The balloon floated across the US early this year before being shot down off the South Carolina coast.

On the first day of class in the fall of 1924, Martha Lum walked into the Rosedale Consolidated School. The mission-style building had been built three years earlier for white students in Rosedale, Mississippi.

Martha was not a new student. This 9-year-old had attended the public school the previous year. But that was before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, banning immigrants from Asia and inciting ever more anti-Asian racism inside the United States.

At the time, African Americans were fleeing the virulent racism of the Mississippi Delta in the Great Migration north and west. To replace them, white landowners were recruiting Chinese immigrants like Martha’s father, Gong Lum. But instead of picking cotton, many Chinese immigrants, like Gong and his wife, Katherine, opened up grocery stores, usually in Black neighborhoods, after being shut out of white neighborhoods.

At noon recess, Martha had a visitor. The school superintendent notified her that she had to leave the public school her family’s tax dollars supported, because “she was of Chinese descent, and not a member of the white or Caucasian race.” Martha was told she had to go to the district’s all-Black public school, which had older infrastructure and textbooks, comparatively overcrowded classrooms, and lower-paid teachers.

Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

[Imani Perry: Lessons from Black and Chinese relations in the Deep South]

“A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Rice on November 21, 1927.

A century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. Rice—as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.

The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized by a legal strategist named Edward Blum, SFFA filed suit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard as well as white and Asian applicants to UNC to claim that their equal-protection rights were violated by affirmative action. Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?

This is indicative of a larger fantasy percolating throughout society: that white Americans, who, on average, stand at the more advantageous end of nearly every racial inequity, are the primary victims of racism. This fantasy is fueling the grievance campaigns of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair for everyone—and that affirmative action is unfair for white and Asian American applicants.

It is a fantasy that race is considered as an admissions factor only through affirmative action. But the Court endorsed SFFA’s call for “race neutral” admissions in higher education—effectively prohibiting a minor admissions metric such as affirmative action, which closes racial inequities in college admissions, while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed: “Race-neutral policies may thus achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without … affirmative action policies.” The result of the Court’s decision: a normality of racial inequity. Again.

This is what the Court considers to be fair admissions for students, because the judges consider the major admissions metrics to be “race-neutral”—just as a century ago, the Court considered Mississippi public schools to be “separate but equal.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, recognized “the inherent folly of that approach” but doesn’t recognize the inherent folly of his “race neutral” approach.

History repeats sometimes without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”

The Court today claimed, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race- based college admissions in sight.” In actuality, twenty years have passed, with no end to racial inequity in sight.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented at the top 100 selective public universities. After affirmative action was outlawed at public universities in California and Michigan in the 1990s, Black enrollment at the most selective schools dropped roughly 50 percent, in some years approaching early-1970s numbers. This lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.

In its reply brief in the UNC case, SFFA argued that the University of California system enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,”  referencing the increase of Latino students at UC campuses from 1997 to 2019. But accounting for the increase in Latino students graduating from high school, those gains should be even larger. There’s a 23-point difference between the percentage of high-school graduates in California who are Latino and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.

Declines in racial representation and associated harms extend to graduate and professional programs. The UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average in the two decades before affirmative action was banned, and dropped well below the national average in the two decades after.

[Bertrand Cooper: The failure of affirmative action]

Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at the most coveted universities isn’t a new phenomenon, it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t because there is something deficient about those students or their parents or their cultures. Admissions metrics both historically and currently value qualities that say more about access to inherited resources and wealth— computers and counselors, coaches and tutors, college preparatory courses and test prep—than they do about students’ potential. And gaping racial inequities persist in access to each of those elements—as gaping as funding for those so-called equal schools in the segregated Mississippi Delta a century ago.

So what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately help white students too, because their family’s low income is least likely to extend to their community and schools. Which is to say that low-income white Americans are far and away less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to live in densely impoverished neighborhoods and send their kids to poorly resourced public schools. Researchers find that 80 percent of low-income Black people and 75 percent of low-income Latino people reside in low-income communities, which tend to have lesser-resourced schools, compared with less than 50 percent of low-income white people. (Some Asian American ethnic groups are likely to be concentrated in low-income communities, while others are not; the data are not disaggregated to explore this.) Predominately white school districts, on average, receive $23 billion more than those serving the same number of students of color.

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. This affects applicants along racial lines, but in complex ways. Asian Americans, for example, have higher incomes than African Americans on average, but Asian Americans as a group have the highest income inequality of any racial group. So standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indian Americans while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups such as Burmese and Hmong Americans. But standardized tests, like these other admissions metrics, are “race neutral”?

Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses.

Besides all of this, the tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

Why are advocates spending millions to expand access to test prep when a more effective and just move is to ban the use of standardized tests in admissions? Such a ban would help not only Black, Native, and Latino students but also low-income white and Asian American students.

Some selective colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic welcomed some of their most racially and economically diverse classes, after receiving more applications than normal from students of color. For many students of color, standardized tests have been a barrier to applying, even before being a barrier to acceptance. Then again, even where colleges and universities, especially post-pandemic, have gone test-optional, we can reasonably assume or suspect that students who submit their scores are viewed more favorably.

When admissions committees at selective institutions value students whose parents and grandparents attended that institution, this legacy metric ends up giving preferential treatment to white applicants. Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants for the classes of 2014–19 at Harvard were white.

