctively doing the work of a city-council member, sighing and making a note when he saw a light-pole banner that had become partially detached.) In June 2022, police shot and killed a 25-year-old Black man named Jayland Walker after a car chase, spurring protests. Three months later, Malik announced that he would run for mayor in 2023, challenging the incumbent Dan Horrigan in the Democratic primary. Within weeks, Horrigan announced that he would not seek reelection.

In Akron, as in many small and midsize cities, the Democratic Party dominates. The city hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1979, and the winner of the Democratic primary is a shoo-in for the general election. The city’s Democratic machine, including Horrigan, opposed Malik, which turned out to be a great asset in a city eager for change. Malik looked to Bibb’s successful race—featuring a young candidate who took on far more seasoned figures in Cleveland—as a model for his campaign.

The differences between Malik and other candidates were less about policy than philosophy. He ran down the middle on issues. In a race in which public safety was voters’ central concern, he promised both police reform and greater safety. Where he distinguished himself from the field was on governing style. During the campaign, he knocked on hundreds of doors and showed up at every event he could, leveraging his youth and energy. Wherever he went, he promised that as mayor he’d bring the same transparency and opportunity for public engagement into a city government that hadn’t felt very open or accessible for decades.

Strachan told me that Malik’s campaign was “facilitative, deliberative, inclusive, and focused on process.” These may be the hallmarks of a younger generation; Strachan noted that they’re also traditionally associated with a more feminine leadership style. And it was women who powered Malik’s victory. He won 43 percent of the vote in a seven-person field, and a postelection poll found that Malik won more votes from women than any other candidate won in total.

If anything, getting elected was the easy part. The council—perhaps eager to establish some leverage over an untested mayor—refused to fund a position to implement his public-engagement initiative. (“I don’t have to like it, but I’m gonna respect it,” he told me, paraphrasing the rapper Nipsey Hussle.) His attempt to change the city charter to allow him to seek outside candidates for police chief fell short. A mass shooting at a birthday party this summer shook the city and made national headlines; now some residents are clamoring for the police chief’s firing.

“It’s easy to get beaten down and just overwhelmed by the issues,” Tony O’Leary, a former deputy mayor who advised Malik’s transition into office, told me. “Shit just comes every day, no matter what you do or how well you prepare. It’s always the unexpected. It doesn’t matter what’s on your to-do list.”

When I spoke with Malik again in September, he said he was adjusting to the incrementalism of the job. The mayor has more power than a ward councilor, but also less chance to act unilaterally. His first nine months on the job, he joked, “have been like 54 years.” But Malik’s respect for process can mask a hard resolve.

“Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, right? But I should be confident in the things that I’m putting forward,” he said. “That doesn’t mean yelling, that doesn’t mean arguing, but it does mean being firm. I’m not going to bring something to someone unless it’s well thought out.”

Mayors don’t always have the luxury, or the burden, of ideology. Many of their most pressing issues aren’t partisan, and they may have to work with state and federal politicians with whom they disagree.

“When you’re dealing with the extreme MAGA-led Republican state legislature that we have in Columbus, I think it’s important to find commonsense, pragmatic Republican lawmakers that I can work with across the aisle who share my vision and love for Cleveland,” Bibb told me.

This fall, Donald Trump and Vance spent weeks fueling a national news cycle based on false, racist claims about legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and promising to deport them if elected. It fell to Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and Governor Mike DeWine, both Republicans, to refute those claims. Migration has taxed Springfield’s housing supply, but local officials also credit it with helping revitalize the economy.

In September, Malik joined a delegation of Ohio mayors that went to Springfield to meet with Rue, offer support, and compare notes. Back home, he told me that although he had no patience for fearmongering or racism, he understood the tension in Springfield.

“When there is a significant rise in population in a community, especially a city of 60,000 people, certainly there are going to be impacts. There’s going to be positive impact. There’s going to be challenges,” he said.

Akron experienced an influx of several thousand people, including many from Nepal and Bhutan, in the early 2000s. Malik said he was conscious of the concerns of longtime Akronites, but noted that, as in Springfield, population growth can help everyone. “I’m walking around a city that was built for 300,000 people,” he told me. “It’s now a city of 187,000 people. It doesn’t run if the population is 100,000.” (A couple of times, Malik half-jokingly tried to persuade me to move home too.)

