David Warner is dismissed lbw by Josh Tongue as England finally break through on day three of the second Ashes Test at Lord's.

One of the few fresh governing concepts to emerge from the Trump White House was the realization that many rules are really just suggestions. If you don’t follow them, you might get tut-tutted, and a court might eventually force your hand, but a lot of the time you just get away with it. This is a powerful and dangerous insight, and unfortunately the Biden White House has not completely shunned it.

A perfect example of this dynamic involves the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from being involved in electoral politics in certain circumstances. Usually, a federal employee who violates the law can be punished by the Office of Special Counsel, an agency whose job it is to enforce this particular law. But when it is White House officials who break the law, OSC’s only recourse is to recommend a consequence to the president. The Trump administration blithely flouted the law, refusing to follow OSC’s rulings. Now the Biden administration seems to be doing the same, reacting to one OSC opinion (a very silly one, but still) by simply refusing to heed it.

The path here was blazed by Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to Donald Trump, who OSC determined had repeatedly and brazenly violated the Hatch Act by making comments directly aimed at boosting Trump’s and other Republicans’ campaigns. Trump refused to take action, so Conway kept it up. The OSC chief, Henry Kerner, a Trump appointee, was aghast, telling NPR he was “unaware of any multiple offenders on that level.” To call Conway unrepentant would be understatement. “If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work,” she smirked. “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

[Kate Shaw: The reactions that reveal everything about Trump vs. Biden]

Now Joe Biden’s press operation seems to be taking the same tack. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has often used MAGA as a pejorative term, and Protect the Public’s Trust, a watchdog group run by a Trump-administration appointee, complained to OSC last year, writing that her comments “appear to be political in nature, seeking the defeat of her political opponents in the Republican party.”

OSC replied this month, concluding that Jean-Pierre did in fact violate the Hatch Act: “The timing, frequency, and content of Ms. Jean‐Pierre’s references to ‘MAGA Republicans’ established that she made those references to generate opposition to Republican candidates. Accordingly, making the references constituted political activity.” But OSC recommended no discipline, noting that the White House Counsel’s Office had believed that the reference was acceptable. OSC also issued a memo on the term:

MAGA remains the campaign slogan of a current candidate for partisan political office, and therefore, its use constitutes political activity. This is true regardless of whether the slogan is used positively or negatively to describe—e.g., MAGA officials, MAGA Republicans, MAGA policies, or MAGA Members of Congress. Accordingly, federal employees should not use “MAGA” or “Make America Great Again” while on duty, in the workplace, or when acting in their official capacity, including communicating through social media, email, or on government websites.

This ruling should appear absurd to anyone who has a glancing familiarity with contemporary politics. Although OSC is correct that “MAGA” is an active slogan, it has long since become a more nebulous descriptor that applies to a movement or strain in conservatism—one that government officials could easily have non-electoral reasons to refer to. Candidates who are not Donald Trump refer to themselves as “MAGA”; in casual discourse and in straightforward news articles, the term is a simple and easily understood shorthand for an ideology.

In one study of southern voters, political scientists asked participants to group themselves as “Traditional Republican,” “America First Republican,” or “MAGA,” labels that respondents had no trouble grasping. “People don’t put on the MAGA label like a pair of pants—it’s an identity that some people have more of and some people have less of,” one of the authors, the Western Carolina University professor Chris Cooper, told Poynter last year. As Jean-Pierre noted at a briefing, “Congressional Republicans have also used ‘MAGA’ to refer to policies and official agenda frequently, for years now—even, clearly, before we entered the administration.” OSC also assented to officials’ use of “MAGAnomics” during the Trump administration.

Regardless of its merits, OSC’s ruling is inconvenient for the White House, which has made a strategic decision to define itself against the MAGA movement and thus wants to be able to refer to it. And so the administration has apparently just decided to disregard it. As Axios reports, the press office continues to use “MAGA” even after the ruling. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

[David A. Graham: Justice comes for Hunter Biden]

Progressives sometimes complain that the Democratic Party is unwilling to engage in what I’ve called “total politics”—the practice of stretching the law as far as it will go—leaving it as a wimpy counterpart to a Republican Party that is eager to charge through guardrails. In some situations, a muscular approach may be beneficial and even justified. But this is not one of those instances. Democrats by and large understood why ignoring Hatch Act rulings was bad during the Trump administration, when they lined up to criticize Conway’s lawlessness. Now that we have a Democratic president, the caucus has been muted. I asked Representative Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who earlier this year sponsored an unsuccessful “Kellyanne Conway Amendment” to make violations of the Hatch Act a felony, for his view on the White House’s decision, but his office didn’t reply.

The impulse to just ignore the ruling is understandable—the ruling is, after all, nonsensical—but the proper functioning of government requires that the White House follow OSC’s opinions whether they’re sensible or not. You don’t need a lot of imagination to see why it’s dangerous for an administration to decide whether it agrees with a conclusion before it decides whether to abide by it, or how such a precedent could expand beyond the marshy and unenforceable realm of Hatch Act violations. That’s the kind of lawlessness that voters rejected in 2020. If nothing else, the Biden administration’s thumbing its nose does inadvertently prove its own point: Trump doesn’t have exclusive dominion over MAGA tactics.

Penelope Jackson stabbed her husband David to death following a meal at their home in Somerset.

In the space of two weeks, the country witnessed two major announcements from the Department of Justice: the first federal indictment of a former president (Donald Trump) for unlawful retention of classified documents and related acts of obstruction, concealment, and false statements, and a guilty plea by the son of the sitting president (Hunter Biden) to federal tax and gun charges.

The identities of the defendants mark these as highly significant political events. And the responses to both sets of charges tell us a great deal about the competing visions of governance on display in the early days of the 2024 election—one vision that threatens to destroy core principles of American law, and one that seeks to safeguard them.

Take, first, Trump’s reaction to his federal indictment. In his political rhetoric and in the emerging legal arguments in his defense, Trump claims that he did nothing wrong. The inquiry, by virtue of the fact that it was conducted by the Department of Justice in a Democratic presidential administration, is an inappropriate “political prosecution,” full stop. Trump leveled similar accusations of political motivation in response to the news of Hunter Biden’s plea deal, although here Trump’s accusation was one of favoritism, not persecution.  

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Trump has spent years dismissing every investigation into him as a political witch hunt, so this should come as no surprise. But what has more recently become clear is that when he asserts that the charges against him are political, he isn’t actually critiquing the prosecutors for what he claims is their lack of independence, or suggesting that they should behave in a neutral and apolitical fashion. His claims that the inquiries are “politically motivated” are neither pure bad faith nor pure projection (though they may be both in part).

