Early in the film Conclave, cardinals from around the world descend upon Vatican City after the death of the pope. Dressed in their scarlet vestments, they head to their guest rooms. A montage shows them rolling their suitcases through cavernous entryways, taking smoking breaks, and checking their iPhones. When they’ve finished settling in, cigarette butts blanket the marble floors.

These images are striking. Here are ostensibly the most virtuous men in the world not only acting like normal human beings but also littering inside the headquarters of their faith. How revolting! How blasphemous!

And how juicy. Based on Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, Conclave, in theaters now, follows the titular process of electing a new pope, a secretive task that the film suggests is mostly a popularity contest full of rumormongering and backstabbing. Caught in the vortex of egos is Cardinal Lawrence (played by a sharp Ralph Fiennes), an Englishman who’d tried to resign recently from his post over his growing doubt about his beliefs, but who was charged by the late pope to lead the conclave anyway. For days, if not weeks, he and his fellow cardinals must vote on who among them should take over the role, and continue voting until they reach a two-thirds majority. Determined to oversee a fair fight, Lawrence plays conciliator and detective as scandals arise, but his ongoing crisis of faith descends into a crisis of confidence.  

[Read: What The Young Pope preached about love]

Conclave is by no means the first project to use Vatican City as a paradoxical backdrop. The 2017 HBO drama The Young Pope (renamed The New Pope in its second season) portrayed worship as an absurd, often surreal exercise, while the 2019 film The Two Popes turned the transfer of papal power into a buddy comedy. But Conclave feels especially timely. The screenwriter Peter Straughan and the director Edward Berger (whose previous movie, All Quiet on the Western Front, landed a Best Picture Oscar nomination) have constructed a propulsive psychological thriller that doubles as a blatant election-year allegory. Despite its heavyweight subject matter, however, the result is remarkably playful; without flattening the importance of the papacy or abandoning the novel’s attention to detail, Conclave exposes the sometimes farcical nature of institutional practices by examining the fallibility of those who run them. Even the most righteous among us are simply human, Conclave points out. In some ways, it’s comforting to think of the most ancient rituals as merely works in progress.  

Consider some of the personalities Lawrence—himself intimidated by what being pope requires—must deal with: There’s pompous Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), a Canadian who’s practically salivating at the chance to lead the Church; Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), an overconfident Nigerian candidate with a dedicated flock; Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a progressive American who says he doesn't want the papacy but bristles at competition; and the Italian Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Catellitto), who’s both bigoted and bigheaded. Conclave offers a stacked cast of scenery-chewing character actors who render routines—say, scribbling one another’s names onto pieces of paper to cast votes over and over—both strangely earnest and preposterous. These are adult men tasked with filling a position almost 1.4 billion people care about, but they’re also just, well, men.

But much of the fun of Conclave comes from the film’s initial appearance as a no-nonsense prestige project. The production team re-created the Sistine Chapel with some tweaks to enhance the tension, including the precise shade of red the cardinals wear. Berger mounts whispered conversations in shadowy hallways, deploys slow-motion sequences backed up by an operatic score, and builds striking tableaus of cardinals warily eyeing one another—elements that are then deliberately paired with hammy, self-aware dialogue. The cardinals follow decorum and have contemplative debates over who deserves the papacy, yet they’re most excited when they trade gossip. They gather in cliques to complain about their rivals and accuse one another of various indiscretions. Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), one of the many nuns working behind the scenes to look after the electors, has a monologue revealing a cardinal’s sins that drew gasps and applause at the screening I attended. Even Lawrence, the steadiest of the lot, gets caught up in the melodrama. “I feel as if I’m at some American political convention,” he laments when he’s dragged into yet another sidebar to discuss yet another rumor. He participates anyway, of course; hearsay is hard to resist.

[Read: The 15 films you should add to your watchlist this season]

Lawrence comes to find the Church’s newly vacant position tempting too. In its best moments, Conclave uses its protagonist to explore the genuinely high stakes of the election as well as its sillier diversions. As the conclave continues—and the more votes he receives from his peers—Lawrence starts to reconsider his rejection of the papacy. In a late scene, Bellini observes that every cardinal secretly has a papal name in mind. Lawrence looks torn, as if afraid to admit that truth to himself. Amid the hokier material, his internal conflict raises serious questions about the nature of spiritual devotion: Do Lawrence’s personal beliefs matter when collective worship is involved? Would running against Bellini, a friend, mean abandoning his own values? Is progress possible in such a rigid institution?