Residents of bigger cities, which have more room and more liberal politics, may be receptive to this kind of argument—and to immigrants. Elsewhere, however, many Ohioans have been amenable to Trump’s message, focused on economic protectionism, nativism, and reduced immigration. His success there has taken Ohio out of the swing-state column at the national level. Broad political shifts, weak candidates, and gerrymandering have all but locked Democrats out of power at the state level. According to a count by David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, Democrats have won just one of 32 statewide races over the past decade, though the success last year of a constitutional amendment to protect abortion access has instilled some hope.

“To the extent that there’s a Democratic future, it’s the mayors, but what Ohio has been doing of late has been chewing up and spitting out Democrats with statewide aspirations,” Niven told me. Democrats hope that younger people and greater diversity will improve their statewide fortunes.

If the state ever turns purple again, Democrats will be looking to the people sitting in mayoral offices today and in the years ahead to win at the state level. “We need more mayors from big cities and medium-sized cities and small cities in this state working in the legislature, running for statewide offices,” he told me. (Bibb excluded himself from consideration, at least for the moment: “Right now, I’m just trying to get reelected in 2025.”)

Making the jump to statewide office isn’t easy, though, not only because of party affiliation but also because Ohio is regionally divided such that no mayor has much name recognition or reach across the state. In 2022, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley ran for governor as a Democrat but was trounced by the incumbent DeWine. Malik told me that he’s heard the optimistic speculation about his future but he’s focused on his current job. “I ran for mayor because I think I can do this job,” he said. “I’m not running for state representative or state senator, because I don’t know state government. I’m not running for Congress. I want to do this job.”

For once, Malik doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. But if he ever wanted to kick the tires, he’d be in the right place.

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

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

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

[Watch: Shifting campaign strategies]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump never mentioned the Pyrex factory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Envy,” Rob said. “Jealousy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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To a casual observer, Donald Trump’s claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs seemed like a bizarre or mistaken claim that ultimately fueled millions of memes, jokes, and racist insults. But to someone who knows what to look for, the story he told read as much more calculated and familiar. Making an outrageous claim is one common tactic of an autocrat. So is sticking to it far beyond the time when it’s even remotely believable. Autocrats often dare their followers to believe absurd claims, as a kind of loyalty test, because “humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes,” says Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist and co-host of Autocracy in America, an Atlantic podcast series.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Pomerantsev and Atlantic staff writer and co-host Anne Applebaum about how to detect the signs of autocracy, because, as they say, if you can’t spot them, you won’t be able to root them out. We also analyze the events of the upcoming election through their eyes and talk about how large swaths of a population come to believe lies, what that means, and how it might be undone.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. There’s something new unfolding in this election, something we haven’t seen in this country on such a grand scale. Kamala Harris said it bluntly at her acceptance speech at the DNC when she talked about how tyrants like Kim Jong Un side with Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris: They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable, because he wants to be an autocrat himself.

[Applause]

Rosin: An autocrat. How do you know if a leader is vying to be an autocrat? It’s an abstract title hard to picture playing out in the U.S. But as I picked up in a new Atlantic podcast, Autocracy in America, if you know what you’re looking for, you can see it pretty clearly.

People who have seen it play out in other countries can tick through the list of autocratic tactics. At work. Right now. In the United States.

Applebaum: That was really the organizing idea of the show, was to tell people that stuff is already happening now.

Rosin: This is staff writer Anne Applebaum. She’s a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and co-host of Autocracy in America.

Her co-host is Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar of propaganda and misinformation.

After I started listening to their show, I realized I was missing some very basic things—patterns that were easy to spot if someone pointed them out to you. So I wanted to get them to help me to understand the moment we’re in, both in this election and in American history.

Here’s my conversation with Anne and Peter.

[Music]

Rosin: So I think of the two of you as, like, detectives. You see patterns happening in the news and the election that the rest of us either don’t notice or don’t quite put together as patterns. So I want to, through your eyes, look at the current election. Have you detected any patterns or signs of the kind of current autocracy in America bubble up in the dialogue of this election?

Applebaum: So I was very struck by the famous “eating cats and dogs” phrase.

Donald Trump: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets.

Applebaum: And everybody laughed at it, and they said, Ha ha ha. That’s very funny. And this struck me as an example of people lying in a way, even though everybody knows they’re lying, and the purpose of the lie was to demonstrate their power. We can lie. We can do whatever we want. We can say whatever we want about these people, and it doesn’t affect us.

And the fact that they never retracted it, despite the fact that people in Springfield were up in arms, and everybody who’s done any reporting—journalists have been to Springfield, have asked people, Are there any dogs or cats being eaten? And people say no.

It’s a way of showing power—so, We can lie, and everybody else is going to go along with our lie when we win the election.

