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Addiction comes in many forms and a lot of them are perfectly legal.

Daily, I fight the urge to scroll—for hours—on various social-media apps, yet I can go months without drinking alcohol and not even think about it.

The question of whether to ban harmful behaviors or substances is one laden with competing priorities: How intrusive is the government intervention? How harmful is the substance? Would banning it even work to curb the behavior? What about the economic impact of a ban? What sorts of revenues can be gained from taxation instead?

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the journalist Danny Funt, who has been reporting for years on a behavior that’s come under much scrutiny lately: sports betting. Renewed debate over bans on sports betting erupted into public view nearly seven years ago in a pivotal Supreme Court case. The decision opened the door to a variety of new state legalization schemes and the outcomes have been mixed, at best. Although states may have stumbled onto a new source of revenue (albeit weaker than some were expecting), it has come at a cost to gamblers’ financial and mental health. The results have turned even vocal proponents into skeptics.

“I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022, and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet,” Funt recalled. “It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, ‘I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas.’”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: The Super Bowl is coming up, and so today we’re talking about the most important part of sports: gambling.

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting that spurred four years of nonstop ads enticing me and you and everyone I know to spend all our discretionary income on FanDuel or DraftKings. At the time, advocates believed that the revenue streams that could come from sports betting were too good to pass up. After the Great Recession, states were cash-strapped and hungry for new sources of money.

States have unevenly legalized, meaning in some places, you can log onto your phone to place a bet, and in others, you might still need to go to a physical location. The Court left open other pathways for the federal government to curb or ban sports betting, and as many of the negative impacts of gambling have metastasized, more policy makers are questioning whether legalization is worth the revenue.

My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My guest today is Danny Funt, a journalist who has tracked the rise of sports betting for The Washington Post and is now working on a wide-ranging book on the topic.

[Music]

Demsas: Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Funt: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So I have actually never bet on sports. I grew up in a Christian household—I am Christian—and it’s just not a thing that my parents ever allowed. We couldn’t even make dollar bets at home. Like, it was just not allowed. And I feel like I knew later on that I had kind of an addictive personality. So I was like, I’m not going to do this. I’m just never going to get into betting or gambling. Have you bet on sports? Is this something that you do?

Funt: Oh yeah. I’m trying to be more honest about that. I used to be like, Well, if you were a restaurant reporter, you’d have to eat out. You’d sort of be obligated to see what the culinary scene is like. So I do the same with sports betting. But truthfully, I was betting on sports long before I ever wrote about it.

I will say that the more you learn about how significant the house’s upper hand is, it definitely gets in the back of your head, and I do a lot less now just knowing I don’t stand a chance.

Demsas: How significant is it?

Funt: It depends on what you’re betting. The standard is actually pretty low. They’ll win $5 for every $100 you bet. But nowadays, that’s getting jacked up. So you might have heard of things like parlays. The parlay hold percentage, which is like the house revenue or the house edge, can be as high as 20 percent. So you’re getting beat pretty bad if you bet a lot of parlays.

Demsas: So sports betting, I feel like, I really did not hear a lot about, other than just when the World Cup is on, and your friend might bet you 20 bucks about the outcome or something like that. And now I feel like it’s everywhere. I feel like I’m seeing ads everywhere. I feel like every time I look over on the Metro, like, there’s some 17-year-old guy on DraftKings—well, let’s hope he’s 19, not 17. But it feels like it came out of nowhere. What happened?

Funt: It really did. That’s really what got my attention: It just felt like, overnight this went from something that we had all been taught was this existential threat to sports, that the professional leagues and the NCAA would never support—there were basically a century’s worth of scandals involving gambling that motivated that concern—and then, suddenly, there was a Supreme Court decision in 2018 that struck down a federal ban on bookmaking outside of Nevada.

And that really was a starting gun for all of these states to say, Hey. This is a way we can raise money and cash in on this opportunity. And it was incredible how night and day it was, where what I described as this existential evil was suddenly repackaged as this wholesome way of enjoying sports that every sports fan ought to consider.

Demsas: So take us back to 1992, where that federal ban was enacted. It’s called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. What led to that effort? Who was pushing for it, and why did they think it was necessary?

Funt: Yeah, I was surprised to learn that it was the professional sports leagues, mainly the NFL, that went to Congress and said, Hey—we need this. So a lot of states back then were facing severe budget deficits. You know, it’s the tail end of the Reagan era; there’s a lot of resistance to tax hikes.

And naturally, when you need to raise money, but you don’t want to raise taxes, states will look at gambling. And there was sort of a groundswell of loosening the laws around tribal casinos and state lotteries. And a lot of states began looking at, basically, a version of state-sanctioned sports betting, where a state lottery is giving people the chance to wager on sporting events.

And the sports league said, We hate this idea. We’ve allowed it in Nevada because it’s been there forever, but we don’t want this to be the way that our fans engage with our product.

Demsas: Why? Why were they opposed?

Funt: For one, the 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal, where, famously, the team rigged the World Series in cahoots with gamblers—that is front and center still. Pete Rose had just been banned for life for betting on baseball as a player and as a coach. Really every decade, if you look back in the history books, there’s a major scandal involving college sports or professional sports or whatever. Beyond that, they just thought, We like the idea of fans liking the games for the games’ sake, and if they’re looking at it through this cynical gambling lens, it’ll kind of cheapen their relationship with sports and diminish our product.

Demsas: That’s very altruistic, right? I mean, I would imagine these sports leagues are just like, What can make us money? You know what I mean?

Funt: Definitely. At the same time, that does make them a lot of money. Think of all the jerseys and pennants and other merch that people buy because they’re lifelong sports fans. It fuels a lot of irrational, obsessive behavior. And then again, so does gambling.

So you can understand why it was very tempting, over time, for the leagues to flip-flop and come around on that. But the Senate and the House held these really robust hearings to evaluate the threat of gambling, the benefit that state-sanctioned gambling might pose. And it was just so striking, to me, that they laid it all out on the table in the early ’90s, and then fast-forward: 25 years later, there was really none of that. It was just, Okay, let’s cash in.

Demsas: So Nevada, you mentioned, has always been exempt from PASPA. What has been their experience?

Funt: Around the ’50s, when casinos were taking off in Nevada, sports betting was sort of an amenity, kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet, you know? It’s just one more thing to draw people in so that they go to the table games and the slot machines that really make money. So in a lot of ways, sports betting was an afterthought.

And yet, many of us thought, If we ever wanted to bet legally on sports, that’s the place to do it. So people would schedule March Madness trips to bet on college basketball, or they’d go during the Super Bowl to bet on that. So it was a pretty big draw, but it was also very marginal in terms of the bottom line for Nevada gambling operators.

But gambling on sports still existed well beyond Nevada in the U.S., because there’s this thriving black market. And one of the big arguments for legalization, just like with cannabis, was, People are going to find a way to do it, so let’s bring it above board, tax it, implement consumer protections. And at least that was a pretty convincing argument in favor.

Demsas: You mentioned the Supreme Court decision, Murphy v. NCAA. That’s the Supreme Court decision that basically strikes down this federal ban. What was the legal argument at issue there? Why did the Supreme Court find that the federal government cannot ban sports betting?

Funt: So crucially, they very explicitly said they can ban sports betting—they had just gone about doing it with a defective bill. So naturally, Supreme Court decisions tend to get oversimplified in the public conscience, but this one is so crucial because sports betting’s advocates took the decision and said, Aha! The Supreme Court has given the green light for sports betting or okayed sports betting.

Really, the case turned on a fairly obscure Tenth Amendment concept about states’ rights. And sports betting was the focus, but it was also kind of beside the point. So New Jersey said that what the federal government has done, in essence, is said, We want to ban sports betting, but we don’t want to regulate it. So we’re going to commandeer the states to do the federal government’s bidding. If they had legalized sports betting before 1992, that’s grandfathered in; it can remain on the books. If they hadn’t, they’re prohibited from changing their mind and legalizing it.

So this argument before the Court wasn’t, Should the federal government be allowed to ban sports betting? It was, Should they be able to tell the states that if they have an existing law, they can’t change it? And, you know, it sounds like the most thrilling Supreme Court oral argument. It was actually pretty dry because it’s so obscure in that way. But the effect was to overturn this ban that had been on the books for a quarter century.

Demsas: What was the state interest in legalization? This is Murphy v. NCAA. That’s Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat. Why was he so hell-bent on taking this on?

Funt: The funny thing is: It was really Chris Christie, his predecessor, who was hell-bent on taking it on, and it really annoys Christie, who views bringing sports betting to New Jersey as one of his crowning achievements. It pains him to this day that the title of that case was updated to reflect Murphy because he took office before the decision came out.

But they had this long-standing economy, mainly in Atlantic City, that was really struggling. They looked at Nevada and were quite envious that sports betting brings people to the state around these major sporting events, year after year, and they said this would be a way to revitalize Atlantic City.

So the argument they brought to the Court wasn’t, Let’s have online sports betting across the country. It was, Let’s have in-person sports betting in these casinos in Atlantic City to jumpstart this ailing economy. As you can imagine, after that, all these states said, Hey—we also could use a lot of tax revenue and jumpstart our economies. Especially during COVID, when so many states were facing pretty dire budget deficits, they said, This is a fairly easy way to snap our fingers and have access to this influx of cash.

And that tends to happen a lot with gambling—is you’re facing some sort of economic or state budgetary issue, and this is a quick fix. So once New Jersey did it, and Delaware and Pennsylvania and a number of other early adopters, there was this ripple effect, where states look to their neighbors and say, Hey—they’re making money off this. We feel like chumps because we’re not. Let’s get on board. And the bandwagon really got off and running.

Demsas: So one thing that’s interesting is that—I’m confused why there’s been such a big focus or why sports betting has been so central to this story, when it feels like all types of online gambling are legal in lots of places now. So can you help me understand why that’s been so front and center?

Funt: I mean there’s so many video games or phone-based apps where it’s like, Hey—do you want to buy some tokens with real money? And then you’re playing with tokens, and then you convert the tokens back to real money, so it’s very sly.

There’s this whole phenomenon of what are branded as sweepstakes, where it’s essentially a loophole to allow people of all ages to risk money on sports, but it’s not called gambling. And you might remember: There’s a long history of things finding loopholes to offer gambling by a different name, most notably the whole daily-fantasy-sports boom that paved the way for sports betting.

So you’re right. It is part of a wider phenomenon. It’s interesting that true online casino gambling, like slots and roulette and poker, was predicted to follow from legal sports gambling. That was what a lot of these companies were banking on. And although about a half dozen states have legalized it, it hasn’t caught on quite as quickly as some of their investors’ hopes, and we could get into that.

Demsas: Yeah, why not?

Funt: The main reason is that the brick-and-mortar casinos think it’ll cannibalize their business, that if people can bet on those games on their phones, they’re not going to bother to make the trek to a retail casino to do the same thing. So I still think that’s going to be in the headlines a lot in the coming years, as states look for more ways to bring in tax revenue.

But to your question about why sports betting seems so dominant, part of it is just: The advertising is unbelievable. These companies are spending billions of dollars every year to get it in front of potential customers in as many ways as possible. As you were saying, you see it on the train. Same here in North Carolina. Billboards, signs downtown—everywhere you look there’s an appeal to get you to start betting on sports, not to mention all the TV ads. So the marketing is just overwhelming.

And then beyond that, it is startling, in that this was seen as something that was done in the shadows, and now it’s so mainstream and really being rammed down people’s throats in a way that a lot of people are quite concerned about.

Demsas: So what is the landscape now, right? Like, after Murphy, states had to pass their own legalization schemes. Right now, D.C. and 27 states allow online sports gambling, and there’s some regional concentration here that I thought was interesting—basically, the entire Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, as well as the Midwest. But lots of the South hasn’t. The Pacific Northwest hasn’t. California and Texas haven’t. What kind of explains this regional variation?

Funt: I think in the Northeast, state lotteries are so deeply rooted. Massachusetts, for example, has the highest-grossing state lottery per capita. So I think it’s easier to transition people into a new form of gambling. In a lot of parts of the country, like California and Texas, tribal interests are so powerful—they’re resisting anything that would threaten their business. In parts of the South, there’s a strong conservative Christian aversion to gambling still, although I think that’s dissipated a lot from one of the main reasons why the country didn’t adopt more gambling sooner. So yeah, it’s a lot of cultural and political reasons.

Demsas: One story of yours really kind of shows how haphazard the legalization process has been. Can you tell us about the Abunai gambler in D.C.?

Funt: Yes, so as you mentioned, D.C. is one of the places that legalized sports betting. Like many places, they did it quite hurriedly and sort of made things up as they go. And one interesting decision the D.C. government made was to have a city-sponsored sports-betting operation, as opposed to letting these companies like FanDuel and DraftKings run the show. So you could bet through those companies at stadiums and arenas, but if you are out and about on your phone or at a lot of these betting terminals in cafés and restaurants and bars, you are betting with a city-sponsored sportsbook called Gambet[DC].

And these terminals—they sort of look like ATM machines. They popped up all over the place, including at this tiny poke shop called Abunai. And one of the interesting things about betting terminals that professional gamblers were quick to pick up on is: Unlike if you’re going to a brick-and-mortar sportsbook, where you give your ID and they pay close attention to who it is betting, you bet anonymously through these terminals. So if you’ve sort of cracked the code and figured out an edge, you can bet anonymously, basically limitlessly, through these terminals and make a killing.

And this one guy found deficiencies in the odds in this poorly run city-sponsored sportsbook. It’s kind of incredible how bad the odds were compared to the rest of the market. Like, it didn’t take a genius to pick off vulnerable games to bet on. So he just finds a list of places in the city that have these betting terminals. Abunai was the first alphabetically on the list. So he says, Okay, great. They have a nice owner and staff, who didn’t mind him basically turning it into his home office.

And day after day, he would just dump cash in this machine and bet as much as he could—so much so that it swung the entire city’s betting numbers so that an overwhelming amount of money was being bet through this one store. He was winning so much that the entire city-run sportsbook was net negative for an entire month, which is unheard of. We all know the house always wins. D.C.’s sportsbook was run so poorly the house lost, in a month.

Demsas: How does that happen? Like, what is going on there?

Funt: So basically, sports-betting odds are often like efficient markets. So just like it’s really hard to beat the stock market, it’s really hard to beat who’s gonna win, you know, a football game or a basketball game, over the long haul, because, basically, the world’s collective wisdom is informing the spreads and the odds on these games.

But the people who are running Gambet[DC], this D.C. sportsbook, were very slow to update the odds. Sometimes, they would just have errors in how they input the information, so they just clearly have the equivalent of a typo in inputting the odds. Just not a lot of oversight. Even though it’s a pretty airtight business, you still need a lot of smart people running it and automation to manage it.

So this guy just picked off all these bad lines and bad odds. And statistically, he gained the upper hand, because if Gambet[DC]’s odds are way out of sync with the rest of the market, chances are the rest of the market’s right.

Demsas: So you literally just have to look at what the market is telling you, what the odds are in other places, and then just go sit down at Abunai Poke and just say like, All right, looking at my phone, what’s going on, on DraftKings or whatever, and then just do that.

Funt: Precisely. He was betting on sports that he didn’t follow at all. He had no expert insights into them. It was just, A respected sportsbook has the odds at this number. Gambet[DC]’s are off in this way. I’m gonna err on the side of the respected sportsbook and bet against Gambet[DC]. And it was hugely profitable, at least as long as he got away with it.

Demsas: Do you know how much money he made?

Funt: Yes, so thanks to some public records that were turned over, only over the course of three months, he profited more than $400,000—pretty unheard of, even for an incredibly successful bettor. That rate of return is just remarkable.

