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

1984 ends not with a bang, but with a grammar lesson. Readers of George Orwell’s novel—still reeling, likely, from the brutal dystopia they’ve spent the previous 300-odd pages living in—are subjected to a lengthy explanation of Newspeak, the novel’s uncanny form of English. The appendix explains the language that has been created to curtail independent thought: the culled vocabulary; the sterilized syntax; the regime’s hope that, before long, all the vestiges of Oldspeak—English in its familiar form, the English of Shakespeare and Milton and many of Orwell’s readers—will be translated into the new vernacular. The old language, and all it carried with it, will die away.

With its dizzying details and technical prose, “The Principles of Newspeak” makes for a supremely strange ending. It is, in today’s parlance, a choice. But it is a fitting one. Language, in 1984, is violence by another means, an adjunct of the totalitarian strategies inflicted by the regime. Orwell’s most famous novel, in that sense, is the fictionalized version of his most famous essay. “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is a writing manual, primarily—a guide to making language that says what it means, and means what it says. It is also an argument. Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

The essay, over the years, has enjoyed the same backhanded success that Orwell himself has. Its barbs have softened into conventional wisdom. Its enduring relevance has consigned it, in some degree, to cliché. Who would argue against clarity?

But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.

And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump mused aloud about the violence Americans might anticipate on November 5. If Election Day brings havoc, he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, the crisis would come not from outside actors but instead from “the enemy from within”: “some very bad people,” he clarified, “some sick people”—the “radical-left lunatics.”

The former president further mused about a solution to the problem. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard,” he said, “or, if really necessary, by the military.”

A presidential candidate who may well retake the White House is threatening to use the military against American citizens: The news here is straightforward. The language that makes the news, though, is not. The words twist and tease, issuing their threats in the conditional tense: It should be. If necessary. Trump’s words often do this; they imply very much while saying very little. They are schooled, like the man himself, in the dark art of plausible deniability. In them, Orwell’s doublespeak—that jargon of purposeful obscurity—gets one more layer of insulating irony: The former president says whatever he wants, and reserves the right not to mean it.

Do we take him at his word? The answer to this question, on which so much else depends, can only ever be “maybe.” When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”—you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.

But the fact that you need to translate him at all is already a concession. The constant uncertainty—about the gravest of matters—is one of the ways that Trump keeps people in his thrall. Clear language is a basic form of kindness: It considers the other person. It wants to be understood. Trump’s argot, though, is self-centered. It treats shared reality as an endless negotiation.

The words cannot bear the weight of all this irony. Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.

[Read: Do you speak Fox?]

Orwell published “Politics” at the end of a conflict that had, in its widespread use of propaganda, also been a war of words. In the essay, he wrestles with the fact that language—as a bomb with a near-limitless blast radius—could double as a weapon of mass destruction. This is why clarity matters. This is why words are ethical tools as well as semantic ones. The defense of language that Orwell offered in “Politics” was derived from his love of hard facts. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” he confessed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His was an elegant dogma. Words matter because facts matter—because truth matters. Freedom, in 1984, is many things, but they all spring from the same source: the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4.

One October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.

Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”

The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution; use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him; and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.

In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.

When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.

The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.

But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.

The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.

The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.

The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.

“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)

Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.

[Read: Why are we humoring them?]

The words fly, flagrant and fast; the definitions that might ground them trail, meekly, in their wake. But when the words are mere slogans—shibboleths and signifiers, narrowcast to one’s tribe—dictionary definitions miss the point. Slogans are rhetoric. They are advertising. They are vibes. They can function, in that way, as what the author Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”: words or phrases that effectively curtail debate—and, with it, critical thought itself. Last year, an author who wrote a book decrying the “woke indoctrination” of children struggled to define what woke actually means. In 2022, the New York Times editorial board effectively declared lexicographic defeat: “However you define cancel culture,” it wrote, “Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” On Tuesday, Musk—who has been spreading his Trump-friendly brand of groupthink on his social-media platform, X—shared an image: a man, his face obscured, wearing a green cap. Stitched onto the hat, in large, all-caps letters, was MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.

In 1990, a conservative Republican group headed by Newt Gingrich sent a pamphlet to Republican candidates running in state elections across the country. The document amounted to a dictionary: 133 words that operatives might use to elevate themselves (family, freedom, pride) and vilify their competitors (decay, corruption, pathetic, traitors). The pamphlet was titled, unironically, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Many in the media, nodding to the Orwell of it all, came to know it as “Newtspeak.”

