Days after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, I received a call from a former officer in the US Air Force. Like most Americans, she worried about how the ruling could harm the health, privacy and freedom of American women. But she raised another issue that is equally deserving of our attention -- the harm to our national security.

Illustrations by Brandon Celi

In the course of a single month this year, the following news reports emanated from Florida: A gun enthusiast in Tampa built a 55-foot backyard pool shaped like a revolver, with a hot tub in the hammer. A 32-year-old from Cutler Bay was arrested for biting off the head of his girlfriend’s pet python during a domestic dispute. A 40-year-old man cracked open a beer during a police traffic stop in Cape Coral. A father from East Orlando punched a bobcat in the face for attacking his daughter’s dog.

In headlines, all of these exploits were attributed to a single character, one first popularized in 2013 by a Twitter account of the same name: “Florida Man,” also known as “the world’s worst superhero,” a creature of eccentric rule-breaking, rugged defiance, and unhinged minor atrocities. “Florida Man Known as ‘Sedition Panda’ Arrested for Allegedly Storming Capitol,” a recent news story declared, because why merely rebel against the government when you could dress up in a bear suit while doing it?

Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as “the America of America,” but to a Brit like me, it’s more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole. Florida’s place in the national mythology is as America’s pulsing id, a vision of life without the necessary restriction of shame. Chroniclers talk about its seasonless strangeness; the public meltdowns of its oddest residents; how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro can be reborn there. “Whatever you’re doing dishonestly up north, you can do it in a much warmer climate with less regulation down here,” said the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who wrote about the weirder side of Florida for the Miami Herald from 1976 until his retirement in 2021.

But under the memes and jokes, the state is also making an argument to the rest of the world about what freedom looks like, how life should be organized, and how politics should be done. This is clear even from Britain, a place characterized by drizzle and self-deprecation, the anti-Florida.

What was once the narrowest swing state has come to embody an emotional new strain of conservatism. “The general Republican mindset now is about grievances against condescending elites,” Michael Grunwald, the Miami-based author of The Swamp, told me, “and it fits with the sense that ‘we’re Florida Man; everyone makes fun of us.’ ” But criticism doesn’t faze Florida men; it emboldens them.

It is no coincidence that the two leading contenders for the Republican nomination both have their base in Florida. In one corner, you have Donald Trump, who retired, sulking, from the presidency to his “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach. (When Trump entered the 2024 presidential race, the formerly supportive New York Post jeered at him with the front-page headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement” before relegating the news story to page 26.)

In the other corner stands the state’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, raised in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, a man desperately trying to conceal his attendance at the elite institutions of Harvard and Yale under lashings of bronzer and highly choreographed outrages. In his speeches, the governor likes to boast that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” In his 2022 campaign videos, he styled himself as a Top Gun pilot and possibly even Jesus himself. You couldn’t get away with that in Massachusetts.

[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

“The thing about being the ‘punch-line state’ is that it’s all true,” the writer Craig Pittman told me over Zoom, his tropical-print shirt gleaming in the sun. “Do you remember the story about the woman who got in trouble in New Jersey for trying to board a plane with her emotional-support peacock?”

Yes, I do.

“The peacock was from Florida.”

When I first arrived in Orlando, in late October, I rented what to me was a comically large Ford SUV and drove to McDonald’s for hash browns and a cup of breakfast tea (zombie-gray, error). Then I went to a gun range, where I began by firing two pistols. The very serious man behind the desk had clocked my teeth (British), accent (Hermione Granger), and sex (female), and expressed skepticism that I would want to fire an AR‑15 assault rifle too. But I did. In the past decade, semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 have become the weapon of choice for young killers, and I needed to see what America was willing to put into the hands of teenagers in the name of freedom.

With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn.

Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida. When the Tampa Bay Rays tweeted in support of gun control after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre last year, the governor vetoed state funding for a new training facility, saying that it was “inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation.” You might think: How petty. Or maybe: How effective.

Hold on to those thoughts. DeSantis is a politician who preaches freedom while suspending elected officials who offend him, banning classroom discussions he doesn’t like, carrying out hostile takeovers of state universities, and obstructing the release of public records whenever he can. And somehow Florida, a state that bills itself as the home of the ornery and the resistant, the obstinate and the can’t-be-trodden-on, the libertarian and the government-skeptic, has fallen for the most keenly authoritarian governor in the United States.

This is the point in the story when a foreign reporter would traditionally go to Walt Disney World and have a Big Thought about how the true religion of America is capitalism. She might include a variation on the French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s observation that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real.”

Me? I went to Disney World; bought a storm-trooper hat, a 32-ounce Coke, and a hot dog that looked like a postapocalyptic ration; then I had my photo taken high-fiving Baloo. What a great day out. The Magic Kingdom drew nearly 21 million tourists in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, and is central to Florida’s mythology. I had to go. For me, the visceral thrill came from the park’s extraordinary bureaucracy: all the attention to detail of a North Korean military parade, purely for your enjoyment.

Disney flatters its customers the way Florida flatters the rich, by hiding the machinery needed to support decadence. You absolutely never see Cinderella smoking a joint behind her castle, or Mickey Mouse losing it with a group of irritating 9-year-olds. In Florida, no one wants to hear about the costs or the consequences. Why else would people keep rebuilding fragile beachfront homes in a hurricane zone—and expect the government to offer them insurance? Of course everyone wants the Man to butt out of their life, but at the same time, the state-backed insurer of last resort hit 1 million policies in August.

Brandon Celi

Baudrillard had it precisely wrong: Disney’s success only underlines how the state is one giant theme park. “This is not a place that makes anything, and it’s not really a place that does anything, other than bring in more people,” Grunwald had told me. Having brought in those people, what Florida never tells them is no, nor does the state ask them to play nicely with the other children: “We’re not going to make you wear a mask or take a vaccine or pay your taxes or care about the schools,” Grunwald said.

[Derek Thompson: Disney vs. DeSantis is the future of politics]

I did have one Big Thought in Orlando: It’s odd that Ron DeSantis cast Disney as an avatar of the “woke mind virus” after its then-CEO, Bob Chapek, spoke out against the Parental Rights in Education bill—known to critics as the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’ ” law—which restricts the teaching of gender and sexuality in schools. Disney’s cartoons now feature LGBTQ characters, and its older films carry warnings about their outdated attitudes, but the corporation itself is deeply conservative in the discipline it demands from its staff, its deep nostalgia for the 1950s, and its celebration of American exceptionalism. At Epcot’s World Showcase, I observed national pavilions built on the kind of gleeful cultural supremacy last seen in 19th-century anthropologists marveling at the handicrafts of the natives. Britain was represented by a fish-and-chips shop, a pub, and a store where you could buy a “masonic sword” for $350. It could have been worse: Brazil, the fifth-largest country on Earth, had been reduced to a caipirinha stand.

Outside Tallahassee, I fell in love. Having driven four hours north to the Panhandle one bright day, wearing denim shorts that would be unnecessary in Britain for nine more months, I ended up in Wakulla Springs State Park.

This was primordial Florida, the swamp I had been promised, and it was heaven: a swimming spot overseen, on the opposite bank, by a 13-foot alligator named Joe Jr., something the tour guide presented as perfectly normal and not at all alarming. Unwieldy manatees glided through the water as if someone had given my SUV nostrils and flippers. Turkey vultures massed in the trees. I had bubble-gum ice cream and a root-beer float—how American is that?—and felt pure happiness flooding me like sunshine.

Here was the magic that brings so many people to Florida, a glow that returned as I traveled around the state on my two trips there: turning off an unremarkable road and finding myself in the public park outside Vero Beach, where for $3 you could walk through warm white sand on a weekday afternoon; having a beer and watching the pink-orange sunset over the marina in the small town of Stuart; the Day-Glo-graffiti walls of Wynwood, south of Miami’s Little Haiti; the revelation that there’s an entire spare Miami just over the bridge from the original. Bumped off my return flight for three days by Hurricane Nicole, I drove to the Kennedy Space Center—just in time to watch a SpaceX rocket blast off into the clear blue sky. At one point, I took a wrong turn outside of Miami onto Alligator Alley and drove 15 miles into the Everglades before I could turn around at a visitors’ center. I’ve never been somewhere so wild that also had M&M’s in vending machines.

Braided through these experiences was the sensation of Florida as a refuge from reality, something that has encapsulated both its promise and its peril since before it was part of America. In the early 1800s, enslaved people escaped from southern plantations and sheltered in Seminole lands, prompting Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, to launch the first in a series of devastating wars. Florida was soon offloaded by the Spanish, and loosely attached to the U.S. for two decades before becoming a state in 1845. It was roundly ignored for a long time after that. In 1940, it was the least populated southern state.

