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Last month, Donald Trump appointed the venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as his senior AI-policy adviser. Krishnan, an Indian immigrant and U.S. citizen, was seen by some as being friendly to H-1B visas, which are often used in Silicon Valley to allow skilled laborers to work in the tech industry. This sent part of the MAGA faction into a frenzy, spurred by troll in chief Laura Loomer, who declared the appointment a betrayal of the “America First” movement.

The argument over H-1Bs exposes an important fissure in the MAGA alliance that worked together to help elect Trump. How Trump navigates this rift will give us clues about what his real priorities will be as president.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Ali Breland, who writes about the internet, technology, and politics, about this new rift in Trump’s camp and other places it might show up. And we’ll go beyond the politics, with staff writer Rogé Karma, to discuss what a solid body of research shows about the relationship between immigrant labor and the American worker—because even though some prominent Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders, agree with Loomer that there is a negative effect from H-1B visas on American workers, research doesn’t back them up.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There are already cracks starting to show in the MAGA alliance, and those cracks happen to show up in the issue that Trump has declared one of his top priorities, which is drastically reshaping U.S. immigration policy. Trump appointed to a senior position someone seen as being friendly to H-1B visas, the visas that allow people with specialized skills to work in the U.S. People in Silicon Valley love these visas. They depend on them. And maybe more importantly, the H-1B visa lovers include Elon Musk.

But the “America First” wing of Trump supporters—sometimes known as the nativist right—they do not love these visas. “America First,” to them, means, literally, Americans first. No exceptions.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. On today’s show, we’ll talk about this MAGA infighting. In the second half of the show, we’ll get into what’s actually true about the relationship between immigration and the American worker, because it turns out that even a lot of Democrats don’t get that one right. But first, let’s dive into the recent news and what it means. To help me with that is Ali Breland, an Atlantic staff writer who writes about the internet, politics, and technology.

Hey, Ali.

Ali Breland: Hey. Thank you for having me.

Rosin: So, Ali, this fracture in the MAGA alliance seemed to start around Christmas, when Trump announced a senior AI-policy adviser. Who is he, and how did people respond?

Breland: Yeah, his name is Sriram Krishnan. He’s this Silicon Valley figure who has a long history. He works in tech, and he was being appointed to be an adviser on Trump’s AI team, which is being headed up by another big guy in tech: David Sacks, who’s a part of the infamous “PayPal Mafia” that includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etcetera.

Rosin: So these are, like—this is a faction. Like, these guys are becoming more and more powerful, sort of Trump’s tech allies.

Breland: Yeah, there’s some different ideological things happening, but for the most part, they’re largely on the same page. And a lot of people right now are kind of calling them the “new tech right,” or just, like, the “tech right.”

Rosin: So they’re on one side, and then how did the discussion around H-1B visas get going?

Breland: Yeah, so there’s this provocateur troll in Trump World called Laura Loomer. She’s been kind of this weird thing on the right for a long time. She’s chained herself to the headquarters of Twitter in protest of her account being banned at one point. But she sees this appointment, and she decides to make hay of it.

She pulls out a tweet that Krishnan made about country caps for green cards, rather, and high-skilled immigration. And she points to these things and says, This is not what we want. This is not “America First.” These things are not good for our constituency. And so that’s, like, the sort of obvious bit of it.

The other bit, too, is you can kind of see how race is this animating issue in this fight. David Sacks had already been appointed by Trump to be his chief adviser on issues of AI and crypto. David Sacks has talked about H-1B visas. He’s pushed Trump on this. He’s successfully gotten Trump to say that he would support the continued use of H-1B visas.

But Loomer didn’t attack him on that and didn’t turn this into a huge issue. Instead, she went after Sriram Krishnan, who is South Asian. And I think, you know, her targeting him, specifically, on this issue and associating him with that kind of speaks to the sort of nativist sentiment undergirding all of this.

Kind of right after the election, I sort of thought that maybe there was a chance that there was going to be some sort of fractious element at some point in the future, because these are two sides that kind of believe sort of different things.

The tech right is reactionary, like the nativist right that includes people like Laura Loomer, people like Steve Bannon. They sort of all have this streak of being frustrated with the progress that’s taken place in America. They are frustrated with what they see as, like, American weakness. But the distinction is that the tech right also loves business. They love being rich. They love making a lot of money and having their industry be benefitted.

The sort of nativist right cares much more about the American constituency and, specifically, the white American constituency—and benefitting what they see as, like, the natural order of whiteness and the average American, and things that some people in the tech right kind of care about but prioritize less than their own companies and less than their own industry.

Rosin: It’s really complicated because they both have ideas like, There’s an optimum society; there’s a right way that things should be. And then they’re slightly different. So what is each side’s ideal “America made great again” look like?

Breland: Yeah, I think it on the sort of nativist right, the ideal America is this place that prioritizes—with some exceptions, more so now—but fundamentally, it’s this white, sort of very classic, conventional, conservative vision for what the United States is. It’s this, like, return fantasy to a version of the 1950s America that prioritizes white American interests above other people—again, with exceptions. There’s—you know, these people would all say that they’re not racist, that they’re just meritocratic, or things like that.

The tech right is more agnostic to those kinds of things. People like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel kind of, to some degree, see value in that. But they only see value as far as that doesn’t get in the way of their vision for creating this sort of all-star team of Americans that can sort of dominate the global stage in technology and dominate economically.

And so they’re willing to go to look to other countries to bring people in; to try to, like, get the best talent, according to them; to try to solve the toughest engineering problems; and to do things like beat China, which is something that they’re all very obsessed with.

Rosin: So they’re less concerned about where people come from. I mean, what makes it especially complicated and charged that this came up so soon is that it came up in immigration. Trump has made controlling immigration one of his top priorities. How did Trump himself end up weighing in on this?

Breland: After a few days of silence—perhaps because this was happening literally over Christmas and the days after—Trump did say that he does support H-1B visas. And he seemed to kind of take Elon’s side on this.

I wasn’t super surprised, because on an episode of the All-In Podcast—which is a sort of who’s who of the tech right; it includes David Sacks—Trump was pressed on the H-1B visa issue, and he did say, Yeah, I support it; I’m down for this. This was in the summer. And so it was consistent for him to come back up with this. And the other thing it’s sort of consistent with, in a sort of more general, patterny kind of way, is that in the past, when there is sort of tension between his sort of more nationalist, nativist base versus the wealthier interests that are in his coalition—not always, but—he often tends to go with the sort of interests of the wealthy, the people who have given him the most amount of money, people who he probably respects because he has a great deal of respect for people who have built wealth.

And so it wasn’t super surprising to see him break that way, especially because it seems like his larger immigration priority is not regarding H-1Bs, and he seems more flexible on that. His larger immigration priority is people who, as he would say, came here illegally and are not quote-unquote “high-skilled workers.”

And so on the sort of issue of mass deportation, this doesn’t signal that he’s, like, going to break from that at all. He’s talked a lot, very aggressively, about conducting mass deportations and quote-unquote “securing the southern border.” And they talk about the southern border, specifically, because they’re talking about a different kind of immigrant, and they have a different set of priorities when it comes to people coming across the southern border.

Rosin: Interesting. So then, maybe, the thing to explore is the nativist right, not just Laura Loomer. Laura Loomer is, you know, a little more on the fringes. But what about someone like Stephen Miller, who will be Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and who is credited with shaping a lot of the more draconian immigration policies in the last administration. He has solid power in this administration. Have we heard from him or someone closer to power about what they think about H-1B visas?

Breland: Miller hasn’t weighed in directly on this specific moment and this specific issue. He sort of gave a cryptic tweet that signaled that he is still anti-H-1B.

But he’s been very consistent on this in the past, and there’s no reason to believe that he would change, as someone who is, like, motivated primarily by this sort of nativist perspective that is, again, sort of galvanized by racial animus and, in many cases, just outright racism. I don’t think he’ll change his perspective, and he’s going to fight on this, and so there’s going to be weird tension moving forward.

Elon seemed to—I don’t want to say he walked back from this position, but, like, after a few days of fighting, he did seem to try to want to soften the blows and sort of extend an olive branch. People in sort of fairly influential but niche figures in this sort of nationalist, reactionary wing of the party also tried to sort of smooth over the tension and make it seem like there was common cause being found. And so they have an interest among themselves in trying to come together and paint themselves as a united front and sort of reach a consensus on this.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, it’s still early. He hasn’t even taken office yet. But could you imagine a universe where, then, it just moves forward, and we quietly make an exception for elite workers and do mass deportations for everyone else? Like, is that where immigration policy could land?

Breland: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that—from my perspective and the things I pay attention to—that seems exactly the direction it’s going to go in.

The tech right is aware of the mass deportations [but] has not really talked out against them. Elon Musk has tweeted acknowledging them and sees them as an inevitability that he doesn’t seem to have a clear problem with. That could change when we sort of get, like, harrowing images of ICE conducting raids and things like that, but right now, that’s the track that we’re on.

Rosin: So if what you said is true, and if the past history holds, he is going to make an exception for elite immigrant workers. What does that imply about how he might handle other economic issues?

Breland: Yeah, if we extrapolate this out, which we can—both from this example but then, also, from how 2016 through 2020 went—Trump is probably going to side, I guess, with more of the wealthier faction, which includes the tech right, which includes people in his coalition, who are people like the hedge-fund manager Scott Bessent, who also sort of have this prioritization of more, like, economically laissez-faire issues. They have this sort of more traditional, conservative perspective on economics. And that’s something that’s going to run into tension with what the nationalists want. They want this sort of economic nationalist perspective that is a departure from this hyper-free-market sort of way of viewing the world that’s been the dominant conservative perspective for the past several decades.

Rosin: So essentially, this rift that you pointed out in the MAGA world—between, you know, Is he going to take the side of the elites, or is he going to take the side of all the workers? even if that means the nativist right—that’s a rift you can track kind of up and down various issues for the next many years, just to see, Okay, whose side does he take on a lot of these issues?

Breland: Exactly. Yeah. AI and automation is going to be a really big one in this area, too, because the tech right obviously cares a lot about AI and automation. They’re very pro-AI and automation. They see this as, like, an existential issue in the United States versus China, and that the U.S. must—to continue its being, like, the most important country in the world—that must beat China on this.

But a lot of the sort of more nationalist right doesn’t agree with this. They see this as a different kind of issue. Tucker Carlson, who I think kind of squarely falls in this nativist camp and is one of its most influential members, has outright said that he opposes—not necessarily the development of AI and automation but—its implementation and use.

He’s talked directly about never using AI for, like, things like driverless trucks. But Elon at Tesla is directly making self-driving trucks. And so yeah, there’s a lot of weird places where these sort of fractures are going to play out.

Rosin: And Tucker Carlson takes that issue because it’s a betrayal of the American worker.

Breland: Precisely.

Rosin: Interesting. So this is, actually, the central fissure of the Trump administration, basically?

Breland: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like that. I do want to say that this is kind of a unique issue, in that it draws in race, which is a very big thing, and it draws in immigration. And so it might get a uniquely high amount of attention. But there’s still going to be versions of this fight that might not play out as aggressively that are going to happen over the next four years.

Rosin: Well, Ali, thank you for pointing out this line to us. We’ll be watching it for the next four years, and thank you for joining me.

Breland: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Rosin: After the break, we explore what’s behind the politics. Trump and his allies made the argument often in the campaign that immigrants take away jobs from Americans. It’s an argument that, on the surface, has some intuitive logic. But it actually doesn’t work like that. More soon.

[Break]

Rosin: Joining me is Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma, who mainly covers economics. Rogé, welcome to the show.

Rogé Karma: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So an early rift broke out in the Trump administration over H-1B visas, which we’ve been discussing on this show, with the nativist right saying what people say about all kinds of immigration: These immigrants take jobs away from American workers. So what do we know about the relationship between H-1B visa holders and the American worker?

Karma: Well, luckily, the H-1B program allocates workers randomly to companies based on a lottery. And that allows researchers to study what actually happens to the companies that did get workers, as opposed to the companies that didn’t.