Pomerantsev: You know, something that’s been much remarked upon in autocratic systems: truth and power sort of switch roles. You know, we think of truth challenging power and holding the powerful by account with the truth. When I lived in Russia—and my first book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, was all about this, how truth didn’t play that role anymore. Truth was about showing your loyalty, showing whose side you’re on—and, you know, subservient to power.

Applebaum: They’re creating around themselves a kind of alternative community, where, If you’re inside our world, we say whatever we want the truth to be, and everybody joins in.

Pomerantsev: And also, rubbishing the idea of truth. I mean, what comes with that is truth stops being about information and analysis. It’s about making a point, saying whose side you’re on. Even the more absurd the lie that you say shows even more, Look at my team. Look at my team. Look whose side I’m on.

And Vance was fascinating. You know, he’s a very fascinating character, something right out of some of the darkest Russian novels, because he kind of intellectualizes this, because he’s also a writer and someone who thinks about language a lot, clearly. And when he went on air and said, Oh yeah. I made this up, and I’ll keep on making things up. Because truth doesn’t matter. You know, something else matters.

J. D. Vance on CNN: If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.

Rosin: And is it just because I’m (A) an American and (B) a journalist that I can’t catch up? Like, you both have so much foreign experience—living in foreign countries, watching autocracy—so you’ve digested this. Is it because it’s new to me that everything—like, every time Trump does it, I keep wishing for the facts to stop the momentum, and they never do, and somehow I can’t catch up? It’s just because we’re new, right? Because Americans just haven’t seen this before.

Applebaum: It’s not that new. I mean, it’s been going on since 2016. And in fact, I would say almost the opposite is true. I think most people—I mean, you may be an exception.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Pomerantsev: It’s because you’re a journalist, not because you’re an American.

Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s because I’m slow.

Applebaum: No. I think most people have got used to it. And I mean, the normalization of the lying and the normalization of the gibberish that Trump comes up with—all of that has become part of the background of politics in America and isn’t shocking the way it would have been. And imagine an election 20 years ago. I don’t know—imagine Bill Clinton going up on the stage and talking about sharks and electrocution and Hannibal Lecter. People would have been outraged, and he would have been thrown off the stage, and Who is this crazy person talking to us?

But we’ve now gone down a path where we’re accustomed to that way of speaking in public. More and more people have joined the former president in doing so. More and more people have got used to listening to that, and we’re in a different world now. Maybe you’re just still in the former world.

Rosin: But why are we laughing? I mean, what you’re saying is quite serious. Like, what you’re saying is that they’re using this pet story in order to sort of flex a kind of autocratic power, and we are just making memes and making jokes and laughing at Trump and saying how ridiculous it is that he’s doing this pet thing. But what you’re talking about is quite serious. So that’s where I’m saying maybe the gap is—like, we haven’t quite caught up—that actually it’s dangerous. It’s not funny.

Pomerantsev: I don’t find it funny at all, actually. I find it very, very sinister. One thing that we keep on coming back to in our show is in Eastern Europe, where there’s been a history of this, the response is often to look at the absurdity of it. A lot of the great Eastern European novels about autocracy are absurdist novels. But absurdism is very scary. I mean, in the hands of the sadistic and the powerful, it’s a terrifying tool. So I find humor and fear can be quite close together sometimes.

Applebaum: No. It’s one of the things you do when you’re afraid and also, especially, when you’re powerless. When democracy has failed completely, when you’re living in a completely autocratic society, then what do you have left? You can’t fight back. You can’t hit anybody. So you turn it into jokes.

Rosin: So that’s the level of Trump. I want to talk about this at the level of followers or people listening to Trump or, you know, the general populace, and tell you guys a story.

I’ve been to more Trump rallies in this election than I have in the last election. And one thing that happens is: I was reporting with an Atlantic reporter. His name is John Hendrickson. He covers politics, and he has a pronounced stutter. And this was at the time that Biden was still running, and Trump had declined to make fun of Biden’s stutter, and then Trump crossed that line in a certain rally. He started to make fun of the way Biden talks.

Trump: Two nights ago, we all heard Crooked Joe’s angry, dark, hate-filled rant of a State of the Union address. Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together? Remember, he said, I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-together. I’m gonna bring it together.

Rosin: And John Hendrickson wanted to go with me to a rally. So we thought we would get into some sticky ethical dilemmas, and we would have kind of difficult conversations with people about compassion and morality. And we did have some of that. But a lot of what happened is that people would say to us, That didn’t happen. Trump didn’t do that. Like, I just, again, wasn’t prepared for that.