The reasons for its transformation after World War II are well known: air-conditioning and bug spray; generations of northeastern and midwestern seniors tempted by year-round sunshine; the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who fled Fidel Castro in the 1960s. Then came the rodent infestation: Disney, with all its money and lobbyists and special tax arrangements, and eventually its own town, called Celebration. Now the state draws crypto hustlers, digital nomads, and people who just plain hate paying state income tax. All of these migrants fueled decades of explosive growth and a landscape of construction, condos, and golf courses. In 2014, Florida’s population overtook New York’s, and in 2022, it was the nation’s fastest-growing state.

But those bare facts conceal a more fundamental change. As Florida has become America, America has become more like Florida: older, more racially diverse but not necessarily more liberal, and more at risk from climate change. “The state that looks most like what we’d expect the United States to look like in 2060?” Philip Bump writes in his new book, The Aftermath. “Florida.”

For so many who choose to live here, arriving in Florida feels like a relief: a liberation from cold winters, from COVID mandates, from the paralyzing fear of political correctness, from the warnings of climatologists and guilt trips by Greta Thunberg. “This is an irresponsible place,” Grunwald told me—a counterweight to Plymouth Rock and the puritanism of the Northeast. When I drove across the border into Georgia, a battery of signs greeted me, warning against speeding and littering, as if to say: Look, we’re relaxed here, but not Florida relaxed. In freedom-loving Florida, you presume, every warning and restriction has been reluctantly imposed in response to a highly specific problem. (Exhibit A, the hotel swimming-pool sign: No swimming with diarrhea.)

Before arriving in the state, I had called the political strategist Anthony Pedicini, who has worked for multiple Republican state representatives and members of Congress in Florida since moving there two decades ago from New York. He expressed a general frustration with the fussiness and rule-making of Democratic-controlled areas: “You’ve dealt with these blue-state politics that have raised your taxes, defunded your police, rewarded homelessness, made the schools a mockery—you’re fed up with it.” And so you go to Florida.

Then Pedicini said something unexpected. “You ever read The Iliad and The Odyssey?” I know them reasonably well, I responded, with the caution of someone who is anticipating a quiz.

“So there was one of the chapters where the ship is going by the Sirens, calling the sailors off,” he continued. “Odysseus strapped himself to the mast so he wouldn’t go, but he made all his sailors plug their ears with wax and cotton. I think Ron DeSantis is like a siren call to all of these suburban Republicans living in these blue states.”

Right, but weren’t the sirens luring people … to their death?

Pedicini was unperturbed. “I’ll tell you this, to give you background on me. I lost my mother during the pandemic to COVID. My mother chose not to get a shot, the only one in our family. Do I blame it on the governor? Absolutely not. Do I blame my mother? No, she made a choice for her that she thought was best for her. It resulted in a disastrous consequence. But the government didn’t have the right to make that choice.”

Everyone I met in Florida agreed that DeSantis was ambitious, hardworking, and smart—but, you know, so were Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. Where were the fizz and the fire and the electric crackle of change that he claimed to be offering?

During a rally held at the American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, on the Space Coast, I got to see DeSantis in person, floodlit like a Pink Floyd concert and flanked by sweet vintage rides. Flags fluttered in the parking lot, declaring BLUE LIVES MATTER and LET’S GO BRANDON, but the experience was underwhelming. DeSantis’s speech was a rote recital of approved villains, lacking the chaos and danger that Donald Trump brings to his rallies.

Brandon Celi

Any serious consideration of DeSantis inevitably runs headlong into his lack of charisma. Can you win the presidency without being able to make small talk? The Republican donor class is very keen to lubricate his path to power, but they worry he can’t schmooze and flatter as well as he bullies and schemes. He has courted partisan YouTubers and talk-radio hosts, but throughout his reelection campaign last year, he did not grant a sit-down interview to any mainstream publication, and declined to cooperate with profiles in The New Yorker, the Financial Times, and The New York Times. His press team specializes in insults that read as though ChatGPT has been trained on Trump speeches—gratuitous, yet somehow bloodless. (Asked to respond to fact-checking queries for this article, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, replied by email: “You aren’t interested in the truth; this is just yet another worthless Atlantic editorial.”)

The governor’s closest adviser is generally agreed to be his wife, Casey—ironically, a former television reporter—who survived breast cancer in 2022, and made a campaign ad extolling the support DeSantis gave her. In general, he reveals little about his inner life. Until recently, he had not spoken publicly about the unexpected death of his sister, Christine, at age 30 in 2015. In February, when the New York Post followed him to Dunedin, to see the governor in his home environment, the most the reporter got out of him was that he’d parlayed his success as a Little League pitcher—his teammates called him “D”—into a job at an electrical store in town. His mother was a nurse and his father installed Nielsen boxes; his middle name is Dion; vacations were spent visiting his grandparents in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He was smart and worked hard enough to get into Yale.

Ah, the Ivy League. This is where DeSantis’s story really takes off: the small-town Florida boy thrust into a world of inherited privilege, elite tastes, and left-wing opinions. “I showed up my first day in jean shorts and a T-shirt because that’s what we wore on the west coast of Florida,” he told Tucker Carlson in April 2021. “That was not something that was received very warmly. And I never quite fit in there, and it was a total culture shock to me.” For the first time, he told Carlson, he heard someone criticize America—and God, and Christianity. “They hated God,” he said. “They hated the country.” For the first time, in other words, the young Ron met people with different political opinions—and he didn’t like it one bit.

After college, DeSantis spent a year teaching at the private Darlington School, in Georgia, where, according to the Times, one student recalled him as a “total jock” who “was definitely proud that he graduated Ivy and thought he was very special.” DeSantis once dared a student who had been boasting about how much milk he could drink to prove it. The student threw up in front of his classmates.

Unlike Trump, DeSantis could have succeeded by the elite’s rules. Like George H. W. Bush, he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the captain of the baseball team. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale. His performance got him into Harvard Law School, after which he joined the legal arm of the U.S. Navy.

He spent Christmas 2006 at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay—not as an inmate, he would later joke on the campaign trail. One former Guantánamo prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, has accused DeSantis of laughing as he was force-fed; Adayfi says he threw up in the young lawyer’s face. “I was screaming,” Adayfi told Eyes Left, which describes itself as a socialist anti-war podcast hosted by veterans. “I looked at him, and he was actually smiling. Like someone who was enjoying it.” Adayfi was released in 2016 after being detained without charge for 14 years, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights later classified this force-feeding as torture. (In his 2023 book, The Courage to Be Free, DeSantis offers few details about his stint at Guantánamo, saying that although detainees would often “claim ‘abuse’ ” in U.S. facilities, “in Iraqi custody they really would get abused and treated inhumanely.”)

In 2007, DeSantis deployed to Iraq with SEAL Team 1, not as a stone-cold killer himself, but as the stone-cold killers’ lawyer. The year before, he had met his future wife on a golf course (very Florida), and in 2009 he married her at Disney World (even more Florida). In honor of the couple’s Italian heritage, the reception was at Italy Isola in Epcot, a private terrace next to a small faux-Venetian canal. They now have three children: Mamie, Mason, and Madison.

Casey DeSantis’s job as a local TV host meant she couldn’t move out of the state, so her husband decided to leave the military and began contemplating his future while serving as a special assistant U.S. attorney in central Florida. He wanted to run for Congress in Florida’s Sixth District, north of Orlando, but he knew he had a problem. “I viewed having earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School to be political scarlet letters as far as the GOP primary went,” he later wrote. He needed a mythology. He needed to embrace his destiny as a Florida Man, a crusader for people who want to open-carry in Publix against the blue-state pencil-necks who worship Rachel Maddow and scoff at birtherism. “If I could withstand seven years of indoctrination in the Ivy League,” he took to telling audiences, “then I will be able to survive D.C. without going native!”

Driving back from Melbourne to Orlando took me past the Reedy Creek Improvement District—a forgettable euphemism for Disney’s private fiefdom, 25,000 acres of land around Lake Buena Vista, where for more than half a century the company was able to control building codes, utilities, and waste collection. Until it crossed Ron DeSantis.

