A few years ago, all of this would have been extremely weird. Actually, as the Democrats around me in the theater stood to applaud Liz Cheney—the pro-life, ultraconservative daughter of Dick—it still kind of was. The former third-ranked GOP House leader was joined onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs by three young onetime Donald Trump staffers, together issuing a warning about his potentially catastrophic unfitness for office—the four horsewomen heralding the threat of the Trump-ocalypse. Attendees seemed in awe of their bravery, and every few moments clapped with vigor.

Such an alignment, everyone agreed, would have been unthinkable in some other, more normal political universe. “If you would have told me four years ago that I’d be voting for Kamala Harris in 2024, my head would have exploded,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in the Trump administration, told me after the event. There were uncomfortable titters from some in the audience, of course, including once when the former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah Griffin spoke highly of her two former bosses, Vice President Mike Pence and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. But the broader feeling—the powerful force that is disdain for Trump—kept everyone nodding solemnly in their seat.

This shared sentiment lines up with the Democrats’ closing pitch in the final days before the election: that Trump is an exceptional threat to American democracy. Voters of all ideological persuasions should choose Harris now and disagree about policy later.

Cheney and her fellow anti-Trump surrogates have run with that message in recent weeks, sometimes even joining Harris herself on the trail. Their effort, the thinking goes, gives Republicans permission to hold their nose and vote for a Democrat, maybe for the first time ever.

It might work. In an election that will almost certainly be decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, Cheney could reach a significant-enough sliver of the electorate for Harris to scrape by in November. They’re hopeful, even, for the deus ex machina of a silent minority. “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” Cheney said Monday during an event with Harris in Royal Oak, Michigan. But centering a campaign on the nobler questions in politics—morality, democracy—is a risky bet when it comes to Trump, who has remained, throughout the past nine years, robustly immune to such high-minded attacks. The Cheney Strategy presumes that bipartisanship can win the day. It might be wishful thinking.

[Listen: Trump and the January 6 memory hole]

In the month since she formally endorsed Harris, Cheney has served as a traveling evangelist for the Democrats, hitting the road in America’s swing states to spread the good news about personal sacrifice and national redemption. There was that event onstage with the former Trump staffers in Philly, plus the stop with Harris in the Wisconsin town where the GOP was founded, and where Cheney declared that she “was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning.” And this week, she wrapped up a three-state series of fireside-chats with Harris. In these appearances, Cheney has repeatedly referred to Trump as “cruel” and “depraved.” She warns that if he becomes president again, the mob attack of January 6, 2021, might look, in comparison, like the peaceful lovefest that Trump falsely maintains it was.

Nothing Cheney says is more telling than her example: A Republican born and bred, she effectively relinquished her seat in Congress and what was already an illustrious political career to stand up for what she thought was right. If a Cheney can vote blue, so can you. One problem, of course, is that most of the attendees at Cheney’s events are not Republicans. They are mostly Democrats—or Republicans who have been casting ballots for Democratic candidates in one election or another since 2016.

These gatherings sometimes carry the air of a religious revival, of people desperate to commune over their almighty revulsion for Trump. They weep and cheer to see Cheney confronting the bullies in this new, disfigured GOP. At other times, the events seem like a group-therapy session. At the theater outside Philly, several people told me, unprompted, about their own family divisions over politics: marriages and relationships torn apart during the Trump era. “I lost a 40-year friendship over Trump,” Sandy Lightkep, from nearby Horsham, told me. “My family’s split in half.” They come because they appreciate the sense of unity, real or imagined. “It’s wonderful that Republicans and Democrats are finally getting together,” Nancy Moskalski, visiting from Connecticut, told me. “This is what Joe Biden always wanted.”

