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.

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Word of death sometimes comes by the most bureaucratic means.

Notice that Pannir Selvam Pranthaman would be killed by the Singaporean government arrived at his sister’s home via DHL. The red-and-yellow envelope, delivered to Sangkari Pranthaman’s apartment in Kuala Lumpur on May 17, 2019, contained two letters: One stated that the president of Singapore had rejected Pannir’s clemency plea; the other informed Sangkari that her younger brother would shortly be hanged for bringing four small packets of heroin across the border into Singapore from Malaysia five years earlier. Last year, Singapore hanged 11 people, all for drug offenses. The country is only one of four known to still execute people for drug-related crimes, according to Amnesty International.

When the siblings were growing up in Ipoh, a hilly city in northwestern Malaysia, for several years they attended the same school, where Sangkari would try to keep an eye on her younger brother. He was “the naughtiest” of the family’s six children, she told me recently—he had a hard time paying attention and was always bouncing around. After school, she would report back to their strict Christian parents if she’d seen Pannir waiting outside the principal’s office to be disciplined. He didn’t appreciate the constant monitoring. As they grew into adulthood, she, of course, could not be her brother’s keeper.

After Pannir was originally arrested on drug charges, in September 2014, Sangkari reprised the childhood role of protective older sibling. First, she tracked down her brother in detention when he stopped responding to messages from family members. Then, in the years since, she has acted as his public advocate and a family spokesperson.

When Sangkari and Angelia, Pannir’s younger sister, speak about their brother, they tear up in laughter recalling their childhood, tear up in despondence at his current plight, and, occasionally, tear up for reasons they can’t fully explain. As they give the details of his case, they pause on multiple occasions to reiterate that they are not arguing Pannir’s innocence. They do not want him immediately freed from prison, nor do they expect him to be cleared of the crime of which he has been found guilty. They just want him alive. “This was his mistake, entirely his mistake,” Sangkari told me. “Because he has committed a crime, he needs to be punished, but the punishment needs to be adequate, not simply putting him to death.”  

The number of executions carried out in Singapore has dropped substantially since the 1990s; in 2012, a number of minor amendments were made to the death-penalty laws. Yet Singapore has stubbornly maintained a hard-line policy on drugs that mandates the death penalty for even minor infractions. Executions restarted with a renewed vigor last year after a two-year hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic. (The Ministry of Home Affairs did not respond to my list of questions, but said that “drugs not only kill but cause an immeasurable amount of harm to families and societies as a whole,” and that “the death penalty is an essential component of Singapore’s criminal justice system and has been effective in keeping Singapore safe and secure.”)

[Read: Biden’s Military-First Posture in the East Is a Problem]

Both independent and government surveys continue to show strong support for capital punishment, with about seven in 10 people backing execution for the most serious crimes. Yet the resumption of executions met with a distinct upsurge in public sentiment against the mandatory death penalty. Thousands of dollars in donations poured in to assist the family of Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, a Malaysian man with an IQ of 69, according to his lawyers, who had been convicted of smuggling roughly three tablespoons’ worth of heroin into Singapore. Hundreds of people gathered to mourn him at a candlelight vigil after he was put to death last April. In a country where freedom of assembly hardly exists and public debate is tightly controlled, the expanding conversation about the death penalty has been notable—especially for the way that it has challenged the status quo more broadly on issues of race, privilege, and inequality. Still, those calling for reforms undoubtedly face a long campaign, and one in which the possibility of enacting tangible reforms remains ultimately unknown.   

Singapore’s government does not release information on the ethnicity of people on death row, but the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination noted in 2021 that a majority of sentenced prisoners belong to ethnic minorities. From 2015 to 2020, experts from the committee said, 44 individuals were sentenced to the death penalty for drug offenses—of whom four were Chinese, three were Indian, and 37 were Malay. A government official said in September 2022 that 10 Malaysians were on death row. In Singapore, which relies on migrant labor from poorer Asian countries to build its skyscrapers, maintain its roads, and care for its senior citizens, those numbers are striking.  

The Transformative Justice Collective, a civil-society group that advocates for prisoners on death row, has spearheaded the effort to build greater awareness among Singaporeans of the injustices of capital punishment. “It is not asking them to just feel pity, but to ask questions about the values on which our society is built and how this system works,” Kirsten Han, a member of the organization, told me. “This issue of the death penalty and prisons is not separate from questions about inequality and labor conditions.”

Singapore’s mulish position on executions has held despite a worldwide trend away from the death penalty. The government continues to hew to a communitarian ideology that regards the state as obliged to protect the population’s well-being through a range of preemptive actions and stringent measures. And if that protection comes at the expense of individual rights, so be it.  

In many respects, over the past decade, Singapore has shed old stereotypes of being a stodgy, uptight nanny state. It has recast itself as an avatar of innovation, masterfully marketed through Hollywood films and hit TV series. The Economist recently referred to the city-state as the “Vienna of the 21st century,” as it draws in China watchers who abandoned that country during the pandemic or were forced to relocate by Beijing’s more authoritarian turn of recent years. Given its growing success with rebranding, Singapore’s stubborn adherence to capital punishment seems jarring. In the past month, with changes to the death penalty in Malaysia, the country looks more like an outlier even in a region that is hardly known for its progressive values.

Formerly a British colony, Singapore retained the death penalty when it gained independence from Malaysia in 1965. The city-state also retained the method of execution it inherited from the colonial era: long-drop hanging, developed in the U.K. in the late 1800s. According to a 2020 paper by two scholars at Australia’s Monash University, Ariel Yap and Shih Joo Tan, Singapore has since independence maintained an “ideology of survival” and justified capital punishment in part because of the country’s proximity to the Golden Triangle, an area where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet that is notorious for drug production. Singapore extended the death penalty to cover drug offenses in 1973, and made it mandatory for some of those offenses in 1975.

The regulations at times put even Singapore’s most staunch supporters in awkward predicaments. A U.S. diplomat based in Singapore in the late ’70s and early ’80s told an oral-history project that staff at the Singapore American School, an elite international school, would routinely conduct searches of students’ lockers. Those found with drugs would be quickly whisked out of the country to avoid criminal charges.

Elsewhere in the region, attitudes on both the death penalty for drug offenses and drug use itself have shifted. Nearby Thailand decriminalized marijuana last year. The streets of Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and other tourism hubs quickly became crammed with shops selling a pungent cornucopia of weed-laced edibles and joints. And this month, neighboring Malaysia’s Parliament passed sweeping reforms to remove the mandatory death penalty, slash the number of offenses punishable by death, and end life sentences of imprisonment. Some 1,300 people there are now eligible for sentencing reviews.

