Donald Trump inspires an uncommon devotion among his most ardent followers, which can obscure a surprising fact about his present political position: Many, if not most, Republicans do not want him to be their party’s next nominee for president. As of today, according to the polling averages of both FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics, Trump has consolidated only half of the Republican primary vote, with the rest split among Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and a handful of other alternatives. The numbers suggest that despite the former president’s best efforts, half of his own party’s voters want to move on. What they can’t agree on is who should displace Trump as their standard-bearer.

If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2016, Trump was repeatedly outpolled by the field of Republican candidates, and hovered around 35 percent on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in February, which he then lost to Senator Ted Cruz. But as the campaign wore on, Trump’s devoted following of a third of GOP primary voters was enough to propel him to victory over a divided group of opponents. He was greatly helped by their tactics—or lack thereof. Instead of attacking Trump as the front-runner, his rivals assailed one another, hoping that Trump would collapse of his own accord and they would inherit his supporters. Rather than consolidate behind a single alternative to Trump, the other contenders fought onward in state after state. This infighting enabled Trump to scoop up the most delegates, even though he never won a state with more than 50 percent of the vote until New York’s primary, on April 19. Soon, Trump’s opponents were out of money and he was the presumptive nominee.

The primary worked out poorly for the GOP establishment and its professional politicians, who found themselves on the losing end of a hostile takeover by an outsider. Yet in the run-up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party looks set to repeat this pattern, with Trump cruising to renomination amid a splintered field. The question is why.

A week ago, conservatives gathered at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff, a prelude to the presidential campaign. For Trump’s challengers, the event offered the opportunity to introduce themselves to an influential electorate and explain why they should succeed the former president as the Republican nominee. But that is not exactly what happened. “The candidates who bothered to make the trip barely bothered to try to knock the front-runner from his perch,” The New York Times reported. “Their strategy appeared straightforward: Avoid confrontation with the better-known, better-funded front-runners, hope Mr. Trump’s attacks take out—or at least take down—Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is second in most Republican polls, and hope outside forces, namely indictments, take out Mr. Trump.” Indeed, the only candidate who drew any fire at all was DeSantis, who did not attend the gathering, and ended up serving less as an alternative to Trump than as his human shield.

Trump enters the 2024 campaign with an array of new vulnerabilities that could be readily exploited by an ambitious opponent eager to appeal to the Republican primary electorate. You got rolled by Dr. Fauci and locked down the country, then lost to a doddering old man in an election you claimed was stolen but whose heist you proved powerless to prevent, they might say. Challengers like DeSantis might also point to national polls that show the Florida governor outperforming Trump in a matchup with President Joe Biden (who himself once rode an air of electability to the nomination). While you and your handpicked candidates in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania have been losing elections, I’ve been winning them by historic margins in Florida.

[Read: Just call Trump a loser]

So far, none of this has happened. The arguments may be there, but no one of consequence is making them. Instead, history seems poised to repeat, with Trump primed to win renomination against a divided field of opponents who refuse to take him on until it’s too late. This may appear baffling, but there are actually good reasons no challenger has been willing to take the fight to Trump.

To begin with, it’s easy to propose that Trump-skeptical Republicans should unite behind a single theoretical candidate. It’s a lot harder to find an actual candidate who can unite them. Ron DeSantis voters want something different than Nikki Haley voters, who want something different than voters for Senator Tim Scott. Back in 2020, the Democratic Party solved a similar problem by turning to Biden to defeat the surging socialist Bernie Sanders. But Biden was a popular former vice president whom most factions found acceptable, if not ideal. No candidate in today’s Republican Party has Biden’s broad shoulders and innocuous appeal.

Similarly, Biden’s success was made possible by his lock on a core constituency of the Democratic primary electorate: Black voters. He lost badly in the early primary states, but took 49 percent in South Carolina, buoyed by then–House Whip Jim Clyburn’s fulsome endorsement. In the 2024 Republican primary, only one candidate has the demonstrated devotion of a key constituency, and that’s Trump with his base.

This is also why tearing into Trump is such an imposing prospect. While it’s true that there are new lines of attack that might work on today’s Trump, whoever is the first to unleash them will likely bear the brunt of the backlash from his supporters. No candidate wants to be the first into the fray, because turning on Trump may doom their prospects, even if it opens up political space for others.