Instead, they are something more sinister and more revealing: a promise—a promise that if allowed to return to office, he will implement a vision of law enforcement in which no separation exists between prosecutors and political leadership, including the president. In the short term, this would mean benefits for Trump and his friends, and punishment for his enemies. But the long-term consequences would be much more dramatic: the abandonment of the core value of equal justice under law.

Viewed in the full context of the Trump presidency and the Trump reelection campaign, Trump’s charge of “political prosecution” seems to be in service of two related and complementary goals. The first is to convince the public that law enforcement and the administration of justice are inherently political, and thus that the charges against him can’t be trusted. There’s some evidence that this is working: A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 47 percent of the public believes that the charges against Trump are “politically motivated.”

The second, related purpose is to begin to prime the public to accept the fundamental changes Trump would like to make to federal law enforcement, and maybe to federal government more broadly, if given the chance. The irony, of course, is that these changes are designed to make law enforcement and government more political. But if Trump is successful enough in destroying the public’s trust and confidence in federal law enforcement, he may encounter little resistance in seeking to radically reshape core features of American governance.

Here the evidence of what Trump would like to do is crystal clear. Trump has explicitly pledged to weaponize the DOJ against political adversaries, telling supporters on the very day of his federal arraignment that he would “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Joe Biden and his family. He’s indicated that in a second term he’d bring back loyalists such as Jeffrey Clark, a key DOJ ally in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And he has begun to preview the position that all federal employees should serve at the pleasure of the president, which could mean the elimination of long-standing protections that insulate members of the civil service from politically motivated reprisal or removal.

[David A. Graham: Justice comes for Hunter Biden]

All of this is an extension of what was on display throughout Trump’s presidency. This is a man who, as president, regularly flouted norms of separation between his personal or partisan interests and those of the American government. He was also singularly focused on attacking the career civil service, which he referred to as the “deep state.” He inveighed constantly against the “shadowy cabal” that he suggested was seeking to undermine him, and he worked to weaken standards of independence and nonpartisanship inside the federal government. Late in his term in office, he issued an executive order purporting to create a new federal-employment status, “Schedule F”; had it gone into effect, this order would have allowed political appointees to reclassify large swaths of the civil service in order to bring them under political control.

So when Trump calls these prosecutions “political,” he’s offering a candid account of his understanding of the relationship between the president and federal prosecutors—that federal prosecutors, like all federal employees, are subject to the directive authority of the president, and so Biden must be behind the pursuit of Trump. Trump’s complaint actually isn’t about this as an ordering principle—it’s that at the moment, he isn’t in a position to leverage the power of the state for his personal benefit. This claim may sound startling, but it follows naturally from Trump’s brand of right-wing populism, one that that offers a narrow vision of who is authentically a member of the polity—his supporters—and pledges to both represent and protect that circumscribed population against a shifting “other”: liberals, the media, prosecutors in Democratic administrations. As Trump recently promised supporters, “I am the only one that can save this nation because you know they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. And I just happened to be standing in their way. And I will never be moving.”

These views are in profound tension with core features of the American political and constitutional tradition—which since at least the late 19th century has emphasized the importance of nonpartisanship and expertise in the federal government in general, and in law enforcement in particular. But Trump is not alone in dissenting from the consensus. GOP-primary hopeful and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has suggested that long-standing norms of DOJ independence are inconsistent with the Constitution. Work by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Representative Jim Jordan on the “weaponization” committee has sought to use congressional-oversight authority to bully and intimidate career officials.

The Trump camp’s response to the news of Hunter Biden’s agreement to plead guilty to two counts of tax evasion, and to accept a diversion agreement to avoid gun charges, is revealing on this score. For years, Trump has fixated on the DOJ’s failure to prosecute Hunter Biden as evidence of political favoritism. Now that Hunter Biden has been charged, and has pleaded guilty, Trump has shifted to accusations that the plea terms are excessively lenient, attributable to—you guessed it—political favoritism. The fact that the investigation and charging decisions were made by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee whom Biden asked to remain in office, is immaterial, as is the fact that the FBI is still run by Christopher Wray, who was handpicked by Donald Trump; so is the fact that on many accounts these charges are harsher than those that would have been brought against an individual guilty of similar conduct but with a different last name.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

All of this contrasts profoundly with President Biden’s handling of his son’s legal difficulties. Biden has bent over backwards to abide by essential bipartisan norms of law-enforcement independence and insulation from political interference. His retention of a Trump appointee as the top Delaware prosecutor was clearly driven by a desire to ensure that the Hunter investigation would be carried out by someone he had not chosen. His decision to permit John Durham to complete his investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation was similar, as was his hands-off approach to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of special counsels to investigate the handling of classified materials by both former Vice President Mike Pence and President Biden himself.

In addition to making these personnel decisions, both Biden and Garland have held their silence on politically sensitive investigations. Biden’s lone remarks about his son’s prosecution pledged love and support “as he continues to rebuild his life.” He has maintained a studied silence on Trump’s indictment, and by all accounts intends to continue it.

In all of this, President Biden has offered, through deeds more than words, a different model of governance. His silence and discretion are admirable, and they grow out of a principled commitment to avoiding any hint of political meddling in sensitive law-enforcement matters. Two strikingly different visions are on offer when it comes to the future of the relationship between law enforcement and politics.

The trouble is, the two visions are not equally apparent. Trump’s vision is on stark display; Biden’s approach is more notable for its lack of action—the refusal to comment, his decision to remain hands-off. Americans have to note these absences as collectively the presence of something else: a demonstrated commitment to a functional system of depersonalized, impartial justice. But Biden’s approach should not be misunderstood as inaction or passivity. It is, rather, an active and considered attempt to preserve the principle that, as Special Counsel Jack Smith put it when announcing the Trump indictment, there is “one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

Donald Trump is not an articulate speaker, but he is an effective one, because he understands the power of the spoken word and deftly wields tone and inflection. One reason the tape of him boasting about sexual assault was such a bombshell was that you could actually listen to Trump saying it all in his inimitable manner. What if there had been tapes of his conversations with FBI Director James Comey? Or his attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a phone call in which implication seemed so important but is impossible to capture on the page? Or of his conversation with Kevin McCarthy on January 6?