[Read: A newsroom at the edge of autocracy]

Amid these signs of liberalization, Singapore’s defense of its practices has grown louder. A sign at the airport reminds citizens and permanent residents departing for Thailand that consuming drugs, even overseas, is illegal. When Vogue magazine’s Singaporean edition profiled Han, of the Transformative Justice Collective, last year, the government issued a nine-point rebuttal rife with whataboutism—accusing the magazine of “seeking to glamourise campaigners against the death penalty”—that Vogue posted as a response. The minister for home affairs and law, a fierce litigator named K. Shanmugam, who posts Facebook updates of his weight-lifting achievements, is the most vocal supporter of the city-state’s execution policy and the sternest critic of those who oppose it.   

“The silence, of narco liberals and apologists for drug traffickers, is deafening. Some are probably hoping that the link between drugs and the violence will be overlooked,” he wrote in a Facebook post last year, after an ex–police officer in Thailand who had attacked a rural child-care center and killed 38 people, the majority of them young children, was reported to have faced a drug charge. “And as far as I know,” he added, “these activists have not held any candle light vigil for the children who have been massacred.”

After the British billionaire Richard Branson, an outspoken anti-death-penalty advocate, criticized Singapore for executing Dharmalingam, the government reacted with the condescension it typically reserves for its detractors. Hinting at colonial-era grievances, the government portrayed Branson as a member of the Western elite trying to impose his will on the country from afar. The government also invited Branson to take part in a televised debate with Shanmugam; Branson declined.

To challenge any official narrative in Singapore is, by design, a vexing undertaking. The country’s media are highly restricted in what and how they can report, because of the government’s resort to both colonial-era laws and newly enacted legislation against “fake news” and foreign interference. According to Reporters Without Borders, “the city-state does not fall far short of China when it comes to suppressing press freedom.” Demonstrations are allowed only at a designated Speakers’ Corner located within one park. Singapore’s universities are world-renowned, but academic freedom is limited, and scholars are reluctant to take on thorny issues of public interest. For inmates on death row and their families, the prospect of a reprieve, let alone any larger reform, looks distant.

Several young activists have stepped into this daunting space for reformers. Kokila Annamalai, who is 34 and another member of the Transformative Justice Collective, told me she approached 22 lawyers last year to assist in the case of Datchinamurthy Kataiah, a Malaysian man on death row for bringing heroin into Singapore. All of them declined. The sister of another man facing execution told me that her boss, fearing repercussions from the government, had pressured her to stop speaking out about her brother last year after she posted a video detailing his situation. Police issued a warning to a National University of Singapore graduate who held up an anti-death-penalty sign during a graduation ceremony last July. The university ham-fistedly attempted to edit the sign out of official photos and videos of the event.

“You come up against how every facet of the system—censorship, draconian legislation, intimidation—is tied together to make it close to impossible for you to fight back or hold the state accountable for its murderous violence,” Annamalai told me, referring to the executions. “It is designed to be a pain-delivery system, and it succeeds very well at that.”

Scholars who study the issue as well as advocacy groups have shown that no evidence supports the idea that the death penalty has a deterrent effect. The Singaporean government, however, points to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2021, which indicated that some 83 percent of Singaporeans believe the death penalty does deter drug trafficking. “There is a very big difference between ‘The death penalty deters certain offenses’ and ‘People believe the death penalty deters.’ When you don’t have a free press,” Annamalai said, “or any meaningful freedom of speech and expression, it is difficult to contest these narratives.”

A more hedged view was offered by a 2016 academic survey. Although it registered 72 percent overall support for the death penalty, similar to the government’s findings, the researchers argued that it would be “misleading to say, without qualifications, that there is public support for the death penalty in Singapore.” They noted that the “mandatory death penalty has weak support”—only about a third of respondents favored capital punishment for drug trafficking and firearms offenses.

At a Transformative Justice Collective event to mark World Day Against the Death Penalty, which I attended last October, Annamalai offered a playful apology for the hesitant style of some of the speakers: The chance to address a public assembly in Singapore was a rare experience, and some had never done so. As part of its advocacy, the collective also launched a door-knocking drive—in an effort, Annamalai told me, to reach the “uncles,” meaning the kind of people whom social-media campaigns might miss. Volunteers solicited signatures from residents in low-income neighborhoods demanding a moratorium on the death penalty and an independent review of the practice.

Han, who is 34 and has faced police questioning for her advocacy, does not come across as the incendiary agitator that the government has portrayed her to be. She said she had feared lots of slammed doors and few eager listeners. The campaign went better than that, but progress was hard-won—in the first three months, the collective gathered 200 signatures and now has about 650. More might have signed, Annamalai said, were it not for fear of retribution.

The campaigners’ decision to address the public, rather than lobby the government, is deliberate. Singapore’s governing order has proved remarkably resilient. Through economic growth, stability, political engineering, and lawfare, the People’s Action Party has held power since 1965.  In that whole period, the country has had only three prime ministers: the founding father Lee Kuan Yew, one of his cabinet colleagues, and now Lee’s son, who has served for nearly 20 years. As yet, major opposition parties have avoided the death-penalty issue, seeing little upside for themselves.

The United Nations has less inhibition about addressing capital punishment; last year it adopted by a wide margin its ninth resolution on a moratorium on executions. But Singapore was not moved, voting against the resolution, as it has done before. Sara Kowal of the Eleos Anti-Death Penalty Clinic at Monash University, told me that against the global trend, “we see the death penalty very embedded in the Asia-Pacific region.” Singapore’s representative at the UN called the resolution an effort “to export a particular model of society to the rest of the world,” which “betrays an attitude of arrogance and an attitude of cultural superiority.”

[Read: Seeking sanctuary in the old empire]

The vote placed the city-state alongside a rogues’ gallery of repressive regimes: Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China all joined Singapore in opposing the measure. So, too, did the United States, where 18 capital sentences were carried out last year. This is the lowest number for the country since 1991, and 23 states have banned the death penalty, but gruesome instances of botched executions continue to occur. (Ex-President Donald Trump has expressed admiration for Singapore’s execution policy—recently giving it a shout-out as he began his reelection campaign.)

A UN-based official at a nongovernmental organization, who asked not to be named in order to discuss behind-the-scenes deliberations, told me that Singapore had been a driving force in unifying opposition: “Singapore seems even more committed, organized, and has more planning than those leading the resolution.” The country, this NGO staffer conceded, is a “phenomenal adversary.”