The treatment of Disney—which has more than 70,000 employees in the state—has become the cornerstone of DeSantis’s pitch to voters; he calls it “the Florida equivalent of the shot heard ’round the world.” It reveals both his governing philosophy and the evolution of the Republican attitude toward corporations. In February, on the eve of his book’s publication, DeSantis signed a bill ending Disney’s control of the district and replacing its board of supervisors with his own handpicked choices. These included Bridget Ziegler, an education activist whose husband had been elected earlier that month as chair of the Florida Republican Party. For a guy who had never run anything before becoming governor, DeSantis has shown an incredible aptitude for patronage.

The campaign against one of Florida’s largest private employers is DeSantisism distilled into its purest form, a kind of Mafia bargain reminiscent of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: Don’t come for me and I won’t come for you. Corporations can be supportive of ruling politicians, or studiously neutral. What they must not do is cause trouble.

What else does DeSantis believe? We know from the media tour for The Courage to Be Free that he is far from a foreign-policy hawk. He has said that it is not in America’s interests to become “further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia.” His first book, 2011’s Dreams From Our Founding Fathers—published by a Florida vanity press called High-Pitched Hum, and clearly riffing on the title of Barack Obama’s first memoir—paints him as an originalist; he claims that the Founding Fathers considered the Constitution a “fundamental law with a stable meaning” rather than a “living document.” He confidently asserts that the country’s first Black president betrayed the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who “did not dream of a transformation of America in which the foundational principles of the nation were tossed aside.”

[David French: Why Republicans are turning against free speech ]

Dreams From Our Founding Fathers was DeSantis’s calling card for his successful 2012 congressional run. He quickly became a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus. Aware of the Tea Party energy coursing through the party, DeSantis was careful not to appear co-opted by the establishment. He slept in his office instead of renting an apartment in Washington, declined the congressional pension plan, and flew back to Florida—and his growing family—as soon as votes ended each week.

During his third term, DeSantis made his bid for promotion to governor—and that is when he received the blessing of this story’s other Florida Man, Donald Trump. The facts are disputed: Trump recently claimed that DeSantis begged him with “tears coming down from his eyes” for an endorsement; other sources have the president moved by watching the potential candidate praise him on Fox News. Either way, in late 2017 Trump posted a tweet describing DeSantis as “a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida.”

That endorsement allowed DeSantis to become a staple of Fox News, with more than 100 appearances in 2018. “The once little-known congressman spent so much time broadcasting Fox News TV hits from Washington this year that he learned to apply his own powder so he could look as polished as he sounded,” Politico reported.

Brandon Celi

Buoyed by Trump’s blessing and the support of right-wing media, DeSantis won Florida’s Republican primary for governor in August 2018 by 20 points. Two months later, he went on to win the general election by just 32,463 votes. In The Courage to Be Free, he recalls asking his transition team to draw up an “exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor. I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.” If DeSantis ever sits behind the Resolute Desk, you can bet he’ll do more than order Diet Cokes and compulsively check Twitter.

In January, after DeSantis had been reelected as governor by 1.5 million votes, I returned to Florida, landing in Miami. This time, the car-rental agency offered me an upgrade to a Cadillac Escalade. I got all the way to climbing up the little step to the driver’s seat, where I looked backwards at two more rows of seats and a trunk, before I decided to set out instead in a positively demure GMC Terrain.

I had been told that there were three Floridas: the Panhandle, best viewed as an extension of the Deep South; the state’s central belt, where maps should read “Here Be Seniors”; and the south, where condo towers and bustling Spanish-speaking enclaves merge slowly into the laid-back beaches of the Keys. Visiting Miami, I could barely comprehend how the city—with its bitcoin brunches and graffiti district and cops who look like male strippers—could be in the same country as Tallahassee, never mind the same state.

Maria-Elena Lopez, the vice chair of the Miami-Dade Democrats, volunteered to tell me why the traditionally blue and “rabidly Latin” county had voted for DeSantis by 11 points in November (he lost there by 21 points in 2018). Her answer was simple: Its more recent arrivals were middle-class conservatives in their countries of origin, and “they didn’t come here to fight the fight of the other people.” Also, she said, “Latin Americans love strongmen.”

Lopez, who came to the United States from Cuba at age 4, also underlined the complicated relationship between recent migrants and the idea of government help, explaining that her fellow Cubans were particularly triggered by anything that smacked of socialism. She pointed to Hialeah, “which is probably our most Latin city in Miami-Dade County … and there is the highest enrollment of what is casually called Obamacare. Okay. Yet they’re like, ‘Obama was Communist.’ Oh, but you like his insurance policies? The messaging does not go with what the actual reality is.”

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

In the November election, DeSantis’s success was not an outlier in Florida; Senator Marco Rubio notched an equally large win, and the party gained four House seats. Yet DeSantis deserves some credit for this: He had pushed an exquisitely gerrymandered redistricting proposal through the state legislature. “His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state,” ProPublica reported last year. As one example, the DeSantis map shattered the seat held by the Black Democrat Al Lawson, which stretched along the border with Georgia, dividing it into four pieces, each of which was inserted into a majority-white district. (DeSantis has rejected the criticisms, calling the old district itself “a 200-mile gerrymander that divvies up people based on the color of their skin.”)

DeSantis also established an Office of Election Crimes and Security, whose officers carried out widely publicized arrests for alleged voter fraud. Fentrice Driskell, the state House minority leader, points to the chilling effect of police officers “parading around 20 individuals who thought that they had registered to vote lawfully” in front of the cameras. (Three defendants have so far had their charges dismissed.) “They were just bogus cases,” Driskell told me, “being used to gin up a big lie that there’s election fraud in Florida.”

Sunday morning in Ron DeSantis’s vision of hell, and I was drinking bottomless mimosas. This was R House, a drag bar in Wynwood, an area of Miami that has made the journey from sketchy to bougie in just two decades. Last July, a viral video filmed at R House showed a drag performer, her implausible breasts barely covered with pasties, dollar bills stuffed into her thong, showing a small child how to strut along a catwalk. “Children belong at drag shows!!!!” read the caption. “Children deserve to see fun & expression & freedom.” DeSantis responded by ordering a government investigation of the restaurant.

When I visited R House, I didn’t see any minors, although the menu did offer a $30 kids’ brunch. If anything, the drag show revealed how thoroughly gay culture has been absorbed into the mainstream; judging by all the sashes and tiaras, most of the customers were part of bachelorette parties. At the table next to me, a woman daintily fed a glass of water to a chihuahua in a jeweled collar. Fans were snapped, dollar bills were waved, and a few performers did some light twerking, but the only serious danger to children here would have been from a flying wig.

I left perplexed. In all honesty, I had found the viral video disturbing; as the DeSantis administration’s complaint argued, the performance had a “sexualized nature” that was clearly inappropriate for kids to watch. But it was no more disturbing to me than giving an 8-year-old a “purity ring,” or letting them fire a pistol, or forcing 10-year-olds to bear their rapists’ babies. Why can’t America just be normal? And why wouldn’t DeSantis, extoller of “parental rights in education,” let moms and dads decide what to show their own children? The paradox of freedom, Florida style, is that it’s really an assertion of control. People like us should be free to do what we want, and free to stop other people from doing what they want when we don’t approve. That’s why it would be deeply unfair to call Ron DeSantis a petty tyrant. If he is a tyrant, he is an expansive one.

Ask Andrew Warren. After the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the twice-elected Democratic state attorney in Hillsborough County signed a pledge that he would not prosecute women who sought abortions, or doctors providing gender surgery or hormones to minors. The DeSantis administration responded by suspending him while he was in the middle of an unrelated grand-jury case. “Five minutes after receiving the email about the suspension, I was escorted out of my office by an armed deputy,” he told me. There wasn’t even enough time to collect his house keys from his desk. In January, a judge ruled that DeSantis had violated Warren’s First Amendment rights and the Florida Constitution, but said he had no authority to reinstate him.

Warren believes his suspension was designed to be a warning to others: “This is what authoritarians do, right? They say that we need to quell dissent, because dissent is so inherently dangerous.”

Similarly stuntlike was DeSantis’s decision to fly 49 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard last year, which became a reliable applause line in the governor’s stump speech. Everything about that story stinks, including the fact that the aviation company involved, Vertol—which had close ties to DeSantis aides—made a handsome profit. That’s part of a pattern. When DeSantis owns the libs, his donors and loyalists tend to benefit. At the start of the year, under the guise of his “war on woke,” he appointed six right-wing activists as trustees of the New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college in Sarasota. The board promptly forced the president out and replaced her with Richard Corcoran, a former Republican speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives, on a salary of $699,000 (more than double the previous president’s). One of the new board members was Christopher Rufo, who has achieved fame among the Very Online for turning critical race theory into a household term. So what if Rufo lives in Washington State? He is big on Twitter and a beloved brand among Tucker Carlson viewers.