Demsas: Wow. So I went down a rabbit hole, when I was researching for this episode, about American history on sports gambling. And I did not know the role of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy—the OG Bobby Kennedy—his crusade against sports gambling. And learning that, kind of in the middle of the 20th century—you touch on this a little bit, but—that the real focus on outlawing sports gambling was about combating organized-crime syndicates.

Bobby Kennedy wrote an article in The Atlantic in April 1962 about this issue. And just quoting from it:

As I sit down today to write this article, a business executive with an industrial firm on the Eastern seaboard is telephoning a bookmaker to place a fifty-dollar bet on a horse race; a factory worker in a Midwestern town is standing at a lunch counter filling out a basketball parlay card on which he will wager two dollars; a housewife in a West Coast suburb is handing a dime to a policy writer who operates a newsstand as a front near the supermarket where she shops.

These people, and millions like them who follow similar routines every day, see nothing wrong in what they are doing. Many of them can afford the luxury of this type of gambling. They look upon it simply as taking a chance.

He continues:

But they are taking a chance which the nation and its economy cannot afford. They are pouring dimes and dollars day by day into a vast stream of cash which finances most illegal underworld activities. The housewife, the factory worker, and the businessman will tell you that they are against such things as narcotics, bootlegging, prostitution, gang murders, the corruption of public officials and police, and the bribery of college athletes. And yet this is where their money goes.

So I did not have a sense that this was a big part of the modern conversation around sports gambling. Is this kind of resolved, or are we still worried about gambling, kind of, going to these underworld activities?

Funt: Yeah, first of all, it’s a great article you turned up. I’m excited to find it myself and read it. That was definitely one of the arguments for legalizing sports betting around 2018, after that Supreme Court decision, because a huge amount of money was being bet through offshore sportsbooks that operated illegally online, taking tens of billions of dollars in wagers from Americans. And there was some evidence that the criminal syndicates that were operating those sportsbooks did a bunch of other criminal activity.

So just as RFK was saying, you’re, in effect, patronizing those sorts of criminal activities. That’s not always the case. Some of them were just Americans who were bookmakers in the U.S. and got tired of getting arrested, so they went to Latin America and set up websites where they could take bets. It wasn’t quite as sinister as that. But at least as the argument went, it was a real boogeyman, that you’re funding criminal organizations, and, Why not fund taxed, legitimate companies by making this legal? So yes, that was definitely a significant argument.

And I think as far as that kind of conscious capitalism goes, well, the sportsbooks that operate today definitely aren’t, you know, also selling drugs and prostitution and all those things. There definitely is some hand-wringing among people of, Does gambling exploit vulnerable people? Do we know that this is making problem gambling more prevalent? And by betting safely, are you still, in effect, funding companies that take advantage of people? So it’s not quite as potent as the argument RFK laid out, but it’s definitely still relevant.

Demsas: And what has the impact been on legalization? Has legalization reduced off-book gambling. Can we even really measure that?

Funt: So you’re right. It’s impossible to know exactly how much gambling is going on under the table. It always has been. I think some of the estimates were inflated to make the argument seem more convincing, but it by no means has eliminated it or even put the dent in it that a lot of the advocates for legalization promised.

Again, in 1992, they looked at all these different types of cause-and-effect things to think about, and one of them was: If you legalize an illegal activity, do you snuff out the black market, or do you just grow the pool of people doing it and, in fact, actually convert some people who might not have been doing it, who are then going to look to the black market, for a variety of reasons? So when it comes to sports betting, yes—there are definitely those offshore, illegal sportsbooks that are hurting because of this.

But there are also people who took up sports betting because they saw ads everywhere and all these generous new-customer offers and started legally, and then they said, Hey. There’s a bunch of different reasons why betting illegally might be advantageous. Maybe I don’t want it showing up on my bank statement. Maybe I don’t want my winnings taxed. Maybe I want to be able to bet much more illegally than you’re able to do so legally, if I’m a winning bettor. So yeah, in some respects, it’s put the offshore business on the ropes, and in other respects, it’s sort of created a funnel of new customers for them.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: what’s gained and what’s lost in states where online sports betting is legal.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to delve into the welfare harms of people who are engaging in sports gambling. But before I do that, I think because of your articles and a lot of other arguments being made and research coming out, there’s a growing narrative about the potential mistake that this was in legalizing gambling. But I think that can be helpful to go back and think in the minds of states who were interested in legalizing gambling. What was going on with them? Like, how much money are they actually making off of this? And what sorts of things is it going to?

Funt: Yeah, that was definitely the No. 1 argument, was, Hey. Let’s just bring in more revenue without taxing people—always, you know, a strong selling point for at least some people.

So whether tax revenue has exceeded or failed to meet expectations varies state by state. In total, since that Supreme Court decision and all these states started legalizing, a little more than $7 billion has been raised in taxes from sports betting for state governments. It’s important to note that $2.6 billion of that has gone to New York State alone, the largest legal sports-betting state, which also has the largest tax rate, so they’re just getting an epic windfall compared to the rest of the country.

Many states simply send the money to their general fund. Some states, like Colorado, specifically earmarked it—in Colorado’s case, for water-conservation issues. But you know, tax revenue is definitely a worthwhile thing to look at, but it’s not the whole picture. I think it’s appropriate to look at a more holistic view of, Sure, states are generating this money, but it’s not like loose change they’re finding in their couch cushions. This is coming from somewhere. It’s coming from their constituents.

We know gambling is, in many respects, kind of a regressive tax in that it, you know, pulls money from a lot of vulnerable people, as opposed to a more progressive tax that proportionately takes from people who can afford to lose. And that’s why some states, like Washington State, have been much more restrictive in the way that, yes, they’ve legalized sports betting, but you can only do it on the grounds at tribal reservations. So their idea was, Let’s give a boost to tribal economies, but we don’t want to depend on revenue from gambling to fund our state’s growing needs. We’d rather do that through progressive taxes, more sustainable, healthier for our society, something that definitely not all states have taken into account.

Demsas: I have seen a lot of that research around the regressivity of these sorts of tax revenues, but I was surprised with sports betting. And there was a Pew poll looking at the demographics of people who engage in sports betting. And they don’t really find any significant differences in educational attainment or household income. They see that men are more likely than women to say they have bet on sports, and adults under the age of 50 (when compared to those over 50), and Black Americans and Hispanic adults are more likely than white and Asian American adults. But I’m surprised that there’s not more of a difference in household income here.

Funt: You’re right. In some respects, I think sports bettors skew a little bit more middle class and well-educated, compared to other forms of gambling. But when we think about the regressivity of it or just whether it’s the healthiest way for society to generate money, it’s not just that the poor are the ones doing the gambling. It’s also—think about that people with gambling problems are, in many respects, these companies’ best customers. They’re losing such a disproportionate amount of money, compared to the rest of the clientele.

Are we comfortable generating money on the backs of people who just find this ruinous, in a lot of ways beyond financially? So that, I think, should give people pause. But you’re right—for a lot of cultural reasons, the people who bet on sports tend to be much more middle class than the people who, say, do scratch-offs or play the lottery.

Demsas: So I want to now turn to all of the harms that have now become evident over the past several years. Can you walk us through the financial impacts of gambling? What are we finding about the legalization of sports gambling on the impact on households’ financial well-being?

Funt: Yes. So last year, I’d say two of the most-buzzed-about studies that came out on that topic—one of them found a direct correlation between states that had legalized sports betting and a demonstrable impact on credit scores and other measures of financial health. A similar study, also last year, found that household savings go down in places where sports betting is legal. So you are seeing a demonstrable impact on people’s financial well-being as a result of the availability of sports betting.

Part of what I find, honestly, quite frustrating about the way this has played out in the U.S. is it’s been treated like this experiment where, We’re entering an uncharted territory. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll discover things. Like, Does this hurt people financially, or does this create a public-health problem that we didn’t anticipate? There’s a whole bunch of countries that are far ahead of the U.S. in terms of legalizing, and there’s a vast body of research that looks at the consequences. This didn’t have to be this shot in the dark for the U.S. We could have looked at Europe and Australia and Latin America and Asia and a lot of other places that are farther along and have had to reconcile the consequences of making gambling so accessible.

So in the U.K., for example, where online gambling was legalized in 2005, one study recently found that Brits lose about £5.5 billion every year betting online, which results in lost economic activity of £1.3 billion. The government estimates conservatively that gambling-related health consequences cost the population more than a billion pounds every year. And again, the people who did that study said: If you actually look at the second- and third-degree consequences, on a mental-health level and all the family trauma that it causes, it’s probably much bigger than a billion pounds, but we can safely say that.

So yes, again, the evidence is starting to trickle out in the U.S., but it’s been there overseas, and I think it’s pretty irresponsible that the states that were establishing regulations didn’t heed those warnings before getting this off and running.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I want to underscore this. I can imagine someone going like, All right, someone is going to, you know, buy some bad fast food out there rather than cook, or they might gamble on some sports. These are all just consumption, and they’re different levels of bad, but is it really that big of a deal?

You know, one of the studies you referenced, a Northwestern University study by Scott Baker and his co-authors—they’re finding that it’s not just displacing other gambling and consumption. People are falling into debt over this. So for every dollar spent on betting, households are putting a dollar less into investment accounts. You’re more at risk of overdrafting your bank account, maxing out credit cards.

And these effects are strongest among households that are already kind of financially precarious. Charles Lehman actually wrote a great article about this for us in The Atlantic. And this is not a situation, I think, where it’s, you know, We’re just getting money reallocated from other places. People are experiencing a lot more debt delinquency over this.

The other study that you referenced, the economist Brett Hollenbeck at UCLA and his co-authors also find, similarly, that the increase of the risk that a household goes bankrupt [goes up] by 25 to 30 percent. I mean, these are really big numbers that we’re seeing here. And can you just walk us through this kind of gambling addiction? Is this a situation where it’s a very small number of people who are getting addicted, and that’s what’s driving these stats? Or are large shares of Americans experiencing financial precarity here? What do you think?

Funt: Right. So the rate of problem gambling is definitely increasing. So for a long time, it was perceived that about 1 to 2 percent of the population is prone to problem gambling. In states that have had legal sports betting and other legal online gambling for a while, they’re seeing that rate closer to 6 or even 8 percent, and it’s even higher among young men, who are often the target audience for sports betting.

But I think it’s important to look beyond problem gambling. Even though those numbers are quite alarming, it can sort of make it seem like a marginal issue. Like, As long as I’m not in that sliver of the population, I’m good. I think that those sorts of consequences that you were describing go beyond people who have diagnosable problems.

So I find quite striking or even alarming the explosion of gambling among college students. And there was a survey recently that found that one in five college students who bet on sports dips into their tuition funds to fund their betting. So obviously, fewer than 20 percent of college students have gambling problems, but you’re still seeing people affect themselves financially because of their betting. So it’s a vast problem, and it’s an under-researched area.

It’s also something that is a developing story. So you’re not going to get a full picture out the gates. Gambling disorder, unlike some addictions where you might experience something once and become hooked on it—that can happen with gambling, but—it’s often a progressive disorder, so it can take several years or even longer to develop a problem. So if you think about it, we’re really in the early innings of this. And that sort of data and that sort of picture of how this is affecting society as a whole is still going to be emerging in the coming years.

Demsas: And, I mean, you talked a little about the mental-health impacts of gambling addiction here, but there was a paper that came out recently—it’s actually what spurred me to want to do this episode with you—about domestic violence. Can you talk to us about what that found?

Funt: Yes, it’s one of those things that’s terrible but, honestly, not totally surprising—that, again, you can see a correlation between the states that have legalized sports betting and those that haven’t, and when people lose bets, they’re more prone to commit acts of domestic violence.

There’s, similarly, a correlation, in that same respect, where sports betting is legal and higher rates of binge drinking. So you can think about it either fueling or just coinciding with a lot of other problematic activity. And it’s why, to really take stock of what this means for society, you’ve got to look at the bigger picture, not just some of these raw numbers that are thrown in our faces all the time.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think that most people have probably heard there’s an older study that’s not about sports betting, but it’s just about, you know, an NFL home team’s upset loss can cause a 10 percent increase in the rate of at-home violence. This is a famous David Card study.

And the thing that I think is really interesting about the Card-Dahl study is that when we’re talking about upset losses—these are, like, unexpected losses, when the home team was predicted to win, and then they lose—you would think, Oh well, maybe in the states where there was an upset win, when the home team was predicted to lose and they actually win, maybe you see a decline in domestic violence, but that doesn’t happen. There’s basically an asymmetry here—

Funt: Oh gosh.

Demsas: —in the gain-loss utility function. So it’s like: You’re actually just gonna get more domestic violence. You’re not gonna even it out or something like that. And that, I think, becomes a really big problem when you are thinking about this paternalism issue here, because I can imagine people hearing this episode are just like, Yeah, this sounds really bad, but do I think the government should be in charge of banning something just because people are making bad decisions?

The downstream effects here are what I think are really convincing. You know, no one consents to having domestic violence happen to them, obviously, ever. But that that might increase as a result of someone else choosing to bet on sports seems, you know, even beyond the pale.

Funt: Yeah, absolutely. I think this debate often gets reduced to, Should this be outlawed, or should it be legal with hardly any restrictions? And I think it oversimplifies the argument, and it—we’re really past that. I don’t know how many states that have legalized it are going to go ahead and say, This was a mistake. Let’s outlaw it.

But there’s such a spectrum within that dichotomy, of: Should there be restrictions on advertising? Should there be restrictions on the enticements for customers? Should we require affordability checks to make sure people are betting at least vaguely within their means? All these different regulations that ought to be debated instead of, Should we ban this? which, of course—you’re right—is going to get a bad reaction from a lot of people who don’t like the government overstepping in the decisions we make.

I think consumer protections were the main argument for legalization. So whether we’re living up to that promise and delivering actual protections that protect the people who were betting illegally, and now we’ve said this is a safer way to do things—that, I hope, is where the conversation goes.

Demsas: I actually was surprised. I was trying to look up what people actually want to happen with legalization here, and I was shocked. Only 8 percent of people—there’s a Pew poll about this—only 8 percent of people thought it was good for the country that sports betting was legal. And 34 percent said it was a bad thing. The rest said they thought it was neither good nor bad. I would not have expected that. Is that what you find when you’re reporting, that people are saying that they think it’s bad that we’re allowing this?

Funt: Yeah, I try not to put too much stock in the anecdotal. Even though I’ve interviewed so many hundreds of people for my work, I’d rather rely on an academic who’s doing a proper study.

That said, yeah, I find it interesting, not only how many average people feel that way, but how many professional bettors, who you’d think would be the biggest evangelists for legalization and defending the way they make their livelihood—a lot of them are some of the most vocal about, This has gotten out of control. It’s crazy that there aren’t more guardrails to protect ordinary people.

I even hear plenty of people who work in the industry say, States and even perhaps the federal government could be doing more to protect customers. So it’s not just casual people who see all the ads and say, Gee, this has run amok. It’s people who are right in the middle of it who feel that way.

Demsas: So you mentioned that other countries have had experiences with this as well. Are there regulations you would copy from other places that maybe can improve our situation?

Funt: Yeah, and I try not to be, you know, a public-policy advocate as a reporter, but I will just say things that a lot of people, whether they’re health experts or player-safety advocates, are encouraging to at least be debated.

So one of them is: Countries that have banned advertisements that use expressions like free or risk-free or no sweat or bonus deceptively—so they’re basically making it sound like a can’t-lose proposition, when either you can lose the money you’re betting on the bonus, this offer, or you might get a little money through the bonus, but you’re obviously going to lose money over time—some countries have tried to weed that out.

