After the second attempt on his life, Donald Trump accused his political opponents of inspiring the attacks against him with their rhetoric. The reality, however, is that Trump himself has a long record—singular among American presidents of the modern era—of inciting and threatening violence against his fellow citizens, journalists, and anyone he deems his opposition. Below is a partial list of his violent comments, from the 2016 presidential campaign until today.

November 22, 2015, in response to a Fox News host asking about a heckler at Trump’s rally in Alabama the day before

February 1, 2016, at a rally in Iowa

February 6, 2016, at a Republican-primary debate

Ethan Miller / Getty

February 22, 2016, about a protester who disrupted a Las Vegas rally

February 22, 2016, at a rally in Las Vegas

March 16, 2016, on what would happen if he wasn’t nominated at the upcoming Republican National Convention

Reuters

August 15, 2017, speaking at a press conference about the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

October 18, 2018, referring to then-Representative Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for physically assaulting a reporter

March 12, 2019, in an interview with Breitbart News

Reuters

May 29, 2020, posted on Twitter during the protests and riots in Minneapolis after George Floyd was murdered

June 2020, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir, which [described] Trump having said this about protesters outside the White House (Trump has denied saying this)

September, 12, 2020, in a Fox News interview, praising police for killing the antifa supporter Michael Reinoehl, who was accused of killing a right-wing protester

Footage by Rise Images / Getty

September 29, 2020, addressing the Proud Boys during a presidential debate

January 6, 2021, just minutes before addressing the crowd at the Ellipse, Trump shouted this to his advance team, according to [testimony] from Cassidy Hutchinson (who served as assistant to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the Trump administration)

January 6, 2021, in a tweet before the election certification took place

Mandel Ngan /AFP via Getty

January 6, 2021, in claiming that the election was stolen and urging supporters to march to the Capitol

January 6, 2021, in a tweet, while rioters at the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence”

Reuters

January 6, 2021, in a video message to the insurrectionists at the Capitol

August 15, 2022, in a Fox News interview about the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence, which uncovered boxes containing classified documents

October 22, 2022, during a Texas rally

November 7, 2022, during a rally in Ohio

March 4, 2023, at the Conservative Political Action Committee summit

March 24, 2023, in a middle-of-the-night rant on Truth Social

Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty

March 25, 2023, during a rally in Waco, Texas

April 27, 2023, during a rally in New Hampshire

August 4, 2023, in a Truth Social post that U.S. prosecutors flagged as an indication that Trump might try to intimidate witnesses in the federal election-subversion case against him

September 22, 2023, on Truth Social, suggesting that General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed

September 29, 2023, speaking at the California Republican Party convention

November 11, 2023, during a Veterans Day speech

December 5, 2023, during a town hall in Iowa, in response to the Fox News host Sean Hannity asking Trump if he could promise not to abuse power or seek retribution if he wins

December 16, 2023, referring to illegal immigrants during a New Hampshire rally

January 9, 2024, to a group of reporters after a court hearing in which his team argued that presidential immunity should protect him from criminal prosecution for attempting to subvert the 2020 election

March 11, 2024, in a Truth Social post promising that he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if elected

March 16, 2024, during a speech about the U.S. auto-manufacturing industry in Ohio (Trump’s campaign later said that he was referencing a “bloodbath” for the automaker industry)

June 6, 2024, in an interview with Phil McGraw, host of Dr. Phil

September 7, 2024, at a rally in Wisconsin, referring to his mass-deportation plans

C-SPAN

September 29, 2024, proposing a violent crackdown by police to deal with crime, during a rally in Pennsylvania

October 13, 2024, in a Fox News interview

October 15, 2024, during a Fox News town hall

October 16, 2024, referring to the January 6 insurrection during a Univision town hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In April 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search.

Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers, and members of Congress took up the cause of reform. Shortly after her remains were discovered, President Donald Trump himself invited the Guillén family to the White House. With Guillén’s mother seated beside him, Trump spent 25 minutes with the family as television cameras recorded the scene.

In the meeting, Trump maintained a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother. “I saw what happened to your daughter Vanessa, who was a spectacular person, and respected and loved by everybody, including in the military,” Trump said. Later in the conversation, he made a promise: “If I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help—I’ll help you with that,” he said. “I’ll help you out. Financially, I’ll help you.”

Natalie Khawam, the family’s attorney, responded, “I think the military will be paying—taking care of it.” Trump replied, “Good. They’ll do a military. That’s good. If you need help, I’ll help you out.” Later, a reporter covering the meeting asked Trump, “Have you offered to do that for other families before?” Trump responded, “I have. I have. Personally. I have to do it personally. I can’t do it through government.” The reporter then asked: “So you’ve written checks to help for other families before this?” Trump turned to the family, still present, and said, “I have, I have, because some families need help … Maybe you don’t need help, from a financial standpoint. I have no idea what—I just think it’s a horrific thing that happened. And if you did need help, I’m going to—I’ll be there to help you.”

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A public memorial service was held in Houston two weeks after the White House meeting. It was followed by a private funeral and burial in a local cemetery, attended by, among others, the mayor of Houston and the city’s police chief. Highways were shut down, and mourners lined the streets.

Five months later, the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, announced the results of an investigation. McCarthy cited numerous “leadership failures” at Fort Hood and relieved or suspended several officers, including the base’s commanding general. In a press conference, McCarthy said that the murder “shocked our conscience” and “forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves.”

According to a person close to Trump at the time, the president was agitated by McCarthy’s comments and raised questions about the severity of the punishments dispensed to senior officers and noncommissioned officers.

