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

Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.

It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character. And for what?

Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.  

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

[Read: Elon Musk has reached a new low]

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

There are three major components to this tool. The first is that X exposes its users to right-wing political content frequently, whether they want it or not. To test this theory, I recently created a new X account, which required me to answer a few onboarding questions to build my feed: I told X that I was interested in news about technology, gaming, sports, and culture. The first account the site prompted me to follow was Musk’s, but I opted instead to follow only ESPN. Still, when I opened the app, it defaulted me to the “For You” feed, which surfaces content from accounts outside the ones a user follows. A Musk post was the first thing I encountered, followed quickly by a post from Donald Trump and another from an account called @MJTruthUltra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower: “Vote, arm yourself, Stock up 3-4 Months Supply of Food and Water, and Pray.” After that was a post from a MAGA influencer accusing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of “censoring patriots,” followed by posts from Libs of TikTok (a video from a school-board meeting about girls’ bathrooms), MAGA influencers Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec, and Dom Lucre, a right-wing personality who was once banned from the platform for sharing an explicit image of a child being tortured.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

X is also experimenting with other algorithmic ways to surface rumors and discredited election news. The platform recently launched a new AI-powered “stories for you” feature, which curates trending topics without human review and highlights them prominently to selected users. NBC News found five examples of this feature sharing election-fraud theories, including debunked claims about voting machines and fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona.

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk's right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

The third and final element of X’s bullshit engine is Musk himself, who has become the platform’s loudest amplifier of specious voter-fraud claims. Bloomberg recently analyzed more than 53,000 of Musk’s posts and found that he has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic, garnering roughly 10 billion views. Musk’s mask-off MAGA boosterism has also empowered other reactionaries with big accounts to shitpost in his image. When they do, Musk will frequently repost or reply to their accounts, boosting their visibility. Here’s a representative example: On October 23, the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire posted that he’d heard a rumor from a senator about more ballots being mailed out in California than the number of legal voters. “Can anyone confirm or deny this?” he asked his more than 166,000 followers on X. Musk replied to the post, noting, “I’m hearing one crazy story after another.”

[Read: Elon Musk says he would recognize a Harris election victory]

On this point, I believe Musk. The billionaire is inundated with wild election speculation because he is addicted to the rumormongering machine that he helped design. This is the strategy at work, the very reason the volume of alarming-seeming anecdotes about a stolen election work so well. Not only are there too many false claims to conceivably debunk, but the scale of the misleading information gives people the perception that there is simply too much evidence out there for it all to be made up. Musk, whether he believes it or not, can claim that he is “hearing one crazy story after another” and coax his bespoke echo chamber to proffer evidence.

X’s current political project is clear: Musk, his PAC, and his legion of acolytes are creating the conditions necessary to claim that the 2024 election is stolen, should Kamala Harris be declared the winner. But the effects of that effort are far more pernicious. If you spend enough time scrolling through the Election Integrity Community feed and its unending carousel of fraud allegations, it isn’t hard to begin to see the world through the paranoid lens that X offers to millions of its users. It is disorienting and dismaying to have to bushwhack through the dense terrain of lies and do the mental calisthenics of trying to fact-check hundreds of people crying nefarious about things they haven’t even bothered to research. Worse yet, it’s easy to see how somebody might simply give in, beaten into submission by the scale of it all. In this way, even though X is Musk’s project, it may actually be built in the image of the MAGA candidate himself. A $44 billion monument to Trump’s greatest (and only real) trick, as he put it in a 2021 speech: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.”

Is Donald Trump well enough to serve as president?

The question is not temperamental or philosophical fitness—he made clear long ago that the answer to both is no—but something more fundamental.

The election is in three weeks, and Pennsylvania is a must-win state for both Trump and Kamala Harris, but during a rally last night in Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, Trump got bored with the event, billed as a “town hall,” and just played music for almost 40 minutes, scowling, smirking, and swaying onstage. Trump is no stranger to surreal moments, yet this was one of the oddest of his political career.

“You’re the one who fights for them,” gushed Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and animal-abuse enthusiast, who was supposed to be moderating the event. But it soon became evident that Trump wasn’t in a fighting mode. The event began normally enough, at least by Trump standards, but, after two interruptions for apparent medical emergencies in the audience, Trump lost interest. “Let’s just listen to music. Who the hell wants to hear questions?” he said.

[David A. Graham: Has anyone noticed that Trump is really old?]

