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.

Donald Trump is scared.

Or so he seems, at least to judge from the interview he did with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier that aired over the past two evenings. Trump was jittery and combative, but that’s not so unusual; the former president tends to answer even softball questions as if they’re accusations. Typically, when confronted with more serious challenges, he deploys his peculiar political glossolalia, verbal fusillades formed out of names and places and phrases plucked from jumbled memories, old talking points, and barely remembered briefings.

But something was different this time. Trump seemed not himself—or at least not the character he’s been presenting to the public for most of his life.

Instead, he seemed deeply uneasy in an environment where he should have felt at home. The hosts of Fox News have been, for the most part, staunch supporters of the 45th president, repeating Trump’s many grievances and echoing his lies about how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. Fox, after all, is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a “hostile” network.

Through it all, Trump seemed genuinely off-balance. (Even some of the Fox analysts noticed it; the longtime Fox anchor and Trump defender Brit Hume, for one, said Trump’s answers about his legal dilemmas “verged on incoherent.”) This was not the same Trump who took instant charge of CNN’s town-hall interview, in which he owned a New Hampshire stage and bulldozed the CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins out of his way while playing to a hooting and applauding crowd.

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

What happened to that more confident Trump? And why did he—or anyone on his staff—think it would be a good idea to sit in a quiet room, alone with an experienced reporter?

If Trump thought the interview was a chance to work the refs on his court case and soften up public opinion, he chose the wrong venue. Trump relies on the energy he gets from proximity to his supporters. For a man who has spent so many years on television, Trump seems uncomfortable in a studio unless an audience is present. His natural habitat is not the tranquil interview salon but the packed house, the rally, the press conference, where he can line up his opponents—liberals, other Republican candidates, his former staff, reporters—like ducks in a rhetorical shooting gallery, each hollow metallic ding of a hit producing a roar of applause.

Trump’s discomfort had a lot to do with Baier. One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about—or even heard—what they just said. He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie. Perhaps Trump was expecting a Fox anchor to cut him a break in such an arrangement; instead, Baier came prepared, and pushed back—with data—on many of Trump’s claims. Given how extreme so many of Trump’s no-one-ever-did-anything-better-than-me statements tend to be, pushing back might not seem so difficult, but credit where it is due: Baier interrupted Trump, corrected him, and challenged him on multiple fronts, including his election lies, his indictments, his record as president, his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, and even his predilection for silly nicknames.  

Baier brought quotes, sound clips, and charts. (CNN’s Collins, undermined by the structure of a live interview in front of a partisan audience, never had a chance to do anything similar.) Trump clearly hated the whole experience this time, and he retreated to his comfort zone, dismissing facts, insulting the people who once worked for him, belittling Fox’s ratings, and accusing the network of bias against him.

“I’m no great fan of Fox,” Trump complained at one point. “You’re sitting here,” Baier responded calmly. “Well, you gotta get your word out somehow, right?” Trump mumbled, with that sullen, childlike affect that is always so disconcerting to see in a man closer to 80 than 8.

Trump’s ire, however, alternated with what the Fox analyst Juan Williams insightfully described as a kind of detachment from the whole business. When Trump went on, for example, about how he’d give the death penalty to drug dealers, Baier interrupted to note that Trump had pardoned a drug dealer named Alice Johnson, who, under his new plan, would have been executed. “Huh?” Trump responded, with evident confusion. “No, no. No. Under my, oh, under that? Uh, it would depend on the severity.” But Baier pressed on: Johnson had run a major cocaine ring. Trump groped around until he conjured up an assertion that if his notional death penalty for drug dealers had existed, Johnson would never have dealt drugs. Problem solved.

And so it went, with every answer either a retreat into magical thinking or chaff bursts of jarring nonsequiturs. Was Vladimir Putin wrong to invade Ukraine? If Trump had been president, Putin would never have done it. How would a Trump administration have handled the Chinese spy balloon? If Trump had been president, China would never have sent the balloon. Would Trump go to war over Taiwan? He’s a great dealmaker, he makes deals. What about his actions on January 6? Lawyers tell him his speech was perfect; also, Maxine Waters is bad.

Trump said all of this while showcasing the trademark tells—including nervous (and distracting) sniffling and verbal hiccups such as “Are you ready?”—that signal when he is tense and flustered. And perhaps he was more than flustered; perhaps his trip to a federal courtroom in Miami has finally induced a fear that he could face real consequences for his actions. His former chief of staff John Kelly thinks so, saying recently that he believes Trump is “scared shitless.” That would explain a lot about Trump’s defensiveness during the Fox interview.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

And Trump may have yet more reason to worry, because the burble of sentence fragments he unloaded on Baier could land him in still deeper trouble. In a potentially important moment, Baier pressed Trump about why he hadn’t simply returned the boxes of materials as the government demanded. Trump, after his ritual invocation of the Divine Right of Presidential Box Ownership, said that he’d wanted to return them but hadn’t had enough time to go through everything, so he didn’t know what was in them. Bad move: Trump had already gotten his lawyers to certify that he did, in fact, know what was in them—or, more accurately, to certify that nothing classified or sensitive remained. As some legal analysts quickly pointed out, including a former prosecutor named Chris Christie, this all sounds a lot like obstruction of justice.

After the discussion of Trump’s indictments, an awkward pause halted the conversation for a moment. Baier took a beat, looked more closely at Trump, and asked: “Are you worried about any of this?” Trump, too, paused—an unnatural moment of hesitancy for a man who seems always to be speaking without the need to take a breath. He did, in fact, seem worried, which is perhaps why Baier took the opening to ask the question.

The moment passed. Trump went back on the attack. And yet, his heart wasn’t in it. He may be tired; he may be distracted. But for now, Donald Trump seems, more than anything, to be afraid.

This should be a window of widening opportunity and optimism for the Republicans chasing Donald Trump, the commanding front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential race.

Instead, this is a time of mounting uncertainty and unease.

Rather than undermine Trump’s campaign, his indictment last week for mishandling classified documents has underscored how narrow a path is available for the candidates hoping to deny him the nomination. What should have been a moment of political danger for Trump instead has become another stage for him to demonstrate his dominance within the party. Almost all GOP leaders have reflexively snapped to his defense, and polls show that most Republican voters accept his vitriolic claims to be the victim of a politicized and illegitimate prosecution.

As GOP partisans rally around him amid the proliferating legal threats, recent national surveys have routinely found Trump attracting support from more than 50 percent of primary voters. Very few primary candidates in either party have ever drawn that much support in polls this early in the calendar. In an equally revealing measure of his strength, the choice by most of the candidates running against Trump to echo his attacks on the indictment shows how little appetite even they believe exists within the party coalition for a full-on confrontation with him.

The conundrum for Republicans is that polls measuring public reaction to Trump’s legal difficulties have also found that outside the Republican coalition, a significant majority of voters are disturbed by the allegations accumulating against him. Beyond the GOP base, most voters have said in polls that they believe his handling of classified material has created a national-security risk and that he should not serve as president again if he’s convicted of a crime. Such negative responses from the broader electorate suggest that Trump’s legal challenges are weakening him as a potential general-election candidate even as they strengthen him in the primary. It’s as if Republican leaders and voters can see a tornado on the horizon—and are flooring the gas pedal to reach it faster.

This far away from the first caucuses and primaries next winter—and about two months from the first debate in August—the other candidates correctly argue that it’s too soon to declare Trump unbeatable for the nomination.

Republicans skeptical of Trump hold out hope that GOP voters will grow weary from the cumulative weight of the multiple legal proceedings converging on him. And he still faces potential federal and Fulton County Georgia charges over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Republican voters “are going to start asking who else is out there, who has a cleaner record, and who is not going to have the constant political volleying going on in the background of their campaign,” Dave Wilson, a prominent Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me. “They are looking for someone they can rally behind, because Republicans really want to defeat Joe Biden.”

Scott Reed was the campaign manager in 1996 for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and is now a co-chair of Committed to America, a super PAC supporting Mike Pence. Reed told me he also believes that “time is Trump’s enemy” as his legal troubles persist. The belief in GOP circles that “the Department of Justice is totally out of control” offers Trump an important shield among primary voters, Reed said. But he believes that as the details about Trump’s handling of classified documents in the latest indictment “sink in … his support is going to begin to erode.” And as more indictments possibly accumulate, Reed added, “I think the repetition of these proceedings will wear him down.”

Yet other strategists say that the response so far among both GOP voters and elected officials raises doubts about whether any legal setback can undermine Trump’s position. (The party’s bottomless willingness throughout his presidency to defend actions that previously had appeared indefensible, of course, points toward the same conclusion.) The veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres has divided the GOP electorate into three categories: about 10 percent that is “never Trump,” about 35 percent that is immovably committed to him, and about half that he describes as “maybe Trump,” who are generally sympathetic to the former president and supportive of his policies but uneasy about some of his personal actions and open to an alternative.

Those “maybe Trump” voters are the key to any coalition that can beat him in the primary race, Ayres told me, but as the polls demonstrate, they flock to his side when he’s under attack. “Many of them had conflict with siblings, with parents, sometimes with children, sometimes even with spouses, about their support for Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “And they are very defensive about it. That makes them instinctively rally to Donald Trump’s defense, because if they suggest in any way that he is not fit for office, then that casts aspersions on their own past support for him.”

This reflex helps explain the paradoxical dynamic of Trump’s position having improved in the GOP race since his first indictment in early April. A national CBS survey conducted after last week’s federal indictment found his support in the primary soaring past 60 percent for the first time, with three-fourths of Republican voters dismissing the charges as politically motivated and four-fifths saying he should serve as president even if convicted in the case.

The Republicans dubious of Trump focus more on the evidence in the same surveys that voters outside the GOP base are, predictably, disturbed by the behavior alleged in the multiplying cases against him. Trump argues that Democrats are concocting these allegations because they fear him more than any other Republican candidate, but Wilson accurately pointed out that many Democrats believe Trump has been so damaged since 2020 that he might be the easiest GOP nominee to beat. “I don’t think Democrats really want someone other than Trump,” Wilson said. Privately, in my conversations with them, plenty of Democratic strategists agree.  

Ayres believes that evidence of the resistance to Trump in the wider electorate may eventually cause more GOP voters to think twice about nominating him. Polls have usually found that most Republican voters say agreement on issues is more important for them in choosing a nominee than electability. But Ayres said that in focus groups he’s conducted, “maybe Trump” voters do spontaneously raise concerns about whether Trump can win again given everything that’s happened since Election Day, including the January 6 insurrection. “Traditionally an electability argument is ineffective in primaries,” Ayres said. “The way the dynamic usually works is ‘I like Candidate X, therefore Candidate X has the best chance to win.’ The question is whether the electability argument is more potent in this situation than it was formerly … and the only answer to that is: We will find out.” One early measure suggests that, for now, the answer remains no. In the new CBS poll, Republicans were more bullish on Trump’s chances of winning next year than on any other candidate’s.

[Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?]

Another reason the legal proceedings haven’t hurt Trump more is that his rivals have been so reluctant to challenge him over his actions—or even to make the argument that multiple criminal trials would weaken him as a general-election candidate. But there are some signs that this may be changing: Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott this week somewhat criticized his behavior, though they were careful to also endorse the former president’s core message that the most recent indictment is illegitimate and politically motivated. Some strategists working in the race believe that by the first Republican debate in August, the other candidates will have assailed Trump’s handling of the classified documents more explicitly than they are now.

Still, Trump’s fortifications inside the party remain formidable against even a more direct assault. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, points out that 85 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of his record as president. In 2016, Trump didn’t win an absolute majority of the vote in any contest until his home state of New York, after he had effectively clinched the nomination; now he’s routinely drawing majority support in polls.

In those new national polls, Trump is consistently attracting about 35 to 40 percent of Republican voters with a four-year college degree or more, roughly the same limited portion he drew in 2016. But multiple recent surveys have found him winning about 60 percent of Republican voters without a college degree, considerably more than he did in 2016.

McLaughlin maintains that Trump’s bond with non-college-educated white voters in a GOP primary is as deep as Bill Clinton’s “connection with Black voters” was when he won the Democratic primaries a generation ago. Ayres, though no fan of Trump, agrees that the numbers he’s posting among Republicans without a college degree are “breathtaking.” That strength may benefit Trump even more than in 2016, because polling indicates that those non-college-educated white voters will make up an even bigger share of the total GOP vote next year, as Trump has attracted more of them into the party and driven out more of the suburban white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

But if Trump looks stronger inside the GOP than he was in 2016, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may also present a more formidable challenger than Trump faced seven years ago. On paper, DeSantis has more potential than any of the 2016 contenders to attract the moderate and college-educated voters most dubious of Trump and peel away some of the right-leaning “maybe Trump” voters who like his policies but not his behavior. The optimistic way of looking at Trump’s imposing poll numbers, some GOP strategists opposed to him told me, is that he’s functionally the incumbent in the race and still about half of primary voters remain reluctant to back him. That gives DeSantis an audience to work with.

In practice, though, DeSantis has struggled to find his footing. DeSantis’s choice to run at Trump primarily from his right has so far produced few apparent benefits for him. DeSantis’s positioning has caused some donors and strategists to question whether he would be any more viable in a general election, but it has not yet shown signs of siphoning away conservative voters from Trump. Still, the fact that DeSantis’s favorability among Republicans has remained quite high amid the barrage of attacks from Trump suggests that if GOP voters ultimately decide that Trump is too damaged, the Florida governor could remain an attractive fallback option for them.

Whether DeSantis or someone else emerges as the principal challenger, the size of Trump’s advantage underscores how crucial it will be to trip him early. Like earlier front-runners in both parties, Trump’s greatest risk may be that another candidate upsets him in one of the traditional first contests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Throughout the history of both parties’ nomination contests, such a surprise defeat has tended to reset the race most powerfully when the front-runner looks the most formidable, as Trump does now. “If Trump is not stopped in Iowa or New Hampshire, he will roll to the nomination,” Reed said.

Even if someone beats Trump in one of those early contests, though, history suggests that they will still have their work cut out for them. In every seriously contested Republican primary since 1980, the front-runner as the voting began has been beaten in either Iowa or New Hampshire. That unexpected defeat has usually exposed the early leader to a more difficult and unpredictable race than he expected. But the daunting precedent for Trump’s rivals is that all those front-runners—from Ronald Reagan in 1980 to George W. Bush in 2000 to Trump himself in 2016—recovered to eventually win the nomination. In his time as a national figure, Trump has shattered a seemingly endless list of political traditions. But to beat him next year, his GOP rivals will need to shatter a precedent of their own.

Gen Z is poised to massively expand its influence in the 2024 election. But its impact may be more complex than typically assumed.

As many as 7 million to 9 million more members of the racially and culturally diverse Gen Z could cast ballots in 2024 than did in 2020, while the number of the predominantly white Baby Boomers and older generations voting may decline by a corresponding amount, according to nonpartisan forecasts. As a result, for the first time, Gen Z and Millennials combined could account for as many votes next year as the Baby Boomers and their elders—the groups that have made up a majority of voters for decades.

That generational transition represents a clear opportunity for Democrats, who have consistently amassed solid, sometimes overwhelming, margins among both Millennials and Gen Z voters. But an analysis of previously unpublished election data from Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, by Michael Podhorzer, the former political director for the AFL-CIO, shows that even the emergence of these new voters may not break the larger political stalemate that has partitioned the country into seemingly immovable blocks of red and blue states.

Podhorzer’s analysis of the Catalist data, shared exclusively with The Atlantic, found that over the past four elections, Gen Z voters have broken heavily for Democrats in blue states, and provided the party solid margins in closely contested swing states. But in red states, with a few prominent exceptions, Podhorzer surprisingly found that even Gen Z voters are mostly supporting Republicans.

The generation’s strong Democratic lean in blue and purple states may create growing challenges for Republicans trying to amass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. But the Republican tilt of younger voters in red states could frustrate Democrats trying to loosen the GOP’s hold on those places. That seemingly unbreakable Republican grip has made it difficult for Democrats to win majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and has allowed the GOP to impose a sweepingly conservative social agenda across nearly half of the country.

Republicans remain dubious that young voters will show up in large numbers anywhere next year for President Joe Biden, the oldest U.S. president, who did not run well among them in the 2020 Democratic primaries and whose approval ratings with them remain anemic. As Kristen Soltis Anderson, a GOP pollster who has extensively studied younger voters, told me, “I don’t think there is a lot of focus in Republican world” about the potential risk to the party of a big surge of new Generation Z voters in 2024, “in part because a lot of Republicans believe that there is just no way young voters will turn out for Joe Biden.”

But other analysts point out that despite their equivocal feelings about Biden, young people voted in very large numbers in 2020 and maintained relatively high turnout in 2022. A lack of enthusiasm about Biden personally “didn’t really dissuade the generation from coming out and voting for Democrats” in either of the past two elections, says John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, which conducts a twice-yearly national survey of youth attitudes. “They knew the stakes in the election. They knew what life was like under more Republican control versus more Democratic control.”

Whatever they think about Biden, the influence of Gen Z, generally defined as young people born from 1997 to 2012, is certain to rise next year simply because so many of them will age into the electorate. William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, estimates that about 15.4 million eligible young people will have turned 18 between the 2020 election and Election Day next year.

In 2016, the first presidential election when any members of the generation were old enough to participate, Gen Z accounted for just 2 percent of voters, according to an analysis of census data by Frey for the nonpartisan States of Change project. In 2020, Gen Z rose to 7.5 percent of all voters, Frey calculates. Frey projects that the generation will increase its share of the electorate to 13 percent in 2024. Depending on turnout, that could mean about 8 million more Gen Z voters next year, increasing the total to about 20 million in all.

Millennials, generally described as younger adults born from 1981 to 1996, have also increased their share of the electorate. In Frey’s analysis of census data, they rose from about one in seven voters in 2008 to just under one in four in 2020. Frey predicts that in 2024, the two generations combined will make up about 37 percent of the electorate.

That could mark a historic tipping point. Frey projects that in 2024, the Baby Boomers and their elders—the last members of the Greatest and Silent Generations still voting—will also constitute 37 percent of voters. If that forecast holds up, it will end decades during which those Republican-leaning older cohorts were the biggest generations in the electorate. Meanwhile, Generation X, defined as those born from 1965 to 1980, will remain stable over this period at about one-fourth of the electorate.

Another fundamental shift in American politics over the past half century is magnifying the impact of this generational evolution: Voters now divide between the parties more along lines of cultural identity than class interest. And on every important cultural and demographic dividing line between the two parties, the younger generations exhibit characteristics that predict support for Democrats.

More than 70 percent of Baby Boomers are white. But just 55 percent of Millennials are white and only slightly more than half of Gen Z are. Millennials and Gen Z are far less likely than older generations to identify with any organized religion and far more likely (especially in Gen Z) to identify as LGBTQ. Younger generations are also more likely than older ones to hold a college degree.

“What sets Gen Z apart is … they are growing up in a much more racially and ethnically diverse cohort, which really is driving them to more progressive positions,” Melissa Deckman, the chief executive officer of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of a forthcoming book on the generation, told me.

Overall, these new voters are behaving almost exactly as those attributes would predict. Before 2004, as I’ve written, exit polls and other sources found little difference between the voting preferences of younger and older voters. But since Millennials and then Gen Z entered the electorate in large numbers, Democrats have established a durable advantage among the young. Catalist’s data, for instance, show that Democrats have carried almost exactly 60 percent of the two-party vote among Millennials and Gen Z in each of the past three presidential elections and in three of the past four congressional elections; the one exception came when the party’s vote among them hit 66 percent in the 2018 congressional races. (One New York Times analyst, citing unpublished polling data, recently claimed that Millennials, though still supporting Democrats, are moving to the right as they age, a view also held by some Republican pollsters. But skeptics quickly noted that other data sources, such as results from the large-sample Cooperative Election Survey, do not show such a shift.)

The key insight that Podhorzer’s analysis adds is that even this strong overall Democratic advantage remains subject to substantial geographic variation that tends to reinforce, rather than reconfigure, the nation’s electoral divisions.

Using Catalist data, he found that Democrats in the four elections from 2016 through 2022 have consistently amassed imposing margins of 20 to as much as 40 percentage points among Gen Z voters in the 18 states he identifies as already leaning reliably Democratic, such as California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Eastern Seaboard states from Maryland to Maine.

Gen Z voters over those four elections have also provided Democrats solid margins of roughly 15 to 25 percentage points in the eight purple states: Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada across the Sun Belt, and Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire in the Rust Belt.

But the story in the remaining two dozen Republican-leaning states is more complex. Podhorzer found that Democrats performed better in the red states among Gen Z than they did among older generations—but not well enough to actually win those youngest voters. Republicans still carried a majority of Gen Z voters in most of the red states. Even in red states where Democrats have won most Gen Z voters in recent elections—including Texas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, and Montana—the party’s margins among them are typically slim. That means Democrats in red states are not generating nearly enough advantage from younger generations to overcome the lopsided GOP edge among older cohorts.