The 1990s were years when politicians were translating the insights of postmodern discourse (the power of “framing” and the like) into the everyday practice of politics. But Gingrich’s memo turned spin into a plot twist. Every word of its grim new language represented an argument: that Democrats were not merely opponents, but enemies; that the differences between the two sides were not merely political, but moral. It recast American politics not as an ongoing debate among equals, but as an epic battle between good and evil. The core aim of propaganda, Aldous Huxley observed, is to make one group of people forget that another group is human; the pamphlet, cheerfully promising aspiring politicians that they could learn to speak like Newt, wove that logic, word by word, into Americans’ political habits.

The language in the pamphlet is stark. It is evocative. It is so very, very clear. It also takes the advice Orwell gave to preserve the thing he most loved and puts it in service of the thing he most feared.

Orwell watched the rise of communism. He fought the rise of fascism. He observed, from a distance and, at times, from intimately close range, the blunt-force power of words. He saw how quickly a common language could be transformed into a divisive one—and how readily, in the tumult, new hatreds and fears could settle into the syntax of everyday life. And he knew that history, so rarely consigned to the past, would repeat—that the battles of the 20th century would very likely be refought, in some form, in the future.

He knew all that, but he could not know it all. And there are moments in “Politics and the English Language” that can read, today, as nearly naive, with its faith in facts and its hope that clarity could be our salvation. Orwell was a satirist, too—1984, he believed, was an example of the genre—but he did not account for the ways that irony could come for language itself. He did not imagine propaganda that does its work through winks and shrugs rather than shouts. He did not sense how possible it would become for people in the future, seeking his wisdom, to wonder whether use clear language offers any counsel at all.

This is not Orwell’s failing, necessarily. And it need not be our own. If we look to him for refuge and find none, that means simply that we will have to use the words we have to create new advice, new axioms, new ways forward. We can take the insight that drove him—that words can expand the world, or limit it; that they can connect us to one another, or cleave us—and seek new means of clarity. We can treat language not just as a tool, but as a duty. We can keep remembering, and reminding one another, that 2 + 2 = 4.

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

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

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

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Under the spell of the crowd]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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In March 2023, when Mark Milley was six months away from retirement as a four-star general and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he met Bob Woodward at a reception and said, “We gotta talk.”

Milley went on to describe the grave degree to which former President Donald Trump, under whom Milley had served, was a danger to the nation. Woodward recounts the episode with Milley—who almost certainly believed that he was speaking to Woodward off the record—in his new book, War:

“We have got to stop him!” Milley said. “You have got to stop him!” By “you” he meant the press broadly. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” His eyes darted around the room filled with 200 guests of the Cohen Group, a global business consulting firm headed by former defense secretary William Cohen. Cohen and former defense secretary James Mattis spoke at the reception.

“A fascist to the core!” Milley repeated to me.

I will never forget the intensity of his worry.

For readers of The Atlantic, this will sound familiar: Milley’s warning about Trump as well as the steps Milley took to defend the constitutional order during Trump’s presidency were the subject of a cover story last year by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. As Goldberg put it in that story: “The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster,” who served as the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman,” McMaster said to Goldberg, “you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?”

Milley knows well the risks of criticizing Trump. The former president has reportedly expressed a desire to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who have criticized him, and he has even suggested that Milley should be executed. Since Milley retired, Woodward noted, the combat veteran who served three tours in Afghanistan has endured “a nonstop barrage of death threats,” which led him to install bulletproof glass and blast-proof curtains in his home.

I long resisted the use of the word fascist to describe Trump. But almost a year ago, I came to agree with Milley that Trump is through-and-through a fascist. He is not only unhinged in his narcissistic self-obsessions, a problem which itself renders him unfit for office; he is also an aspiring dictator who demands that all political life centers on him. He identifies his fellow Americans as “enemies” because they are of a different race, national origin, or political view. And he has threatened to use the powerful machinery of the state and its military forces to inflict brutality on those fellow citizens.

Of course, it’s one thing to hear such concerns from angry members of the so-called Resistance on social media, from liberal talk-show hosts, or even, say, from curmudgeonly retired political-science professors who write for magazines. It’s another to hear them from a man who once held the nation’s top military office.

Some observers question whether Milley should have said anything at all. I understand those reservations: I taught military officers for decades at the Naval War College, and I am familiar with the tradition—handed down from America’s first commander in chief, George Washington—of the military’s avoidance of entanglement in civilian politics. I, too, am uncomfortable that, while still on active duty, Milley spoke to Woodward about a presidential candidate. He could have waited a few months, until his retirement; he could even have resigned his commission early in order to be able to speak freely.