This is the reason Republican contenders have once again fallen back on the hope that Trump will collapse on his own, and that outside forces—the justice system, the media, even old age—will swoop in and take care of the former president for them. But Trump’s indictments won’t sway Republican primary voters who have already dismissed them, and the mainstream media’s critical coverage won’t persuade GOP loyalists who don’t read or trust it.

The hard truth that Republican challengers have yet to absorb is that if their strategy to beat Trump is to hope that someone else beats Trump for them, they are not serious alternatives to Trump. Likewise, expecting people outside the Republican Party to police the Republican Party is not a strategy; it’s a surrender. The only actors who have any chance of altering the primary’s trajectory are those with credibility in Republican politics, whether they are politicians or popular commentators. There’s no guarantee that taking on Trump will yield a different outcome, but refusing to do so guarantees him a glide path to the nomination.

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In recent years, Americans appear to be getting more and more uncomfortable with intimacy. Why? And is this trend reversible?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The GOP’s unworkable work requirements Why won’t powerful men learn? Just wait until Trump is a chatbot. Disconnected People

When my colleague Faith Hill recently interviewed Michael Hilgers, a therapist with more than 20 years of experience, he painted a worrying picture of intimacy in America: “It’s painful to watch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when Hilgers can sense that clients do want to pursue deep social connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there,” he noted.

One might say that America is in its insecure-attachment era.

Let’s back up a little: Insecure attachment is a term used to describe three of the four basic human “attachment styles” that researchers have identified. The framework has risen in popularity in recent years, appearing alongside astrology signs and Enneagram types as social-media-friendly ways to understand the self. Faith lays out the four styles in her recent article:

People with a secure style feel that they can depend on others and that others can depend on them too. Those with a dismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overly committed to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection. People with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, cling or search for validation. And people with fearful (or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy, too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing them away.

Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed a decline in secure attachment and an increase in the dismissing and fearful styles. These two insecure styles are “associated with lack of trust and self-isolation,” Faith explains. She notes that American distrust in institutions has also been on the rise for years—it’s well known that more and more Americans are feeling skeptical of the government, organized religion, the media, corporations, and police. But recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans are growing more wary not only of “hypothetical, nameless Americans,” but of their own colleagues, neighbors, friends, partners, and parents.

The root causes of America’s trust issues are impossible to diagnose with certainty, but they could well be a reflection of Americans’ worries about societal problems. One psychologist who did research into Americans’ insecure-attachment trend “rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with,” Faith writes: “war in Europe, ChatGPT threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news,” as well as financial precarity. As Faith puts it: “When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships.”

Some researchers argue for other likely suspects, such as smartphone use or the fact that more Americans than ever are living alone. The decline in emotional intimacy is also happening against the backdrop of a decline in physical intimacy. Our senior editor Kate Julian explored this “sex recession,” particularly among young adults, in her 2018 magazine cover story.

A lack of trust is showing up in the workplace as well. In 2021, our contributing writer Jerry Useem reported on studies suggesting that trust among colleagues is declining in the era of remote and hybrid work:

The longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, a recent study of more than 5,400 Finnish workers found, the more their faith in colleagues fell. Ward van Zoonen of Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, began measuring trust among those office workers early in 2020. He asked them: How much did they trust their peers? How much did they trust their supervisors? And how much did they believe that those people trusted them? What he found was unsettling. In March 2020, trust levels were fairly high. By May, they had slipped. By October—about seven months into the pandemic—the employees’ degree of confidence in one another was down substantially.

All in all, as Faith writes, “we can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing further and further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.” The good news is that if humans have the capacity to lose trust in one another, they can also work to build it back up. “The experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful,” Faith concludes:

Hilgers [the therapist] knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues to change—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, he told me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to let people in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.”

As Faith argued in an earlier article, attachment styles are not destiny, despite what the internet might lead you to believe. “Your attachment style is not so much a fixed category you fall into, like an astrology sign, but rather a tendency that can vary among different relationships and, in turn, is continuously shaped by those relationships,” she wrote. “Perhaps most important, you can take steps to change it”—and connect with others better as a result.