Podhorzer told me this regional variation is “only surprising to the extent you believe that age explains almost everything about voters’ partisanship. But if you understand that the neighborhood you grew up in, the parents you have, the schools you went to, and the general politics that you are introduced into is a big factor, it shouldn’t be surprising at all. Because if you grow up in Brooklyn, no matter how old you are, you are swimming in blue water … and the same goes for those growing up in red America.”

For Democrats, the most important of the trends Podhorzer cataloged may be their persistent strength among Gen Z voters in the battleground swing states that decide who wins the White House. In all, Podhorzer calculates that Gen Z voters in the swing states who cast their first ballot in the 2018 election or after have preferred Democrats by nearly 20 percentage points. (Democrats also hold a strong 15-point edge among Millennials in those states who voted for the first time in 2018 or after.) To Podhorzer, the clear lesson of these trends is that Democrats are more likely to win the battleground states by investing in turning out these new voters than by trying to lure back the mostly blue-collar whites who have abandoned the party to support Donald Trump.

Podhorzer says the Democratic advantage among younger voters in the purple and blue states has been driven largely by an unusual dynamic. Typically, he points out, young voters gravitate toward a party because of a positive association with the president in office as they entered the electorate: John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. But in this case, Podhorzer argues, the most powerful force moving Gen Z toward Democrats is not so much excitement about the party (or Biden), but negative views of Trump. “They are coming of age at a time when everybody around them, as well as the popular culture, loathe and ridicule” Trump, he told me. “Especially in the blue states, where MAGA candidates have hijacked the nominating process, there is no exemplar of a reasonable Republican anywhere to be seen.”

Some GOP strategists aren’t particularly concerned about the party’s poor performance with young voters, Anderson, the GOP pollster, says, because inside the GOP coalition, Trump is strongest among the youngest generations. “So if you are hanging out in Republican land only, you can easily convince yourself that Donald Trump is actually very popular with young voters, because he is irreverent and edgy or whatever your rationale would be,” she told me. The problem is that too many in the GOP don’t realize “that the young people in the past who might have liked Mitt Romney aren’t in our rooms anymore” and that instead we “have boiled the youth of the party down to this very Trumpist core.”

In many red states, Republicans appear to be taking no chances with the unfolding generational transition: Several GOP-controlled states, such as Texas, Georgia, and Arizona, where the ascending younger generations are much more racially diverse than older voters, have imposed the toughest restrictions on voting.

In every state, influence in the coming years will flow from those mostly white older generations to more diverse younger ones. By 2028, Frey projects, the Boomers and their elders will fall to slightly below a third of voters nationwide, while Millennials and Gen Z will soar well past two-fifths. By 2032, when all of Gen Z is eligible, Americans born after 1980 will cast almost exactly half of all votes.

Deckman said she expects Gen Z to continue to lean left over this period—in part because, more than any previous generation, these young people are consuming media that they themselves create, on TikTok and similar platforms. “Their news is generated by themselves, and because they are more progressive, I think many Gen Zers are consuming information that reinforces those viewpoints,” she told me.

As Podhorzer’s analysis shows, this transition isn’t yet threatening Republicans in most red states. And in the swing states, Republicans can probably offset the growing presence of Gen Z and Millennials in 2024 by running better with older voters, many of whom are unhappy with Biden’s performance.

But the Democratic advantage with Gen Z is like an investment whose value compounds over time—in this case, as their share of the electorate expands. If Republicans can’t regain at least some ground with younger voters, especially in the battleground states, the party will need to squeeze bigger margins out of shrinking groups. In any given election, as Trump demonstrated in 2016, Republicans might meet that test. But making that math add up will only get tougher for the GOP as the generational transition inexorably rolls on.

The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta spent long stretches of the past year talking to CNN’s then-CEO Chris Licht about his grand experiment to reset the cable giant as a venue more welcoming to Republicans. In a major profile of Licht, Alberta documented the many disasters along the way, culminating in Licht’s ouster from the network this week.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin talks to Alberta about the rise and fall of Licht, and what it means for the media.

“This is a guy who had been working 80-hour weeks since he took the job and had been really pouring himself into trying to remake CNN into something different and something new,” Alberta recalled of the period leading up to a disastrous CNN town hall with Donald Trump that Licht oversaw. He had, “with the world watching, failed,” Alberta said. “And that was crushing for him.”

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk with Tim Alberta, who watched the implosion at CNN up close in real time. And I ask him: Did Licht’s mission to redefine journalism fail because of Licht or because it is a fundamentally misguided mission?

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Tim Alberta: It was apparent to me immediately when I saw Chris after the town hall ended that he knew this wasn’t good.

Hanna Rosin: “Chris” is Chris Licht, the former CEO of CNN, who was ousted this week. And that’s my colleague Tim Alberta, who’s been reporting on Licht for the past year.

Alberta: This is a guy who I’ve gotten to know decently well over the past year or so, a guy who’s just got a bottomless supply of self-confidence.

And, in that moment, when the town hall ended and I met him in the lobby, he was pale. His shoulders were sort of slumped. He looked distressed. Thoroughly distressed.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. You may have read about the Trump Town Hall in Manchester, New Hampshire that CNN aired last month. Maybe you even watched it. The event was part of Licht’s broader mission to signal that Republicans and even Trump supporters were welcome at CNN again.

Which was connected to an even bigger mission, one that Licht defined as getting back to real journalism: truths, facts, and less spin. Instead, CNN lost control of the town hall. Trump used it as a forum to double down on lies about the 2020 election. Among other unsavory things. It was pretty much universally considered a disaster and backstage, right after the event, Licht knew it.

Alberta: It was a deeply human moment where I, I think a guy who, you know, agree with his decisions, disagree with his decisions, whatever.

This is a guy who had been working, like, 80 hour weeks since he took the job and had been really pouring himself into trying to remake CNN into something different and something new, and had in this moment with the world watching failed. And that was, it was, it was, um, it was crushing for him. You could just see it in, in that, in that moment

Rosin: In this episode, we talked to Tim Alberta, who watched the implosion at CNN up close in real time.

Alberta: So I first met Chris last summer. We had dinner. I had been pitching his team on doing this story. Ultimately after pushing and pushing, pushing, there was a meeting set up over dinner in New York.

Rosin: Can I ask, why did you want to meet him so badly? What was interesting to you about this story?

Alberta: Well, I think, a couple of things. First, CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years. I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years.

And I’d seen firsthand time and time and time again. How at rallies or smaller candidate events how CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6th and on everything else.

And so what was interesting to me was that Licht came in, and, and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN, was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank and file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years.

And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over, one of the world’s biggest news organizations. You know, CNN has 4,000, some employees spread all across the world, and, you’re, you’re, you’re coming in at a really sensitive time, taking over this incredibly difficult job, and in some sense you’re making it harder on yourself by staking out that sort of very ambitious goal.

Rosin: You watched Chris Licht come in as a newbie at CNN. How did he fit in in the beginning?

Alberta: Well, awkwardly, I think is the, is the fair way to say it, because you have to keep in mind that he was following Jeff Zucker, who had been there for, I guess at that point, about a decade, and was beloved. He was sort of a larger than life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody.

Not only the on-air talent, but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews, uh, this guy just sort of made everybody feel like part of a family. And he was affectionate, had nicknames, knew everybody’s kids. I mean, and, and so obviously when Zucker was forced out as president of CNN at the beginning of 2022 and, and then Licht came in shortly thereafter, he inherited a newsroom that was reeling from the departure of sort of their, their fearless leader, Jeff Zucker, who had, you know, keep in mind really sort of steered CNN through an unprecedented period of, of almost warfare with the White House during the Trump years where there were threats called into CNN, reporters being singled out as the enemy of the people, you know, they were really under fire in, in ways that we’d never seen a news organization under fire from a White House before. And so there was this, this incredibly tense dynamic already there. And then Zucker is forced out and Licht walks into that.

Meanwhile, there’s incredible financial turmoil. There’s been a change in ownership with a new parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, taking over CNN and their financials are pretty wobbly, and so there’s massive cost cutting.

And Licht, sort of stepping into that position, I think really went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t.

So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was, sort of, cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.

In fact, one of the first things he did after taking the job was turn Zucker’s office on the 17th floor, which was right outside some of the main studios right in the heart of the newsroom, and turned it into a conference room as sort of a symbolic move. And then he himself picked an office up on the 22nd floor in a space most employees at CNN, including longtime veteran reporters, they didn’t even know how to find that office. and that, that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists.

Rosin: And so why do you think he thought this mission was important? Was it just about saving CNN or was it about something broader?

Alberta: So it became clear to me from the earliest conversations that I began having with people, well before Licht even agreed to participate in this piece, that to Chris Licht. This was about more than CNN. This was about the journalism industry itself. He had made it known that he didn’t blame a lot of these folks for their souring on the mainstream media.

That he saw some of the, the, the big news organizations getting over their skis on certain stories or perhaps giving too much attention to the stylistic stuff at, at the expense of the more substantive, uh, stories that they could have been covering. In other words, Licht was sort of making it known that he felt that all of media had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a, a real threat to democracy itself. I mean, that’s not an overstatement.

Rosin: Wow. So it was not just a business decision to save CNN. It was not just about saving cable news. It was not even just about journalism and media. It was an even bigger project. It sounds like.

Alberta: I think what’s clear is two things. Number one, to the people at the top at Warner Brothers Discovery from the Board of Directors to the CEO, David Zaslav, they were very much invested in CNN as a, you know, profit center.

A place that was, you know, accustomed to making over a billion dollars annually and a prestigious brand that could generate a lot of revenue. And I think Licht viewed it somewhat differently. Licht was trained as a journalist. He calls journalism his first love. He practiced being Walter Cronkite in his basement as a kid putting on fake newscasts.

I mean, this is a guy who really loves the news and, and, and so I think, whether one agrees with him or completely disagrees with him or is somewhere in between, it’s, I think it’s worth recognizing just at a, at a sort of ground level that this is someone who really does consider himself a journalist, first and foremost, and really believed that the institution of journalism in America was under assault.

And that some of its trouble was self-inflicted. And he believed that if he could introduce a new model at CNN that was built around toning down the commentary, dialing back the outrage, and leading with facts, and, and, and just really being very careful with tone and orienting everything toward,sort of fact forward journalism.

That if they could restore trust in the CNN brand by doing that then it would create a model that the entire industry might try to replicate. And, and that was really his vision from the outset.

Rosin:. So he starts off on this incredibly ambitious, serious mission almost to turn back time on journalism. Was there a moment you could pinpoint when this mission started to go wrong?

