If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns.

But don’t be fooled. Americans are very invested, and very worried, about the future of artificial intelligence. Polling consistently shows that a majority of adults from both major parties support government regulation of AI, and that demand for regulation might even be growing. Efforts to curb AI-enabled disinformation, fraud, and privacy violations, as well as to support private-sector innovation, are under way at the state and federal levels. Widespread AI policy is coming, and the next president may well steer its direction for years to come.

On the surface, the two candidates couldn’t be further apart on AI. When AI has come up on the campaign trail, the focus has not been on substantive issues, but instead on the technology’s place in a supposed culture war. At a rally last winter, Trump railed against the Biden administration’s purported “use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens” (a contorted reference, perhaps, to an interview that week in which Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas denounced the “politicization” of public education around the dangers of AI, including misinformation). Trump also said he would overturn Joe Biden’s executive order on AI—a sprawling document aiming to preserve consumer and civil rights while also spurring innovation—“on day one.” Then, over the summer, the GOP platform lambasted the “dangerous” executive order as slowing innovation and imposing “Radical Leftwing ideas” on the technology, perhaps referring to the order’s stated “dedication to advancing equity.” Elon Musk, now the most powerful Trump surrogate in the world, recently invited his followers to “imagine an all-powerful woke AI.” Harris, for her part, hasn’t discussed AI much as a candidate, but she is leading many of Biden’s AI efforts as vice president, and her economic platform mentions furthering “the commitments set forth in the 2023 AI Executive Order.”

[Read: The real AI threat starts when the polls close]

Such rhetoric is par for the course this election cycle: Trump in particular has never been known for nuance or gravity, and tearing down Biden is obviously his default position. What no one seems to remember, though, is that Biden’s “dangerous” executive order echoes not one but two executive orders on AI that Trump himself signed. Many of the policies around AI that President Biden and Vice President Harris have supported extend principles and initiatives from Trump’s term—such as efforts to establish federal funding for AI research, prepare American workers for a changing economy, and set safety standards for the technology. The two most recent presidential administrations even agreed on ensuring that federal AI use is nondiscriminatory. Trump’s approach to the technology, in turn, built on foundations laid during Barack Obama’s presidency.

In other words, despite how AI has been approached by their campaigns (that is, barely, or only in the shallowest terms), both candidates have real track records on AI, and those records are largely aligned. The technology appeared to be a rare issue driven for years by substance rather than partisanship, perhaps because prior to the launch of ChatGPT, it wasn’t on many Americans’ minds. With AI now assuming national importance, Trump has promised to tear that consensus down.

Still, there’s a good chance he won’t be able to—that reason and precedent will prevail in the end, if only because there’s already so much momentum behind what began during his own administration. “To the extent that the Trump administration worked on issues of science and technology policy, it worked on AI,” Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who previously served as the acting director of Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told me. And in doing so, it was inheriting priorities set under a man Trump has called “the most ignorant president in our history.” Near the end of his second term, Obama directed several federal agencies to study and plan for the growing importance of “big data” and AI, which culminated at the end of 2016 with the publication of a report on the “future of artificial intelligence,” as well as a national strategic plan for AI research and development. Those included broad suggestions to grow the federal government’s AI expertise, support private-sector innovation, establish standards for the technology’s safety and reliability, lead international conversations on AI, and prepare the American workforce for potential automation.

A few years later, Trump began to deliver on those recommendations through his executive orders on AI, a 2019 update to that strategic plan, and his White House’s guidance to federal agencies on using AI. “The Trump administration made AI a national technology priority,” Michael Kratsios, who served as the country’s chief technology officer under Trump and helped design his AI strategy, told Congress last October. In that testimony, Kratsios, who is currently the managing director of the start-up Scale AI, lauded much of Obama’s previous and Biden’s current work on AI—even criticizing Biden for not doing enough to implement existing policies—and noted the continued importance of supporting “high-quality testing and evaluation” of AI products.

Biden and Harris have since taken the baton. Trump’s first executive order in particular did “have a lot of the ingredients that got much more developed in Biden’s EO,” Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School who has advised the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on the fair and responsible use of algorithms, told me. “So when Trump says he’s going to repeal it with a day-one action, one wonders, what is it exactly that’s so offensive?” Even specific policies and programs at the center of Biden and Harris’s work on AI, such as establishing national AI-research institutes and the National AI Initiative Office, were set in motion by the Trump administration. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, which Harris’s economic plan touts by name, originated with AI legislation that passed near the end of Trump’s term. Innovation, supporting American workers, and beating China are goals Harris and Trump share. Bluster aside, the candidates’ records suggest “a lot of similarities when you get down to the brass tacks of priorities,” Alexandra Givens, the president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy and civil rights, told me.

[Read: The EV culture wars aren’t what they seem]

To be clear, substantive disputes on AI between Harris and Trump will exist, as with any pair of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates on most issues. Even with broad agreements on priorities and government programs, implementation will vary. Kratsios had emphasized a “light touch” approach to regulation. Some big names in Silicon Valley have come out against the Biden administration’s AI regulations, arguing that they put undue burdens on tech start-ups. Much of the Republican Party’s broader message involves dismantling the federal government’s regulatory authority, Goodman said, which would affect its ability to regulate AI in any domain.

