Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, a raft of self-help books and articles appeared, written by students of post-Soviet society. Drawing on lessons gleaned from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, these authors sought to supply Americans with a manual for thwarting Trumpism. In The New York Review of Books, Masha Gessen published an essay titled “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” The Yale historian Timothy Snyder churned out a best-selling pamphlet, On Tyranny, a step-by-step guide to resistance.

The core lesson these writers hoped to impart was the necessity of sustained outrage. “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock,” Gessen instructed. Without outrage, they warned, apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the forest.

Those warnings were stirring, and they helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump. Those who embraced this style, and their critics who facetiously mocked it, began referring to the “Resistance.” Although the Resistance harbored grifters and occasionally flirted with conspiracy theories, it also worked at the time. Pressure from the Resistance bolstered institutions, especially segments of the media and the Democratic Party, that might have plausibly buckled as Trump attempted to impose his will. And it supplied the electoral energy that helped the Democrats win at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020.

In the closing weeks of this election, I can’t help but recall the very different mood that prevailed four years ago. Back then, many journalists acted as if the prospect of a second Trump term was a national emergency, necessitating unrelenting negative coverage of the incumbent. Voting was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Even if Joe Biden provoked little affection, his campaign felt to his supporters like the culmination of a liberation movement.

On the cusp of Trump’s potential return to power, the Resistance now feels like a relic of another era. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, is not what it once was. Pollsters privately suspect that this election will have lower turnout than the last. Organizers canvassing for Vice President Kamala Harris say that they encounter widespread indifference among progressive voters, especially the young. Segments of the elite that once proudly opposed Trump have made peace with him.

At a certain point, some humans, even the richest and most powerful, simply give up. The most graphic illustration of this is Jeff Bezos. In the years after he bought The Washington Post, the Amazon founder seemed to bathe in the praise that his paper received for its coverage of Trump. He paid for glossy Super Bowl ads, blaring the paper’s new motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” By financing journalistic resistance to Trump, he whitewashed his own growing reputation as a rapacious monopolist. He became a darling of the Washington elite and a heroic figure in some journalistic circles. But he also suffered Trump’s lashings and retaliatory threats against his business.

Two presidential elections later, Bezos has made a different choice. Last week, he vetoed a Post editorial endorsing Harris, just before its publication. After 11 years of owning the paper, he broke with tradition and suddenly decided that the Post should no longer put its weight behind a presidential candidate. He later supplied a high-minded justification for his meddling, which mostly blamed journalists rather than autocrats for widespread mistrust of the media, but it wasn’t hard to interpret the psychology at play. In his mind, and for the sake of his balance sheet, resistance is no longer worth it.

[Read: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

Outrage is a transient emotional state, almost impossible to sustain over the years, because it’s so draining, both physically and emotionally. (Gessen and Snyder warned about that, too.) And Trump has a special talent for provoking exhaustion, because he’s such an all-consuming figure, with a unique ability to spike his critics’ blood pressure and populate their nightmares.

Another reason outrage has faded is that Biden won the last election. He campaigned on the promise of returning the nation to normal, and so the establishment reset itself to neutral. The belief that the nation had escaped Trump gained purchase in much of traditional media, especially after the January 6 attack. The Trump era resulted in a break from the profession’s norms; it demanded an uncharacteristic spirit of partisanship and emotionalism. But with Biden’s arrival in the White House, a broad swath of media attempted to restore its impartiality, to reclaim whatever authority it might have sacrificed in its combat with Trump.

Having reverted back to their old ways, many outlets were somehow caught unprepared for Donald Trump’s return. They have been painfully slow to describe the even more autocratic version of the man who has emerged in this campaign, who is running on far more explicit pronouncements of his authoritarian intentions. It’s hard to quantify the tilt of news coverage—and easy to overstate its influence. But there’s a pet phrase that recurs in news stories that captures the inability to grasp the danger: The press likes to describe Trump’s “old grievances,” which implies that he’s merely playing back his greatest hits, more of the same old anger. But that downplays the novelty of Trump’s promise to unleash the military on “enemies within.” Or the fact that, as my colleague Anne Applebaum has noted, his rhetoric has come to resemble that of Hitler and Mussolini. On the merits, this warning should crowd out every other story in the campaign.