In an Oval Office meeting on December 4, 2020, officials gathered to discuss a separate national-security issue. Toward the end of the discussion, Trump asked for an update on the McCarthy investigation. Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense (Trump had fired his predecessor, Mark Esper, three weeks earlier, writing in a tweet, “Mark Esper has been terminated”), was in attendance, along with Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel. At a certain point, according to two people present at the meeting, Trump asked, “Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?”

According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.

Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”

Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.

Shortly after I emailed a series of questions to a Trump spokesperson, Alex Pfeiffer, I received an email from Khawam, who asked me to publish a statement from Mayra Guillén, Vanessa’s sister. Pfeiffer then emailed me the same statement. “I am beyond grateful for all the support President Donald Trump showed our family during a trying time,” the statement reads. “I witnessed firsthand how President Trump honors our nation’s heroes’ service. We are grateful for everything he has done and continues to do to support our troops.”

Pfeiffer told me that he did not write that statement, and emailed me a series of denials. Regarding Trump’s “fucking Mexican” comment, Pfeiffer wrote: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election.” He provided statements from Patel and a spokesman for Meadows, who denied having heard Trump make the statement. Via Pfeiffer, Meadows’s spokesman also denied that Trump had ordered Meadows not to pay for the funeral.

The statement from Patel that Pfeiffer sent me said: “As someone who was present in the room with President Trump, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice. In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”  

The personal qualities displayed by Trump in his reaction to the cost of the Guillén funeral—contempt, rage, parsimony, racism—hardly surprised his inner circle. Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (“This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”)

A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, told me that Trump does not comprehend such traditional military virtues as honor and self-sacrifice. “The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes,” McCaffrey said. “It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”  

I’ve been interested in Trump’s understanding of military affairs for nearly a decade. At first, it was cognitive dissonance that drew me to the subject—according to my previous understanding of American political physics, Trump’s disparagement of the military, and in particular his obsessive criticism of the war record of the late Senator John McCain, should have profoundly alienated Republican voters, if not Americans generally. And in part my interest grew from the absolute novelty of Trump’s thinking. This country had never seen, to the best of my knowledge, a national political figure who insulted veterans, wounded warriors, and the fallen with metronomic regularity.

Today—two weeks before an election that could see Trump return to the White House—I’m most interested in his evident desire to wield military power, and power over the military, in the manner of Hitler and other dictators.

Trump’s singularly corrosive approach to military tradition was in evidence as recently as August, when he described the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for heroism and selflessness in combat, as inferior to the Medal of Freedom, which is awarded to civilians for career achievement. During a campaign speech, he described Medal of Honor recipients as “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” prompting the Veterans of Foreign Wars to issue a condemnation: “These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.” Later in August, Trump caused controversy by violating federal regulations prohibiting the politicization of military cemeteries, after a campaign visit to Arlington in which he gave a smiling thumbs-up while standing behind gravestones of fallen American soldiers.

His Medal of Honor comments are of a piece with his expressed desire to receive a Purple Heart without being wounded. He has also equated business success to battlefield heroism. In the summer of 2016, Khizr Khan, the father of a 27-year-old Army captain who had been killed in Iraq, told the Democratic National Convention that Trump has “sacrificed nothing.” In response, Trump disparaged the Khan family and said, “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures.”

One former Trump-administration Cabinet secretary told me of a conversation he’d had with Trump during his time in office about the Vietnam War. Trump famously escaped the draft by claiming that his feet were afflicted with bone spurs. (“I had a doctor that gave me a letter—a very strong letter on the heels,” Trump told The New York Times in 2016.) Once, when the subject of aging Vietnam veterans came up in conversation, Trump offered this observation to the Cabinet official: “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”

In 1997, Trump told the radio host Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” This was not the only time Trump has compared his sexual exploits and political challenges to military service. Last year, at a speech before a group of New York Republicans, while discussing the fallout from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, he said, “I went onto that (debate) stage just a few days later and a general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, ‘Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened.’” I asked Trump-campaign officials to provide the name of the general who allegedly said this. Pfeiffer, the campaign spokesman, said, “This is a true story and there is no good reason to give the name of an honorable man to The Atlantic so you can smear him.”

In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”

Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”

This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I. Kelly responded by explaining a simple rule: Presidents should, as a matter of politics and policy, remember that the “good guys” in any given conflict are the countries allied with the United States. Despite Trump’s lack of historical knowledge, he has been on record as saying that he knew more than his generals about warfare. He told 60 Minutes in 2018 that he knew more about NATO than James Mattis, his secretary of defense at the time, a retired four-star Marine general who had served as a NATO official. Trump also said, on a separate occasion, that it was he, not Mattis, who had “captured” the Islamic State.  

As president, Trump evinced extreme sensitivity to criticism from retired flag officers; at one point, he proposed calling back to active duty Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, two highly regarded Special Operations leaders who had become critical of Trump, so that they could be court-martialed. Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir that he and Milley talked Trump out of the plan. (Asked about criticism from McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Trump responded by calling him a “Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer” and said, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?”)

Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. According to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s recent book, Donald Trump v. the United States, Trump asked Kelly, “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Kelly answered, “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.” Trump also publicly floated the idea of “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” as part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep himself in power.

On separate occasions in 2020, Trump held private conversations in the White House with national-security officials about the George Floyd protests. “The Chinese generals would know what to do,” he said, according to former officials who described the conversations to me, referring to the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, which carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. (Pfeiffer denied that Trump said this.) Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all fucking losers!”