Over the past nine years, Pannir has nearly exhausted his legal options. He won a last-minute stay of execution in 2019, after the letters were delivered to his sister. Pannir later attempted to have his sentencing reduced to life imprisonment and caning instead; his lawyer, Too Xing Ji, argued that Pannir had provided information to police that led to the arrest of a drug trafficker. The court ruled in November 2021 that Pannir’s information about the trafficker was true and contemporaneous, and the individual was later arrested, but it was not sufficient grounds for a change of sentencing, because the Central Narcotics Bureau said it had not used the information in its arrest. His final legal challenge is a civil suit alleging that inmates’ private correspondence was improperly shared with the attorney general by prison officials. A hearing in that case is scheduled for early next month.  

Pannir’s ultimate fate will be uniquely his own, but his journey to death row is one that shares many commonalities with that of others who have faced execution in Singapore before him. After finishing high school in Malaysia, he found a job in 2010 as a security guard in Singapore. To save money, Pannir often stayed in Johor Bahru, a Malaysian city close to the border with Singapore, and commuted across the causeway that connects the two countries. With few friends and far from family and home, he spent many hours at a small gambling parlor near his apartment. There, according to court documents and his sisters, he became acquainted with a man he knew as “Anand.”

Late on September 4, 2014, police searched Pannir’s motorbike as he made the trip into Singapore and found packets wrapped in tape that were later identified as containing just under two ounces of heroin. Pannir told officers that he was carrying the packages for Anand, and he believed they were some kind of aphrodisiac. Pannir has been in prison ever since.     

When Sangkari became pregnant, Angelia started making the trip to Singapore each weekend to see their brother. Over the years, she has become a seasoned campaigner, lobbying popular musicians to record songs written by her brother in jail—and looking beyond Singapore to argue in favor of Malaysia’s recent death-penalty reforms.

Angelia keeps a folder stuffed with bus-ticket stubs, flight boarding passes, and hotel receipts among stacks of legal documents and T-shirts emblazoned with her brother’s image. When I asked why she was holding on to these things, she smiled. When her brother got out, she said, laughing, she was going to make him repay all the expenses.

On the morning of August 26, 2021, a sweaty young American diplomat named Sam Aronson stood in body armor near the end of a dusty service road outside the Kabul airport, contemplating the end of his life or his career.

Thirty-one and recently married, 5 foot 10 without his combat helmet, Sam surveyed the scene at the intersection near the airport’s northwest corner, where the unnamed service road met a busy thoroughfare called Tajikan Road. Infected blisters oozed in his socks. He winced at gunfire from Afghan Army soldiers who fired over the heads of pedestrians in a crude form of crowd control. He breathed exhaust from trucks that jittered past market stalls shaded by tattered rugs and faded canvas. The withdrawal of American forces after two decades of war, the sudden fall of Kabul to the Taliban, and the mad rush to the airport by tens of thousands of desperate Afghans couldn’t stop street vendors from hawking cotton candy, vegetables, and on-the-spot tailoring.

Eleven days earlier, Sam had been home in Washington, D.C. He possessed only a layman’s knowledge of Central Asia; he’d spent the previous two years at the American embassy in Nigeria, and had been a State Department bodyguard before that, for Ambassador Samantha Power and others. But, ambitious and allergic to inactivity, he’d volunteered to join the skeleton staff in Kabul overseeing the frenzied evacuation.

Now, as a U.S. Foreign Service officer and vice consul, Sam had the power to grant U.S. entry to people with American passports, visas, and green cards, as well as to the nuclear families of qualified Afghans who had helped the United States and might face Taliban reprisals. Once approved, evacuees were assigned seats aboard military cargo planes whose takeoffs and landings created a white noise that hummed in Sam’s ears. By the morning of the 26th, the emergency airlift had already evacuated more than 100,000 people. In two more days, the operation would end.

Sam felt like a lifeguard in a tsunami. He and a few colleagues could review the documents of only a tiny fraction of the thousands of people pressed against the airport walls. State Department rules handed down from Washington required him to deny entry to extended families—men, women, and children who clutched at him and begged for their lives. The improvised, chaotic screening process forced Sam to make quick decisions that might be reversed at subsequent checkpoints.   

Then Sam discovered a loophole: a secret airport entrance, nicknamed “Glory Gate,” that had been created by CIA paramilitary operatives, the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force, and Afghan Army soldiers. The service road where he stood was a hidden-in-plain-sight path that led from Tajikan Road to a gap in the airport wall. If he could bring people in through that back door, Sam realized, he could approve them himself in freelance rescues that skirted the bureaucratic process entirely. That is, if he could avoid getting himself or anyone else killed.

Sam faced a terrible choice: follow the State Department’s shifting, confusing, infuriating policies about whom he could save, or follow his conscience and risk his life and career to rescue as many imperiled people as he could.

As the morning heat rose toward 90 degrees, Sam concluded that he had no choice after all.  

To surreptitiously bring in evacuees on foot, someone would need to go beyond the end of the service road, cross Tajikan Road, walk more than 100 meters through the bustling street market, and collect at-risk Afghans at the Panjshir Pump, a 24-hour gas station used by the CIA and others as a transit point for evacuees. Then they’d need to retrace their steps without drawing hostile attention from the street crowds or the Taliban fighters who regularly cruised past in pickup trucks.

Unarmed, Sam was not allowed to step beyond the end of the Glory Gate service road. Even being that far outside the airport walls exposed him to danger of kidnapping or death. He needed an accomplice.

Upon his arrival in Kabul, Sam had befriended a 20-year-old Afghan man with a California-surfer vibe who could have passed for his younger brother. Asadullah “Asad” Dorrani had spent two years working as a translator for the U.S. Special Forces. Asad had been offered seats on multiple flights, but he refused to leave without his sister, her husband, and their two young children.

Unlike Sam, Asad wasn’t bound by U.S.-government limits on where he could travel. Then again, involving Asad in Sam’s Glory Gate plan would put the young man’s life at risk.

They connected over WhatsApp and made a deal: Sam would help Asad save his sister’s family, and Asad would escort Sam’s rescue targets from the Panjshir Pump to the service road.  

Sam and Asad’s test case was an Afghan teenager. His older brother and guardian, Ebad, had worked for the U.S. embassy in Kabul, which qualified Ebad, his wife, and their children for evacuation—but not his brother. “I take care of him,” Ebad pleaded. “He doesn’t have anyone else. He’s all alone.” It pained Sam to imagine the fate of a 17-year-old on the cusp of manhood in a city under Taliban control.