There have been a lot of countries that have restricted when and how you can advertise, to try to minimize the number of young people that are seeing gambling ads day after day. So they might say you can’t advertise during sporting events or during certain hours of the day when kids are more likely to be watching TV.

Affordability checks are a polarizing one because that does tend to feel quite paternalistic, but in a lot of the places that have imposed those, the thresholds are sky-high. They’re not telling you, You should spend your money here or there. They’re saying, If someone’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars within a day of signing up, maybe you ought to check in and see if they can afford to be doing that—things that are a lot more palatable than you might think when you hear a phrase like affordability check.

So there’s so many different reforms. Another one that is getting a lot of buzz at the federal level is this idea of a national self-exclusion list. So one thing that’s quite helpful for people with problems is they say, I’d like to cut myself off from gambling, to remove that temptation. But currently, let’s say I live in New Jersey—I can do that in New Jersey, but if I drive 15 minutes into New York or Pennsylvania, that exclusion doesn’t apply in those states. So it’s enormously tempting to do that. It might make sense to have a national self-exclusion list. So operators that are functioning across state lines have to honor exclusion, no matter where you are.

Things like that, again, it’s not about, Should we outlaw this? or, Should we backpedal on the decision to legalize? There’s this whole host of consumer protections that might be worth considering.

Demsas: Yeah, one thing I’d heard talked about is also not allowing people to make bets with credit cards, such that you have to have the money, so you can’t run up these large bills that you literally cannot pay back. And it seems like something about allowing it everywhere you are is a problem, right?

There’s a level to which I don’t know that we’re putting the genie back in the bottle on online betting, but the idea that you can pull out your phone at any point when you’re stressed out, that you don’t have to go somewhere, seems like a problem. And maybe creating some sort of temporal bounds, like maybe you can’t do it on college campuses or something like that—you can’t do it in schools in general, or you can’t do it at bars or something—you know, that might create some backlash here, but it indicates that, you know, there are ways to reduce the problem here.

Funt: You’re right that you have to use geolocation when you use these apps so that they can tell that you’re in a legal betting state, and it’s extraordinarily precise and effective. So if you’re in D.C. and you go into a federal building, suddenly your sports-betting app no longer works. It literally, like, works if I’m in a yard within the okay zone versus the not-okay zone. It’ll pick up on that.

There’s a state delegate in Maryland named Pam Queen, who’s also a professor at Morgan State University, who had the idea of: We could use this to either ban sports betting on college campuses or do something even more modest, like ban it in classrooms or in underage dorms or dorms during certain hours. The possibilities, as you were saying, are limitless, and it doesn’t have to be as severe as, you know, You can’t bet at a stadium or at a bar. It could be things that I think most people would agree sound appropriate, like, You shouldn’t bet in a freshman dorm or, you know, during class.

So yeah, that is a really potent tool that hasn’t caught on anywhere, but I think she and other people are going to be pushing for that.

Demsas: I then also want to ask you about your experiences interviewing legislators. So there are a lot of legislators who are involved in this effort, a lot of governors who have signed bills to allow sports betting or to allow online betting in their states. Have you talked to anyone who’s exhibited any kind of concern with how things have gone?

Funt: Buyer’s remorse, in some cases. Most notably, I’d say: I interviewed Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts who signed the bill legalizing bookmaking there in 2022 and then a few months later became president of the NCAA and has become a really vocal champion for limiting the amount of betting on college sports, particularly in light of the brutal harassment that college athletes and coaches get whenever their performance costs someone a bet.

It’s honestly horrifying, the sort of stuff they see on social media and in real life. And he has said point-blank, I wish, in hindsight, this had stayed in Las Vegas. As you were saying, it’s pretty commonsense that if you can bet from literally anywhere at any time of day, that’s gonna be quite a different situation than if you have to go to a casino, or even go to Las Vegas, in order to bet—or hunt down a bookie and find ways to bet through crypto or other sort of sketchy things that a lot of people are uncomfortable doing.

The idea that you can swipe to deposit money on your phone and then tap a couple of times and bet limitless amounts at any time of day is such a game changer. He was saying, We didn’t really process what a difference that would make, and I wish we had. So yes, he’s maybe the most forthcoming about that, but there are a lot of lawmakers who are seeing the fallout, in a lot of different respects, and saying, Maybe we need to re-regulate, as a lot of the rest of the world has decided is appropriate.

Demsas: Well, Danny, always our last and final question. This has been an episode chock-full of ideas that were good on paper. But what is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Funt: All right, so I was living in New York after college. I had a tiny balcony. I went and bought seeds to grow. I think it was, like, cucumbers and basil. And I was getting breakfast with my buddy Brian, and I was like, Dude, you will not believe how cheap these seeds are. We could totally grow vegetables and herbs and whatever else and sell it, and the margins would be crazy, and we’d make a killing. And he was like, So your business idea is farming? And I was like, Touché, Brian. You’re right. This is maybe not the most groundbreaking business idea. So he set me straight on that one.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, you didn’t live out—I actually, so my first house when I moved out of college was this group house, and we had the idea to farm some vegetables for the house, and it was successful in that we had some kale and sweet potatoes. But I have never in my life been like, I am never getting my food from my own labor. Like, this is just never happening again.

Funt: Oh, yeah.

Demsas: It’s a lot of work, and I feel like it caused so much strife in our household, too, because people were like, Who’s gonna harvest? What do we do with all this, like, extra kale now that no one wants to eat, because we have 20,000 bushels of kale. And you’re just, like, giving it away. But I’m glad that you did not actually have to execute your good on paper idea. You just figured it out beforehand.

Funt: I liked it, the basil I grew, but it wasn’t scalable. Brian was right.

Demsas: Danny, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Funt: My pleasure. Thanks again for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.x

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme. Titans of business and media are throwing themselves at his feet as supplicants. He has obliterated long-standing norms, unashamedly soliciting payoffs from corporations with business before the government. (The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount, whose parent company needs Trump’s approval for a merger, is mulling a settlement of one of his groundless lawsuits.) Steps that even his allies once dismissed as unthinkable, such as freeing the most violent, cop-beating January 6 insurrectionists, have again reset the bar of normalcy.

These displays of dominance have convinced many of Trump’s critics and supporters alike that his second term will operate in a categorically different fashion from the first. Where once he was constrained by the “deep state”—or, depending on your political priors, by the efforts of conscientious public servants—Trump will now have a fully subdued government at his disposal, along with a newly compliant business and media elite. He will therefore be able to carry out the sorts of wild policy objectives that failed to materialize during his first term.

The earliest indications, however, suggest that this might prove only half true. Trump has clearly claimed some territory in the culture wars: He is now dancing with Village People in the flesh, not merely to a recording of the group’s most famous track. And when it comes to getting away with self-dealing and abuses of power, he has mastered the system. But a politician and a party that are built for propaganda and quashing dissent generally lack the tools for effective governance. As far as policy accomplishments are concerned, the second Trump term could very well turn out to be as underwhelming as the first.

Trump has promised a grand revolution. At a pre-inaugural rally, he announced, “The American people have given us their trust, and in return, we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” He branded his inauguration “Liberation Day,” labeled his incoming agenda a “revolution of common sense,” and boasted, “Nothing will stand in our way.” After being sworn in on Monday, he signed a slew of executive orders in a move that has been termed “shock and awe.”

[David A. Graham: The Gilded Age of Trump begins now]

Those orders fall into a few different categories. Some are genuinely dangerous—above all, the mass pardon of about 1,500 January 6 defendants, which unambiguously signals that lawbreaking in the service of subverting elections in Trump’s favor will be tolerated. Others, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization and freezing offshore wind energy, will be consequential but perhaps not enduring—that which can be done by executive order can be undone by it.

What’s really striking is how many fall into the category of symbolic culture-war measures or vague declarations of intent. Trump declared a series of “emergencies” concerning his favorite issues, just as Joe Biden had. His order declaring an end to birthright citizenship seems likely to be struck down on constitutional grounds, although the Supreme Court can always interpret the Fourteenth Amendment’s apparently plain text as it desires. He is re-renaming a mountain in Alaska—which, in four years’ time, could be renamed yet again, perhaps after one of the police officers who fought off Trump’s insurrection attempt. He has ordered the federal government to officially recognize only two genders, male and female. “You are no longer going to have robust and long drop-down menus when asking about sex,” an incoming White House official said. Ooooh, the federal intake forms will be shorter!

Meanwhile, Trump has already scaled back many of his most grandiose day-one promises from the campaign. Broker an end to the Ukraine war before taking office? He has “made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election,” The New York Times reports. Ask again in a few months. Bring down grocery prices? Never mind.

Trump’s supporters probably realized that some of his campaign pledges were hyperbolic. Even by realistic standards, however, Trump seems unprepared to deliver on some of his biggest stated goals. Take his signature domestic policy. Trump loudly promised throughout the presidential campaign to impose massive global tariffs once he took office. And yet, even that proposal remains theoretical. Trump’s executive order on trade instructs, “The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Trade Representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures,” and then proceeds to issue more solemn calls for study of the matter.

Presidents don’t always come into office with fully formed plans, but Trump doesn’t even have concepts of a plan, or any way to resolve fundamental tension between his belief that foreign countries should pay tariffs and the reality that tariffs raise prices for Americans. Another White House document announces, “All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.” What measures? We can be fairly sure that there is no secret plan waiting to be unveiled.

None of this is to say that Trump will accomplish nothing. At a minimum, he will restrict immigration and sign a regressive tax cut. But even his policy successes will likely sow the seeds of a thermostatic backlash in public opinion. Americans favor mass deportation in the abstract, but their support dwindles when they contemplate specifics. An Axios poll found that strong majorities oppose separating families, employing active-duty military to locate undocumented immigrants, and using military funds to carry out immigration policy. Even some high-level Trump allies have warned that mass deportations will cause immediate economic disruption.

Trump’s fiscal agenda is where the desires of his wealthy benefactors, the preferences of his voters, and economic conditions will clash most violently. The previous two Republican presidents to take office—George W. Bush in 2001, and Trump in 2017—inherited low inflation and low or falling interest rates. Both were able to cut taxes and raise spending without facing any near-term economic costs. In his second term, Trump faces an economy that, while growing smartly, is still plagued with high interest rates relative to the pre-COVID norm. If Trump revises the old playbook of cutting taxes now and worrying about the cost later, he may discover that “later” happens right away.

One answer to the dilemma would be to pay for tax cuts with deep cuts to social spending on the poor, a staple of past Republican budgets. Yet Trump’s strength with low-income voters turns that maneuver into another potential source of backlash. Last month, The Washington Post’s Tim Craig interviewed low-income Trump voters in a poor town in Pennsylvania who earnestly believe that he will not touch their benefits.

[Russell Berman: What Trump can (and probably can’t) do with his trifecta]

Meanwhile, some of Trump’s most prominent backers refuse to acknowledge that any tough choices await. In a recent interview, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presented Marc Andreessen, one of the Silicon Valley billionaires hoping to influence Trump’s domestic agenda, with concerns that Elon Musk’s plans to cut the budget would alienate voters. In response, Andreessen insisted that the very suggestion reflected “absolute contempt for the taxpayer,” repeating versions of the line rather than engaging with the problem. Musk himself recently reduced his goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget to a mere $1 trillion. When the brains of the operation are picking arbitrary round numbers and then revising them arbitrarily, one begins to question their grasp on the challenge they face.

Whether Trump pays any political price for failing to deliver on unrealistic promises—or for succeeding at delivering on unpopular ones—is an open question. Political difficulties won’t generate themselves. They will require an energetic and shrewd opposition. And a major purpose of Trump’s maneuvers to intimidate corporate and media elites is to head off a backlash by gaining control over the information environment.

One of Trump’s greatest strengths as a politician is to constantly redefine his policy goals so that whatever he does constitutes “winning.” The success of this tactic reflects the degraded intellectual state of the Republican Party’s internal culture. The conservative movement rejected institutions such as academia and the mainstream media decades ago, building up its own network of loyal counterinstitutions that would construct an alternate reality. This has helped Republicans hold together in the face of corruption and misconduct that, in a bygone era, would have shattered a governing coalition. (Today, Watergate would just be another witch hunt.) But the impulse to disregard expertise and criticism has also disabled Republicans’ ability to engage in objective analysis. The past two Republican administrations accordingly both ended in catastrophe, because the president had built an administration of courtiers who flattered his preexisting beliefs, whether about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq or COVID and the economy.

[George Packer: The end of democratic delusions]

None of those pathologies has disappeared. To the contrary, the MAGA-era GOP has grown more cultlike than ever. The rare, feeble attempt to steer Trump away from bad decisions is usually buried in obsequious flattery. The Trump presidency will be, by definition, a golden age, because Trump will be president during all of it. But it is a measure of his allies’ decrepitude that, whatever positions he ultimately lands on, they are prepared to salute.

Trump has struck fear into his party and America’s corporate bosses. His inauguration was a display of mastery, a sign that none will dare defy his wishes. But a leader surrounded by sycophants cannot receive the advice he needs to avoid catastrophic error, and to signal that his allies can enrich themselves from his administration is to invite scandal. In his inaugural spectacle of dominance and intimidation, Trump was planting the seeds of his own failure.

Long before Donald Trump rewarded Tulsi Gabbard’s loyalty with a nomination to be the next director of national intelligence, before her friendliness with Tucker Carlson, and before her association with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was loyal to another charismatic leader. A man who remains mostly unknown outside Hawaii but is reputed to have a powerful hold over his followers.

That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master. According to its website, the foundation promotes yoga meditation to achieve spiritual and physical enlightenment, but Butler, well known for his fervent and graphic sermons about the evils of gay sex, does not appear to tolerate dissent from his followers. Some former devotees have called the secretive group a cult.

Other than raw ambition, Gabbard’s adherence to Butler’s foundation has been the only perceptible through line in her switchbacking, two-decade political career. First there was an astonishingly quick leap from enigmatic state lawmaker to national Democratic Party leader; then came Gabbard’s almost-as-quick falling-out with the party establishment; there followed an inscrutable congressional record, including a seemingly inexplicable visit with a Middle East dictator; after that was Gabbard’s stint as a Fox News media darling, and finally her rebirth as a MAGA Republican, nominated to be America’s next spymaster.

While Gabbard awaits a confirmation hearing, even senators in Trump’s party seem concerned about her suitability. Maybe they should be: Democrats figured out the hard way that they couldn’t rely on Gabbard; Republicans may soon learn the same.

To understand how Gabbard ended up in the middle of such a strange ideological Venn diagram, it helps to know about her early years. Born in American Samoa, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where she was homeschooled and spent time surfing in the blue waves off Oahu. Her father, Mike, is now a Democratic state senator, but he’s done a bit of his own party-flipping; during Gabbard’s childhood, Mike was an independent, and later switched to the Republican Party, after leading Hawaii’s movement against same-sex marriage. He launched a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality Hawaii and hosted a radio show titled Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii. In 1998, Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.