[Music]

Rosin: The first time someone said it, I just said, Yes. He did, like a baby. And they said, Well, no. We don’t know—he didn’t, and so then I sort of stepped back and called up the video. And then there was a video of Trump doing what we said he had done. So then the next time someone said he didn’t do that, I just showed them the video, and they said, Well, we don’t—I don’t know where that video came from. I don’t know that that’s real.

And so I didn’t know what to do next. Like, when people just say, That didn’t happen, I just wasn’t sure where to go next. So what I did was go home and Google the term psychological infrastructure. And I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but just what has happened to our brains? And I wanted you two to reflect on this.

Applebaum: I mean, one of the things that happened to our brains—and I don’t think it’s only Trump supporters—is that the quantity of information that we all see every day is so enormous. And so much of it is either false or irrelevant, or somehow we learn to exclude it, that I think the old, slow process of thinking about what’s true and what’s not true—it’s hardly even relevant anymore. It’s not just Americans, actually. I mean, I think everybody has started to treat facts and evidence and truth differently. And I think that’s kind of where Trump comes from.

In the way that Hollywood produced Ronald Reagan and TV produced JFK, because they were the new forms of media, and they were the ones who were successful in that media, I think Trump is somebody who’s successful in the world of very fast video clips and takes, where you’re not paying any attention anymore to what’s actually true and what’s not, and what’s AI and what’s not, and what’s staged and what’s not. I think he’s just a beneficiary of that.

Pomerantsev: I always wonder: What is the permission structure that a leader gives their followers, especially when the leader has this really tight emotional bond with their followers?

The permission structure that Trump gives his audience, I think, is: He sticks a middle finger up to reality. It’s very nice to give a middle finger to reality. Reality, essentially, at the end of the day, reminds you of death. I mean, it’s a middle finger to death at some very deep level. That’s what Trump gives people. So he denies reality, so you can deny reality, so when Hanna turns up with her evidence, you can go, Eh, fuck that.

Rosin: Oh my God. That—

Pomerantsev: And that gives you a high.

Rosin: Peter, that’s so—I mean, that feels correct, because there is such a hostility towards the media in a Trump rally. And it is very fun for people in a Trump rally, because often the media has the power. Like, I have equipment. I have a microphone. I have a lot of things. It is such a high for people to give us the middle finger and just say, like, You have no power. You’re nothing. That is very much in that dynamic. So I wonder if there is just some pleasure in telling us that didn’t happen. And it doesn’t matter if you knew it happened or saw it happen or anything like that.

Pomerantsev: We know about the hostility to the media as a kind of, like, sociological strategy, but also, I wonder, actually, it’s deeper than that. By telling the people who represent knowledge and facts a big middle finger, it’s part of this bigger rebellion against reality.

Applebaum: You know, Trump, from the very beginning of his political career—one of the central things he was doing was attacking the idea of truth. Remember how he broke into our consciousness in the political world as a birther. You know, Barack Obama is not really the president. He’s an illegitimate president. He was born in Kenya.

Trump on The View: Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate? I think he probably—

Barbara Walters on The View: Why does he have to?

Trump on The View: Because I have to and everybody else has to.

Trump on The Today Show: I thought he was probably born in this country, and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I had before.

Meredith Vieira on The Today Show: But based on what?

Applebaum: And the fact that he could build a community of trust around that idea was a beginning, for a lot of people, of a break with, as you say, the idea that facts are real and that there’s some structure of truth, fact-finding, journalism, etcetera that can back it up.

So I think this has been a deliberate thing that he’s done for a decade, is to try to undermine people’s faith in truth and faith in journalism and faith in all kinds of other institutions, as well. But he is aided by the nature of the modern conversation and debate, which has only become more chaotic, you know, with every passing year.

Rosin: Do you two think of the American mind as broken in some way? No. I’m serious. Like, where we journalists are playing a losing game, and the American mind is corroded?

Applebaum: I’m not sure it’s just the American mind.

Pomerantsev: That was a very diplomatic answer, Anne. Damn, that was good. That was good.

Rosin: I actually wonder about this. I actually wonder about this. I mean, that is a very unmelodic phrase I Googled, psychological infrastructure. But I did start to think of the world in this way. Like, Okay, there’s a transportation infrastructure. There are all these, you know—but then there’s a collective-consciousness infrastructure, and it’s being corrupted, you know. In the same way you can sort of hack into an electrical grid, you can hack into a collective consciousness. And it just seems terrifying to me.