And I agree with you. I think there’s a real sort of “man on the street” argument. There’s a sort of view that there’s a fixed pool of jobs, and so any immigrant that we bring in is going to take away a job that would otherwise go to an American. But when researchers have looked at this, the overwhelming majority of the studies have actually found no negative impact on either employment or wages, which I think at first sounds a little bit counterintuitive.

But the reason is a few fold. One: Companies who get H-1B workers actually end up growing and scaling up faster than the companies who don’t. And then because of that, they have to then hire a bunch of more native-born workers around that immigrant. The second reason is innovation.

One of my favorite statistics comes from Jeremy Neufeld, who’s a fellow at the Institute for Progress. And he pointed out that 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. startups belong to immigrants. Now, not all of those are H-1B holders, but there’s a lot of evidence that the companies who are awarded H-1B visas—they produce more patents, more new products, get more VC funding, and all of that actually creates jobs. So on the whole, I actually don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for this broader nativist claim about this program.

Rosin: Let’s make this a little more concrete. So let’s just play out a theoretical company. Here’s a theoretical company, hires H-1B visa holders. How does it work? Like, innovation is a vague word. How does it actually play out?

Karma: I think what’s important to remember here is that getting one of these H-1B visas is actually pretty difficult. And so the idea that a company is going to be able to systematically bring in foreign workers to replace their native ones using this program—it’s just really hard to do because there’s such a low chance they’re even going to get those workers in the first place. And so a lot of times when companies use this program, what they’re doing is they’re looking for a very important skill set.

So let’s use semiconductors as an example. This is an industry, when it comes to the manufacturing of semiconductors, that U.S. companies haven’t really done for a while. A lot of the most advanced chips are made in places like Taiwan, and so a lot of the best talent is abroad. And so if you’re a U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, the industry in the U.S. estimates that even if we had the best job-training programs possible, that would only fill about 50 percent of the high-skilled demand for the labor force in this field.

And so you need to bring in folks who have this highly specialized knowledge, probably because they’ve worked in other countries. But then, what that allows you to do, once you have a subset of foreign-born workers who can do this sort of specialized manufacturing—what you then have is people to come in and support around them. And then because a company has that need met, they’re able to then hire a bunch of other workers to fill other needs that they have but that don’t require that same kind of specialized knowledge.

And on the other flip side is that we actually have some studies that look at: What happens to the companies that don’t get H-1B visas? What happens to those companies? Do they hire more native workers? Do they invest in more job training? And it turns out that they don’t. In fact, they end up often just either (A) producing less or growing less quickly, or (B)—and this is a finding of a lot of the recent literature—they end up outsourcing the jobs instead. And so instead of bringing in this new worker and then hiring more native workers around them, they just say, Well, look, we have an office in China, or we have an office in Singapore, or we have an office in Hong Kong or India. Let’s just hire more there because we’re not going to be able to get the talent that we need here.

There are a handful of outlier studies, but I think, right now, the broad consensus in the field is that the H-1B program, even for all its flaws, doesn’t seem to have these negative employment or wage effects.

Rosin: So that’s what the research shows. It’s fairly definitive until now, and yet even some Democrats have repeated the line, The H-1B visas take away American jobs—for example, Bernie Sanders. What do you make of that?

Karma: Well, I think where Bernie’s coming from—and I think where a lot of Democrats are coming from and, quite frankly, some Republicans—is that there are two things that are true here at once. The first thing that’s true is that we don’t find these huge negative effects from the H-1B program. And the second thing that’s also true is that, despite that, the H-1B program has a lot of flaws, a lot of loopholes that companies have learned how to game.

So one of these is that a significant portion of H-1B visas are used by so-called outsourcing firms, which are these companies that basically bring in foreign workers. They train them here, and then, when their H-1B visa expires, they employ them in their home countries for a fraction of the cost. And so they’re functionally using the H-1B visa to train workers here and then employ them at lower labor costs elsewhere.

That’s just bad, on the face of it. The fact that we still don’t see negative effects, overall, is really telling, but we should fix that loophole by, among other things, raising the minimum wage for H-1B visa holders, making the program merit-based instead of random—like, you can more closely regulate how companies use those workers.

So I think part of what Bernie Sanders is getting at, part of what some of these critiques are getting at, is that this program does have a lot of flaws that allow corporations to game it. And it’s actually kind of shocking that, despite all these flaws, it still hasn’t produced these horribly negative results.

But imagine how much better it could be if we fix them. So I really think that this might be a place where you see the sort of messy realities of immigration politics running up against what, really, people all across the political spectrum agree is a pretty common-sense set of reforms. But that doesn’t always mean it makes good politics.

Rosin: Right. Right. Okay. So we’ve been talking exclusively about the H-1B visas because they came up in the news, but the whole of Trump’s promise is not specifically about H-1B visas at all; it’s a promise of mass deportation and immigrant labor, in general. I know that you’ve been looking into the research about the relationship between immigrant labor and the American worker. What did you find?

Karma: Well, I went into this because I kept hearing Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller make these kind of claims that sound kind of intuitive—that when immigrants come in, they take jobs from natives, right? There’s a sort of Econ 101 logic, which says that when the supply of any good goes up, including labor, the price of that good, like wages, goes down.

And so I kept hearing these arguments and thinking, Well, maybe there’s something to this, and so let’s actually look at what is happening. And it turns out that the sort of Trump-Vance view was pretty much the conventional wisdom for most of the 20th century, both among policymakers and economists, until a study came along that sort of shattered the consensus.

And so to tell you about the study, I’m gonna go back a little bit. So in 1980, Fidel Castro, the president of Cuba, opened up emigration from his country. He lifted the ban on emigration. And what that allowed is for 125,000 Cubans to leave from Mariel Harbor to Miami, Florida, an event that ended up becoming known as the Mariel Boatlift. And in just a few short months, Miami’s workforce expands by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands every year because of immigration. And this created the perfect conditions for what economists call a “natural experiment.” It was like this big, massive shock that only happened to Miami.

And so what the economist David Card later realized is that you could compare what happened to workers in Miami to workers in other cities that had not experienced the boatlift, track how wages did in both, and then see what actually happened. And his view was, Look—if there is a negative effect of immigration on wages, Miami in the 1980s is exactly where it should show up. It’s this big, unprecedented shock. That makes what he ended up finding so shocking, because he ends up finding that this huge influx of immigrants has virtually no effect on both employment or wages of native-born workers in Miami, including those without a college degree.

Rosin: And why? I mean, it seems counterintuitive.

Karma: It seems completely counterintuitive. There are a few reasons, but I think the big one—and the big thing that the common-sense view of immigration misses—is that immigrants aren’t just workers. They’re also consumers. You know, they’re people who buy things, like healthcare and housing and groceries. And so at the same time that they’re, you know, competing with Americans for jobs, they’re also buying lots of things that then increase the need for more jobs.

And I think this sounds counterintuitive, but we think about it in other contexts all the time, right? When’s the last time you heard a Republican politician railing against the upcoming group of high-school graduates because they were about to come in and compete with, you know, people currently in the workforce?

You probably haven’t, because we understand that population growth has these two sides to it: that people are consumers who create demand for jobs and workers who take jobs. And so I think that’s the gist of the problem with the conventional view.

Rosin: So that was a singular study. Has that held up over time?

Karma: It has. And so after that study, it got a lot of researchers interested, and this has now been studied in countries all over the world, from Israel to Denmark to Portugal to France, and almost all of the high-quality studies come back with very similar results.

I think the one complication in all of this—the one challenge—has been, Well, what about the least-skilled workers? What about: Okay, maybe on average, immigrants don’t hurt the employment prospects or the wages of native-born workers, but what about the least-skilled workers? What about high-school dropouts, folks without a high-school diploma? And a lot of the more recent literature has shown that even that group doesn’t suffer when immigrants come in.

And so I think the broad consensus in the literature now is that immigration does have costs. It can exacerbate inequality. Tellingly, the wages of other immigrants often get hurt by new immigration. You could see some negative effects in certain sectors, even if it’s balanced out by other sectors, but on the whole, it appears to be really beneficial for basically all classes of native workers.

Rosin: So at this point, there’s a large body of research saying the arrival of immigrants—even sudden arrival of immigrants—doesn’t have a great effect on the American worker, may even have a positive effect. Now, what about the disappearance of immigrant labor? Because Trump’s promise is mass deportations. I’m not sure if you can just flip, you know, the findings of this research. Like, is there a similar natural experiment or study that shows how that might affect workers or the economy?

Karma: There is, actually. And I think the claim from Trump and his advisers is that the ultimate pro-worker policy is mass deportation, right? Because what happens when you get rid of a bunch of immigrant laborers is now those employers have to hire natives at higher wages, because there’s a sort of artificially created labor shortage.

Rosin: Right.

Karma: And again, very intuitive. But when we actually look at what happens in the real world, we see something very different. So the best study on this, I think—although there’s a few—is from the Secure Communities program, which is a Department of Homeland Security program that between 2008 and 2014 deported about 500,000 immigrants. And because the program was rolled out community by community, it created this really nice natural experiment where you could see what happened to the communities that had experienced it and the ones [that] hadn’t.

You could compare them and see what the overall effect [was]. And what researchers found, actually, shocked me—it shocked many of them—was that for every hundred immigrants that were deported, you actually ended up with nine fewer jobs for natives. That’s not just temporary work. That’s, like, nine jobs permanently gone in this community.

And there are many studies that reinforce this finding from all across history, from the Bracero program, studies on the H-2B program—which is like H-1B, but for lower-skilled immigrants—studies going all the way back to the Great Depression that all find similar things.

And the reason is that immigrants are deeply interwoven into their local economies. And so take the restaurant industry. If you’re a restaurant owner, and suddenly you lose a big chunk of your workforce, to the point where you either have to have higher labor costs and at the same time you have less demand, there’s a good chance you have to go out of business altogether. And when you go out of business, that doesn’t just hurt the immigrants who are working for you. That also hurts the native-born workers.

And so there are all these sort of synchronicities, all of these interconnections, that allow immigration to have this positive sum effect. But then as soon as you—if you rip out the immigrants, then native workers often get caught in the crossfire.

Rosin: Yeah. So if the research is so consistent—so strong—and makes a lot of sense, if you think about it a tiny bit more deeply, why do you think this sentiment persists? Is it just a feeling, you know? Because it persists on both the right and the left. It’s not as if the left is fighting back. They don’t necessarily advocate mass deportations, but they are also not fighting back against this idea that immigrants take away American jobs.

Karma: I think part of the fixation on the economics of immigration is a way for many people like us—elites, people in the media—to try to find a more materialist explanation for a set of instincts that I think many of us are uncomfortable with. And I think that is actually kind of a tragedy.

I think if people oppose immigration or feel strongly about immigration because of certain cultural beliefs or concerns about national identity, it’s important to take those concerns seriously. And I think it’s actually a problem, and even a bit patronizing, that we tend to project these sort of more wonky economic concerns onto that.

Rosin: Yeah. I had a conversation with Representative Ritchie Torres of New York right after the election, who talked about how a lot of the immigrants in his neighborhood had a surprising amount of anti-undocumented immigrant sentiment.

And it made me wonder about—I don’t even know how to define this, but sense of chaos, just a feeling of things not being in control. It’s sort of the way people feel about crime. There just seems to be a sense that things have run away, and you can’t get ahead. It’s a vague thing, but it is related to—There’s just so much out of control, and I need someone to stop it.

Karma: I actually think that’s a really important point. One of the greatest shifts in public opinion on immigration has happened in the last few years, where in 2020, according to Gallup, only 28 percent of Americans said they wanted immigration decreased.

Four years later, that number was 55 percent. So it had almost doubled. And that is much larger and much faster than even the public-opinion shift on something like gay marriage. So this is a huge, almost unprecedented shift. And as I dug into why, what came up over and over again is this feeling of chaos, this feeling that we are not in control of our own border. And when you actually look at questions about how people feel towards immigrants themselves, they hadn’t changed nearly as much.

People weren’t necessarily anti-immigrant, as much as they felt like the immigration process had gotten out of control and the immigration process was no longer serving the country. And so I think it is really important to distinguish [between] those two things. And I think a lot of the public-opinion shift we’ve seen over the last few years—it isn’t about economics. It’s really about this sense of control and chaos.