With Asad translating, Sam spoke by phone with Ebad’s brother and directed him to the Panjshir Pump. Sam told Ebad’s brother to whisper “devils” when approached by a young Afghan man in body armor. Asad had chosen the password because he thought it sounded like something from a movie.

Sam needed the cooperation of the covert American operator who ran Glory Gate, a combat-hardened, thick-bearded man in his 40s whose call sign was Omar. He explained the plan, and Omar agreed to help. On Omar’s signal, Afghan paramilitary guards under his command created a distraction by firing their weapons over the heads of passersby. At a break in traffic, Asad sprinted from the service-road entrance into Tajikan Road. He cut through an opening in a median strip, crossed to the far side, and wove through the restless crowd east toward the gas station.

Days earlier, Asad had seen Afghan soldiers fired on by a sniper at the North Gate, an incident that left one dead. But risking his life for Ebad’s brother might enable Asad to do the same for his sister’s family. He told himself, If there is a chance, I’m going to take it.

Sam waited anxiously at the edge of Tajikan Road. He knew that Asad could find himself with a bull’s-eye on his back, if for no other reason than his American-issued body armor.

Sam also worried about his career. No one in the State Department knew that he’d recruited a young Afghan interpreter. For all practical purposes, Asad was “this random Afghan guy I met in the passenger terminal.” Now Sam had sent him outside the wire to grab some other random Afghan guy who didn’t qualify as a nuclear-family member of an embassy staffer.

What if he gets taken by the Taliban? Sam thought. Ultimately, the State Department, the White House, is responsible, but I will have caused that disaster. If anything goes wrong, Asad is fucked. I’m fucked. My career is over.  

Sam with Asad (Photograph courtesy Sam Aronson)

After long minutes of waiting, Sam saw Asad sprinting toward him with a wide-eyed young man in tow. Sam and a security contractor pulled them behind Hesco bastions, dirt-filled barriers that looked like huge hay bales.

The security contractor searched Ebad’s brother for weapons or explosives. Finding none, the next challenge was getting the teenager past diplomatic and military security, then reconnecting him with Ebad. First, Sam realized he needed to do one more thing.

“Hold up, let’s take a picture,” Sam said. Shortly after 9:30 a.m., Sam texted it to Ebad with a two-word caption: “Got him.”

Ebad replied: “I will remember your kindness for ever.”

Goosebumps rose on Sam’s sunburned forearms. He recognized that he’d crossed a line.  

Once inside the passenger terminal, Sam faked his confidence, adopting a don’t-bother-me demeanor. He didn’t want to explain what he’d done, and he didn’t want anyone to learn that the young man wasn’t part of an embassy staffer’s nuclear family. If that happened, Ebad’s brother would be thrown back into the crowds, and Sam might be relieved of duty and ordered onto the next plane.

Sam rushed Ebad’s brother past the State Department screening officials stationed outside the terminal. He muttered “special-interest case,” to falsely suggest that he was acting under a higher government authority. It worked.

So Sam began plotting to bring others through Glory Gate.

A diplomatic-security officer who’d been in the military gave Sam a ride back toward Tajikan Road. Having seen what Sam had accomplished, the officer turned to him with a question: “Can you help me with my old interpreter? He worked with me up in Mazar-i-Sharif”—the scene of fierce battles—“and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get his family in this whole time.”

Sam thought, Why are you asking me for permission? If the officer wanted to pull in his onetime interpreter, Sam thought he could simply do it himself. Then it dawned on Sam: The security officer understood the system. Only a State Department consular official like Sam had the authority to designate someone as an at-risk Afghan eligible to enter the airport. Sam nodded. He told the officer to give his interpreter directions to the Panjshir Pump.

When Sam returned to the edge of Tajikan Road, he learned that Asad’s sister, Taiba Noori, was too afraid to make a run for the airport. On a teary phone call, Taiba had told Asad: “I’m sorry, I can’t do it … My children might get hurt.”

“Call her again,” Sam insisted. “Tell her we just made this work. We did the proof of concept. She’s not going to be the first one. This will work!”

Asad called back. Worn down, Taiba and her husband, Noorahmad Noori, agreed to go to the Panjshir Pump with their 5-year-old son, Sohail, and 3-year-old daughter, Nisa.  

The Noori family reached the Panjshir Pump at about the same time as the security officer’s former interpreter, his wife, and their two young children. Sam decided that on this second run, they should attempt to bring in both families at once, a total of eight people, an exponential leap from the single target of Ebad’s brother. Sam filled in Omar, who again signaled Afghan paramilitary guards to scatter the crowd with gunfire. Asad ran into Tajikan Road.

Sam paced with anxiety. As the minutes passed, he noticed several Afghan men edging toward a cement wall 150 meters to the west, apparently intending to climb over and sprint toward the airport, even if it meant risking gunfire. Two of Omar’s Afghan soldiers opened fire low above the men’s heads. The would-be wall jumpers retreated.

Amid the gunfire, Sam spotted Asad running toward him, breathing heavily, carrying Sohail. Taiba ran toward Sam, screaming as she dragged Nisa by the hand. Noorahmad carried their bags. As bullets from the Afghan guards buzzed low over their heads, Sam put himself between danger and the people he needed to protect.

He yelled at Taiba to pick up Nisa, then  spun the mother and daughter around and placed himself squarely behind them. He hoped the steel plates in his body armor would shield them if anyone shot in their direction from the street. Explosions of gunfire and stun grenades mixed with Taiba’s cries.

“Okay,” Sam shouted, “let’s move!”

Sam led them down the service road into a protective alcove within an alley of cement blast walls.

“Sit down, sit down,” he told them.  

Sam grabbed water bottles that felt as warm as toast and gave them to Asad and his sister’s family. The interpreter and his family took cover nearby. Sam exchanged fist bumps with Sohail and Nisa, which made the children smile. Asad radiated relief. Still Taiba wept.

“You’re safe now,” Sam said.

Back inside the airport, Sam’s off-book evacuation initiative came under sudden threat from his bosses, who still didn’t know what he’d been doing.

His supervisor cornered Sam as he entered the barn-shaped building that the State Department and the U.S. military used as a command center. “Good, there you are,” she said. “I need you for a special project. I’ve got to run out for 10 minutes. Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

She disappeared, and Sam tried not to lose what remained of his cool. Earlier that day, the last official gate to the airport had been closed for security reasons. I’m just getting this thing going, he thought. Now she’s going to pull me for something else? If I’m not out there doing this, nobody will be.  