Trump has often expressed his esteem for the type of power wielded by such autocrats as the Chinese leader Xi Jinping; his admiration, even jealousy, of Vladimir Putin is well known. In recent days, he has signaled that, should he win reelection in November, he would like to govern in the manner of these dictators—he has said explicitly that he would like to be a dictator for a day on his first day back in the White House—and he has threatened to, among other things, unleash the military on “radical-left lunatics.” (One of his four former national security advisers, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir, “It is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping who would be happiest to see Trump back in office.”)

Military leaders have condemned Trump for possessing autocratic tendencies. At his retirement ceremony last year, Milley said, “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator … We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Over the past several years, Milley has privately told several interlocutors that he believed Trump to be a fascist. Many other leaders have also been shocked by Trump’s desire for revenge against his domestic critics. At the height of the Floyd protests, Mattis wrote, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.”  

Trump’s frustration with American military leaders led him to disparage them regularly. In their book A Very Stable Genius, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, both of The Washington Post, reported that in 2017, during a meeting at the Pentagon, Trump screamed at a group of generals: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” And in his book Rage, Bob Woodward reported that Trump complained that “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

Trump’s disdain for American military officers is motivated in part by their willingness to accept low salaries. Once, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, Trump said to aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” (On another occasion, John Kelly asked Trump to guess Dunford’s annual salary. The president’s answer: $5 million. Dunford’s actual salary was less than $200,000.)

Trump has often expressed his love for the trappings of martial power, demanding of his aides that they stage the sort of armor-heavy parades foreign to American tradition. Civilian aides and generals alike pushed back. In one instance, Air Force General Paul Selva, who was then serving as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the president that he had been partially raised in Portugal, which, he explained, “was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. In America, we don’t do that. It’s not who we are.”

For Republicans in 2012, it was John McCain who served as a model of “who we are.” But by 2015, the party had shifted. In July of that year, Trump, then one of several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, made a statement that should have ended his campaign. At a forum for Christian conservatives in Iowa, Trump said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

It was an astonishing statement, and an introduction to the wider public of Trump’s uniquely corrosive view of McCain, and of his aberrant understanding of the nature of American military heroism. This wasn’t the first time Trump had insulted McCain’s war record. As early as 1999, he was insulting McCain. In an interview with Dan Rather that year, Trump asked, “Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.” (A brief primer: McCain, who had flown 22 combat missions before being shot down over Hanoi, was tortured almost continuously by his Communist captors, and turned down repeated offers to be released early, insisting that prisoners be released in the order that they’d been captured. McCain suffered physically from his injuries until his death, in 2018.) McCain partisans believe, with justification, that Trump’s loathing was prompted in part by McCain’s ability to see through Trump. “John didn’t respect him, and Trump knew that,” Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide and co-author, told me. “John McCain had a code. Trump only has grievances and impulses and appetites. In the deep recesses of his man-child soul, he knew that McCain and his achievements made him look like a mutt.”

Trump, those who have worked for him say, is unable to understand the military norm that one does not leave fellow soldiers behind on the battlefield. As president, Trump told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action. To him, they could be left behind, because they had performed poorly by getting captured.

My reporting during Trump’s term in office led me to publish on this site, in September 2020, an article about Trump’s attitudes toward McCain and other veterans, and his views about the ideal of national service itself. The story was based on interviews with multiple sources who had firsthand exposure to Trump and his views. In that piece, I detailed numerous instances of Trump insulting soldiers, flag officers and veterans alike. I wrote extensively about Trump’s reaction to McCain’s death in August 2018: The president told aides, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he was infuriated when he saw flags at the White House lowered to half-mast. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he said angrily. Only when Kelly told Trump that he would get “killed in the press” for showing such disrespect did the president relent. In the article, I also reported that Trump had disparaged President George H. W. Bush, a World War II naval aviator, for getting shot down by the Japanese. Two witnesses told me that Trump said, “I don’t get it. Getting shot down makes you a loser.” (Bush ultimately evaded capture, but eight other fliers were caught and executed by the Japanese).

The next year, White House officials demanded that the Navy keep the U.S.S. John S. McCain, which was named for McCain’s father and grandfather—both esteemed admirals—out of Trump’s sight during a visit to Japan. The Navy did not comply.

Trump’s preoccupation with McCain has not abated. In January, Trump condemned McCain—six years after his death—for having supported President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. “We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare,” Trump told an Iowa crowd. “Obamacare is a catastrophe. Nobody talks about it. You know, without John McCain, we would have had it done. John McCain for some reason couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember?” This was, it appears, a malicious reference to McCain’s wartime injuries—including injuries suffered during torture—which limited his upper-body mobility.  

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’]

I’ve also previously reported on Trump’s 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery. Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, accompanied him. The two men visited Section 60, the 14-acre section that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars (and the site of Trump’s Arlington controversy earlier this year). Kelly’s son Robert, a Marine officer killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, is buried in Section 60. Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” At first, Kelly believed that Trump was making a reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand nontransactional life choices. I quoted one of Kelly’s friends, a fellow retired four-star general, who said of Trump, “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.” At moments when Kelly was feeling particularly frustrated by Trump, he would leave the White House and cross the Potomac to visit his son’s grave, in part to remind himself about the nature of full-measure sacrifice.

Last year Kelly told me, in reference to Mark Milley’s 44 years in uniform, “The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.”

The specific incident I reported in the 2020 article that gained the most attention also provided the story with its headline—“Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” The story concerned a visit Trump made to France in 2018, during which the president called Americans buried in a World War I cemetery “losers.” He said, in the presence of aides, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” At another moment during this trip, he referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who had lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for dying for their country.