Rosin: Yeah. So maybe the place to end is this: Have you talked to anyone or done any thinking about how, in a situation like this, you close the gap? Because we, as journalists—it’s frustrating to us to know that there is an answer. You know, there’s an answer that research has provided. There are truths and facts. And separate from that, there is a perception. So have you thought of or seen anybody talk interestingly about how you bridge a gap like that, where people feel one way that is discordant with what the reality is?

Karma: Unfortunately, like any good journalist, I’m not quite as good at the solutions as I am about identifying the problems. But I will say, I think at the root of a lot of this is the fact that there’s an underlying scarcity. Right?

So I think an example of this is housing. Recently—you know, we haven’t talked about this, in particular—but J. D. Vance and Donald Trump made a big deal in their campaign about how immigrants were responsible for driving up housing costs. That argument has never held weight in American politics before, because it is only over the last decade that housing costs and a housing shortage has become a big problem. When there is material scarcity, people look for a villain; people look for someone to blame. And so I think one answer to, for example, the blaming [of] immigrants for housing costs is to say, Well, if we fix the housing shortage such that people don’t feel that scarcity, maybe we can avoid some of that.

I think the other sort of way I’d look at this is: In some senses, one of the most pro-immigrant things you could do is reduce the amount of chaos, right? So I think there’s actually a sort of middle ground here where you could reduce a lot of the chaos at the border while expanding legal immigration in a way that keeps immigrants coming in but creates a more orderly process that people feel comfortable with. And you can actually get more positive sentiment as a result.

I just think what makes it difficult is the politics are almost perfectly aligned to make that difficult from happening. And it’s been, you know—immigration reform is something that politicians have been talking about for more than 20 years now, and it hasn’t happened.

Rosin: Well, that was really helpful. Rogé, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about this.

Karma: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Sara Krolewski fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

My thanks to Ali Breland and Rogé Karma for joining me. If you’d like to hear Rogé go even deeper on the research into immigration’s economic impact, you can hear him on another Atlantic podcast called Good on Paper. It’s hosted by staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, and that episode is linked in the show notes.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

In the world of nutrition, few words are more contentious than healthy. Experts and influencers alike are perpetually warring over whether fats are dangerous for the heart, whether carbs are good or bad for your waistline, and how much protein a person truly needs. But if identifying healthy food is not always straightforward, actually eating it is an even more monumental feat.

As a reporter covering food and nutrition, I know to limit my salt and sugar consumption. But I still struggle to do it. The short-term euphoria from snacking on Double Stuf Oreos is hard to forgo in favor of the long-term benefit of losing a few pounds. Surveys show that Americans want to eat healthier, but the fact that more than 70 percent of U.S. adults are overweight underscores just how many of us fail.

The challenge of improving the country’s diet was put on stark display late last month, when the FDA released its new guidelines for which foods can be labeled as healthy. The roughly 300-page rule—the government’s first update to its definition of healthy in three decades—lays out in granular detail what does and doesn’t count as healthy. The action could make it much easier to walk down a grocery-store aisle and pick products that are good for you based on the label alone: A cup of yogurt laced with lots of sugar can no longer be branded as “healthy.” Yet the FDA estimates that zero to 0.4 percent of people trying to follow the government’s dietary guidelines will use the new definition “to make meaningful, long-lasting food purchasing decisions.” In other words, virtually no one.

All of this is a bad omen for Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. As part of his agenda to “make America healthy again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to improve the country’s eating habits by overthrowing a public-health establishment that he sees as ineffective. He has promised mass firings at the FDA, specifically calling out its food regulators. Indeed, for decades, the agency’s efforts to encourage better eating habits have largely focused on giving consumers more information about the foods they are eating. It hasn’t worked. If confirmed, Kennedy may face the same problem as many of his predecessors: It’s maddeningly hard to get Americans to eat healthier.

[Read: Everyone agrees Americans aren’t healthy]

Giving consumers more information about what they’re eating might seem like a no-brainer, but when these policies are tested in the real world, they often do not lead to healthier eating habits. Since 2018, chain restaurants have had to add calorie counts to their menus; however, researchers have consistently found that doing so doesn’t have a dramatic effect on what foods people eat. Even more stringent policies, such as a law in Chile that requires food companies to include warnings on unhealthy products, have had only a modest effect on improving a country’s health.

The estimate that up to 0.4 percent of people will change their habits as a consequence of the new guidelines was calculated based on previous academic research quantifying the impacts of food labeling, an FDA spokesperson told me. Still, in spite of the underwhelming prediction, the FDA doesn’t expect the new rule to be for naught. Even a tiny fraction of Americans adds up over time: The agency predicts that enough people will eat healthier to result in societal benefits worth $686 million over the next 20 years.

These modest effects underscore that health concerns aren’t the only priority consumers are weighing when they decide whether to purchase foods. “When people are making food choices,” Eric Finkelstein, a health economist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told me, “price and taste and convenience weigh much heavier than health.” When I asked experts about better ways to get Americans to eat healthier, some of them talked vaguely about targeting agribusiness and the subsidies it receives from the government, and others mentioned the idea of taxing unhealthy foods, such as soda. But nearly everyone I spoke with struggled to articulate anything close to a silver bullet for fixing America’s diet issues.

RFK Jr. seems to be caught in the same struggle. Most of his ideas for “making America healthy again” revolve around small subsets of foods that he believes, often without evidence, are causing America’s obesity problems. He has warned, for example, about the unproven risks of seed oils and has claimed that if certain food dyes were removed from the food supply, “we’d lose weight.” Kennedy has also called for cutting the subsidies doled out to corn farmers, who grow the crops that make the high-fructose corn syrup that’s laden in many unhealthy foods, and has advocated for getting processed foods out of school meals.

There’s a reason previous health secretaries haven’t opted for the kinds of dramatic measures that Kennedy is advocating for. Some of them would be entirely out of his control. As the head of the HHS, he couldn’t cut crop subsidies; Congress decides how much money goes to farmers. He also couldn’t ban ultra-processed foods in school lunches; that would fall to the secretary of agriculture. And although he could, hypothetically, work with the FDA to ban seed oils, it’s unlikely that he would be able to generate enough legitimate scientific evidence about their harms to prevail in an inevitable legal challenge.

The biggest flaw in Kennedy’s plan is the assumption that he can change people’s eating habits by telling them what is and isn’t healthy, and banning a select few controversial ingredients. Changing those habits will require the government to tackle the underlying reasons Americans are so awful at keeping up with healthy eating. Not everyone suffers from an inability to resist Double Stuf Oreos: A survey from the Cleveland Clinic found that 46 percent of Americans see the cost of healthy food as the biggest barrier to improving their diet, and 23 percent said they lack the time to cook healthy meals.

If Kennedy figures out how to actually get people like me to care enough about healthy eating to resist the indulgent foods that give them pleasure, or if he figures out a way to get cash-strapped families on public assistance to turn down cheap, ready-to-eat foods, he will have made significant inroads into actually making America healthy again. But getting there is going to require a lot more than a catchy slogan and some sound bites.

Presidents whom most voters view as failures, justifiably or not, have frequently shaped American politics long after they leave office—notably, by paving the way for presidencies considered much more successful and consequential. As President Joe Biden nears his final days in office, his uneasy term presents Democrats with some uncomfortable parallels to their experience with Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral takes place this week in Washington, D.C.

The former Georgia governor’s victory in 1976 initially offered the promise of revitalizing the formidable electoral coalition that had delivered the White House to Democrats in seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 (won by Franklin D. Roosevelt) to 1964 (won by Lyndon B. Johnson), and had enabled the party to enact progressive social policies for two generations. But the collapse of his support over his four years in office, culminating in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, showed that Carter’s electoral victory was instead that coalition’s dying breath. Carter’s troubled term in the White House proved the indispensable precondition to Reagan’s landmark presidency, which reshaped the competition between the two major parties and enabled the epoch-defining ascendancy of the new right.

The specter of such a turnabout now haunts Biden and his legacy. Despite his many accomplishments in the White House, the November election’s outcome demonstrated that his failures—particularly on the public priorities of inflation and the border—eclipsed his successes for most voters. As post-election surveys made clear, disapproval of the Biden administration’s record was a liability that Vice President Kamala Harris could not escape.

Biden’s unpopularity helped Donald Trump make major inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, just as the widespread discontent over Carter’s performance helped Reagan peel away millions of formerly Democratic voters in 1980. If Trump can cement in office the gains he made on Election Day—particularly among Latino, Asian American, and Black voters—historians may come to view Biden as the Carter to Trump’s Reagan.

In his landmark 1993 book, The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek persuasively argued that presidents succeed or fail according to not only their innate talents but also the timing of their election in the long-term cycle of political competition and electoral realignment between the major parties.

Most of the presidents who are remembered as the most successful and influential, Skowronek showed, came into office after decisive elections in which voters sweepingly rejected the party that had governed the country for years. The leaders Skowronek places in this category include Thomas Jefferson after his election in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Roosevelt in 1932, and Reagan in 1980.

These dominating figures, whom Skowronek identifies as men who “stood apart from the previously established parties,” typically rose to prominence with a promise “to retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed had been lost.” Trump fits this template with his promises to “make America great again,” and he also displays the twin traits that Skowronek describes as characteristic of these predecessors that Trump hopes to emulate: repudiating the existing terms of political competition and becoming a reconstructive leader of a new coalition.

The great repudiators, in Skowronek’s telling, were all preceded by ill-fated leaders who’d gained the presidency representing a once-dominant coalition that was palpably diminished by the time of their election. Skowronek placed in this club John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Carter. Each of their presidencies represented a last gasp for the party that had won most of the general elections in the years prior. None of these “late regime” presidents, as Skowronek called them, could generate enough success in office to reverse their party’s declining support; instead, they accelerated it.

The most recent such late-regime president, Carter, was elected in 1976 after Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 had already exposed cracks in the Democrats’ New Deal coalition of southerners, Black voters, and the white working class. Like many of his predecessors in the dubious fraternity of late-regime presidents, Carter recognized that his party needed to recalibrate its message and agenda to repair its eroding support. But the attempt to set a new, generally more centrist direction for the party foundered.

Thanks to rampant inflation, energy shortages, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter was whipsawed between a rebellion from the left (culminating in Senator Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge) and an uprising on the right led by Reagan. As Carter limped through his 1980 reelection campaign, Skowronek wrote, he had become “a caricature of the old regime’s political bankruptcy, the perfect foil for a repudiation of liberalism itself as the true source of all the nation’s problems.”

Carter’s failures enabled Reagan to entrench the electoral realignment that Nixon had started. In Reagan’s emphatic 1980 win, millions of southern white conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, as well as northern working-class white voters renounced the Democratic affiliation of their parents and flocked to Reagan’s Republican Party. Most of those voters never looked back.

The issue now is whether Biden will one day be seen as another late-regime president whose perceived failures hastened his party’s eclipse among key voting blocs. Pointing to his record of accomplishments, Biden advocates would consider the question absurd: Look, they say, at the big legislative wins, enormous job growth, soaring stock market, historic steps to combat climate change, skilled diplomacy that united allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and boom in manufacturing investment, particularly in clean-energy technologies.

In electoral terms, however, Biden’s legacy is more clouded. His 2020 victory appeared to revive the coalition of college-educated whites, growing minority populations, young people, and just enough working-class white voters that had allowed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win the White House in four of the six elections from 1992 through 2012. (In a fifth race over that span, Al Gore won the popular vote even though he lost the Electoral College.) But the public discontent with Biden frayed almost every strand of that coalition.

Biden made rebuilding his party’s support among working-class voters a priority and, in fact, delivered huge gains in manufacturing and construction jobs that were tied to the big three bills he passed (on clean energy, infrastructure, and semiconductors). But public anger at the rising cost of living contributed to Biden’s job-approval rating falling below 50 percent in the late summer of 2021 (around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal), and it never climbed back to that crucial threshold. On Election Day, public disappointment with Biden’s overall record helped Trump maintain a crushing lead over Harris among white voters without a college degree, as well as make unprecedented inroads among nonwhite voters without a college degree, especially Latinos.