College athletes are mostly white and wealthy—because most collegiate sports require resources to play at a high level. White college athletes make up 70 to 85 percent of athletes in most non-revenue-generating sports (with the only revenue-generating sports usually being men’s basketball and football). And student athletes, even ones who are not gaming the system, receive immense advantages in the admissions process, thus giving white applicants yet another metric by which they are the most likely to receive preferential treatment. Even Harvard explained as part of its defense that athletes had an advantage in admissions over nonathletes, which conferred a much greater advantage to white students over Asian American students than any supposed disadvantage that affirmative action might create. And white students benefit from their relatives being more likely to have the wealth to make major donations to highly selective institutions. And white students benefit from their parents being overrepresented on the faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Relatives of donors and children of college employees normally receive an admissions boost.

Putting this all together, one study found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students “would have been rejected” if they hadn’t been in those four categories, the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found.

While private and public universities tout “diversity” recruitment efforts, their standard recruitment strategies concentrate on high-income students who are predominantly white and Asian, at highly resourced schools, positioned to have higher grade point averages and test scores that raise college rankings. Public colleges and universities facing declines in state and federal funding actively recruit white and wealthy out-of-state students who pay higher fees. At many institutions, including a UC campus, “admission by exception,” a practice originally promoted as a means of expanding opportunities for disadvantaged groups, has been used to enroll international students with the resources to pay U.S. tuition fees.

Targeting international students of color to achieve greater diversity on campus disadvantages American students of color. Targeting students from families who can pay exorbitant out-of-state fees benefits white families, who have, on average, 10 times the household net worth of Black families.

Affirmative action attempted to compensate not just for these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students, but also for the legacy of racism in society. This legacy is so deep and wide that affirmative action has rightly been criticized as a superficial, Band-Aid solution. Still, it has been the only admissions policy that pushes against the deep advantages that white Americans receive in the other admissions metrics under the cover of “race neutral.”

[Issa Kohler-Hausmann: No one knows what ‘race neutral’ admissions looks like]

If anti-affirmative-action litigants and judges were really supportive of “race neutrality”—if they were really against “racial preferences”—then they would be going after regular admissions practices. But they are not, because the regular admissions metrics benefit white and wealthy students.

Litigants and judges continue to use Asian Americans as political footballs to maintain these racial preferences for white and wealthy students. Particularly in the Harvard case, SFFA’s Edward Blum used Asian plaintiffs to argue that affirmative action harms Asian American applicants. No evidence of such racist discrimination was found in the lower courts. According to an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists, the so-called race-neutral admissions policy SFFA advocated for (which was just adopted by the highest Court) would actually harm Asian American applicants. It denies Asian American students the ability to express their full self in their applications, including experiences with racism, which can contextualize their academic achievements or struggles and counter racist ideas. This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans. Pacific Islander Americans have a higher rate of poverty than the average American.

Pitting Asian and Black Americans against each other is an age-old tactic. Martha Lum’s parents didn’t want to send their daughter to a “colored” school, because they knew that more resources could be found in the segregated white schools. Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta a century ago motivated the Lums to reinforce anti-Black racism—just as some wealthy Asian American families bought into Blum’s argument for “race neutral” admissions to protect their own status. Yet “separate but equal” closed the school door on the Lums. “Race neutral” is doing the same. Which is why 38 Asian American organizations jointly filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

A century ago, around the time the Court stated that equal facilities for education were being afforded to both races, Mississippi spent $57.95 per white student compared with $8.86 per Black student in its segregated schools. This racial inequity in funding existed in states across the South: Alabama ($47.28 and $13.32), Florida ($61.29 and $18.58), Georgia ($42.12 and $9.95), North Carolina ($50.26 and $22.34), and South Carolina ($68.76 and $11.27). “Separate but equal” was a legal fantasy, meant to uphold racist efforts to maintain these racial inequities and strike down anti-racist efforts to close them.

Homer Plessy had sued for being kicked off the “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. About four years later, the Court deployed the “separate but equal” doctrine to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause to defend the clearly unequal train cars and the exclusion of Black Americans like Plessy from better-equipped “whites only” cars. Later, the Court used the same doctrine to exclude Asian Americans like Martha Lum from better-equipped “whites only” schools.

The “separate but equal” doctrine was the Court’s stamp to defend the structure of racism. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson’s influence reached far beyond the railway industry more than a century ago, the fantasy of “race neutral” alternatives to affirmative action defends racism well beyond higher education. Evoking “race neutrality,” Justice Clarence Thomas recently dissented from the Supreme Court decision upholding a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibits racist gerrymandering.  

Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature. It was nearly a century ago that civil-rights activists in the NAACP and other organizations were gearing up for a legal movement to expose the fantasy of “separate but equal.” In this new legal movement, defenders of affirmative action can no longer use the false framing of affirmative action as “race conscious” and the regular admissions metrics as “race neutral”—a framing that has been used at least since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, which limited the use of affirmative action. Racist and anti-racist is a more accurate framing than “race neutral” and “race conscious.”  