Trump had already been scheduled to visit one cemetery, and he did not understand why his team was scheduling a second cemetery visit, especially considering that the rain would be hard on his hair. “Why two cemeteries?” Trump asked. “What the fuck?” Kelly subsequently canceled the second visit, and attended a ceremony there himself with General Dunford and their wives.  

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in Belleau, France, in November 2018. (Shealah Craighead / White House)

The article sparked great controversy, and provoked an irate reaction from the Trump administration, and from Trump himself. In tweets, statements, and press conferences in the days, weeks, and years that followed, Trump labeled The Atlantic a “second-rate magazine,” a “failing magazine,” a “terrible magazine,” and a “third-rate magazine that’s not going to be in business much longer”; he also referred to me as a “con man,” among other things. Trump has continued these attacks recently, calling me a “horrible, radical-left lunatic named Goldberg” at a rally this summer.

In the days after my original article was published, both the Associated Press and, notably, Fox News, confirmed the story, causing Trump to demand that Fox fire Jennifer Griffin, its experienced and well-regarded defense reporter. A statement issued by Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, soon after publication read, “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard.”

Shortly after the story appeared, Farah asked numerous White House officials if they had heard Trump refer to veterans and war dead as suckers or losers. She reported publicly that none of the officials she asked had heard him use these terms. Eventually, Farah came out in opposition to Trump. She wrote on X last year that she’d asked the president if my story was true. “Trump told me it was false. That was a lie.”

When I spoke to Farah, who is now known as Alyssa Farah Griffin, this week, she said, “I understood that people were skeptical about the ‘suckers and losers’ story, and I was in the White House pushing back against it. But he said this to John Kelly’s face, and I fundamentally, absolutely believe that John Kelly is an honorable man who served our country and who loves and respects our troops. I’ve heard Donald Trump speak in a dehumanizing way about so many groups. After working for him in 2020 and hearing his continuous attacks on service members since that time, including my former boss General Mark Milley, I firmly and unequivocally believe General Kelly’s account.”

(Pfeiffer, the Trump spokesperson, said, in response, “Alyssa is a scorned former employee now lying in her pursuit to chase liberal adulation. President Trump would never insult our nation’s heroes.”)

Last year, I published a story in this magazine about Milley that coincided with the end of his four-year term. In it, I detailed his tumultuous relationship with Trump. Milley had resisted Trump’s autocratic urges, and also argued against his many thoughtless and impetuous national-security impulses. Shortly after that story appeared, Trump publicly suggested that Milley be executed for treason. This astonishing statement caused John Kelly to speak publicly about Trump and his relationship to the military. Kelly, who had previously called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had referred to American prisoners of war as “suckers” and described as “losers” soldiers who died while fighting for their country.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly asked. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs, are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

When we spoke this week, Kelly told me, “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country. There are many, many people who have heard him say these things. The visit to France wasn’t the first time he said this.”

Kelly and others have taken special note of the revulsion Trump feels in the presence of wounded veterans. After Trump attended a Bastille Day parade in France, he told Kelly and others that he would like to stage his own parade in Washington, but without the presence of wounded veterans. “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Milley also witnessed Trump’s disdain for the wounded. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America” at his installation ceremony in 2019. Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an improvised-explosive-device attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Avila is considered a hero up and down the ranks of the Army.

It had rained earlier on the day of the ceremony, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair almost toppled over. Milley’s wife, Holly­anne, ran to help Avila, as did then–Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.

An equally serious challenge to Milley’s sense of duty came in the form of Trump’s ignorance of the rules of war. In November 2019, Trump intervened in three different brutality cases then being adjudicated by the military. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an ISIS member. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. In a highly unusual move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him. A junior Army officer named Clint Lorance was also the recipient of Trump’s sympathy. Trump pardoned Lorance, who had been convicted of ordering the shooting of three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. And in a third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he thought was a Taliban bomb maker. “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state,” Trump said at a Florida rally.

In the Gallagher case, Trump intervened to allow Gallagher to keep his Trident insignia, one of the most coveted insignia in the entire U.S. military. The Navy’s leadership found this intervention particularly offensive because tradition held that only a commanding officer or a group of SEALs on a Trident Review Board were supposed to decide who merited being a SEAL. Milley tried to convince Trump that his intrusion was hurting Navy morale. They were flying from Washington to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to attend a “dignified transfer,” a repatriation ceremony for fallen service members, when Milley tried to explain to Trump the damage that his interventions were doing.

In my story, I reported that Milley said, “Mr. President, you have to understand that the SEALs are a tribe within a larger tribe, the Navy. And it’s up to them to figure out what to do with Gallagher. You don’t want to intervene. This is up to the tribe. They have their own rules that they follow.”

Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump said he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

Milley then summoned one of his aides, a combat-veteran SEAL officer, to the president’s Air Force One office. Milley took hold of the Trident pin on the SEAL’s chest and asked him to describe its importance. The aide explained to Trump that, by tradition, only SEALs can decide, based on assessments of competence and character, whether one of their own should lose his pin. But the president’s mind was not changed. Gallagher kept his pin.

One day, in the first year of Trump’s presidency, I had lunch with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, in his White House office. I turned the discussion, as soon as I could, to the subject of his father-in-law’s character. I mentioned one of Trump’s recent outbursts and told Kushner that, in my opinion, the president’s behavior was damaging to the country. I cited, as I tend to do, what is in my view Trump’s original sin: his mockery of John McCain’s heroism.