He thought about disobeying her order to wait, but that didn’t seem wise. He could tell her what he’d been doing and ask permission to continue, but she might order him to stop. Shit, Sam thought. How am I going to get out of this?

He texted a colleague on the small State Department team and asked for help. He explained his unsanctioned evacuations at Glory Gate. “She’s trying to pull me for some bullshit project, but I’m getting people off the road right now. If she pulls me, we’re not getting anybody else in.”

Sam’s colleague, older and more experienced in the art of bureaucratic avoidance, calmed him down. He also recognized a way he could capitalize on Sam’s enterprise.

“Dude, you’re getting people in? I’ve got a family I’ve been trying to get in this whole time.”  

Sam’s colleague wanted to help a former interpreter from his Army days, to repay the man for saving his life more than a decade earlier. Sam told him: “If you can do damage control to distract her or something so she doesn’t realize I’m gone, I’ll go get your interpreter’s family in, plus others.”

The colleague agreed to provide cover.  

As more people learned what he was doing, Sam’s list of target names grew longer.

To keep track, he used a Sharpie to write descriptions and coded names on his left forearm and the back of his left hand. For instance, the security officer’s former interpreter and his three family members from Mazar-i-Sharif became “4 Mazar.” Each time Sam and Asad brought in another group, Sam drew a line through the code. The skin on his arm soon looked like the work of an amateur tattoo artist, covered with crossed-out names of ex-lovers.

(Photograph courtesy Sam Aronson)

During one van ride back to Tajikan Road around 2:30 p.m., Sam realized that he hadn’t eaten anything all day except two Nutri-Grain bars. He found a brown plastic bag of military rations on the van floor marked Menu 4: Spaghetti With Beef and Sauce and shoveled the cold gruel into his mouth.

Sam’s frenetic pace put him in conflict with an embassy email sent that day to all the State Department team members in Kabul. With the tone of a wellness letter, it told them to stay “hydrated, fed, and rested,” and noted that the team was already short-staffed because of illness and fatigue. The email sounded an ominous note as well, instructing them to keep their bags packed and to be ready to leave within 30 minutes in case of emergency.

Back at Tajikan Road, Sam learned that Glory Gate’s intelligence operators had received a warning of a terrorist car bomb heading their way. If it wasn’t intercepted, they expected it to arrive sometime in the next two hours.

Ignoring an impulse to run as far and as fast as he could, Sam sent a voice message to the colleague who was helping him, cautioning that a car bomb might complicate plans to rescue his old interpreter. “I’m going to try to get your guys,” Sam said, shouting over low-flying planes, “but things are really fucking fluid, and we’ve got to move fast because they’re probably going to shut this gate and boot us pretty soon.”

Sam and Asad brought in two more families, again using his “special-interest case” swagger in the terminal. Next, eight Afghan women who were American citizens or green-card holders. The women were members of Afghanistan’s Hazara population, a persecuted ethnic and religious minority who feared genocide under the Taliban.  

Meanwhile, Sam watched American covert operatives take defensive action to prevent any terrorist vehicles from entering Glory Gate. They moved blast walls with a forklift and positioned an armored personnel carrier sideways across the service road. When Sam asked one of the gatekeepers for details, he said: “Be ready to pull back. If we say run, run.”

Sam could only hope that if he got that message, he would have time to call Asad and bring him in. Sam told himself this mission would be Asad’s last, no matter what. Asad would be on a plane with his sister’s family by nightfall, even if Sam had to drag him on personally.

When they reached the passenger terminal on the day’s final trip, Sam handed off the Hazara women and the interpreter and his family to another State Department colleague. Sam noted the time: 5:08 p.m. As he looked at his watch, he could see that he’d crossed out every Glory Gate target name on his left forearm.

On that one day, August 26, Sam, Asad, and a pair of State Department security officers—with help from American intelligence operatives, Special Operations Forces, and Afghan paramilitary troops—personally brought 52 people, from 13 families, through Glory Gate. (Several hundred Afghans who’d worked at the U.S. embassy also passed through the gate on buses.)

But there were others Sam had turned down. A United Nations program officer whose family they’d rescued texted him in the afternoon: “My sister and family 4 people are also waiting if possible can you plz help them. She has two kids.” His sister worked at the Afghan presidential palace, and her husband was a contractor for the Americans and the British.

“Sorry,” Sam replied. “I’m on the last group I’m allowed to grab. They’re shutting down this gate.”

This refusal, among others, would haunt Sam: For every at-risk Afghan they’d helped, countless others remained in peril.

Outside the Americans’ command center, Sam stopped in a courtyard to smoke a cigarette, a new habit he’d picked up to calm his nerves. He crushed the butt under his heel and went in. Dehydrated, limping from his blisters, caked in sweat and dust, Sam peeled off his helmet and body armor and sank onto a couch.

At that moment, less than a mile away, a former engineering student named Abdul Rahman Al-Logari walked among several hundred fellow Afghans waiting to be searched by Marines outside the Abbey Gate. Under his clothing, he wore a 25-pound explosive vest. While U.S. officials searched on the ground and from the air for a car bomb, Logari arrived on foot. He drew close to American servicemen and -women clustered near other Afghans.

At 5:36 p.m., he detonated his suicide bomb.

Ball bearings the size of peas tore through the crowd, killing 13 U.S. troops and at least 170 Afghans. The bomb seriously wounded dozens of other U.S. military personnel and many more Afghans seeking evacuation. Bodies filled the open sewage canal that divided the roadway leading to the Abbey Gate. Screams of pain and grief filled the air. Survivors raced to rescue others. Some tried to climb the airport walls. Believing they were under attack by ISIS-K gunmen, Marines opened fire.  

Word of the terrorist attack spread instantly through the command center. A voice boomed: “Attention. Unconfirmed report of a blast at the Abbey Gate. Stand by for more information.”

Sam jolted from the couch to full alert. Warnings sounded about follow-up attacks. One report, which turned out to be mistaken, claimed that a second bomb had exploded at the Baron Hotel, across from the Abbey Gate. Sam heard a report of a grenade tossed over the airport wall. Another alert said terrorists had breached the airport, but soon that report was withdrawn.  

Oh my God, Sam thought. This just keeps going on and on.

The alert system resumed, with a blaring siren warning of an imminent rocket attack. A robotic female voice repeated: “Incoming, incoming, incoming. Take cover.”

As he huddled in a corner, Sam remembered a lesson he’d learned days earlier: If he heard the whirring engine of an incoming rocket, he needed to sing, to save his lungs from the blast pressure.