On the Thursday night after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an obscure but telling celebration unfolded inside a converted barn off a highway stretching through the cornfields of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The place was called Gateway House of Prayer, and it was not exactly a church, and did not exactly fit into the paradigms of what American Christianity has typically been. Inside, there were no hymnals, no images of Jesus Christ, no parables fixed in stained glass. Strings of lights hung from the rafters. A huge map of the world covered one wall. On the others were seven framed bulletin boards, each representing a theater of battle between the forces of God and Satan—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself. Gateway House of Prayer, it turned out, was a kind of war room. And if its patrons are to be believed, at least one person, and at peak times dozens, had been praying every single minute of every single day for more than 15 years for the victory that now seemed at hand. God was winning. The Kingdom was coming.

“Hallelujah!” said a woman arriving for the weekly 7 o’clock “government watch,” during which a group of 20 or so volunteers sits in a circle and prays for God’s dominion over the nation.

“Now the work begins!” a man said.

“We have to fight, fight, fight!” a grandmother said as they began talking about how a crowd at Trump’s election watch party had launched into the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

“They were singing that!” another man said.

Yes, people replied; they had seen a video of the moment. As the mood in the barn became ever more jubilant, the grandmother pulled from her purse a shofar, a hollowed-out ram’s horn used during Jewish services. She blew, understanding that the sound would break through the atmosphere, penetrate the demonic realm, and scatter the forces of Satan, a supernatural strike for the Kingdom of God. A woman fell to the floor.

“Heaven and Earth are coming into alignment!” a man declared. “The will of heaven is being done on Earth.”

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

Although the secular establishment has struggled to take all of this seriously, Trump has harnessed this apocalyptic energy to win the presidency twice.

If you were curious why Tucker Carlson, who was raised Episcopalian, recently spoke of being mauled in his sleep by a demon, it may be because he is absorbing the language and beliefs of this movement. If you were questioning why Elon Musk would bother speaking at an NAR church called Life Center in Harrisburg, it is because Musk surely knows that a movement that wants less government and more God works well with his libertarian vision. If you wanted to know why there were news stories about House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Southern Baptist, displaying a white flag with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven outside his office, or the same flag being flown outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Catholic, the reason is that the Revolutionary War–era banner has become the battle flag for a movement with ideological allies across the Christian right. The NAR is supplying the ground troops to dismantle the secular state.

Alexandre Luu

And if you are wondering where all of this is heading now that Trump has won the presidency, I was wondering the same thing. That is why I was sitting in the circle at Gateway House of Prayer, where, about 20 minutes into the evening, I got my first clue. People had welcomed me warmly. I had introduced myself as a reporter for The Atlantic. I was taking notes on Earth-heaven alignment when a woman across from me said, “Your writers have called us Nazis.”

She seemed to be referring to an article that had compared Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler’s. I said what I always say, which is that I was there to understand. I offered my spiritual bona fides—raised Southern Baptist, from Alabama. The woman continued: “It’s an editorial board that is severely to the left and despises the Trump movement.” A man sitting next to me came to my defense. “We welcome you,” he said, but it was clear something was off, and that something was me. The media had become a demonic stronghold. The people of God needed to figure out whether I was a tool of Satan, or possibly whether I had been sent by the Almighty.

“I personally feel like if you would like to stay with us, then I would ask if we could lay hands on you and pray,” a woman said.

“We won’t hurt you,” another woman said.

“We just take everything to God,” a woman sitting next to me said. “Don’t take it personally.”

The praying began, and I waited for the judgment.

How all of this came to be is a story with many starting points, the most immediate of which is Trump himself. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, establishment leaders on the Christian right were backing candidates with more pious pedigrees than Trump’s. He needed a way to rally evangelicals, so he turned to some of the most influential apostles and prophets of the NAR, a wilder world where he was cast as God’s “wrecking ball” and embraced by a fresh pool of so-called prophecy voters, people long regarded as the embarrassing riffraff of evangelical Christianity. But the DNA of that moment goes back further, to the Cold War, Latin America, and an iconoclastic seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner.

He grew up in New York City during the Great Depression, and embraced a conservative version of evangelical Christianity when he was courting his future wife. They became missionaries in Bolivia in the 1950s and ’60s, when a wave of Pentecostalism was sweeping South America, filling churches with people who claimed that they were being healed, and seeing signs and wonders that Wagner initially dismissed as heresy. Much of this fervor was being channeled into social-justice movements taking hold across Latin America. Che Guevara was organizing in Bolivia. The civil-rights movement was under way in the United States. Ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches were embracing the theology of liberation, emphasizing ideas such as the social sin of inequality and the need for justice not in heaven but here and now.

In the great postwar competition for hearts and minds, conservative American evangelicals—and the CIA, which they sometimes collaborated with—needed an answer to ideas they saw as dangerously socialist. Wagner, by then the general director of the Andes Evangelical Mission, rose to the occasion. In 1969, he took part in a conference in Bogotá, Colombia, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association that aimed to counter these trends. He wrote a book—Latin American Theology: Radical or Evangelical?—which was handed out to all participants, and which argued that concern with social issues “may easily lead to serving mammon rather than serving God.” Liberation theology was a slippery slope to hell.

After that, Wagner became a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, teaching in the relatively experimental field of church growth. He began revisiting his experience in Bolivia, deciding that the overflowing churches he’d seen were a sign that the Holy Spirit was working in the world. He was also living in the California of the 1970s, when new religions and cults and a more freewheeling, independent, charismatic Christianity were proliferating, a kind of counter-counterculture. Droves of former hippies were being baptized in the Pacific in what became known as the Jesus People movement. Preachers such as John Wimber, a singer in the band that turned into the Righteous Brothers, were casting out demons before huge crowds. In the ’80s, a group of men in Missouri known as the Kansas City Prophets believed they were restoring the gift of prophecy, understanding this to be God’s natural way of talking to people.

Wagner met a woman named Cindy Jacobs, who understood herself to be a prophet, and believed that the “principalities” and “powers” mentioned in the Book of Ephesians were actually “territorial spirits” that could be defeated through “spiritual warfare.” She and others formed prayer networks targeting the “10/40 window”—a geographic rectangle between the latitudes of 10 and 40 degrees north that included North Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia that were predominantly Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu.

C. Peter Wagner (Alexandre Luu)

Wagner also became captivated by a concept called dominionism, a major conceptual shift that had been emerging in conservative theological circles. At the time, the prevailing view was that God’s mandate for Christians was simple evangelism, person by person; the Kingdom would come later, after the return of Jesus Christ, and meanwhile, the business of politics was, as the Bible verse goes, rendered unto Caesar. The new way of thinking was that God was calling his people to establish the Kingdom now. To put it another way, Christians had marching orders—a mandate for aggressive social and institutional transformation. The idea had deep roots in a movement called Christian Reconstructionism, whose serious thinkers—most prominently a Calvinist theologian named R. J. Rushdoony—were spending their lives working out the details of what a government grounded in biblical laws would look like, a model for a Christian theocracy.

By 1996, Wagner and a group of like-minded colleagues were rolling these ideas into what they were calling the New Apostolic Reformation, a term meant to evoke their conviction that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was moving around the globe, endowing believers with supernatural power and the authority to battle demonic forces and establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. The NAR vision was not technically conservative but radical: Constructing the Kingdom meant destroying the secular state with equal rights for all, and replacing it with a system in which Christianity is supreme. As a practical matter, the movement put the full force of God on the side of free-market capitalism. In that sense, Wagner and his colleagues had found the answer to liberation theology that they’d been seeking for decades.

Wagner, who died in 2016, wrote dozens of additional books with titles such as Dominion! and Churchquake! The movement allowed Christianity to be changed and updated, embracing the idea that God was raising new apostles and prophets who could not only interpret ancient scripture but deliver “fresh words” and dreams from heaven on a rolling, even daily basis. One of Wagner’s most talented acolytes, a preacher named Lance Wallnau, repackaged the concept of dominionism into what he popularized as the “7 Mountain Mandate,” essentially an action plan for how Christians could dominate the seven spheres of life—government, education, media, and the four others posted on the walls like targets at Gateway House of Prayer.

What happened next is the story of these ideas spreading far and wide into an American culture primed to accept them. Churches interested in growing found that the NAR formula worked, delivering followers a sense of purpose and value in the Kingdom. Many started hosting “7M” seminars and offering coaching and webinars, which often drew wealthy businesspeople into the fold. After the 2016 election, a group of the nation’s ultra-wealthy conservative Christians organized as an invitation-only charity called Ziklag, a reference to the biblical city where David found refuge during his war against King Saul. According to an investigation by ProPublica, the group stated in internal documents that its purpose was to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains.” Wallnau is an adviser.

By last year, 42 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society,’ ” according to Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who has been developing new surveys to capture what he and others describe as a “fundamental shift” in American Christianity. Roughly 61 percent agreed with the statement that “there are modern-day apostles and prophets.” Roughly half agreed that “there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,” and that the Church should “organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.”

Overall, Djupe told me, the nation continues to become more secular. In 1991, only 6 percent of Americans identified as nonreligious, a figure that is now about 30 percent. But the Christians who remain are becoming more radical.

“They are taking on these extreme beliefs that give them a sense of power—they believe they have the power to change the nature of the Earth,” Djupe said. “The adoption of these sort of beliefs is happening incredibly fast.”

The ideas have seeped into Trumpworld, influencing the agenda known as Project 2025, as well as proposals set forth by the America First Policy Institute. A new book called Unhumans, co-authored by the far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and endorsed by J. D. Vance, describes political opponents as “unhumans” who want to “undo civilization itself” and who currently “run operations in media, government, education, economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment”—the seven mountains. The book argues that these “unhumans” must be “crushed.”

“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the authors write. “It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

my own frame of reference for what evangelical Christianity looked like was wooden pews, the ladies’ handbell choir, and chicken casseroles for the homebound. The Southern Baptists of my childhood had no immediate reason to behave like insurgents. They had dominated Alabama for decades, mostly blessing the status quo. When I got an assignment a few years ago to write about why evangelicals were still backing Trump, I mistakenly thought that the Baptists were where the action was on the Christian right. I was working for The Washington Post then, and like many journalists, commentators, and researchers who study religion, I was far behind.

Where I ended up one Sunday in 2021 was a church in Fort Worth, Texas, called Mercy Culture. Roughly 1,500 people were streaming through the doors for one of four weekend services, one of which was in Spanish. Ushers offered earplugs. A store carried books about spiritual warfare. Inside the sanctuary, the people filling the seats were white, Black, and brown; they were working-class and professionals and unemployed; they were former drug addicts and porn addicts and social-media addicts; they were young men and women who believed their homosexual tendencies to be the work of Satan. I met a young woman who told me she was going to Montana to “prophesy over the land.” I met a young man contemplating a future as a missionary, who told me, “If I have any choice, I want to die like the disciples.” They had the drifty air of hippies, but their counterculture was pure Kingdom.

They faced a huge video screen showing swirling stars, crashing waves, and apocalyptic images, including a mushroom cloud. A digital clock was counting down, and when it hit zero, a band—keyboard, guitars, drums—began blasting music that reminded you of some pop song you couldn’t quite place, from some world you’d left behind when you came through the doors. Lights flashed. Machine-made fog drifted through the crowd. People waved colored flags, calling the Holy Spirit in for a landing. Cameras swooped around, zooming in on a grown man crying and a woman lying prostrate, praying. Eventually, the pastor, a young man in skinny jeans, came onstage and demon-mapped the whole city of Fort Worth. The west side was controlled by the principality of Greed, the north by the demonic spirit of Rebellion; the south belonged to Lust. He spoke of surrendering to God’s laws. And at one point, he endorsed a Church elder running for mayor, describing the campaign as “the beginning of a righteous movement.”