This is where our conversation got strange, and noteworthy. Kushner answered in a way that made it seem as though he agreed with me. “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

I found this baffling for a moment. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment. In Trump’s mind, traditional values—values including those embraced by the armed forces of the United States having to do with honor, self-sacrifice, and integrity—have no merit, no relevance, and no meaning.

The fictional president Josiah Bartlet dropped into a Democratic canvassing headquarters in a Madison, Wisconsin, strip mall last Sunday morning. He was there on behalf of Kamala Harris, addressing a room full of jittery volunteers stranded in a real-life political campaign.

Bartlet—or rather, Martin Sheen, the actor who played him on the beloved TV show The West Wing—was an emissary from a bygone era of better political angels that may or may not have ever existed off-screen. The show aired from 1999 to 2006 but has continued, on streaming platforms, to inspire fresh generations of operatives with its portrayal of a noble Democratic White House untainted by House of Cards, Veep, and the Trump-era darkness that would follow.

“While acting is what I do for a living,” Sheen told the crowd, “activism is what I do to stay alive.” He looked out at his audience, about 100 people set to embark on a day of canvassing and door-knocking. His voice acquired a note of paternal warmth: “I see all the faces in here.” All of this work is “worth it,” he assured everyone. “I see that the light is on.”

Personally, I saw anxiety. Fear and exhaustion, too. I might have been projecting, but it seemed palpable in this den of last-minute activity—the strain and burden of another jump-ball election, with stakes entirely too high and margins entirely too thin and nerves entirely too frayed.

With two weeks left in this writer’s-room-nightmare of a campaign, and Wisconsin still up for grabs, all the usual platitudes felt far too plausible: Everyone was talking about Democracy being at stake and the threat of fascism on the other side and America facing an existential moment and all of that. None of it felt like the usual overwrought melodrama.

Who could blame volunteers for wanting a little escapism and some doughnuts on a Sunday morning? Sheen brought along three of his West Wing co-stars: Bradley Whitford (who played deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman), Richard Schiff (communications director Toby Ziegler), and Mary McCormack (deputy national security adviser Kate Harper). They were upbeat but quick with their reality checks. “This ain’t no stinkin’ television show,” Whitford said. “The stakes are real.”

Ever since The West Wing ceased production, the cast has enjoyed its own next act as a kind of progressive wish-cast ensemble. First Lady Jill Biden hosted several of the actors and creators at a White House celebration of the show’s 25th anniversary last month. They have toured some of the well-trodden battlegrounds of the campaign trail. I’ve encountered them periodically through the years, popping up at the various headquarters, candidate events, and hotel lobbies of Iowa; New Hampshire; Washington, D.C.; and assorted other political petting zoos.

“We’re not just a bunch of people from television paying lip service here,” Whitford said on Sunday. “What you are doing is so important.” The cast likes to think The West Wing is also so important, or at least carries with it some level of relevance today, in these very different political times.

After the canvassing headquarters, the West Wing troupe headed to a packed theater across town. “We’re going to win!” Whitford declared onstage. He sounded like he really believed it. Then again, he is an actor.

Schiff echoed his co-star’s message, but lacked the same volume—and conviction. “I’m going to say it softer than Brad, but we’re going to win,” he said. The crowd cheered. Hope can be galvanizing, even if laundered through Hollywood characters who vacated their fictional offices nearly two decades ago.

Yes, it’s easy to be cynical. The West Wing was a TV show—a very good one, depicting a world very much still yearned for, even if gathering dust. You can question the utility of these celebrity drop-bys. But at the same time, why not? What’s the harm of nostalgia to keep the throngs awake in these final, weary days?

I admit that I came away less skeptical than I went in. “I know I’m preaching to the choir,” Whitford told the Democratic volunteers. “But I just want to make you sing!” And everyone sang: “The Star Spangled Banner” to kick off the morning and “America the Beautiful” as the cast left the stage.

Sheen, who is now 84, looks tremendously well preserved—but thankfully has no interest in serving in any role beyond the pretend president emeritus that he still plays in the eyes of his adoring public. He told me that someone will come up to him at least once a day, often more, and address him as “Mr. President.” He had just boarded a plane at LAX the day before, and a fellow passenger greeted him: “Good morning, Mr. President, is Air Force One in the shop?” He happily plays along—being gracious is not hard work. Changing minds and coaxing votes and winning elections is hard work.

On Sunday, Sheen emphasized that the struggle is its own reward. He likes to tell an old Irish story about a man who dies and arrives at the gates of heaven. “Saint Peter says, ‘Show me your scars,’” Sheen said. But the man has no scars to show, and Saint Peter tells him what a pity that is. “Was there nothing worth fighting for?” Saint Peter asks. At this point in the story, Sheen’s voice gained several octaves, and he launched into the crescendo of his speech: “We are rightly called to find something in our lives worth fighting for. Something deeply personal and uncompromising.” Nothing that has value in life, he argued, comes easy.

“You’re my president!” a woman standing next to me shouted. Within seconds of his pep talk ending, Sheen was swarmed. Volunteers posed for pictures and clutched Harris-Walz signs for him to autograph.

A young woman who walked up to Sheen/Bartlett seemed quite emotional. It can be a momentous experience, meeting an actual fake president. “It was all because of your show that I got into politics,” the young woman, Amanda Boss, told him. Boss said she’d started watching West Wing at the age of 5. She loved how fast everyone talked and walked and how important everything seemed to be, at all times. She told me she had never met a president before. I was compelled to remind her that Saint Bartlet was a fictional character.

“Yes,” she said. “But he was real in my head.”