[Yascha Mounk: How to save academic freedom from Ron DeSantis]

At 44, DeSantis represents a new generation of Republicans who have learned to speak Rumble—the unmoderated alternative to YouTube—as well as fluent Fox. He knows which of his actions to shout about, and which ones are better smothered in boredom. At a flashy press conference on April 19, 2021, for example, DeSantis surrounded himself with cops to sign the Combating Public Disorder Act, which was presented as taming the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement but—according to Jason Garcia, a former Orlando Sentinel investigative reporter who now runs a Substack called Seeking Rents—gave police extra power to quell dissent and civil disobedience more generally. That was a moment worth staging for applause by the Blue Lives Matter contingent. By contrast, the governor waited until just before midnight the same day to approve Senate Bill 50, a blandly worded law that collects sales tax from online shoppers while giving tax breaks to Florida businesses. The difference between the splashy staging of the anti-riot bill and the quiet enactment of S.B. 50 “illustrates DeSantis to me so perfectly,” Garcia said. “He’s a governor that is masterful at driving these angry social-war fights that divide people, then turning around and governing like a pro-corporate Republican.”

From the outside, Mar-a-Lago looks less like a millionaires’ playground and more like an all-inclusive Mediterranean resort. But Trump’s Palm Beach estate does have a watchtower outside, and a guard who was not keen to let me in, even to speak to the manager.

No matter. Instead I headed around the corner to the house owned by the real-estate billionaire Jeff Greene, hoping that he had insight into the one man who could crush DeSantis’s ambitions. Someone, somewhere, buzzed me into the gate, but Greene was playing tennis when I arrived, so I wandered around the estate for five minutes, worried about being shot by an overzealous security guard. When Greene finally brought me inside, his house was everything I had hoped for: toilets with self-warming seats, a terrace backing onto the beach, photos of him embracing world leaders, the works. “That’s a Picasso,” he said, leading me down a corridor to his terrace. This was the Palm Beach lifestyle I had heard so much about.

Greene was once a member of Mar-a-Lago, but he let his membership lapse after he ran as a Democratic candidate for governor in 2018 (he came in fourth in the primary). His campaign promoted him as someone willing to stand up to Donald Trump, using a grainy video of him and Trump gesticulating at each other in the dining room at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in December 2016 as proof. Despite this history, Greene had sympathy for Trump’s complaint that DeSantis would be nothing without him.

Trump seems to feel DeSantis’s betrayal keenly. Shortly before the November election, he debuted a new nickname for his rival: Ron DeSanctimonious. But it didn’t land, somehow, and Trump’s more recent efforts—Meatball Ron, Shutdown Ron, Tiny D—have not been as devastating as Low-Energy Jeb or Little Marco. Locked away for two years in Mar-a-Lago like the world’s most gregarious shut-in, the former president has been consumed by his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, long past when it stopped being a useful, base-enraging lie.

The demands of Palm Beach socializing meant that Greene was certain to encounter Trump again—in fact, Greene was due at Mar-a-Lago the following weekend for a benefit in aid of the Palm Beach Police and Fire Foundation. That might be awkward, because a few months earlier he had told the Financial Times that Trump had “no friends.” Then came the former president’s dinner with Ye—Kanye West—who was going around saying things like “I like Hitler,” and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

“I realized that I probably should call the Financial Times to say I owe President Trump an apology,” Greene told me, looking the least apologetic a man has ever looked, an attitude the tennis whites amplified, “because he really does have two friends.”

Was he not worried about going to Mar-a-Lago under the circumstances? Not at all, it turned out, because Greene would be accompanied by his friend Mehmet Oz, Trump’s anointed (and failed) candidate for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, as well as by his best man, with whom he had just spent two weeks in St. Barts.

And who would that be? Mike Tyson.

I blinked a few times, before my brain supplied the necessary explanation: Florida.

On January 3, DeSantis was sworn in as governor for a second time, on the steps of the capitol in Tallahassee. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., but at 10:20, the public seating area was full, and stragglers had to watch on a giant television screen on South Monroe Street, which had been renamed “Ron DeSantis Way” for the occasion. (Other elected officials were assigned smaller side streets in their honor.) Again, I felt inescapably British: We wouldn’t let our politicians get carried away like this.

In the press pen, an enthusiastic livestreamer broadcast his hope that Pfizer, Moderna, and the media would be held accountable for their crimes, then emitted an audible “Ooh” of appreciation when Casey DeSantis stepped out in a mint-green caped dress, with elbow-length white gloves. Her husband took a seat on the dais, splay-legged, his hands disconcertingly locked into a diamond in front of his crotch.

This is what it looks like to become the Chosen One. The former Fox host Glenn Beck had lent DeSantis his rare Bible for the swearing-in. The podcaster Dave Rubin, previously torn between the Florida governor and Trump, tweeted a photograph from the bleachers—not the VIP section, I noted—and later produced a YouTube video praising the “one line in DeSantis’ speech that made the crowd go nuts.” (I had been led to believe that Floridians going nuts would involve some combination of gasoline, swimming trunks, guns, pythons, golf carts, alcohol, and an unexplained fatality. Here, they just stood and clapped.) The donors and the party hierarchy were ready to move on from Donald Trump; so, it seemed, were the partisan media.

The speech drew on the dark Bannonite energy of the right-wing online ecosystem, name-checking “entrenched bureaucrats in D.C., jet-setters in Davos, and corporations wielding public power” and breezing through the obligatory geographic shout-outs, “from the Space Coast to the Sun Coast,” to Daytona, Hialeah, and the rest. “Freedom lives here, in our great Sunshine State of Florida!”

The rest of the 16-minute speech was a tour through the greatest hits of his campaign, followed by the predictable raising of his eyes to the horizon of greater ambitions. DeSantis wanted to offer a Florida Blueprint to the rest of America; this was a place that was preserving the “sacred fire of liberty” that had burned in Independence Hall, at Gettysburg, on the D-Day beaches of Normandy, and that had inspired a president to stand in Berlin and declare, “Tear down this wall.” Yes, the speech said, I may be currently in charge of highway maintenance and appointments to the board of chiropractic medicine, but I have so much more to give.

The central question about DeSantis is this: Is he a corporate tax-cutter or a conspiratorial frother? Is he closer to Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Greene? The great DeSantis innovation has been to realize how much cover calculated outrage provides for rewarding cronies—and that the more you preach “freedom,” the more you can get away with authoritarianism.

Although the Sunshine State forged DeSantis, he’s not a true Florida Man. Some 400 miles away from Tallahassee, at Mar-a-Lago, you could get the full sugar rush of Trump, a born performer who finds his causes by sniffing the wind, then road-tests potential lines on Truth Social and live audiences, feeling the crackle of a palpable hit. DeSantis offers a synthetic, lab-grown alternative. He’s Sweet’N Low.

During the inauguration, the Pledge of Allegiance was read by Felix Rodríguez, a paramilitary CIA officer during the Bay of Pigs incident and a recent winner of the governor’s Medal of Freedom. The 81-year-old stumbled over the words, and I realized instantly what a natural politician—Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan—would have done: walk over, take Rodríguez’s arm, and create a viral moment of human connection. DeSantis stood rigid and stern. Given a 15-hour run-up and a focus group, he might have gamed out the advantages of a small, public act of kindness. But he couldn’t get there on his own.

Nothing is more damning of the modern Republican Party than the fact that DeSantis needs to flaunt his authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and casual cruelty to court its base. Even then, the routine falls flat. DeSantis lacks the weirdness, effervescence, and recklessness that makes his home state so compelling. A true Florida Man does not master bureaucracy and use his powers of patronage to reshape institutions in his image. A true Florida Man does not make the trains run on time. A true Florida Man tries to soup up his boat with a nitro exhaust and accidentally burns down the illegal tiki bar he built in his backyard. Some are born Florida Men, some achieve Florida Manhood, and some have Florida Manhood thrust upon them by the demands of right-wing politics.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Magic Kingdom of Ron DeSantis.”

The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.

“I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”

It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.

[Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots]

Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.

According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.

But he isn’t the only one.

Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.

The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.

“I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.

At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.

“Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”

It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)

It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.

“A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”

The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.

“He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”

[Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement]

Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.

“Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”

Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.

Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.

There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.

In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.

There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]

Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.

“So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”

She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”

This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.

DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.

“He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.

Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.

Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.

Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?

“It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”

[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”

In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.

Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.

Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

“The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.

Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.

Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.

“He fights,” Byrd replied.

Within days of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's memorial service in late September 2020, boxes of her files and other office possessions were moved down to a dark, windowless theater on the Supreme Court's ground floor, where -- before the ongoing pandemic -- tourists could watch a film about court operations.

By its own maneuvering, the modern Supreme Court has made itself the most powerful branch of government. Superior to Congress. Superior to the president. Superior to the states. Superior to precedent, procedure, and norms. In effect, superior to the people.

Most talked about in this regard, of course, is the Court’s ending of long-established reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the assertion of extreme power extends well beyond the issue of abortion.

For example, in a case called TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the conservative majority in 2021 narrowed Congress’s Article I power to give consumers the right to sue over data deliberately mishandled by credit-reporting agencies, reasoning that the legislature can only recognize theories of harm analogous to ones that existed as a matter of “American history and tradition.” And this year, the Court is considering a handful of lawsuits by states challenging the exercise of discretion by the executive branch on the theory that federal policy affects state budgets, which could effectively enable states—and thus the Court—to function as the ultimate overseers of federal policy. One of those, Haaland v. Brackeen, is poised to possibly upend roughly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent that recognizes American Indian tribes as political sovereigns, as well as Congress’s plenary power over American Indian affairs. The outcome of the case, which involves a decades-old federal statute that sets child-welfare standards for American Indian children, could put hundreds of U.S. tribal treaties at risk as well.

[Rebecca Nagle: The Supreme Court case that could break Native American sovereignty]

The mere fact that the Court agreed to consider these and other extraordinary claims this term exposes the right-wing majority’s appetite for asserting massive power under the auspices of judicial review.

In a November essay for the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law School professor Mark A. Lemley describes this Court as an “imperial” one that has embarked on “a radical restructuring of American law across a range of fields and disciplines.” The means run along two lines: substantive changes to the Constitution made under the guise of interpretation, and procedural power grabs executed despite traditions of deference. This has pushed our constitutional system dangerously off balance, with little opportunity for correction.

Ironically, the danger comes from the “conservative” wing of the Court, born in part out of a purported rejection of “activist” court decisions, which it criticizes as policy making—territory that belongs to the elected branches of government. All six of the purportedly conservative justices—Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—have professed a commitment to textualism and originalism, methods of constitutional interpretation that theoretically should constrain judges’ discretion to the “plain” language of the text, with occasional reference to historical understandings of the Framers’ contemporaneous intent. Many folks blithely assume that the right-wing justices are more restrained than their progressive counterparts as a result. The precise opposite is the case.

Neither textualism nor originalism can possibly answer every thorny question about the ambiguous language that fills the relatively terse, 236-year-old constitutional text. Judges judge, after all—meaning they exercise discretion, often subjectively. For example, in both Dobbs and the controversial Second Amendment decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which permanently clipped the power of states to regulate public safety with regard to guns, Justices Alito and Thomas in their respective majority opinions picked and chose snippets of history that favored one outcome while rejecting others, and offered no guiding principle for deciding which “originalist” evidence is worthy of deference and which is not. Given this intellectual dissonance, the most logical conclusion is that these justices’ claimed adherence to a superior judicial philosophy is merely a smoke screen for something else: ideology. Whatever conservative ethos of restraint there once was has therefore vanished.

What will constrain this Court? Not its constitutional philosophy, and not respect for precedent either. The decision in Dobbs was stunning not just because it gutted a constitutional right many counted on. It was also a snub to the vitality of judicial precedent itself, which has long operated as a check on the power of the Supreme Court.

What about states? No, their power won’t constrain the Court either, despite the traditional conservative concern for states’ rights. To be sure, in Dobbs, the Court gave state legislatures the power to regulate abortion, but in Bruen, the same Court struck down a more-than-100-year-old New York State handgun-licensing law that regulated the carrying of concealed weapons in public. Dobbs enhanced state legislatures’ control over abortion. Bruen took it away over guns and public safety.

Conservatives’ traditional respect for the relative power of the presidency is faring no better. Under President George W. Bush, a predominant theme of legal conservatism was the “unitary executive theory,” which fastened unbridled power in the White House during times of war. At the Department of Justice, John Yoo famously wrote the “torture memos” that green-lit military interrogations, use of force, rendition, and intelligence gathering unconstrained by domestic or international law—on the rationale that the Constitution assigns all executive power to the president.

The current Supreme Court has taken a substantially different approach. To be sure, in Trump v. Hawaii, it upheld President Donald Trump’s power to restrict entry of foreign nationals from certain countries, even in the face of possible First Amendment violations, as a “fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” But this term, under the same Immigration and Nationality Act, the Court is considering a challenge brought by the states of Texas and Louisiana to the Biden administration’s guidelines that set forth priorities for use by immigration officers in determining which noncitizens to apprehend and remove. If the Court uses this case to dilute the president’s discretionary law-enforcement power over immigration, which, as the Justice Department argues, is “deep-rooted” in the separation of powers, it could turn federal judges into “virtually continuing monitors of the wisdom and soundness of Executive action.”

Meanwhile, the Court has undertaken an assault on the power of executive-branch agencies to enact regulations—and on Congress’s power to empower agencies in the first place. Since its 1984 landmark decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Court has deferred to agency regulations so long as those regulations comport with the authority given by Congress. Last term, the Court blew a hole in what’s known as “Chevron deference” and replaced it with an amorphous “major-questions doctrine,” which essentially gives the justices unfettered discretion to select which handoffs of legislative power to agencies it doesn’t like. If it sees a “major” question—as it did with climate-change policy in a case called West Virginia v. EPA—it will no longer tolerate congressional delegations of rule-making authority to agencies unless the delegation is sufficiently precise. But that’s a “know it when we see it” requirement that neither Congress nor agencies have any way of predicting in advance of a legislative or regulatory undertaking.

[Liza Heinzerling: The Supreme Court is making America ungovernable]

The Court has also usurped Congress’s Article I power to protect ballot access, unabashedly legislating from the bench in a case called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. There, a 6–3 majority added a multifactor test for plaintiffs seeking to challenge voting restrictions under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—even though Congress saw fit to broadly forbid any voting law that “results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race, such as when elections are “not equally open to participation” by all. Unconstrained by the plain language of that law, the Court added hurdles to Section 2 that it apparently perceived as missing—despite a textual lack of constitutional authority to do so.

The justices’ usurpation has extended to their Article III colleagues on the lower federal bench. The Constitution references only the Supreme Court but empowers Congress to create the lower federal courts, which it did almost immediately after ratification with the first Judiciary Act of 1789. Congress also defines the scope of the judiciary’s power to hear categories of cases, which with rare exceptions are initiated in the lowest federal courts. Those courts’ decisions go to appellate courts for review. A select few of those decisions are then accepted for final review by the high Court.

The beauty of this hierarchy is that issues develop and percolate over time, nuances are hashed out, and different parties weigh in. By the time the Supreme Court accepts a case on a writ of certiorari, there is already a rich factual and legal backdrop that maximizes the potential for a transparent outcome of high quality. And the deliberative process does not end there. Over a period of months, the Court accepts lengthy briefing by multiple parties, including amici curiae, whose diverse perspectives ensure a thorough airing of matters of enormous significance to the regular citizenry. It then holds oral argument to flesh out any concerns.

Not only has the modern Court bypassed its own full briefing and argument at an unprecedented pace, issuing more “emergency” orders—which are short and devoid of meaningful explanation—than it has regular opinions, but in some instances, it has skipped the intermediate appellate courts altogether. The trouble is, many of its quick-and-dirty rulings have had enormous substantive implications. It refused to stay Texas’s six-week abortion ban—even though Roe protected abortion access until viability at about 24 weeks’ gestation—on an emergency application. It struck down New York’s occupancy restrictions for religious services and blocked Biden’s eviction moratorium—both on emergency applications during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. It reinstated for the 2022 midterms an Alabama electoral map that a lower court has said was likely illegal on an emergency application. And it used an emergency order to restore a Trump-era policy that made it harder for states to block projects that could pollute waterways, prompting Justice Elena Kagan to complain that “the Court’s emergency docket [is] not for emergencies at all,” instead “becom[ing] only another place for merits determinations—except made without full briefing and argument.”

The Constitution’s fluid nature means all this power must go somewhere—and it’s going straight back to the Court itself. The collective result of these maneuvers is that the Court now has more discretion to say with constitutional permanence what national policy is, how future policy gets made, and who decides what’s in and what’s out. And the justices keep choosing themselves.