Alberta: Well, I would say two things. First, you could argue that it was almost doomed from the beginning because, you know, cable news has been in sort of long decline, predating Trump, postdating Trump, even though Trump sort of breathed some artificial life into ratings and revenues for a few years there, it’s been clear for a long time because of cord cutting, because of these silly little things we carry around in our pockets all day and stare at too much.

Um, for a whole host of reasons that cable news has been in trouble. I also think that there’s not any compelling evidence to suggest that Americans, or at least any critical mass of Americans, want to get their news without fear or favor, that, that, that there’s any critical mass of Americans who just want the facts and then wanna make up their own mind. I mean, there’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest in fact that Americans want to get their news from sources that will, sort of, reaffirm their existing worldviews and, and tell them what they want to hear and not necessarily challenge them where their idols lie.

And that’s, I think, the thing Chris Licht tried to challenge from the outset and really, really sold people around him hard on the idea that, for the sake of American democracy, we needed to do something about that. And I think in that sense, he was probably fighting a doomed mission from the very beginning.

Rosin: So he was fighting a doomed mission. It was difficult from the outset. He decided to do it anyway. So what actually happened? I mean, he must have known it was gonna be difficult.

Alberta: Yes. Well, a–and as the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And that’s sort of what happened at CNN. Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times. Um, you know, the recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and, and, and go strong on, on certain stories.

But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky and, and really, I think the first glimpse into that that I got was watching behind the scenes as CNN prepared last fall to launch its new morning show. Now, Licht had made a decision to take Don Lemon, who was probably the most polarizing personality at CNN and make Lemon the face of this new morning show called CNN This Morning. And, and so in some ways Licht had tied his fate to Don Lemon’s fate, and as of the springtime when Lemon had committed, sort of, a series of blunders and had made some enemies internally, and obviously the most notable incident was when he said that Nikki Haley, the presidential candidate who’s 51 years old, was past her prime and that a woman’s only in her prime if she’s in her twenties or thirties or forties. And it caused so much turmoil, at the network, and it was a mess. And it was clear at that point that the one thing that he had really been counting on as a win, this morning show, was looking more and more like loss every day.

Rosin: In addition to this morning show drama he was wading through...not everyone at CNN was on board with his mission right? He may have defined it as truth and journalism, but lots of other people pointed out many many problems with what he was actually trying to do, in practice.

Alberta: Yeah. Because beyond just giving that sort of broad definition that I think a lot of us would agree to around what good journalism should be, you know, leading with the facts and telling the truth without fear or favor, um, the specifics became a bit troubling.

And, you know, specifically the question of, you know, what do you do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and, uh, prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?

Do you have to have some rules in place around how you cover those people? And, you know, Licht would fall back repeatedly on this analogy of some people like rain, some people don’t like rain, and we will have anybody on this network whether they like rain or don’t like rain, but we will not have people on this network who say that it’s not raining outside when it really is. Now, it’s an interesting metaphor but I think the problem for Licht is that the application of it was a little bit uneven. Even going back to the very beginning of his tenure, one of the first programming decisions he made after taking over as the new boss at CNN was to tell his producers to downplay the first hearing of the January 6th committee in Congress.

Remember, it was shown in primetime, this was sort of a, ’get your popcorn ready’ primetime special event that MSNBC went wall to wall with its coverage and earned monster ratings. But because of Licht’s edict to the staff, CNN covered it very casually, didn’t give it the sort of attention that it would have given something like that in previous years, and it got slaughtered in the ratings by MSNBC.

So, there were a lot of examples along the way that gave cause to some of Licht’s own journalists to question, okay, well he says the mission is this thing, but is our execution really in keeping with that, and ultimately it was the town hall with Donald Trump that really broke the camel’s back.

Rosin: Okay. Tell me how that whole event came about

Alberta: Licht and his team had been working for some time to reach an agreement with the former president Donald Trump to bring him on CNN for some sort of big interview.

What they ultimately agreed on was a town hall in New Hampshire, the first in the nation primary state and Licht knew that he was going to get a lot of pushback from his own employees on this. Uh, a lot of people who felt that Trump should not be platformed, that he’d, uh, caused sufficient distress to the country with his lies and his assaults on the ballot box.

And his, um, disruption of the transition of power that CNN should not be platforming him at all, much less in a town hall format. And, and you know, I, I would just flashback quickly to the very first conversation I ever had with Chris where we talked about how the media covered Trump in the past and how it needs to cover him in the future. And I was really slack jawed, just shocked, frankly, when Chris said to me, well, I think the media has learned its lesson.

This is not something that I lose sleep over. This idea, this question of how do we cover Trump? I, you know, and, and I said, whaaaat really? Like, you, you, you think you’ve, you think you’ve got the answer? And he said, yeah, we cover him the same way as anybody, right? We, we, we hold him accountable with the facts and we don’t let him play us.

And, uh, we don’t, dial it up to 11 every time so that we lose the trust of the audience. You know, this is, this is pretty simple stuff. That’s what he said to me. And…

Rosin: I’ve heard other editors say that, by the way, but go ahead.

Alberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so he did two things. First, he picked Kaitlan Collins, the Rising Star reporter at CNN, who everybody there has a ton of respect for, picked her to host this town hall event with Trump.

And second, he made a really forceful case to his senior staff and told them, look, If not CNN, then who? We alone have the experience putting these events on. We have the journalistic chops, we’ve got Kaitlan, we can fact check in real time. We can hold him accountable in front of a live international audience in ways that nobody else can.

So why shouldn’t we do it? And he really made a strong case to his team and he won over people who, who had been resistant to it. He really got a lot of buy-in. But in the process of doing that, he made it very clear that all the chips were now in the center of the table. That this was it.

That this was the big bet that Licht was willing to make, that he needed this win badly. That he needed this sort of signature moment to validate his approach, not only his approach to courting Republican viewers, but also his approach to dealing with his own staff, people who were really, sort of, resistant to some of what he was prescribing and, and how he was going about executing this mission.

So, so really this was setting up to be the make or break moment for Chris Licht at CNN, and he knew it going into Manchester.

Rosin: And it sounds like it was also part of his bigger mission of we can have a different kind of conversation that involves truth and involves airing things more honestly, like it was part of that conversation as well

Alberta: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Rosin: Now you were there, you were close to them as this was all going, not just present at the town hall, but talking to Licht as this was happening, what was, what was he like during the event?

Alberta: So I only talked to him briefly before the program, and then we spoke after the program. So he pulled me into a hallway that was kind of on the sidelines of the main auditorium where the event had just emptied out. And we talked for a few minutes there, and I asked him, you know, did this advance the mission, the journalistic mission of CNN that you’ve spent so much time describing to me?

And, you know, he couldn’t say, no, it didn’t. But he also, in that moment, to his credit, I don’t think he was even capable of lying to me and putting on a brave face and saying, yeah, of course it did. and so he just looked at me and he said, that’s too early to say.

Rosin: Hmm. So what did people say? Like how did people respond to that town hall?

Alberta: Not well, it was immediately and widely panned across the ideological spectrum of left and right, the partisan spectrum of blue and red, the, you know, journalistic spectrum. I mean, it was just, it was hard to find anybody defending it. And in fact, you know, Licht’s own employee, the media writer Oliver Darcy, published his newsletter, “Reliable Sources.” A couple of hours after the town hall concluded and Oliver’s opening line in the newsletter was: “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN [Wednesday evening].”

Rosin: So it sounds like if Licht’s original mission was to model a different kind of conversation with a new kind of open tone, it accomplished exactly the opposite.

Alberta: I think that’s right. and again, there’s a difference between theory and execution. In theory, the town hall was defensible, but the execution of the town hall was not.

Rosin: After the break, an inside look at Licht’s final days. And what happens at CNN after.

Rosin: So how did things unfold in the weeks following the town hall that led to the news this week of him being pushed out?

Alberta: So the week following the town hall, I was in New York and I had a pre-arranged, hard-won pre-arranged meeting with David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of CNN. And, at the very last minute, the office of Zaslav informed me that he was no longer willing to speak on the record with me for this story, even though that had been the agreement.

And as I said, it was sort of a hard-won agreement over some time of negotiations. So that was another red flag that just told me that obviously if the boss, the big boss, if he’s unwilling to put himself out there on the record in support of his embattled leader at CNN, that’s not a good sign for him.

And in fact, I even told Zaslav’s office, I told him very plainly, do you know how this is gonna look? You do recognize I’m giving you a chance here to defend your guy and to defend Zaslav himself, and you’re passing on it. You’re hiding from me, changing the rules of our agreement to do this interview. And they decided to do that. And so that was another moment where it was very clear to me that he was in trouble.

So the next day after the canceled meeting, I sat down with Licht for our final interview. And I could sense having, again, gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language. That there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong. There was, I think, an acceptance at that point of just how bad things were for him internally.

You know, when I was asking about his employees being so upset with him, when I was poking and prodding on specific things that they were upset with him about, he didn’t make any effort to push back on it or to dispute the premise or to try to, you know, kind of talk his way out. He just seemed in that moment almost resigned to the realities of how badly things had gone awry inside of his organization.

And, that in and of itself was, was just, almost stunning to me because this was a guy who, in all of our interactions, he was just so predictably confident and self-assured and always had this kind of look in his eye like he knew something you didn’t know..

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but your Atlantic story was published on June 2nd. He was out on June 7th. When I read your story, I thought, Ooh, it would be very hard for this person to keep their job. And I did wonder, were you surprised by the news this week?

Alberta: [sigh] I can’t say that I was surprised if only because in the days after the piece was published, I was just inundated with text messages and emails and phone calls from people at CNN telling me the situation there was untenable, that there was no way he could survive this. And, that was all unsolicited.

I was not reaching out, trying to follow up on the situation. I, I was not looking to try to break the news of him, you know, being ousted or anything like that. It was just organically obvious that the situation there just wasn’t sustainable. Um, he had lost the trust of too many people. And frankly, I think it’s worth saying that he’d lost the trust of a lot of these folks before the story had come out.

And I think when the story came out, what I heard time and time and time again from journalists was that there was no coming back from it. That the relationships there could not be rebuilt after some of the things he had said in the piece. And so in that sense, no, I was not surprised.

Rosin: You know, it’s, it’s weird to be a reporter in a position of having a story come out and then someone gets fired. In your case, it sounds like you see yourself as just a chronicler of something that was already unfolding, not like a causer of events, but just you wrote this story, this happened. It was already on its way.