Before a Harris-Cheney appearance in Chester County, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, I met two women who seemed to reflect the improbable alliance of the pair that would soon be onstage. “I just remember there was a time when I could have a discussion with a lot of my Republican and conservative friends,” Tanya Cain, who wore a navy-blue KAMALA HARRIS sweatshirt, told me. “We have to break this, whatever this is, and move forward.” Cain laughed. “If you would tell me Liz Cheney was gonna be in my politics—” The woman next to her, Susan Springman, broke in: “I never thought Harris would be in my politics either!” A lifelong Republican voter wearing a black turtleneck and pearls, Springman had voted for Trump in 2016 but now regretted it. “MAGA has to go, and whatever that means, I am willing to go with it to destroy that and to move forward with something else,” she said. She’d also persuaded her Republican husband to read Cheney’s book Oath and Honor, she said; he’d be voting for Harris too.

Democrats are banking on hopes that people like Springman aren’t such rare birds. That similar aisle-crossing comity is happening all around the country, under the radar. It’s totally fine, they say, if only a few Republicans are showing up to these events—they believe the important thing is the message it sends. Perhaps Cheney’s efforts will help remind voters of the violent attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election. “It’s about driving a news cycle that reinjects the memory of what happened and tries to put the stakes back at the center of the conversation,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump publication The Bulwark who has appeared on the trail in support of Harris, told me.

The Cheney Strategy reflects a Harris-campaign pivot. For the first weeks of her presidential bid, Harris’s line about Trump was, primarily, that he was responsible for taking away women’s reproductive rights. When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joined the ticket, the pair focused on communicating to voters that Trump and the MAGA Republicans were “weird.”

[Read: The swing states are in good hands]

Harris has worked hard to introduce herself, define her campaign, and deliver a message that sets her apart from Biden. For a while, she seemed successful, pulling ahead of Trump in several key swing states. But the polls have been tightening for weeks, compelling Harris to adopt something closer to Biden’s final pitch from 2020: that Trump is a reckless would-be dictator, whose reelection could bring about the end of American decency and democracy. “Brat summer is over,” as Vox’s Christian Paz put it. “‘Trump is a fascist’ fall is in.”

A closing argument about January 6 was the natural next move in this high-stakes election, Longwell told me. “They’ve decided that’s their closing pitch, to sort of go for those undecided voters,” she said. “Strategically, that’s correct.”

Most registered Republicans will vote for Trump, but it’s true that many conservative-identifying voters have concerns about his character. Whether enough of those exist to change the election result is debatable. Longwell and her Never Trump allies point to the GOP primary contest for evidence: Nikki Haley received 157,000 votes in Pennsylvania, even after she’d dropped out of the race, and she got 14 percent of the vote in pivotal Waukesha County, Wisconsin. “Trump has actively avoided courting any of those people,” Griffin, the former White House aide, told me. “So our belief is that there are people that you can reach—a sizable number of Republican voters—who will be willing to either cast their ballot this one time only for a Democrat, or at minimum, not vote for him.”

The gender gap in voting intention is wider than ever. College-educated women and suburbanites, in particular, are recoiling from Trump, and recent polling shows that women voters in general are 16 points more likely to support Harris. “Republican women can tip this election,” Brittany Prime, a self-identified moderate Republican and a co-founder of the anti-Trump organization Women4US, told me. Her group has identified nearly 400,000 “MAGA-exhausted” women in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, who, the group believes, can be persuaded to vote for Harris in November. Prime sees that effort as a twofold push. First, they assure voters that backing a Democrat “doesn’t mean you aren’t a Republican anymore,” she said. The second part of the message is that “no one’s going to find out, I promise.”

Some of the Republican women that Prime’s organization is talking to have requested that no mailers or ballots be sent to their home, she told me, because they don’t want their husband to find out. They plan to “go into the voting booth, vote their conscience, and never admit to it,” she said. When you talk to anti-Trump Republicans about this clandestine sisterhood, they will share stories about sticky notes in bathroom stalls reminding women that who they vote for is secret. Back in 2016, pollsters identified the “shy Trump voter” phenomenon, which referred to the poll respondents who were unwilling to admit that they were voting for Trump—and thus went unrepresented in surveys. Prime and other anti-Trump conservatives are hopeful that a similar phenomenon happens again, but in reverse: the shy anti-Trump voter. “We could be surprised on Election Day and the days after that there’s a silent majority, a quiet groundswell” in support of Harris, she said.