This is not how it is supposed to work. A too-powerful, unaccountable Court is a threat to the entire system. Short of a constitutional amendment retracting their life tenure, or a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate willing to do controversial things such as restricting the Court’s jurisdiction or expanding the number of justices, there’s nothing the voting public can really do about this political power grab and its lasting impact on the lives of millions. As Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote for the Court in 1849, “If the judicial power extends so far, the guarantee contained in the Constitution of the United States is a guarantee of anarchy, and not of order.”

In one of the first major legal tests of laws cracking down on abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a Texas man filed a lawsuit against three women claiming they illegally assisted his ex-wife in her abortion.

President Joe Biden is following a strategy of asymmetrical warfare as the 2024 presidential race takes shape.

Through the early maneuvering, the leading Republican candidates, particularly former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are trying to ignite a procession of culture-war firefights against what DeSantis calls “the woke mind virus.”

With the exception of abortion rights, Biden, by contrast, is working to downplay or defuse almost all cultural issues. Instead Biden is targeting his communication with the public almost exclusively on delivering tangible economic benefits to working-class families, such as lower costs for insulin, the protection of Social Security and Medicare, and the creation of more manufacturing jobs.

[Read: Biden’s blue-collar bet]

While the leading Republican presidential contenders are effectively asking voters “Who shares your values?” or, in the harshest versions, “Who shares your resentments?,” Biden wants voters to ask  “Who is on your side?”

The distinction is not absolute. Trump, DeSantis, and the other Republicans circling the 2024 race argue that Biden’s spending programs have triggered inflation, and insist that lower taxes, budget cuts, and more domestic energy production would spur more growth. And in addition to their unwavering defense of abortion rights, Biden and his aides have also occasionally criticized some of the other Republican cultural initiatives, such as DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation in early grades.

But the difference in emphasis is real, and the contrast illuminates the core of Biden’s vision about how to sustain a national majority for Democrats. He’s betting that the non-college-educated workers, especially those who are white, who constitute the principal audience for the Republican cultural offensive will prove less receptive to those divisive messages if they feel more economically secure.

“We need to reforge that identity as the party that gives a damn about people who feel forgotten, who have really tough lives right now,” says the Democratic strategist Mike Lux, who recently released a study of political attitudes in mostly blue-collar, midsize “factory towns” across the Midwest. “That’s the central mission. And that’s why I think Biden is right to be focusing on those economic issues first.”

But other Democrats worry that Biden’s economy-first approach risks allowing Republicans such as DeSantis to define themselves as championing parents while advancing an agenda that civil-rights advocates believe promotes exclusion and bigotry. They also fear that Biden’s reluctance to engage more directly with Republicans over the rollback of rights raging through red states risks dispiriting the core Democratic constituencies, including Black Americans and the LGBTQ community, that face the most direct consequences from restrictions on how teachers and professors can talk about race or bans on gender-affirming care for minors. These Democrats have grown even more uneasy as Biden lately has moved toward Republican positions on immigration (with new restrictions on asylum seekers) and crime (by indicating that he would not block congressional efforts to reverse a reform-oriented overhaul of Washington, D.C.’s criminal code.)

“Not engaging in culture wars does not mean that Democrats win: It means that we forfeit,” says Terrance Woodbury, chief executive officer and founding partner of HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young and minority voters. The group’s polling, Woodbury told me, shows that “not only do Democratic voters expect Democratic leaders to do more to advance social and racial justice” but that “they will punish Democrats that do not.”

My conversations with Democrats familiar with White House thinking, however, suggest that Biden and those around him don’t share that perspective. In that inner circle, I’m told, the dominant view is that the best way to respond to the culture-war onslaught from Republicans is to engage with it as little as possible. Those around Biden do not believe that the positions Republicans are adopting on questions such as classroom censorship, book bans, LGBTQ rights, and allowing people to carry firearms without a permit, much less restricting or banning abortion, will prove popular with voters beyond the core conservative states.

More fundamentally, Biden’s circle believes that voters don’t want to be subjected to fights about such polarizing cultural issues and would prefer that elected officials focus more on daily economic concerns such as inflation, jobs, and health care. Those around Biden largely share the view expressed by the Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who studied public attitudes about key GOP educational proposals in two national surveys last year. “People don’t really want either side of these culture wars to win; they want to just stop having these culture wars,” Molyneux told me. “They really see a lot of this as a diversion.” A national survey released this week by Navigator, a Democratic polling consortium, supports Molyneux’s point: When asked to identify their top priorities in education, far more voters cited reducing gun violence and ensuring that kids learn skills that will help them succeed than picked “preventing them from being exposed to woke ideas about race and gender.”

[Shadi Hamid: The forever culture wars]

Biden hasn’t completely sidestepped the culture wars. After mostly avoiding the issue earlier in his presidency, he’s been relentless in his defense of abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. (Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris commemorated what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe with a speech in Tallahassee, Florida, where she targeted DeSantis’s signing of legislation banning abortion there after 15 weeks.) When DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, the White House also criticized him. And most recently in Selma, Alabama, Biden has also issued tough criticisms of the red-state laws erecting new hurdles to voting.

Yet the Biden administration, and especially the president himself, have mostly kept their distance from the surging tide of bills advancing in Florida and other red states rolling back a broad range of civil rights and liberties. Tellingly, when Biden traveled to Florida last month, it was not to condemn DeSantis’s agenda of restrictions on classroom teachers or transgender minors, but to defend Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act; the only time he mentioned DeSantis by name was to criticize him for refusing to expand eligibility for Medicaid health coverage under the ACA.

Since the midterm election, Biden has centered his public appearances on cutting ribbons for infrastructure projects and new clean-energy or semiconductor plants funded by the troika of massive public-investment bills he signed during his first two years; defending Social Security and Medicare; highlighting lower drug prices from the legislation he passed allowing Medicare to bargain for better deals with pharmaceutical companies; and combatting “junk fees” from airlines, hotels, and other companies. In his State of the Union address last month, Biden spoke at length about those economic plans and what he calls his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” before he mentioned any social issues, such as police reform, gun control, and abortion. The budget Biden will release today advances these themes by proposing to extend the solvency of Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent.

The emphasis was very different in marquee appearances last weekend from Trump and DeSantis. Trump, in his long monologue on Saturday at CPAC, accused Biden of exacerbating inflation and promised to pursue an all-out trade war with China. But those comments came deep into a nearly two-hour speech in which Trump blurred the boundary between calling on his supporters to engage in a culture war and an actual civil war, when he promised to be their “retribution” against elites and “woke tyranny.”

When DeSantis spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, northwest of Los Angeles, last Sunday, he delivered more of an economic message, attributing Florida’s robust population growth in part to its low taxes and low spending. But he drew a much more passionate reaction from his audience later when he denounced the “woke mind virus,” recounted his stand during the coronavirus pandemic against “the biomedical security state,” and pledged to “empower parents” against the educational establishment. DeSantis received his only standing ovation when he declared that schools “should not be teaching a second grader that they can choose their gender.”

To some extent, the heavy reliance by Trump and DeSantis on these cultural confrontations reflects their belief that GOP primary voters are much more energized now by social rather than economic issues. Yet it also represents the widespread GOP belief that distaste for liberal positions on cultural issues remains an insuperable barrier for Democrats with most working-class voters, including a growing number of Latino men. “Blue-collar voters don’t separate cultural concerns from economic fears,” the GOP strategist Brad Todd, a co-author of The Great Revolt, told me in an email. “They think big global companies are in cahoots with the left on culture, and they don’t put pocketbook concerns ahead of way-of-life concerns.”

Todd thinks Biden’s attempt to define himself mostly around economic rather than cultural commitments represents his desire “to jump in a time machine and go back to the Democratic Party of the ’80s.” Indeed, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, came of age politically in an era when Republicans repeatedly used racially infused “wedge issues” to pry away working-class white voters who had mostly supported Democrats on economic grounds over the previous generation. Some Democrats see Biden’s recent moves to adopt more right-leaning policies on immigration and crime as a resurgence of that era’s widespread Democratic belief that the party needed to neutralize cultural issues, typically by conceding ground to conservative positions.