These are idle questions, but they are helpful for thinking about a recording of Trump talking about classified documents, obtained by CNN and published last night. In the recording, Trump discusses a document he says was a plan produced by the Defense Department for attacking Iran. He describes it as “highly confidential … secret information” and says that he could have declassified it as president—contra his public insistence that he did. A transcript of almost all of the audio was made public in the federal indictment of Trump earlier this month, so most of the substance is not new. Yet hearing Trump say it in his own voice is a more real and visceral experience, undermining the former president’s defense and perhaps illuminating his motivations.

[David A. Graham: Lordy, there are tapes]

Other than the redaction of “Iran,” the two things omitted from the conversation in the indictment are echt Trump. In one aside, he jokes that Hillary Clinton would have sent such classified material to Anthony Weiner, “the pervert.” The irony of Trump mocking Clinton’s mishandling of classified material while mishandling classified material was apparently not lost on Special Counsel Jack Smith, who included several Trump remarks criticizing Clinton during the 2016 campaign in the indictment. The second is one final line at the end, where Trump orders, “Hey, bring some, uh, bring some Cokes in please.” The tape does not make clear to whom he is speaking, but the man who often has that task is Walt Nauta—the aide who is charged with several felonies alongside Trump.

Trump hasn’t tried to deny he had the conversation transcribed in the indictment, so the tape doesn’t knock out any of his defenses. He has claimed that the rustling documents audible in this tape were just newspaper clippings, which doesn’t make any sense with what he says, though the recording itself doesn’t provide evidence in either direction. Last night on his social-media site, Trump inexplicably and without elaboration called the recording “an exoneration.”

More broadly, Trump’s defense strategy, such as it is, hasn’t really been to deny that he had classified documents. Instead, he’s pursued a (flimsy) political argument that he is being unfairly targeted. Yet an enigma remains: Why was Trump so insistent on holding on to the sensitive documents? He’s never been all that interested in policy questions. He doesn’t seem to want them for a presidential memoir. But even after the federal government threatened him with prosecution, he continued to seek ways to hide documents, leading to 37 felony charges.

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

This mystery has led to fevered speculation about, for example, Trump trying to sell sensitive material for his own profit. Neither the indictment nor any other known evidence supports this. But listening to the tape reinforces a different understanding. Trump is incapable of separating his own individual feuds—in this case, with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—from matters of state and national security. The former president reverses the old feminist mantra: For Trump, the political is personal.

He has regularly demonstrated this tendency, in both directions. On the one hand, he has conflated his own interests and the government’s—whether that is demanding personal loyalty from civil servants, or using the government to direct money and business to his private ventures. On the other, he never seemed to grasp the importance of his position. As president, he shot from the hip, not recognizing that while an outlandish statement he made as a TV star might land him on the front page of the New York Post, an outlandish statement he made as president could rupture alliances or foment violence.

In the case of the classified documents, both forms are at play. Trump refuses to recognize that records from his administration could possibly belong to the federal government rather than him. And he hoarded the documents for use in settling personal scores against government employees.

[David A. Graham: Trump misses the point]

At the time of the recording in this case, a New Yorker article had reported that Milley worried Trump would attack Iran in the last days of his administration. Trump brandished what he said was a plan to attack Iran in order to claim that Milley, and not he, was the real warmonger. What was interesting about the document to Trump was not that it was classified and thus illicit (though he knew that, as he demonstrated), nor that it was substantively interesting. The only reason Trump cared was that he could maybe use it for settling scores.

Once you start looking for the political-as-personal dynamic, you can find it everywhere in the story. It explains why Trump mixed ephemera like newspaper clippings and golf clothing in with some of the most sensitive government documents. It perhaps explains why he thought nothing of storing his stuff in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. And it explains why he was so peevish about anybody looking in his boxes. “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” Trump told one of his lawyers, according to notes the lawyer kept.

That’s relatable. Who wants somebody rifling through the personal materials related to the grudges he keeps? Taking what Trump says at face value is usually unwise. But in this case, he may have really meant exactly what he said. The only problem is, those materials weren’t his to begin with.

The inspector-general position at the State Department has been vacant for more than three years. President Donald Trump removed the previous inspector general, Steve Linick, in May 2020 as part of a series of firings that one article called the “slow-motion Friday night massacre of inspectors general.” Yet, more than two years into a new administration, President Joe Biden still has not nominated anyone for the vacancy. Instead, the vacancy has been filled by a string of acting IGs, which are not the same as a confirmed one.    

Other agencies have also lacked a permanent inspector general for too long. The Department of the Treasury inspector-general position has been vacant for almost four years; the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) position has been vacant for more than two. Four other agencies are also waiting for the president to nominate an inspector general.

President Biden should nominate candidates for these positions immediately. The delays are not good for the inspectors general’s offices, for the agencies, and for public confidence in oversight of the agencies.

Inspectors general perform a difficult but essential role. Their job is to independently audit, evaluate, and investigate agency programs and operations. They expose waste, fraud, and abuse, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government operations. They return billions of dollars to the federal Treasury. They hold powerful government officials accountable for alleged misconduct. They promote transparency in government and inform taxpayers how their money is being spent. In a previous article, I called them some of the most important public servants you’ve never heard of.    

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

And yet, too many of these crucial positions are currently filled by acting inspectors general. In the State Department, for example, the inspector general’s office has been led by acting IGs for lengthy periods. Before Linick’s tenure, a foreign-service officer served as the acting inspector general for five years, throughout the entire first term of the Obama administration, from 2008 to 2013. Linick was finally nominated and confirmed in 2013, and he provided stable leadership for seven years. After he was fired in 2020, several more acting inspectors general have led the office, some for short periods of time, others for longer. This instability in permanent leadership can hurt an inspector general’s office and its long-term ability to manage its challenging mission.

To be sure, many acting inspectors general do their best in their unpopular role even though they do not know how long their tenure will be. I was both a confirmed inspector general of the Department of Justice for more than a decade (from 2000 to 2011), and served as the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense for more than four years (from 2016 to 2020). President Trump removed me as the acting DOD inspector general around the time he fired the State Department inspector general and several others.

When I was the acting DOD inspector general, I tried to make the same hard decisions that a confirmed one would. But serving as an acting inspector general is not the same as being the permanent one. Some officials in an agency—as well as some in the inspector general’s office—think they can wait out an acting inspector general, who may not be in the position for a long time. Agency officials may not respond to the acting inspector general’s reports and recommendations with the same urgency. A permanent inspector general is more likely to implement long-term strategic changes or take difficult personnel actions within the office. It is easier for a permanent inspector general to recruit talented employees and managers who know that the inspector general is likely to remain in office. Congress and the public sometimes question whether an acting inspector general is holding the agency accountable in the same way as a confirmed one, no matter the qualifications, experience, or track record of the acting inspector general.