Walking across the bleak, hot parking lot to my rental car afterward, I could understand how people were drawn into their realm. After that, I started seeing the futuristic world of the NAR all over the place. Sprawling megachurches outside Atlanta, Phoenix, and Harrisburg with Broadway-level production values; lower-budget operations in strip malls and the husks of defunct traditional churches. Lots of screens, lots of flags. Conferences with names like Open the Heavens. A training course called Vanquish Academy where people could learn “advanced prophetic weaponry” and “dream intelligence.” Schools such as Kingdom University, in Tennessee, where students can learn their “Kingdom Assignment.” In a way, the movement was a world with its own language. People spoke of convergence and alignment and demon portals and whether certain businesses were Kingdom or not.

In 2023, I met a woman who believed that her Kingdom assignment was to buy an entire mountain for God, and did. It is in northwestern Pennsylvania, and she lives on top of it with her husband. They are always finding what she called “God signs,” such as feathers on the porch. Like many in the movement, she didn’t attend church very often. But every day, she followed online prophets and apostles such as Dutch Sheets, an acolyte of Wagner’s who has hundreds of thousands of followers and is known for interpreting dreams.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

In 2016, Sheets began embracing prophecies that God was using Trump, telling fellow prophets and apostles that his victory would bring “new levels of demonic desperation.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Sheets began releasing daily prophetic updates called Give Him 15, casting Trump’s attempt to steal the election as a great spiritual battle against the forces of darkness. In the days before the insurrection, Sheets described a dream in which he was charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol to stand for the Kingdom. Although he was not in Washington, D.C., on January 6, many of his followers were, some carrying the APPEAL TO HEAVEN flag he’d popularized. Others from Wagner’s old inner circle were there too. Wallnau streamed live from near the U.S. Capitol that day and, that night, from the Trump International Hotel. Cindy Jacobs conducted spiritual warfare just outside the Capitol as rioters were smashing their way inside, telling her followers that the Lord had given her a vision “that they would break through and go all the way to the top.” In his most recent book, The Violent Take It by Force, the scholar Matthew Taylor details the role that major NAR leaders played that day, calling them “the principal theological architects” of the insurrection.

Faith leaders, including major figures in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, pray with Donald Trump at the White House in 2019. (Storms Media Group / Alamy)

At the Pennsylvania statehouse, I met an apostle named Abby Abildness, whom I came to understand as a kind of Kingdom diplomat. It was the spring of 2023, and she had recently returned from Iraqi Kurdistan, where she had met with Kurdish leaders she believed to be descended from King Solomon, and who she said wanted “holy governance to go forth.”

I watched YouTube videos of prophets broadcasting from their basements. I watched a streaming show called FlashPoint, where apostles and prophets deliver news from God; guests have included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because another dimension of the NAR is that the movement is a prominent advocate of Christian Zionism.

I came to understand how the movement amounts to a sprawling political machine. The apostles and prophets, speaking for God, decide which candidates and policies advance the Kingdom. The movement’s prayer networks and newsletters amount to voter lists and voter guides. A growing ecosystem of podcasts and streaming shows such as FlashPoint amounts to a Kingdom media empire. And the overall vision of the movement means that people are not engaged just during election years but, like the people at Gateway House of Prayer, 24/7.

[Read: This just in from heaven]

As November’s election neared, I watched the whole juggernaut crank into action to return Trump to the White House. Wallnau, in partnership with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, promoted an effort called Project 19, targeting voters in 19 swing counties. He also launched something called the Courage Tour, which similarly targeted swing states, and I attended one event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It looked like an old-fashioned tent revival, except that it was also an aggressive pro-Trump mobilization effort. Wallnau dabbed frankincense oil onto foreheads, anointing voters into God’s army. Another speaker said that Kamala Harris would be a “devil in the White House.” Others cast Democrats as agents of Lucifer, and human history as a struggle between the godless forces of secular humanism and God’s will for humankind.

A march called “A Million Women” on the National Mall drew tens of thousands of people and culminated with the smashing of an altar representing demonic strongholds in America. With the Capitol dome as their backdrop, people took turns bashing the altar as music surged and others prayed, and when it was rubble, the prophet Lou Engle declared, “We’re going to point to the north, south, and east, and west, and command America! The veil has been ripped!”

The NAR movement was a major source of the “low-propensity voters” who backed Trump. Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates, which tracks antidemocratic movements, has been documenting the rise of the NAR for years, and warning about its theocratic goals. He believes that a certain condescension, and perhaps failure of imagination, has kept outsiders from understanding what he has come to see as the most significant religious movement of the 21st century, and one that poses a profound threat to democracy.

“Certain segments of society have not been willing to understand where these people are coming from,” Clarkson told me. “For me, it’s part of the story of our times. It’s a movement that has continued to rise, gathered political strength, attracted money, built institutions. And the broad center-left doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

Which leaves the question of what happens now.

The movement certainly aligns with many goals of the Christian right: a total abortion ban, an end to gay marriage and LGBTQ rights. Traditional family is the fundamental unit of God’s perfect order. In theory, affirmative action, welfare programs, and other social-justice measures would be unnecessary because in the Kingdom, as Abildness, the Pennsylvania apostle, and her husband once explained to me, there is no racism and no identity other than child of God. “Those that oppose us think we are dangerous,” her husband told me, describing a vision of life governed by God’s will. “But this is better for everyone. There wouldn’t be homelessness. We’d be caring for each other.”

Matthew Taylor told me he sees the movement merging seamlessly into “the MAGA blob,” with the prophets and apostles casting whatever Trump does as part of God’s plan, and rebuking any dissent. “It’s the synchronization with Trump that is most alarming,” he said. “The agenda now is Trump. And that’s how populist authoritarianism works. It starts out as a coalition, as a shotgun marriage, and eventually the populism and authoritarianism takes over.”

[Read: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

In another sense, the movement has never been about policies or changes to the law; it’s always been about the larger goal of dismantling the institutions of secular government to clear the way for the Kingdom. It is about God’s total victory.

“Buckle up, buttercup!” Wallnau said on his podcast shortly after the election. “Because you’re going to be watching a whole new redefinition of what the reformation looks like as Christians engage every sector of society. Christ is not quarantined any longer. We’re going into all the world.”

On the day after the election, I went to Life Center, the NAR church where Elon Musk had spoken a couple of weeks earlier. The mood was jubilant. A pastor spoke of “years of oppression” and said that “we are at a time on the other side of a victory for our nation that God alone—that God alone—orchestrated for us.”

The music pounded, and people cheered, and after that, a prominent prophet named Joseph Garlington delivered a sermon. He was a guest speaker, and he offered what sounded like the first hint of dissent I’d heard in a long time. He talked about undocumented immigrants and asked people to consider whether it might be possible that God was sending them to the U.S. so they could build the Kingdom.

“What if they are part of the harvest?” he said. “He didn’t send us to them; maybe he’s sending them to us.”

It was a striking moment. Life Center, Mercy Culture, and many other churches in the movement have large numbers of Latinos in their congregations. In 2020, Trump kicked off his outreach to evangelical voters at a Miami megachurch called El Rey Jesús, headed by a prominent Honduran American apostle named Guillermo Maldonado. I wondered how the apostles and prophets would react to the mass deportations Trump had proposed. Garlington continued that Trump was “God’s choice,” but that the election was just one battle in the ultimate struggle. He told people that it’s “time for war,” language I kept hearing in other NAR circles even after the election. He told people to prepare to lose friends and family as the Kingdom of God marched on in the days ahead. He told them to separate from the wicked.

“If you’ve got a child and he says, ‘Come and let us go serve other gods,’ go tell on him. Tell them, ‘I’ve got a kid who is saying we need to serve other gods. Can you help me kill him?’ ” Garlington said he wasn’t being literal about the last part. “But you need to rebuke them,” he said. “You need to say, ‘Honey, if you keep on that path, there’s a place reserved in hell for you.’ ”

This was also a theme the next day at Gateway House of Prayer, where I waited to learn my own fate, as people began praying in tongues and free-forming in English as the Holy Spirit gave them words.

Alexandre Luu

“We’re asking for a full overturning in the media,” a man said. “We’re asking for all the media to turn away from being propagandists to being truth tellers.”

“Their eyes need to be opened,” a woman said. “They don’t know God at all. They think they know all these things because they’re so educated and worldly. But they do not see God … And that’s what we need. The harvest.”

“The reformation,” the grandmother added.

“The reformation,” the woman said.

At one point, a man questioned me: “The whole world knows The Atlantic is a left-wing, Marxist-type publication. Why would you choose to go and work there?” At another point, the group leader defended me: “I feel the Lord has called her to be a truth seeker.” At another point, the grandmother spoke of a prophecy she’d heard recently about punishment for the wicked. “There are millstones being made in Heaven,” she said. “Straight up. There’s millstones.” Another woman spoke of “God’s angry judgment” for the disobedient.

“There’s a lot of people that are going to change their minds,” a man said.

“You’ll be happy with the changes God brings,” a woman reassured me. “You’ll be happy.”

This went on for a while. I wasn’t sure where it was going until the leader of the group decided that I should leave. She could not have been nicer about it. She spoke of God’s absolute love, and absolute truth, and absolute justice, and then I headed for the door.

A few women followed me into the lobby, apologizing that it had come to this. They were sorry for me, as believers in the movement were sorry for all of the people who were lost and confused by this moment in America—the doubters, the atheists, the gay people, Muslims, Buddhists, Democrats, journalists, and all the godless who had not yet submitted to what they knew to be true. The Kingdom was here, and the only question was whether you were in, or out.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Army of God.”

'Mexican America'? Mexico's Sheinbaum mocks Trump over his 'Gulf of America' idea

Edmund Wilson hated mysteries. In the 1940s, one of the most respected literary critics in America outlined his objections to the genre in a pair of caustic essays, “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” and “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” After receiving a deluge of irate responses, Wilson conceded that he had recently been reading himself to sleep with the Sherlock Holmes series, enthralled by its “fairy-tale poetry of hansom cabs, gloomy London lodgings, and lonely country estates.” He contended, however, that Holmes’s cases occupied a special category: “They are among the most amusing of fairy-tales and not among the least distinguished.”

If Sherlock Holmes really is the last of the classic fairy-tale heroes, he may also be the first to have been protected by modern intellectual-copyright law. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Holmes to his loyal companion, Dr. Watson, in the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet, but the final stories didn’t fall out of copyright until January 1, 2023. Now that the characters are unambiguously free to use, numerous Holmes projects are scheduled to premiere or begin filming in the coming year alone, including Guy Ritchie’s Young Sherlock series on Amazon; Watson, a CBS procedural starring Morris Chestnut; and Sherlock & Daughter with David Thewlis on the CW. Brendan Foley, the creator of Sherlock & Daughter, told me that “the escape of Holmes and Watson into the public domain” might not be the only explanation for the coming surge, but “it certainly didn’t hurt.”

The latest spin-offs can safely ignore the confusing rights issues that plagued earlier adaptations. For the big-budget action movies that Ritchie directed with Robert Downey Jr., Warner Bros. took the extraordinary step of signing agreements with two competing entities that claimed to own Holmes. Robert Doherty, the creator of Elementary, which reimagines Holmes in present-day New York, told me in an email that the rights situation for his CBS series was “murky” but that a deal was struck out of an abundance of caution: “I think the view on the studio side was that the characters were indeed in the public domain. At the same time, all parties wanted to tread very carefully.”

Although the Holmes copyright debacle has finally expired, it offers a preview of even more contentious battles to come. Modern audiences have plenty of experience with the notion of a series character, developed over decades, who inspires both “fan works”—a concept that Holmes devotees essentially invented—and a seemingly endless string of reboots. For one glaring example, a little more than a decade from now, the public domain will welcome the earliest stories featuring another hero often called “the world’s greatest detective”: Batman. And his current owners will have every reason to study the playbook of the Doyle estate.

The confusion surrounding Holmes stands as a cautionary tale about the manipulation of copyright law—not by opportunists exploiting a valuable piece of intellectual property, but by the character’s official custodians. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Nicholas Meyer’s novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which imagined Sigmund Freud treating Holmes for his addiction to cocaine. Its release was delayed for months by negotiations with Doyle’s copyright holders, resulting in what Meyer now calls “no seven-per-cent solution, I promise you.”