He eventually pivoted for good to a playlist of his favorite songs: “Hallelujah,” “Rich Men North of Richmond,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Elvis’s rendition of “Dixie.” At one point, he asked his staff to play Pavarotti and display the immigration chart that he was about to discuss when an assassin tried to kill him this summer.

To watch the event is to see signs of someone having a breakdown. Like Joe Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump in June, when the president’s fumbling performance and struggle to get sentences out made it impossible to believe he was up to the task of serving for four years, Trump’s rally last night would force any reasonable person to conclude that he is not up to the grueling task of leading the world’s greatest nation, handling economic crises, or dealing with foreign adversaries.

Which isn’t to say that some people didn’t try to reason through it. Reporters still seem unsure of how to deal with Trump’s stranger behaviors. Journalists are trained to take information and make sense of it, even amid chaos. The problem is that doing so conjures logic where none exists.

Here’s how The New York Times described the night: “Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned—and, it appeared, for himself—to just listen to music instead.” ABC News: “Former President Donald Trump’s town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on Monday evening was interrupted twice by medical emergencies in a very warm Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and Fairgrounds before he cut the program short.” NBC News: “Former President Donald Trump turned a town hall event … into an impromptu listening party Monday night, playing an unlikely selection of tunes for more than 30 minutes after the event was paused for medical emergencies.” The Associated Press: “Donald Trump’s town hall in the Philadelphia suburbs turned into an impromptu concert Monday after the former president was twice interrupted by medical emergencies in the room.”

Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, was blunter. “Hope he’s okay,” she posted on X. Her reaction is self-interested, but she’s right that he really may not be okay. A presidential race is exhausting for even a young and vigorous person, which Trump, 78, is not. He has campaigned far less this time around than he did in his prior two runs. In the past few weeks, as the election has neared, he has ramped up his time on the trail, and the wear is showing. His rallies have been so scattershot and rambling that even major outlets that long shied away from questions about Trump’s fitness have had no choice but to address them. In the wee hours of the morning yesterday, he used Truth Social to demand that Harris take a cognitive test. He’s lacing into his own donors at private events. He has been blocked from his usual outlet of playing golf because of security concerns after two assassination attempts.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s West Point stumbles aren’t the problem]

Reporters have noticed Trump’s supporters leaving rallies early in recent weeks, yet many people hung around as Trump bobbed on the stage and said nothing last night. In a way, the moment seemed to distill a 2024 Trump rally down to its essence. No one is there to hear policy ideas. Trump has transgressed so far, for so long, that he can barely shock anymore. Kristi Noem isn’t a big draw. Instead, people come to say they saw Trump. At one point, he announced that he’d play “YMCA” and then the event would end, but attendees stayed, so Trump just kept rolling. The event wrapped up only around the time that an aide brought Trump a note during “November Rain.”

As horrifying as it all was, no one expects to see a reaction like the concerted push for change that followed Biden’s debate collapse. It’s too late in the campaign to switch candidates, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. Democrats forced Biden out, even though they like him, because they want to win. But Republican officeholders are terrified of Trump, because rank-and-file Republican voters worship him in an entirely different way—something demonstrated by them hanging around for his DJ set and Noem’s obsequious “sir”s all night. “Total lovefest at the PA townhall!” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson, posted on X. “Everyone was so excited they were fainting so @realDonaldTrump turned to music. Nobody wanted to leave and wanted to hear more songs from the famous DJT Spotify playlist!” Somewhere, Baghdad Bob was blushing.

But Trump’s musical selections sometimes reveal more than his words or his aides do. During the 2016 campaign, his choice of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as exit music seemed like a pointed message to his political adversaries and the nation. Last night, he might have been sending a pointed message to himself, with the help of an Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman hit: “It’s time to say goodbye.”

A curious set of claims has recently emerged from the right-wing corners of the social-media platform X: FEMA is systematically abandoning Trump-supporting Hurricane Helene victims; Democrats (and perhaps Jewish people) are manipulating the weather; Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio. These stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on X carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost—and offers considerable political gain.

Unverified claims that spread from person to person, filling the voids where uncertainty reigns, are as old as human communication itself. Some of the juiciest rumors inspire outrage and contradict official accounts—and from time to time, such a claim turns out to be true. Sharing a rumor is a form of community participation, a way of signaling solidarity with friends, ostracizing some out-group, or both. Political rumors are particularly well suited to the current incarnation of X, a platform that evolved from a place for real-time news and conversations into a gladiatorial arena for partisan fights, owned by a reflexive contrarian with a distaste for media, institutions, and most authority figures.