Related:

America is in its insecure-attachment era. The trait that “super friends” have in common Today’s News Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it had targeted Ukrainian army reserve units with high-precision missile strikes to prevent them from reaching the front lines. A Utah judge postponed ruling on a statewide abortion-clinic ban to next week, following the failure yesterday of two anti-abortion bills in Nebraska and South Carolina. Former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly appeared before a federal grand jury for more than seven hours to testify in a criminal investigation into alleged efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Dispatches Books Briefing: We need to make room for more voices in philosophy, Kate Cray writes. With a wider canon, enlightenment could come from anywhere. Work in Progress: AI tools are a waste of time, Derek Thompson argues. Many people are simply using them as toys.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Maskot / Getty

A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe

By Frieda Klotz

As Republicans across the U.S. intensify their efforts to legislate against transgender rights, they are finding aid and comfort in an unlikely place: Western Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least five countries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for children and adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.

The about-face by these countries concerns the so-called Dutch protocol, which has for at least a decade been viewed by many clinicians as the gold-standard approach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A cheerful goodbye to the Guardians of the Galaxy Why Hollywood writers may go on strike Nikki Haley’s dilemma is also the Republicans’ problem. Long-haulers are trying to define themselves. Culture Break Graeme Hunter / HBO

Read. “The Renovation,” a new short story from Kenan Orhan about exile from Turkey and longing for a homeland.

Watch. The latest episode of Succession (streaming on HBO Max), which features the creepiest corporate retreat ever.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last year, Faith wrote one of my favorite Atlantic articles in recent memory, about people with a very unique social appetite: the “nocturnals,” or the ultra-introverts who come alive when most people are fast asleep.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was “built entirely with AI imagery.” The content of the ad isn’t especially novel—a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden—but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to create it stands out: It’s a “Daisy” moment for the 2020s.

We should expect more of this kind of thing. The applications of AI to political advertising have not escaped campaigners, who are already “pressure testing” possible uses for the technology. In the 2024 presidential-election campaign, you can bank on the appearance of AI-generated personalized fundraising emails, text messages from chatbots urging you to vote, and maybe even some deepfaked campaign avatars. Future candidates could use chatbots trained on data representing their views and personalities to approximate the act of directly connecting with people. Think of it like a whistle-stop tour with an appearance in every living room. Previous technological revolutions—railroad, radio, television, and the World Wide Web—transformed how candidates connect to their constituents, and we should expect the same from generative AI. This isn’t science fiction: The era of AI chatbots standing in as avatars for real, individual people has already begun, as the journalist Casey Newton made clear in a 2016 feature about a woman who used thousands of text messages to create a chatbot replica of her best friend after he died.  

The key is interaction. A candidate could use tools enabled by large language models, or LLMs—the technology behind apps such as ChatGPT and the art-making DALL-E—to do micro-polling or message testing, and to solicit perspectives and testimonies from their political audience individually and at scale. The candidates could potentially reach any voter who possesses a smartphone or computer, not just the ones with the disposable income and free time to attend a campaign rally. At its best, AI could be a tool to increase the accessibility of political engagement and ease polarization. At its worst, it could propagate misinformation and increase the risk of voter manipulation. Whatever the case, we know political operatives are using these tools. To reckon with their potential now isn’t buying into the hype—it’s preparing for whatever may come next.

On the positive end, and most profoundly, LLMs could help people think through, refine, or discover their own political ideologies. Research has shown that many voters come to their policy positions reflexively, out of a sense of partisan affiliation. The very act of reflecting on these views through discourse can change, and even depolarize, those views. It can be hard to have reflective policy conversations with an informed, even-keeled human discussion partner when we all live within a highly charged political environment; this is a role almost custom-designed for LLM.

[Read: Return of the People Machine]

In U.S. politics, it is a truism that the most valuable resource in a campaign is time. People are busy and distracted. Campaigns have a limited window to convince and activate voters. Money allows a candidate to purchase time: TV commercials, labor from staffers, and fundraising events to raise even more money. LLMs could provide campaigns with what is essentially a printing press for time.

If you were a political operative, which would you rather do: play a short video on a voter’s TV while they are folding laundry in the next room, or exchange essay-length thoughts with a voter on your candidate’s key issues? A staffer knocking on doors might need to canvass 50 homes over two hours to find one voter willing to have a conversation. OpenAI charges pennies to process about 800 words with its latest GPT-4 model, and that cost could fall dramatically as competitive AIs become available. People seem to enjoy interacting with chatbots; OpenAI’s product reportedly has the fastest-growing user base in the history of consumer apps.