While he waited for an explosion or an all-clear signal, Sam texted his wife: “You’re going to see something on the news shortly. I’m okay.”

“If they offer you a plane out,” she replied, “do not be the hero who stays.”  

But he did stay, until the very end, and saved more people, in even more harrowing nighttime rescues that took him beyond Glory Gate into the chaos of Tajikan Road.  

He left Kabul late on August 28, on one of the last planes out.

To Sam’s relief, when his bosses in Kabul and back in D.C. learned about his unauthorized actions at Glory Gate, they weren’t angry. He’d helped vulnerable people without triggering a catastrophe, so Sam was hailed for his initiative rather than punished for his defiance. A commendation letter described Sam as a hero amid the “apocalyptic” scene in Kabul.  

A separate letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Sam for his “commitment, bravery, and humanity.” It concluded: “I am honored to be part of your team.”

And yet, Sam says his supervisor denied his request for a couple of days off to recover. Despite a pledge from Blinken that no one returning from Kabul would be penalized for seeking therapy, Sam was told to inform the medical office that he’d seen a State Department psychologist, which Sam believed could have triggered a career-threatening mental-health review. Sam pushed back and the request was dropped. Eventually, feeling that he needed a bigger change, he resigned from the State Department and took a job on the global-policy team of a tech company.  

Sam remained in regular contact with Asad, who settled in Michigan near his family. When Asad visited Washington, Sam took him to an Afghan restaurant to catch up.  

For several months after his return, Sam had nightmares. He drank bourbon or wine to help him sleep. A woman in a headscarf with two young children begging for money outside a Target sparked flashbacks. He felt the dry air, heard the gunshots, and began to tremble. He broke out in tears on the ride home.

Sam felt proud of what he’d accomplished in Kabul. During the last days of a lost war, in a hostile place where he didn’t belong and shouldn’t have been, he’d put the lives of others above his own. But he also carried guilt for all those he couldn’t help, and for all the people he’d turned away before discovering Glory Gate.

“I followed those orders,” he says. “If I could do it all over again, I’d say screw the rules and let them in.”  

This article was adapted from the forthcoming book The Secret Gate: A True Story of Courage and Sacrifice During the Collapse of Afghanistan.

The United Nations General Assembly president discusses whether reform is required for the UN to make progress.

In the past, I’ve leaned on the great Arab proto-sociologist Ibn Khaldun to explain modern life. “Empires age and decay in the course of three generations,” he argued in the 14th century, and they trace a typical path: First, hardened provincials, working closely in tribal units, claw their way to power; their children enjoy the fruit, ruling in ease during a peak of power; but in the third generation, the scions become dissolute and disconnected and end up farming out their power to others. The empire crumbles.

[Read: The 2016 presidential race: A cheat sheet]

It can seem like a hacky Gladwellian schema, and I cite it only with tongue in cheek, but the framework is fun and awfully adaptable. For example, it might offer some explanation for why on earth Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is apparently running for the 2024 Democratic nomination for president.

A Kennedy Kandidacy will probably generate some headlines because certain factions of the press can’t resist the family, but it’s going to end in ignominious defeat for RFK Jr., who will be lucky to outpace Marianne Williamson for a distant silver medal in the Democratic primary if Joe Biden runs for reelection—and probably won’t do any better if Biden opts out.

Not much about this makes sense, but Ibn Khaldun might not be surprised. The Kennedy dynasty began with the striving, sharp-elbowed Joe Kennedy, who built a fortune and sway in the early 20th century. He propelled his sons to the highest ranks of political power: John was elected president; Robert Sr. was attorney general and a senator, and may well have become president if he hadn’t been assassinated in 1968; Ted was one of the most successful senators in American history. But already the signs of dissipation had appeared. That brings us to the third generation. Many of them are quite accomplished, though the family continues to be haunted by tragedy. But the close family ties have begun to strain; RFK Jr.’s sister and cousins have rightly excoriated his anti-vaccine stance.

And where his father and uncles mounted serious runs for the White House, what does an RFK Jr. candidacy offer a primary voter? Not freshness and youth—he’s 69 and comes from a famous family. Not diversity—he’s a northeastern Irish Catholic boy like Biden. Not a clear policy alternative, either—Kennedy’s political positions are fairly middle-of-the-road for the Democratic Party, with an emphasis on the environment, except for his espousal of conspiracy theories around voting machines and vaccines, which have little purchase in the party.

One answer, as reported by CBS’s Robert Costa: The conservative saboteur Steve Bannon has apparently been urging Kennedy to run, and “believes RFK Jr. could be both a useful chaos agent in 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country.” It’s just as Ibn Khaldun predicted: By the third generation of a dynasty, mercenaries and outsiders have become the powers behind the throne—or at least behind the vanity campaign for the Oval Office.

This cheat sheet tracks who’s in, out, up, and down in the 2024 races. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Not officially, but in every other respect, yes. Every time he’s been asked, he says he expects to run, and when his longtime aide Ron Klain departed as chief of staff, Klain said he’d be there “when” Biden runs in 2024. An announcement could come soon, now that the State of the Union has passed.

Why does he want to run?
Biden has always wanted to be president and is proud of his work so far; he also seems to believe that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

[Mark Leibovich: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
If he runs, it’s probably his for the taking. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden does not, she’s expected to be the favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
It’s too soon to tell, but she’d start with an advantage if Biden sits this out.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden bows out.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden doesn’t, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
Say it with me: No, but if Biden doesn’t, she might.

Why does she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Perhaps.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Yes. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice. “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
If Biden, etc.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.

Is he running?
Yes. He has filed his paperwork and will reportedly announce the run on April 19.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition—hell, he wouldn’t even be the first Kennedy to primary a sitting Democrat. If he does run, you can expect a campaign arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming.”)

Who wants him to run?
Who knows? One report says Steve Bannon is encouraging his run in order to stoke chaos, which checks out. Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines—with whom he has clashed over vaccines—is at least willing to tolerate it. “I’m thinking about it, and I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is my wife has green-lighted it,” he said.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

[Elaine Godfrey: Trump begins ‘retribution’ tour]

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP is still all in on Trump, but it’s a little hard to tell how big. Polling shows that his support among Republicans is all over the place, but he’s clearly not a prohibitive front-runner.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, but past results are no guarantee of future success.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Not officially, but clearly the answer is yes. DeSantis is getting a campaign and super PAC up and running, marshaling donors, and inserting himself into national politics. He reportedly might not announce until May or June.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers the prospect of a synthesis of Trump-style culture war and bullying and the conservative politics of the early 2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
Members of the Republican establishment who want a pugilistic alternative to Trump, disaffected MAGA types, and maybe Jeb!