[Read: November will be worse]

When Elon Musk bought the platform, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he argued that it had become too quick to censor heterodox and conservative ideas. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he said in April 2022, shortly after initiating his purchase, “which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” But Musk quickly broomed out most of the Trust and Safety team that addressed false and misleading content, along with spam, foreign bots, and other problems. As Musk has drifted to the right—his profile picture now features him in a MAGA hat—the platform he rebranded as X has become the center of a right-wing political culture built upon a fantastical rumor mill. Although false and misleading ideas also spread on Facebook, Telegram, and Trump’s own platform, Truth Social, they move faster and get more views on X—and are likelier to find their way into mainstream political discussion.

Many political rumors on social media begin when people share something they supposedly heard from an indirect acquaintance: The false narrative about pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield started when one woman posted to a Facebook group that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost their cat and had seen Haitians in a house nearby carving it up to eat. Others picked up the story and started posting about it. Another woman shared a screenshot of the Springfield post on X, to bolster her own previous claim that ducks were disappearing from local parks.

Unbound by geography, online rumors can spread very far, very fast; if they gain enough traction, they may trend, drawing still more participants into the discussion. The X post received more than 900,000 views within a few days. Others amplified the story, expressing alarm about Haitian immigrants. No substantive evidence of the wild claims ever emerged.

[Juliette Kayyem: The fog of disaster is getting worse]

Rumors alleging that FEMA was abandoning Trump voters after Helene followed the same pattern: Friend-of-a-friend posts claimed that FEMA was treating Trump supporters unfairly. These claims became entangled in misinformation about what kinds of financial recovery resources the government would provide, and to whom. Claims about abandonment or incompetence were sometimes enhanced by AI-generated images of purported victims designed to tug on the heartstrings, such as a viral picture of a nonexistent child and puppy supposedly adrift in floodwaters. The image spread rapidly on X because it resonated with people who are suspicious of the government—and people who share misleading content rather than question it.

The amplification of emotionally manipulative chatter is a familiar issue on social media. What’s more disconcerting is that Republican political elites—with Musk now among them—are openly legitimizing what the X rumor mill churns out when it serves their objectives. X’s owner has claimed that FEMA is “actively blocking citizens” who are trying to help flood victims in North Carolina, and that it “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives.” J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, elevated rumors of pet-eating Haitians to national attention on social media for days; Donald Trump did the same in a presidential debate. Influential public figures and political elites—people who, especially in times of crisis, should be acting as voices of reason—are using baseless, often paranoid allegations for partisan advantage.

History shows that the weaponization of rumors can lead to devastating consequences—scapegoating individuals, inciting violence, deepening societal divisions, sparking moral panics, and even justifying atrocities. Yet online rumormongering has immense value to right-wing propagandists. In the 2020 election, Trump and his political allies set the narrative frame from the top: Massive fraud was occurring, Trump claimed, and the election would be stolen from him. The supposed proof came later, in the form of countless online rumors. I and other researchers who watched election-related narratives unfold observed the same pattern again and again: Trump’s true believers offered up evidence to support what they’d been told was true. They’d heard that impersonators were using other people’s maiden names to vote. A friend of a friend’s ballot wasn’t read because they’d used a Sharpie marker. These unfounded claims were amplified by influencers and went viral, even as Twitter tried to moderate them—primarily by labeling and sometimes downranking them. None of them turned out to be true. Even so, today, 30 percent of the public and 70 percent of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. This simmering sense of injustice is powerful—it spurred violence on January 6, 2021—and continues to foster unrest.

In Ohio recently, claims about supposed Haitian pet-eaters led to dozens of bomb threats, according to state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has attempted to correct the record. Local Republican business leaders who praised their Haitian workers received death threats for their troubles. Similarly, fire chiefs and local Republican elected officials pushed back on Helene rumors after FEMA workers were threatened.  

What of left-wing rumors? They exist, of course. After the assassination attempts on Trump, some commentators insinuated that they were “false flag” attacks—in other words, that his camp had staged the incidents to gain public sympathy for him. But mainstream media called out left-wing conspiracism and fact-checked the rumors. The people expressing them were overwhelmingly censured, not encouraged, by fellow influencers and elites on their side of the political spectrum.