President Biden has long been a fervent supporter of inspectors general. When he was the vice president, he worked closely with inspectors general to provide oversight of $800 billion in Recovery Act funding. He has regularly praised the work of inspectors general, saying in his most recent State of the Union address: “Before I came to office many inspector generals were sidelined. Fraud was rampant. Last year, I told you, the watchdogs are back.”

[David A. Graham: Trump is attacking the final safeguard against executive abuses]

Yet despite this welcome support, more than two years into his administration, he still has not nominated an inspector general for the State Department, the Treasury Department, or USAID. There are suitable candidates, both within the inspector-general community and elsewhere in government. In the past, some of the best inspectors general had previous experience running other inspector-general offices in smaller agencies, or serving as deputy or assistant inspectors general. President Biden could select someone like that for the vacant positions.

Some agency heads resist the nomination of an inspector general for their agency. Some agencies even opposed the creation of an inspector general, arguing that such oversight was not necessary. The Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Defense, among others, initially argued they did not need an inspector general. Now the Supreme Court resists oversight and an inspector general for the federal judiciary. But every organization needs oversight, even the federal judiciary.

Certainly, it is important to pick the right person for the position—someone with the experience, temperament, and backbone to handle the challenging assignment. An ineffective or inexperienced inspector general can undermine an inspector general’s office, hamstring an agency, and impair the overall credibility of inspectors general, as evidenced by the problems in the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office.

But it should not take more than two years for the administration to interview, vet, and select an appropriate candidate for vacant inspector-general positions. Even after a nomination, it will still be a long time, if history is a guide, before the Senate confirms the nominees.

The president should nominate inspectors general for the vacant positions now. There is no excuse for the lengthy delays in filling these important roles.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech is warbling, crackling, scratchy—sort of like Marge Simpson’s. His voice, he told me, is “fucked up.” The official medical diagnosis is spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the larynx. He didn’t always sound this way; his speaking style changed when he was in his 40s. Kennedy has said he suspects an influenza vaccine might have been the catalyst. This idea is not supported by science.

He was telling me about his life with one arm outstretched on the velvet sofa of his suite at the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan. It was the end of May, and a breeze blew in through the open doors leading to a private terrace. Two of his aides sat nearby, typing and eavesdropping. A security guard stood in the hallway.

Kennedy was finishing a plate of room-service risotto, and his navy tie was carefully tucked into his white button-down shirt. He’s taller, tanner, and buffer than the average 69-year-old. He is, after all, a Kennedy. His blue eyes oscillate between piercing and adrift, depending on the topic of discussion.

He told me that he’s surrounded by “integrative medical people”—naturopaths, osteopaths, healers of all sorts. “A lot of them think that they can cure me,” he said. Last year, Kennedy traveled to Japan for surgery to try to fix his voice. “I’ve got these doctors that have given me a formula,” he said. “They’re not even doctors, actually, these guys.”

I asked him what, exactly, he was taking.

“The stuff that they gave me? I don’t know what it is. It’s supposed to reorient your electric energy.” He believes it’s working.

When he was 19, Kennedy jumped off a dock into shallow water, which he says left him nearly paralyzed. For decades, he could hardly turn his head. Seven years ago, at a convention of chiropractors, a healer performed a 30-minute “manipulation of energy”—making chanting noises while holding his hands six inches over Kennedy’s body. The next morning, his neck felt better. “I don’t know if they had anything to do with each other, but, you know, it was weird,” he said.

Though he’s been a member of the premier American political dynasty his whole life and a noted environmentalist for decades, most people are just now discovering the breadth and depth of Kennedy’s belief system. He has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”

Kennedy reached a new level of notoriety in 2021, after the publication of his conspiratorial treatise The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It has sold more than 1 million copies, according to his publisher, “despite censorship, boycotts from bookstores and libraries, and hit pieces against the author.” The book cemented his status as one of America’s foremost anti-vaxxers. It also helped lay the foundation for his Democratic presidential primary campaign against Joe Biden.

[Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

On the campaign trail, he paints a conspiratorial picture of collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. If elected, he has said he would gut the Food and Drug Administration and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.” His most ominous message is also his simplest: He feels his country is being taken away from him. It’s a familiar theme, similar to former President Donald Trump’s. But whereas Trump relies heavily on white identity politics, Kennedy is spinning up a more diverse web of supporters: anti-vaxxers, anti-government individuals, Silicon Valley magnates, “freethinking” celebrities, libertarians, Trump-weary Republicans, and Democrats who believe Biden is too old and feeble for a second term.

So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent. What had initially been written off as a stunt has evolved into a complex threat to both Biden and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way: Kennedy’s support is real.

He is tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche. Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them. Falling down conspiratorial internet rabbit holes has become an entirely normal pastime. Study after study confirms a very real “epidemic of loneliness.” Scores of people are bored and depressed and searching for narratives to help explain their anxiety and isolation. Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.

Even though Kennedy remains a long-shot candidate, his presence in the 2024 race cannot be ignored. “My goal is to do the right thing, and whatever God wants is going to happen,” Kennedy told me. He now earnestly believes that in 12 months, he will be the Democratic nominee for president.

“Every individual, like every nation, has a darker side and a lighter side,” Kennedy told me. “And the easiest thing for a political leader to do is to appeal to all those darker angels.”

He was talking about George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor and subject of Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard.

“Most populism begins with a core of idealism, and then it’s hijacked,” he said. “Because the easiest way to keep a populist movement together is by appealing—you employ all the alchemies of demagoguery—and appealing to our greed, our anger, our hatred, our fear, our xenophobia, tribal impulses.”

Does Kennedy consider himself a populist? “He considers himself a Democrat,” his communications director, Stefanie Spear, told me in an email. The most charitable spin on Kennedy’s candidacy is that he aims to be the iconoclastic unifier of a polarized country. He looks in the mirror and sees a man fighting for the rights of the poor and the powerless, as his father did when he ran for president more than half a century ago.