Optimistically, one possible result might be that we’ll get less annoyed with the deluge of political ads if their messaging is more usefully tailored to our interests by AI tools. Though the evidence for microtargeting’s effectiveness is mixed at best, some studies show that targeting the right issues to the right people can persuade voters. Expecting more sophisticated, AI-assisted approaches to be more consistently effective is reasonable. And anything that can prevent us from seeing the same 30-second campaign spot 20 times a day seems like a win.

AI can also help humans effectuate their political interests. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, primitive chatbots had a role in donor engagement and voter-registration drives: simple messaging tasks such as helping users pre-fill a voter-registration form or reminding them where their polling place is. If it works, the current generation of much more capable chatbots could supercharge small-dollar solicitations and get-out-the-vote campaigns.

And the interactive capability of chatbots could help voters better understand their choices. An AI chatbot could answer questions from the perspective of a candidate about the details of their policy positions most salient to an individual user, or respond to questions about how a candidate’s stance on a national issue translates to a user’s locale. Political organizations could similarly use them to explain complex policy issues, such as those relating to the climate or health care or … anything, really.

Of course, this could also go badly. In the time-honored tradition of demagogues worldwide, the LLM could inconsistently represent the candidate’s views to appeal to the individual proclivities of each voter.

In fact, the fundamentally obsequious nature of the current generation of large language models results in them acting like demagogues. Current LLMs are known to hallucinate—or go entirely off-script—and produce answers that have no basis in reality. These models do not experience emotion in any way, but some research suggests they have a sophisticated ability to assess the emotion and tone of their human users. Although they weren’t trained for this purpose, ChatGPT and its successor, GPT-4, may already be pretty good at assessing some of their users’ traits—say, the likelihood that the author of a text prompt is depressed. Combined with their persuasive capabilities, that means that they could learn to skillfully manipulate the emotions of their human users.

This is not entirely theoretical. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that interacting with AI has a persuasive effect on human users. A study published in February prompted participants to co-write a statement about the benefits of social-media platforms for society with an AI chatbot configured to have varying views on the subject. When researchers surveyed participants after the co-writing experience, those who interacted with a chatbot that expressed that social media is good or bad were far more likely to express the same view than a control group that didn’t interact with an “opinionated language model.”

For the time being, most Americans say they are resistant to trusting AI in sensitive matters such as health care. The same is probably true of politics. If a neighbor volunteering with a campaign persuades you to vote a particular way on a local ballot initiative, you might feel good about that interaction. If a chatbot does the same thing, would you feel the same way?

To help voters chart their own course in a world of persuasive AI, we should demand transparency from our candidates. Campaigns should have to clearly disclose when a text agent interacting with a potential voter—through traditional robotexting or the use of the latest AI chatbots—is human or automated.

[Read: Where’s the AI culture war?]

Though companies such as Meta (Facebook’s parent company) and Alphabet (Google’s) publish libraries of traditional, static political advertising, they do so poorly. These systems would need to be improved and expanded to accommodate user-level differentiation in ad copy to offer serviceable protection against misuse.

A public, anonymized log of chatbot conversations could help hold candidates’ AI representatives accountable for shifting statements and digital pandering. Candidates who use chatbots to engage voters may not want to make all transcripts of those conversations public, but their users could easily choose to share them. So far, there is no shortage of people eager to share their chat transcripts, and in fact, an online database exists of nearly 200,000 of them. In the recent past, Mozilla has galvanized users to opt into sharing their web data to study online misinformation.

We also need stronger nationwide protections on data privacy, as well as the ability to opt out of targeted advertising, to protect us from the potential excesses of this kind of marketing. No one should be forcibly subjected to political advertising, LLM-generated or not, on the basis of their internet searches regarding private matters such as medical issues. In February, the European Parliament voted to limit political-ad targeting to only basic information, such as language and general location, within two months of an election. This stands in stark contrast to the U.S., which has for years failed to enact federal data-privacy regulations. Though the 2018 revelation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal led to billions of dollars in fines and settlements against Facebook, it has so far resulted in no substantial legislative action.

Transparency requirements like these are a first step toward oversight of future AI-assisted campaigns. Although we should aspire to more robust legal controls on campaign uses of AI, it seems implausible that these will be adopted in advance of the fast-approaching 2024 general presidential election.