As with other recent papacy-centric projects, the film leaves these questions unanswered, and never deeply interrogates the Church’s biggest ongoing scandals, including allegations of clergy sex abuse. Conclave also adds a few too many contrived twists in its quest for narrative drama, but the movie moves nimbly enough to avoid a collapse into pure fantasy. Its revelations about piety as a facade may resonate best with viewers outside the Vatican, but I suspect that some on the inside would confess to having had the same thoughts.

Among the pedestaled titans of Western music, George Frideric Handel was the first composer whose work not only quickly became celebrated in his own time but has been heralded ever since. Before Handel, no real “repertoire” of enduring music had existed. Composers were considered craftsmen in an evanescent art, their creations regularly superseded by fresher work. Most music that got performed was relatively new. Claudio Monteverdi, the preeminent European composer of the early 17th century, was largely forgotten within decades of his death, in 1643. Johann Sebastian Bach amounted to hardly more than a cult figure after he died, in 1750, his major works unplayed well into the next century.

When Handel died, at 74 in 1759, he was already well fortified for posterity. A celebrity since his 20s, he had been the subject of grand portraits and was depicted as Orpheus in a 1738 statue in London’s Vauxhall Gardens. Whereas Bach earned an unmarked grave in Leipzig and one obituary four years after he died, Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Handel stands apart in another way from the musical giants who have since been rediscovered and enshrined: Each of them is renowned for an array of often-performed pieces. His stature is owed above all to a single work—the oratorio Messiah. Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the Messiah occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind. Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. The Messiah often is, trotted out during the Christmas season by amateur and professional choruses around the globe. A fair percentage of the world probably knows the “Hallelujah” chorus well enough to sing along.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why music really does make you happier]

This skewed acclaim is unfair to Handel, who was as brilliantly prolific as any composer who ever lived. But it is also a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the Messiah, which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,” the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.

Reasons for the Messiah’s enduring power are manifold, though certainly they begin with the music itself, which manages to join the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s ability to convey, era after era, “a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.” King, who embarked on the book during the pandemic, found renewed comfort in the Messiah’s arc, especially its message of hope in difficult times, starting with those first words: “Comfort ye.” He also felt moved to recover “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins in the murkier currents of what is remembered as the age of reason.

King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University and a splendid writer, has made a specialty of popular cultural history. A meticulous researcher, he delivers surprises, and his prologue is one of them:

Some days he would wander the manor house in a blank stupor, barely able to lift a foot … He was so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer. He never married, fathered no children, and made distant enemies more readily than close friends.

These fine and vivid sentences are not, as the reader expects, about Handel. They are about his exquisitely odd and obsessive acolyte, Charles Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist, a figure few listeners are aware of.

King proceeds to relay more about Jennens’s inner life and creative struggles than about Handel’s, of which firsthand reports are skimpy. Jennens’s story is indeed fascinating. A rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident, he was “emotionally tormented,” but still managed to be a significant art collector, Shakespeare scholar, and patron of music. King’s resurrection of Jennens’s crucial role, laboring in private over a libretto that he hoped would inspire “the Prodigious” (as he called Handel) to new musical heights, helps illuminate how unusual Handel’s oratorio was and remains.

Here is the “weirdness” that King emphasizes. An oratorio is essentially an unstaged opera, a story told in music. The Messiah is a collection of gnomic scriptural passages that are prophetic in import but offer no story at all. “It has nothing that could be called a plot,” King observes. “Its form is more like that of a found poem, built from Bible verses that have been rearranged and, here and there, edited” by a depressive man struggling to find his way toward hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment vision of religion. Jennens, for whom faith and kingship were imbued with mystery, endorsed the legitimacy of the deposed Stuart monarchy and rejected the rational Deist perspective. For his part, Handel—a generally agreeable though fiercely proud man, witty and gluttonous and gouty, and given to polylingual swearing—was probably indifferent to such political and sectarian matters. But he knew a good librettist when he saw one.

The form of King’s book is like an intricate collage, gathering very different characters with the goal of concentrating on the surround, the context. Not all of the figures are directly connected to Handel, and at times King’s deep background verges on the tangential. But a similar storyline links his cast of characters: They are coping with dire predicaments (of widely varying sorts), in a time of political flux and fear, all of them managing to carry on—a spirit of perseverance that runs through the Messiah.