Alberta: Well, yes, I, I, let me say it this way, I’ve had a number of CNN reporters reach out. People who are friends of mine, people who I’ve known and worked with and respected for a long time, who all were saying basically the same thing to me, independent of one another, which is that, Hey, don’t feel bad about this. Because I think because they think I’m a nice guy—I hope because they think I’m a nice guy.

Rosin: So, is your conclusion that Licht’s experiment, his mission, did fail. There was no reset with Republican voters viewing CNN, like it didn’t work.

Alberta: It’s hard to draw any other conclusion just based on the ratings. I mean, Chris’s biggest problem was, as I think I said earlier, that he just didn’t have a win that he could point to.

Rosin: Mhmm.

Alberta: And if your goal is to reclaim some significant chunk of lost voters who have written off your news network, that’s going to take time. And I think everybody understood that it was going to take time.

And one year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse. And so just in judging the execution of the journalistic vision that Licht had laid out for me and laid out for his staff upfront I don’t know how you could view it as anything other than a failure because the metrics by which you would judge it do not look good.

Rosin: Now you’ve said a few times this is a matter of execution. But I have to say, his failure does leave me wondering if anyone could have succeeded. Like my immediate thought after hearing that he was out at CNN, was in our political climate is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?

Alberta: I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest. And let’s be clear, like, I think that there’s been a pile on because of social media and the way that our news environment works, there’s been a pile on and a lot of people taking shots at Chris Licht, some of which I think are probably unfair.

You know, this is, this is a talented guy and a guy who’d been pretty successful everywhere he’d been. And I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be. And to your specific question, I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do, which is sort of re-imagining the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that has been, sort of, systematically manipulated into not trusting the mainstream media for decades.

I think it’s really healthy to have at least some piece of the market offering what Licht was envisioning and trying to win back disaffected, distrusting Republican viewers with more of a straight news, just the facts ma’am, approach. I think that that’s very much worth trying. It’s just, in some ways, it strikes me as an utterly impossible task. And I think if he could do it all over again, even if his goals were the same, I’m pretty sure that Chris Licht would go about emphasizing them and articulating them a little bit differently because he, in a lot of ways, sort of set himself up for failure.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show. We are very glad that you were following this story so closely.

Alberta: You’re welcome Hanna. Thank you for having me.

Tim Alberta: It was apparent to me immediately when I saw Chris after the town hall ended that he knew this wasn’t good.

Hanna Rosin: “Chris” is Chris Licht, the former CEO of CNN, who was ousted this week. And that’s my colleague Tim Alberta, who’s been reporting on Licht for the past year.

Alberta: This is a guy who I’ve gotten to know decently well over the past year or so, a guy who’s just got a bottomless supply of self-confidence.

And in that moment, when the town hall ended and I met him in the lobby, he was pale. His shoulders were sort of slumped. He looked distressed. Thoroughly distressed.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. You may have read about the Trump Town Hall in Manchester, New Hampshire that CNN aired last month. Maybe you even watched it. The event was part of Licht’s broader mission to signal that Republicans and even Trump supporters were welcome at CNN again.

Which was connected to an even bigger mission, one that Licht defined as getting back to real journalism: truths, facts, and less spin. Instead, CNN lost control of the town hall. Trump used it as a forum to double down on lies about the 2020 election. Among other unsavory things. It was pretty much universally considered a disaster and backstage, right after the event, Licht knew it.

Alberta: It was a deeply human moment where I, I think a guy who, you know, agree with his decisions, disagree with his decisions, whatever.

This is a guy who had been working, like, 80 hour weeks since he took the job and had been really pouring himself into trying to remake CNN into something different and something new, and had in this moment with the world watching failed. And that was, it was, it was, um, it was crushing for him. You could just see it in, in that, in that moment

Rosin: In this episode, we talked to Tim Alberta, who watched the implosion at CNN up close in real time.

Tim: So I first met Chris last summer. We had dinner. I had been pitching his team on doing this story. Ultimately after pushing and pushing, pushing, there was a meeting set up over dinner in New York.

Rosin: Can I ask, why did you want to meet him so badly? What was interesting to you about this story?

Alberta: Well, I think, a couple of things. First, CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years. I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years.

And I’d seen firsthand time and time and time again. How at rallies or smaller candidate events how CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6th and on everything else.

And so what was interesting to me was that Licht came in, and, and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN, was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank and file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years.

And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over, one of the world’s biggest news organizations. You know, CNN has 4,000, some employees spread all across the world, and, you’re, you’re, you’re coming in at a really sensitive time, taking over this incredibly difficult job, and in some sense you’re making it harder on yourself by staking out that sort of very ambitious goal.

Rosin: You watched Chris Licht come in as a newbie at CNN. How did he fit in in the beginning?

Alberta: Well, awkwardly, I think is the, is the fair way to say it, because you have to keep in mind that he was following Jeff Zucker, who had been there for, I guess at that point, about a decade, and was beloved. He was sort of a larger than life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody.

Not only the on-air talent, but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews, uh, this guy just sort of made everybody feel like part of a family. And he was affectionate, had nicknames, knew everybody’s kids. I mean, and, and so obviously when Zucker was forced out as president of CNN at the beginning of 2022 and, and then Licht came in shortly thereafter, he inherited a newsroom that was reeling from the departure of sort of their, their fearless leader, Jeff Zucker, who had, you know, keep in mind really sort of steered CNN through an unprecedented period of, of almost warfare with the White House during the Trump years where there were threats called into CNN, reporters being singled out as the enemy of the people, you know, they were really under fire in, in ways that we’d never seen a news organization under fire from a White House before. And so there was this, this incredibly tense dynamic already there. And then Zucker is forced out and Licht walks into that.

Meanwhile, there’s incredible financial turmoil. There’s been a change in ownership with a new parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, taking over CNN and their financials are pretty wobbly, and so there’s massive cost cutting.

And Licht, sort of stepping into that position, I think really went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t.

So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was, sort of, cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.

In fact, one of the first things he did after taking the job was turn Zucker’s office on the 17th floor, which was right outside some of the main studios right in the heart of the newsroom, and turned it into a conference room as sort of a symbolic move. And then he himself picked an office up on the 22nd floor in a space most employees at CNN, including longtime veteran reporters, they didn’t even know how to find that office. and that, that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists.

Rosin: And so why do you think he thought this mission was important? Was it just about saving CNN or was it about something broader?

Alberta: So it became clear to me from the earliest conversations that I began having with people, well before Licht even agreed to participate in this piece, that to Chris Licht. This was about more than CNN. This was about the journalism industry itself. He had made it known that he didn’t blame a lot of these folks for their souring on the mainstream media.

That he saw some of the, the, the big news organizations getting over their skis on certain stories or perhaps giving too much attention to the stylistic stuff at, at the expense of the more substantive, uh, stories that they could have been covering. In other words, Licht was sort of making it known that he felt that all of media had been broken in some sense, or at the very least, had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a, a real threat to democracy itself. I mean, that’s not an overstatement.

Rosin: Wow. So it was not just a business decision to save CNN. It was not just about saving cable news. It was not even just about journalism and media. It was an even bigger project. It sounds like.

Alberta: I think what’s clear is two things. Number one, to the people at the top at Warner Brothers Discovery from the Board of Directors to the CEO, David Zaslav, they were very much invested in CNN as a, you know, profit center.

A place that was, you know, accustomed to making over a billion dollars annually and a prestigious brand that could generate a lot of revenue. And I think Licht viewed it somewhat differently. Licht was trained as a journalist. He calls journalism his first love. He practiced being Walter Cronkite in his basement as a kid putting on fake newscasts.

I mean, this is a guy who really loves the news and, and, and so I think, whether one agrees with him or completely disagrees with him or is somewhere in between, it’s, I think it’s worth recognizing just at a, at a sort of ground level that this is someone who really does consider himself a journalist, first and foremost, and really believed that the institution of journalism in America was under assault.

And that some of its trouble was self-inflicted. And he believed that if he could introduce a new model at CNN that was built around toning down the commentary, dialing back the outrage, and leading with facts, and, and, and just really being very careful with tone and orienting everything toward,sort of fact forward journalism.

That if they could restore trust in the CNN brand by doing that then it would create a model that the entire industry might try to replicate. And, and that was really his vision from the outset.

Rosin:. So he starts off on this incredibly ambitious, serious mission almost to turn back time on journalism. Was there a moment you could pinpoint when this mission started to go wrong?

Alberta: Well, I would say two things. First, you could argue that it was almost doomed from the beginning because, you know, cable news has been in sort of long decline, predating Trump, postdating Trump, even though Trump sort of breathed some artificial life into ratings and revenues for a few years there, it’s been clear for a long time because of cord cutting, because of these silly little things we carry around in our pockets all day and stare at too much.

Um, for a whole host of reasons that cable news has been in trouble. I also think that there’s not any compelling evidence to suggest that Americans, or at least any critical mass of Americans, want to get their news without fear or favor, that, that, that there’s any critical mass of Americans who just want the facts and then wanna make up their own mind. I mean, there’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest in fact that Americans want to get their news from sources that will, sort of, reaffirm their existing worldviews and, and tell them what they want to hear and not necessarily challenge them where their idols lie.

And that’s, I think, the thing Chris Licht tried to challenge from the outset and really, really sold people around him hard on the idea that, for the sake of American democracy, we needed to do something about that. And I think in that sense, he was probably fighting a doomed mission from the very beginning.

Rosin: So he was fighting a doomed mission. It was difficult from the outset. He decided to do it anyway. So what actually happened? I mean, he must have known it was gonna be difficult.

Alberta: Yes. Well, a–and as the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And that’s sort of what happened at CNN. Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times. Um, you know, the recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and, and, and go strong on, on certain stories.

But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky and, and really, I think the first glimpse into that that I got was watching behind the scenes as CNN prepared last fall to launch its new morning show. Now, Licht had made a decision to take Don Lemon, who was probably the most polarizing personality at CNN and make Lemon the face of this new morning show called CNN This Morning. And, and so in some ways Licht had tied his fate to Don Lemon’s fate, and as of the springtime when Lemon had committed, sort of, a series of blunders and had made some enemies internally, and obviously the most notable incident was when he said that Nikki Haley, the presidential candidate who’s 51 years old, was past her prime and that a woman’s only in her prime if she’s in her twenties or thirties or forties. And it caused so much turmoil, at the network, and it was a mess. And it was clear at that point that the one thing that he had really been counting on as a win, this morning show, was looking more and more like loss every day.

Rosin: In addition to this morning show drama he was wading through...not everyone at CNN was on board with his mission right? He may have defined it as truth and journalism, but lots of other people pointed out many many problems with what he was actually trying to do, in practice.