My own objectivity on the issue of Milley speaking with Woodward is strained by my strong feelings about Trump as an existential danger to the nation, so I checked in with a friend and widely respected scholar of American civil-military relations, Kori Schake, a senior fellow and the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It’s a legitimately difficult call,” she wrote to me. She noted that resigning and then going public is always an option. She admitted, however, that for a general to throw his stars on the desk might be an honorable exit, but it’s not much use to the people remaining in uniform who must continue to serve the country and the commander in chief, and in general she sees the idea of simply quitting and walking out to be unhelpful.

So when should a general—who’s seen things in the White House that terrify him—raise the alarm if he believes that a president is planning to attack the very Constitution that all federal servants are sworn to protect? Schake thinks that Milley overestimated his importance and was out of his lane as a military officer: “The country didn’t need General Milley to alert them to the danger of Trump, that was evident if people wanted to know, and plenty of civilian officials—including General Milley’s boss, [Mark Esper], the Secretary of Defense—had already been sharing their concern.”

Schake is one of the smartest people I know on this subject, and so I am cautious in my dissent, especially because other scholars of civil-military affairs seem largely to agree with her. And like Schake, I am a traditionalist about American civil-military relations: Trump, as I wrote during his presidency, routinely attacked the military and saw its leaders as his opponents, but that should not tempt anyone in uniform to match his egregious violations of our civil-military norms and traditions.

A comparable situation occurred during the final days of President Richard Nixon’s time in office: Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger told the Joint Chiefs chair at the time, General George Brown, that any “unusual orders” from the president should be cleared through him. (The Constitution, of course, does not have a special provision allowing Cabinet officers to subvert the chain of command at will if they think the president is having a bad day.) Schlesinger’s actions arose from concern about Nixon’s mental state; four years earlier, Admiral Thomas Moorer, one of Milley’s predecessors as Joint Chiefs chair, was so worried about Nixon’s policies that he actually oversaw some internal spying on National Security Council proceedings.

And yet I understand Milley’s alarm and frustration. He was not grousing about a policy disagreement or trying to paper over a temporary crisis regarding the president’s capacity. He was concerned that a former American president could return to office and continue his efforts to destroy the constitutional order of the United States. This was no political pose against a disliked candidate: For Milley and others, especially in the national-security arena, who saw the danger from inside the White House, Trump’s continuing threat to democracy and national stability is not notional.

I also am somewhat heartened that a four-star general, when faced with what he sees as a dire peril to the nation, believes that the sunlight of a free press is the best option. But, more important, are people now listening to what Milley had to say? The revelations about his views seem to have been overwhelmed by yet more of Trump’s gobsmacking antics. As I was writing today’s Daily, news broke that Trump had added Nancy Pelosi and her family to his enemies list. (Paul Pelosi has already suffered a hammer attack from a deranged man stoked by conspiracy theories, a ghastly incident that some Trump supporters have used as a source for jokes; Trump himself has referenced it mockingly.)

All of this raises the question, once again, of what it will take, what will be enough, to rouse the last undecided or less engaged American voters and bring them to the ballot box to defend their own freedoms. Milley and other senior military officers are in a bind when it comes to talking about a former president, but telling the truth about Trump is a duty and a service to the nation.

Related:

How Mark Milley held the line Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The man who’s sure that Harris will win A Trump loyalist on the brink Shoplifters gone wild

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier aired tonight at 6 p.m. ET. Italy passed a law that criminalizes seeking surrogates abroad, including in countries where surrogacy is legal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented the country’s Parliament with a “Victory Plan,” which aims to end the Ukrainian-Russian war by next year and calls for a NATO invitation for Ukraine.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Found Image Holdings / Corbis / Getty.

The Sunshine Staters Aren’t Going Anywhere

By Diane Roberts

Floridians regularly observe that Florida is trying to kill us. Venomous water snakes lie in wait for heedless kayakers paddling down the wrong slough. More people die of lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state. I-4, from Tampa to Daytona Beach, is the deadliest highway in the country. Mosquitoes the size of tire irons carry several sorts of fever and encephalitis, and the guacamole-colored algae infesting our waters can cause severe respiratory distress and liver disease. Despite claims of perpetual sunshine, the weather in Florida is often horrendous: 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 95 percent humidity.

Then there are the storms.

Read the full article.

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On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small, in the “Dear Therapist” newsletter. This month, she is inviting readers to submit questions related to Thanksgiving.

To be featured, email dear.therapist@theatlantic.com by Sunday, October 20.