For example, King delves at length into the outlandish marital travails of the contralto Susannah Cibber, whom Handel turned to as he rounded up singers for the Messiah premiere, in 1742 in Dublin, a propitious convergence for both. We learn, as a scandalized public did, all about her husband’s outrageous abusiveness, her lover’s and family’s efforts to protect her, the two lawsuits her husband filed against the lover (a creditor whom he’d initially welcomed into a ménage à trois). Cibber’s well-known suffering lent her musical lamentations in the oratorio a raw power—“He was despised and rejected of Men,” she sang, “a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with Grief”—for a stunned opening-night audience and in many of her performances after.

Other lives and issues are more peripherally entangled in King’s tale of the Messiah’s emergence. A distressing chapter on the British slave trade, to which Handel had a minor financial connection, features an African Muslim named Ayuba Diallo who ends up enslaved in Maryland. Against all odds, he ultimately succeeds in returning to Bundu, in West Africa. His episodic journey includes an interlude in London, where “it would not have been unusual to see Diallo walking past Jennens’s townhouse in Queen Square”—though who knows if the two ever met. Several times in his absorbing narratives, King reaches for these sorts of indirect associations.

And what about Handel’s evolution, personal and musical? After all, he is the composer who made the Messiah, even if he didn’t do it alone, or have the originating idea for it. Handel sometimes gets a bit lost along the way in Every Valley. After a well-stocked chapter about the oratorio and its premiere, King understandably—he isn’t a musician or musicologist—doesn’t devote much space to exploring the particulars of Handel’s style and reputation, or the special place of the Messiah in his work as a whole.

The compositions that Handel churned out at a remarkable rate were simultaneously demand-driven and distinctive, convention-bound and transcendent. Working within the musical language of his time, he could conjure any effect: dancingly energetic, profound, aristocratic, folksy, eerie, heart-filling, comic. He could do it all, and he had an uncanny sense of how to grab an audience. (His effervescent Water Music is a familiar example.) Few could work faster; that Handel wrote the Messiah in 24 days has long stirred talk of divine inspiration, though in fact he was known to turn out a three-hour opera in three weeks. Some have speculated that he was manic-depressive and wrote when he was manic. Indisputably, his speed was abetted by liberal borrowing from his own work and generous pilfering from other composers’ (not illegal in pre-copyright times, but still regarded as a bit tacky). Four Messiah choruses are lifted from his earlier pieces, none of them sacred. About his plagiarisms, Handel was unapologetic, saying more or less that those people didn’t know what to do with their stuff.

He wasn’t wrong: Handel the enthusiastic copier was also a pioneer in developing the English oratorio. Born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, he settled in England in 1712 and concentrated on the genre of Italian opera seria, a London craze whose popularity later faded. Facing bankruptcy by the 1730s, Handel revived his career by turning from seria—courtly entertainment stuffed with mannered drama—to the pared-down English oratorio. Making use of his operatic skills and dramatic instincts, he transfigured this new musical genre with results that most choral composers you could name—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms—are manifestly indebted to. By contrast, the artificiality of his operas, the major part of his output, has kept them from becoming repertoire staples.

[From the November 1946 issue: Handel]

In all of his work, Handel was among the greatest, most irresistible of tunesmiths. Like Bach, he believed in a union of word, meaning, and music. To that end, Bach often pursued esoteric symbolism and numerology, with vocal lines crossing in the music when Christ is mentioned, and the like. Handel wanted his illustration to be more on the sleeve. “Their land brought forth frogs,” the soprano sings in his oratorio Israel in Egypt, to an accompaniment that is hopping, hopping, hopping. When the chorus proclaims, “There came all manner of flies,” the strings break out in buzzing.

In those places, Handel plays the plagues of Egypt for laughs, but he does the same kind of thing in earnest in the Messiah. “Every Valley shall be exalted,” the tenor sings in a robustly rising line, which sinks for “and every Mountain and Hill made low.” Then “the Crooked” (jagged line), “straight” (held note), “and the rough Places” (jagged again), “plain” (long held note). Each word and image of the text is painted like this.