The Gabbard family was—and, according to several Hawaii residents and people familiar with the group, still is—devoted to Butler and his foundation. “The belief system was [Butler’s] interpretation of the Hare Krishna belief system, plus Buddhism, Christianity, and whatever else,” Lalita Mann, a former disciple of Butler’s, told me. Fraternizing with outsiders was frowned upon, Mann said; complete obedience was expected: “To offend him would be offending God.” Gabbard’s own aunt once described the group as “the alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”

Butler had an appetite for temporal as well as spiritual power. Gabbard, a smart, good-looking girl from a political family, always appealed to him, Mann and Anita Van Duyn, another defector from the group, told me. Butler described Gabbard as a stellar pupil of his teaching. In her teens, Gabbard reportedly attended a school run by Butler’s followers in the Philippines. “He always wanted someone to be high up in the federal government” to direct the culture toward godliness, Van Duyn told me. Trump’s team rejected this characterization. “This is a targeted hit on her faith, fomenting Hinduphobia,” Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, told me. “The repeated attacks that she has sustained from the media and Democrats about her faith and her loyalty to our country are not only false smears; they are bigoted as well.” (Gabbard herself did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

The Science of Identity Foundation leader was not the only person to see Gabbard’s appeal. The people I interviewed described the surfer cum mixed-martial-arts aficionado as shy but warm. She has a rich, low voice, and always greets people with a friendly “Aloha.” Her demeanor helps explain how quickly she rocketed to political success from a young age. She chooses her words carefully, and listens intently, often seeming like the most mature person in a room, even when she is one of the youngest. “She cocks her head, and she pulls you in” to the “Tulsi hug,” one Hawaii Democrat told me. “It’s very mesmerizing.” Gabbard, in other words, has charisma. And she has always made it count.

In 2002, soon after she married her first husband, Gabbard dropped out of community college and ran for a seat in the Hawaii state House. In that race, and in others that followed, a swarm of volunteers associated with Butler’s group would descend on the district to knock on doors and pass out yard signs, according to someone who worked with Gabbard’s campaign in those early days, and who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. Back then, Gabbard shared her father’s views on same-sex marriage and opposed abortion rights, two positions that were—particularly in recent years—politically risky in solid-blue Hawaii. But she was clearly struggling to form her ideology, the former campaign colleague said, and determine a political identity of her own.

After one term in office, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, and went to Iraq as part of a medical unit, the first of two Middle East deployments. After her return, she and her husband divorced. In 2010, she ran successfully for a seat on the Honolulu city council. “She was as ambitious as you could possibly be,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague told me. And she was respected. Gabbard was racking up experiences, fleshing out her political résumé. Congress was next for Gabbard, and everybody knew it.

In the fall of 2011, something happened that shocked politicians in Hawaii. EMILY’s List, the national organization whose goal is to elect pro-abortion-rights women to Congress, announced that it was backing Gabbard. To political observers, it didn’t make sense. Gabbard had a D behind her name, but was she really a Democrat? Behind the scenes, EMILY’s List was wondering the same thing. Although her position on abortion had evolved in ways acceptable to the organization, Gabbard was still iffy on same-sex marriage. Her answers on the EMILY’s List application had made its leaders uneasy, one former staffer told me, and that staffer was asked to call Gabbard for clarification. During their conversation, Gabbard said she didn’t want the government involved in marriage. The staffer pointed out that the government was already involved in heterosexual marriage, so it wouldn’t be fair to deny the same access to gay couples. Gabbard seemed not to have considered this, the staffer told me, and after only a few minutes on the phone, Gabbard declared that her position had changed. Politicians typically do some finagling to secure the support of special-interest groups, but this was different.

“I’ve never had another conversation like that,” said the staffer, who still works in Democratic politics but asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “She was willing to do or say whatever. It was like she had absolutely no moral compass.” I heard the same sentiment from numerous people who have worked with Gabbard, both in Hawaii and at the federal level.

Gabbard’s leftward journey was well under way. Her second Middle East deployment, to Kuwait, had inspired a “gradual metamorphosis” on social issues, she told Honolulu Civil Beat in 2012, adding, “I’m not my dad. I’m me.” By the time she got to Congress, in 2013, Democrats had embraced her like a long-lost friend. Gabbard was celebrated as the first Hindu member of Congress and was eagerly welcomed in the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging star,” and House leaders gave her a seat on the prominent Armed Forces Committee. She was, to use a more contemporary comparison, AOC before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There was this initial huge fascination with Gabbard” inside the party, a former Democratic House staffer, who requested anonymity to speak about his time working closely with Gabbard, told me. President Barack Obama himself lobbied for Gabbard to get a vice chairmanship on the Democratic National Committee, its former chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told me. The Florida lawmaker hesitated at first. “I was warned early on that she was close to extremists in Hawaii,” Wasserman Schultz told me, referring to anti-gay activists. Still, she gave Gabbard the benefit of the doubt.

Gabbard proved popular among the other freshmen. “She was funny, she was engaging,” a former House colleague and friend of Gabbard’s, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me. She ran around with a small, bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Representatives Beto O’Rourke of Texas, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma; some of them met for CrossFit in the mornings.

But the congressional crush on Gabbard fizzled almost as quickly as it began. Wasserman Schultz told me that the DNC had a hard time getting Gabbard to show up for meetings or conference calls. When a House vote against employment discrimination came up, Gabbard was difficult to pin down, Wasserman Schultz said—even though, as a DNC vice chair, she should have been “the easiest ‘yes’ in the caucus.”

[Read: The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump]

Gabbard seemed eager to stand out in a different way. She took to sitting on the Republican side of the House chamber. Despite her DNC perch, she voted with Republicans to condemn the Obama administration for not alerting Congress about a prisoner exchange with the Taliban in 2014, and the next year criticized the Democratic president’s reluctance to refer to Islamic State terrorists as “Islamic extremists.”

The representative from Hawaii was not facing a tough reelection, so none of these positions made sense to her fellow Democrats. Some suggested that she was a rare independent thinker in Congress; others identified in her a less virtuous strain of opportunism. Gabbard had “masked herself as a progressive to gain power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. After all, voters in Hawaii almost never elect Republicans to Congress.

Others pointed to deeper forces. “I think something happened around 2013,” Gabbard’s campaign colleague from Hawaii told me, pointing out that, at the time, several of her original congressional staffers resigned, and Gabbard replaced them with people affiliated with the Science of Identity Foundation. In 2015, Gabbard married Abraham Williams, the son of her office manager, both of whom, the colleague told me, were involved in the group. The couple’s Oahu wedding was attended by several members of Congress, including then–House Whip Steny Hoyer, as well as a representative from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist party. It seemed as though Butler’s group had reeled her back in, the campaign colleague said. He remembers thinking, “I don’t know who the hell you are anymore.”

During the 2016 Democratic primary, Gabbard resigned from the DNC and endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president because, she said, Hillary Clinton was too hawkish. Sanders-aligned progressives appreciated her support, especially because the Vermont senator had just been shellacked in South Carolina. On the trail, Gabbard spoke confidently about anti-interventionism, climate change, and Medicare for All. “I couldn’t think of an issue then where we had any degree of separation,” Larry Cohen, a union leader and the chair of the pro-Sanders progressive group Our Revolution, told me.

Senator Bernie Sanders with Gabbard at his campaign rally in Gettysburg ahead of the Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania, April 2016 (Mark Wilson / Getty)

But, in 2017, Gabbard made a move that stumped her new progressive friends, as well as most everyone else: She flew to Syria, in the middle of its civil war, and twice met with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had by then already killed hundreds of his own people using chemical weapons, and who clung to power thanks to aid from Vladimir Putin. The original plan, according to a former staffer for Gabbard, had been to meet with everyday Syrians and “bear witness.” But as The Washington Post reported today, the trip’s actual itinerary deviated dramatically from the one that had been approved by the House Ethics Committee. The meetings with Assad had not been in the plan, and even Gabbard’s staffer, like others on her team, did not know about them until after they’d happened. “You fucked us,” the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to speak about confidential matters, remembers telling Gabbard later. “The reason you told us you were going on this trip will never come up again. It will only ever be about you meeting with Assad.”

For D.C. institutionalists, Gabbard’s conversations with Assad broke a long-standing convention that members of Congress do not conduct freelance foreign policy. But many also saw the trip as an unforgivable swerve toward autocracy.

Outside the Washington scene, Gabbard’s independence and charisma still counted. When Gabbard ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she could still muster an enthusiastic if motley alliance of progressives, libertarians, and conservative Hindus. She also did well among the kind of people who are fond of saying that all politicians are corrupt and neither political party is good for America. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast that year.

Despite that glowing endorsement, Gabbard never scored above single digits in the contest, and dropped out of the race in March 2020. In the years that followed, she would pop up now and again with new and surprising takes. In December 2020, Gabbard introduced a bill to ban trans women and girls from playing women’s sports, plus two pieces of anti-abortion legislation. In 2021, she left Congress altogether. The next year, when Russia invaded Ukraine, she blamed President Joe Biden and NATO for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” Then she turned up as a featured speaker at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At a late-summer conference in Michigan last year, Gabbard announced that she was supporting Donald Trump for president. She completed her political migration in October at a MAGA rally in North Carolina, when she said that she was joining the Republican Party. She praised Trump for transforming the GOP into “the party of the people and the party of peace.” Her message was that she hadn’t left the Democrats; they had left her. “People evolve on politics all the time,” the former House colleague and friend told me. “But that’s a long way from saying Hey, the party went too far to embracing Donald Trump.”

Gabbard’s instincts are those of a “moth to a flame of power,” Wasserman Schultz told me. And Trump’s flame is burning brightly again. But in Gabbard’s dogged pursuit of power, or at least of proximity to power, others see the influence not of a new guru, but of the old one: Butler. “She’s his loyal servant,” Van Duyn, the Science of Identity Foundation defector, said, and Gabbard regards him as “possessing infallible authority.” Van Duyn also told me that she has sent letters to several Democratic lawmakers, asking them to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI because she fears that sensitive intelligence “can and will be communicated to her guru.”

Each of the current and former Democratic lawmakers I spoke with for this story had concerns about the Gabbard-Butler relationship. “There are some very tough questions that need to be asked,” Representative Jill Tokuda, Democrat of Hawaii, told me. “Who’s really calling the shots when it comes to what Tulsi Gabbard believes?”

Gabbard at the Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on October 27, 2024 (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

Butler, who is now in his late 70s and reportedly living in a beachfront home in Kailua, did not respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, Jeannie Bishop, the foundation’s president, disputed the accounts of people whom the group considers to be “propagating misconceptions,” and accused the media of “fomenting” Hinduphobia. (Butler’s foundation, along with a collection of 50 Hindu groups, sent out a press release last week blasting recent media coverage as “Hinduphobic.”)

[Tom Nichols: Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is a national-security risk]

Regardless of whom her opportunism ultimately serves, political opportunity has come again for Gabbard. After she hitched her wagon to Trump, he chose her to be his spymaster in chief—a position for which she does not seem remotely qualified. The current director, Avril Haines, was confirmed after previously serving as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and deputy counsel to the president for national-security affairs in the Office of White House Counsel. Gabbard has no similar background in intelligence or agency leadership. Henning, the Trump spokesperson, pointed to Gabbard’s endorsement from former CIA Director of Counterterrorism Bernard Hudson, who has commended Gabbard’s “independent thinking.”

Gabbard’s Assad visit and her pro-Russian views also remain fresh in the minds of many in Congress. Nothing proves that Gabbard is a “Russian asset,” as Hillary Clinton once famously put it, but Moscow seems gleeful about her selection to lead the intelligence agency: “The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda crowed after her nomination was announced. Another Russian state outlet called Gabbard a “comrade.”

Judging by the congressional hearings so far, traditional expertise and credentials may not matter much to the GOP lawmakers charged with confirming Trump’s picks. But the incoherence of Gabbard’s ideological evolution may yet count against her: Reliability could be the sticking point. Republicans should know, as well as Democrats, that “she’s ruthless in her pursuit of personal power,” the Hawaii campaign colleague told me. “Even if that means disappointing MAGA folks or Trump, it’s clear she’d do it in a heartbeat.”

During her eight years in Congress, Gabbard was a fierce defender of privacy rights, something her supporters on both the right and the left long admired. In particular, she had opposed the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that permits some warrantless surveillance of American citizens. But after meeting with senators last week, Gabbard announced that the act’s surveillance capability “must be safeguarded.” The would-be director of national intelligence had had a change of heart.

The Capitol One Arena is rather dreary. The 27-year-old venue was considered so outdated—and the neighborhood around it so drab—that last year the owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards threatened to move the teams to Virginia.

But today, the arena will be the unlikely venue where Donald Trump’s political powers and showman’s instincts will be placed on full display.

A tiny desk, affixed with the presidential seal and bathed in red, white, and blue lights, has been placed on a stage built in the center of the arena where—in lieu of a traditional inaugural parade—Trump will hold a rally this afternoon. That is where he is expected to sit and sign a slew of executive orders. His efforts to reshape national policy and presidential power will come not in a quiet Oval Office but in front of a raucous crowd of supporters.

Trump officially completed his stunning comeback by taking the oath of office just after noon today in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. But his second term, in many ways, will truly begin a few hours later in that packed arena about a mile away. An executive producer at heart, Trump has always leaned on the power of imagery in cultivating political force. And in his inaugural address, he was stage-managing his sequel, a presidential spectacle that offered a preview of his plans for his second act.

There were few notes of unity.

“My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal,” Trump said, “and all these many betrayals that have taken place, and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

The frigid temperatures gave Trump an excuse to move the inauguration inside, much as Ronald Reagan did in 1985, and they provided him with further control of the pageantry. By not braving the cold—and, to be clear, several inaugurations have been colder—Trump also dispensed with any focus on the size of his crowd, something that upset him deeply eight years ago.

Moreover, he was able to mark his return to power in the very space where a violent mob of his supporters tried to overturn an election to keep him in power. Four years ago, a crowd radicalized by lies of a stolen election stormed the U.S. Capitol and desecrated its Rotunda, committing acts of violence in Trump’s name. Today, official Washington used that same historic hall to welcome him back to power.

If Trump had delivered his speech in its customary outdoor location on the Capitol’s west front, the cheers from the crowd down on the mall below would have been distant. But the indoor setting invoked a State of the Union address, held annually just down the hall in the House of Representatives chamber. And Trump furthered that feeling with a partisan speech, pushing a litany of policy proposals. Reactions split along party lines, with Republicans repeatedly leaping to their feet to applaud and Democrats, including outgoing President Joe Biden, sitting silently.

Trump leaned into the visual messaging of the Capitol ceremony. For most people, seating charts are mundane, tiresome organizational tools. But they are prized in Washington for clues as to who’s up and who’s down, offering a literal map of proximity to power. The signals sent by Trump were clear: GOP donors and friends such as Miriam Adelson and Dana White were seated right behind the row for former presidents. His new tech-billionaire friends—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—got prime seats inside the Rotunda, in front of the incoming Cabinet, while a number of Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and Brian Kemp of Georgia, were shoved to the overflow room.

Inauguration Day was designed to showcase democracy’s strength. Instead, the events of the day showed its inherent fragility. Biden provided Trump what Trump did not give him—a peaceful transfer of power with all the niceties of ceremony—but the outgoing president was so concerned about his successor exacting revenge that he issued extraordinary preemptive pardons to some government officials and members of his own family, which cut sharply against his pledge to restore democratic norms.

As his motorcade wound its way through Washington, Trump was surrounded by his own image. Many of those thronging the nation’s capital—even those shut out of the events by the weather-related scheduling changes—sported shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with Trump’s mugshot taken at Fulton County Jail, in Atlanta, when he was charged in August 2023 with racketeering. At the time, that case in Georgia was just one of four criminal cases that imperiled Trump, though it was the only one that produced a booking photo quickly disseminated around the globe.

Many Democrats hoped it would doom Trump’s chances, undermining a campaign that was about retribution, yes, but also about keeping the candidate out of prison. But three of the cases fell by the wayside, derailed by stalling tactics, prosecutorial blunders, and a helpful Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. And the one case that did move forward—the hush-money trial in New York—ended with a conviction that will be recorded in the history books but meant little else.