Like others I spoke with, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, believes that focusing primarily on economic issues makes sense for Biden now, but that he will eventually be forced to address the GOP’s cultural arguments more directly. Sublimating those issues, she argues, isn’t sustainable, because it is “hurting the very people” Democrats now rely on to win and because the Republican cultural arguments, left unaddressed, could prove very persuasive to not only working-class white voters but also Hispanic and even Black men. Ultimately, Fernandez said, Biden and other Democrats must link the two fronts by convincing working-class voters that Republicans are picking cultural fights to distract them from an economic agenda that mostly benefits the rich. “We have to put to bed this idea [that] we can have an economic message that doesn’t address the racial grievance and fear of change that is at the center of all this culture-war stuff,” argued Fernandez, whose group funds candidates and organizations focused on building a multiracial electoral coalition.

[Franklin Foer: What Joe Biden knows about America]

The debate among Democrats ultimately comes down to whether Biden is skillfully controlling the electoral battlefield or trying to resurrect a coalition that no longer exists (centered on working-class families) at the expense of dividing or demoralizing the coalition the party actually relies on today (revolving around young people, college-educated white voters, and racial minority voters). Several Democratic strategists told me that one obvious challenge with Biden’s trying to define the election around the question of which party can deliver the best economic results for working-class families is that polls throughout his presidency have found that more Americans would pick the GOP. “People still think that Trump economics was better for them than Biden or Obama economics,” Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters in 2020, told me.

To Lake, that’s an argument for Biden’s strategy of stressing kitchen-table concerns, because she believes the party cannot win unless it narrows the GOP advantage on the economy. But other Democrats believe today’s party is less likely to persuade a national majority that it is  better than Republicans for their finances than it is to convince them that the Trump-era GOP constitutes a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. Biden’s response to the Republican initiatives censoring teachers, rolling back abortion access, and threatening LGBTQ rights “simply cannot be ‘more jobs,’” Woodbury said. “If Democrats insist on fighting exclusively on economic terms, every poll in America shows they will lose.”

Immediately following the leak of its draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health last spring, the Supreme Court in a press release described the incident as an “egregious” breach of trust. Chief Justice John Roberts directed the marshal of the Supreme Court to investigate the leak. That investigation resulted in a report, issued earlier this year, that did not uncover the source of the leak.

This result did not surprise me. As the inspector general of the Department of Justice and acting inspector general of the Department of Defense for many years, I was often asked to conduct leak investigations. They are notoriously difficult to resolve.

[Glenn Fine: The most important public servants you’ve never heard of]

Not all leaks are as egregious as this one. Many do not warrant a full investigation or the upheaval such an investigation can cause to an organization, particularly given that they are rarely successful. But this one clearly did, because the leak damaged the integrity of the Court and its decision-making process, which the Court recognized.

Unfortunately, the leak investigation it conducted demonstrates how not to conduct a leak investigation. It also illustrates, again, the need for internal oversight at the Court, which should have a better permanent capacity to police itself by more credibly investigating alleged misconduct and by identifying faulty procedures proactively.

The first problem in the Court’s leak investigation was whom the Court asked to conduct it. The marshal of the Court, Gail A. Curley, is responsible for overseeing the Supreme Court building’s operations, providing security for the justices and the building, disbursing payrolls, and managing the courtroom, including calling it to order. Curley is a former Army lawyer who does not have experience or expertise in conducting this type of complex investigation.  

Even more problematic, the marshal did not have the necessary independence to conduct the investigation. In essence, she was asked to investigate her bosses, the justices, who are in the universe of potential leakers. They supervise her and can fire her. She was conflicted from the start. That is no reflection on Curley or her integrity. Any marshal would have been placed in the same position.

The second problem was how the investigation was conducted. According to the report itself, the probe focused on Court personnel—law clerks and permanent employees, who were intensively interrogated. They were required to sign notarized affidavits. Their personal cellphones were scrutinized. They were questioned as to whether they had talked about Court decisions with anyone, including their spouses, in the Dobbs case or other cases, prior to public release. According to the report, follow-up was pursued on leads relating to the clerks and employees.  

The investigation did not treat the justices in the same way. When the report was issued, whether they had even been interviewed was not clear. It makes no mention of investigating the justices at all.   

That omission prompted an outpouring of questions and criticism. In response, a day after the report was issued, Curley released a short statement declaring that she had spoken “with each of the Justices, some on multiple occasions.” She said that the justices had “actively cooperated in this iterative process, asking questions and answering mine.” She stated that she had followed up on all credible leads and that none had implicated the justices, so she did not think it necessary to ask them to sign sworn affidavits.  

This double standard of investigation was baffling. What was this “iterative” process, with the justices “asking questions and answering mine”? That’s not how investigators normally conduct interviews. Why weren’t the justices required to sign affidavits like the clerks and Court employees were? Were the justices’ phones scrutinized like the clerks’ phones? Were the justices also questioned about whether they had discussed cases with their spouses or whether their spouses had access to the Dobbs draft opinion? Did the justices take the draft opinion home to work on, which may have given family members access to it? What were the credible leads that Curley alluded to in her cryptic statement?

Neither the report nor Curley’s statement gave any reason for this double standard. It was an Alice in Wonderland investigation: The conclusion seemed to come first—let’s focus on the clerks and employees, not the justices, as the likely source of the leak—rather than result from a consistent investigation focusing on all potential leakers.

The third problem was that the investigation’s report was incomplete. A report is credible when it comprehensively explains the investigative process, the facts found, and the investigator’s analysis based on those facts. Others may disagree with the analysis, but the investigation and the evidence should at least be fully described. This report did not do that. It left many questions unanswered, such as the ones above about how the justices were treated, who the “seasoned attorneys and trained federal investigators with substantial experience” assisting Curley in the probe were, and whether the justices had input into how the investigation was conducted.

In addition, the Court’s statement accompanying the report contains a troubling assertion: “The leak was no mere misguided attempt at protest. It was a grave assault on the judicial process.” This implies that the leaker was believed to be someone “protesting” the substance of the draft Dobbs opinion, presumably because the leaker opposed a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

That is one plausible theory about who leaked the opinion. Another plausible one is quite different: that the draft opinion was leaked to bolster support for it, and to make any wavering justices in the majority feel pressure to stick with their tentative decision to overturn Roe.

[Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century]

The report itself does not provide sufficient evidence to conclude which theory is more likely. But the comment suggesting that the opinion had been leaked in “protest” undermines confidence that the investigation was unbiased.

Finally, in an attempt to buttress the report’s credibility, Chief Justice Roberts asked Michael Chertoff, a former U.S. attorney, judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, assistant attorney general, and secretary of Homeland Security, to opine on the thoroughness of the investigation. Chertoff wrote in a statement accompanying the report that Curley and her team had conducted a thorough inquiry and that he could not identify any additional useful investigative measures. Yet this testimonial makes the report less rather than more persuasive, as it ignores the report’s weaknesses and the double standard in how the investigation was conducted.

Subsequently, CNN reported that Chertoff and the Court have long-standing financial ties; Chertoff received nearly $1 million in contracts to provide security assessments for the justices. Someone with this sort of connection to the Court may have a financial incentive to maintain good relations with it, and is thus not in the best position to provide an unbiased opinion about the thoroughness of its internal investigation. This creates a conflict, or at the very least the appearance of one.

To its credit, the report identified many flawed Court procedures that had contributed both to the leak and to the difficulty in investigating it. These include the Court’s inability to track who had access to Court documents, its lack of written policies for safeguarding sensitive documents, and its lax and outdated information-security policies.

However, the existence of these widespread deficiencies again demonstrates the need for dedicated, experienced internal oversight at the Court, such as an inspector general for the judiciary, whose job is to help identify problems before they contribute to egregious breaches.

No one likes oversight, but every institution needs it, especially insular institutions such as the Court, which operates without much transparency. The Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and other executive-branch agencies initially resisted oversight by an inspector general. They argued that it could undermine their independence, second-guess their decisions, or harm their operations. None of that proved true. Inspectors general were established in each agency, and although not perfect or a solution to every problem, their oversight helped make the agencies more accountable, transparent, and able to address allegations of misconduct.

The value of such oversight should not be a partisan issue. I have worked with strong leaders in the administrations of each party who recognized its benefits. For example, Attorney General John Ashcroft supported independent oversight, even when it resulted in criticism of his actions, because he said it helped in the effort to continuously improve agency operations. Similarly, Secretary of Defense James Mattis encouraged the inspector general’s office to bring problems to his attention, which he said was crucial to correcting deficiencies in agency operations. Such oversight might be painful in the short run, but it makes the agency healthier in the long run.