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

Affirmative-action policies are anti-racist because they have been proved to reduce racial inequities, while many of the regular admissions metrics are racist because they maintain racial inequities. To frame policies as “race neutral” or “not racist” or “race blind” because they don’t have racial language—or because the policy makers deny a racist intent—is akin to framing Jim Crow’s grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests as “race neutral” and “not racist,” even as these policies systematically disenfranchised southern Black voters. Then again, the Supreme Court allowed these Jim Crow policies for decades on the basis that they were, to use today’s term, “race neutral.” Then again, voter-suppression policies today that target Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters have been allowed by a Supreme Court that deems them “race neutral.” Jim Crow lives in the guise of “racial neutrality.”

Everyone should know that the regular admission metrics are the racial problem, not affirmative action. Everyone knew that racial separation in New Orleans and later Rosedale, Mississippi, was not merely separation; it was segregation. And segregation, by definition, cannot be equal. Segregationist policies are racist policies. Racial inequities proved that then.

The Court stated in today’s ruling, “By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.” But it still does not want to acknowledge another inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment that has emerged today: Race cannot be neutral.

Today, racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be “race neutral” are hardly neutral. Race, by definition, has never been neutral. In a multiracial United States with widespread racial inequities in wealth, health, and higher education, policies are not “race neutral.” Policies either expand or close existing racial inequities in college admissions and employment. The “race neutral” doctrine is upholding racist efforts to maintain racial inequities and striking down anti-racist efforts to close racial inequities.

Race, by definition, has never been blind. Even Justice John Harlan, who proclaimed, “Our Constitution is color-blind” in his dissent of Plessy v. Ferguson, prefaced that with this declaration: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country” and “it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.”

In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.

“Separate but equal” then. “Race neutral” now.

War with Mexico? It’s on the 2024 ballot, at least if you believe the campaign rhetoric of more and more Republican candidates.

In January, two Republican House members introduced a bill to authorize the use of military force inside Mexico. They were not know-nothings from the fringes of the MAGA caucus. One was Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy Seal who received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The other was Mike Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret who served as the counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and was a successful entrepreneur before he entered Congress.

Military operations inside Mexico have been endorsed by Republican senators too. Last September, Tom Cotton of Arkansas published an op-ed that proposed:

We can also use special operators and elite tactical units in law enforcement to capture or kill kingpins, neutralize key lieutenants, and destroy the cartel’s super labs and organizational infrastructure. We must work closely with the Mexican government and ensure its continued support in this effort—but we cannot allow it to delay or hinder this necessary campaign.

At a committee hearing in March, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham also favored military operations: “America is under attack. Our nation is being attacked by foreign powers called drug cartels in Mexico.” He concluded: “They are at war with us. We need to be at war with them.” That was not a figure of speech. Along with fellow Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, Graham has repeatedly urged military operations against cartels backed by the “fury and might of the United States.”

[Anne Applebaum: How do you stop lawmakers from destroying the law?]

Also in March, Rolling Stone reported that former President Donald Trump—who is once again the Republican presidential front-runner—has asked advisers for war plans and has speculated about deploying Special Operations teams into Mexico.

At a campaign event in Eagle Pass, Texas, Trump’s closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, proposed a selective naval blockade of Mexican ports.

“These precursors are sent into Mexico,” he said, referring to chemicals used in the production of fentanyl. “The cartels are creating the drug. And then they’re moving the drug into the United States of America. We’ll mobilize the Coast Guard and the Navy to interdict precursor chemicals.”

Sometimes the proponents of military operations inside Mexico add a caveat about cooperating with the Mexican government, as Cotton did in his op-ed and as DeSantis does in the written supplement to his naval blockade proposal.

But DeSantis did not mention the caveat in his spoken remarks yesterday, and the caveats get dropped when the idea is promoted on television and in social media. The Fox News star Greg Gutfeld argued on his program in December 2022 that it didn’t matter whether Mexico agreed or not:

It’s time to take out cartels in Mexico, bomb the bleep out of them. It’ll be over in minutes … And it doesn’t matter if Mexico won’t agree, when their cartels are free to invade us anyway. We didn’t ask Pakistan if we could drop in and kill bin Laden.

Probably very little of this talk is meant to be taken literally. Much of it functions as a rhetorical escape from the political dilemma that Republicans and conservatives face.

Synthetic opioids are inflicting death and suffering across the United States: 70,000-plus Americans died of overdose in 2021. The Republican brand is to sound tough, to promise decisive action. In the past, that impulse led Republicans to vow a war on drugs inside the United States: harsher penalties for users and dealers, more powers for police to search and seize. But this time, the users are Americans whom Republicans regard as their own. Five out of every eight victims of opioid overdose are non-Hispanic white people. Whereas historically, fatal overdoses have been an urban problem, synthetic opioids have been taking lives almost exactly equally between urban and rural areas. In deep-blue states such as California and New York, the death rates from synthetic opioids are even worse in rural areas than in the cities.

Republican lawmakers have little appetite for a domestic crackdown that would criminalize so many of their own constituents and their constituents’ relatives. At the retail level, many a “dealer” is also a user, a member of the community seeking to finance his or her own addiction by spreading addiction to others. Contemporary conservatism tells a fable about virtuous middle-Americans beset by alien villains. Apply that fable to the fentanyl crisis, and you arrive where Fox’s Gutfeld did at the conclusion of his December monologue: “So that’s my plan, bomb the supply, reduce harm among the demand by availing safer, clean alternatives.” Compassion for us. Violence for them.