In contrast, when social-media companies stepped in to address false claims of voter fraud in 2020, the political influencers who most frequently spread them clamored for retribution, and their allies delivered. Representative Jim Jordan, one of the House’s most powerful Republicans, convened a congressional subcommittee that cast efforts to fact-check and label misleading posts as “censorship.” (Full disclosure: I was one of the panel’s targets.)

Conservatives have reframed fact-checking as a censorship technique by “woke” tech companies and biased journalists. Musk abandoned the practice in favor of Community Notes—which, in theory, allow fellow users to add their own fact-checks and context to any post on the platform. Musk once described Community Notes as a “game changer for combating wrong information”—he understood, correctly, that opening up the fact-checking process to many different voices could better enable consensus about what the truth is. But Community Notes cannot keep up with the rumors roiling X. Notes are absent from some of the most outrageous claims about pet-eating migrants or FEMA malfeasance, which have millions of views. Even as Musk himself has become one of the most prominent boosters of political rumors, Community Notes on Musk’s own tweets have a way of disappearing.

[Listen: Autocrats win by capturing the courts]

Musk’s original vision for Twitter may have been just to nudge the platform a bit to the right—toward a more libertarian approach that would bolster it as a free-speech platform while preserving it as the best place to go for breaking news. Instead, figuring out what’s really happening is harder and harder, while X is becoming ever more useful as a place for powerful people to source outrageous material for political propaganda.

Many people across the political spectrum are still on X, of course. The platform has a reported 570 million monthly users, on average. However much Musk’s changes annoyed people on the center and the left, network effects have kept many of them on the platform; those who don’t want to lose friends or followers are likely to keep posting. Yet the market is providing alternative options. Bluesky and Mastodon absorbed some of the extremely online left-leaning users who got fed up first. Threads, an offshoot of Instagram, quickly followed; although the others are still small, Threads has more than 200 million monthly active users. People have other places to go. So do advertisers.

Still, today’s emerging alternative platforms are not a replacement for the Twitter of the late 2010s; real-time news is harder to find, and communities on each of the new entrants have gripes about curation and moderation.

Users who miss the golden age of Twitter still have the option of counterspeech—trying to push back against rumors with good information, and hoping that X’s algorithm will lift it. The question is whether doing so is worth the potential personal cost: Why spend time refuting rumors if your efforts are likely to go largely unseen or bring the wrath of an (unmoderated) mob?

Without a concerted push to defend truth—by leaders, institutions, and the public—the rumor mill will continue to churn, and its distortions will become the foundation of an irreparably divided political landscape. As Hurricane Milton roared across Florida, social-media users were fantasizing, absurdly, about government control of tropical cyclones and making death threats against weather forecasters. Whether Milton-related conspiracy theories will enter the national political discussion isn’t yet clear. But the broad cycle of rumors and threats is becoming depressingly familiar.

Rumors have always circulated, but the decision by Republican politicians and Musk to exploit them has created a problem that’s genuinely new. In the modern right-wing propaganda landscape, where facts are recast as subjective and any authority outside MAGA is deemed illegitimate, eroding trust in institutions is not an unfortunate side effect—it is the goal. And for now, the result is a niche political reality wherein elites on the right, including the world’s richest man, amplify baseless claims without legitimate pushback.

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

[Read: November will be worse]

Some of the lies and obfuscation are politically motivated, such as the claim that FEMA is offering only $750 in total to hurricane victims who have lost their home. (In reality, FEMA offers $750 as immediate “Serious Needs Assistance” to help people get basic supplies such as food and water.) Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Fox News have all repeated that lie. Trump also posted (and later deleted) on Truth Social that FEMA money was given to undocumented migrants, which is untrue. Elon Musk, who owns X, claimed—without evidence—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”

The result of this fearmongering is what you might expect. Angry, embittered citizens have been harassing government officials in North Carolina, as well as FEMA employees. According to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an extremism-research group, “Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government,” including “calls to send militias to face down FEMA.” The study also found that 30 percent of the X posts analyzed by ISD “contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the FEMA Director of Public Affairs; and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.” The posts received a collective 17.1 million views as of October 7.

Online, first responders are pleading with residents, asking for their help to combat the flood of lies and conspiracy theories. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said that the volume of misinformation could hamper relief efforts. “If it creates so much fear that my staff doesn’t want to go out in the field, then we’re not going to be in a position where we can help people,” she said in a news conference on Tuesday. In Pensacola, Florida, Assistant Fire Chief Bradley Boone vented his frustrations on Facebook ahead of Milton’s arrival: “I’m trying to rescue my community,” he said in a livestream. “I ain’t got time. I ain’t got time to chase down every Facebook rumor … We’ve been through enough.”