People often have mixed feelings about their birthdays, especially as they age. Countries can experience that too. For better or worse, America is due for a big birthday party: July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—our national semiquincentennial, in the awkward Latinate construction, or “semiquin” for short. In an ideal world, it would be a moment of commemoration and celebration as well as a chance to reflect on national history. But so far, the semiquin is shaping up as an embarrassingly accurate reflection of America’s identity crisis.

Until recently, America250, the federal commission charged with planning for 2026, was mired in organizational infighting and countless disputes, including over funding shortages and the distribution of patronage. Authorized while Barack Obama was president, the commission started work under Donald Trump, changed course under Joe Biden, and will spend most of 2025 answering to who knows which chief executive. But the challenges of 2026 extend well beyond logistics, appropriations, and leadership. How do you throw a grand national party when the country seems unable to agree on first principles or basic facts? Should 2026 be a rah-rah festival or a sober history lesson? What should the non-MAGA component of the American populace—that is, at least half of it— bring to such a patriotic occasion? Should it bring anything at all?

[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]

Former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, now the head of America250, still believes that the country can pull off something meaningful. The child of a Mexican-born single mother, she recalls the 1976 bicentennial as a moment when she began to feel “pride in what it means to be American.” She wants 2026 to offer the same sort of experience, tailored to a new generation.

And perhaps it will. As Rios pointed out when we spoke, 1976 was itself hardly a moment of political harmony; the Vietnam War and Watergate had just crashed to a close, right on the heels of the turbulent 1960s. Nor, for that matter, was American society especially peaceable at the time of the sesquicentennial, in 1926, when the Ku Klux Klan was regularly parading through Washington, D.C.; or at the time of the centennial, in 1876, when the country was fighting over the future of Reconstruction; or at the time of the semicentennial, in 1826, when a controversial populist leader, Andrew Jackson, had just lost a close election and vowed to return for a second go-round.

What seems different about the present moment is that the very idea of trying to tell some sort of national story—much less one with patriotic overtones—has itself been called into question. That’s especially true among the people who purport to care most deeply about an honest reckoning with the American past. For generations, liberals leaned into a story of gradual, if uneven, progress toward unfulfilled ideals. But even they no longer believe that the narrative of progress holds the power it once did.

There is, of course, no national narrative that will magically unite America; true national consensus has never existed and won’t suddenly materialize now. But during past celebrations—50, 100, 150 years ago—the people excluded from America’s mythic narrative managed to leverage the nation’s symbols and rhetoric and put alternative stories before the public. They believed that the Declaration of Independence and the flag could be useful and inspirational.

At stake in 2026 is whether a divided country can find common symbols worth embracing. But also at stake is whether those who take a critical view of America’s past will step up proudly and say not only what they stand against, but what they stand for in the American story.

There was once a standard template for how to celebrate a centennial: Declare greatness and throw a big party, preferably in Philadelphia. Over the past two centuries, this model has yielded its fair share of jingoism, along with fireworks and flags and cannon blasts. But it has also provided an opportunity for reexamining American history and for raising questions about the country’s future.

The first attempt at a national party in Philadelphia, during the “jubilee” year of 1826, did not quite come off. As one local newspaper noted, “The apathy of the citizens” seemed to be the defining feature of that particular July 4. The anniversary nonetheless occasioned at least a bit of national self-reflection. In early 1824, anticipating the semicentennial, President James Monroe invited the Marquis de Lafayette, the teenage French hero of the American Revolution, to return to the U.S. and take a look at what he had wrought. With much hoopla, Lafayette visited every state as well as the nation’s capital. But he also expressed horror at certain aspects of American life, especially the South’s ongoing embrace of slavery. During a visit to the Virginia plantation of former President James Madison, Lafayette pointedly reminded him of “the right that all men, without exception, have to liberty.”

Fifty years later, on the other side of the devastating Civil War, Philadelphia tried again. This time, it succeeded. With an eye to the world’s fairs then popular in Europe, the city was determined to put on “the greatest international exposition that the world had ever witnessed,” as the historian Thomas H. Keels writes—albeit an exposition with a distinctly American stamp. The nation was engaged in a fierce debate over race, political partisanship, women’s rights, and the growing concentration of capital. All the more reason, organizers thought, to try to get everyone together to celebrate what there was to like about America.

They started planning a festival for 1876 that was ultimately attended by some 20 percent of the American population. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, those millions of visitors found an entire mini-city constructed to house and display the marvels of the modern world. At the Main Building, ticket-holders encountered their first telephone, courtesy of the rising young inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Thomas Edison sent his latest inventions too. France contributed the upraised right arm and torch of a proposed Statue of Liberty; visitors could ascend stairs to the top for just a dime. The sheer number of gigantic expo buildings—249 in all—testified to the organizers’ outsize ambitions.

This frenzy of activity and investment sent an unmistakable message: Despite the Civil War, America was full of energy and on the rise. But the scale of the spectacle masked important absences. Although 26 states built their own pavilions, most southern states opted out. Black citizens were banned from the expo altogether. When Frederick Douglass, an invited guest, tried to take his seat on the dais at the opening ceremony, guards blocked him until a U.S. senator intervened. The grim politics of 1876 would soon result in a violent and contested presidential election, and with it the end of Reconstruction in the South.

If the expo did little to renew American commitments to equality, it did provide an occasion for certain excluded groups to restate their claims to full American citizenship, using the Declaration as inspiration. On July 4, Susan B. Anthony showed up uninvited at the Independence Hall ceremonies, flanked by fellow suffragists, to read the Declaration of the Rights of Women. In Washington, a group of Black men produced their own Negro Declaration of Independence.