But even if bomb-Mexico talk is intended only to shift blame—to redirect anger toward politically safer targets—the talk carries real-world political dangers.

The first danger of these calls for unilateral U.S. intervention is that it alienates opinion inside Mexico. Trump, DeSantis, Graham, and the others are speaking to Americans. But Mexicans can hear too. Are Americans dying because of Mexican drug sales? Mexicans are dying because of American drug purchases. Mexico has about one-third the population of the United States, but four times the homicide rate. Many, if not most, of those homicides are casualties of the battles for market share set in motion by American drug demand. Does Mexico do too little to halt the flow of opioids northward? The United States does nothing to halt the flow of guns southward.

Mexican resentment of U.S. hypocrisy has weakened Mexican leaders who want to strengthen the partnership with the United States—and empowered exploiters of anti-American sentiment, including the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As American politicians shift from merely blaming Mexico to outright threatening Mexico, the resentment will only intensify.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

The second danger is an even more sinister effect within Mexico: American threats of war upon Mexico will enhance the political power of criminals against the Mexican state.

Criminals have often benefited from nationalism in protecting and supporting their operations inside Mexico. One notorious example: In 1985, Mexican cartel criminals abducted, tortured, and murdered a Drug Enforcement Agency officer, Enrique Camarena. The crime boss Rafael Caro Quintero was identified by the United States as the “intellectual author” of the murder. He was immediately arrested, but never extradited. Caro Quintero was rearrested by Mexican marines in July 2022. But President Lopez Obrador took exception at his daily morning press conference to reports that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had located Caro Quintero, suggesting the Americans had overstepped. The Mexican courts meanwhile seemed to interpret U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s request for “immediate extradition” of Quintero as a potential infringement of the accused’s rights as a Mexican citizen. Nor unfortunately is this a unique case of Mexican officials using nationality as a justification to protect criminals from American justice. If Republican politicians revive ancient memories of past U.S. aggression against Mexico, it will make any such justifications more plausible and acceptable to Mexican opinion.

A third danger of the war talk is that Republican politicians are radicalizing their own voters. Three years ago, proposals to bomb Mexico would have sounded crazy. But if enough people repeat the talk—if it is debated, amplified, and validated by trusted commentators—the talk gains power. It becomes thinkable, sayable, and then ultimately doable. “Doable” is not the same as “done.” But an atmosphere is being created in which Republicans who do not speculate about war with Mexico may be perceived as weak.

DeSantis may imagine that his call for a naval blockade offers a moderate alternative to outright war. But he is still training Republican primary voters to expect a promise of some kind of military action against Mexico. It could be conducted beyond Mexican waters, farther from cameras that could record images of explosions or injured civilians. But think harder, and it’s actually an even more invasive idea than air strikes, because the blockade would need to continue for months, years, maybe forever.

The fourth danger is that the Republicans have ceased to consider even the most obvious risks. Despite Lindsey Graham’s vivid language, the Mexican criminal cartels are not in fact at war with the United States. They are doing business with the United States—a lethal business, but business all the same. As rational profit-maximizers, they take care to avoid direct confrontations with American power. In March, criminals abducted four Americans in Matamoros, Mexico, killing two. After the survivors were released, the local cartel issued a public letter of apology and surrendered five men whom it blamed for the abduction. “We have decided to turn over those who were directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted under their own decision-making and lack of discipline,” the letter stated. Whatever was really going on in this murky story, clearly the cartel was worried about consequences for the murders.

But what if the U.S. begins bombing and rocketing cartel operations? Will the old restraints still apply? What would then deter the cartels from extending their violence across the border? “The enemy gets a vote,” goes an old warning. If the United States opts to escalate a law-enforcement challenge into a military conflict, it must prepare for its well-financed, well-armed antagonist to respond in kind. And unlike previous irregular antagonists, such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, this is one that intimately understands and has deeply penetrated U.S. society.

The risks to the United States extend beyond U.S. and Mexican territory. Right now, the United States and its allies are assisting Ukraine against a Russian invasion. What happens to the consensus behind that effort if, 18 months from now, the United States has bombed, invaded, or blockaded its own neighbor? What if U.S. forces unintentionally inflict civilian casualties or destroy the property and livelihoods of nearby innocents? The U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and against Iraq in 2003 were joined by global coalitions and supported by United Nations resolutions. There will be no such international legitimation for a U.S. attack inside Mexico, or blockade of Mexico, without the consent of the Mexican government.

There have been occasions in the past when the threat of unilateral U.S. action has pressured Mexican authorities to step up to their responsibilities. But in those cases, the threat was delivered behind closed doors, such that the Mexican side could yield without public humiliation. Today’s threats are creating the opposite pressure—so much so as to raise the question, disturbing on both sides of the border, “Is public humiliation maybe the real point of this otherwise futile exercise?”

The toll of opioids upon American life and American homes is indeed horrific. The cooperation of the Mexican state has been unsatisfying, as López Obrador has proved an especially unreliable and double-sided partner. U.S. frustration with Mexico has a valid basis, and nobody should pretend that the Mexican government is innocent amid the fentanyl traffic. The point is that the American government should not act brutishly, stupidly, and self-defeatingly.