Credit the RNC, at least, with disclosing that their recent ad was AI-generated—a transparent attempt at publicity still counts as transparency. But what will we do if the next viral AI-generated ad tries to pass as something more conventional?

As we are all being exposed to these rapidly evolving technologies for the first time and trying to understand their potential uses and effects, let’s push for the kind of basic transparency protection that will allow us to know what we’re dealing with.

Republicans have had 10 months to hammer out a coherent post-Roe message on abortion. You would think they’d have nailed it by now.

Yet on Tuesday, Nikki Haley set out to declare her position on the issue—and proceeded to be about as clear as concrete.

She began with plausible precision. “I want to save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations told reporters gathered at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America headquarters, in Northern Virginia—a press event billed as a “major policy speech.” But her statements quickly got squishier. It’s good that some states have passed anti-abortion laws in the past year, she said. And as for the states that have reacted by enshrining abortion-rights protections? Well, she wishes “that weren’t the case.”

And then she seemed to channel Veep’s Selina Meyer. “Different people in different places are taking different paths,” Haley said, with a self-assurance that belied the indeterminacy of her words.

[Read: Abortion pills will be the next battle in the 2024 election]

Questioning whether any national anti-abortion legislation would ever pass, Haley did gesture at a need for some action. “To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus,” she said. As for what that might look like, she had no words. And she took no questions.

Some people seemed to like Haley’s speech, in a tepid way. She sounded human when she described how her husband had been adopted, and how she’d struggled with infertility. “Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, before concluding, “The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch.” But it could do better—or at least do with something more specific.  

Leaders of the self-described pro-life movement were predictably annoyed at Haley’s conciliatory-sounding vagueness. “Disappointing speech by @NikkiHaley today. Leads with compromise & defeatism, not vision & courage,” Lila Rose, who heads the group Live Action, tweeted. “We agree that consensus is important, but to achieve consensus we will need to stake out a principled position,” wrote Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.

Even Haley’s hosts seemed on the wrong page. “We are clear on Ambassador Haley’s commitment to acting on the American consensus against late-term abortion by protecting unborn children by at least 15 weeks,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement sent to me. But a few hours later, Team Haley emailed me to correct the record: “She committed to working to find a consensus on banning late-term abortion. No specific weeks,” Nachama Soloveichik, Haley’s communications director, wrote. Not only did Haley alienate both sides—she confused them!

[Mary Ziegler: Abortion restrictions targeted at minors never stop there]

Haley is in a tough spot, as are all of the Republican presidential wannabes. They each have their own personal convictions on abortion; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, has been outspoken in his support for a national ban. But they’re up against an issue that seems to have cost their party a string of recent elections. Most Americans believe that abortion should be accessible, with some limits.

The “consensus” position, then, is somewhere in the foggy zone between no abortion ever and abortion whenever. But primary elections tend to push candidates toward one extreme or another. “The gap between what the base demands and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten really wide,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me. “Nowhere is this more true than on abortion.”

What all politicians need to do “is settle on a position they believe they can defend, and they need to repeat it consistently and clearly,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told me. “Any politician whose position on abortion is vague will be wrapped around the axle eventually with questions and doubts about where they actually stand.”

Some GOP candidates have followed Ayres’s advice. But much axle-wrapping has occurred already in the early days of the 2024 primary season.

Asked on the campaign trail whether he’d support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told CBS, “I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening on a very important topic,” before pivoting so hard to an anecdote about Janet Yellen that I thought he’d need a neck brace. In a follow-up interview, Scott backtracked, clarifying that as president, he would “literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation” Congress sent to his desk.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to mount a presidential bid, did approve a very conservative state law recently—a six-week abortion ban. But he signed that legislation in the dead of night earlier this month, while most people in Tallahassee were probably in bed. (By contrast, last year, he celebrated the signing of a 15-week ban with a big party at a church.) The following day, DeSantis gave a speech at a Christian university full of students who are opposed to abortion, yet said nothing about his major legislative achievement. He’s mostly stayed quiet about it since—even at glad-handing events in early primary states.

So far, the only confirmed presidential candidate who seems clear on his position and keenly aware of the political optics is Donald Trump. Despite being hailed by anti-abortion activists as the “most pro-life president” in history, Trump has never been rigid on abortion (probably because he supported abortion rights for most of his life as a public figure), and he doesn’t talk much about the issue now. But a spokesperson told The Washington Post recently that Trump “believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level.” Shorter Trump: I’ve done my bit—it’s up to the states now. God bless.