Kennedy markets himself as a maverick, someone outside the system. But he’s very much using his lineage—son of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy—as part of his sales pitch. Now living in Los Angeles with his third wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, he nonetheless launched his campaign in Boston, the center of the Kennedy universe. The phrase I’M A KENNEDY DEMOCRAT is splashed across the center of his campaign website. Visitors can click through a carousel of wistful black-and-white family photos. There he is as a young boy with a gap-toothed smile, offering a salute. There he is visiting his Uncle John in the Oval Office.

[Alan Brinkley: The legacy of John F. Kennedy]

Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, with their seven children, in February 1963. (Ethel was expecting their eighth child in June.) The boys, from left, are Robert Jr., 8; David, 7; Michael, 4; and Joe, 10. The girls, from left, are Kathleen, 11; Kerry, 3; and Mary Courtney, 6. (AP)

In reality, his relationship with his family is more complicated. Several of his siblings have criticized his anti-vaccine activism around COVID. Last year, at an anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C., Kennedy suggested that Jews in Nazi Germany had more freedom than Americans today. In response, his sister Kerry Kennedy tweeted, “Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive. I strongly condemn him for his hateful rhetoric.” (He later issued an apology.) In 2019, a trio of notable Kennedys wrote an op-ed in Politico pegged to a recent measles outbreak in the United States. RFK Jr., they said, “has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Several Kennedys serve in the Biden administration, and others—including RFK Jr.’s younger sister Rory and his first cousin Patrick—are actively supporting Biden’s reelection effort.

Multiple eras of Kennedy’s life have been marked by violence and despair. He was just 14 years old when his father was assassinated. His second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, struggled with mental illness and died by suicide while the couple was estranged and in the process of divorcing. He told me he believes that “almost every American has been exposed, mostly within their own families, to mental illness, depression, drug addiction, alcoholism.” In 1983, Kennedy himself was arrested for heroin possession and entered rehab. He recently told The Washington Post that he still regularly attends 12-step meetings.

Kennedy maintains a mental list of everyone he’s known who has died. He told me that each morning he spends an hour having a quiet conversation with those people, usually while out hiking alone. He asks the deceased to help him be a good person, a good father, a good writer, a good attorney. He prays for his six children. He’s been doing this for 40 years. The list now holds more than 200 names.

I asked him if he felt that his dad or uncle had sent him any messages encouraging him to run for president.

“I don’t really have two-way conversations of that type,” he said. “And I would mistrust anything that I got from those waters, because I know there’s people throughout history who have heard voices.”

He laughed.

“It’s hard to be the arbiter of your own sanity. It’s dangerous.”

The morning before we met, I watched a recent interview Kennedy had given to ABC News in which he said, “I don’t trust authority.” In our conversation, I asked him how he planned to campaign on this message while simultaneously persuading voters to grant him the most consequential authority in the world.

“My intention is to make authority trustworthy,” he said, sounding like a shrewd politician. “People don’t trust authority, because the trusted authorities have been lying to them. The media lies to the public.”

I was recording our conversation on two separate devices. I asked him if the dual recordings, plus the fact that he could see me taking notes, was enough to convince him that whatever I wrote would be accurate.

“Your quotes of mine may be accurate,” he said. “Do I think that they may be twisted? I think that’s highly likely. ”

I wondered why, if that was the case, he had agreed to talk with me at all.

“I’ll talk to anybody,” he said.

That includes some of the most prominent figures in right-wing politics. He told me that he’d met with Trump before he was inaugurated, and that he had once flown on Trump’s private plane. (Later he said he believes Trump could lead America “down the road to darkness.”) He told me how, as a young man, he had spent several weeks in a tent in Kenya with Roger Ailes—they were filming a nature documentary—and how they had remained friends even though Kennedy disapproved of Ailes’s tactics at Fox News. He also brought up Tucker Carlson. I asked if he’d spoken with the former Fox News host since his firing earlier this spring.

“I’ve texted with him,” Kennedy said.

“What’s he up to?” I asked.

“He’s—you know what he’s up to. He’s starting a Twitter … thing. Yeah, I’m going to go on it. They’ve already contacted me.”

Kennedy told me he’s heard the whispers about the nature of his campaign. Some people believe his candidacy is just a stalking-horse bid to help elect Trump, or at least siphon support away from Biden.

One week before Kennedy entered the race, the longtime Trump ally and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone wrote a curious Substack post titled “What About Bobby?” in which he suggested the idea of a Trump-Kennedy unity ticket. In a text message to me, Stone said his essay was nothing but a “whimsical” piece of writing, noting that the idea had “legal and political” obstacles. A photo of the two men—plus former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a notable conspiracy theorist—had been circulating on the internet; Stone called it opposition research from Biden’s team. “Contrary to Twitter created mythology, I don’t know Robert Kennedy,” he texted. “I have no role in his campaign, and certainly played no role in his decision to run.”

I asked Kennedy about a recent report that had gotten some attention: Had Steve Bannon encouraged him to enter the race?

[From the July/August 2022 issue: American Rasputin]

“No,” he said. “I mean, let me put it this way: I never heard any encouragement from him. And I never spoke to him.” He then offered a clarification: He had been a guest on Bannon’s podcast during the pandemic once or twice, and the two had met a few years before that.

When I asked Bannon if he had urged Kennedy to challenge Biden, he said, “I don’t want to talk about personal conversations.” He told me he believes Kennedy could be a major political figure. “I was pleasantly surprised when he announced,” he said.

“He’s drawing from many of those Trump voters—the two-time Obama, onetime Trump—that are still disaffected, want change, and maybe haven’t found a permanent home in the Trump movement,” Bannon said. “Populist left, populist right—and where that Venn diagram overlaps—he’s talking to those people.” Bannon told me the audience for his podcast, War Room, “loves” Kennedy. “I think Tucker’s seeing it, Rogan’s seeing it, other people—the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right, obviously some of us are farther right than others—I think are seeing it. It’s a new nomenclature in politics,” he said.

“And obviously the Democrats are scared to death of it, so they don’t even want to touch it. They want to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Photograph by Chris Buck for The Atlantic

Perhaps more than anyone in politics, Kennedy is the embodiment of the crunchy-to-conspiracist pipeline—the pathway from living a life honoring the natural world to questioning, well, everything you thought you knew. For much of his life, he was a respected attorney and environmentalist. In the 1980s, Kennedy began working with the nonprofit Riverkeeper to preserve New York’s Hudson River, and he later co-founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is affiliated with conservation efforts around the world. Like many other environmentalists, he grew distrustful of government, convinced that regulatory agencies had fallen under the thrall of the corporations they were supposed to be supervising.