Meanwhile, you hear Handel lifting the music to mighty climaxes over and over, and it never gets old.

“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,” the chorus sings, tossing that bit back and forth in dancing counterpoint. Momentum begins to gather, the notes climbing, the rhythm bouncing us joyously along: “And the Government shall be upon his Shoulder; and his Name shall be called.” Then we arrive at spine-tingling proclamations: “Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace,” as strings race ecstatically above. What Beethoven, who considered Handel his only musical superior, particularly admired was his ability to get dazzling effects with simple means. As both composers knew, simple is hard.

Among the possibly apocryphal stories about Handel, one has him commenting to his servant, upon finishing the “Hallelujah” chorus, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.” In fact, nothing indicates that he considered the Messiah his magnum opus at the time, or expected that this piece—with its grandeur, its gravitas, its power to be emotionally moving at nearly every moment—would be his ticket to immortality. Famous though he was, Handel was still a jobbing composer, and composers had never been endowed with an immortal aura.

[From the April 1885 issue: Handel 1685–1885]

Yet he was eager to share an awestruck response to the Dublin premiere. As King reports, Handel wrote a letter a few months after the event, enclosing an Irish bishop’s verdict: “The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it,” the cleric reported. “It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other.”

The letter was to Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist. Handel wanted him to know “how well Your Messiah was received in that Country.” One of the most inspired composers of all time might have been aware, in some sense, that he had transcended himself, but he could not claim to understand the alchemy that had worked this wonder. In the spirit of his oratorio, the goal of his letter to Jennens seems to have been not to blow his own horn but to give comfort to his companion in the endeavor.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Heritage Images / Getty; Photo12 / UIG / Getty; Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Print Collector / Getty; Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy; CBW / Alamy; Album / Alamy.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Weirdest Hit in History.”

From 11:09 a.m. to 11:14 a.m. yesterday, I thought Francis Fukuyama had died. When an X account that seemed connected with Stanford University announced the legendary political scientist’s passing, many people were fooled. Much to my chagrin, I was among them. And then the account declared itself to be a hoax by Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian prankster. Minutes later, Fukuyama himself posted on X, “Last time I checked, I’m still alive.”

Debenedetti, whom I could not immediately reach for comment, has previously issued many fake death announcements, including for the economist Amartya Sen (still alive), the pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante (still alive), the Cuban leader Fidel Castro (dead as of 2016). In 2012, Debenedetti told The Guardian that his purpose was to reveal how poorly the media do their job, arguing that “the Italian press never checks anything, especially if it is close to their political line.” But fooling people undercuts the idea of shared truth—a cornerstone of liberal democracy itself.

That the hoax was targeting Fukuyama, one of liberal democracy’s greatest defenders, made the situation all the more striking. In 1989, as communism was on the verge of collapse, Fukuyama published an essay called The End of History, which argued that modern liberal democracy had outcompeted every viable alternative political system. Humanity, he argued, had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” (He later expanded the essay into a book, The End of History and the Last Man.)

[Francis Fukuyama: More proof that this really is the end of history]

But how durable is liberal democracy? Although Americans are experiencing far greater material prosperity than their forebears, fears of political violence are growing, and the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is using authoritarian language. Fukuyama foresaw the potential for trouble in 1989. “The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote back then. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

Wondering what Fukuyama thought of yesterday’s hoax—and our current political moment—I requested an interview. The transcript below has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s great to find you alive and well. How are you feeling?

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, that was an unusual event.

Demsas: How did you learn about your “death”?

Fukuyama: One of my former students, I guess, tweeted that this had happened and that it was a hoax. And then I went back and looked at the original tweet, and then it just went viral, and everybody was tweeting about it, so I decided I should actually assert that I was still alive. So it got a lot of attention.

Demsas: What was your reaction when you saw it?

Fukuyama: I couldn’t figure out what the motive was, and I also couldn’t figure out why anyone would take the time to produce a tweet like that. It was a pointless exercise. I guess the other reaction is that X, or Twitter, has become a cesspool of misinformation, and so it seemed it was a perfect thing to happen on X that might not happen on other platforms.

Demsas: Do you know who Tommaso Debenedetti is?

Fukuyama: No.

Demsas: He is an Italian who has claimed responsibility for a series of hoaxes, including the fake announced death of Amartya Sen. He told The Guardian years ago that the Italian press never checks anything. This seems like a part of his broader strategy to, I guess, reveal the problems with fact-checking in the media. What do you make of this strategy?