If any national consensus on abortion exists, the GOP strategist Ayres said, Trump’s position “is pretty close” to it. Trump has always seemed to have “a lizard-brain sense of where the voters are,” Longwell said. “He has a relationship to the base, and he doesn’t have to pitch what he believes.” And, unlike DeSantis, Trump has never signed a law banning abortion at any stage, so it’ll be harder to pin him down. Sure, there’s an activist class that would like to see abortion banned in all cases. To them, Trump could reply, You got your justices. You’re welcome.

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

Right now Trump and his lizard brain have a commanding lead in the GOP primary. His victory would set up an interesting general-election situation—a fitting one for our complicated post-Roe country: a former president who once personally supported abortion rights and is now politically opposed to them running against a sitting president whose own position on abortion is the exact opposite.

Until a Republican presidential nominee emerges, we’ll hear many more Haley-esque platitudes that sound thoughtful and weighty but ultimately aren’t.

“Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one has done to date,” Haley told reporters on Tuesday, before wrapping up her speech with—you could almost hear a drumroll—“finding consensus.” The waffling will continue, in other words, until the primary concludes.

The former US vice-president sat for more than seven hours before a federal grand jury, sources say.

Mike Pence was subpoenaed to testify about the events leading up to the 2021 US Capitol attack by Trump supporters.

Of the roughly 1,000 people who have been charged for their participation in the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, nearly a quarter were indicted alongside a relative or romantic partner. All sorts of other close personal relationships run through the indictments: the two roommates from Ohio who have known each other since they were kids, the three high-school buddies from North Carolina, the three Marines from Camp Lejeune, a Florida man and his pastor, an electrician’s apprentice and his boss. The conventional wisdom about radicalization is that ideas attract people to extremist movements and to the violence those movements commit. Most adherents, though, never move beyond reading manifestos, watching videos, or plunging down internet rabbit holes. Very often, what differentiates those who commit overt violence is their personal ties to others in the movement. Because although extremist movements are ideological, extremist violence turns out to be strikingly social.

As a historian of American social movements, I’ve found that the perpetrators of violence tend to be pulled along not by ideas alone, as compelling as these people may find them, but also by the power of personal connections. These individual loyalties can create obligations so intense that they permit those who feel them to justify committing horrors.

[From the April 2023 issue: The new anarchy]

The phenomenon reaches far back into the 20th century. Think of the lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp. These two young Black men were accused of killing a white man, but their lynching was not determined by that. Instead, their murder, in August 1930 in Marion, Indiana, followed a grim pattern that became one of the most common forms of political violence in 20th-century America: an accusation of rape leveled by a white woman who had reason to lie, a quick arrest, the accused Black men’s imprisonment in a jail that police weren’t willing to defend when a mob descended. Once the jail’s doors had been battered down, Smith and Shipp were dragged from their cells and hanged from a maple tree on the courthouse lawn, two blocks away. The aftermath of the killings was captured in a commemorative photo sold as a postcard for 50 cents that showed members of the mob smiling for the camera, the young Black men’s brutalized bodies dangling above them.

A few days after the lynching, the executive secretary of the NAACP arrived in town to conduct a quiet investigation. His report on the murders, which was widely distributed through the organization’s press service, resulted in a storm of publicity that forced the county’s district attorney to respond. Together with the attorney general of Indiana, the D.A. launched an inquiry that stripped away the anonymity that normally protected lynch mobs’ leading participants.

The official investigation found that the assault on the jail began when the sheriff refused to hand Smith and Shipp over to the father and the uncle of the alleged rape victim, 18-year-old Mary Ball. Although the mob swelled to more than 1,000 people at its peak, witnesses attributed the worst of the violence to a core group of 21 men, 17 of whom, by my tally, lived close enough to one of the Ball brothers to be called their neighbors. White supremacy underpinned the killings of Smith and Shipp, but the rage of those who committed the atrocity was mobilized by the intimate ties of family and community.