[From the November 2021 issue: ‘I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore’]

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who advised President Nixon on domestic affairs, told the following story in The American Scholar about his attempts to curb drug abuse by squeezing supply. In the late ’60s, the drug of concern was heroin; an important source of supply was via the port of Marseilles in France—the fabled “French Connection.” Over many months, Moynihan negotiated agreements to stop the flow through Marseilles, mercifully without the threat of rockets or Special Forces operations.

I found myself in a helicopter flying up to Camp David to report on this seeming success. The only other passenger was George P. Shultz [then the secretary of labor ], who was busy with official-looking papers. Even so, I related our triumph. He looked up. “Good,” said he, and returned to his tables and charts. “No, really,” said I, “this is a big event.” My cabinet colleague looked up, restated his perfunctory, “Good,” and once more returned to his paperwork. Crestfallen, I pondered, then said, “I suppose you think that so long as there is a demand for drugs, there will continue to be a supply.” George Shultz, sometime professor of economics at the University of Chicago, looked up with an air of genuine interest. “You know,” he said, “there’s hope for you yet!”

Drug interdiction has not worked in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, in Andean South America. American demand and American wealth will summon supply from somewhere, and if one channel of commerce is stopped, another will open. The drug problem is located here, and the answer must be found here. Belligerent snarls and growls may excite American emotions, and they may win some American votes. But if those snarls and growls are acted upon, they will plunge the United States into troubles compared with which the fentanyl problem of today will seem the least of evils. Unfortunately, it’s too late to silence the threats. They have become the price of entry to Republican politics. But it’s not too late to challenge and rebut them—and to elect leaders who understand that Mexico will be either America’s partner or America’s disaster.

Last month, during a meeting of Democrats in rural southwestern Iowa, a man raised his hand. “What are three noncontroversial issues that Democrats should be talking about right now?” he asked the evening’s speaker, Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor and a minor state celebrity.

I watched from the side of the room as Sand answered quickly. The first two issues Democrats should talk about are new state laws dealing with democracy and education, he told the man. And then they should talk about their support for abortion rights. “People in the Iowa Republican Party and their activist base” want to “criminalize abortion,” Sand said.

I registered this response with a surprised blink. Noncontroversial? Democrats in competitive states, and especially committed centrists like Sand, aren’t usually so eager to foreground abortion on the campaign trail. This seemed new.

[Read: The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa]

Ascribing a narrative to some elections is easy. The past two midterm cycles are a case in point. The Democrats’ 2018 blue wave, for example, will go down as a woman-led backlash to a grab-’em-by-the-groin president. In 2022, Democrats performed better than expected, according to many analysts, because abortion rights were on the ballot. Now, a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats want to do it again.

They’re betting that they can re-create and even supercharge their successes last year by centering abortion rights in their platform once again in the lead-up to 2024. They want all of their elected officials—even state auditors—talking about the issue. “If we can do all that, we’re gonna be telling the same story in December 2024 that we told in 2022,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive political group Swing Left, told me.

But this time, Republicans might be better prepared for the fight.

After the leaked draft opinion before the Dobbs decision last May, many in Washington assumed that abortion would fade from voters’ minds by the time November rolled around. “As we get further away from the shock of that event, of Roe being overturned, you don’t think that … people will sort of lose interest?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked the Democratic political strategist Tom Bonier in September 2022. People did not. Two months later, Democrats celebrated better-than-expected results—avoiding not only the kind of “shellacking” that Barack Obama’s party had suffered in 2010, but the widely predicted red wave. The Democrats narrowly lost the House but retained control of the Senate, flipping Pennsylvania in the process. Abortion-rights campaigners won ballot measures in six states.

“The lesson has been well learned,” Bonier told me last week. “This is an issue that is incredibly effective, both for mobilizing voters but also for winning over swing voters.”

[Read: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?]

The latest polling suggests that the issue is very much alive. A record-high number of registered U.S. voters say that abortion is the most important factor in their decision about whom to vote for, and most of those voters support abortion rights, according to Gallup. Rather than growing less salient over time, abortion may even have gained potency: Roughly a quarter of Americans say that recent state efforts to block abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights, not less, according to a USA Today poll last week. Not only that, but recent data suggest that demand for abortion has not been much deterred, despite post-Dobbs efforts to restrict it.

Americans have watched as Republicans in 20 states restricted or banned abortion outright, and activists took aim at interstate travel for abortions and the pill mifepristone. Stories about pregnant women at risk of bleeding out or becoming septic after being denied abortions have lit up the internet for months. All of this attention and sentiment seem unlikely to dissipate by November 2024.

“Republicans ran races on this issue for decades,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told me. “You’re gonna see Democrats run on this issue for decades to come as well.”

Already, Democratic activists plan to engage swing voters by forcing the issue in as many states as possible. So far, legislators in New York and Maryland have introduced abortion-related ballot measures for 2024. Similar efforts are under way in other states, including Florida, Arizona, Missouri, South Dakota, and Iowa.

Smith and her fellow party operatives are confident that they’ve landed on a message that works—especially in purple states where candidates need to win over at least a few moderates and independents. The most successful Democrats last year anchored their abortion messages around the concept of personal liberty, Swing Left’s Radjy told me, because it was “the single issue that is equally popular among far left, far right, center left, and center right.” Radjy shared with me a research report that concluded: “With limited attention and resources, [candidates should] lead with the freedom to decide. Freedom is resonating with the base and conflicted supporters, as well as Soft Biden and Soft Trump women.”