Fukuyama: Well, first of all, it wasn’t very successful. The fact that you can propagate something like this on Twitter doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the media. People debunked it within, I would say, seconds of this having been posted, so I’m not quite sure what kind of a weak link this exposes.

Demsas: This sort of informational ecosystem seriously weakens liberal democracy, right? If there cease to be shared facts, if it becomes difficult for voters to transmit their feelings about the world, culture, the economy to elected officials, it weakens the legitimacy of democratic signals.

Fukuyama: When I wrote my book Trust back in the mid-1990s, I described the United States as a high-trust society. That’s just completely wrong right now. And a lot of that really is due to the internet or to social media. This is a symptom of a much broader crisis, and it’s really hard to know how we’re going to ever get back to where we were 30 years ago.

Demsas: Does it say anything about the strength of liberal democracy that the democratization of media erodes trust?

Fukuyama: The classic theorists of democracy said that just formal institutions and popular participation weren’t enough, and that you had to have a certain amount of virtue among citizens for the system to work. And that continues to be true. One of the virtues that is not being cultivated right now is a willingness to check sources and not pass on rumors. I’ve caught myself doing that—where you see something that, if it fits your prior desires, then you’re very likely to just send it on and not worry about the consequences.

Demsas: Next week we have the election between Trump and Kamala Harris, and there are a great deal of normal policy distinctions between the two candidates. And when you look at why people are making their decisions, they often will point to things like inflation or immigration or abortion. But there’s also a distinction on this question of democracy too, right? Why does it feel like there’s this yearning for a more authoritarian leader within a democracy like the United States?

Fukuyama: What’s really infuriating about the current election is that so many Americans think this is a normal election over policy issues, and they don’t pay attention to underlying institutions, because that really is what’s at stake. It’s this erosion of those institutions that is really the most damaging thing. In a way, it doesn’t matter who wins the election, because the damage has already been done. You had a spontaneous degree of trust among Americans in earlier decades, and that has been steadily eroded. Even if Harris wins the election, that’s still going to be a burden on society. And so the stakes in this thing are much, much higher than just the question of partisan policies. And I guess the most disappointing thing is that 50 percent of Americans don’t see it that way. We just don’t see the deeper institutional issues at stake.

Demsas: We’re in a time of great affluence—tons of consumer choice, access to goods and services, bigger houses, bigger cars. George Orwell once wrote, in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf, that people have a desire to struggle over something greater than just these small policy details. [“Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet,” Orwell observed.] Does that desire create a problem for democracies?

Fukuyama: There’s actually a line in one of the last chapters of The End of History where I said almost exactly something like if people can’t struggle on behalf of peace and democracy, then they’re going to want to struggle against peace and democracy, because what they want to do is struggle and they can’t recognize themselves as full human beings, unless they’re engaged in the struggle.

Demsas: In The End of History, you wrote that “men have proven themselves able to endure the most extreme material hardships in the name of ideas that exist in the realm of the spirit alone, be it the divinity of cows or the nature of the Holy Trinity.” And I worry that liberal democracy is unable to provide the sorts of ideas that make people want to struggle or fight for it. Does it feel to you like it’s doomed?

Fukuyama: Well, I don’t think anything is doomed. This is the problem with peace and prosperity. It just makes people take [things] for granted. We’ve gone through periods of complacency, punctuated by big crises. And then in some of these prior cases, those crises were severe enough to actually remind people about why a liberal order is a good thing, and then they go back to that. But then time goes on so you repeat the cycle, with people forgetting and then remembering why liberal institutions are good.

Demsas: After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, I had friends say, do you think your entire view of the American public would change if 120,000 people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had voted differently? And I wonder if that’s a question to ask ourselves now, if Trump wins again. Does it really say that much about people’s views on democracy?

Fukuyama: It has much deeper implications. The first time he won, he didn’t get a popular-vote majority. You could write it off as a blip. But everybody in the country has lots of information now about who he is and what he represents. So the second time around, it’s going to be a much more serious indictment of the American electorate.

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Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

[Peter Wehner: Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying?]

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots, so that Cambodia would be “purified.”

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.

[Read: Trump isn’t bluffing]

In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”

His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.

These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.