Trump has mused that the legal proceedings created images that reinforced his claim to be a victim of a government overreach, the subject of a witch hunt, a martyr taking arrows for his supporters. Throughout the race, he used those visuals to recast political vulnerabilities as visceral symbols of toughness and power. Day after day, the Republicans flocked to the courthouse—sometimes in matching red ties—to demonstrate their fealty. And many in the GOP saw his mugshot not as a sign of wrongdoing or guilt, but as an image of strength and defiance. He used it for countless fundraising appeals and merchandising opportunities.

That wasn’t an accident. In the weeks before Trump’s own arraignment, he saw the case’s other defendants pose for unflattering booking photos that looked washed-out and weak. So Trump practiced various facial expressions, one of his advisers told me on condition of anonymity to discuss private moments. He eventually settled on a scowl, matching his first instinct. And then in the booking room, Trump told confidants later, he saw where the light was coming from and positioned his face, frowning and leaning forward, half in the shadows and half in the full glare.

Trump loved the result. And when it came time to pose for photos for the official inaugural program, he re-created it, his adviser told me. Vice President J. D. Vance’s portrait looks like most official portraits: a pleasant closed-mouth smile, plenty of light illuminating his face. Trump instead asked for an extreme close-up, like his booking photo, with his face somewhat in shadow, glaring at the audience. The photo shaved years off his 78-year-old face and projected a strongman’s toughness.

The other image that defined the 2024 campaign was captured moments after an assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a campaign stop in Butler County, Pennsylvania. With blood from his wounded ear streaking across his face, Trump had the showman’s presence of mind to stop the Secret Service agents trying to hustle him to safety. He stood tall, pumped his fist at the roaring crowd, and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight!” It was moment of inspiration—captured in a series of instantly famous photographs—and, for Trump loyalists, perfectly showcased a political survivor.

John F. Kennedy was considered the originator of modern presidential iconography, while Reagan enhanced it. But even more than his glamorous predecessors, Trump knows that the pictures matter far more than the substance. His whole political career has been built around imagery. It was launched on the back of The Apprentice, the highly stylized version of his business career that exaggerated his success and made him America’s CEO.

After he was elected, I saw his skill at stagecraft firsthand while covering his White House. Some images he created were meant for the history books, such as when he left those of us in the press pool behind to step over the border at the DMZ and into North Korea, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in the hermit-like nation. Others were more mundane: During an Oval Office interview ahead of the 2018 midterms, Trump stopped the questions to make sure the photographer had the most flattering lighting. He held up his hand, and issued instructions.

“Let’s make sure this looks the way it should,” Trump said, unsmiling, while directing the angle and illumination of the photos.

That same attention to the power of political imagery was on display again in Washington today, from the Capitol Rotunda to the Capitol One Arena. Moments after completing his inaugural address, Trump spoke to the overflow room and began by praising the stagecraft of the ceremony.

“It was so beautiful in there today that maybe we should do it every four years,” said Trump, who added that the Rotunda featured “the best acoustics I’ve ever heard in a room.”

He smiled at the camera.

The mood of a Donald Trump rally typically follows a downhill trajectory, beginning with hot pretzels and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and concluding with grievances aired and retribution promised. But last night at Capital One Arena, the mood was jubilant all the way through.

This was Trump’s final rally before his triumphant return to the White House, and like high schoolers facing the promise of a lightly supervised all-night lock-in, attendees were giddy with anticipation. Fans dressed in Uncle Sam hats and scarlet peacoats crammed into the arena, which was lit up in shades of red and royal blue. Each rally-goer I spoke with was looking forward to something different from the next Trump presidency. “They’re doing a nice big raid up in Chicago, and I’m excited about that,” Will Matthews, from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me, referring to yet-unconfirmed rumors about where Trump’s promised mass deportations will begin. Jenny Heinl, who wore a PROUD J6ER sweatshirt, told me that she was eager “to hear about the pardons.”

The message across MAGA world was clear: The next four years are going to be big. “Everyone in our country will prosper; every family will thrive,” Trump promised last night. Speaking before him, Stephen Miller, the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, predicted that America is “now at the dawn of our greatest victory.” Earlier in the day, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and the host of the War Room podcast, had hosted a brunch on Capitol Hill. He’d dubbed the event “The Beginning of History,” and, for better or worse, it is.

Throughout yesterday’s rain and snow in Washington, D.C., Trump’s supporters held tight to their joy. “I can’t believe we’re in!” I heard a woman shout to a friend as they dashed through the arena doors. The preceding few days had been bewildering. Citing the low temperatures, the Trump transition team announced on Friday that the inauguration would be moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. A mad scramble ensued for the very limited supply of new tickets. In the end, a few fans will still get to watch in person. Most of them, though, will be right back at Capital One for an inauguration watch party.

One group of Trump fans had carpooled together from Canada to attend the inauguration, and wore matching red sweatshirts reading MAPLE SYRUP MAGA. They were disappointed about the venue change—14 degrees is not cold, the Canadians insisted—but they were still happy they’d made the trip. “If Trump hadn’t been elected,” Mary, who had come from St. Catharines, Ontario, and asked to use only her first name, told me, there would be more and more “woke bullshit.” For Mary and her friends, Trump’s reelection means that there will instead be an end to the fentanyl crisis, tighter border security, and a stronger example for other Western countries.

Sharon Stevenson, from Cartersville, Georgia, had joined a caravan of dozens of Georgians traveling to the rally, and had waited in line for more than seven hours to get inside the arena. The effort, she assured me, was “100 percent worth it.” Stevenson and her friends were eager to lay out their expectations for Trump. “The biggest thing for me is to investigate all the fraud,” she said. The “stolen election,” the January 6 “massacre”—“it’s going to come out under this administration.” Her friend, Anita Stewart from Suwanee, Georgia, told me that her priority was health, and that she was particularly excited about the prospect of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “I’m looking forward to hopefully no more commercials for drugs!” Plus affordable groceries, she said—and cheap gas.

With a wishlist so long, and expectations so immense, one wonders how Trump’s supporters will respond if the about-to-be president doesn’t meet them all. When I asked Stevenson that question, she smiled and shook her head. “Promises made, promises kept,” she said. “If there’s one person who keeps their word, it’s Donald Trump.”

[Read: What Trump did to law enforcement]

During the roughly three hours before the headliner took the stage, his supporters ate chicken fingers and posed for the Jumbotron camera as it swung around the arena. They bowed their heads when the hosts of the MAGA favorite Girls Gone Bible podcast asked God to bless Trump, and sang along as the musician Kid Rock performed a mini-concert, including his 2022 single “We the People,” featuring a brand-new lyric in honor of the inauguration: “Straighten up, sucker, cause Daddy’s home.”

The political pronouncements really got going at about 4 p.m., starting with Miller, who received a hero’s welcome from the crowd and said that Trump’s win represented “the triumph of the everyday citizen over a corrupt system.” (As he spoke, the incoming first lady, Melania Trump, was on X announcing the launch of a meme coin to match her husband’s new one, a development that turned the family into crypto-billionaires over the weekend.) Later, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host turned MAGA podcaster, hailed “the goodness that is about to rain down” under Trump’s leadership. And Donald Trump Jr., fresh from his recent mission to Greenland, affirmed that the next four years will be his father’s “pièce de résistance.”

When at last Trump arrived onstage, he was greeted ecstatically as the embodiment of his allies’ declarations and his followers’ dreams. He teased his plans to sign nearly 100 executive orders today, including what he has described as a “joint venture” with the parent company of TikTok and a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. “You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he predicted. Before welcoming the Village People to join him onstage for an exuberant rendition of “YMCA,” Trump ran through a list of additional priorities to come: the largest deportation operation in American history, lower taxes, higher wages, and an end to overseas wars. “The American people have given us their trust,” Trump declared, “and in return we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.”

That history begins at noon.

Democrats spent more than $20 million last year to end then-Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s congressional career. Now, however, the Republican they worked so hard to defeat is their favorite nominee for President-Elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Trump’s selection of Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary came as a pleasant surprise to many Democrats and union leaders, who expected him to follow past Republican presidents and name a conservative hostile to organized labor. But Chavez-DeRemer endeared herself to unions during her two years in Congress. A former mayor of an Oregon suburb who narrowly won her seat in 2022, she was one of just three House Republicans to co-sponsor the labor movement’s top legislative priority: a bill known as the PRO Act, which would make unionizing easier and expand labor protections for union members.

After Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination was announced, two senior Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Patty Murray of Washington State, issued cautiously optimistic statements about her—a rare sentiment for Democrats to express about any Trump nominee. In addition, Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president who spoke at last year’s Republican National Convention and whose union stayed neutral in the presidential race after repeatedly backing Democratic nominees, has championed Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination. And it has given more progressive union leaders hope that, after winning the largest vote share from union households of any Republican in 40 years, Trump might change how his party treats the labor movement.

[Annie Lowrey: The rise of the union right]

“It’s a positive move for those of us who represent workers and who want workers to have a better life,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a close ally of Democratic Party leaders, told me. She noted that Chavez-DeRemer bucked her party not only by supporting the PRO Act but also by voting against private-school vouchers and cuts to public-education funding.

Trump courted union members throughout his campaign, seeing them as a key part of a blue-collar base that helped him flip states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden won in 2020. In September, his running mate, J. D. Vance, told reporters that the drop in private-sector union membership in recent decades was “a tragedy”—a statement sharply at odds with the GOP’s long-running advocacy of laws that would make unionizing harder, including in Vance’s home state of Ohio. O’Brien and congressional Republicans reportedly pushed for Trump to pick Chavez-DeRemer after the election. The decision may have been a reward for the Teamsters’ snub of Kamala Harris.

Yet until his selection of Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s support for unions had stopped at rhetoric. He’s surrounded himself with conservative billionaires and generally sided with business interests by opposing minimum-wage increases, enhanced overtime pay, and other policies backed by organized labor. With that record in mind, Democrats have added qualifiers to their embrace of Chavez-DeRemer. “If Chavez-DeRemer commits as labor secretary to strengthen labor unions and promote worker power,” Warren said in her statement, “she’s a strong candidate for the job.”

That remains a big if. A spokesperson for the Trump transition, Aly Beley, told me that Chavez-DeRemer no longer supports the PRO Act—a major shift that will disappoint Democrats but might help her secure the GOP support she needs to win confirmation. “President Trump and his intended nominee for secretary of labor agree that the PRO Act is unworkable,” Beley said.

For the same reasons that Democrats like Chavez-DeRemer, conservatives are concerned and have pushed her to renounce her pro-union stances before Republicans agree to vote for her. “This is the one that stands out like a sore thumb,” Grover Norquist, the conservative activist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, told me of her nomination. Her support for the PRO Act, Norquist said, reflected “very bad judgment.” An anti-union group, the National Right to Work Committee, wrote in a letter to Trump before he announced Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination that she “should have no place” in his administration: “She would not be out of place in the Biden-Harris Department of Labor, which completely sold out to Big Labor from the start.”

In the Senate, Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination is not moving nearly as quickly as those of other Trump picks. The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP), which oversees the Labor Department, has not scheduled her confirmation hearing. (Republicans have prioritized hearings for Trump’s national-security nominees.) And she hasn’t met with the committee’s chair, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who issued a noncommittal statement after her nomination was announced. “I will need to get a better understanding of her support for Democrat legislation in Congress that would strip Louisiana’s ability to be a right to work state, and if that will be her position going forward,” Cassidy posted on X. Rand Paul, who also serves on the committee and is the leading sponsor of major anti-union legislation, has said little publicly about Chavez-DeRemer—and didn’t respond to a request for comment—but his chief strategist replied to the post, urging Cassidy to “stop her.” (Cassidy has been similarly lukewarm about another nominee within the committee’s jurisdiction: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary.)

Chavez-DeRemer added her name to the PRO Act only a few months before last year’s election. Norquist speculated that she did so to appease unions in her district in the hopes of keeping her seat. If that was her strategy, it failed: Chavez-DeRemer lost to Democrat Janelle Bynum after one of the most expensive campaigns in the country.

Other Republicans see Chavez-DeRemer’s pro-labor stances as sincere, not strategic. A former colleague of hers, Representative Cliff Bentz of Oregon, praised her nomination and said that Trump had picked her for the Labor Department not in spite of her close ties to unions but because of them. “The fact that President-Elect Trump reached out to labor shows that he understands the need to create a better relationship between labor on the one hand and Republican folks on the other,” he told me. “And he saw in Lori exactly what he is trying to do.” Bentz said he would be surprised if Chavez-DeRemer “walks much of anything back.”

But Chavez-DeRemer wouldn’t be the first Trump Cabinet nominee to disavow a past position in order to win over Republican skeptics in the Senate. Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for director of national intelligence, reversed her opposition to a key surveillance tool known as FISA Section 702, which was enacted after the September 11 terrorist attacks. And Kennedy is reportedly softening his long-standing attacks on vaccines in meetings with GOP senators.

[Read: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

If Chavez-DeRemer turns against the PRO Act, Democrats and unions will surely cool on her, but they won’t be shocked. Union leaders told me that they were under no illusions that Republicans would completely retract their hostility toward the labor movement, even if her nomination represented a move in that direction. “We have seen Project 2025,” Jody Calemine, the director of advocacy for the AFL-CIO, said. “That agenda is anti-worker to its very core.”

How much influence Chavez-DeRemer would have in an administration populated by corporate leaders is unclear. The PRO Act, for example, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress even with a supportive labor secretary, and Norquist expects that the White House will exert tight control over policies enacted by Cabinet leaders, as it has during recent administrations of both parties.

To progressives, Chavez-DeRemer is clearly preferable to some of the other names Trump reportedly considered for labor secretary. Most notably, these include Andrew Puzder, the fast-food CEO whose nomination in 2017 collapsed amid ethical conflicts, revelations that he employed an undocumented immigrant as a housekeeper, and reports of labor-law violations at his company’s restaurants. She is also seen as friendlier to unions than either of Trump’s labor secretaries during his first term, Alexander Acosta and Eugene Scalia.

Chavez-DeRemer might be the best nominee Democrats can get under Trump. But labor leaders such as Weingarten will be watching closely to see how she squares her recent support for union-friendly legislation with an administration that is, in other key positions, empowering business leaders and billionaires. “This is where the rubber hits the road about whether the parties stay in their own preexisting camps” with regard to labor, Weingarten told me. She said she would lobby Democratic senators to support Chavez-DeRemer if the nominee sticks by her pro-union positions. But if she renounces them, Weingarten said, “then all bets are off.”

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Not long after Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth read his opening statement and began fielding questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, I began thinking: I hope neither America’s allies nor its enemies are watching this. The hope was, of course, completely unreasonable. Such hearings are watched closely by friends and foes alike, in order to take the measure of a nominee who might lead the most powerful military in the world and would be a close adviser to the president of the United States.

What America and the world saw today was not a serious examination of a serious man. Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfit nominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune.

Most of the GOP senators asked questions that had little to do with the defense of the United States and everything to do with the peculiar obsessions that dominate the alternative reality of right-wing television and talk radio, especially the bane of “wokeness.” Perhaps that was just as well for Hegseth, because the few moments where anything of substance came up did not go well for him. When Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska, for example, tried early on to draw Hegseth out with some basic questions about nuclear weapons, he was lost. He tried to fumble his way around to an answer that included harnessing the creativity of Silicon Valley to innovate a future nuclear force … or something.