I asked Kennedy if there was a link between his earlier work and his present-day advocacy against vaccines. “The most direct and concrete nexus is mercury,” he said.

In the 2000s, Kennedy said, he read a report about the presence of mercury in fish. “It struck me then that we were living in a science-fiction nightmare where my children and the children of most Americans could now no longer engage in this seminal primal activity of American youth, which is to go fishing with their father and mother at their local fishing hole and come home and safely eat the fish,” he said.

As an environmentalist, Kennedy traveled around the country giving lectures, and about two decades ago, mercury poisoning became a focal point of these talks. He soon noticed a pattern: Mothers would approach him after his speeches, telling him about their children’s developmental issues, which they were convinced could be traced back to vaccines that contained thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative. “They all had kind of the same story,” Kennedy said. “Which was striking to me, because my inclination would be to dismiss them.”

[Read: Inside the mind of an anti-vaxxer]

He said that one of these women, a Minnesotan named Sarah Bridges, showed up on his front porch with a pile of studies 18 inches deep, telling him, “I’m not leaving here until you read those.” Kennedy read the abstracts, and his beliefs about vaccines began to shift. He went on to become the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine nonprofit.

When I contacted Bridges, she noted that she is a college friend of Kennedy’s sister-in-law and clarified that she had approached Kennedy while visiting his family’s compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, she confirmed that she gave Kennedy a stack of documents related to thimerosal, and that this likely was the beginning of his anti-vaccine journey.

Bridges’s family story is tragic: One of her children ended up in the hospital after receiving the pertussis vaccine. He now lives with a seizure disorder, developmental delays, and autism—conditions Bridges believes were ultimately caused by his reaction to the vaccine, even though studies have shown that vaccines do not cause autism. Bridges says she received compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, colloquially known as “vaccine court,” for her son’s brain damage.

Bridges doesn’t consider herself an anti-vaxxer. She told me that she still talks with Kennedy once in a while, but that she was surprised to learn he was running for president. She’s a lifelong Democrat, and declined to say whether she would support him in the election. She did tell me that she has received two doses of the COVID vaccine. She views the extremity of her son’s reaction as the exception, not the rule. “I think the American public is smart enough that we can have a nuanced conversation: that vaccines can both be a public good and there can be—and there, I think, is—a subset of people who don’t respond to them,” she said.

Kennedy’s campaign manager, the former Ohio congressman and two-time presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, strongly objects to anyone labeling his candidate “anti-vaxx.” When I used the term to describe Kennedy, Kucinich told me that such a characterization was a “left-handed smear” and “a clipped assessment that has been used for political purposes by the adherents of the pharmaceutical industry who want to engage in a sort of absurd reductionism.” Kennedy, he said, stands for vaccine safety.

I asked Kucinich to specify which vaccines Kennedy supports. He seemed flummoxed.

“No!” he said. “This is … no. We’re not—look, no.”

At one point, Kennedy looked me dead in the eye and asked if I knew where the term conspiracy theory came from. I did not. He informed me that the phrase was coined by the CIA after his uncle’s assassination in 1963 as part of a larger effort to discredit anyone who claimed that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, hadn’t acted alone. This origin story is not true. A recent Associated Press fact-check dates the term’s usage as far back as 1863, and notes that it also appeared in reports after the shooting of President James Garfield in 1881.

JFK’s assassination and Kennedy’s father’s, just five years apart, are two of the defining moments of modern American life. But they are difficult subjects to discuss with surviving family members without feeling exploitative. Kennedy doesn’t shy away from talking about either murder, and embraces conspiracy theories about both.

“I think the evidence that the CIA murdered my uncle is overwhelming, I would say, beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “As an attorney, I would be very comfortable arguing that case to a jury. I think that the evidence that the CIA murdered my father is circumstantial but very, very, very persuasive. Or very compelling. Let me put it that way—very compelling. And of course the CIA participation in the cover-up of both those murders is also beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s very well documented.” (In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson said: “The notion that CIA was involved in the deaths of either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy is absolutely false.”)

Two years ago, hundreds of QAnon supporters gathered in Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK’s assassination. They were convinced that JFK Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, would dramatically reappear and that Donald Trump would be reinstated as president. I asked Kennedy what he made of all this.

“Are you equating them with people who believe that my uncle was killed by the CIA?” he asked. There was pain in his voice. It was the first time in our conversation that he appeared to get upset.

[From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as pallbearer during his father’s funeral (Photo by Fairchild Archive / Penske Media / Getty)

Unlike many conspiracists, Kennedy will actually listen to and respond to your questions. He’s personable, and does not come off as a jerk. But he gets essential facts wrong, and remains prone to statements that can leave you dumbfounded. Recently, the Fox News host Neil Cavuto had to correct him on air after he claimed that “we”—as in the United States—had “killed 350,000 Ukrainian kids.”

I brought up the QAnon adherents who’d flocked to Dallas because I wanted to know how he felt about the fact that so many disparate conspiracies in America were blending together. I asked him what he would say to Alex Jones, the conspiracist who spent years lying about the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“There’s only so many discussions that you can have, and only so many areas where you can actually, you know, examine the evidence,” Kennedy said. “I’d say, ‘Show me the evidence of what you’re saying, and let’s look at it, and let’s look at whether it is conceivably real.’” He told me he didn’t know exactly what Jones had said about the tragedy. When I explained that Jones had claimed the whole thing was a hoax—and that he had lost a landmark defamation suit—Kennedy said he thought that was an appropriate outcome. “If somebody says something’s wrong, sue them.”

“I mean,” he said, “I know people whose children were killed at Sandy Hook.”

Who will vote for Kennedy?

He was recently endorsed by the Clueless star Alicia Silverstone. Earlier this month, Jack Dorsey, the hippie billionaire and a Twitter co-founder, shared a Fox News clip of Kennedy saying he could beat Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in 2024. “He can and will,” Dorsey tweeted. Another tech mogul, David Sacks, recently co-hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy, as well as a Twitter Spaces event with him alongside his “PayPal mafia” ally Elon Musk. Sacks, whose Twitter header photo features a banner that reads FREE SPEECH, has an eclectic history of political donations: Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and DeSantis, to name a few.

Kennedy continues to win praise from right-wing activists, influencers, and media outlets. While some of this support feels earnest, like a fawning multithousand-word ode from National Review, others feel like a wink. The New York Post covered his campaign-kickoff event under the headline “‘Never Seen So Many Hot MILFs’: Inside RFK Jr’s White House Bid Launch.”