By 1926, the political terrain looked different. White women could finally vote; most Black men and women in the South could not. The U.S. had been through another war, this time in Europe, and had come out of it disillusioned. At home, during the war, the country had jailed thousands of dissenters. The Ku Klux Klan had built a powerful constituency, especially within the Democratic Party. And the country had slammed its doors shut to most immigrants.

The organizers of the sesquicentennial celebration nonetheless doubled down on the model of a big party in Philadelphia. An estimated 6 million people showed up—not as many as the organizers had hoped for, but still a substantial number. The marvels on display were thoroughly of their moment: on the lowbrow end, Jell-O and Maxwell House coffee; on the high, Kandinsky and Matisse.

The exposition was billed as a “Festival of Peace and Progress,” but like its predecessors, it could not help but reflect the political tensions of its time. When the KKK put in a bid for a special Klan day at the fair, the mayor of Philadelphia said yes before saying no. The fair itself was largely segregated, though Philadelphia’s Black community mobilized to ensure at least modest access and participation. Under pressure, the festival added the future civil-rights icon A. Philip Randolph as a last-minute speaker to represent the Black community and share the platform with government officials at the opening ceremony. Randolph delivered a searing account of how the nation had betrayed its promise of equality for Black citizens.

Philadelphia tried to give it one more go 50 years later—for the bicentennial, in 1976. As the big birthday approached, though, many observers started to question whether the standard model really made sense anymore. “Is a World’s Fair-type Bicentennial festival appropriate for a country wracked with social, racial, and environmental agonies?” the writer Ada Louise Huxtable asked in The New York Times. By 1976, President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the mounting traumas of the 1970s had helped to yield a scaled-back, privatized, and decentralized celebration. There were some old-fashioned touches, such as the American Freedom Train, which conveyed the nation’s founding documents and historical treasures from city to city, and the cheery tall ships that sailed between ports. But corporate promotion rather than civic purpose carried the day. Branded products included a 1776-themed tampon disposal bag marketed with the slogan “200 Years of Freedom.”

Critics pushed back against what they described as the “Buycentennial.” Some of the most theatrical resistance came from an ad hoc group called the People’s Bicentennial Commission, organized by the New Left activist (and future social theorist) Jeremy Rifkin. The group held rallies at sites such as Lexington and Concord, all the while claiming to be acting in the true spirit of ’76. Rifkin thought it crucial that the American left engage with rather than reject the narratives and symbols of the nation’s founding. Other groups, including the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, sought to ensure that at least some programming would reflect the Black experience. They advocated for a more diverse and inclusive account of the nation’s history—not one American story, but many.

At least some of that vision began to be realized in the years during and after the bicentennial. What 1976 may have lacked in spectacle, it ultimately made up for with quiet investment in the infrastructure of public history, much of it attuned to bringing overdue attention to marginalized groups. According to a study by the American Association of State and Local History, some 40 percent of all historical institutions in existence by 1984—museums, living-history sites, local preservation societies, and the like—were created during the bicentennial era.

In the summer of 2016, while most of the country was transfixed by the presidential race pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, Congress established the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, made up of private citizens, members of Congress, and federal officials. The commission was given the job of overseeing a national 2026 initiative.

Its leaders took their time getting started, and Trump’s White House offered little guidance beyond the implicit admonishment to make American history great again. In Philadelphia, a group of local boosters took matters into their own hands. They called themselves USA250, a name barely distinguishable from that of the federal commission, and set out to make the case for a “blockbuster festival.”

USA250 had no shortage of ambitious, expensive ideas. Beginning in 2025, according to one scheme, roving caravans would crisscross the country, showcasing the best of American history, art, food, and music. In 2026, the caravans would converge on Philadelphia. The budget that the organizers imagined was a symbolic $20.26 billion. However, there were no longer many takers for this kind of effort, even in Philadelphia. The arrival of COVID in early 2020—and the fear of super-spreader events it engendered—dealt another blow to the prospect of a big in-person bash.

As for the federal commission, it swiftly descended into a morass of charges and countercharges over process, favoritism, hiring, gender discrimination, and budget decisions. In June 2022, Meta pulled out of a $10 million sponsorship deal, reportedly owing to the commission’s “leadership dysfunction.” Around the same time, several female executives quit the commission and filed suit. They described a Gilded Age level of “cronyism, self-dealing, mismanagement of funds, potentially unlawful contracting practices and wasteful spending”—not to mention sex discrimination and a toxic work environment. In the midst of the meltdown, the Biden White House stepped in to appoint Rosie Rios as the new commission chair. By then, the clock was down to less than four years.

One of the federal commission’s signature initiatives, America’s Stories, is radically decentralized—less a top-down master plan than a national Instagram feed. Its website encourages Americans to send in personal reflections about the country’s past, present, and future in the form of songs, poems, personal essays, photographs, audio recordings, and videos. The stated goal is to create “the most inclusive commemoration in our history,” one in which “no story is too small” to matter. Rios views the emphasis on social media, as well as on diversity of experience, as a way to attract constituencies that might otherwise look elsewhere—notably young people, who often seem to think that the past has little to offer.

R. Scott Stephenson, the CEO of Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, describes the federal strategy as a “StoryCorps model” of historic commemoration. He worries that such a decentralized approach won’t rise to the moment. “If it’s just about everybody telling their story,” he asks, what’s to bring everybody together? His concerns are echoed by many in the public-history sphere. At the moment, though, almost nobody sees any prospect for a single big in-person celebration reminiscent of the extravaganzas of the past.