And there is the “Radical Leftwing” rhetoric. The Biden-Harris administration made sure the “first piece of work out the public would see would be the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” Nelson said, which outlines various privacy and civil-rights protections that anyone building or deploying AI systems should prioritize. Republicans seem to have a particular resistance to these interventions, which are oriented around such concepts as “algorithmic discrimination,” or the idea that AI can perpetuate and worsen inequities from race, gender, or other identifying characteristics.

But even here, the groundwork was actually laid by Trump. His first executive order emphasized “safety, security, privacy, and confidentiality protections,” and his second “protects privacy, civil rights, [and] civil liberties.” During his presidency, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology issued a federal plan for developing AI standards that mentioned “minimizing bias” and ensuring “non-discriminatory” AI—the very reasons why the GOP platform lashed out against Biden’s executive order and why Senator Ted Cruz recently called its proposed safety standards “woke.” The reason that Trump and his opponents have in the past agreed on these issues, despite recent rhetoric suggesting otherwise, is that these initiatives are simply about making sure the technology actually functions consistently, with equal outcomes for users. “The ‘woke’ conversation can be misleading,” Givens said, “because really, what we’re talking about is AI systems that work and have reliable outputs … Of course these systems should actually work in a predictable way and treat users fairly, and that should be a nonpartisan, commonsense approach.”

In other words, the question is ultimately whether Trump will do a heel turn simply because the political winds have shifted. (The former president has been inconsistent even on major issues such as abortion and gun control in the past, so anything is possible.) The vitriol from Trump and other Republicans suggests they may simply oppose “anything that the Biden administration has put together” on AI, says Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer scientist at Brown University who previously advised the Biden White House on science and technology policy and co-authored the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Which, of course, means opposing much of what Trump’s own administration put together on AI.

But he may find more resistance than he expects. AI has become a household topic and common concern in the less than two years since ChatGPT was released. Perhaps the parties could tacitly agree on broad principles in the past because the technology was less advanced and didn’t matter much to the electorate. Now everybody is watching.

Americans broadly support Biden’s executive order. There is bipartisan momentum behind laws to regulate deepfake disinformation, combat nonconsensual AI sexual imagery, promote innovation that adheres to federal safety standards, protect consumer privacy, prevent the use of AI for fraud, and more. A number of the initiatives in Biden’s executive order have already been implemented. An AI bill of rights similar to the Biden-Harris blueprint passed Oklahoma’s House of Representatives, which has a Republican supermajority, earlier this year (the legislative session ended before the bill could make it out of committee in the senate). There is broad “industry support and civil-society support” for federal safety standards and research funding, Givens said. And every major AI company has entered voluntary agreements with and advised the government on AI regulation. “There’s going to be a different expectation of accountability from any administration around these issues and powerful tools,” Nelson said.

When Obama, Trump, and Biden were elected, few people could have predicted anything like the release of ChatGPT. The technology’s trajectory could shift even before the inauguration, and almost certainly will before 2028. The nation’s political divides might just be too old, and too calcified, to keep pace—which, for once, might be to the benefit of the American people.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Recently, in a few cities across the country, Starbucks quietly unveiled a pair of drinks, one resembling a pistachio milkshake, the other a mossy sludge. Unlike with green beverages already on the Starbucks menu, their hue does not come from matcha, mint, or grapes. They are green because they contain actual greens—or, at least, a dried and powdered form of them sold by the supplement company AG1. Now getting a hefty dose of vegetables—including, but not limited to, broccoli, spinach, and, uh, “grasses”—is as easy as ordering an iced AG1 Coconutmilk Blend or its sibling, the Watermelon Blend.

Powdered greens are hardly a new concept: Dehydrated, pulverized vegetables, sweetened with natural sugars, have been stirred into shakes and smoothies for decades. But AG1, formerly known as Athletic Greens, is one of many powdered-greens brands that are having a moment. Inescapable on the social-media feeds of wellness influencers, powdered greens are riding the same wave as green juices and Erewhon smoothies. These health-coded, aesthetically pleasing, status-symbol products are cool, pleasant-tasting vectors for plain old vegetables.

Powdered greens claim all sorts of benefits, such as more energy, stronger immunity, and a happier gut. But above all, they promise convenience—a “hack” for eating vegetables, as Suja, another powdered-greens company, frames it. The basic premise is that eating vegetables is a slog, but a necessary one. Buying and consuming fresh vegetables—cleaning, chopping, cooking, and chewing them—is apparently so energetically taxing, so time-consuming, so horrible that it’s better to sneak them into tasty drinks, some of which are flavored like candy.

Yes, swirling powder into liquid is less strenuous than massaging kale. And drinking food is a faster way to choke down something foul-tasting. There was a time when eating vegetables was challenging and disgusting, but not now. Greens have never been so cheap, tasty, or accessible. There are so many better ways to eat veggies than slurping them down like baby food.