After the novel became a best seller, Meyer wrote five sequels, including last year’s Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram From Hell, but he told me that he might never have attempted the first novel if he had foreseen the ensuing headaches: “I had done a back-of-the-envelope calculation and convinced myself that Holmes was in the public domain. Math is not my strong suit.” Yet even for the experts, untangling the facts of the case has always been a three-pipe problem—the kind of mystery that Holmes could solve only after three pipefuls of his favorite shag tobacco.

[Read: Sherlock Holmes, unlikely style icon]

Over the four decades during which Doyle wrote the original stories, international copyright law was rapidly evolving. After the author died in 1930, a colorful array of contenders fought over the rights, including his playboy sons, Denis and Adrian; Denis’s widow, the former Princess Nina Mdivani; and the producer Sheldon Reynolds and his wife, Andrea, who had a very public affair with the notorious socialite Claus von Bülow. Eventually, those rights coalesced under the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., which is overseen by various family members. (There are no direct descendants.) But the confusion didn’t end there. The four novels and 46 short stories published before 1923 entered the public domain in 1998. Only the last 10 stories in the series were covered by the Copyright Term Extension Act—nicknamed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” after its most famous beneficiary—that passed later that year, postponing future expirations of some copyrights by decades.

Yet the Doyle estate used those late stories as a wedge, arguing that it retained licensing rights for all works featuring Holmes and Watson during the remaining quarter of a century before the final tales—widely seen as the worst of the bunch—fell out of copyright. Their claim: The characters didn’t assume their definitive form until the series was complete. The estate based its argument on a distinction between “flat” and “round” fictional characters first proposed by E. M. Forster in his 1927 book, Aspects of the Novel, a concept frequently invoked in high-school literature classes but never previously tested in court.

In its legal filings, the estate drew a contrast between “flat” characters without depth—such as Superman and Amos and Andy—and “round” characters such as Holmes, who were capable of complexity and change. Doyle, it said, continued to develop Holmes to the very end, gradually transforming him from a reasoning machine into an empathetic figure who displays affection for women, dogs, and even his long-suffering partner. And it soon became clear that this argument would have enormous implications for copyright holders, who would be motivated to retain control over their characters by changing them incrementally for as long as possible.

In 2013, the estate was sued by the prominent Sherlockian Leslie S. Klinger, who refused to pay a licensing fee for an anthology of new Holmes stories by contemporary writers. Klinger said that all of the detective’s crucial components—including his “bohemian nature” and his “aptitude for disguise”—were established early in the series. (As other commentators have noted, some of Holmes’s most recognizable characteristics—the deerstalker cap, the distinctive curved calabash pipe, the phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson”—never appeared in Doyle’s stories at all.)

After the case was decided in Klinger’s favor, an appeal ended up before U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner, who upheld the ruling and ordered the estate to pay all legal costs, criticizing its strategy as “a form of extortion” against creators: “It’s time the estate, in its own self-interest, changed its business model.” Yet the lingering “fog of uncertainty,” as Klinger’s lawyer described it, allowed the estate to continue policing its claim on elements from the final run of stories, especially their alleged depiction of a more emotional Holmes.

In 2015, the estate filed suit against the makers of Mr. Holmes, an Ian McKellen film adapted from a novel by Mitch Cullin, who complained to a reporter, “It is cheaper for corporations to settle than go to court, and I believe the estate is not only keenly aware of that reality, but that they bank on it as an outcome.” Five years later, it went after the Netflix movie Enola Holmes, contending that the estate owned the stories that defined the version of Holmes “stamped in the public mind.” Both suits were likely privately settled, but with all rights now expired, the estate has turned to what its head of licensing, Tim Hubbard, described in an email as “authenticat[ing] projects and partnerships where our collaborators want to be connected to the source.” (The estate declined to address specific questions about its legal strategies or arguments.)

[Read: Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law]

It has also been relieved of the obligation to make an argument that Meyer, the author of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, succinctly dismissed to me as “bullshit.” The estate created a false narrative about the character it was supposedly protecting, Meyer argued, ignoring the abundant earlier evidence of what Watson calls the “hidden fires” smoldering beneath the exterior of the otherwise rational Holmes, who displays humor, empathy, and emotion throughout the series.

One could plausibly claim, as Klinger suggested, that all of the important aspects of the character were there from the very beginning. In his seminal 1910 essay, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes,” the theologian Ronald A. Knox identified 11 elements of the archetypal case. According to Knox, the only story that contained the full list was none other than A Study in Scarlet, which was published in the United States by J. B. Lippincott in 1890.

Betsy Rosenblatt, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, told me that the novel’s U.S. copyright would have lasted a maximum of 56 years, meaning that the characters should have entered the public domain in America in 1946. If creators had been allowed to independently explore eight decades sooner one of the most popular fictional characters in history, our picture of Holmes might have been immeasurably enriched.

These issues aren’t merely historical or hypothetical. In 2034, the oldest Superman comics will enter the public domain, followed a year later by Batman. Jay Kogan, a senior vice president in charge of legal affairs at DC Comics, has advocated for protecting the company’s stake in its superheroes “by gradually changing the literary and visual characteristics of a character over time.” Whereas Holmes evolved organically—or so the estate has claimed—Bruce Wayne might don new costumes only so that a corporation can assert control over “the de facto standard” of the Dark Knight.

Creativity, however, doesn’t follow the logic of copyright law. Once a character becomes a cultural possession—with the “fairy-tale” quality that enchanted Edmund Wilson—even a rudimentary form will carry the aura of its other incarnations. As soon as the earliest version of Batman is freely available, creators will benefit from his full history, turning these associations to all kinds of surprising ends. This is exactly why copyrights expire. Holmes and Watson are eternal not because they are mysteriously “round,” but because they are flat enough to fit into new stories for every generation.

E. M. Forster, who defined these categories in the first place, saw that flatness can be enormously satisfying: “We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account.” Doyle himself knew that such reliability could be a source of comfort. In the 1917 story “His Last Bow,” which transposed the pair from the Victorian era into the Great War, Holmes offered a backhanded compliment to his faithful friend: “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.”

“The countdown clock on the next catastrophic crash has already started,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me.

In the past few weeks, I have heard that sentiment or similar from economists, traders, Hill staffers, and government officials. The incoming Trump administration has promised to pass crypto-friendly regulations, and is likely to loosen strictures on Wall Street institutions as well.

This will bring an unheralded era of American prosperity, it argues, maintaining the country’s position as the head of the global capital markets and the heart of the global investment ecosystem. “My vision is for an America that dominates the future,” Donald Trump told a bitcoin conference in July. “I’m laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.”

[Annie Lowrey: The three pillars of the bro-economy]

Financial experts expect something different. First, a boom. A big boom, maybe, with the price of bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies climbing; financial firms raking in profits; and American investors awash in newfound wealth. Second, a bust. A big bust, maybe, with firms collapsing, the government being called in to steady the markets, and plenty of Americans suffering from foreclosures and bankruptcies.

Having written about bitcoin for more than a decade—and having covered the last financial crisis and its long hangover—I have some sense of what might cause that boom and bust. Crypto assets tend to be exceedingly volatile, much more so than real estate, commodities, stocks, and bonds. Egged on by Washington, more Americans will invest in crypto. Prices will go up as cash floods in. Individuals and institutions will get wiped out when prices drop, as they inevitably will.

The experts I spoke with did not counter that narrative. But if that’s all that happens, they told me, the United States and the world should count themselves lucky. The danger is not just that crypto-friendly regulation will expose millions of Americans to scams and volatility. The danger is that it will lead to an increase in leverage across the whole of the financial system. It will foster opacity, making it harder for investors to determine the riskiness of and assign prices to financial products. And it will do so at the same time as the Trump administration cuts regulations and regulators.

Crypto will become more widespread. And the conventional financial markets will come to look more like the crypto markets—wilder, less transparent, and more unpredictable, with trillion-dollar consequences extending years into the future.

“I have this worry that the next three or four years will look pretty good,” Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell and a former International Monetary Fund official, told me. “It’s what comes after, when we have to pick up the pieces from all the speculative frenzies that are going to be generated because of this administration’s actions.”

For years, Washington has “waged a war on crypto and bitcoin like nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told crypto entrepreneurs this summer. “They target your banks. They choke off your financial services … They block ordinary Americans from transferring money to your exchanges. They slander you as criminals.” He added: “That happened to me too, because I said the election was rigged.”

Trump is not wrong that crypto exists in its own parallel financial universe. Many crypto companies cannot or choose not to comply with American financial regulations, making it hard for kitchen-table investors to use their services. (The world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, declines even to name which jurisdiction it is based in; it directs American customers to a smallish U.S. offshoot.) Companies such as Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo tend to offer few, if any, crypto products, and tend to make minimal, if any, investments in crypto and crypto-related businesses. It’s not so much that banks haven’t wanted to get in on the fun. It’s that regulations have prevented them from doing so, and regulators have warned them not to.

This situation has throttled the amount of money flowing into crypto. But the approach has been a wise one: It has prevented firm failures and crazy price swings from destabilizing the traditional financial system. Crypto lost $2 trillion of its $3 trillion in market capitalization in 2022, Kelleher noted. “If you had that big of a financial crash with any other asset, there would have been contagion. But there wasn’t, because you had parallel systems with almost no interconnection.”

Forthcoming regulation will knit the systems together. Granted, nobody knows exactly what laws Congress will pass and Trump will sign. But the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, or FIT21, which passed the House before dying in the Senate last year, is a good guide. The law was the subject of intense lobbying by crypto advocates with billions on the line and cash to spend, including $170 million on the 2024 election. It amounts to an industry wish list.

FIT21 makes the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulator of most crypto assets and firms and requires that the CFTC collect far less information from companies on the structure and trading of crypto products than securities firms give the SEC.

[Annie Lowrey: The Black investors who were burned by Bitcoin]

Beyond loose rules, financial experts anticipate loose enforcement. The CFTC predominantly oversees financial products used as hedges by businesses and traded among traders, not ones hawked to individual investors. It has roughly one-fifth the budget of the SEC, and one-seventh the staff. And in general, Washington is expected to loosen the strictures preventing traditional banks from keeping crypto on their books and preventing crypto companies from accessing the country’s financial infrastructure.

According to Prasad, this regime would be a “dream” for crypto.

Trump and his family are personally invested in crypto, and the president-elect has floated the idea of establishing a “strategic” bitcoin reserve, to preempt Chinese influence. (In reality, this would mean deploying billions of dollars of taxpayer money to soak up speculative assets with no strategic benefit to the United States.) How many Republicans will invest in crypto because Trump does? How many young people will pour money into bitcoin because his son Eric says its price is zooming toward $1 million, or because the secretary of commerce says it is the future?

Nothing being considered by Congress or the White House will reduce the inherent risks. Crypto investors will remain vulnerable to hacking, ransomware, and theft. The research group Chainalysis tallied $24.2 billion in illicit transactions in 2023 alone. And if the U.S. government invests in crypto, the incentive for countries such as Iran and North Korea to interfere in the markets would go up exponentially. Imagine China engaging in a 51 percent attack on the bitcoin blockchain, taking it over and controlling each and every transaction. The situation is a security nightmare.

Americans will be exposed to more prosaic scams and rip-offs too. The SEC has brought enforcement actions against dozens of Ponzi schemers, charlatans, and cheats, encompassing both the $32 billion sham-exchange FTX and ticky-tacky coin firms. Nobody expects the CFTC to have the muscle to do the same. And FIT21 leaves loopholes open for all kinds of scuzzy profiteering. A crypto firm might be able to run an exchange, buy and sell assets on its own behalf, and execute orders for clients—legally, at the same time, despite the conflicts of interest.

Simple volatility is the biggest risk for retail investors. Crypto coins, tokens, and currencies are “purely speculative,” Prasad emphasized. “The only thing anchoring the value is investor sentiment.” At least gold has industrial uses. Or, if you’re betting on the price of tulip bulbs, at least you might end up with a flower.

With crypto, you might end up with nothing, or less. A large share of crypto traders borrow money to make bets. When leveraged traders lose money on their investments, their lenders—generally the exchange on which the traders are trading—require them to put up collateral. To do that, investors might have to cash out their 401(k)s. They might have to dump their bitcoin, even in a down market. If they cannot come up with the cash, the firm holding their account might liquidate or seize their assets.