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When I was a young boy, my father adorned the back of our Dodge Coronet 440 station wagon with bumper stickers. Proud to Be An American, one read, a manifestation of a simple truth: Both of my parents deeply loved America, and they transmitted that love to their four children.

In high school, I defended America in my social-studies classes. I wrote a paper defending America’s support for the South Vietnamese in the war that had recently ended in defeat. My teacher, a critic of the war, wasn’t impressed.

At the University of Washington, I applied for a scholarship or award of some kind. I don’t recall the specifics, but I do recall meeting with two professors who were not happy that, in a paper I’d written, I had taken the side of the United States in the Cold War. Their view was that the United States and the Soviet Union were much closer to moral equivalents than I believed then, or now. It was a contentious meeting.

[From the November 2024 issue: The moment of truth]

As a young conservative who worked in the Reagan administration, I was inspired by President Ronald Reagan’s portrayal of America—borrowed from the Puritan John Winthrop—as a shining “city upon a hill.” Reagan mythologized America, but the myth was built on what we believed was a core truth. Within the conservative intellectual movement I was a part of, writers like Walter Berns, William Bennett, and Leon R. Kass and Amy A. Kass, and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote powerfully about patriotism.

“Love of country—the expression now sounds almost archaic—is an ennobling sentiment, quite as ennobling as love of family and community,” Himmelfarb wrote in 1997. “It elevates us, invests our daily life with a larger meaning, dignifies the individual even as it humanizes politics.”   

I find this moment particularly painful and disorienting. I have had strong rooting interests in Republican presidential candidates who have won and who have lost, including some for whom I have great personal admiration and on whose campaigns I worked. But no election prior to the Trump era, regardless of the outcome, has ever caused me to question the fundamental decency of America. I have felt that my fellow citizens have made flawed judgements at certain times. Those moments left me disappointed, but no choice they made was remotely inexplicable or morally indefensible.  

This election is different.

The nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump, is a squalid figure, and the squalor is not subtle. His vileness, his lawlessness, and his malevolence are undisguised. At this point, it is reasonable to conclude that those qualities are a central part of Trump’s appeal to many of the roughly 75 million people who will vote for him in three weeks. They revel in his vices; they are vivified by them. Folie à millions.

Trump may lose the election, and by that loss America may escape the horrifying fate of another term. But we have to acknowledge this, too: The man whom the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” is in a razor-thin contest against Kamala Harris, a woman who, whether you agree with her or not, is well within the normal boundaries of American politics. If he loses, he will not concede. Trump will instead attempt to tear the country apart. He can count on the near-total support of his party, and the majority of the white evangelical world. They will once again rally to his side, in the name of Jesus.

This should leave the rest of us shaken. Not because America, despite being an exceptional nation, has ever been perfect, or close to perfect. We have experienced slavery and segregation, the Trail of Tears and the internment of Japanese Americans, McCarthyism and My Lai, the Johnson-Reed Act and the beating and torture of the suffragists, the Lavender Scare, and the horrors of child labor. But what makes this moment different, and unusually dangerous, is that we have never before had a president who is sociopathic; who relishes cruelty and encourages political violence; who refers to his political opponents as “vermin,” echoing the rhetoric of 20th-century fascists; who resorts to crimes to overturn elections, who admires dictators and thrives on stoking hate. Trump has never been well, but he has never been this unwell. The prospect of his again possessing the enormous power of the presidency, this time with far fewer restraints, is frightening.

[From the November 2024 issue: The case for Kamala Harris]

Jonathan Rauch, a contributor to The Atlantic, recently reminded me that the Founders warned us about such a scenario. They knew this could happen, he said, and they gave us multiple safeguards. Those safeguards are in danger of failing. “My faith in democracy is breaking,” he told me. “Part of me is breaking with it.” Americans have three weeks to keep the break from happening.   

Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, in his annual message to Congress, told Americans that “we here hold the power, and bear the responsibility.” What was at stake was emancipation, of course, but also “honor or dishonor.”

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth” is how Lincoln concluded his remarks.

If Donald Trump wins the election, those of us who grew up loving America won’t stop loving her. But it will be a love tinged with profound disappointment and concern, almost to the point of disbelief. It is one thing, and quite a disturbing thing, for Trump’s soul to represent the soul of his party. It is quite another, given all we know, for him to represent, as president, the soul of his country. It would be an act of self-desecration.

We’re not there yet. Ours is still a republic, if we can keep it.

Over the past week, Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp. At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home. But on Sunday morning, he outdid himself in an interview on Fox News, by saying that “the enemy within”—Americans he described as “radical left lunatics,” including Representative Adam Schiff of California, whom he mentioned by name—are more dangerous than Russia or China, and could be “very easily handled” by the National Guard or the U.S. military.