Smith echoed this reframing. “Republican politicians want to insert themselves into women’s personal medical decisions,” she said, by way of exemplifying the message. “They want to take away this critical freedom from you.” In her view, that gives Democratic candidates a decisive advantage: They don’t even have to say the word abortion; they only have to use the language of freedom for people to be receptive.

Joe Biden has never been the most comfortable or natural messenger on abortion. But even he is giving the so-called freedom framework a try. Freedom is the first word in the president’s reelection-announcement ad. Republicans, he says in a voice-over, are “dictating what health-care decisions women can make”; they are “banning books, and telling people who they can love.”

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

It’s helpful, Democratic strategists told me, that the Republicans jockeying for the presidential nomination have been murky at best on the issue. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley held a press conference in April to explain that she sees a federal role in restricting abortion, but wouldn’t say what. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was foggy on his own commitments in interviews before appearing to support a 15-week national ban. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed a six-week limit on abortion, talks about that ban selectively. The leader of the primary pack, Donald Trump, has said that abortion laws should be left to the states, but told a reporter recently that he, too, is “looking at” a 15-week restriction.

Trump clearly wants to appease the primary base while keeping some room to maneuver in the general election. But if he’s the nominee, Democrats say, he’ll have to answer for the end of Roe, as well as the anti-abortion positions advocated by other Republicans. “When I worked for Obama in 2012, as rapid-response director, we tied Mitt Romney to the most extreme positions in his party,” Smith told me. If Trump is the abortion-banning GOP’s nominee, they will “hang that around his neck like a millstone.”

I found it difficult to locate Republican strategists willing to talk with me about abortion, and even fewer who see it as a winning issue for their party. One exception was the Republican pollster and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who says that Republicans can be successful in campaigning on abortion—if they talk about it the right way. At a press conference celebrating the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, hosted by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, Conway seemed to take a swipe at the former president—and the rest of the wishy-washy primary field. “If you’re running to be president of the United States, it should be easy to have a 15-minimum-week standard,” she said.

To win on abortion is to frame your opponent as more extreme, and Democrats have made that easy, says Conway, who also acts as an adviser to the Republican National Committee. Broad federal legislation put forward by Democratic lawmakers last year, in response to the Dobbs leak, would prevent states from banning abortion “after fetal viability” for reasons of the mother’s life or health. Republicans claim that this means that Democrats support termination at all stages of pregnancy. Voters may not like outright bans on abortion, but they also generally don’t support abortion without limits. Conway advises Republican candidates to explain to voters whether they support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, and get that out of the way—and then demand that their Democratic opponents define the time limits they favor. “I’d ask each and every one of them, ‘What are your exceptions? I’ve shown you mine,’” Conway told me.

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Conway’s bullishness is belied by what some of her political allies are up to. While Democrats are pushing for ballot measures that will enshrine abortion rights into law, Republicans are trying to make it harder to pass state constitutional amendments. For example, after it became clear that a ballot measure could result in new abortion protections being added to the Ohio Constitution, state Republicans proposed their own ballot measure asking voters in a special election later this summer to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments.

This scheme does not demonstrate faith that a majority of voters are with them. But it does set up Ohio as the first practical test of abortion’s salience as a political issue in 2024. If Democrats can get their voters to show up this August in the name of abortion rights, maybe they can do it next year too.

The sharp exchange between former President Barack Obama and two nonwhite 2024 GOP presidential candidates captures how diverging perceptions about racial inequity have emerged as a central fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

In their presidential campaigns, Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is Black, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, have repeatedly insisted that systemic or structural racism is no longer a problem in America. That drew a sharp rebuke earlier this month from Obama, who said the pair had joined “a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can all make it.’”   

Both Scott and Haley responded by accusing Obama of treating minority voters as victims and repeating their claims that racism and structural inequities can no longer hold back anyone who will “work hard” and display “integrity” and “grit,” as Scott told a mostly white audience at a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity last Tuesday.

[Read: ‘People who are different are not the problem in America’]

“When I hear people telling me that America is a racist nation, I got to say: Not my America, not our America,” Scott declared to loud applause.

Scott and Haley have leaned into the criticism from Obama, highlighting it to raise their profile in a Republican presidential race where each has attracted just single-digit support in national polls. But in responding to Obama, they have demonstrated how difficult it has become for any GOP leader—especially one who is not white—to challenge the party consensus that the nation has transcended discrimination against minorities and women.

For a Republican coalition that still relies predominantly on white voters, hearing nonwhite GOP candidates dismiss racism offers “acquittal and absolution,” says Robert P. Jones, the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies American attitudes toward race and culture. Such comments from figures like Scott and Haley, he told me, provide “permission” for other Republicans “to not even have to ask the questions” about whether systemic discrimination still shapes U.S. society.

Likewise, Michael Steele, the Black former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he believes that Scott is expressing such an absolutist rejection of racism—despite Scott’s acknowledgment that he has faced racial profiling in his own life—because he recognizes that that assertion is what the GOP’s mainly white electorate wants to hear.