A report released last month by the Office of Financial Research, a government think tank, makes clear just how dangerous this could be: Some low-income households are “using crypto gains to take out new mortgages.” When crypto prices go down, those families’ homes are going to be at risk.

Many individual investors do not seem to understand these perils. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has had to warn the public that it does not protect crypto assets. The Financial Stability Oversight Council has raised the concern that people do not realize that crypto firms are not subject to the same oversight as banks. But if Trump is invested, how bad could it be?

Regulators and economists are not worried primarily about the damage that this new era will do to individual households, however. They are worried about chaos in the crypto markets disrupting the traditional financial system—leading to a collapse in lending and the need for the government to step in, as it did in 2008.

Where Wall Street once saw fool’s gold, it now sees a gold mine. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater called crypto a “bubble” a decade ago; now he thinks it is “one hell of an invention.” Larry Fink of BlackRock previously referred to bitcoin as an “index of money laundering”; today he sees it as a “legitimate financial instrument”—one his firm has already begun offering to clients, if indirectly.

Early in 2024, the SEC began allowing fund managers to sell certain crypto investments. BlackRock launched a bitcoin exchange-traded fund in November; one public retirement fund has already staked its pensioners’ hard-earned cash. Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs are doing crypto deals too. Billions of traditional-finance money is flowing into the decentralized-finance markets, and billions more will as regulators allow.

[Charlie Warzel: Crypto’s legacy is finally clear]

What could go wrong? Nothing, provided that Wall Street firms are properly accounting for the risk of these risky assets. Everything, if they are not.  

Even the sturdiest-seeming instruments are dangerous. Stablecoins, for example, are crypto assets pegged to the dollar: One stablecoin is worth one dollar, making them useful as a medium of exchange, unlike bitcoin and ether. Stablecoin companies generally maintain their peg by holding one dollar’s worth of super-safe assets, such as cash and Treasury bills, for every stablecoin issued.

Supposedly. In the spring of 2022, the widely used stablecoin TerraUSD collapsed, its price falling to just 23 cents. The company had been using an algorithm to keep TerraUSD’s price moored; all it took was enough people pulling their money out for the stablecoin to break the buck. Tether, the world’s most-traded crypto asset, claims to be fully backed by safe deposits. The U.S. government found that it was not, as of 2021; moreover, the Treasury Department is contemplating sanctioning the company behind tether for its role as a cash funnel for the “North Korean nuclear-weapons program, Mexican drug cartels, Russian arms companies, Middle Eastern terrorist groups and Chinese manufacturers of chemicals used to make fentanyl,” The Wall Street Journal has reported. (“To suggest that Tether is somehow involved in aiding criminal actors or sidestepping sanctions is outrageous,” the company responded.)

Were tether or another big stablecoin to falter, financial chaos could instantly spread beyond the crypto markets. Worried investors would dump the stablecoin, instigating “a self-fulfilling panic run,” in the words of three academics who modeled this eventuality. The stablecoin issuer would dump Treasury bills and other safe assets to provide redemptions; the falling price of safe assets would affect thousands of non-crypto firms. The economists put the risk of a run on tether at 2.5 percent as of late 2021—not so stable!

Other catastrophes are easy to imagine: bank failures, exchange collapses, giant Ponzi schemes faltering. Still, the biggest risk with crypto has little to do with crypto at all.

If Congress passes FIT21 or a similar bill, it would invent a novel asset class called “digital commodities”—in essence, any financial asset managed on a decentralized blockchain. Digital commodities would be exempted from SEC oversight, as would “decentralized finance” firms. In the FIT21 bill, any firm or person can self-certify a financial product as a digital commodity, and the SEC would have only 60 days to object.

This is a loophole big enough to fit an investment bank through.

Already, Wall Street is talking up “tokenization,” meaning putting assets on a programmable digital ledger. The putative justification is capital efficiency: Tokenization could make it easier to move money around. Another justification is regulatory arbitrage: Investments on a blockchain would move out of the SEC’s purview, and likely be subject to fewer disclosure, reporting, accounting, tax, consumer-protection, anti-money-laundering, and capital requirements. Risk would build up in the system; the government would have fewer ways to rein firms in.

Crypto regulation could end up undermining the “broader $100 trillion capital markets,” Gary Gensler, the soon-to-be-former head of the SEC and the crypto industry’s enemy No. 1, has argued. “It could encourage noncompliant entities to try to choose what regulatory regimes they wish to be subjected to.”

[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]

We have seen this movie before, not long ago. In 2000, shortly before leaving office, Bill Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The law put strictures on derivatives traded on an exchange, but left over-the-counter derivatives unregulated. So Wall Street ginned up trillions of dollars of financial products, many backed by the income streams from home loans, and traded them over the counter. It packaged subprime loans with prime loans, obscuring a given financial instrument’s real risk. Then consumers strained under rising interest rates, crummy wage growth, and climbing unemployment. The mortgage-default rate went up. Home prices fell, first in the Sun Belt and then nationwide. Investors panicked. Nobody even knew what was in all of those credit-default swaps and mortgage-backed securities. Nobody was sure what anything was worth. Uncertainty, opacity, leverage, and mispricing spurred the global financial crisis that caused the Great Recession.

The crypto market today is primed to become the derivatives market of the future. Were Congress and the Trump administration to do nothing—to leave the SEC as crypto’s primary regulator, to require crypto companies to play by the existing rules—the chaos would remain walled off. There’s no sensible justification for digital assets to be treated differently than securities, anyway. By the simple test the government has used for a century, nearly all crypto assets are securities. But Washington is creating loopholes, not laws.

As the crypto boosters like to say, hold on for dear life. “A lot of bankers, they’re dancing in the street,” Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase said at a conference in Peru last year. Maybe they should be. The bankers are never the ones left holding the bag.

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Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”

This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.

Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.

Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.

Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.

When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.

This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.

[From the October 2024 issue: Kash Patel will do anything for Trump]

Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.

Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.

Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.

Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”

Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.

[Autocracy in America: The end of democracy has already begun]

For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.

By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “The New Rasputins.”

A politically powerful opponent of birthright citizenship railed that the United States cannot “give up the right” to “expel” dangerous “trespassers” who “invade [our] borders,” “wander in gangs,” and “infest society.”

Was this Donald Trump speaking in 2024? No, the quote is from an 1866 speech on the Senate floor by Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, a leading opponent of adding a provision to the U.S. Constitution granting citizenship based solely on birth on U.S. soil. Who were the “invaders” that Senator Cowan so feared? “I mean the Gypsies,” Cowan explained, despite offering no evidence that Roma migration posed a risk to the United States.

Senator Cowan lost the fight. In 1868, the nation ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the first sentence of which guarantees birthright citizenship. The amendment invalidated the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that no Black person could ever be a U.S. citizen. Equally important, the Constitution now guaranteed citizenship to the children of immigrants born on U.S. soil, “no matter from what quarter of the globe he or his ancestors may have come,” as one senator later put it in a speech to his constituents.

[Martha S. Jones: Birthright citizenship was won by freed slaves]

More than 150 years later, Trump has vowed to end birthright citizenship on “day one” of his new administration for children without at least one parent who is a citizen or green-card holder. He made that announcement in a three-minute video prominently posted on his campaign website, which he repeated in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press last month.

In 2025, the end of birthright citizenship is more than just an applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It has a genuine, if slim, chance of making its way into law. If it does, it will upend the lives of millions, and create a caste system in which a new set of people—native-born non-Americans—can never work or live in the open.

This prospect ought to be taken seriously. How would President Trump implement such a plan? Is it constitutional? And would the U.S. Supreme Court back him up?

The first question is easy, because Trump has told us exactly how he intends to proceed. In the video, the president-elect commits to issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025, that would deny citizenship not only to the children of undocumented immigrants but also to those born to parents who both are legally in the United States on a temporary visa for study or work. (Trump’s order as proposed would apply only to children born after it is issued.)

The consequences would be immediate. Trump says he will order government officials to deny these children passports and Social Security numbers. They will be prohibited from enrolling in federal programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and likely state benefits as well.

As adults, if all goes according to Trump’s plan, they will be barred from voting, holding elected office, and serving on juries. States could deny them a driver’s license and block them from attending state universities. They would be prohibited from working in the United States, and any U.S. citizen who employs them could be fined or even jailed under federal immigration laws. Many would be rendered stateless. Perhaps worst of all, they would live in perpetual fear of being deported from the only country in which they have ever lived.

[Read: Trump’s murky plan to end birthright citizenship]

Ending birthright citizenship for these children would affect everyone in America. Everyone would now have to provide proof of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status on the date of their birth to qualify for the rights and benefits of citizenship. The new law would necessitate an expanded government bureaucracy to scrutinize hospital records, birth certificates, naturalization oaths, and green-card applications.

Lawsuits are sure to follow, which leads to the second question: Will Trump have the constitutional authority to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants?

Per the text of the Constitution, the answer is a hard no. Some constitutional provisions are fuzzy, but the citizenship clause is not one of them. It states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Even the deeply racist Supreme Court back in 1898 couldn’t find any wiggle room in that language. Just two years before, in 1896, the Court had somehow read the Constitution’s equal-protection clause to permit “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, ushering in the Jim Crow era. But when the U.S. government argued in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the children of Chinese immigrants were not birthright citizens, the justices balked. The language granting citizenship to “all persons born” in the United States was “universal,” the Court explained, restricted “only by place and jurisdiction.” More recently, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that point, stating as an aside in a 1982 opinion addressing the rights of undocumented children to attend school: “No plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

Despite the clear text and long-standing judicial precedent, Trump claims that undocumented immigrants and their children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and so fall within the exception to universal birthright citizenship.

That is nonsense. Undocumented immigrants must follow all federal and state laws. When they violate criminal laws, they are jailed. If they park illegally, they are ticketed. They are required to pay their taxes and renew their driver’s license, just like everyone else. Trump certainly agrees that undocumented parents of native-born children can be deported for violating immigration laws at any time. So in what way are these immigrants and their children not subject to U.S. jurisdiction?

The citizenship clause’s exception for those not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States applies only to children born to members of American Indian tribes and the children of diplomats, as Congress explained when drafting that language in 1866. In contrast with undocumented immigrants, both groups owe allegiance to a separate sovereign, and both are immune from certain state and federal laws. (Native Americans were granted birthright citizenship by federal statute in 1924.)

As nonsensical as they are in an American context, Trump’s ideas didn’t come out of nowhere. In 1985, the law professor Peter Schuck and the political scientist Rogers Smith wrote an influential book, Citizenship Without Consent, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause did not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants. These scholars asserted that “immigration to the United States was entirely unregulated” before the 1870s, and so there was no such thing as an “illegal immigrant” and likewise no intent to grant birthright citizenship to their children. Many scholars and commentators, including some members of Congress, have repeated that same claim. In 2015, the law professor Lino Graglia testified before the House Judiciary Committee that “there were no illegal aliens in 1868 because there were no restrictions on immigration.” Then-Representative Raúl Labrador repeated the same point at that hearing, asserting as fact that there was “no illegal immigration when the Fourteenth Amendment came into being.” In an op-ed in June 2023, a former Department of Homeland Security policy adviser declared, “There were no immigrant parents living unlawfully in the United States” in the 19th century.

These critics have their facts wrong. In a recent law-review article, the legal scholars Gabriel Chin and Paul Finkelman explained that for decades, Africans were illegally brought to the United States as slaves even after Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, making them the “illegal aliens” of their day. The nation was well aware of that problem. Government efforts to shut down the slave trade and deport illegally imported enslaved people were widely reported throughout the years leading up to the Civil War. Yet no one credible, then or now, would argue that the children of those slaves were to be excluded from the citizenship clause—a constitutional provision intended to overrule Dred Scott v. Sandford by giving U.S. citizenship to the 4.5 million Black people then living in the United States.