This wasn’t the first time Trump suggested using America’s armed forces against its own people: As president, he thought of the military as his personal guard and regularly fantasized about commanding “his generals” to crush dissent, which is one reason former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley reportedly told Bob Woodward that he sees Trump as “fascist to his core.”

The term fascism has been so overused as a denunciation that many people have understandably tuned it out. But every American should be shocked to hear a presidential nominee say that other Americans (including a sitting member of Congress) are more dangerous than two nations pointing hundreds of nuclear warheads at America’s cities. During the Cold War, conservative members of the GOP would likely have labeled anyone saying such things as a “comsymp,” a fellow traveler, or even a traitor. Indeed, one might expect that other Republicans would be horrified to hear such hatred directed at their fellow citizens and such comfort given to the nation’s enemies.

Pretty to think so. But today’s Republican leaders are cowards, and some are even worse: They are complicit, as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin proved today in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. At least cowards run away. The GOP elected officials who cross the street against the light just to get away from the reporters are at least showing a tiny, molecular awareness of shame. Youngkin, however, smiled and dissembled and excused Trump’s hideousness with a kind of folksy shamelessness that made cowardice seem noble by comparison.

Tapper read Trump’s remarks verbatim, and then asked: “Is that something that you support?” Youngkin replied that Tapper misunderstood Trump, who he said was referring to undocumented immigrants. No, Tapper responded, Trump clearly meant American citizens. Tapper added that Trump had singled out Schiff. Youngkin aw-shucksed his way through stories about Venezuelan criminals and Virginians dying from fentanyl. “Obviously there is a border crisis,” Tapper said. “Obviously there are too many criminals who should not be in this country, and they should be jailed and deported completely, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” And then, to his credit, Tapper wouldn’t let go: What about Trump’s threat to use the military against Americans?

Well, Youngkin shrugged, he “can’t speak” for Trump, but he was certain that Tapper was “misrepresenting [Trump’s] thoughts.”

Some of the people who watched Youngkin’s appalling dishonesty immediately thought of one of the most famous passages from George Orwell’s 1984: “The Party told him to reject the evidence of his eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But this interpretation gives Youngkin too much credit. Orwell’s dictators were able to terrify people with torture and deprivation into accepting the government’s lies. Youngkin, however, is not a terrified subject of an authoritarian regime: He’s just an opportunist. Like J. D. Vance, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Youngkin is demanding that everyone else play along and pretend that Trump is just a misunderstood immigration hawk, and then move on—all so that Youngkin can later say that he was a loyal Republican when he contends for the leadership of the GOP after Trump is either defeated, retired, or long gone.

In this, Youngkin joins a long list of utterly dishonorable people, including Nikki Haley, who ran against Trump with energy and honesty and then bowed and scraped after she was defeated. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has noted, 10 Republican senators could have changed the course of history by supporting Trump’s impeachment. Ohio Senator Rob Portman, a supposed GOP moderate, is a particularly galling example. Portman twice voted against convicting Trump. He announced his retirement just weeks after the January 6 insurrection, and he had no electoral chances to protect (not that protecting one’s electoral chances is an honorable excuse). Still, he let Trump slide, perhaps out of fear of reproach from his neighbors back in Ohio.

It’s not exactly a revelation that the Republican Party’s elected ranks have become a haven for cranks and opportunists, and sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference: When Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, talks about how “they” can control the weather, it’s hard to tell if she is just a kook, if she herself is an anti-Semite, or if she is employing yet another anti-Semitic trope because she knows that some of the MAGA base feasts on such garbage.

For someone like Greene, the difference doesn’t matter. She is ignorant. And she traffics in ignorance. Her constituents have rewarded her with a safe seat in Congress. But in the Trump era, the conceit all along has been that more responsible Republicans such as Youngkin are lurking in the background, keeping their heads down while quietly and competently doing the people’s business.

Americans should therefore watch Youngkin’s exchange with Tapper for themselves. They should see that supposedly competent Republicans have already abandoned the party. To believe otherwise—especially after watching someone like Youngkin—is to truly obey the commandment to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

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

“He went home,” Kelly said.

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

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

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

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

All but one, that is.

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

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

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

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

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

I

A CITIZEN, NOT A CAESAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

A MAN IN COMMAND OF HIMSELF

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

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

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

[Barton Gellman: What happened to Michael Flynn?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

A PRESIDENT, NOT A KING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

WASHINGTON BETRAYED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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