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.

This has all been building for more than a decade. On The Colbert Report, back in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness, which he defined as “the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support.” This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. But the misinformation crisis is not always what we think it is.

[Read: Florida’s risky bet]

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

In one sense, these attacks—and their increased desperation—make sense. The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era, one that will reverberate to Election Day and beyond. Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.

These days, you can easily find vapes in flavors that include “Lush Ice,” “Blueberry Banana,” “Mango Lychee,” “Hot Fudge,” and “Fcuking Fab” (whatever that is). No matter which one you choose, it’s almost certainly illegal. The tiny battery-powered devices that produce a mist of nicotine when you inhale, first popularized by Juul, are not outright banned—at least not for adults—but only a few flavored vapes have gotten the FDA authorization required before they hit the market. That hasn’t stopped hundreds of shadowy companies, many based abroad, from effectively hawking contraband. Vapes are sold to Americans online for as little as $5, and are well-stocked in convenience stores, smoke shops, and even vending machines.

With such little oversight, it’s no wonder that about 1.6 million American kids are regularly vaping, leading to panic that they are getting duped into a lifetime of nicotine addiction. The FDA has levied fines, filed lawsuits, and even seized products to keep vapes off of shelves, and the agency has pledged a major escalation in its efforts. Politicians across the political spectrum, including Senators Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer, have advocated for a vaping crackdown. But not Donald Trump.

In 2020, Trump abruptly abandoned a plan to ban flavored vapes, much to the chagrin of public-health officials. Late last month, Trump posted on Truth Social that, if elected, he would “save Vaping again!” The former president may be a deeply flawed messenger, and the vaping industry hardly deserves any sympathy. Many of these companies flagrantly violate the law and overtly market to kids. Even so, Trump has a point. Vapes—as a replacement for cigarettes, anyway—are actually worth saving.

Trump said in that Truth Social post that vapes have “greatly helped people get off smoking.” It’s easy to dismiss that as spin. After all, he had received a personal visit from the head of the vaping industry’s lobbying group that same day. However, vapes are indeed a revelation for the 28 million adults in the United States who smoke cigarettes. They work as well, or even better, than all of the conventional products designed to help wean people off of cigarettes.

Gum, lozenges, and patches simply deliver nicotine, the addictive chemical that keeps smokers smoking, in a safer way. These so-called nicotine-replacement therapies don’t contain any of the harmful ingredients in tobacco products such as cigarettes. Whenever you might feel an itch to smoke, you can instead use one of these replacements to satiate your craving.

But nicotine-replacement therapies don’t work well. Less than 20 percent of people who try to quit smoking using these therapies in clinical trials are actually successful; one study found they aren’t any better than attempting to quit cold turkey. That’s because, for smokers, nicotine gums and lozenges never deliver anything close to the euphoric feelings of puffing on a cigarette. Your average cigarette is just tobacco leaves wrapped in paper with a filter on the end, but it is exquisitely efficient at delivering nicotine to the body. When burned, tobacco creates nicotine particles that hit receptors in the brain within 10 to 20 seconds. Nicotine-replacement therapies deliver nicotine much more slowly—from minutes to several hours—because the drug is absorbed by the mouth or through the skin.

But you know what can get close to the experience of smoking? Vapes. They generate an aerosol that can reach deep into the lungs, allowing nicotine to hit the bloodstream at a speed that is “almost identical” to cigarettes, Maciej Goniewicz, an expert on nicotine pharmacology at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, told me. Part of what makes vapes so effective is that they look and work like cigarettes. “People who are addicted to smoking are not just physiologically addicted to the nicotine; they’re also behaviorally addicted to the process of smoking,” Ken Warner, an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Michigan, told me.

Vapes even hold their own against the one conventional treatment that’s more effective than the traditional gums and patches: a prescription drug called Chantix. Instead of replacing the nicotine in cigarettes, it blocks the pleasurable effects of nicotine on the brain. According to a recent clinical trial, roughly 40 percent of some 400 people given a vape or Chantix successfully quit smoking after six months. Vaping may be an easier transition for smokers: Chantix isn’t widely used, in large part because of its side effects, which include nausea and vivid dreams. It certainly doesn’t hurt that huffing on a “Fcuking Fab”–flavored gadget can also just be fun. That vapes come in so many flavors is often the reason people start vaping in the first place. It’s not that different from alcohol: Many drinkers would prefer a vodka cranberry over a shot of Tito’s.