Applebaum: It matters a lot who the leaders of your country are. I remember an Italian friend of mine telling me a long time ago, after Berlusconi had been the leader of Italy for a number of years, it actually changed the way men and women related to each other in the country, because Berlusconi was famous for having lots of young girlfriends and so on.

Suddenly, it became okay for married men to have much younger girlfriends, in a way that it hadn’t been before. So he kind of changed the morality because he was the top dog, so whatever he did was okay. And that suddenly meant it was okay for a lot of other people too. And I think Trump did something like that too.

He made lying okay. You know, If Trump does it, and he’s the president—or he was the president—then it’s okay for anyone to do it. We can all do it. And so I do think he had an impact on the national psyche, or whatever term you want to use.

Pomerantsev: Yeah. I think the question isn’t whether it’s broken or not. Clearly, something has snapped if 30 percent of the country think the last election rigged in some way.

So the question, Is it broken irrevocably? is actually the question. And the only thing I would say from seeing this in authoritarian regimes or regimes that go authoritarian-ish: It’s very shocking when you see people openly choosing to live in an alternative reality. It’s not that they got duped. They’re doing that because it’s part of their new identity.

It can also be thin because it is a bad identity. And actually, in their personal lives, they’re still completely rational. You know, they need facts as soon as they’re looking at their bank account. So it’s not all pervasive. This is just something you do for your political identity, for the theater of it, which means that it can change very fast, again, and change back again. So there is a thinness to it.

Rosin: But that’s hopeful.

Pomerantsev: That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean. So is it irrevocable? Not necessarily, is what I would say. But clearly something’s broken.

Rosin: After the break, Anne and Peter play out our near future—that is, what happens after the election—and Anne tries her hardest not to sound too dark.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay. So broaden out a little bit. What’s at stake in the election, as you two see it? This election.

Applebaum: I have to be careful not to sound apocalyptic, because it’s kind of my trademark tone, and I’m seeking to—

Rosin: It’s your brand. You’re trying to change your brand. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I’m trying to tone it down. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay.

Pomerantsev: Just as things get really apocalyptic, Anne’s like, I’m going to be all self-helpy. (Laughs.)

Applebaum: I think whether the United States continues to be a democracy in the way that we’ve known it up until now—or at least since the Civil War or maybe since the civil-rights movement—is at stake.

I think, for example, the question of whether we will go on having, you know, a Justice Department that adheres to the rule of law and government institutions who act in the interests of the American people—rather than the interest of the president, personally, and his friends, personally—I think all of that’s at stake.

So the thing that I’ve seen happen in other countries is the politicization of the state and the politicization of institutions. And that’s what I think is very, very likely to happen if Trump wins a second term. And once that begins, it is very hard to reverse. It’s very hard to bring back the old civil servants who are, for better or for worse—I mean, maybe they’re ineffective or incompetent, but at least they think they’re acting in the interests of Americans.

Once you don’t have that culture anymore, it’s difficult to rebuild, and I’m afraid of that.

Pomerantsev: Look—America’s meaning in the world goes beyond its borders. It is the only superpower that’s also a democracy and talks a lot about freedom, though we unpack what it means by “freedom” in the show. There’s a real risk that a Trump victory is the end of America’s role doing that. For me, actually, the most sinister moment in the debates was when Trump looked to Viktor Orbán, the leader of Hungary, as his role model.

Orbán is not of great importance geopolitically. Hungary is a tiny country, but he’s a model for a new type of authoritarian-ish regimes inside Europe. And if America cuts off its alliances, if America makes possible a world where Russia and China will dominate—and there’s a real risk of that—then we’re into a very, very, very dangerous and turbulent future.

This is a moment when democracies really do hang together. The other side is very focused and very ruthless. Something that didn’t make it into the show was a quote from an interview that we did with Mikhail Zygar, the Russian journalist. He’s in Episode 2. But there was one line that didn’t make it into the show for editing reasons. But he sort of told us: What do the Kremlin elite call Trump?

And they call him Gorbachev, America’s Gorbachev, by which they don’t mean he’s a liberal reformer. They mean he’s going to bring the whole thing crashing down. It’s the end of America, and it’s Russia and China’s moment to dominate.

Applebaum: Yeah. And not just the end of America as a democracy but the end of American leadership in the world, the way that Gorbachev ended—

Pomerantsev: The project’s over.

Applebaum: The project’s over. That’s what they think.

Pomerantsev: Oh, they’re licking their lips.

Rosin: Let’s say Trump doesn’t win. Do all your worries fade away?