The wellness industry is full of products marketed as shortcuts to better health, some more dubious than others. At the very least, powdered greens can be a genuinely useful way to get a solid amount of vegetables. Americans “really under-consume leafy greens,” Anna Rosales, a dietician and senior director at the Institute for Food Technologists, told me. According to the USDA, only 10 percent of people eat the recommended amount of vegetables, which is roughly 2.5 cups a day. That’s a problem because greens reduce the risk of chronic ailments such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

Greens that are dried through freezing instead of heat retain more nutrients and fiber, Rosales said. But green powders should be viewed as a “safety net”—they’re meant to “help us get to a place where we’re closer to the dietary recommendations.” They’re not a replacement for greens, or an excuse to eat less of them. In pretty much every way, normal greens are better than the powdered kind. The classic complaint about vegetables is that people don’t have time to buy and prepare fresh produce. As a working parent, I can relate. Often, grocery shopping and cooking are simply out of the question. How about just grabbing a salad to go?

Earlier this year, I wrote about the fast-casual salad chains expanding out of coastal cities and into Middle America. They aren’t all $18-a-bowl places such as Sweetgreen; an exclusively drive-through chain called Salad and Go, based in the Southwest, offers options for less than $7—about the same price as a Big Mac.

Standard fast-food chains, some of which waffled on salad in previous decades, now regularly sell it: Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A’s offerings have even been praised for being quite tasty. Growing interest in salad is pressuring restaurants to make them better, or at least more interesting: Caesar salads are mutating to include all sorts of weird ingredients such as tequila and fava beans, as my colleague Ellen Cushing wrote, but “even bastardized ones rock, and people want to buy them.”

Even if salad isn’t your thing, ready-made vegetable dishes are easier than ever to get a hold of. Gone are the days when the only options available at fast-casual restaurants were the celery sticks that came with chicken wings. Crispy brussels sprouts, spinach-artichoke dip, and sweet-potato fries (along with salad) are now standard fare at national chains such as Applebee’s, Olive Garden, and Cheesecake Factory. (While not particularly healthy in these forms, they count toward your vegetable intake: Just eight brussels sprouts comprise a single serving.)

Even at-home options are better now. It takes about the same time to shake up a cup of greens as it does to heat up a frozen dish of, say, roasted-squash-and-tomato pasta or spinach saag paneer. Many meal-subscription services will ship such dishes directly to your home. Most grocery stores offer precut vegetables to save on cooking prep time (or to eat directly out of the tray). And discount stores such as Dollar General have even begun to sell fresh produce. There are simply more ways than ever to get your greens.

Of course, eating at restaurants and subscribing to meal plans are out of budget for a lot of people. Many Americans struggle to meet the fruit-and-vegetable dietary guidelines because of cost, which has only increased with inflation. Regular vegetables aren’t cheap, but neither is the powdered stuff. Powdered greens range from $1 to $3.30 per drink, according to a recent roundup by Fortune; a month’s supply of AG1 would set you back $99. The number of vegetable servings in each unit of green powder depends on the brand, yet even those that offer three or four servings of vegetables per scoop aren’t exactly cost-effective. A 12-ounce bag of frozen broccoli at Walmart, which would supply you with four servings of vegetables, costs a little more than $1.

The real allure of powdered greens may not be time or cost, but rather that they feel like a cheat code for health. A company called Kroma Wellness markets its Supergreens Elixir Jar as the “easiest way to nourish your body”; another, Bloom, claims that “you don’t have to make any revolutionary changes to feel your best this year—all it takes is one daily scoop!” Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist who hosts a popular health podcast, is also the science adviser for AG1, and has called it the “simplest, most straightforward way” to get his daily dose of nutrients. The hard way, in contrast, would be to overhaul your diet and lifestyle so that you consistently eat enough greens—and learn to like them. Doing so is guaranteed to improve your health, but not overnight, and not without significant effort. You certainly won’t experience the immediate sense of accomplishment you get after downing a glass of greens.

Even so, as it has become easier than ever to eat vegetables, habits can be hard to break. Children holding their nose while they choke down lima beans is not so different from adults guzzling sweetened greens through a straw. Sometimes, parents add pureed beets to brownies, mash squash into macaroni and cheese, and fold black beans into burgers because children won’t eat them otherwise. Yet this practice is contested: Some argue that kids should just learn to enjoy their vegetables. Adults should do the same.

Powdered greens are the latest complication in America’s long, messy relationship with vegetables. At best, vegetables are thought of as side dishes; at worst, they’re the thing you spit into a napkin when no one’s looking. Vegetarians have been mocked for more than a century. That all children hate greens is baked into pop culture. The notion that vegetables are a second-tier food is so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that vegetables are actually really good now—so good that you don’t need to chug them down in sugary drinks. Powdered greens may be helping some adults get more vegetables, but they perpetuate the underlying problem: They still treat greens as something you have to, rather than want to, eat.