So far, Kennedy hasn’t staged many rallies. He favors long, winding media appearances. (He’s said that he believes 2024 “will be decided by podcasts.”) He recently talked COVID and 5G conspiracy theories with Joe Rogan, and his conversation with Jordan Peterson was removed from YouTube because of what the company deemed COVID misinformation. The day we met, Kennedy told me that he had just recorded a podcast with the journalist Matt Taibbi.

I asked Taibbi, who wrote for me when I was an editor at Rolling Stone and who now publishes independently on Substack, if he could see himself voting for Kennedy next year.

“Yeah, it’s possible,” Taibbi said. “I didn’t vote for anybody last time, because it was …” He trailed off, stifling laughter. “I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So if he manages to get the nomination, I would certainly consider it.”

Years ago, in a long Rolling Stone article, Kennedy falsely asserted that the 2004 election had been stolen. The article has since been deleted from the magazine’s online archive.

“I’ve never been a fan of electoral-theft stories,” Taibbi said. “But I don’t have to agree with RFK about everything,” he added. “He’s certainly farther along on his beliefs about the vaccine than I am. But I think he is tapping into something that I definitely feel is legitimate, which is this frustration with the kind of establishment reporting, and this feeling of a lack of choice, and the frustration over issues like Ukraine—you know, that kind of stuff. I totally get his candidacy from that standpoint.”

Kennedy’s campaign operation is lean. He told Sacks and Musk that he has only about 50 people on the payroll. He’s beginning to spend more time in the early-voting state of New Hampshire. I asked Kucinich about Kennedy’s plans for summer: large-scale rallies? A visit to the Iowa State Fair? He could offer no concrete details, and told me to stay tuned.

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

Despite the buzz and early attention, Kennedy does not have a clear path to the nomination. No incumbent president in modern history has been defeated in a primary. (Kennedy’s uncle Ted came close during his primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.) Following decades of precedent, the Democratic National Committee won’t hold primary debates against a sitting president.

“We’re not spending much time right now thinking about the DNC,” he said. “We’re organizing our own campaign.”

Spokespeople for the DNC, the Biden campaign, and the White House did not offer comment for this article.

“Democrats know RFK Jr. isn’t actually a Democrat,” Jim Messina, who led Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and is in close touch with the Biden 2024 team, said in a statement. “He is not a legitimate candidate in the Democratic primary and shouldn’t be treated like one. His offensive ideas align him with Trump and the other GOP candidates running for president, and are repellent to what Democrats and swing voters are looking for.”

I asked Kennedy what he thought would be more harmful to the country: four more years of Biden or another term for Trump.

“I can’t answer that,” he said.

He paused for a long beat. He shook his head, then pivoted the conversation to Russia.

“I think that either one of them is, you know, I mean, I can conceive of Biden getting us into a nuclear war right now.”

Kennedy’s 2024 campaign, like Trump’s, has an epic We are engaged in a final showdown tenor to it. But maybe this sentiment runs deeper than his current candidacy. These are the opening lines of Kennedy’s 2018 memoir, American Values:

From my youngest days I always had the feeling that we were all involved in some great crusade, that the world was a battleground for good and evil, and that our lives would be consumed in that conflict. It would be my good fortune if I could play an important or heroic role.

[Read: The martyr at CPAC]

Since meeting Kennedy, I’ve thought about what he said about populism—how it emerges, how it’s exploited and weaponized. He seems to believe that he is doing the right thing by running for president, that history has finally found him, as it found his uncle and father. That he is the man—the Kennedy—to lead America through an era of unrelenting chaos. But I don’t know how to believe his message when it’s enveloped in exaggeration, conspiracy, and falsehoods.

The United States has grown only more conspiratorial in the half century since the publication of Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” There are those who refuse to get the COVID vaccine because of the slim potential of adverse side effects, and then there are those who earnestly fear that these innoculations are a way for the federal government to implant microchips in the bodies of citizens. The line between fact and fantasy has blurred, and fewer and fewer Americans are tethered to something larger or more meaningful than themselves.

Kennedy was raised in the Catholic Church and regularly attended Mass for most of his life. These days, he told me, his belief system is drawn from a wide array of sources.

“The first line of the Tao is something to the effect that ‘If it can be said, then it’s not truth’—that the path that is prescribed to you is never the true path, that basically we all have to find our own path to God, and to enlightenment, or nirvana, or whatever you call it,” he said.

He’s now walking his family’s path, determined to prevail in the battle of good against evil. He’s said he’s running under the premise of telling people the truth.

But as with so many of the stories he tells, it’s hard to square Kennedy’s truth with reality.

David Warburton, who was accused of sexual misconduct, says its influence has created an "unfair" situation.

David Gill must serve 16 years for killing Pat McCormick and dumping his weighted body in a lake.

Each October for the past several years, when I prepare to fork over too much money to stream every single San Antonio Spurs game, it has been with an eye to the past.

I rationalize the expense: Gregg Popovich is the greatest basketball coach of all time; over the course of 27 years leading the Spurs, he has won five championships and more than 1,300 games, and given San Antonians a lifetime of memories. And although in the past few seasons the Spurs have won … less, to put it mildly, they’ve played with the same passion and reverence for the game of basketball that Pop demands. There’s no way I can stop supporting him and the team just because they are in a slump. When Keldon Johnson dives for a loose ball in a meaningless-but-close game in April of a 20-win season, I think of the way Manu Ginóbili used to throw his body around for the team and smile. Or, when Sandro Mamukelashvili comes out of nowhere to steal the show against the two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić in a surprise March win, I’m reminded of leaping out of my seat in the Alamodome, cheering for another gritty Malik Rose performance.

I hold on to the hope that with Pop still in control, things might turn around. He might still be able to squeeze a bit of greatness out of players who don’t know how good they could be. Luckily for the franchise, there’s reason to believe that a player is on the way who has the chance to be an all-timer.

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that Americans don’t dominate basketball]

Last month, the Spurs won the first pick in the NBA-draft lottery—where teams who missed the playoffs find out the year’s draft order; the worse your team was, the better odds you have of getting an early pick. If all goes as expected tonight, they will select Victor Wembanyama, the 19-year-old French generational prospect who, at 7 foot 2, has the frame of a center with the ball-handling ability and finesse of a guard. NBA scouts have salivated over “Wemby” for years, calling him the best prospect since LeBron James (no pressure), and soon, he will likely call San Antonio home.