Applebaum: Some do. I mean, not having Trump as the leader—having him having been defeated in an election, especially if that election result holds and there is not another rebellion—that will force at least some part of the Republican Party to try to move on and find different language and different leaders.

But there will be a long legacy, even if he loses—so the legacy of people who’ve come to accept his way of speaking and his way of dealing with the world as normal, the legacy of people who believe that Kamala Harris is a Marxist revolutionary who’s out to destroy America, the legacy of violence in politics and the language of violence in politics. I mean, we’ve always had it, actually, in U.S. history. You can find lots of moments where it’s there, kind of rises and falls depending on the times. But we have a continued high level of threat, I think.

Rosin: Right. So it still requires a vigilance. It’s clear from this conversation why you two were motivated to make this series, Autocracy in America. Why does going back in history and doing this broad sweep—why is that useful? Why approach it in that way?

Pomerantsev: America is incredibly exceptional. But also, the things that play out here, you know, they have their precedence internationally and in history. And sometimes stepping back from the immediate moment is the way to sort of both understand it and also start to deal with it. You know, sometimes when you’re just in this—you know, the latest rage tweet or the latest, like, horrific TikTok video or something—stepping back, seeing the context, seeing the larger roots, seeing that it happens elsewhere is a way of then starting to deal with it.

I mean, that’s what a therapist will always get you to do. He says, Step back from the crisis, and let’s talk about the context. And the context is both uplifting in the sense that there have been ways to deal with this before but also—I mean, for me it was fascinating to understand how the story of autocracy in America is not just about Trump at all.

It’s a stable thing that’s been there all the time. The series, for me, was transformative in the sense that—I entered it, and I’m still in the process of making sense of it—I entered it very much with this idea that the story of America is the story of America outgrowing its lacks of freedoms and rights and getting better and better.

And by the end, I was kind of inching towards a revisioning, where it seems a country where the autocratic instincts and the democratic instincts are constantly competing, constantly at war with each other, and mitigated by things like foreign-policy. I mean, you know, Episode 4 is all about how America’s foreign policy choices in the Cold War, being for freedom, made it improve civil rights at home.

So all these factors influence the progress of democracy, the upholding of rights and freedoms. And it’s not some simple line. And that, for me, was actually quite—I don’t know. That was very new for me.

Applebaum: I think it’s also important that people stop thinking about history the way I was, essentially, taught in school, which is that it’s some kind of line of progress.

You know, The arc of history bends towards justice, or whatever way you want to put it—that we’re on some kind of upward trajectory, you know, and that sometimes we back down but, Never mind. It’ll keep going, because history isn’t determinative like that. It’s, in fact, circular. Things happen. We grow out of them. But then they come back. You know, ideas return. Old ways of doing and thinking—they don’t get banished forever. They reemerge.

And when you look at American history, just like when you look at the history of any country, actually, you find that. You find that old ideas come back, and I thought it was worth it, in this series, since we were talking about the present and the future, to also look at the way some of the same ideas and arguments had played out in the past.

Rosin: Well, Anne, Peter, thank you so much for making this series and for talking to us about it today.

Applebaum: Thank you.

Pomerantsev: Thank you for listening.

Rosin: Listeners, I urge you to check out the whole series, Autocracy in America. You’ll learn to spot the signs of autocracy in our past and right now. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

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

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

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

[Read: November will be worse]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Listen: Autocrats win by capturing the courts]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leon Neal / Getty

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

[Watch: The candidates’ policy differences]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Paola Ramos: The immigrants who oppose immigration]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paradox of running a campaign against Donald Trump is that you have to convince voters that he is both a liar and deadly serious.

On the one hand, much of what the Republican presidential nominee says is patently false. Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not eating cats and dogs; President Joe Biden is not dodging calls from the governor of hurricane-stricken Georgia; crime is not, in fact, on the rise.

And yet, on the other hand, Trump is not bluffing when it comes to his plans to radically shift the federal government and change the fabric of American life. These include a huge expansion in political-patronage jobs, campaigns of retribution against political adversaries, and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants—all things that Trump has placed at the center of his campaign and that he tried to do in his first term. Trump’s critics talk about these plans not just because of an abstract commitment to democracy—it’s also good politics. Many of these ideas are deeply unpopular, and will motivate voters to oppose Trump.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]

That’s the theory, at least. But Trump exists in a strange zone where voters hear what he’s saying and then largely discount it, perhaps as a result of his past dissembling, or perhaps because the ideas just seem too extreme to be real. Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer turned Trump critic who now works for the nonprofit Protect Democracy, has dubbed this the “believability gap.”