Alberta: Yeah. Because beyond just giving that sort of broad definition that I think a lot of us would agree to around what good journalism should be, you know, leading with the facts and telling the truth without fear or favor, um, the specifics became a bit troubling.

And, you know, specifically the question of, you know, what do you do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and, uh, prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?

Do you have to have some rules in place around how you cover those people? And, you know, Licht would fall back repeatedly on this analogy of some people like rain, some people don’t like rain, and we will have anybody on this network whether they like rain or don’t like rain, but we will not have people on this network who say that it’s not raining outside when it really is. Now, it’s an interesting metaphor but I think the problem for Licht is that the application of it was a little bit uneven. Even going back to the very beginning of his tenure, one of the first programming decisions he made after taking over as the new boss at CNN was to tell his producers to downplay the first hearing of the January 6th committee in Congress.

Remember, it was shown in primetime, this was sort of a, ’get your popcorn ready’ primetime special event that MSNBC went wall to wall with its coverage and earned monster ratings. But because of Licht’s edict to the staff, CNN covered it very casually, didn’t give it the sort of attention that it would have given something like that in previous years, and it got slaughtered in the ratings by MSNBC.

So, there were a lot of examples along the way that gave cause to some of Licht’s own journalists to question, okay, well he says the mission is this thing, but is our execution really in keeping with that, and ultimately it was the town hall with Donald Trump that really broke the camel’s back.

Rosin: Okay. Tell me how that whole event came about

Alberta: Licht and his team had been working for some time to reach an agreement with the former president Donald Trump to bring him on CNN for some sort of big interview.

What they ultimately agreed on was a town hall in New Hampshire, the first in the nation primary state and Licht knew that he was going to get a lot of pushback from his own employees on this. Uh, a lot of people who felt that Trump should not be platformed, that he’d, uh, caused sufficient distress to the country with his lies and his assaults on the ballot box.

And his, um, disruption of the transition of power that CNN should not be platforming him at all, much less in a town hall format. And, and you know, I, I would just flashback quickly to the very first conversation I ever had with Chris where we talked about how the media covered Trump in the past and how it needs to cover him in the future. And I was really slack jawed, just shocked, frankly, when Chris said to me, well, I think the media has learned its lesson.

This is not something that I lose sleep over. This idea, this question of how do we cover Trump? I, you know, and, and I said, whaaaat really? Like, you, you, you think you’ve, you think you’ve got the answer? And he said, yeah, we cover him the same way as anybody, right? We, we, we hold him accountable with the facts and we don’t let him play us.

And, uh, we don’t, dial it up to 11 every time so that we lose the trust of the audience. You know, this is, this is pretty simple stuff. That’s what he said to me. And…

Rosin: I’ve heard other editors say that, by the way, but go ahead.

Alberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so he did two things. First, he picked Kaitlan Collins, the Rising Star reporter at CNN, who everybody there has a ton of respect for, picked her to host this town hall event with Trump.

And second, he made a really forceful case to his senior staff and told them, look, If not CNN, then who? We alone have the experience putting these events on. We have the journalistic chops, we’ve got Kaitlan, we can fact check in real time. We can hold him accountable in front of a live international audience in ways that nobody else can.

So why shouldn’t we do it? And he really made a strong case to his team and he won over people who, who had been resistant to it. He really got a lot of buy-in. But in the process of doing that, he made it very clear that all the chips were now in the center of the table. That this was it.

That this was the big bet that Licht was willing to make, that he needed this win badly. That he needed this sort of signature moment to validate his approach, not only his approach to courting Republican viewers, but also his approach to dealing with his own staff, people who were really, sort of, resistant to some of what he was prescribing and, and how he was going about executing this mission.

So, so really this was setting up to be the make or break moment for Chris Licht at CNN, and he knew it going into Manchester.

Rosin: And it sounds like it was also part of his bigger mission of we can have a different kind of conversation that involves truth and involves airing things more honestly, like it was part of that conversation as well

Alberta: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Rosin: Now you were there, you were close to them as this was all going, not just present at the town hall, but talking to Licht as this was happening, what was, what was he like during the event?

Alberta: So I only talked to him briefly before the program, and then we spoke after the program. So he pulled me into a hallway that was kind of on the sidelines of the main auditorium where the event had just emptied out. And we talked for a few minutes there, and I asked him, you know, did this advance the mission, the journalistic mission of CNN that you’ve spent so much time describing to me?

And, you know, he couldn’t say, no, it didn’t. But he also, in that moment, to his credit, I don’t think he was even capable of lying to me and putting on a brave face and saying, yeah, of course it did. and so he just looked at me and he said, that’s too early to say.

Rosin: Hmm. So what did people say? Like how did people respond to that town hall?

Alberta: Not well, it was immediately and widely panned across the ideological spectrum of left and right, the partisan spectrum of blue and red, the, you know, journalistic spectrum. I mean, it was just, it was hard to find anybody defending it. And in fact, you know, Licht’s own employee, the media writer Oliver Darcy, published his newsletter, Reliable Sources. a couple of hours after the town hall concluded and Oliver’s opening line in the newsletter was, it’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN tonight, or something just like that.

Rosin: So it sounds like if, if Licht’s original mission was to model a different kind of conversation with a new kind of open tone, it accomplished exactly the opposite.

Alberta: I think that’s right. and again, there’s a difference between theory and execution. In theory, the town hall was defensible, but the execution of the town hall was not.

Rosin: After the break, an inside look at Licht’s final days. And what happens at CNN after.

Rosin: So how did things unfold in the weeks following the town hall that led to the news this week of him being pushed out?

Alberta: So the week following the town hall, I was in New York and I had a pre-arranged, hard-won pre-arranged, meeting with David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of CNN. And, at the very last minute, the office of Zaslav informed me that he was no longer willing to speak on the record with me for this story, even though that had been the agreement.

And as I said, it was sort of a hard-won agreement over some time of negotiations. So that was another red flag that just told me that obviously if the boss, the big boss, if he’s unwilling to put himself out there on the record in support of his embattled leader at CNN, that’s not a good sign for him.

And in fact, I even told Zaslav’s office, I told him very plainly, do you know how this is gonna look? You do recognize I’m giving you a chance here to defend your guy and to defend Zaslav himself, and you’re passing on it. You’re hiding from me, changing the rules of our agreement to do this interview. And they decided to do that. And so that was another moment where it was very clear to me that he was in trouble.

So the next day after, after the canceled meeting, I sat down with Licht for our final interview. And I could sense having, again, gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language. That there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong. There was, I think, an acceptance at that point of just how bad things were for him internally.

You know, when I was asking about his employees being so upset with him, when I was poking and prodding on specific things that they were upset with him about, he didn’t make any effort to push back on it or to dispute the premise or to try to, you know, kind of talk his way out. He just, he, he seemed in that moment almost resigned to the realities of how badly things had gone awry inside of his organization.

And, that in and of itself was, was just, almost stunning to me because this was a guy who, in all of our interactions, he was just so predictably confident and self-assured and, always had this kind of look in his eye like he knew something you didn’t know..

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but your Atlantic story was published on June 2nd. He was out on June 7th. When I read your story, I thought, Ooh, it would be very hard for this person to keep their job. And I did wonder, were you surprised by the news this week?

Alberta: [sigh] I can’t say that I was surprised if only because in the days after the piece was published, I was just inundated with text messages and emails and phone calls from people at CNN telling me the situation there was untenable, that there was no way he could survive this. And, that was all unsolicited.

I was not reaching out, trying to follow up on the situation. I, I was not looking to try to break the news of him, you know, being ousted or anything like that. It was just organically obvious that the situation there just wasn’t sustainable. Um, he had lost the trust of too many people. And frankly, I think it’s worth saying that he’d lost the trust of a lot of these folks before the story had come out.

And I think when the story came out, what I heard time and time and time again from journalists there was that there was no coming back from it. That the relationships there could not be rebuilt, after some of the things he had said in the piece. And so in that sense, no, I was not surprised.

Rosin: You know, it’s, it’s weird to be a reporter in a position of having a story come out and then someone gets fired. In your case, it sounds like you see yourself as just a chronicler of something that was already unfolding, not like a causer of events, but just you wrote this story, this happened. It was already on its way.

Alberta: Well, yes, I, I, let me say it this way, I’ve had a number of CNN reporters reach out to me today. People who are friends of mine, people who I’ve known and worked with and respected for a long time, who all were saying basically the same thing to me, independent of one another, which is that, Hey, don’t feel bad about this.

Because, I think because they think I’m a nice guy, I hope because they think I’m a nice guy, don’t feel bad about this because this was coming sooner or later.

Rosin: So, is your conclusion that Licht’s experiment, his mission, did fail. There was no reset with Republican voters viewing CNN, like it didn’t work.

Alberta: It’s hard to draw any other conclusion just based on the ratings. I mean, Chris’s biggest problem was, as I think I said earlier, that he just didn’t have a win that he could point to.

Rosin: Mhmm.

Alberta: And if your goal is to reclaim some significant chunk of lost voters who have written off your news network, that’s going to take time. And I think everybody understood that it was going to take time.

And one year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse. And so just in judging the execution of the journalistic vision that Licht had laid out for me and laid out for his staff upfront I don’t know how you could view it as anything other than a failure because the metrics by which you would judge it do not look good.

Rosin: Now you’ve said a few times this is a matter of execution. But I have to say, his failure does leave me wondering if anyone could have succeeded. Like my immediate thought after hearing that he, he was out at CNN, was in our political climate is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?

Alberta: I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest. And let’s be clear, like, I think that there’s been a pile on because of social media and the way that our news environment works, there’s been a pile on and a lot of people taking shots at Chris Licht, some of which I think are probably unfair.

You know, this is, this is a talented guy and a guy who’d been pretty successful everywhere he’d been. And I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be. And to your specific question, I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do, which is sort of re-imagining the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that has been, sort of, systematically manipulated into not trusting the mainstream media for decades.

I think it’s really healthy to have at least some piece of the market offering what Licht was envisioning and trying to win back disaffected, distrusting Republican viewers with more of a straight news, just the facts ma’am, approach. I think that that’s very much worth trying it’s just, in some ways, it strikes me as an utterly impossible task. And I think if he could do it all over again, even if his goals were the same, I’m pretty sure that Chris Licht would go about emphasizing them and articulating them a little bit differently because he, in a lot of ways, sort of set himself up for failure.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show. We are very glad that you were following this story so closely.