On many other questions, including adherence to the Geneva Conventions, the role of the military in domestic policing, and the obligation to disobey illegal orders, Hegseth fudged and improvised. He seemed aware that he had to avoid sounding extreme while still playing for the only audience that really matters: 50 Republican senators and one former and future president of the United States. His evasions were not particularly clever, but they didn’t need to be. He was clear that his two priorities as secretary will be to lead a culture war within the Pentagon, and to do whatever Trump tells him to do.

If America’s friends and adversaries saw an insubstantial man in front of the committee, they also saw Republicans—members of what once advertised itself as the party of national security—acting with a complete lack of gravity and purpose. Few Republicans, aside from Fischer and a rather businesslike Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, asked Hegseth anything meaningful about policy. Ernst extracted a promise from Hegseth to appoint a senior official to be in charge of sexual-assault prevention, but most of her colleagues resorted to the usual buzzwords about DEI and cultural Marxism while throwing Hegseth softballs. (Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri also managed to mention drag queens, but the trophy for most cringe-inducing moment goes to Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, who asked Hegseth how many genders there are. When Hegseth said “two,” Sheehy said: “I know that well. I’m a she-he.” Get it? Sheehy? She-he? He’s here all week, folks; tip your waiters.)

And speaking of buzzwords, most of Hegseth’s answers relied on his vow to support “the warfighters” and their “lethality,” two words that have been floating around the Pentagon—as things full of helium will do—for years. Hegseth, to his credit, has learned how to speak fluent Pentagon-ese, the content-free language in which the stakeholders help the warfighters leverage their assets to increase their lethality. (I taught military officers for years at the Naval War College. I can write this kind of Newspeak at will.) As Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut noted, Hegseth might not be qualified to be secretary of defense, but he could squeak by as a Pentagon spokesperson.

Some Democrats highlighted that Hegseth has never run anything of any significant size, and that his record even in smaller organizations hasn’t been particularly impressive. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan pointed out that no board of directors would hire Hegseth as the CEO even of a medium-size company. Other Democrats drilled Hegseth on his personal behavior, including accusations (which he has denied) that he has engaged in sexual assault and alcohol abuse. At one point, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona listed specific incidents, asking Hegseth to confirm or deny them. Each time, Hegseth responded only by saying “anonymous smears,” which he seems to think is like invoking the Fifth Amendment. Hegseth also said he wasn’t perfect, and that he’s been redeemed by his faith in Jesus Christ, whose name came up more often than one might expect during a hearing related to national security.

Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Army veteran who was wounded during her service in Iraq, brought out a large poster of the Soldier’s Creed, emphasizing the insistence on standards and integrity embodied in it. She asked Hegseth how the Defense Department could still demand that service members train and serve at such high standards if the Senate lowered the bar for leading the Pentagon just for him. After she quizzed him on various matters and Hegseth again floundered, she put it simply and directly: “You’re not qualified, Mr. Hegseth.”

Not that any of it mattered to the Republicans on the committee, some of whom took great offense at questions about Hegseth’s character. Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma tried to turn the tables on his colleagues by asking how many of them had ever voted while drunk or cheated on their spouses, as if that somehow obviated any further fussing about whether a possible secretary of defense was an adulterer or struggles with substance abuse.

Unfortunately for Mullin, he doesn’t know his Senate history, so Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member, helpfully spelled it out for him: If any member of the Senate were nominated to such a position, Reed said, they too would have to answer such questions. And then he added that the late Senator John Tower was in 1989 rejected for the same job Hegseth wants—over accusations of a drinking problem.

Throughout this all, I tried to imagine the reaction in Moscow or Beijing, where senior defense-ministry officials were almost certainly watching Hegseth stumble his way through this hearing. They learned today that their incoming opponent apparently has few thoughts about foreign enemies, but plenty of concerns about the people Trump calls “the enemy from within.” The MAGA Republicans, for their part, seem eager only for Hegseth to get in there and tear up the Pentagon.

After today, I suspect America’s enemies are happily awaiting the same thing.

Related:

Pete Hegseth declines to answer. The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

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Israel and Hamas are “on the brink” of accepting an agreement for a cease-fire in Gaza and the exchange of some hostages and prisoners, according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election was released last night. The Biden administration announced that Cuba will be removed from the state-sponsor-of-terrorism list, which would help clear the way for the release of some political prisoners.

Evening Read

Illustration by Federico Tramonte

They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy.

By Ariel Sabar

On a Wednesday morning in October 2014, in a garage in the woods of Pennsylvania, Tommy Trotta tried on some new jewelry: a set of rings belonging to the baseball great Yogi Berra. Each hunk of gold bore a half-carat diamond and the words “New York Yankees World Champions.”

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On a Wednesday morning in October 2014, in a garage in the woods of Pennsylvania, Tommy Trotta tried on some new jewelry: a set of rings belonging to the baseball great Yogi Berra. Each hunk of gold bore a half-carat diamond and the words NEW YORK YANKEES WORLD CHAMPIONS. The team had given them to Berra for each of his 10 World Series victories—no player had ever won more.

Trotta, a balding 39-year-old who lived with his wife and two kids in Scranton, had grown up a Yankees fan. He’d dreamed as a boy of one day joining the team. Berra had been the favorite player of his beloved godmother, who gave Trotta his first Yankees uniform when he was a toddler and took him to games at Yankee Stadium.

Trotta never competed past Little League. But there was more than one way into a hall of fame. In a methodically planned heist in the dark and rain of that October morning, he’d climbed onto a balcony at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, in Little Falls, New Jersey, carrying a duffel bag of tools and dressed entirely in black. He’d cut through a double-reinforced window built to withstand foul balls from an adjoining stadium. Then he’d used a 20-volt DeWalt grinder, with a fire-rescue blade, to slice open a bulletproof display case labeled BASEBALL’S RING LEADER.

Berra’s rings now glinted on Trotta’s hands. They evoked for him a magnificent time before his own birth: the mid-century years when Berra had won World Series after World Series with teammates such as Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, and Mickey Mantle. How many men besides Berra—and now Trotta—would ever know the feeling of those rings on their fingers? How many besides Trotta could sense the weight of all those victories, then destroy every last ounce of it for cash?

In the garage in the Pennsylvania woods, an electric melting furnace was reaching a programmed temperature of more than 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Trotta handed Berra’s rings to a friend, who used jewelers’ tools to pluck out the diamonds and cut up the rings. The dismembered rings were then dropped into the furnace, where they liquefied into a featureless mass of molten gold.

Mining has a proud history in the parts of northeastern Pennsylvania that Trotta and his crew called home. Scranton, the biggest city there, was named after a pair of brothers who exploited the region’s rich deposits of iron and coal. But where earlier generations had descended into the ground for raw minerals, Trotta broke through windows. His mother lode was the championship rings, belts, and trophies—veined with precious metals and gemstones—that sat, almost for the taking, inside low-security sports museums across America.

[From the June 2023 issue: Ariel Sabar on the billion-dollar Ponzi scheme that hooked Wall Street, Warren Buffett, and the U.S. Treasury]

Trotta so perfected this niche line of burglary that he evaded the FBI and more than a dozen police agencies for two decades. His longevity was all the more remarkable given the size and makeup of his crew: three friends he’d known since grade school; his cousin’s fiancé; Trotta’s eldest sister, Dawn; two of her ex-boyfriends; and a neighbor of one of the exes. By day, they had normal jobs: plumber, carpenter, building contractor, bar owner, mechanic, Uber driver, real-estate closing agent. By night, they allegedly served as Trotta’s getaway drivers, toolmakers, and assistants.

Trotta told me his story last year, while he was on pretrial release, awaiting sentencing. He has pleaded guilty to a single count of theft of major artwork, as part of a cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors who have indicted and are seeking to convict his entire crew. I interviewed Trotta in his lawyer’s office, at the apartment he shared with Dawn, and over a few meals and car rides. This article draws on those conversations and on details in the federal indictments, police records, and other public documents.

Trotta stands at about 5 foot 8 and has a round, expressive face—cleft chin, narrow eyes, jutting nose and lips. He speaks like an earnest 10-year-old telling of adventures so grand, he can barely sit still. He turns 50 this year. He hides his bald head beneath a newsboy cap; his once lean, CrossFit-hardened body has grown pear-shaped and wobbly. “Fat Elvis,” he told me.

Trotta claims now to know what he never grasped during a lifetime of thieving: the pain he caused people, particularly the families and fans of the sports heroes whose hard-won trophies he’d plundered. Yogi Berra was nearing his 90th birthday—his last—and grieving the recent death of his wife, Carmen, when Trotta broke into the museum that October, stealing 16 of Berra’s baseball rings and two of his MVP plaques.

“I’m hated in the sports world,” Trotta told me. “I’m hated at a very deep level.”

Trotta felt as though he was born to steal. “In the blood” was how he put it, and it wasn’t just a metaphor. His father—Thomas Trotta Sr., known as “Big Tom” to Trotta’s “Little Tommy”—served as a police officer in Passaic, New Jersey, for seven years before discovering that he liked the other side of the law better. In March 1976, nine months after Trotta was born, his father accepted $750 from an associate of the Genovese crime family to torch a Hackensack dance club. A jury convicted him of arson and conspiracy, and a state judge sentenced him to two to three years in prison, rejecting any “sentimental concern for the family of a crooked cop.”

Left: The Trotta siblings pose with their father’s guns. Right: Thomas Trotta Sr., or “Big Tom.” (Courtesy of Tommy Trotta)

Big Tom was a Vietnam War veteran, fond of camouflage, jean shorts, and exotic firearms. Four months after leaving prison, he held up a Rite Aid pharmacy and was quickly caught. Later he ran heroin and cocaine for a New Jersey drug ring. Little Tommy was 15 years old—and watching from the back seat—when FBI agents yanked his dad out of the driver’s seat of the family car to arrest him. (Trotta Sr. agreed to testify against his associates and was sentenced to 22 months in prison.)

Big Tom may not have been cut out to be a successful arsonist, stickup man, or drug trafficker, but he did better as a thief, supporting his family without once getting caught. To steal without violence was a sly art, and Little Tommy loved when his dad asked for help. Where other fathers took their sons fishing, Trotta’s dad took his to steal salmon from a hatchery. Where other dads took their kids to see historical sites, Big Tom took his son to loot them: Little Tommy, at age 11, would look out for rangers at the Gettysburg battlefield at night as his father dug up Civil War artifacts with a metal detector and spade.

They’d moved from northern New Jersey to rural Pennsylvania in 1986, supposedly to escape the corrupting influences of city life. But it was there, in tiny Madison Township—on a former hay farm, off a dirt road, 15 miles east of Scranton—that Trotta’s criminal education began in earnest. His sister Dawn, who was four years older, had started dating a boy named Nicholas Dombek, a floppy-haired blond who’d quit school, robbed a gas station, and moved in with the Trottas after having had enough of his own parents. Dombek became a kind of older brother to Trotta, and a second son to Big Tom. (Dombek did not respond to requests for comment.)

Big Tom mentored Dombek in home and commercial burglary; Dombek, in turn, mentored Trotta; and by high school, Trotta had helped turn a group of boys he’d known since he was about 11 into a surprisingly disciplined band of thieves.

The gang would listen to idle talk among schoolmates and neighbors to figure out when houses might be unoccupied or stores flush with cash. Then they’d strike, syncing their movements over walkie-talkies and fleeing on ATVs and snowmobiles (also stolen) down wooded trails that police cars couldn’t reach. Trotta never used weapons: His code was always to run if spotted. But in other ways he could be ruthless. He stole $6,000 from the home of a schoolmate’s great-grandmother, he told me, then gave the boy a cut for his advice on how to do it. And he stole a safe from a clothing shop managed by his own girlfriend. Police interrogated the girlfriend, who had no idea he was responsible, but Trotta didn’t mind. The suspicion that fell on innocent employees after his burglaries, he said, “was good for me.”

After graduating from North Pocono High School, in 1994, Trotta got a student loan and enrolled in a six-month vocational-training course in alarm-system technology. He learned that you could disable an alarm by ripping its control panel—or “brain”—off the wall. He found out that many motion detectors had a “pet alley,” an unmonitored area near the floor for small animals. And he discovered that most alarms had a built-in delay: 60 to 90 seconds between when a sensor was tripped and when security was called. The feature was designed to reduce false alarms by giving owners time to punch in a code if they triggered the system accidentally. Trotta took away a different lesson: If a burglar got in and out in under 90 seconds, he could vanish into the night before anyone knew he’d been there. This insight, more than any other, became the basis for the next phase of his career.

Clockwise from top left: Tommy Trotta, Dawn Trotta, Nicholas Dombek, Damien Boland, Al Atsus, and Joe Atsus (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: 1989 and 1994 North Pocono High School yearbooks; Tommy Trotta.)

In August 1999, Keystone College, in La Plume, Pennsylvania, held a celebration for its most famous alumnus: the Baseball Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, who pitched for the New York Giants from 1900 to 1916 and won an astonishing 373 games. Mathewson had helped invent the fadeaway pitch and was nicknamed the “Christian Gentleman” for his refusal to play on Sundays.

Trotta was invited to the festivities by a baseball-card dealer he knew. They watched a one-man show about Mathewson’s life, then walked to the gym for an exhibit of memorabilia that Mathewson’s widow had given the school. Keystone’s athletic director was such an exuberant promoter of Mathewson’s legacy that she slid open a case to give visitors close-ups of the most thrilling items: Mathewson’s 1902 contract with the Giants; his 1916 contract with the Cincinnati Reds; and a World’s Champions jersey he wore after winning the 1905 World Series, its right sleeve cut off at the elbow for friction-free pitching.

Trotta didn’t think much of any of it until the car ride home, when his friend casually said that the Mathewson memorabilia in that one case might be worth more than half a million dollars. It was the most interesting thing Trotta had heard all evening.

He called Joe Atsus—a member of the thieving crew he’d known since middle school—the moment he got home. As Atsus made his way to the house, Trotta dug out a ski mask, a crowbar, and a pair of walkie-talkies. When they got to the Keystone gym, after midnight, Trotta noticed a parked car near the glass side door he’d planned to break through, and a plugged-in vacuum cleaner just inside. If a janitor was there, they’d momentarily stepped away. Trotta was reaching for his crowbar to smash the door when it occurred to him to try the handle. The door was unlocked. Trotta ran to the display, jimmied the sliding glass free of its ratchet lock, and grabbed the jersey and contracts. He was in and out, he recalled, in about 25 seconds. “It was like it was meant to just be taken,” he told me.

Nicholas Dombek (left) and Tommy Trotta in the 1990s (Courtesy of Tommy Trotta)

Trotta continued to burglarize homes to cover his day-to-day living expenses; unlike his assistants, he had no other job. But homes were haystacks: Somewhere in all that clutter, you’d maybe find an antique, a gun, some jewelry, but nothing to make you truly rich. Exhibits like Mathewson’s, Trotta realized, were clutter-free—everything in them was precious. If you could snag half a million dollars in memorabilia in half a minute from a college gym, imagine the takings in an actual museum.

The most prestigious museum in northeastern Pennsylvania was right there in Scranton. Founded by a local physician in 1908, the Everhart Museum had a diverse collection that ranged from a Tyrannosaurus rex skull to paintings by important artists. In 2000, a year after the Mathewson heist, the Everhart made headlines when it proposed strengthening its finances by selling its one Matisse. The painting, a 1920 still life called Pink Shrimp, had been appraised at more than $4 million. Trotta and his crew set in motion a plan to steal it; they began by filming the museum’s layout with camcorders while pretending to be tourists.