“[These ideas] are out in public. They’re on video. They’re very easy to see and understand,” she told me. “What a lot of people are failing to comprehend is how he would turn that rhetoric into a reality.”

One way to think about the believability gap is to consider Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–coordinated blueprint for a second Trump term. Such external planning documents are not unusual, I noted in August, and even given that many of the details in this one are far out of the mainstream, Democrats’ success in turning Project 2025 into a campaign liability is surprising. An NBC News poll late last month found that 57 percent of voters viewed Project 2025 negatively; almost all of this group viewed it very negatively. Even a third of Republicans dislike it. A recent survey from the progressive pollster Navigator found 50 percent disapproval and just 9 percent approval for Project 2025.

[Read: The mistake that could cost Trump the election]

But the trick is that even though Project 2025 is deeply unpopular, Trump is somewhat immune to the effects if people think he won’t really do the things in it. Lake Research Partners (LRP), a Democratic firm, recently polled swing-state voters about Project 2025. When respondents were asked about specific policies within the document, an important split emerged between how they felt about each idea versus how likely they thought it was to happen. For example, 57 percent were very concerned about cutting programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, but only 33 percent thought that was very likely. Similarly, 46 percent would be very concerned about Trump deploying troops against American citizens, yet only a quarter thought Trump would ever do such a thing—even though Trump showed enthusiasm for doing just that in 2020, including in public statements.

But the believability gap nearly disappears when it comes to two of the most traditional GOP policy priorities. Even though Trump in 2024 is the most aberrant major-party nominee in American history—outdoing even earlier Trump iterations—the LRP polling finds that voters are very concerned about tax cuts for the wealthy and restrictions on abortion, contraception, and infertility treatments and also think Trump would be very likely to implement those policies.

[David Frum: The danger ahead]

Voters’ dismissal of the likelihood of Trump pursuing his most extreme ideas, Carpenter told me, represents “a failure of imagination and inability to think about how his words could really become operable with the right people around him. It’s sort of unfathomable to a lot of Americans that that’s not exaggerated rhetoric.”

For the Kamala Harris campaign, the believability gap is a challenge: Get people to believe that Trump will pursue the ideas that the public hates. The evidence available to them is substantial. Some of the most extreme ideas in Project 2025, such as liquidating much of the civil service and politicizing the federal government, are things that Trump has already tried to do. As president, he attempted to use the Justice Department to punish political adversaries, closed down investigations into allies, and sought to punish Amazon for negative coverage in The Washington Post, owned by Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos. (Carpenter has also pointed to actions taken by Republican state governments as proof of what Trump could achieve.)

That helps explain a major shift in Democratic campaign strategy that has become apparent in recent months. When President Joe Biden was the party’s nominee, he frequently spoke about the election as an existential threat to democracy, using high-flown rhetoric. Since replacing him atop the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has not stopped talking about democracy, but she’s made it much less of a focus, instead emphasizing issues such as abortion and tax cuts—and, yes, Project 2025. People already hate it. The Harris campaign needs them to believe it.

America’s immigration debate has taken a restrictionist turn. Eight years ago, Donald Trump declared that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” and promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the southern border. That rhetoric, extreme at the time, seems mild now. Today, he depicts immigrants as psychopathic murderers responsible for “poisoning the blood of our country” and claims that he will carry out the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Democrats have shifted too. In 2020, Joe Biden ran on the promise to reverse Trump’s border policies and expand legal immigration. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.” That kind of humanitarian language is gone from Democrats’ 2024 messaging. So is any defense of immigration on the merits. When asked about immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris touts her background prosecuting transnational criminal organizations and promises to pass legislation that would “fortify” the southern border.

[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]

The change in rhetoric did not come out of nowhere. Politicians are responding to one of the most dramatic swings in the history of U.S. public opinion. In 2020, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration should decrease. Just four years later, that number had risen to 55 percent—the highest level since 2001. (Other surveys find similar results.) Republican attitudes have shifted the most, but Democrats and independents have also soured on immigration.

Although public opinion is known to ebb and flow, a reversal this big, and this fast, is nearly unheard-of. It is the result of a confluence of two powerful factors: a partisan backlash to a Democratic president and a bipartisan reaction to the genuine chaos generated by a historic surge at the border.

Political scientists have long observed that public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of a sitting president’s rhetoric, priorities, and policies, especially when that president is an especially polarizing figure—a phenomenon known as “thermostatic public opinion.” No president has kicked the thermostat into action quite like Trump. In response to his incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh policies, including the Muslim ban and family separation, being pro-immigrant became central to Democratic identity. In 2016, only 30 percent of Democrats told Gallup they wanted to increase immigration; by 2020, that number had grown to 50 percent. In just four years under Trump, Democratic attitudes toward immigration levels warmed more than they had in the previous 15.