Nobody, that is, except for Donald Trump. Alone among major political figures, Trump has seized the early momentum to offer a grand, centralized semiquincentennial vision. In May 2023, he released a campaign video introducing the idea of a Salute to America 250, the “most spectacular birthday party” the country has ever known. Though billed as a serious celebration of the world’s oldest democracy, the plan contains no shortage of reality-TV touches. One proposal is a Patriot Games, in which high-school athletes would be pitted against one another in interstate Olympics-style competition. Another is the National Garden of American Heroes, a long-standing pet project in which Trump hopes to select “the greatest Americans of all time” to be honored in a Washington statuary park. The centerpiece of the celebration would be the Great American State Fair, an 1876 expo-style gathering to be held in Iowa. “It’ll be something!” he promised.

The video’s release produced plenty of critical commentary from MAGA skeptics. But, to paraphrase Trump, the Great American State Fair would at least be something: a focused, national, in-person commemoration with a clear message about where the country has been and where it is going. Whatever its other virtues may be, the individualized, localized, “invitation” approach evades any such nation-defining mission.

The problem is, many Americans don’t know what they’d be celebrating. On the left, rejecting traditional patriotism has become de rigueur: by kneeling for the national anthem, dismissing the Founders as enslavers, and expressing unease at the prospect of flying an American flag. Seeing left or liberal activists deploying the images and ideas of the revolution for their own purposes is far less common than it used to be. One consequence may be that many people who care about a critical, nuanced view of the American past will simply opt out of 2026. If that happens, who will be left in charge of defining what founding-era ideals such as “independence,” “revolution,” “We the People,” and “the general Welfare” are supposed to mean in the 21st century?

The task of identifying a usable past is of course much easier for Trump and his MAGA coalition than for those who seek a true reckoning with the country’s history of injustice. Trump has a clear view and a simple message: that only certain people count, that the past was better than the present, and that U.S. history was a tale of triumph until roughly the 1960s.

Trump’s views are embodied in the work of a group called the 1776 Commission, appointed near the end of his presidency. Its creation (and name) was partly a reaction to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, with its emphasis on slavery and the Black experience. It was also a bid to put the Trump stamp on the founding legacy. “As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, we must resolve to teach future generations of Americans an accurate history of our country so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles once again,” the commission’s report stated—at the same time promoting its own exclusionary and distorted vision of the past, one in which the Founders would obviously have opposed progressive social policy, affirmative action, and all forms of identity politics.

Professional historians have scorned The 1776 Report as right-wing propaganda rather than anything resembling actual history. But scholars have often hesitated to offer an alternative national narrative in its place. By and large, they do not view themselves as being in the business of nationalism or patriotism; their mission is mostly to tell the truth as they see it. Within academia, the nation-state is itself often seen as a suspect form of social organization and power with a dubious track record.

But in this moment of democratic crisis—and democratic possibility—there is something dissatisfying about sidestepping the challenge of 2026, with its implicit call to create a usable but thoughtful national narrative. During Trump’s term in office, the historian Jill Lepore chastised fellow academics for abandoning the project of a national story just when it was needed most. “Writing national history creates plenty of problems,” she argued. “But not writing national history creates more problems, and those problems are worse.”

Coming up with an honest but coherent vision for 2026 is a genuine challenge. For the past 60 years, much of American historical scholarship has been about exposing a darker story behind self-congratulatory myths. As a believer in that effort, I have long shared the left’s ambivalence about patriotic symbols: the flag, the Founders, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Today, though, I feel an urgency to reclaim and redefine all these things, lest they be ceded to those darker forces historians like to write about.  

[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]

The fact is, Americans have a pretty good origin story, as such things go: centrally, a revolution on behalf of human equality, despite all of its flaws and blind spots and limits. “On the subject of equality,” the political theorist Danielle Allen has argued, “no more important sentence has ever been written” than Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” For its moment—and even for ours—it was a bold and revolutionary statement.

Movements for equality, racial justice, and human rights have long taken advantage of that legacy. The abolitionists of the 1830s invented the Liberty Bell as a symbol of human freedom, seeing in its inscription to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” a useful link to both the past and the future. The labor radicals of the late 19th century claimed Jefferson and Thomas Paine along with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Finding a stake in the American story has always been more difficult for those deliberately excluded from the Declaration’s vision: women and sexual minorities, Black communities, Indigenous nations. In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous address asking “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer was that it marked a day of mourning, not celebration. Still, Douglass seized the moment to pressure white citizens to live up to their “saving principles,” noting that the Founding Fathers understood that “there is always a remedy for oppression,” even if they did not follow that insight to its logical conclusion.

What we are witnessing now, with respect to America’s 250th, is thus a strange turn of events. To varying degrees, abolitionists, suffragists, labor leaders, and civil-rights activists were willing and able to harness America’s mythic rhetoric and stated principles to advance their causes. They embraced and invented cherished national symbols. And yet today, many who profess to believe in human equality and social justice seem to have little use for the American origin story and its most venerable words and figures.

Why not reclaim them? The American revolution was, after all, a revolution—not in every respect the one you or I might have wanted, but an enormous stride toward equality. And revolution itself is an inherently malleable concept, made to be renewed and redefined with each generation. One need not wear a tricorne hat or fly the stars and stripes in order to celebrate the unlikely moment when a group of private citizens organized, dreamed big, and defeated the world’s most powerful empire.

Though, now that I think of it, why not wear the hat and fly the flag? Despite today’s political optics, neither one actually belongs to the devotees of MAGA rallies. Perhaps those on the left can at least seize the moment to open up the conversation over what, if anything, really makes America great—and to teach some actual history. If they don’t, the meaning of 2026—and of American patriotism—will be decided for them.