They lost their chance when the museum abruptly sold the Matisse. But Trotta was undeterred. On a return visit, he started talking about the painting with a guard, who mentioned that another artwork was probably worth more: Springs Winter, a movie-poster-size drip painting attributed to Jackson Pollock.

Over the next five years, Trotta, Dombek, and other members of the crew took turns visiting—and at times filming—the museum. They mapped the location of each security camera and motion detector, each entry and egress. In bed at night, Trotta replayed the footage obsessively, until he felt he could walk the museum blindfolded. The heist’s exact timing would depend, in a sense, on the gods: The crew needed a storm to hit Scranton between 2 a.m. and dawn. From burglarizing houses as teens, they knew that bad weather slowed the police and muffled the sound of breaking glass. Rain or snow was particularly effective an hour or two after bars closed, when police—tired after the usual arrests—tended to lose steam and become, in Trotta’s phrase, less “peppy.”

But all of those plans were set aside one early morning in November 2005, when a giant brawl erupted at a Scranton bar called Whistles. Trotta, Joe Atsus, and another schoolmate, Damien Boland—whose great-grandmother’s house Trotta had burglarized years earlier—were having a drink when the melee (which they’d played no part in) drew seemingly every last police cruiser to Whistles’ front door.

[From the April 2018 issue: An OurTime.com con man and the women who busted him]

Let’s do it now, Trotta told his friends. He had no ax, no crowbar, no ski mask. But a huge bar fight near closing time was a diversion as providential as a 3 a.m. downpour. He had more luck still when his friends dropped him off behind the museum: A large tent—erected for the Everhart’s annual ball the next night—blocked sight lines to the back door.

After failing to kick in the door, Trotta grabbed a ladder beside the tent and used it as a battering ram, bashing a hole in the glass and crawling through it. In the pitch dark, he bounded up the stairs to the second-floor gallery. He removed the Pollock from the wall and, on the spur of the moment, took an Andy Warhol silk screen, La Grande Passion, right near it. He was downstairs, out the hole, and in his pickup in less than a minute. “We’re rich!” Atsus said, according to court documents.

But by sunup, Trotta was so convinced of his imminent arrest that he pulled a lawn chair into his driveway and just sat there, waiting for the police. Lacking a mask, he’d improvised inside the museum by lifting his sweater over his nose, like some Looney Tunes bandit. Worse, it was a colorful sweater, which anyone at the bars he’d visited the previous evening might recognize.

Yet by the end of the day, no police had showed. The Scranton Times-Tribune soon reported that the museum’s surveillance cameras were under repair and not working that night.

Trotta’s relief was replaced by a new anxiety, captured in a front-page Times-Tribune headline the next day: “FBI: ‘No Market for Stolen Art.’ ” “The true art in an art theft is not stealing the material,” Robert Wittman, then the FBI’s lead art-crime investigator, told the newspaper. “It’s selling it.”

No one had linked the Everhart and Mathewson heists, but word of both had spread among museums, dealers, and collectors. Anyone who tried to sell the Pollock and the Warhol—together potentially worth millions—or the Mathewson memorabilia would almost certainly be discovered. Buyers, for their part, could face both civil and criminal liability, having no credible excuse for ignorance.

At first Trotta thought he could sell the items, no problem, once the five-year statute of limitations for theft expired. Later he realized his error: Under federal laws governing museum crime, prosecutors had as many as 20 years to bring charges. In desperation, he sent a videotape of the art and memorabilia to his father, to see if any of Big Tom’s underworld connections might bite. “I can’t move this,” his dad eventually reported back.

A few months after the Everhart job, one of Trotta’s crew saw an article in Electric City, an alternative Scranton weekly. Arthur Byron Phillips, an eccentric artist who had loaned the Pollock to the museum, was offering a biblical-sounding reward. “Return the purported Pollock to him,” the paper said, “and he’ll grace your palms with silver.” Phillips told reward seekers to be prepared to verify their bona fides by naming the gallery on the painting’s reverse side: “Anyone coming up with that name will prove that they have the actual picture.”

Hot art might not be sellable, Trotta realized, but apparently it could be ransomed. He found a gas station with a pay phone, checked for security cameras, and dialed.

“The Parsons Gallery,” Trotta said.

Phillips replied after a long silence. “You have my attention.”

“I want a million dollars in cash. Don’t call the police.”

“I don’t have a million dollars in cash.”

“Then you’ll never see the painting again,” Trotta said, hanging up.

When Trotta passed the gas station the next day, the pay phone was gone. He suspected that Phillips had called the FBI. The phone was likely on its way to a crime lab. Trotta was glad he’d wiped his fingerprints off his quarters. But he’d screwed up again: He’d asked for too much. “If we went, ‘$50,000,’ I tell you what—he pays, he gets his painting back, okay?”

Dombek eventually decided that art was dangerous. According to prosecutors, he burned a painting by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey—valued at $500,000 and stolen by Trotta from a New Jersey museum—rather than risk getting caught with it. Dombek was like that. Whereas Trotta shone at getting loot, Dombek always had ideas about what to do with it.

The garage Nicholas Dombek had built, on the six acres he lived on in Thornhurst Township, was essentially an improvised chemistry lab. Its long shelves were lined with beakers, droppers, funnels, jugs, calipers, and cookers, alongside containers of various acids, powders, and solutions. Chemical formulas were handwritten on the walls beside what appeared to be personal affirmations. DREAMS ARE EXTREMLY [sic] IMPORTANT YOU CAN’T DO IT UNLESS YOU IMAGINE IT, read one. Another read ALWAYS KEEP SECRETS. It wasn’t necessarily the science that Dombek’s father and older brother taught in the public schools (his dad had a master’s degree in chemistry from Bucknell University), but it reflected at least some of what he’d picked up before quitting school after eighth grade and moving in with the Trottas.

Though Dombek would later testify in court that he was trying to change the bond of water “to cure cancer,” his successes tended to the more pedestrian: S-hooks for attaching stolen license plates to getaway cars; a spiked metal ball for pulverizing reinforced glass; a chain that trucks could use to rip ATMs off their base. Dawn Trotta, who dated Dombek as a teenager and remained friends with him, recalled his particular facility for annihilating cars for her father, who helped people dispose of them for insurance money. “Nick could disappear a vehicle in hours,” she told me. Among the literature Dombek kept handy were The Anarchist Cookbook, A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, and Recovery and Refining of Precious Metals.

After the Mathewson and Everhart fiascoes, Trotta told me, Dombek had one of his ideas. The thing that made most museum pieces valuable—their status as unique, instantly recognizable objects—was also the thing that made them unsellable. But what if you scrapped a museum piece, almost like you did a car? Could certain one-of-a-kind objects be remade, in a lab, into tradable commodities?

In March 2011, Trotta stole 13 silver golf trophies from the Country Club of Scranton during an overnight storm, then delivered them to Dombek’s garage. Five had been awarded to the club’s most illustrious member: Art Wall Jr., who had won the 1959 Masters at Augusta National, beating the defending champion, Arnold Palmer.

The trophies buckled under the heat of Dombek’s torches and furnaces, then puddled and cooled into an untraceable blob of silver. (As Dombek refined his methods, the blobs would come to look less “criminal”—as Trotta put it—and more like professionally made ingots, in the shape of bars or pucks.) Lumps of metal might sell for a tiny fraction of what the original objects, with their feel-good history, would have fetched in a legal market, but there was no legal market. Trotta drove the silver blob to precious-metals dealers in Manhattan’s Diamond District, who bought it for about $6,000, no questions asked.

A business model was born, and Trotta—newly married, with a wife to support—dedicated himself to its perfection. He began mornings now on his laptop at the local Starbucks or Dunkin’, Googling for websites where the words gold, silver, or diamonds showed up alongside terms such as museum and display. When a promising target appeared in the search results, he’d immediately drive, for hours sometimes, to see it; some were mining museums, but far more were halls of fame or sports museums, many of them in small towns. (The crew cased the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York, for years, but gave up after discovering that the diamonds on the championship belt they were after had been replaced by inexpensive replicas.)

Trotta’s reconnaissance grew bolder. On return visits to a target, he’d often bring his sister Dawn’s two preschool-age kids, which gave him cover to film its interior under the guise of recording his little loved ones. He’d ask his niece and nephew to walk over to certain windows, to see if their movements made lights blip on nearby motion detectors. (Dawn told me she appreciated the child care and was unaware of her brother’s ulterior motives.)

When it was Dombek’s turn to visit a target, he’d discreetly tap display cases with a penny, Trotta told me, to glean from the sound whether the glass was easily breakable or bulletproof—information that helped Trotta decide whether to bring his DeWalt grinder, Estwing camper’s ax, or center punch on heist night. With each successful job, Trotta became more convinced that his “dorky” face—together with the button-down shirts he wore on museum visits—made him look like the most generic of American tourists.

When the weather app on their phones showed storms nearing a target, Dombek, like a football coach, would chalk arrows and X’s on his garage floor, diagramming Trotta’s path through a museum. Then, in Dombek’s yard, Trotta would rehearse the moves at full speed, tracking his times on a stopwatch.

Dawn did her part by renting cars at the Scranton airport, then handing the keys to her brother. Not only did rentals rarely break down; they were so new and clean that police tended to overlook them, even in the immediate aftermath of a heist.

Trotta’s system left almost no detail unconsidered, from the way he activated burner phones and bleached his burglary tools to the music he psyched up with—AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” or Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”—before crashing through a window. A trophy could be stolen from a museum at 3 a.m., melted in Dombek’s furnace by 8 a.m., and sold in Manhattan by 1 p.m.—enough time to enjoy a vodka with the Russian dealers they sold to and to pick up a new batch of ski masks at the Army-Navy store on their walk back to the Port Authority garage, where they’d parked.

From the summer of 2011 through late 2013, as gold prices hit record highs, Trotta’s crew made nearly $500,000, more cash than they’d seen in their whole lives. Trotta had launched nearly flawless heists on the Sterling Hill Mining Museum, in Ogdensburg, New Jersey; the United States Golf Association museum, in Liberty Corner, New Jersey; the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, in Goshen, New York; and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Among the objects melted into oblivion were golf’s historic U.S. Amateur Trophy; a replica of the golfer Ben Hogan’s 1953 Hickok Belt, a diamond-studded gold strip given to the best professional athlete of the year; an 18-karat Memphis Gold Challenge Cup awarded in 1902 to the trotting horse Lou Dillon; a silver Fabergé tureen that Czar Nicholas II gave to Dillon’s American owner in 1912, to thank him for introducing harness racing to Russia; and two 1903 trophies designed by Tiffany, one for the Brighton Cup, the other for the Belmont Stakes.

In 2012, Trotta stole from the United States Golf Association Museum, in New Jersey. (Bernards Township Police Department)

By late 2013, the FBI and the sporting press started to suspect a connection among the heists. Theories ranged “from the common street crime variety to complex schemes worthy of ‘The Sopranos,’ ” The New York Times reported that October. A year later, Trotta was in and out of the Yogi Berra Museum so fast that nothing looked amiss from the front doors when the police got there, about five minutes after the alarm sounded. “Because of the rain and wind,” one officer wrote in a report, “our visibility was limited.” Not until Berra’s son Dale arrived at the museum the next morning—he kept an office there—was the theft discovered.

When Trotta disappeared, sometimes for days, to case or burglarize a museum, he’d lie to his wife. He’d say he was in New Jersey doing HVAC work with Joe Atsus and Joe’s brother, Al, who had a contracting business. On their marriage certificate, in 2009, Trotta listed his profession, falsely, as “plumber.” Trotta told me that his wife never asked questions, so long as money came in. Trotta’s parents’ relationship had worked much the same way.

The trouble began after they had children. Trotta’s wife started to resent his frequent absences, which left her with too little help around the house. One night, while Trotta was on his way to a museum, she called to demand that he immediately return with supplies for their 1-year-old son. “She’s like, ‘Thomas needs diapers, you motherfucker,’ ” Trotta recalled. (His wife, who filed for divorce in 2018, told me that she preferred not to involve herself in this story, writing in an email, “I am ok with whatever Tommy stated.”)

Money was becoming tighter, too. Berra’s 16 rings and two MVP plaques—valued at $1.5 million intact—had grossed Trotta’s crew just $10,300 after melting. The more he and his wife fought, the more he wondered how long he could keep it up: the burglaries, the lies, all of it. He thought about day-trading or opening a restaurant. If he could pull one last job—a really big one—he’d have the capital to start an honest business, draw a steadier income, do better as a husband and dad. He was turning 40. It was time.

Yogi Berra poses with his World Series rings in 2000. (Steve Crandall / Getty)

He found an exit the way he’d found everything else: on Google. In 1894, the Russian Empress Alexandra wore a spectacular crown at her wedding to Czar Nicholas II, the same Nicholas, incidentally, whose Fabergé tureen Trotta had stolen from the racing museum in Goshen. Some 1,535 diamonds covered six velvet-draped silver bands, which converged beneath a cross made of six larger diamonds. Trotta believed he could get $5 million in the Diamond District by scrapping the crown’s stones.

The crown, he discovered, sat shockingly close to a first-floor window in a Washington, D.C., mansion once owned by one of America’s wealthiest women. Marjorie Merriweather Post—the cereal heiress, businesswoman, and philanthropist—had purchased Hillwood, as the 25-acre estate was called, in 1955 and filled it with fine art and collectibles from 18th-century Russia and France. In 1977, four years after her death, Hillwood opened to the public as a museum and gardens.

Trotta had cased it more than a dozen times before returning in the summer of 2015 for a crucial, final step. He called it a “night check”: hours spent in a car or in bushes, searching through binoculars for guards and other nocturnal activity. Trotta was a few minutes from the night-check spot when he got into a shouting match with his wife over the phone. He was jolted out of it by a flash in the street: A speed camera had photographed his vehicle, placing it uncomfortably close to Hillwood. He called off the night check and drove the four hours home, furious.

Back in Pennsylvania, he grew so impatient that he dispensed with his usual caution. Forget the night check, he thought. He’d return to Washington with a single mission: to take the crown and retire. He could misdirect the police by setting fire to—or, as he put it, “cooking”—a Hillwood outbuilding as a diversion. But Boland and Ralph Parry, another friend who’d agreed to accompany him, talked him out of the fire. “You want more charges?” Parry said, according to Trotta.

In the darkness of an August morning in 2015, Trotta used fence cutters to enter Hillwood’s grounds and a grinder to cut a bulletproof window some eight feet from the empress’s crown. As Trotta reached for his ax to smash open the display case, he heard a voice shout “Halt!” In the red glow of his headlamp, he glimpsed a man in uniform down the hall. The Hillwood, it turned out, employed night guards. Trotta leaped out the window he’d entered, yelling, “Pop the smoke.” Boland yanked the pin from a smoke grenade and lobbed it behind them as they ran toward Rock Creek Park and forded the creek to Parry’s waiting car. (In a statement issued through his lawyer, Boland called Trotta an “inveterate liar” with “no credibility.” Parry’s lawyer did not comment.)

The failure drove Trotta into a depression. Why hadn’t he returned for a night check? Why had he let his less experienced friends talk him out of a diversion? What was wrong with him?

Since childhood, he’d tried to abide by the one scruple his father seemed to have: Don’t do drugs. But after Hillwood, as his marriage crumbled, he needed release. He began taking Percocet, a narcotic painkiller, and became hooked, paying as much as $50 on the street for each 30-milligram tablet.