But the thermostat works the other way too. When Biden took office, he immediately rescinded many of Trump’s border policies and proposed legislation to “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system.” This triggered a backlash. Right-wing media and Republican politicians sought to turn Biden’s policies into a liability. By mid-2022, the percentage of Republican voters who said immigration should decrease had risen by 21 points. And with Trump no longer in the White House to mobilize the opposition, Democratic immigration attitudes began by some measures to creep closer to their pre-2016 levels as well. “The paradox of Trump was that he inspired an unprecedented positive shift in immigration attitudes,” Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me. “But because it was a reaction to Trump himself, that positivity was always extremely fragile.”

Trump is not the entire story, however. Public opinion continued to drift rightward long after Biden took office. From June 2023 to June 2024 alone, the percentage of Democrats who favored decreased immigration jumped by 10 points, and the percentage of Republicans by 15 points. That’s the single largest year-over-year shift in overall immigration attitudes since Gallup began asking the question back in 1965.

[Derek Thompson: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong]

Voters may have been responding to the sharp rise in so-called border encounters—a euphemism for the apprehension of undocumented immigrants entering the country from Mexico. These reached a record 300,000 in December 2023, up from 160,000 in January of that year and from just 74,000 in December 2020. The surge overwhelmed Customs and Border Patrol, and scenes of overcrowded immigrant-processing centers and sprawling tent encampments became fixtures on conservative media outlets. Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of asylum seekers (about 120,000 at this point) to cities such as New York, Chicago, and Denver, which were caught off guard by the influx. Suddenly blue-state cities across the country got a taste of border chaos in the form of stressed social services, migrants sleeping on streets, frantic city officials, and community backlash. “I don’t think the shift in attitudes is surprising, given what’s been happening at the border,” Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told me. “People are sensitive to what’s going on, and they respond to it.”

Some experts call this the “locus of control theory,” or, more colloquially, the “chaos theory” of immigration sentiment. The basic idea, grounded in both survey data and political-science research, is that when the immigration process is perceived as fair and orderly, voters are more likely to tolerate it. When it is perceived as out of control and unfair—perhaps due to an uncommonly large surge of migrants—then the public quickly turns against it. Perhaps the best evidence for this theory is that even as Americans have embraced much tighter immigration restrictions, their answers to survey questions such as “Do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society?” and “Do you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?” and even “Should it be easier to immigrate to the U.S?” haven’t changed nearly as much, and remain more pro-immigrant than they were as recently as 2016. “I don’t think these views are contradictory,” Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, a deputy director at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “People can simultaneously have compassion for immigrants while also feeling anxious and upset about the process for coming into the country.”

One implication of chaos theory is that leaders can mitigate opposition to immigration by introducing reforms that make the process less chaotic. That’s what the Biden administration tried to do in June of this year, when it issued a series of executive orders that would, among other things, bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and give the Department of Homeland Security the ability to halt the processing of asylum claims altogether if the volume of requests gets too high. Border encounters have fallen steadily throughout 2024, reaching about 100,000 in July and August—still a high number, but the lowest level since February 2021. Perhaps not coincidentally, the salience of immigration for voters has also been falling. This past February, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration was the most important problem facing the country; by August, that number had dropped to 19 percent. (It crept back up to 22 percent in September, for reasons that likely have more to do with the wave of disinformation about Haitian migrants than with crossings at the border, which continued to fall.)

The very fact that Biden had to rely on unilateral executive orders, which are being challenged in court, illustrates a deeper issue. Even though most Americans want a more orderly and fair immigration system, the nature of thermostatic public opinion gives the opposition party strong incentives to thwart any action that might deliver it. Earlier this year, congressional Republicans killed a border-security bill—which had previously had bipartisan support—after Trump came out against it, lest the Biden administration be given credit for solving the issue that Trump has staked his campaign on. And if Trump is reelected, the pendulum of public opinion could very well swing back the other way, putting pressure on Democrats to oppose his entire immigration agenda.

What’s clear is that the current hawkish national mood is not the fixed end point of American popular sentiment. Attitudes toward immigration will continue to fluctuate in the years to come. Whether public policy changes meaningfully in response is anyone’s guess.

JD Vance says immigrants with temporary protections in Springfield, Ohio, are 'illegal'. Experts say he is wrong.