Just like how it’s not just heavy drinkers who enjoy a vodka cranberry, the same is true of flavored vapes. The attractiveness of flavors is also why kids gravitate toward them, as do adults who have never smoked. Because kids overwhelmingly use flavors, banning them seems like an easy way to reduce vape use. But if public health is about managing trade-offs, the benefits of vapes seem to outweigh the negatives. Although no kids should be vaping, abusing these products is not deadly like cigarettes are. Amid rising public awareness about the dangers of youth vaping, even FDA’s top tobacco official has acknowledged publicly that youth vaping is no longer the epidemic it was a few years ago.

But there are other caveats to consider when it comes to the anti-smoking potential of vapes. They are regulated as consumer products and not medicines, so they have not gone through the same rigorous approval process that every other anti-smoking drug has gone through. We still don’t know alot about how effective vapes might be to help people quit smoking, or how often smokers need to use them to successfully quit. Because vapes are still relatively new, no one can say definitively that they do not carry some long-term risks we do not know yet. The current Wild West of vapes also adds to the potential pitfalls. Vapes also contain known carcinogens, likely because of the chemicals in e-liquids being heated to high temperatures. Some likely carry higher risks than others because of how little standardization there is in the chemicals used.

All of these risks have made public-health groups understandably reluctant to embrace their use. The FDA acknowledges that vapes are safer than cigarettes, though they do not endorse them as an anti-smoking treatment. Should the agency get its way, the majority of flavored vapes will eventually be off of store shelves. The head of the FDA’s tobacco center has said that “nothing is off the table.”

No matter who wins in November, some of the FDA’s decisions are likely out of the next president’s control: The agency’s decisions on which vapes to green-light doesn’t rest with the commander in chief or the FDA commissioner; rather, they are governed by FDA scientists who are following a legal standard. Still, having a president who embraces vaping could go a long way. Surveys show that a sizable proportion of smokers mistakenly think vapes are more dangerous than cigarettes. That likely keeps many smokers from trying them.

Kamala Harris has not weighed in on vaping since becoming the Democratic nominee. (Her campaign declined to comment on her position. And any single-issue vaping voters out there might do well to reconsider their priorities before voting for Trump.) His stance isn’t exactly academically rigorous, nor is it adequately nuanced. But if Trump acknowledges the benefits of vaping while also condemning the lawlessness of much of the current vaping industry, he could help legitimize a product that has been shunned by most of the medical establishment. For now, few reputable companies are willing to invest in making their own vapes, and few doctors are going to recommend them to patients.

This all might sound like public-health sacrilege. But given that the overwhelming majority of smokers who try to quit each year fail, “anything that we can add to the tool kit as a way that could help people transition away from smoking is something that is worth exploring,” Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has studied anti-smoking drugs, told me. You might cringe at the thought of anyone putting something called “Fcuking Fab” into their lungs, but consider that cigarettes still kill nearly 500,000 Americans each year. Vapes are deeply flawed. Unfortunately, so are the alternatives.

Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”

Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats. All of the above? Whoever they are, Greene appeared to be saying, they sent a hurricane roaring toward Trump country.

The claim may be laughable, but Greene wasn’t trying to be funny. Donald Trump and his allies, including Greene, are working hard to politicize the weather—to harness Helene and soon-to-make-landfall Milton as a kind of October surprise against the Democrats before next month’s election. Such false claims have real-world implications, not least impeding recovery efforts. But they also offer a foretaste of the grievance-fueled disinformation mayhem that we’ll see on and after Election Day. In what will almost certainly be another nail-biter of an election—decided once again by tens of thousands of votes in a few states—conspiracy-mongering about the validity of the results could lead to very real political unrest.

Over the next few weeks, “we’re going to see this disinformation get worse,” Graham Brookie, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council, an international-affairs think tank, told me. “We’re going to be coming back to this again and again and again.”