Sixty-five years later, on April 19, 1995, a former soldier named Timothy McVeigh pulled a rented Ryder truck into the delivery zone of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. He primed the fuses on the nearly 5,000-pound fertilizer bomb that he and his friend Terry Nichols had assembled in the truck’s cargo bed. Then he got out, locked the truck’s door, and walked toward the car he’d left in a parking lot several blocks away. He was still on his way there when the bomb detonated, demolishing the front of the building and killing 168 people, including 19 children, many of whom had been in a day-care center right above the delivery zone.

[Read: Alt history]

McVeigh saw his political purpose as guided by the anti-government extremism he’d embraced in the white-power militia movement. On the morning of the bombing, he carried with him pages from The Turner Diaries, the apocalyptic 1978 novel whose white-nationalist hero counters Washington’s mounting oppression by blowing up the FBI’s headquarters. In that respect, there would seem to be a straight line from his ideological conversion to the violence he committed that day. But he had been immersed in the movement for seven years before his attack on the Murrah building. For most of that time, he had engaged in only the pettiest of political acts—until he became bound by the personal ties that ran through the militia movement as strongly as they did in the mob that murdered Shipp and Smith.

Those connections started to form in the mid-1980s, when James Nichols brought Terry, his younger brother, into the militia that was taking root around their home in rural Michigan. Terry joined the Army in 1988. During his basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia, he befriended McVeigh, whose own interest in white-power survivalism had been inspired, in large part, by The Turner Diaries. How much influence Terry then had on McVeigh is not completely clear, though McVeigh officially joined the movement during the first year they spent together, following a spell as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The two men had seemed to drift apart after Terry washed out of the Army in 1989, but they reconnected when McVeigh was discharged two years later. Terry was then living with James on their family farm. In early 1993, McVeigh also moved in. There, James revived his big-brother role as mentor, feeding his brother and his friend with movement propaganda, ferrying them to militia meetings, and stoking their anger in long conversations he tended to dominate. The two younger men took almost every step leading to the bombing together, except for the single act of driving the Ryder truck, which McVeigh did alone. When he was arrested, little more than an hour later, he listed the Nichols farm as his home and James as his next of kin.

In his lawyer’s telling, 24-year-old Hunter Seefried had no interest in Donald Trump’s January 6 rally at the Ellipse. He had voted for Trump. And he was sure that his father, Kevin, was right when he said that the Democrats had stolen the election. It just didn’t bother him enough to devote a day to protesting it. But his dad wanted the family to go with him, and saying no was likely to cause more trouble than it was worth. So, that morning, Hunter and his girlfriend made the two-hour drive with his parents from their small town in Delaware to Washington, D.C.

[Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Extremism has spread into the mainstream]

When the rally was over, Kevin insisted that they join the march on Congress, though they had planned on having lunch and heading home. Once they got to Capitol Hill, Hunter’s mother and his girlfriend faded into the crowd, while Hunter and his father worked their way to the front. They reached the west portico just as the first few rioters were climbing through a window that a Proud Boy had smashed open. Hunter carefully removed the last shards from the frame. Then he and his dad climbed in too.

They moved through the building together, up the stairs with the mob trying to chase down the Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, into an ugly confrontation with the backup officers Goodman had called. The two of them joined the mob’s front line, Kevin screaming at the officers to step aside or shoot him. When it became clear that the police wouldn’t back down, Hunter and Kevin left the building, 25 minutes after they’d entered.

Three months later, father and son were indicted together on seven misdemeanors and a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding.

We don’t yet know enough about all of the extremist organizations that were involved in the January 6 attack to be able to trace their webs of affinity with the same precision. But what we already know is revealing: The Seefrieds are hardly alone.

The federal indictments identify the 14 Oath Keepers who, at the height of the riot, marched through the mob in military-style stack formation. Six of them had come to the Capitol with a relative who was also an Oath Keeper. Two others, both military veterans, had a tight friendship. One of the pair had also found a mentor in another Oath Keeper, 15 years his senior. “Love the hell outta you,” the younger man texted him on January 8. “You too, my dear friend!” the mentor texted back. “We stormed the gates of corruption together (although on opposite sides of the building) so between that and our first meeting and getting to know you since I can say we will always be brothers!”

Hunter Seefried was no Oath Keeper. He was a barely political young man following his father, whose own radicalization had not gone beyond following right-wing news sites and pro-Trump social media. Yet they were among the first rioters to breach the Capitol building, half an hour before the Oath Keepers started their march.