[From the March 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

Can he win the nomination?
No one quite knows how a Trump-DeSantis battle will play out, but it seems very possible.

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Perhaps as a MAGA-friendly alternative to Trump? It’s hard to say, as my colleague Tim Alberta has chronicled. Haley served under Trump, condemned him over January 6, said she wouldn’t run if he ran, and now is running anyway.

[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina]

Who wants her to run?
That’s also hard to say, but if DeSantis stumbles in the spotlight, she could make a play for his supporters.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 37-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling resume (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J.D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.

Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like Covidism, climatism, and gender ideology.”

Who wants him to run?
As The New Yorker found in a long profile in December, he has some avid fans. So far, little evidence suggests this amounts to a winning coalition.

Can he win the nomination?
Almost certainly not. At this stage, Ramaswamy gives off Steve Forbes/Herman Cain/Morry Taylor vibes—an interesting character from the business world, but not a contender. Then again, Trump once did too.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, the formerly longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
Yes. Hutchinson announced on April 2 that he is running, with a formal launch coming later in the month. It would have been funnier to announce a day earlier, though.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying that Trump disqualified himself with his attempts to steal 2020’s election. Hutchinson is also unique in the field for having called on Trump to drop out over his indictment in New York.

Who wants him to run?
Some old-school Republicans would welcome his candidacy, but it’s hard to imagine a groundswell.

Can he win the nomination?
Unlikely.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
No. After giving a campaign “very serious consideration,” Hogan ruled himself out on March 5, saying he was worried that too large a field would help Trump win the nomination once more.

Why did he want to run?
Hogan argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.” He’s also a vocal critic of Donald Trump.

Who wanted him to run?
Moderate, business-friendly “Never Trump” Republicans love Hogan.

Could he have won?
No.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he’s the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
“Maybe I run, maybe I don’t,” he said in early February. But he passed on a Senate run last year and just created a fundraising vehicle that typically presages a candidacy.

Why does he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and sees his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Maybe. Scott has visited Iowa and considered a campaign, and says he doesn’t plan to run for another Senate term.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him.

Can he win the nomination?
Who knows? The soft-spoken Scott is untested in this kind of campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
Most likely. He’s released a campaign-style memoir, though he had to blurb it himself, and has pointedly distanced himself from Trump on some issues.

Why does he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wants him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
He hasn’t said, but he’s been traveling to stump for Republicans and meet with donors, and he’s limited to a single term as governor.

Why does he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, so far to no avail.

Who wants him to run?
Republicans who see him as able to run on Trumpy cultural issues while keeping some distance from Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as governor of Indiana and U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Pretty likely, though he hasn’t declared.

Why does he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. His time as Trump’s VP both makes him more plausible and probably rules him out, because he’s fallen afoul of his old boss.

Who wants him to run?
Conservative Christians, rabbit lovers.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

Can he win the nomination?
It’s hard to see it happening.

(Mandel Ngan / Getty) Francis Suarez

Who is he?
Suarez is the popular second-term mayor of Miami and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Is he running?
He’s been telling reporters for months that he’s considering, most recently in March.

Why does he want to run?
Suarez touts his youth—he’s 45—and said in October 2022, “I’m someone who believes in a positive aspirational message. I’m someone who has a track record of success and a formula for success.” He’s also someone who voted against the Republican Ron DeSantis in the 2018 governor’s race and did not vote for Trump in 2020.

Who wants him to run?
Is there really room for another moderate-ish Republican in the race? Suarez reports that Trump said he was the “hottest politician in America after him,” but the former president would probably not be a supporter, and with DeSantis a presumptive candidate, Suarez would be an underdog in his home state.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly unlikely.

(Sam Wolfe / Bloomberg / Getty) Mike Rogers

Who is he?
Rogers is a congressman from Alabam—wait, no, sorry, that’s the other Representative Mike Rogers. This one is from Michigan and retired in 2015. He was previously an FBI agent and was head of the Intelligence Committee while on Capitol Hill.

Is he running?
He is thinking about it and has formed a group with the suitably vague name “Lead America.”

Why does he want to run?
He laid out some unassailably broad ideas for a campaign in an interview with Fox News, including a focus on innovation and civic education, but it’s hard to tell what exactly the goal is here. “This is not a vanity project for me,” he added, which, OK, sure.

Who wants him to run?
“I think the Trump, Trump-lite lane is pretty crowded,” he told Fox. “The lane that is not talking about Trump, that is talking about solutions and the way forward and what the real challenges we face—I just don’t find a lot of people in that lane.” Which, again, OK?

Can he win the nomination?
Nope.

(Ida Mae Astute / Getty) Chris Christie

Who is he?
What a journey this guy has had, from U.S. attorney to respected governor of New Jersey to traffic-jam laughingstock to Trump sidekick to Trump critic. Whew.

Is he running?
He is “trying to figure out” if there’s a way to run against Trump and DeSantis, he told Fox News in late March. A former aide told The New York Times that Christie “wants for sure” to run.

Why does he want to run?
Anyone who runs for president once and loses wants to run again—especially if he thinks the guy who beat him is an idiot, as Christie clearly thinks about Trump. Whether he’d rerun his 2016 campaign or adapt to a new GOP era is yet to be seen.

Who wants him to run?
“I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with donors over the course of the last few weeks,” Christie has said, as is obligatory of long-shot candidates. But he doesn’t seem to have much campaign-in-waiting or a clear constituency.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.

In late November, a journalist named Ali Pour-Tabatabaie reported that 18 girls from an arts academy in the city of Qom, Iran, had fallen sick, apparently from the effects of poison. The story got little attention at the time, as the country was consumed with the protests that had begun after the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. The 22-year-old woman had been arrested by the morality police on grounds of not wearing the hijab, or mandatory headscarf, properly. Two weeks after that first report of poisoning, 51 students were hospitalized in Qom. By the end of December, a dozen more cases of suspected mass poisoning of students, most of them female, were reported in states around the country. The timing of these incidents, occurring within weeks of the nationwide anti-regime protests led by women and girls, has raised suspicion for many Iranians that the attacks are a form of retribution for dissent.

The students complained of a variety of symptoms, including dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, and general weakness, that had come on after they had smelled something foul. What some described as the odor of rotten fruit, and others compared to the smell of bleach, had suddenly filled the air. In the central city of Borujerd, a teacher said she had seen “something like a bomb” tossed into a school compound.