While Greene was making her strange foray into cloud-seeding and weather modification last week, Trump was spreading his own set of more terrestrial lies. At a rally in Georgia, the GOP nominee claimed that the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, couldn’t reach Joe Biden, even though Kemp had spoken with the president about relief efforts the day before. On Truth Social, Trump falsely alleged that government officials in hurricane-battered North Carolina were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” Later, Trump repeatedly accused Vice President Kamala Harris of spending FEMA money on “illegal migrants.” (She didn’t; FEMA administers a program that helps state and local governments house migrants, but those resources are separate from disaster-relief funds.) Over the weekend, Trump argued that Americans who lost their homes in Helene were receiving only $750 from FEMA—in fact, that amount is just emergency aid for essentials; survivors can apply for up to $42,500 in additional assistance.

Online, rumors swirled. Right-wing activists shared texts from unnamed acquaintances in unidentified places complaining about the government response. Elon Musk, a recent convert to the Church of Trump, told his 200 million followers on X that FEMA had been “ferrying illegals” into the country instead of “saving American lives.” Later, when he accused the Federal Aviation Administration of blocking aid to parts of North Carolina, Musk was talked down by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who apparently assured him in a phone call that this was not happening.

The practical effect of these falsehoods is that local officials have to spend precious time and energy combatting misinformation, rather than recovery efforts. FEMA’s response has, inevitably, aroused frustrations about delays and bureaucracy, but the intensity of this hurricane season is creating unprecedented challenges. And the propagation of lies could demoralize people in affected areas, “reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA” for help, one agency official said earlier this week. Government officials have spent the past week engaged in the crisis-comms operation of a lifetime: FEMA has a dedicated webpage for debunking rumors being spread by the leader of the Republican Party and his allies; the state of North Carolina does, too. And at least one GOP member of Congress has broken ranks to send out a press release clarifying that, in fact, “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.”

The problem is that their efforts aren’t making much of an impact, Nina Jankowicz, the author of How to Lose the Information War, told me. “That is in part because we have seen the complete kind of buy-in from the Republican Party establishment into these falsehoods.” Hurricane Milton, currently a Category 4 storm, will hit Florida’s west coast tonight, and already the same Helene-style conspiracy theories have begun to circulate. “WEATHER MODIFICATION WEAPONIZED AGAINST POLITICAL OPPONENTS,” one Trump-aligned account with 155,000 followers wrote on X: “It’s being done to protect pedophiles and child traffickers from prosecution and so much more.” A self-described “decentralized tech maverick” is telling Floridians that FEMA won’t let them return to their homes if they evacuate. (The post, which received 1.1 million views, is a lie.)

[Read: Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading]

Rumor and distortion typically abound during and after storms, mass shootings, and other “crisis-information environments,” as the academic parlance labels them. And elections, especially ones with narrow margins, have very similar dynamics, Brookie, from the Atlantic Council, told me. “There’s a lot of new information, high levels of engagement, and a lot of really sustained focus on every single update.”

The 2024 election may not be called on November 5 and could easily remain unresolved for a few days afterward. In that fuzzy interregnum, a very familiar series of events could unfold. Just replace Trump’s hurricane-related conspiracy theories with some wild allegation about Sharpies at polling sites or secret bins full of uncounted ballots. Instead of being blamed for hogging FEMA resources, undocumented immigrants will be accused of voting en masse. It’s easy to imagine, because we already saw it play out in 2020: the suitcases of ballots and a burst pipe, the tainted Dominion voting machines, the hordes of zombie voters. The MAGA loyalists in Congress and the pro-Trump media ecosystem will amplify these claims. Musk, never one to stay calm on the sidelines, will leap into the fray with his proprietary algorithm-boosted commentary.

Local election officials will try to clear things up, but it could be too late. Millions of Americans across the country, primed to distrust government and institutions, will be sure that something sinister has taken place.

The hurricanes’ aftermath will already have created new opportunities for conspiracy-mongers, even before the election. After Helene, the North Carolina Elections Board passed emergency measures that will allow some voters to request and receive absentee ballots up until the day before the election. Depending on the damage caused by Milton, Florida may make some of its own election changes. “That will clearly come under attack,” Elaine Kamarck, a co-author of Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation, told me. As we saw with procedural changes made to accommodate voters during the coronavirus pandemic, “change in the voting process can always be used to make people paranoid.”

Right now, Americans in the Southeast are preparing to weather a very dangerous storm. This time next month, all of us will be facing a storm of a different kind.