At Hunter’s sentencing hearing this past October, his lawyer argued that he didn’t deserve prison time; Hunter had put himself in the mob’s vanguard only because he was a dutiful son, and not as an insurrectionist. But America’s history of violent extremism makes that distinction meaningless. The Seefrieds turned to violence as so many people had before them, through the tangling together of dangerous ideas and intimate obligations. The more extremism spreads into the mainstream, the more likely that combination is to take hold again. As the personal pulls the ideological closer and closer to the center of American democracy, there is no limit to the damage this potent combination might do.

In emotional testimony, she says she is trying to "get her life back" after the alleged 1996 rape.

A New York judge has admonished Trump for calling the trial a 'witch hunt' on the social network Truth Social.

It’s been a difficult and disorienting four weeks in MAGA world.

On March 30, former President Donald Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his alleged role in participating in a scheme to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges, and more serious charges may well follow.

Last week, Fox News, the highest-rated and most influential cable news network in America, agreed to pay more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of deranged conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. It was, according to The Washington Post, the largest publicly disclosed monetary settlement ever in an American defamation action. There are more, and potentially more expensive, lawsuits pending.

And on Monday Fox abruptly cut ties with its biggest prime-time star, Tucker Carlson, one of the most mendacious and poisonous figures in the history of American television.

[David A. Graham: Tucker’s successor will be worse]

“I’m shocked. I’m surprised,” Donald Trump told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly. “I think Tucker’s been terrific,” the former president added. “He’s been, especially over the last year or so, he’s been terrific to me.” Other key figures on the MAGA right, like Donald Trump Jr., described the network’s decision as “mind-blowing,” and called Carlson “an actual thought leader in conservatism” and a “once-in-a-generation type talent.”

Republican Senator J. D. Vance, in a text message to The New York Times, said, “Tucker is a giant, and the most powerful voice against idiotic wars and an economy that placed plutocrats over workers. This is a huge loss for a conservative movement that hopes to be worthy of its own voters.” Representative Matt Gaetz, a MAGA star, lavished praise on Carlson during an appearance on Newsmax. And Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, said it was a “sad day for Fox News” but a “great day for Tucker,” because he no longer had to “answer to a corporate power.”

What used to rule the day on the American right was “owning the libs.” But now they are owning one another.

Some of us have spent the better part of eight years warning about the incalculable damage that would be done to the United States, to its politics and culture, and to the Christian witness by those who embraced a Trumpian ethic, defined by cruelty, lawlessness, the shattering of norms and traditional boundaries, and an eagerness to annihilate truth and trust in institutions. Those warnings have been validated, those concerns vindicated. What happened on January 6 wasn’t an anomaly; it was an apotheosis.

Now this movement, which has taken such delight in aiming its nihilistic arrows at the Democratic Party and the Republican establishment, at media outlets and scientists, is in the process of devouring itself. A l’exemple de Saturne, la revolution devore ses enfants.

It is a lesson nearly as old as time itself: Those whose passions are inflamed—and Trump supporters are nothing if not perennially inflamed—are drawn to destruction. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years,” the 18th-century conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke warned.

Lack of restraint is the essence of the Trump movement. Shattering guardrails is what they find thrilling. But what MAGA adherents forget is that those guardrails exist to protect not only others, but also ourselves from excess, self-indulgence, and self-harm. There’s a reason that temperance—self-mastery, the capacity to moderate inordinate desires, balance that produces internal harmony—is one of the four cardinal virtues.   

The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading rather than receding. They are becoming more rather than less indiscriminate. Those who are part of that movement, and certainly those who lead it, act as if they’re invincible, as if the rules don’t apply to them, as if they can say anything and get away with anything. That has certainly been true of Trump, and it is often true of those who have patterned themselves after Trump, which is to say, virtually the entire Republican Party.

But it goes even beyond this. MAGA world directs its ridicule at those who exercise temperance, who embrace restraint, and who ask themselves what they should do rather than what they can get away with. Those who reject the ethic of Thrasymachus—the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes might makes right and injustice is better than justice—are dismissed as weak and delicate. The denizens of MAGA world not only relish discarding guardrails; they scorn those who abide by them.

The priority for those who love our country is to contain the wreckage and defeat the MAGA movement. We’re still in mid-drama, so that day is a ways off. But it will come. Because in the end, those who live without limits are destroyed by them.