The problem with a quiet groundswell, though, is in its name. All of these hopeful anecdotes are impossible to translate into hard data about voter numbers and behavior. And some on the left are frustrated with Harris’s closing strategy, partly, because it’s an appeal to Republicans. “She’s trying to win without the base,” as Naomi Klein, the progressive author and columnist, put it this week.

A consistent drumbeat about practical, pocketbook policies would be better, other critics argue. After all, Democratic candidates in close House and Senate races are running campaign ads about abortion. A recent survey from the Center for Working-Class Politics found that voters responded better to “economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative” than to warnings about Trump. “Ironically,” Dustin Guastella, a research associate with the group, wrote this week, “if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it.”

[Read: The everyday warfare of voting in America]

Most Americans already know what they think about Trump. As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who was once a Trump critic and now supports him, put it rather cynically on CNN this week, “With a guy like [Trump], it’s kinda baked into the vote.” Sure, Trump referring to his critics as “the enemy from within” is despicable. So is Trump’s statement as president, reported by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, that he wished he had generals like Hitler’s. But voters have been hearing stories about Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and norm violations for years, and the polls still show an impossibly tight race. Almost four years after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol—and amid his four indictments and felony conviction—Trump’s favorability rating is higher now than at any time during his presidency.

After Cheney and the former Trump staffers finished speaking onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs, the audience responded with sustained applause, and the attendees I interviewed for feedback shook their heads in wonder. “It’s just amazing. I was impressed by these young women,” Ann Marie Nasek, a lawyer from Glenside, Pennsylvania, told me. It’s so difficult to understand the other side, she explained—why her neighbors and family members, who are, by all accounts, good and decent people, still support Trump, despite everything. “I wish this whole room was filled with Republicans,” she said, looking around.

On Tuesday, seven days before Election Day, Harris will deliver a speech from the Ellipse, the park behind the South Lawn of the White House where four years ago Trump rallied his supporters before they descended on the Capitol. Harris’s intention is obvious: conjure the dark imagery of the day that a defeated American president attempted to cling to power, just as voters make their final deliberations. Less clear is whether enough of those voters care.

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Over the past three months, Elon Musk has mobilized his many resources—his exceptional wealth, far-reaching online platform, and time—for a cause that could have profound effects on his personal fortune and American society: electing Donald Trump.

Musk is going all in: In addition to donating $75 million to America PAC, a group he founded that backs Trump, he has also temporarily relocated to the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania to effectively run Trump’s get-out-the-vote strategy from a war room he set up in Pittsburgh. He has stumped on the trail, hosting a Trump town hall in the auditorium of a Pennsylvania high school last week and telling locals to go “hog wild” on voter registration. And, in his latest stunt, he has offered $1 million a day to registered voters in swing states who sign an America PAC petition backing the First and Second Amendments—a move that the Justice Department reportedly said might be breaking election laws. His efforts may prove consequential: As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote this past weekend, “If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.”

Musk is far from the only major donor in this race. Bill Gates has reportedly given $50 million to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and various billionaires publicly support Harris or Trump. What distinguishes Musk though, beyond his on-the-ground efforts, is his ownership of X. He can spread information (and disinformation) with ease, and stifle views he doesn’t like, Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, told me in an email. Media owners have always been influential in American politics (Rupert Murdoch, for example, played a prominent role in past elections through his leadership of Fox News). But Rosenfeld noted that Musk’s particular combination of wealth and media control is “unprecedented.”

Musk’s audience is massive on X: His posts, many of which have amplified false and inflammatory rhetoric, get billions of views. Over the weekend he boosted the baseless claim that Michigan had more registered voters than eligible citizens. After Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said that wasn’t true—and that Musk was spreading “dangerous disinformation”—Musk doubled down and accused her of lying to the public. This disinformation had a swift real-world impact: Benson told CBS that her team received harassing messages and threats after Musk’s post. Such rhetoric has the potential to warp how much voters trust election processes. Musk’s America PAC has also been urging people to report examples of “voter fraud” through what it calls the Election Integrity Community on X. Though such fraud remains exceptionally rare, his efforts could further sow distrust in election integrity and lay the groundwork for future claims of a stolen race. (America PAC did not immediately respond to my request for comment.) So prominent is Musk’s role in the MAGA movement that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joked archly at a recent rally: “I’m going to talk about [Trump’s] running mate …. Elon Musk.”