Have you ever watched a crowd go wild for a PowerPoint slide? After a few introductory hellos yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gestured to a screen showing the same graph on illegal immigration that he had been talking about when he was nearly assassinated in July and delivered his real opening line: “As I was saying …”

The audience loved that. The rallygoers had waited in line for hours in the hot sun to get into the field, and this was their reward. They had made it through warm-up speeches by J. D. Vance, Lara Trump, and Scott Presler, the last of these being the founder of Gays for Trump and the March Against Sharia, who promised any Amish people watching that Trump would “protect your raw milk … protect your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.” (One of the wonders of the MAGA movement is how it absorbs other political positions—in this case, crunchiness and pro-natalism—into one seamless mythology.) After that came the crowd’s moment to rejoice in the defeat of, as Trump put it, “a cold-blooded assassin [who] aimed to silence me and silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country.” An opera singer even performed “Ave Maria.”

Famously, the Gettysburg address was just 271 words long. Trump’s speech went on for 90 minutes. The contrast between the bits of the speech he read from the teleprompters, which covered “hallowed places” and monuments to valor, and the ad-libbed sections, which featured digressions about potholes and the Olympic boxing controversy, was stark. How can we say that America has an attention-span “crisis” when people are volunteering to listen to this stuff?

[Charlie Warzel: Elon Musk has reached a new low]

The real highlight of the show, however, was when the former president brought Elon Musk onstage. The billionaire had been posting excitedly all day about his endorsement of the former president—yes, a man who prides himself, Cartman-like, on refusing to cede to any outside authority was positively giddy about the chance to publicly swear fealty to Trump.

Musk used to claim that he was a disappointed Democrat, and that he wanted X to reflect the breadth of American opinion. “​​For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he posted in April 2022, as he was in the middle of buying it. Three months later, he argued that Trump was too old to run for president again: “It’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

The former president took that about as well as you would expect. “When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” he posted on Truth Social in July 2022.

Musk did not drop to his knees and beg in Butler, but he didn’t have to—he has already made his MAGA loyalism very clear on X. Yesterday he capered behind Trump. Honestly, credit to his 53-year-old knees for being so limber. He gamboled. He frolicked, frisky as a spring lamb, fertile as a spawning salmon, executing a series of small jumps behind the ex-president and exposing a few inches of pallid stomach as his OCCUPY MARS T-shirt rode up. “He saved free speech,” said Trump, who nonetheless looked slightly alarmed at Musk’s exuberance. “He created so many different great things.”

Musk took the mic and gestured to his MAGA hat—black on black instead of the usual white on red. “As you can see,” he told the crowd, “I’m not just MAGA. I’m dark MAGA.”

Earlier in the proceedings, Vance had painted Trump as the victim of inflammatory rhetoric rather than one of its main proponents. Musk now tried a similar Uno reverse card, arguing that Trump was the only candidate who could be trusted “to preserve the Constitution, to preserve democracy in America.” He showed no awareness that Trump, as the latest court filings suggest, tried to intimidate his vice president out of certifying the 2020 election results and then reacted with callous indifference when a mob threatened Mike Pence’s life as a result. (“So what?” Trump is alleged to have said.) In between repeatedly apologizing for repeating himself, Musk also managed to say that if Trump did not win, “this’ll be the last election. That’s my prediction.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: A legendary American photograph]

After Musk took his seat again, Trump lavished more praise on the billionaire. He had no idea what the satellite network Starlink was, he said, but he had heard from those affected by Hurricane Helene that they wanted it, and he had called Musk. Just like that—while the two men were still on the phone—Starlink was on its way to North Carolina and Georgia. This was the purest essence of strongman politics, implying that anything can be solved by the right guy talking to the right other guy. No holdups, no bureaucracy, no need even for the leader to understand what’s going on. Just simple problems and simple solutions.

At this, the crowd started to chant: “Elon! Elon! Elon!”

This was probably the reception that Musk had hoped for when he bought Twitter. He didn’t find it then, of course: Many of his best engineers have quit, foreign judges have ruled against him, advertisers have deserted him, and prominent people have left the platform. No matter. In Butler, Pennsylvania, was the adoration Musk seems to crave. He must believe that Trump will let him do whatever he wants—including, as the ex-president put it, “reach Mars before the end of my term.” And why not? That wasn’t the most ludicrous thing uttered onstage in Butler.

The pact between Musk and Trump gives both men something they want—a megaphone for their ideas, a conduit to their fans, an ability to shape the political conversation. Yesterday was supposed to be a celebration of the former president’s miraculous survival and a tribute to the brave Americans who risked their lives to help others in the shooting. Instead it marked an unpredictable alliance between the world’s richest man and the politician who has successfully bullied and flattered him into bending the knee.