The money he made from a 2016 heist of the Roger Maris Museum—all the way out in Fargo, North Dakota—hardly seemed worth the hours of travel. And the drugs were making him sloppy. He cut himself so badly breaking into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in Canastota, New York, and the Franklin Mineral Museum, in Franklin, New Jersey, that he trailed blood on the windows and floors. All for nothing; the boxing belts turned out to be made of a cheap alloy, and the mining stones—tourmaline, zircon, alexandrite—were worthless. Some malignant force seemed to be conspiring against him. When he entered Harvard’s Mineralogical & Geological Museum, disguised as a Hasidic Jew and ready to snatch a large diamond in the middle of the day, the stone, which he’d seen every time he’d cased the museum, was no longer on display.

His edge dulled by narcotics, he returned to the petty thievery of his youth: houses in his own neighborhood, dinky antique shops, convenience-store ATMs—whatever, whenever, for another handful of pills.

Trotta was driving to a friend’s apartment in the snowy early morning of March 4, 2019, when a Pennsylvania state-police cruiser came up behind him. His Pontiac had been fishtailing on the slicked roads, but the troopers didn’t make a traffic stop until he inexplicably pulled over. (Trotta told me he’d wanted to let the car pass, not seeing its police markings until too late.)

Trotta failed a field sobriety test and was charged with a DUI, illegal possession of controlled substances, the unauthorized use of someone else’s car (his cousin’s), the use of a different car’s license plates (his sister’s), and other motor-vehicle violations. He kept it together enough to refuse a blood-alcohol test: The last thing he needed was anyone tying his DNA to the blood he’d shed at various crime scenes. At the police barracks, however, he asked for water. A trooper fished his cup out of the trash and sent it to a forensics lab.

When troopers opened the Pontiac’s trunk the next day, they realized that the driver might be someone other than their usual yahoo out past his bedtime. Inside the vehicle were bolt cutters, a sledgehammer, a headlamp, ski masks, walkie-talkies, burner phones, bits of jewelry, a checkered shirt that had been caught on security cameras during a recent jewelry-store heist, and brochures for sports museums. When Trotta met his lawyer, he asked what the police had found in the car. The lawyer, a seasoned defense attorney named Joe D’Andrea, replied, “Everything but Jimmy Hoffa.”

Nine days after Trotta’s arrest, FBI agents gathered at a state-police barracks with law-enforcement officers from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. They’d come to review a long list of burglaries with similar MOs and to figure out whether Trotta was their missing link. The DNA results that came in after the meeting erased all doubt.

Trotta was turning 44 that year. He’d known the core members of his crew since Ronald Reagan was president. They’d seen one another through graduations, marriages, kids, joblessness, substance abuse, divorce. Joe and Al Atsus were godparents to Trotta’s children. “If you’re robbing stuff at 11 or 12 with people, and at 40 you’re still robbing stuff with these people,” Trotta told me, “you can’t actually get a closer bond than that.” He estimated that over their lives together, they’d done more than 1,500 burglaries.

But when he was arrested, he said, not one of them came to his aid. No real money for lawyers or bail. No sympathy for the years of prison he might face—for crimes that had enriched them all. “He’s a big boy; he’ll eat it,” one of them told his sister. Dombek, claiming to be broke, gave Trotta a handful of screws, suggesting that he scrap them for a bit of cash, according to Trotta. The police, meanwhile, started using evidence from the Pontiac, and interviews with at least one associate, to charge Trotta with a series of local crimes: a 2016 ATM theft, a 2018 house burglary. “My friends,” Trotta concluded, “were prepared to bury me.”

In April 2019, with his lawyer’s encouragement, he began cooperating with state police and prosecutors, and eventually with the FBI. The police fitted him with a listening device, and he recorded damning conversations with Dombek, a man he loved like a brother. In one of those conversations, Dombek said that if anyone turned on him, he’d “sneak on their property, turn off the well cap, and pour a gallon of some kind of substance down their well and would kill that person and their whole family,” according to a police summary of the recording. Dombek also talked about destroying evidence of their crimes, and about plans to kill one witness by mixing fentanyl into his cocaine or by poisoning him with a toxic plant called false hellebore.

In August of that year, the state police raided Dombek’s property, discovered the makeshift chemistry lab, and charged him with burglarizing a house with Trotta. Released on bail, Dombek stormed over to the homes of Trotta’s mother and sister. He called Trotta a “fucking rat,” according to court records, and threatened violence if Trotta didn’t shut up or change his story. The police promptly charged Dombek with five counts of witness intimidation.

U.S. attorneys, meanwhile, persuaded their state counterparts to let them mount a single prosecution of nearly all the museum heists. As federal agents gathered evidence, Dombek and Trotta remained in a Pennsylvania prison on state charges: the former for three years, until he pleaded no contest to a single charge each of witness intimidation and home burglary; the latter for almost four years, until he pleaded guilty to the DUI, the ATM theft, and two home burglaries.

Then, in June 2023, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced federal charges against Trotta, Dombek, and seven other alleged ring members, including Joe and Al Atsus. (Al Atsus’s lawyer told me that any criminal allegations against his client were “absolutely ridiculous and patently absurd”; Joe Atsus’s lawyer declined to comment for this story.) Investigators had linked the ring to 21 burglaries across five states over more than 20 years. A press release credited 20 state and local police departments, as well as the FBI, for helping solve the case.

Boland and the Atsus brothers have pleaded not guilty. Dombek vanished into the woods when he learned of his arrest warrant but reappeared after six months and pleaded not guilty. Tommy and Dawn Trotta, Ralph Parry, and two others pleaded guilty as part of cooperation deals. “Very guilty, Your Honor,” Trotta assured a federal judge.

“We ripped the guts out of people emotionally,” Trotta told me. “I know that now.” In May 2019, while out on bail on the state charges, Trotta broke into a vacant house in New Jersey that the Atsus brothers owned. It was the last place he’d seen the Mathewson memorabilia, the Pollock, and the Warhol. He’d hoped to restore them to their owners, he said. But if the items were there, he couldn’t find them. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

In the days after the 1999 Mathewson heist, two of the pitcher’s biggest fans were among the most heavily interrogated. Eddie Frierson, an actor who’d written and performed the one-man show about Mathewson that night, endured searches by the state police and grillings by the FBI while still deep in grief himself over the loss to the college and to baseball history. “I was aching,” he told me.

Terry Wise was the Keystone College official in charge of the Mathewson display that weekend. When she’d been hired as athletic director a few years earlier, she’d encouraged the college’s president to do more with the memorabilia: How many schools could claim as an alumnus an inaugural inductee of the Baseball Hall of Fame? It was Wise who had opened the case that night to give visitors—including Trotta, she now realizes—a better look at Mathewson’s contracts and jersey. Worse than being questioned by six cops the next day are the feelings of guilt and naivete she still lives with. “I can’t believe it’s 25 years,” she said as we spoke in the gym parking lot, a few steps from the door where Trotta had let himself in.

Haley Zale launched a “Bring Back the Belts” campaign on social media after her great-uncle’s championship belts were stolen in 2015 from the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Tony Zale had beaten Rocky Graziano in 1948 to become the middleweight champion of the world. After Tony’s death, in 1997, Haley visited the museum every year to say her Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and to remember the shy man who’d come up from nothing, beaten Graziano, and been a grandfather figure to her—teaching her boxing stances, applauding her childhood ballet routines, and calling her Miss America. “Visiting Uncle Tony’s belts,” she told me, “was like visiting his grave.”

Lindsay Berra told me that her grandfather Yogi reacted to the disappearance of his rings and plaques with his familiar good humor. “Well, I know I won them,” he said. He worried only about the schoolchildren who visited the museum: Could the broken glass be cleaned up so the kids didn’t get cut?

Berra’s relatives took the theft harder. “Every one of those rings has a story behind it, and it’s about him and a team and the Yankees and a time in our country,” Lindsay told me. “You’re taking little pieces of American history when you take them. They belong to all Americans, not just the guy who won them.”

When the museum’s director called in 2023 to tell her that the alleged culprits had melted the rings for the sake of a few thousand bucks, Lindsay cried as much in sorrow as for the stupidity and waste. Wouldn’t it have been easier and more lucrative to knock off a Kay Jewelers? she thought. She couldn’t understand how Trotta could try on her grandfather’s rings—claiming to be a fan—only to moments later destroy them.

I asked if she believed Trotta’s professions of remorse. “No,” she said. “I think he’s sorry he got caught.”

Even after the police had found “everything but Jimmy Hoffa” in the Pontiac, even after he’d agreed to cooperate, Trotta burglarized a New York jewelry store and came close to ransacking the Saratoga Springs racing museum a second time. He aborted only because he’d spotted a guard during a night check. Then, in January 2024, as half his crew was headed for trial—with himself the star witness for the prosecution—Trotta allegedly stole gift cards, cash, and jewelry from the house of a woman he’d driven home from a bar. The police dropped the charges after Trotta’s lawyer gave the home’s owner a $7,500 check for the missing items, the local police chief told me. Trotta claims that it was a misunderstanding, but the federal judge overseeing the heist cases was displeased enough to revoke Trotta’s pretrial release.

The instinct to steal remains so strong, Trotta told me—so “in the blood”—that he feels as if his brain needs rebuilding. Like a recovering addict, he has to stay constantly on guard against his own impulses. He worries, too, about his son. At 11, he’s now the age Trotta was when Big Tom led him into a life of crime. When Trotta calls from jail, he talks with his son about the misery of incarceration: the bad food, the piece of metal with a half-inch mat that passes for a bed.

The only steady paycheck Trotta earned in his adult life was at Walmart in the early 2000s. (Courtesy of Tommy Trotta)

For a couple of years in the early 2000s, to satisfy probation on a minor theft charge, Trotta held a part-time job loading Walmart trucks. It was the only steady paycheck he’d earned in his adult life; he was miserable. “It was like the coal mines of old,” he told me. “It’s honest and you could wake up and feel proud, but, like, you’re in a category now of real broke-ness.” Guys could live paycheck to paycheck there for 20 years and never save enough for even a little self-indulgence.

Trotta had never grown rich as a thief. He’d taken some nice vacations, eaten some expensive steaks. But he drove junkers, dressed plainly, and had owned a house for just a couple of years before the payments became too much for him. His sister’s place, where he’d lived in a basement bedroom before and after his marriage, was perhaps the closest thing he’d had to a stable home. Yet a thief’s life—like a gambler’s—made wealth something other than impossible. Months would pass in which Trotta would scrape by on penny-ante burglaries. “Then, all of a sudden, a big thing would hit: Boom, we’re good.” And for however many days the money lasted, he felt free.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Trophy Hunters.”

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.”

On Abbott Elementary, celebrity sightings are as common as a back-to-school flu outbreak or drama with the PTA. The show’s Season 2 premiere kicked off with the spunky second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (played by Quinta Brunson) trying to surprise Abbott students with an appearance from “the only celebrity that matters”: Gritty, the internet-famous mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers. In Season 3, Bradley Cooper joined a class for show-and-tell, the Philadelphia Eagles star Jalen Hurts tried to help a teacher’s boyfriend propose, and Questlove DJed a party in the school gym.

As on many a network sitcom, Abbott’s celebrity cameos tend to involve the stars playing themselves, with some embellished biographical details to sweeten their stories. (Questlove, for example, claimed that he and Allen Iverson both credit their illustrious careers to Abbott’s principal, who happens to be one of their closest friends.) Now, midway through its fourth season, Abbott has found a clever way to continue celebrating that hometown pride—and expand the show’s comedic arsenal. The latest episode taps some of Philly’s most well-known fictional personalities, using their outlandish antics to draw out a bit more edge from Abbott’s plucky educators.

In tonight’s episode, the main characters of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia saunter into the public school and invigorate the mockumentary by stirring up chaos. Anyone familiar with the long-running FX sitcom about a group of bartenders knows that the Sunny protagonists don’t belong anywhere near an elementary-school campus. Throughout its 16 seasons, the most of any live-action American comedy series, It’s Always Sunny has been a riotous, foul-mouthed chronicle of escalating misbehavior from a gang of total miscreants. The loosely plotted sitcom has followed the Paddy’s Pub slackers through outrageous, ill-conceived schemes that almost always reveal just how craven they are: They’ve smoked crack in an attempt to exploit the welfare system, siphoned gas to sell door-to-door, and outlined some deeply concerning strategies for picking up women.

Suffice it to say, none of them is getting invited to speak at a commencement ceremony or Career Day. By contrast, most of the strangers who’ve popped up at Abbott over the years, whether they’re district bureaucrats or local businesspeople, at least pretend to have altruistic motives. When these visitors cause issues for the school, it’s usually due to incompetence, negligence, or an easily resolved misunderstanding. And of course, there’s generally a moral at the end of the story—the kind of humorous, heartfelt fare that makes Abbott so beloved as family viewing.

[Read: Abbott Elementary lets Black kids be kids]

But things go awry almost immediately after the Sunny squad shows up in “Volunteers,” the first of two planned crossover episodes. The gang arrives at Abbott under the guise of offering the overworked educators some much needed help from the local school district. Instead, Mac (Rob McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Frank (Danny DeVito), and Deandra (Kaitlin Olson) quickly discover that there are documentary cameras rolling at Abbott, prompting the superlatively toxic Dennis to excuse himself because he knows “quite a bit about filming and consent.” The others stick around, acting slightly more buttoned-up than usual because they know they’re being recorded, but they’re still too abrasive to fit in. They admit that they’re there only to satisfy the community-service requirements of a court order, and in response to one teacher calling them criminals, ask whether it’s really a “crime” to dump 100 gallons of baby oil, 500 Paddy’s Pub T-shirts, and a Cybertruck in the Schuylkill River.

These kinds of ludicrous scenarios are par for the course on Sunny, but they strain the boundaries of the malfeasance we usually see from Abbott characters. For the educators, that creates an amusing challenge: The Sunny gang isn’t a pack of wayward teenagers waiting for an understanding mentor to show them the light, and their moral failures can’t be rehabilitated with a pep talk. No earnest, well-articulated argument for the importance of early-childhood education will make characters like these abandon their selfishness, and the unexpected dose of cynicism gives Abbott’s formula an intriguing mid-season shake-up—a nice wrinkle, considering how many network sitcoms begin to feel repetitive the longer they stay on the air.

Take the drama caused by Deandra, or “Sweet Dee.” This episode finds the lone woman in the main Sunny crew initially bonding with Janine while volunteering in her classroom: Dee praises Janine in front of the second graders after the two women realize they both attended the University of Pennsylvania. But their camaraderie takes a hit when Dee starts lusting after Gregory (Tyler James Williams), Janine’s fellow teacher—and, after a lengthy will-they-won’t-they storyline, also her boyfriend. When Janine tells Dee that she’s in a relationship with Gregory, the Sunny transplant is undeterred: “You’re good if I take a spin though, yeah?” It’s the first time Janine’s encountered a real romantic foil on the series, and as the conflict plays out, Dee’s brash flirting style forces Janine to acknowledge her fears about the relationship. These scenes offer Janine, easily the most childlike of the teachers, an opportunity to grow by facing the tension head-on—a feat made easier by her having a farcical villain in Dee.

Abbott will never be the kind of show where the main cast routinely has to fend off mean-spirited romantic sabotage or keep tabs on a man who gives off serious Andrew Tate vibes. After the volunteers slink back to Paddy’s, the most shiftless person on campus will once again be Principal Coleman (Janelle James), whose ineptitude and vanity don’t prevent her from advocating for the students from time to time. Still, the Sunny crossover episode marks a compelling chapter in Abbott’s evolution. The series has stayed family-friendly thanks to its educational setting, showcasing the comic talents of both its students and teachers. But Abbott is now proving itself adept at something different too: comedy with a real bite, even if it’s not in service of teaching a lesson.