Alberta: You’re welcome Hanna. Thank you for having me.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Mike Pence and Chris Christie are each expected to announce their 2024 presidential candidacy this week. As the Republican primary field continues to grow, so do candidates’ awkward attempts to prove that they’re just regular people. Below, I explore the fraught nature of “dressing for the job you want” on the campaign trail.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The murder rate is suddenly falling. Get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all. How parking ruined everything Americana Cosplay

One of the most memorable scenes from HBO’s political satire Veep is an unsettlingly realistic campaign spot. Jonah Ryan, a WASPy, weaselly Capitol Hill aide, attempts to rebrand himself as an everyman when he runs for Congress. In lieu of his navy blazer and khakis, Jonah dons a flannel shirt and a puffy vest, and chops wood (poorly). He looks uncomfortable merely holding the axe, let alone swinging it.

I thought of Jonah this past weekend as former Vice President Mike Pence rolled into Des Moines, Iowa, straddling a Harley-Davidson. Pence mugged for the cameras in a black leather vest, jeans, and cowboy boots. To be fair, Pence was the only presidential candidate who actually rode a motorcycle to Senator Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” charity glad-handing event, so he deserves a little bit of credit. But the photos were, well, quite funny. Pence has spent years cultivating a distinct personal image—that of a stoic, soft-spoken churchgoer who never has a hair out of place. Picture Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, then imagine his exact opposite: That’s Pence.

Still … at least he didn’t autograph a Bible! Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was also in Iowa this past weekend, and he graciously signed someone’s copy of the good book. (His wife, Casey, was photographed in her own motorcycle leather, adorned with an image of Florida, a gator, and the phrase Where Woke Goes to Die. She and her husband took an SUV, not a hog, to the event.)

As his campaign gets under way, DeSantis is also undergoing a Jonah-like evolution. He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, yet he’s still learning basic retail-politics skills. My colleague Mark Leibovich recently observed DeSantis up close on the trail in New Hampshire. While working the rope line at an American Legion hall, DeSantis “smiled for the camera like the dentist had just asked him to bite down on a blob of putty; like he was trying to make a mold, or to fit one,” Leibovich wrote.

To be sure, the performative “I’m just like you” campaign pitch is by no means a purely Republican phenomenon. Remember in 2015, when Hillary Clinton informed us that she was “just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids”? Or way back in 2003, when John Kerry tried to court Philadelphia voters by visiting the divey cheesesteak mecca Pat’s and doomed his campaign by asking for Swiss cheese instead of Whiz?

In the last presidential election cycle, after being dogged by accusations of hiding from the coronavirus pandemic in his basement, Joe Biden released his own how-do-you-like-me-now campaign ad. As an electric guitar strummed in the background, Biden revved the engine of his convertible Corvette Stingray, then tore off down what looked like a very safe private road, ostensibly in support of an electric-vehicle future. The spot unintentionally called to mind the 2009 Onion headline “Shirtless Biden Washes Trans Am in White House Driveway.”

I asked my colleague Amanda Mull, who spent 10 years in the fashion industry and writes about consumerism, why presidential candidates lean into the same form of über-Americana year after year. “Politics is a strange industry full of fundamentally strange people who mostly don’t quite realize how odd they are,” she said.

She went on, “This working-man Americana cosplay is, on some level, an acknowledgement that politicians exist separately from regular people, and it’s an attempt to bridge a gap on an aesthetic level that they are incapable of bridging interpersonally. But they’re weird guys, so the end result is the exact opposite—they look so uncomfortable, so uncanny in their little jeans and boots, that they might as well have just landed from outer space.”

The current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, skipped Iowa altogether this past weekend, but rest assured, he’s been busy doing his own pandering. Last week, Trump proposed a yearlong “Salute to America 250” party to be held at the Iowa state fairgrounds in celebration of the country’s coming semiquincentennial in 2026. “Together we will build it, and they will come,” Trump proclaimed. You could virtually smell the rising corn.

Related:

Ron DeSantis’s joyless ride Why won’t Trump’s rivals just say it? Today’s News A sonic boom was heard in the D.C. area after military jets scrambled to respond to a private flight crossing into restricted airspace. The plane was determined not to be a threat. The California attorney general is investigating whether a group of migrants that, on Friday, was flown to California on a private plane was sent by the state of Florida, calling it “state-sanctioned kidnapping.” The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, on allegations that the company is mishandling customer funds and lying to regulators and investors. Evening Read Illustration by Jo Imperio

In Defense of Humanity

By Adrienne LaFrance

On July 13, 1833, during a visit to the Cabinet of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson had an epiphany. Peering at the museum’s specimens—butterflies, hunks of amber and marble, carved seashells—he felt overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of nature, and humankind’s place within it.

The experience inspired him to write “The Uses of Natural History,” and to articulate a philosophy that put naturalism at the center of intellectual life in a technologically chaotic age—guiding him, along with the collective of writers and radical thinkers known as transcendentalists, to a new spiritual belief system. Through empirical observation of the natural world, Emerson believed, anyone could become “a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition”—finding agency, individuality, and wonder in a mechanized age.

Read the full article.

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Read. A new collection of Charles Portis’s work makes the case for his place in the American canon.

Listen. The newest episode of the How to Talk to People podcast discusses what we owe our friends in a culture that prioritizes romance.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The NBA Finals are tied at one game apiece, and if you’re not already watching, you still have time to tune in. The Denver Nuggets are vying for their first title in franchise history. Hardly anybody expected their opponents, the No. 8 seed Miami Heat, to make it this far, but their star, Jimmy Butler, is one of the greatest competitors in all of basketball. He’s going up against the mesmerizing Jamal Murray and the two-time MVP Nikola Jokić, who, despite his 6-foot-11-inch stature, can dribble and pass like a guard. Game 3 is Wednesday, and the series will go to at least five (hopefully more).

— John

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Remember Ron DeSantis?

Of course you know who Ron DeSantis is. But remember who he appeared to be just a few months ago? In the first days after the 2022 midterms, the Florida governor looked like the future of the Republican Party. Donald Trump had just led the GOP to its third straight underwhelming election, thanks largely to underperformance by the former president’s favored candidates. Meanwhile, DeSantis had romped to victory in Florida. The Republican Party seemed to need an alternative to Trump, and DeSantis looked like that guy.

DeSantis officially entered the race May 24 during a disastrous appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces. The decision to appear virtually is a sign of exactly what ails his fledgling campaign: DeSantis’s reputation thrived online, but once he had to actually meet people IRL, he looked strange and anything but invincible. How he stumbled is partly a story about media narratives—how press coverage can inflate and then deflate a candidate in short order—and, ironically, partly a story about how politics is strange and unpredictable, no matter what the narrative shapers tell you.

What is striking is how little has materially changed about the presidential race since the midterms. Mostly, DeSantis has continued to add to his list of conservative triumphs in Florida, with some asterisks. DeSantis’s fight against Disney has stagnated a bit; the Mouse has good lawyers who have managed to run some circles around the governor. Just last week, Disney announced that it would cancel $1 billion in development in Orlando. DeSantis also signed a ban on abortion after six weeks of gestation into law, which he wanted but which some observers expect will be a liability for him. As for Trump, his major developments are getting indicted in Manhattan and losing a $5 million sexual-assault and defamation lawsuit. These are not the sorts of things you typically expect to help a candidate.

And yet, Trump has only gotten stronger over that period. In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump has gone from a low of 47.3 percent on November 18 to 56 percent today, while DeSantis has fallen from 29 to just less than 20 percent. (Everyone else is still a distant afterthought.) The former president has benefited from Republican voters rallying around him amid his legal troubles. As for DeSantis, he has less failed than declined to seize the moment: Many supporters have been frustrated that he is only now officially launching his campaign, even though it’s been a foregone conclusion for years. Until recently, he’s declined to really criticize Trump much. His wooden, clumsy appearances overseas, in Washington, and in New Hampshire have hurt him too, as has an uncharacteristically disciplined and methodical Trump effort to tear DeSantis down. Detractors say DeSantis is too online, an impression that his Twitter campaign launch did not exactly help.

How did DeSantis stock go from so high to so low? His crash began with being overrated in the first place. Reporters love a shiny new object, pundits don’t like Trump, and the prospect of a Trump-DeSantis battle royale got everyone excited. When people asked me what I thought was the biggest flaw in conventional wisdom, I would say that DeSantis was overrated—which made me feel pretty clever, until I realized that every other political reporter felt the same way. It just took a while for polls to catch up.

Today, DeSantis is probably underrated. Now that he’s officially in the race, he’ll get a bump in the polls, and we’ll start to hear about a “Ronaissance” (trademark pending). Just how underrated, though? If he’s really going to challenge Trump, he’s going to have to show that he has the stomach to really fight back. (The vapors in DeSantis land over a pretty mild tweet from his super PAC don’t augur well, though it’s early.) He’s also going to have to solve his 2020 conundrum: He can’t very well imply that Trump is a loser while also endorsing Trump’s view that the election was stolen. Only Trump can pull off that type of cognitive dissonance.

Everyone thinks they know what it would take for Republicans to free themselves of Trump, but, like true communism, it’s never been tried: GOP politicians have never been willing or able to actually do it. DeSantis’s early hype was rooted in a belief that he had what it took to follow through. Now he has a chance, but, as Trump’s old defense secretary noted, the enemy gets a vote—and he’ll be starting from a more commanding advantage than ever over DeSantis.

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?
Yes. Biden formally announced his run on April 25.

Why does he want to run?
Biden’s slogan is apparently “Let’s finish the job.” He centered his launch video on the theme of freedom, but underlying all of this is his apparent belief 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?
Barring unforeseen catastrophe, yes. 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 were to bow out, she’d be the immediate 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?
Not right now.

(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 stepped away.

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?
Not at this moment.

(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 dropped out, 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?
No.

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?
Not if she isn’t running.

(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 a scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
No.

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?
Not now.

(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 announced his 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. 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?
Despite his bizarre beliefs, he’s polling in double digits against Biden—though that may mostly be reflection of dissatisfaction with the president and of his own famous surname.

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 the ‘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?
Yes. He is slated to finally announce a long-awaited run in an appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces on May 24.

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?
He doesn’t look like the Trump-toppler today that he did several months ago, but it’s 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 résumé (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. 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 the 2020 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?
No. On June 5, after weighing a campaign, he announced he would not run. Warning about the dangers of a Trump reprise, he said, “Every candidate needs to understand the responsibility of getting out and getting out quickly if it’s not working.” Points for taking his own advice!

Why did he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and saw his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism. He is also a prominent Trump critic.

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

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

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

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

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign in North Charleston, South Carolina, on May 22.

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. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, is his first high-ish-profile endorsement.