Musk wasn’t always aligned, at least in public, with such zealotry. He reportedly said that Trump was a “stone-cold loser” in 2020, and he supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Still, as my colleague Charlie Warzel told me last month, Musk’s feelings of being aggrieved and attacked escalated when he faced pushback from liberals after his Twitter takeover; soon after, he began using X as a megaphone for MAGA. And, though his Trump endorsement seemed out of step with his long-standing image as a climate innovator, it is consistent with his rightward drift: Over the past few years, he has reportedly been quietly donating to Republican causes and candidates, including giving $10 million to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last year for his ill-fated primary run.

The wealthy have long played an outsize role in politics—but Musk, as he so often does, is venturing to new extremes. If Trump wins, Musk’s gamble may pay off handsomely: In addition to a promised role in Trump’s government, he is poised to receive epic government contracts for his companies. But even if Trump doesn’t win, Musk could set a precedent for uber-rich donors getting more directly involved with political campaigns; that could intensify the “oligarchic side of modern American democracy,” Rosenfeld warned. Though Musk’s hands-on, incendiary campaigning methods are chaotic—and possibly illegal—his efforts during this election may pioneer a model for other megadonors looking to reshape a race.

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What Elon Musk really wants Elon Musk has reached a new low.

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Ratpocalypse Now

By Annie Lowrey

Has any man in history talked about “how much he hates rats” more than New York City Mayor Eric Adams? Adams himself posed that question at the city’s inaugural National Urban Rat Summit last month. “Let’s figure out how we unify against public enemy number one: Mickey and his crew.”

Mickey is, canonically, a mouse. But Adams’s campaign against the city’s endemic brown-rat population might be the most effective and highest-profile initiative of his scandal-ridden mayoralty.

Read the full article.

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Under normal circumstances, you would not expect a crowd of regular Americans—even those engaged enough to go to a political rally—to recognize an assistant secretary of health and human services. But the crowd at Donald Trump’s appearance earlier this month at the Santander Arena, in Reading, Pennsylvania, started booing as soon as Rachel Levine’s image appeared on the Jumbotron.

That’s because Levine is the highest-profile transgender official in the Biden administration, and she has become a public face of the American left’s support for medical gender transition by minors. Having heard the Reading crowd’s ugly, full-throated reaction to Levine’s mere image, I understand why the prospect of a second Trump term might alarm transgender Americans—or the parents of gender-nonconforming children. I also more clearly understand Trump’s strategy: to rile up voters over positions that he thinks the Democrats won’t dare defend.

Back in 2016, the Republican presidential nominee portrayed himself as a moderate on trans rights, saying that Caitlyn Jenner was welcome to use whatever bathroom she wanted to at Trump Tower. But Trump’s rhetoric has become steadily more inflammatory, and his positions have hardened. Many commentators have nevertheless been surprised by the ferocity of Republican attacks on this issue. In 2022, the party’s efforts to exploit trans-rights controversies for electoral gain repelled more voters than they attracted, and recent polling in three swing states shows that more than half of respondents agreed that “society should accept transgender people as having the gender they identify with.”

[Read: The slop candidate]

Yet polls have also detected considerable public skepticism on three specific points: gender-related medical interventions for minors, the incarceration of trans women in women’s jails, and trans women’s participation in female sports. In Pennsylvania, one attack ad is on repeat throughout prime-time television. It ends: “Kamala’s for they/them; President Trump is for you.” The Republicans have spent $17 million on ads like this, according to NPR. “Republicans see an issue that can break through, especially with Trump voters who’ve been supporting Democratic candidates for Senate,” Semafor’s Dave Weigel wrote recently.