Republicans, Steele told me, like finding “the Black man to put out there to say that shit to begin with. You pick someone to affirm the lie in a way that you ostensibly take your fingerprints off it. You create this artificial legitimacy around an illegitimate point.”

One of the core beliefs that binds the modern Republican coalition, particularly since the rise of Donald Trump, is rejection of the idea that racial minorities and women face structural bias in American society.

Studies of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections conducted by the Tufts political scientist Brian Schaffner and his colleagues used the Cooperative Election Study, a large-scale national poll, to determine the factors that predicted which candidate voters supported in those races. Those studies found that in each contest, the single best predictor of who voted for Trump was the belief that systemic racism no longer exists in the U.S.; the second-best predictor was denial that systemic bias exists against women.

Within the GOP, those views command overwhelming support. In an email, Schaffner told me almost nine in 10 Republicans reject the idea that structural discrimination exists against racial minorities; about three-fourths doubt that women face entrenched bias. Fully two-thirds of Republicans say there’s little bias against either minorities or women. Only one in 20 Republicans, Schaffner found, believe that both groups still face systematic discrimination.

As Trump more overtly identified the GOP with white racial resentments, Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Since Obama’s presidency, polls show, the share of Democrats who say that Black Americans and other minorities face structural discrimination has dramatically increased. With more Democrats describing systemic racism as a problem, the gap between the two parties on racial questions has notably widened over roughly the past 15 years.

Other surveys document a further step in thinking among Republicans. Not only do a majority of Republican voters assert that structural barriers no longer constrain women or minorities; a majority also claim that core GOP constituencies are the real victims of bias.

In PRRI polling, about two-thirds of Republicans agreed that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities. In a 2022 national survey, PerryUndem, a firm that polls for progressive organizations, found that about seven in 10 Republicans agreed both that “white men are the most attacked group in the country right now” and that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”

[Tom Nichols: The pointless Nikki Haley campaign]

Similarly, in a national 2021 survey conducted by a UCLA  polling project, Republicans believed there to be more discrimination against white people than against other racial groups, more against men than women, and more against Christians than other religious groups, such as Muslims and Jews. “Republicans see a racial order in which historically privileged groups, like white Americans, are now the real victims,” the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck wrote in their book The Bitter End, which cited the UCLA research.

Sides, a professor at Vanderbilt University, points out that the claim that white people are the victims of “reverse discrimination” has been a rallying cry for the right since the civil-rights era. But, he told me, that long-standing conservative complaint “has become supercharged in this current climate” because of “the demographic reality that white Americans, and white Christian Americans, are not going to be as numerically dominant or as politically powerful as they used to be.”

As Obama correctly noted, both Scott and Haley are following a long line of earlier nonwhite GOP candidates who similarly declared that America has transcended racial discrimination. The late Herman Cain, a Black Republican who sought the party’s 2012 presidential nomination, insisted at the time, “I don’t believe racism in this country holds anybody back in a big way.” Ben Carson, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination and then served as his secretary of housing and urban development, offered his audiences similar assurances. Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee last year to run in Georgia against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, released an ad in which he declared, “Senator Warnock believes America is a bad country full of racist people. I believe we’re a great country full of generous people.”

Scott and Haley have regularly issued similar pronouncements. Both have stressed America’s racial progress over the past several generations. Scott has pointedly contrasted his experience with that of his late grandfather, who he said had to step off the sidewalk when a white person passed. Scott’s emphasis on that progress marks a shift that his critics find jarring after his candid acknowledgments earlier in his career that he faced racial profiling from Capitol Hill police even after his election to the Senate. Scott is “kind of whistling past the point, when you want to create this impression that there’s no racism, where in the next sentence you tell us how you have been profiled by Capitol Hill police,” Steele told me.

In their campaigns, Scott and Haley have each contended that they succeeded in life because family members encouraged them to take personal responsibility for their fate and not to identify as a victim. The same path, both say, is open today to any American regardless of race or ethnicity. “The left,” Scott insisted at the Hannity town hall, refuses “to deal with America in 2023 and not 1923 because they know that the truth of my life disproves the lies of their radical agenda.”

Obama, though, in his comments on The Axe Files, a podcast hosted by his former top political adviser David Axelrod, acknowledged racial progress over his lifetime: “The good news is that I think we are closer to an approximation of the ideal than we were 100 years ago or 200 years ago.” But he said that Scott, Haley, and the other Republicans stressing individual responsibility are disregarding the persistence of wide gaps between white Americans and racial minorities on a broad array of economic and social measures. If political leaders “pretend as if everything’s equal and fair,” Obama said, “then I think people are rightly skeptical” of their commitment to ensuring equal opportunity.

Steele agrees with Obama. “I cannot give quarter to this idea that people in this country don’t hold racist attitudes, No. 1, and No. 2, the institutions that a lot of these folks built reflect that racism in a variety of ways,” he told me. Steele wants Haley and Scott to try to convince an audience of Black people otherwise. “Come to Prince George’s County, and you look Black people in the eye and tell them there’s no racism,” said Steele, who served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor in the mid-2000s. “Or let’s take that conversation to Howard University. It’s easy to do when you have 1,000 white people hooting and hollering at every word you say.”

Carlos Curbelo, a Cuban American Republican former U.S. representative from Miami, also believes that, for Scott, accepting the party consensus discounting racism is the prerequisite for GOP voters listening to him on anything else. “Part of what he is banking on is that he is a man of color who is making these pronouncements,” Curbelo told me.