Hardly a sector of society is immune from the onset of apathy. It exists within the business elite, embodied by Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, who can’t be bothered to publicly announce their private opposition to Trump, perhaps because it might somehow cost them. It exists within the segment of the left that has decadently announced that it can’t stomach voting for Harris because she hasn’t been sufficiently outraged by the war in Gaza, as if democracy at home wasn’t hanging in the balance.

I’ll admit, shamefacedly, that I feel a measure of apathy myself. The prospect of a second Trump term is a nightmare that I’d rather not ponder, a fear that I’d rather repress. If I didn’t have a professional obligation to obsess over this election, I would be hiding in escapist entertainment. But that would just be a less destructive version of Bezos’s selfishness.

In this final stretch of the campaign, there are glimmers of outrage. According to NPR, 200,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions to protest Bezos’s decision. In the long run, that boycott might self-destructively imperil an essential institution. In the short run, it’s evidence that a meaningful portion of the electorate is unwilling to sleepwalk into a second Trump term, a hopeful indication that the cloud of apathy might, however belatedly, be lifting.

There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.

It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the same thing about the previous world-record holder, a 2,702-pound beast grown in Italy in 2021, or the world-record holder before that, a Belgian 2,624-pounder in 2016. Each year around this time, giant pumpkins across the globe are forklifted into pickup trucks and transported to competitions where they break new records.

Michael Jordan set the record at California’s Half Moon Bay Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, considered the Super Bowl of North American pumpkin-growing. The first winner of the competition, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. In 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. “At that time, we thought, Gee whiz, can we push these things any farther?” Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that establishes global standards for competition, told me. Yet in just another decade, the record passed the 2,000-pound mark. “We’ve zoomed past that now,” Travis Gienger, the grower from Minnesota who cultivated Michael Jordan, told me. For champion growers, there’s only one thing to do next: try to break 3,000.

Last year, Michael Jordan weighed in at a world-record 2,749 pounds. (Alex Washburn / AP)

Giant pumpkins aren’t quite supersize versions of what you find in the grocery store. All competitive pumpkins are Curcubita maxima, the largest species of squash—which, in the wild, can grow to 200 pounds, about 10 times heavier than the common Halloween pumpkin. But decades of selective breeding—crossing only the largest plants—has created colossal varieties.

Virtually all of today’s champions trace their lineage to Dill’s Atlantic Giant, a variety bred in the 1970s by a Canadian grower named Howard Dill. Very competitive growers source their seeds from one another, through seed exchanges and auctions, where a single seed can be sold for thousands of dollars, Michael Estadt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Extension who has cultivated giant pumpkins, told me. Seeds from Gienger’s champions are in high demand, yet even he is constantly aiming to improve the genetics of his line. “I’m looking for heavy,” he said.

Yet even a pumpkin with a prize-winning pedigree won’t reach its full size unless it’s managed well. Like babies, they require immense upkeep, even before they are born. Months before planting, at least 1,000 square feet of soil per pumpkin must be fertilized and weeded. Once seedlings are planted, they have to be watered daily for their entire growing period, roughly four months. No mere garden hose can do the trick; each plant needs at least one inch of water a week, which allows the pumpkin to gain up to 70 pounds in a single day. The fruit and leaves must also be inspected at least once daily for pests and disease—no small feat as their surface area balloons. Quickly spotting and excising the eggs of an insect called the squash-vine borer, then bandaging the wounded vine, is paramount. One day, you might have a great pumpkin, “then boom, the next day, all of the vine is completely dead,” says Julie Weisenhorn, a horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota who has grown giant pumpkins—named Seymour (744 pounds) and Audrey (592 pounds).