By March, more than 5,000 students, in 25 provinces and from 230 schools, had been affected. The closing of schools last month for the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, raised hopes that the attacks might have ended. But as schools reopened, those hopes were dashed when a series of new cases were reported in several cities.

When the first cases appeared, the authorities tried to downplay the issue. The governor of Qom attributed the incident to a carbon-monoxide leak from schools’ heating systems, but a parliament representative from the principality called it “suspicious.” Some officials accused the country’s foreign enemies, as Iran often does, while others dismissed the event entirely as mass hysteria. Some foreign observers cited by Nature magazine say that a mass psychogenic event brought on by stress reactions to the protest unrest and state violence cannot be ruled out; other experts discount this hypothesis, pointing to the abundant number of cases of hospitalizations of girls suffering physical effects.

[Mary Louise Kelly: Why I went to Iran]

In late February, a health minister said that some of the cases had been caused by chemical poisoning, although that statement was soon rebutted by the interior minister. No specific substance responsible for the symptoms has been identified, but the interior minister recently announced that “suspicious samples” had been recovered during investigations. In mid-March, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report that called the poisonings “deliberate.” The regime appears to have abandoned its earlier dismissals; by this month, more than 100 suspects had been arrested in connection with the incidents.

The government’s double-talk planted confusion among the public and suggested that there was no consensus among officials. Such contradiction—one official offering an explanation, only to be undermined by another—is characteristic of Tehran’s damage-control tactics. At times, an impression of division can reflect real tensions within the ruling elites. At others, it can be fabricated to project a false sense of behind-the-scenes competition between hawks and doves, as if the elites were somehow responsive to public opinion.

Amid this information mayhem, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, finally broke his silence after three months and offered a statement of his own: “If the poisoning of students is proven, those behind this crime should be sentenced to capital punishment and there will be no amnesty for them.”

The severity of Khamenei’s retributive language did not convince many people that he sincerely intended to investigate the poisonings and identify suspects. In a country that has installed more surveillance devices in public places than George Orwell’s Big Brother could dream of, few believed that the authorities did not already know who the culprits were. Furthermore, the sheer geographical spread of the poisonings made it improbable that anyone without access to state resources could have carried out the attacks. Yet, instead of those behind the crime, the reporter Pour-Tabatabaie was arrested, though his family are uncertain which agency is detaining him and on what charges.

Amid the doubt and fear, speculation abounds. Speaking with the Persian-language service of the BBC, Hatam Ghaderi, a political-science professor in Tehran, called the poisonings “the most blatant example of state-sponsored terrorism, intended to sow fear among people.” Ghaderi suggested that the incidents might be a show of force by the more radical, “Taliban-like” elements within the regime ahead of a power struggle anticipated after the death of the aged and ailing Khamenei. Ghaderi’s argument gains plausibility from the fact that Qom, the epicenter of the poisonings, is known for its religious seminaries and as a stronghold of Shiite clerics. And because even Qom had seen protests in recent months, the poisonings could be retaliation or deterrence aimed at the next generation of young women drawn to reject the hijab. If, in fact, rogue, “Taliban-like” elements are the culprits, or if the public is led to believe that they are, the supreme leader could appear as the lesser of two evils, compared with the utterly ruthless hard-liners who might be maneuvering to replace him.

[Dennis Ross: Iran needs to believe America’s threat]

Some Iranians nevertheless regard the supreme leader himself as chiefly responsible—not necessarily for directly ordering the poisoning attacks, but for tacitly permitting his conservative supporters to deal with dissent as they see fit. Even before the poisonings of schoolchildren began, the regime has been able to rely on plainclothes agents to carry out physical attacks on protesters; sometimes they include members of the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary organization aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Ali Sajjadi, a U.S.-based historian and journalist, believes that Khamenei has effectively incited such vigilantism as far back as June 2017, when he told a group of university students that they should see themselves not merely as “soldiers,” but as “officers” in a “soft war” in defense of the Islamic Republic’s values and beliefs. Elaborating on his bellicose metaphor, he told them that they should “fire at will.”

Those “officers” may have heard Khamenei’s declaration on October 3 that “some protesters only needed a punishment in order to recognize their error” as a call to action. What the punishment should be, and who should deliver it, were matters Khamenei left for others to decide for themselves. Not unlike the mob that broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the devout followers of the supreme leader were given license to do what they thought he had asked of them.

When suspects were eventually arrested, the leniency shown by officials was striking, compared with the draconian treatment of protesters against the regime—hundreds have been killed in the streets, thousands imprisoned, and several executed. But these poisoning suspects thus far remain unnamed and have not been charged. An interior-ministry deputy spoke of the alleged perpetrators as if they were mere schoolyard pranksters. “Among the detainees are those who are not enemies, and who, with calm and proper guidance, will be managed,” the official said.

[Roya Hakakian: The real reason Iran says it’s canceling the morality police]

Until now, the Iranian regime had reserved its worst malevolence for dedicated political opponents. Its operatives have hunted down dissidents, including exiles, and assassinated, disappeared, beheaded, kidnapped, or executed them. If, as Ghaderi and others allege, these school poisonings were state-sanctioned, that would represent a new level of indiscriminate regime violence, dire even by Tehran’s standards, against its citizens. No question, the strength of such a sustained and widespread protest movement has made it the greatest domestic challenge to the Islamic Republic since the clerics took power in 1979. This time, as never before, the protesters were calling not for reform, but for regime change—a demand that even the former presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, under house arrest in Tehran, echoed in a message earlier this year. (The widely suspected vote-rigging in the 2009 election, when Mousavi ran against the conservative incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is what sparked Iran’s last great popular uprising, the Green Movement.)

The unprecedented calls for change within Iran present the United States with a historic opportunity. For years, many Americans have believed that the U.S. robbed Iran of a democratic future by supporting its last monarch, the Shah. History is now offering America a second chance to keep faith with the nation’s democratic aspiration. With Russia and China, and now possibly Saudi Arabia, as its autocratic allies, the theocratic regime in Tehran is poised to survive its economic woes. China hopes to replace America on the world stage, but for the many millions of Iranians who are yearning for a democratic future, China can offer only more of the dark present in which they already live. The Iranians’ demand for the rule of law creates a space for America to act as no other global leader can: by hearing and answering the call of people for freedom.

Afghan men working for the United Nations in Kabul will stay home in solidarity with their female colleagues after the Taliban prohibited Afghan women from working for the global organization, according to a senior UN official.