Trump has always used his audiences as an editor, refining his talking points based on the raw feedback of boos and cheers. At the rally in Reading, the image of Levine—pictured in the admiral’s uniform she wears as head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps—was part of a montage dedicated to condemning what Trump called the “woke military.” This video juxtaposed clips from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—meant to represent good old-fashioned military discipline—with more recent footage of drag queens lip-synching to Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam.” Never mind that Full Metal Jacket is an anti-war film showing how sustained brutalization corrodes the soul.

This video is part of Republicans’ larger argument that their opponents are big-city elitists who have attempted to change the culture by imposing radical policies from above and then refused to defend them when challenged—and instead called anyone who disagreed a bigot. Many on the left see transgender acceptance as the next frontier of the civil-rights movement and favor far-reaching efforts to uproot discrimination. Yet activists and their supporters have waved away genuinely complex questions: Some claim, despite the available evidence from most sports, that biological males have no athletic advantage over females—perhaps because this is an easier argument to make than saying that the inclusion of trans women should outweigh any question of fairness to their competitors.

Others default to the idea that underage medical transition is “lifesaving” and therefore cannot be questioned—even though systematic evidence reviews by several European countries found a dearth of good research to support that assertion. According to emails unsealed earlier this year in an Alabama court case, Levine successfully urged the influential World Professional Association for Transgender Health to eliminate minimum-age guidelines for gender-transition hormones and surgeries.

The Republicans are using trans issues as a symbol of “wokeness” more generally—what conservatives paint as a rejection of common sense, and as a top-down imposition of alienating values by fiat. In right-wing online echo chambers, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is known as “Tampon Tim” for signing a state law calling for menstrual products to be placed in both girls’ and boys’ bathrooms. Throughout the speeches in Trump’s Reading event, talk of “men playing in women’s sports” and an exhortation to “keep men out of women’s sports” reliably drew the biggest cheers of the night. (Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for Senate, brought up the issue, as did Trump himself.) The former president’s 90-minute speech had an extended riff on underage transition—and how schools might avoid telling parents about their child’s shifting gender. “How about this—pushing transgender ideology onto minor children?” Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”

Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed. In the presidential debate, many commentators laughed at the bizarre phrasing of Trump’s claim that Kamala Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” But the charge was basically true: While running for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Harris replied “Yes” to an ACLU questionnaire that asked her if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”

This year, Harris has mostly avoided such issues. She has tacitly moved her position from the left toward the center without explaining the shift or answering whether she believes she was previously wrong—a microcosm of her campaign in general.

As with abortion, a compromise position on gender exists that would satisfy a plurality of voters. Essentially: Let people live however makes them happy, but be cautious about medicalizing children and insist on fair competition in female sports. But Harris has been unwilling or unable to articulate it, and candidates in downballot races have followed her lead. You can see why: Even as polls suggest that many voters are more hesitant than the median Democratic activist, any backsliding by candidates from the progressive line alienates influential LGBTQ groups. In Texas, the Democrat candidate for Senate, Colin Allred, has faced such a barrage of ads about female sports from the Ted Cruz campaign that he cut his own spot in response. “Let me be clear; I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports,” Allred says in the clip. The LGBTQ publication The Advocate wrote this up as him having “embraced far-right language around gender identity.”

[Read: The improbable coalition that is Harris’s best hope]

Like Allred, the Harris campaign has realized, belatedly, that silence is hurting the candidate’s cause. When the vice president was interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News last week, she made sure to raise a New York Times story about how the Trump administration had also offered taxpayer-funded gender medicine in prisons. “I will follow the law,” Harris said. “And it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed.”

Is that enough to neutralize the attacks? Seems unlikely: The Republican ads have not disappeared from the airwaves, because they bolster the party’s broader theme that Harris is more radical than she pretends to be. Which is the real Kamala Harris—the tough prosecutor of the 2010s or the ultraprogressive candidate of 2019 and 2020?

Presumably her campaign believes that every day spent talking about gender medicine for teens is one not spent discussing Trump’s mental fitness or disdain for democratic norms. In the absence of her articulating a compromise position, however, the Republicans are defining the contours of the debate in ways that could prove fateful—for Harris, for trans people, and for the country as a whole.