“The Spurs are part of the lifeblood of the city, and almost instantaneously you saw the mood shift and the hopes of the city just shoot through the roof,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who watched the draft lottery in his car, told me. “The Spurs have been through some tough times over the last several years, and fortune seems to have shifted in an instant.” If you need a gauge for the excitement in the city, roughly 3,000 fans made deposits for season tickets in the two days after the lottery, and the first three rows of courtside seats sold out, as did the suites. One NBA scout estimated that Wembanyama could add $500 million to the value of the franchise thanks to his name recognition, international celebrity, and talent. And Spurs fans know what a No. 1 pick means for the city—we’ve seen it before.

On May 18, 1997, the day of that year’s lottery, the Spurs had just come off a surprisingly terrible season. David Robinson, the star big man whom they had taken with the No. 1 draft pick a decade prior, had been sidelined the entire year with a back injury. With Robinson, the Spurs had been a 60-win playoff team over the previous two seasons; without him, they struggled to cobble together 20 victories all year. But that night, the Spurs were putting the season behind them, because their struggles meant they were again well positioned to land the first pick.

That year’s drawing was the Tim Duncan sweepstakes. Duncan, who’d shone as a power forward at Wake Forest University, snagging rebounds in games like he was the only man on the court, was no doubt going to be selected first. The Spurs didn’t have the best odds of getting the first choice—that honor went to the Boston Celtics, who’d lost 34 of their final 38 games of the season—but they had hope. And as the lottery went along, that hope turned into belief. “I was nervous,” Spurs chair Peter Holt told reporters at the time. “But when we started getting down to 3-2-1, I got excited.” When the envelope was opened—revealing the fiesta-colored Spurs logo—Holt could do nothing but pump his fists.

On June 25, a little over a month later, during the draft itself, the Spurs made their selection official. Two first-overall picks—Duncan and Robinson—would be teaming up, and the league was terrified. As Stu Jackson, then general manager of the Vancouver Grizzlies, put it at the time: “I don’t mind getting the fourth pick … What I mind is having to face Robinson and Duncan in the West four times next season.”

I turned 6 the next day; Duncan became the birthday gift that kept on giving.

Two seasons after the Spurs selected Duncan, their luck began to pay off.

It’s Memorial Day, May 31, 1999, and the Spurs are in the Western Conference finals—one series away from the big dance. There are 12 seconds left in the fourth quarter. The Spurs, down 18 points in the third, have clawed their way back to within two. Sean Elliott, the Spurs forward, doesn’t so much as pirouette as look like someone just bumped into his shoulder on the street. His pinkie toe is practically hugging the sideline as he catches the ball. Somehow—divine intervention, maybe—Elliott composes himself with a hop and one dribble while orienting his body toward the hoop. His heels hang out-of-bounds, the balls of his feet planted firmly inside the line. Rasheed Wallace, the Portland Trail Blazers power forward, uses every bit of his 7-foot-4-inch wingspan to try to get a hand on the ball. It is no use. Elliott’s eyes lock on to what he can see of the rim as he rises with the picturesque form of basketball-shooting manuals.

“He fires the three,” Bob Costas, the NBC announcer, says. “And he hits it!” The Alamodome erupts—logically, some Trail Blazers fans must be there, but it seems like all 35,000 people in the arena have joined in an ebullient chorus. About 20 miles away, at our home on Randolph Air Force Base, my living room erupts in screams as well.

Some say that shot set the Spurs dynasty in motion. Neither Robinson nor Duncan took it, but it showed that this team was going to fight until the end for a victory, that the basketball gods were smiling on San Antonio. The win led the Spurs to sweep the Trail Blazers and catapulted them into the NBA Finals.

[From the January/February 2019 issue: Tibet is going crazy for hoops]

It’s nearly a month later—June 25, the fifth game of the Finals—and the Spurs are leading the series 3–1—one victory away from winning the whole thing. My family is huddled around the television. There are 2.1 seconds left on the clock. The New York Knicks guard Charlie Ward is trying to inbound the ball at half-court; the Spurs guard Avery Johnson—the “Little General”—is jumping around in front of him. Ward lobs the ball to Latrell Sprewell, who is immediately met by Duncan and Robinson. They don’t swat at the ball, just hold their arms erect—the “Twin Towers,” they called them—and make Sprewell’s shot near-impossible. He barely gets it over them; it’s an air ball straight into the hands of Elliott, who slams the ball into the ground as the buzzer sounds. Duncan, who averaged 27 points and 14 rebounds in the series, is named Finals MVP.

We put our Spurs flags on our Ford Windstar and drive downtown. It’s mayhem. Horns blare. My dad rolls down the windows and we join in the celebration.

I wake up the next morning as an 8-year-old. What a gift.

The finals never came that close to my birthday again, but each June that the Spurs hoisted the Larry O’Brien Championship trophy—1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2014—was a gift to the city of San Antonio. The Spurs became a model of consistency, and even as the roster changed, the core held—Tim, David, Avery, and Sean became Tim, Tony, and Manu, which became Tim, Tony, Manu, and Kawhi—and Pop remained their leader. Even when the Spurs did not win, or (sigh) even make, the Finals, they won a lot. For 18 consecutive seasons, from 1999 to 2017, the Spurs won at least 50 games.

No one expects Wemby to come in and return the franchise to its status as a perennial finals contender overnight. (Okay, maybe some people do, and he might, but that’s beside the point.) What Wembanyama will bring back to San Antonio—what we pray he’ll bring back—is a foundation to build on. “It’s almost as if the success of the Spurs is the cool wind that comes in for the spring,” Nirenberg told me. “When we’ve been through the losing seasons over the last several years, it’s almost been in anticipation of when the ice would thaw; and when you see that pick come in … it’s just, it’s just like everything starts to bloom again. That’s really the outlook.”

Basketball fans everywhere—regardless of whom they support—should be glad that this potentially generational player isn’t going to be thrown into a team that’s expected to win right away. No one else in the NBA has the sort of job security that Gregg Popovich does—a security that allows him to let players develop instead of overworking them early. Wemby will be mentored by two of the best big men—in Duncan and Robinson—to ever play the game; both first-overall picks who know the pressure that comes with that designation.

Two decades from now, I hope I’ll be writing about how June 22, 2023, four days before my 32nd birthday, was the day that the dynasty was renewed. And even if that’s not meant to be, I’m going to fork over my money and enjoy the ride with a team that’s given me and my hometown so much.