[Read: Birthright citizenship wasn’t born in America]

Even so, these ideas have gained traction in the right-wing legal community—a group that will be empowered in Trump’s next term. The Fifth Circuit judge James C. Ho, who is regularly floated as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court, recently said in an interview that children of “invading aliens” are not citizens, because “birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion”—a reversal of his previous position on this issue. (This is the judicial equivalent of shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!”) Never mind that undocumented immigrants—a majority of whom entered the United States legally and then overstayed their visa—don’t qualify as invaders under any definition of the word. And never mind that there is no support for that idea in either the Constitution’s text or its history. In 1866, Senator Cowan opposed granting citizenship to the children of the “flood” of Chinese immigrants into California, as well as to Gypsy “invaders” of his own state. His colleagues pointed out that the only invasion of Pennsylvania was by Confederate soldiers a few years before. Birthright citizenship, they explained, would ensure that the United States would never revert back to the slave society that the Confederates invaded Pennsylvania to preserve.

In truth, all of these baseless arguments are window dressing for the real goal. The Fourteenth Amendment’s overarching purpose was to end a caste system in which some people had more rights under the law than others. To be sure, that ideal has always been a work in progress. But many opponents of birthright citizenship don’t even hold out that ideal as a goal; they would rather bring caste back, and enshrine it in our laws.

If birthright citizenship were to end tomorrow for children without at least one parent who was a citizen or lawful permanent resident, it would bar from citizenship hundreds of thousands of people each year. These people wouldn’t be eligible to participate in our democracy, and they would be forced to live and work in the shadows, as would their children and their children’s children. The end of birthright citizenship would create a caste of millions of un-Americans, locked in perpetuity into an inferior, exploitable status. Ironically, if Trump were to succeed in ending birthright citizenship, he would preside over the most dramatic increase of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history.

That brings us to the third question: Would five members of the Supreme Court uphold Trump’s proposed executive order?

No sitting justice has addressed this question directly. At his confirmation hearing in 2006, Justice Samuel Alito was asked whether he thought the children of undocumented immigrants qualified for birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. He refused to answer on the grounds that a future case might come before him, but he also observed: “It may turn out to be a very simple question. It may turn out to be a complicated question. Without studying the question, I don’t know.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to respond to the same question for the same reason. (These two justices also dodged questions about whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade on those grounds.)  

The Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, an expert on the Supreme Court, believes that, at most, “two” or “maybe … even three justices” on the current Court would vote to end birthright citizenship. But all it takes is five, and the Court’s composition may well change. Trump appointed three justices during his first term in office, and he could appoint a few more before the end of his second. It is they who will have the last word.

A slab of uplifted rock larger than Italy sits in the center of the American Southwest. It is called the Colorado Plateau, and it is a beautiful place, higher ground in every sense. What little rain falls onto the plateau has helped to inscribe spectacular canyons into its surface. Ice Age mammoth hunters were likely the first human beings to wander among its layered cliff faces and mesas, where the exposed sedimentary rock comes in every color between peach and vermillion. Native Americans liked what they saw, or so it seems: The plateau has been inhabited ever since, usually by many tribes. They buried their dead in its soil and built homes that blend in with the landscape. In the very heart of the plateau, the Ancestral Pueblo people wedged brick dwellings directly into the banded cliffs.

Some of the best-preserved Ancestral Pueblo ruins are located near two 9,000-foot buttes in southeastern Utah, 75 miles from where its borders form a pair of crosshairs with those of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Ancestral Pueblo were not the only Native Americans in the area. Other tribes lived nearby, or often passed through, and many of them describe the buttes as “Bears Ears” in their own languages. Thousands of archaeological sites are scattered across the area, but they have not always been properly cared for. Uranium miners laid siege to the landscape during the early atomic age, and in the decades since, many dwellings and graves have been looted.

In 2015, five federally recognized tribes—the Navajo Nation, the Zuni, the Hopi, the Mountain Ute, and the Ute—joined together to request that President Barack Obama make Bears Ears a national monument. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, as they called themselves, wanted to protect as many cultural sites as possible from further desecration. They asked for nearly 2 million acres centered on the buttes. In 2016, Obama created a monument of roughly two-thirds that size.

The borders of that monument have been shifting ever since. In late 2017, President Donald Trump erased all but roughly 15 percent of the protected land, in the name of reversing federal overreach and restoring local control; and in the years that followed, mining companies staked more than 80 new hard-rock claims within its former borders. The majority were for uranium and vanadium, minerals that are in demand again, now that a new nuclear arms race is on, and tech companies are looking for fresh ways to power the AI revolution.

In 2021, President Joe Biden put the monument’s borders back to where they’d started—and the miners’ claims were put on hold. Now Trump is reportedly planning to shrink Bears Ears once again, possibly during his first week in office.

With every new election, more than 1 million acres have flickered in and out of federal protection. People on both sides of the fight over Bears Ears feel jerked around. In southeastern Utah, the whipsaw of American politics is playing out on the ground, frustrating everyone, and with no end in sight.

Vaughn Hadenfeldt has worked as a backcountry guide in Bears Ears since the 1970s. He specializes in archaeological expeditions. Back when he started, the area was besieged by smash-and-grab looters. They used backhoes to dig up thousand-year-old graves in broad daylight, he told me. Some of these graves are known to contain ceramics covered in geometrical patterns, turquoise jewelry, and macaw-feather sashes sourced from the tropics. Thieves made off with goods like these without even bothering to refill the holes. Later on, after Bears Ears had become a popular Utah stopover for tourists passing through to Monument Valley, the looters had to be more discreet. They started coming in the winter months, Hadenfeldt told me, and refilling the ancient graves that they pillaged. “The majority of the people follow the rules, but it takes so few people who don’t to create lifelong impacts on this type of landscape,” he said.

Hadenfeldt lives in Bluff, Utah, a small town to the southeast of Bears Ears. Its population of 260 includes members of the Navajo Nation, artists, writers, archaeologists, and people who make their living in the gentler outdoor recreation activities. (Think backpacking and rock climbing, not ATVs.) The town’s mayor, Ann Leppanen, told me that, on the whole, her constituents strongly oppose any attempt to shrink the monument. More tourists are coming, and now they aren’t just passing through on the way to Monument Valley. They’re spending a night or two, enjoying oat-milk lattes and the like before heading off to Bears Ears.

[Read: What kinds of monuments does Trump value?]

But Bluff is a blue pinprick in bright-red southern Utah, where this one town’s affection for the monument is not so widely shared. Bayley Hedglin, the mayor of Monticello, a larger town some 50 miles north, described Bluff to me as a second-home community, a place for “people from outside the area”—code for Californians—or retirees. For her and her constituents, the monument and other public lands that surround Monticello are like a boa constrictor, suffocating their town by forcing it into a tourism economy of low-paying, seasonal jobs. The extra hikers who have descended on the area often need rescuing. She said they strain local emergency-services budgets.

I asked Hedglin which industries she would prefer. “Extraction,” she said. Her father and grandfather were both uranium miners. “San Juan County was built on mining, and at one time, we were very wealthy,” she said. She understood that the monument was created at the behest of a marginalized community, but pointed out that the residents of Monticello, where the median household income is less than $64,000, are marginalized in their own right. I asked what percentage of them support the national monument. “You could probably find 10,” she said. “10 percent?” I asked. “No, 10 people,” she replied.

The two bluffs known as the "Bears Ears" stand off in the distance at sunset in the Bears Ears National Monument on May 11, 2017 outside Blanding, Utah. George Frey / Getty

The election-to-election uncertainty is itself a burden, Hedglin said. “It makes it hard to plan for the future. Even if Trump shrinks the monument again, we can’t make the development plans that we need in Monticello, because we know that there will be another election coming.” Britt Hornsby, a staunchly pro-monument city-council member in Bluff, seemed just as disheartened by what he called the federal government’s “ping-pong approach” to Bears Ears. “We’ve had some folks in town looking to start a guiding business,” he said, “but they have been unable to get special recreation permits with all the back-and-forth.”

[Read: Return the national parks to the tribes]

The only conventional uranium-processing mill still active in the United States sits just outside the borders of another nearby town, Blanding. Phil Lyman, who, until recently, represented Blanding and much of the surrounding area in Utah’s House of Representatives, has lived there all of his life. Lyman personifies resistance to the monument. He told me that archaeological sites were never looted en masse, as Hadenfeldt had said. This account of the landscape was simply “a lie.” (In 2009, federal agents raided homes in Blanding and elsewhere, recovering some 40,000 potentially stolen artifacts.) While Lyman was serving as the local county commissioner in 2014, two years before Bears Ears was created, he led an illegal ATV ride into a canyon that the Bureau of Land Management had closed in order to protect Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. Some associates of the anti-government militant Ammon Bundy rode along with him. A few were armed.

To avoid violence, assembled federal agents did not make immediate arrests, but Lyman was later convicted, and served 10 days in jail. The stunt earned him a pardon from Trump and a more prominent political profile in Utah.When Biden re-expanded the monument in 2021, Lyman was furious. While he offered general support for the state of Utah’s legal efforts to reverse Biden’s order, he also said that his paramount concern was not these “lesser legal arguments” but “the federal occupation of Utah” itself. Like many people in rural Utah, Lyman sees the monument as yet another government land grab, in a state where more than 60 percent of the land is public. The feds had colluded with environmentalists to designate the monument to shut down industries, in a manner befitting of Communists, he told me.

Davina Smith, who sits on the board of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition as representative for the Navajo Nation, grew up just a mile outside of Bears Ears. She now lives in Blanding, not far from Lyman. Her father, like Mayor Hedglin’s, was a uranium miner. But Native Americans haven’t always been treated like they belong here, she told me. “People in Utah say that they want local control, but when we tried to deal with the state, we were not viewed as locals.” Indeed, for more than 30 years, San Juan County’s government was specifically designed to keep input from the Navajo to a minimum. Only in 2017 did a federal court strike down a racial-gerrymandering scheme that had kept Navajo voting power confined to one district.

Smith, too, has been tormented by what she called the “never-ending cycle of uncertainty” over the monument. The tribes have just spent three years negotiating a new land-management plan with the Biden administration, and it may be all for naught. “Each new administration comes in with different plans and shifting priorities, and nothing ever feels like it’s moving toward a permanent solution,” Smith said.

The judicial branch of the federal government will have some decisions of its own to make about the monument, and may inject still more reversals. In 2017, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and other groups sued the government over Trump’s original downsizing order, arguing that the president’s power to create national monuments under the Antiquities Act is a ratchet—a power to create, not shrink or destroy. No federal judge had ruled on that legal question by the time of Biden’s re-expansion, and the lawsuit was stayed. If Trump now shrinks the monument again, the lawsuit will likely be reactivated, and new ones likely filed. A subsequent ruling in Trump’s favor would have far-reaching implications if it were upheld by the Supreme Court. It would defang the Antiquities Act, a statute that was written to protect Native American heritage, empowering any president to shrink any of America’s national monuments on a whim. (The Biden administration launched an historic run of monument creation. Project 2025, a policy blueprint co-written by Trump’s former head of BLM, calls for a shrinking spree.) The borders of each one could begin to pulsate with every subsequent presidential handover.

An act of Congress might be the only way to permanently resolve the Bears Ears issue. Even with Republican lawmakers in control, such an outcome may be preferable to the endless flip-flops of executive power, Hillary Hoffmann, a co-director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, told me. “The tribes have built bipartisan relationships with members of Congress.” They might not get as much land for the monument as they did under Obama or Biden, she said, but perhaps a grand bargain could be struck. A smaller allotment of protected land could be exchanged for the stability that would allow local communities—including monument supporters and opponents alike—to plan for their future.

In the meantime, people in southeastern Utah are waiting to see what Trump actually does. When I asked Smith how the tribes are preparing for the new administration, she was coy. She didn’t want to telegraph the coalition’s next moves. “We are definitely planning,” she told me. “This isn’t our first time.” Everyone in the fight over Bears Ears has to find some way to cope with the uncertainty; for Smith, it’s taking the long view. She invoked the deeper history of the Colorado Plateau. She called back to the Long Walk of the Navajo, a series of 53 forced marches that the U.S. Army used to remove thousands of tribe members from their land in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1860s. “When the cavalry came to round up my people, some of them sought refuge in Bears Ears,” she said. “To this day, I can go there and remember what my ancestors did. I can remember that we come from a great line of resilience.”