Growers can keep pushing the pumpkin weight limit by ensuring that a plant isn’t pollinated by a variety that has subpar genes. To do so, they hand-pollinate, painstakingly dusting pollen from a plant’s male flowers into the female ones. This usually leads the plant to bear three or four fruit, but only the most promising is allowed to survive. The rest are killed off in an attempt to direct all of the plant’s resources toward a single giant. In the same vein, wayward vines are nipped, and emerging roots thrust deep into the ground, in hopes of harnessing every last nutrient for the potential champion.

Still, some factors are beyond anyone’s control. The weather can literally make or break a pumpkin. Too much rain can cause a pumpkin to grow too quickly, cracking open its flesh, which would disqualify it from competition. Too much sunlight hardens the flesh, making it prone to fractures. It’s not uncommon for giant pumpkins to have custom-built personal sunshades. North America’s giant-pumpkin capitals—Half Moon Bay, Nova Scotia, and Minnesota—have nature on their side, with low humidity and nighttime temperatures. Cooler nights mean less respiration, which means less wasted energy.

Yet nature bests even the world’s champions. This year, Gienger couldn’t break the record he set with Michael Jordan; he blames cold and wet weather, which made it harder to feed micronutrients to his pumpkin, Rudy. (At 2,471 pounds, it still won the Half Moon Bay competition.) And no matter how big a pumpkin grows, it needs to pack a few extra pounds for the road: Once they’re cut from the vine, they rapidly lose their weight in water. A pumpkin can drop roughly 10 pounds in a single day.

All of the experts I spoke with believe that 3,000 pounds is within reach. “It’s still an upward trend,” said Grande, who noted that a 2,907-pounder has already been recorded, albeit a damaged one. Pumpkin genetics are continually improving; more 2,000-pounders have been grown in the past year than ever before, according to Grande. Growers are constantly developing new practices. Each year, the Great Pumpkin Conference holds an international summit for growers and scientists to trade techniques (last year’s was in Belgium, and this year’s will be in the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field). Shifting goals have precipitated new (and expensive) methods: Carbon dioxide and gibberellic acid are being used as growth stimulants; some pumpkins are fully grown in greenhouses.

The reason that giant-pumpkin weights increased 20-fold in half a century is the same reason that runners keep running faster marathons, that skyscrapers keep clawing at the sky, and that people spend so much on anti-aging. To push nature’s limits is a reliably exhilarating endeavor; to be the one to succeed is a point of pride. Food companies, in particular, build their entire businesses on developing the biggest and best. Wild strawberries are the size of a nickel, but domesticated ones are as huge as Ping-Pong balls. Industrial breeding turned the scrawny, two-and-a-half-pound chickens of the 1920s into today’s six-pounders. There’s still room for them to grow: Strawberries can get as big as a saucer, and the heaviest chicken on record was a 22-pounder named Weirdo. But foods sold commercially are subject to other constraints on growth, such as transportation, storage, processing, and customer preference. Unusually big foods are associated with less flavor, and their size can be off-putting. When it comes to food, there is such a thing as too big.

Giant pumpkins, by contrast, have a singular purpose: to become as heavy as possible. They don’t have to be beautiful, taste good, or withstand transport, because they are not food. When companies develop boundary-pushing crops and animals, that tends to be an isolationist enterprise, shrouded in secrecy. But in the giant-pumpkin community, there is less incentive to guard seeds and techniques. Most competitions are low-stakes local affairs, and nobody ever became rich off giant pumpkins, not even Howard Dill.

Breaking records is largely seen as a communal effort. “The secret to our success is that we are a sharing community,” Grande said. In a few contests, the investment is worth it—the Half Moon Bay prize for world-record-breakers is $30,000—but “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Estadt told me. People do it, he said, “for the thrill of the win.”

All of the pumpkin experts I spoke with acknowledged that there must be a limit. But nobody has any idea what it is. Four thousand pounds, 5,000—as far as growers can tell, these are as feasible as any other goal. Every milestone they reach marks another human achievement, another triumph over nature. But even the most majestic of pumpkins inevitably meets the same fate: devoured by livestock, and returned to the earth.

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