The same is true at the Supreme Court. Dedicated, permanent oversight could examine Court processes to help prevent problems before they occur, and more credibly investigate misconduct when it happens. Unfortunately, the flawed and incomplete leak investigation by the Court undermined, rather than strengthened, trust in the Court and in its ability to police itself.  

Female tammar wallabies are rarely, if ever, truly alone. Their pregnancies last almost exactly 12 months—and within hours of giving birth, most of the marsupials can be found mating again, conceiving another embryo that they may end up carrying for the next year, save for the single day on which they labor, deliver, and couple up once more.

Bizarrely, most of the embryo’s long stint in utero is spent barely doing anything at all. Once it reaches an 80-cell state, the approximate width of two strands of hair, it arrests its growth and, for 11 months, “just floats,” says Jane Fenelon, a reproductive biologist at the University of Melbourne. It’s a baby in developmental dormancy, a pregnancy that its mother has put on pause.

For most mammals, humans among them, fertilization starts a regimented countdown toward birth. But at least 130 species have found ways to temporarily freeze their gestational clock and delay the most grueling parts of gestation, birth, and lactation until “an optimal time,” says Nucharin Songsasen, a reproductive biologist at the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute. These animals can sync up their offspring’s arrival with the seasons that will provide the most food; they can conserve their own energy and avoid overspending on ill-timed births. They can even keep an embryo on hold in case an already born offspring dies, revving up a new pregnancy without having to mate again. The bodies of these mothers-to-be effectively turn gestation on and off—in a way, granting themselves a modicum of control over not just how much to invest in kids, but when.

[Read: Pregnancy is a war; birth is a cease-fire]

Scientists still don’t know exactly how this phenomenon, called embryonic diapause, works, how common it is, or when or how many times it evolved—but they’re trying to find out. Fitting together those pieces wouldn’t just mean solving one of the biggest puzzles in reproduction. It could change the way that researchers approach species conservation; it could aid the development of new assisted reproductive technology in humans. It may even someday revolutionize the treatment of cancer—a disease that can thwart powerful therapies by entering a stasis of its own.

The prime directive of any mammalian embryo is, simply, to grow. In just days, weeks, or months, one cell must become billions or trillions, a frenetic developmental race that is “really a force of nature,” says Hannele Ruohola-Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington. “It’s internally controlled, that the embryo will develop, will continue, doesn’t stop.”

At least, that’s usually how it goes. In the mid-1800s, hunters in Europe discovered that female roe deer spotted mating in the summer didn’t have visible embryos in their abdomens until December—a baffling delay. One researcher chalked it up to stunted development; another figured that the deer’s summer trysts had been some sort of reproductive feint, and the real mating was happening secretly in the fall.

Both of those notions were wrong. Roe deer, the scientific community eventually confirmed, were conceiving in summer. But just a couple of days after fertilization, their embryos would slow their growth to a near halt for four or five months, punting birth to the next spring. Evolutionarily, the delay did make sense for all parties involved: Does could mate during the rut, but wouldn’t have to find the calories needed for lactation until food became abundant again; meanwhile, the offspring in the abdomen could wait in an early, low-maintenance state until the world turned hospitable once more.

[Read: Can we talk about how weird baby mammals are?]

The discovery shocked scientists, and turned out to be not at all unique. In the decades that followed, a whole menagerie of mammals—among them, badgers, otters, armadillos, bats, and seals—were found to reproduce with similar delays. The lengths, cues, and even frequency of pauses differ so much among species that the trait likely evolved independently more than once, says Jeeyeon Cha, a reproductive biologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Some diapauses, such as those of mice, last mere days and are triggered only if the mother is lactating to feed offspring that have already been born; others, such as those of the American mink, stretch on for weeks, and are cued by the seasonal ebb and flow of daylight. Female black bears, which ovulate repeatedly during breeding season, use diapause to mate with several males—then deliver cubs that share a birthday, but not a dad. And tammar wallabies use both suckling and sunlight to tune their pregnancy dials, coordinating their schedules so that nearly all births occur in late January. The point is for joeys to remain in the pouch for the next eight or nine months, until the Southern Hemisphere’s spring, says Marilyn Renfree, a reproductive biologist at the University of Melbourne: When researchers have chauffeured the marsupials across the equator, the birthing schedules flip.

Even after a century, mammalian diapause feels “counterintuitive” to the ways in which scientists conceive of cellular growth, says Hao Zhu, a cancer biologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Cells should no more be able to arrest their metabolism and growth than a human can stop breathing or digesting and still expect to survive. Researchers don’t have a solid sense of how embryos endure the ordeal for so long. “Normally, if you stop cells growing, they die,” Fenelon told me. For now, it seems as though paused embryos are able to hover on the very edge of life—synthesizing only a small number of proteins and running their metabolic motors on low. They ramp down their oxygen use, and pivot from digesting sugars to breaking down their internal stores of fat. “It’s similar to fasting,” says Aydan Bulut-Karslioglu, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.

[Read: It’s really hard to know when a zoo animal is pregnant]

At least some embryos can maintain their quiescence for a bafflingly long time: Decades ago, a group of researchers was able to induce a pregnant tammar wallaby into embryonic diapause for more than two years—and when they lifted the hold, her embryo was still able to awaken and come to full term. Even so, Bulut-Karslioglu told me, a theoretical limit for every species must exist. Eventually, scientists have found, the embryos will start to cannibalize their own innards, and may ultimately begin to run out of fuel. And the longer they remain in diapause, she told me, the longer it seems to take the cells to rouse.

Researchers are getting closer to re-creating diapause with embryos in a laboratory dish. But although some scientists, including Bulut-Karslioglu, have come close to perfect mimicry (using mouse embryos), “we are probably missing something,” she told me. The mystery ingredient won’t be simple. For years, researchers hoped that there would be a master chemical or genetic switch that “turned the embryo off,” Fenelon told me. “That doesn’t seem to be the case.” Rather, diapause seems to involve an intermittent dialogue, with the uterus rebuffing the embryo’s attempts to implant until the time is right. For all its quirks, though, the system seems powerful enough to transcend evolutionary barriers: When researchers transplant embryos from sheep (which have standard, unpauseable pregnancies) into the uteruses of mice, the sheep embryos will enter stasis—and then safely resume their development upon returning to a species-appropriate womb.

Scientists still aren’t sure of the signals that thrust certain species into or out of diapause. And answering those questions is only getting more urgent as climate change continues to warp the seasons, says Helen Bateman-Jackson, a wildlife biologist at the Toronto Zoo. Weddell seals, for example, already have to mate or give birth in very narrow windows of time for their pups to survive—a schedule they manage via a brief pregnancy pause, Michelle Shero, a reproductive biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me. If rising temperatures or melting ice disrupt the signals that control that halt, their offspring may be more likely to die.

If humans could re-create diapause in labs, scientists could help endangered zoo animals reproduce; hopeful human parents could turn to diapause as an alternative to freezing embryos. Someday, doctors might be able to help their patients better time childbirth to certain life events, or to meet the medical needs of a parent or fetus. Or perhaps diapause-inspired technologies could eventually yield a twist on birth control, Renfree told me, allowing people to effectively halt the reproductive cycle at essentially no cost—like “the best contraceptive you can imagine.”

Inhibiting diapause could also take life away from cells that are causing harm. Certain cancer patients repeatedly find their disease coming back, despite multiple rounds of harsh treatments such as chemotherapy. Researchers used to think that a genetically distinct population of tumor cells were somehow surviving the cull—a problem that could potentially be solved with a different flavor of drug. But in recent years, they have realized that cancer cells may instead be escaping the blitz by pausing their own growth—an eerie parallel to the stasis embryos enter when their mother’s body experiences outside stress. It works because “chemotherapy targets dividing cells,” says Catherine O’Brien, a cancer biologist at the University of Toronto. If cancer cells manage to pause that process, they’ll squeak right on by.

Jinsong Liu, a cancer biologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center who’s been studying the connection between embryonic diapause and cancer diapause for years, told me that embryos and tumors have a lot in common: Both just desperately want to grow. But those similarities also mean that there could be a way to foil cancer cells’ subterfuge. Researchers could design drugs to block cells from going into stasis, or cook up new therapies that target cells specifically in their paused state. Still other treatments might rewire cells already in dormancy, so that they reactivate as benign entities, rather than tumorous growths ready to invade again. Some of these treatments could be on the market within just a few years—though a clearer sense of how diapause works in both reproductive and cancerous contexts would be key to finagling the therapies just right. Diapause may sometimes delay the genesis of life. But, carefully harnessed, it could someday help postpone the march toward a too-early death.