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?
No. On April 14, Pompeo announced he wasn’t running. “This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again,” he said.

Why did 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 wanted him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Could he have won 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?
Probably not. He said on May 1 that he wasn’t running “this year.” But he seems to be rethinking that as Ron DeSantis’s campaign sputters.

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?
Certainly not if he isn’t running.

(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 is himself running, 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, okay, 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, okay?

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 really wants to, but 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. Moreover, he seems agitated to see other Republicans trying to run without criticizing Trump.

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 of a campaign-in-waiting or a clear constituency, except the Mooch.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Larry Elder

Who is he?
A longtime conservative radio host and columnist, he ran as a Republican in the unsuccessful 2021 attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on April 20.

Why does he want to run?
Glad you asked! “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable,” he tweeted. “We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there. That’s why I’m running for President.” We don’t have any idea what that means either.

Who wants him to run?
Impossible to say at this stage, but deep-blue California is a tough launching pad for any conservative, especially an unseasoned candidate. This recall campaign also dredged up various unflattering information about his past.

Can he win the nomination?
Hope springs eternal, but probability does not.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Rick Perry

Who is he?
Perry was a three-term governor of Texas before serving as energy secretary under Donald Trump. He’s also run for president three times: in 2012, 2016, and … I forget the third one. Oops.

Is he running?
Oh, right! The third one is 2024, maybe. He told CNN in May that he’s considering a run.

Why does he want to run?
He didn’t say, but he’s struggled to articulate much of a compelling case to Republican voters beyond the fact that he’s from Texas, he looks good in a suit, and he wants to be president, gosh darn it.

Who wants him to run?
Probably no one. As Mike Pompeo already discovered, there’s not much of a market for a run-of-the-mill former Trump Cabinet member in the primary—especially one who had such a forgettable turn as secretary, mostly remembered for being dragged peripherally into both the first Trump impeachment and election subversion.

Can he win the nomination?
The third time would not be a charm.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Doug Burgum

Who is he?
What? You don’t know? Do you even pay attention to politics? Nah, just kidding. A self-made software billionaire, Burgum’s serving his second term as the governor of North Dakota.

Is he running?
Apparently so! He was on approximately no one’s radar until a CBS News report on May 18 that kindly referred to his plans to run a “dark horse” campaign. Extremely dark.

Why does he want to run?
He told a North Dakota newspaper that he thinks the “silent majority” of Americans want candidates who aren’t on the extremes. (A wealthy outsider, targeting the silent majority? Where have we heard that before?)

Who wants him to run?
Lots of people expected a governor from the Dakotas to be a candidate in 2024, but they were looking at Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Burgum is very popular at home—he won more than three-quarters of the vote in 2020—but that still amounts to fewer people than the population of Toledo, Ohio.

Can he win the nomination?
“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” he has said. “That’s a competitive advantage.” But it’s even better to have a chance, which he doesn’t.

THIRD-PARTY AND INDEPENDENT (Tom Williams / Getty) Joe Manchin

Who is he?
A Democratic U.S. senator and former governor of West Virginia, he was the pivotal centrist vote for the first two years of Joe Biden’s term. I’ve described him as “a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.”

Is he running?
It’s very hard to tell how serious he is. He has visited Iowa, and is being courted by No Labels, the nonpartisan centrist organization, to carry its banner. He’s shown no signs of running, and would stand no chance, in the Democratic primary.

Why does he want to run?
Manchin would arguably have less power as a third-party president than he does as a crucial swing senator, but he faces perhaps the hardest reelection campaign of his life in 2024, as the last Democrat standing in a now solidly Republican state. He also periodically seems personally piqued at Biden and the Democrats over slights perceived or real.

Who wants him to run?
No Labels would love to have someone like him, a high-profile figure who’s willing to buck his party and has policies that would appeal to voters from either party. It’s hard to imagine he’d have much of an organic base of support, but Democrats are terrified he’d siphon off enough votes to hand Trump or another Republican the win in a three-way race.

Can he win?
“Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter,” he said in April. If that is true, do not expect to see him in the presidential race.

(Frederick M. Brown / Getty) Cornel West

Who is he?
West is a philosopher, a theologian, a professor, a preacher, a gadfly, a progressive activist, an actor, a spoken-word recording-artist, an author … and we’re probably missing a few.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on the People’s Party ticket on June 5.

Why does he want to run?
“In these bleak times I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States,” he said in his announcement video. West is a fierce leftist who has described Trump as a “neo-fascist” and Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal.”

Who wants him to run?
West was a high-profile backer of Bernie Sanders, and it’s easy to imagine him winning over some of Sanders’s fervent fans. The People’s Party is relatively new and unproven, and doesn’t have much of a base of its own.

Can he win?
Let’s hear it from Brother West: “Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he said. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.” Sounds like a no, but it should be a lively, entertaining campaign.

Real-life Ron DeSantis was here, finally. In the fidgety flesh; in Iowa, South Carolina, and, in this case, New Hampshire. Not some distant Sunshine State of potential or idealized Donald Trump alternative or voice in the far-off static of Twitter Spaces. But an actual human being interacting with other human beings, some 200 of them, packed into an American Legion hall in the town of Rochester.

“Okay, smile, close-up,” an older woman told the Florida governor, trying to pull him in for another photo. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, had just finished a midday campaign event, and the governor was now working a quick rope line—emphasis on quick and double emphasis on working. The fast-talking first lady is much better suited to this than her halting husband. He smiled for the camera like the dentist had just asked him to bite down on a blob of putty; like he was trying to make a mold, or to fit one. It was more of a cringe than a grin.

“Governor, I have a lot of relatives in Florida,” the next selfie guy told him. Everybody who meets DeSantis has relatives in Florida or a time-share on Clearwater Beach or a bunch of golf buddies who retired to the Villages. “Wow, really?” DeSantis said.

He was trying. But this did not look fun for him.

Retail politicking was never DeSantis’s gift. Not that it mattered much before, in the media-dominated expanse of Florida politics, where DeSantis has proved himself an elite culture warrior and troller of libs. DeSantis was reelected by 19 points last November. He calls himself the governor of the state “where woke goes to die,” which he believes will be a model for his presidency of the whole country, a red utopia in his own image.

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

What does the on-paper promise of DeSantis look like in practice? DeSantis has performed a number of these in-person chores in recent days, after announcing his presidential campaign on May 24 in a glitchy Twitter Spaces appearance with Elon Musk.

As I watched him complete his rounds in New Hampshire on Thursday—visits to a VFW hall, an Elks Club, and a community college, in addition to the American Legion post—the essential duality of his campaign was laid bare: DeSantis is the ultimate performative politician when it comes to demonstrating outrage and “kneecapping” various woke abuses—but not so much when it comes to the actual in-person performance of politics.

The campaign billed his appearance in Rochester as a “fireside chat.” (The outside temperature was 90 degrees, and there was no actual fire.) The governor and first lady also held fireside chats this week at a welding shop in Salix, Iowa, and at an event space in Lexington, South Carolina. The term conjures the great American tradition started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Those were scary times—grim visages of malnourished kids and food riots and businessmen selling pencils on the street. FDR’s cozy evenings around the radio hearth were meant to project comfort and avuncular authority.

Sitting on gray armchairs onstage in Rochester—Casey cross-legged and Ron man-spread—the DeSanti reassured their audience that the Florida governor was the candidate best equipped to protect Americans from contemporary threats no less serious than stock-market crashes and bank closures. He was focused on a distinct set of modern menaces: “woke indoctrination” and “woke militaries” and “woke mind viruses” and “woke mobs” that endanger every institution of American life. He used woke more than a dozen times at each event (I counted).

Also, DeSantis said he’s a big supporter of “the death penalty for pedophiles” (applause); reminded every audience that he’d sent dozens of migrants to “beautiful Martha’s Vineyard” (bigger applause); and promised to end “this Faucian dystopia” around COVID once and for all (biggest applause).

Also, George Soros (boo).

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

Casey talked at each New Hampshire stop about the couple’s three young children, often in the vein of how adorably naughty they are—how they write on the walls of the governor’s mansion with permanent markers and leave crayon stains on the carpets. Ron spoke in personal terms less often, but when he did, it was usually to prove that he understands the need to protect kids from being preyed upon by the various and ruthless forces of wokeness. One recurring example on Thursday involved how outrageous it is that in certain swim competitions, a girl might wind up being defeated by a transgender opponent. “I’m particularly worried about this as the father of two daughters,” DeSantis told the Rochester crowd.

This played well in the room full of committed Republicans and likely primary voters, as it does on Fox. Clearly, this is a fraught and divisive issue, but one that’s been given outsized attention in recent years, especially in relation to the portion of the population it directly affects. By comparison, DeSantis never mentioned gun violence, the leading cause of death for children in this country, including many in his state (the site of the horrific Parkland massacre of 2018, the year before he became governor). DeSantis readily opts for the culture-war terrain, ignoring the rest, pretty much everywhere he goes.

His whole act can feel like a clunky contrivance—a forced persona railing against phony or hyped-up outrages. He can be irascible. Steve Peoples, a reporter for the Associated Press, approached DeSantis after a speech at a VFW hall in Laconia and asked the governor why he hadn’t taken any questions from the audience. “Are you blind?” DeSantis snapped at Peoples. “Are you blind? Okay, so, people are coming up to me, talking to me [about] whatever they want to talk to me about.”

No one in the room cared about this little outburst besides the reporters (who sent a clip of it bouncing across social media within minutes). And if the voters did care, it would probably reflect well on DeSantis in their eyes, demonstrating his willingness to get in the media’s face.

[Yair Rosenberg: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]

Journalists who managed to get near DeSantis this week unfailingly asked him about Donald Trump, the leading GOP candidate. In Rochester, NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez wondered about the former president’s claim that he would eliminate the federal government’s “administrative state” within six months of a second term. “Why didn’t you do it when you had four years?” DeSantis shot back.

In general, though, DeSantis didn’t mention Trump without being prompted—at least not explicitly. He drew clear, if barely veiled, contrasts. “I will end the culture of losing in the Republican Party,” he vowed Thursday night in Manchester. Unsaid, obviously, is that the GOP has underperformed in the past three national elections—and no one is more to blame than Trump and the various MAGA disciples he dragged into those campaigns.

“Politics is not about building a brand,” DeSantis went on to say. What matters is competence and conviction, not charisma. “My husband will never back down!” Casey added in support. In other words: He is effective and he will follow through and actually do real things, unlike you-know-who.

“Politics is not about entertainment,” DeSantis said in all of his New Hampshire speeches, usually at the end. He might be trying to prove as much.