But Curbelo also maintains that each side in this exchange is overstating its case. Obama and other Democrats, he says, downplay the extent to which individual minorities can now overcome discrimination, while Republicans like Scott unrealistically excuse the persistence of structural racial barriers. “There is some validity to what he and Haley are saying,” Curbelo told me. “I just wish they would explain the whole issue, not just the half that is more convenient for them right now.”

As the sparring between Obama and Scott and Haley demonstrates, the two parties appear locked in an action-and-reaction cycle that is pushing them further apart on racial questions. The more traditionally marginalized groups demand greater recognition and influence, the more aggressively conservatives push back, and vice versa. For at least the rest of this decade, that cycle seems far more likely to intensify than abate.

The Democrats’ increased reliance on voters of color—and the increased focus on racial equity by the white voters in their coalition—has pressured them to direct greater attention on racial injustice in everything from school curricula to the behavior of police departments.

Republicans, whose Trump-era coalition has grown more reliant on the voters most uneasy with all the ways America is changing, have responded by digging in against these demands for new approaches. Across the red states, Republican-controlled governments are moving with remarkable speed and consistency to pass laws limiting classroom discussion of racial or gender inequities, banning books, and barring programs meant to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Republicans portray this wave of legislation as a fundamentally defensive attempt to prevent radical “woke” ideas from indoctrinating young people. But to Democrats and their allies, it’s GOP officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who are seeking to suppress the nation’s diverse younger generations with restrictive new laws on voting, LGBTQ rights, and how teachers can discuss America’s racial record.

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

PRRI’s Jones, who has written several books on race and religion, offers a telling example of how the conservative approach to racial injustice has hardened. He notes that as recently as the 1990s, the deeply conservative Southern Baptist Convention, in a formal statement repudiating its role in supporting slavery, apologized “to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”

Given the current climate on racial issues within conservative circles, Jones told me, he considers it virtually inconceivable that the Southern Baptist Convention today would acknowledge that systemic racism even exists, much less apologize for it. “The external historical reckoning the country is going through,” Jones told me, is prompting an “internal response” within the GOP that has generated a virtually lockstep rejection of racism as an ongoing problem.

There’s no question that all of these cultural causes now generate more passion inside the GOP coalition than such traditional party priorities as cutting taxes, limiting regulation, and promoting a strong national defense. “Issues related to race alongside gender identity and similar things, that’s their bread and butter,” Vanderbilt’s Sides says of GOP candidates today. “That’s what they want to talk about.”

Haley and Scott have placed themselves directly in that current. Their insistence that America has moved beyond racial inequality will surely win them loud applause from a mostly white Republican primary electorate that gets an extra jolt of satisfaction from hearing a person of color validate that view. Their endorsement of those arguments may not be enough to allow either to overtake better-known, better-funded alternatives, chiefly Trump and DeSantis, who are offering very much the same case. But echoing the claim that discrimination is in the past may be their ante for any future advancement in the Trump-era GOP.

Photographs by Olivia Crumm

On the day she heard God tell her to buy a mountain, Tami Barthen already sensed that her life was on a spiritual upswing. She’d recently divorced and remarried, an improvement she attributed to following the voice of God. She’d quit traditional church and enrolled in a course on supernatural ministry, learning to attune herself to what she believed to be heavenly signs. During one worship service, a pastor had even singled her out in a prophecy: “There’s a double door opening for you,” he’d said.

But it was not until two years later, in June of 2017, that she began to understand what that could mean, a moment that came as she and her husband were trying to buy land for a retirement cabin in northwestern Pennsylvania. They’d just learned that the small piece they wanted was part of a far larger parcel—a former camp for delinquent boys comprising 350 acres of forest rising 2,000 feet high and sloping all the way down to the Allegheny River. As Tami was complaining to herself that she didn’t want a whole mountain, a thought came into her head that seemed so alien, so grandiose, that she was certain it was the voice of God.

“Yes, but I do,” the voice said.

She decided this must be the beginning of her divine assignment. She would use $950,000 of her divorce settlement to buy the mountain. She would advance the Kingdom of God in the most literal of ways, and await further instructions.

What happened next is the story of one woman’s journey into the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country—a movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House, that fueled his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and that is becoming a radicalizing force within the more familiar Christian right.

It is called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a sprawling ecosystem of leaders who call themselves apostles and prophets and claim to receive direct revelations from God. Its congregations can be found in cities and towns across the country—on landscaped campuses, in old supermarkets, in the shells of defunct churches. It has global prayer networks, streaming broadcasts, books, podcasts, apps, social-media influencers, and revival tours. It has academies, including a new one where a fatigues-wearing prophet says he is training “warriors” for spiritual battle against demonic forces, which he and other leaders are identifying as people and groups associated with liberal politics. Its most prominent leaders include a Korean American apostle who spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the January 6 insurrection and a Honduran American apostle whose megachurch was key to Trump’s evangelical outreach. Besides Trump, its political allies include school-board members, county commissioners, judges, and state legislators such as Doug Mastriano, a retired Army intelligence officer whose outsider campaign for Pennsylvania governor last year was widely ridiculed, even as he won the GOP nomination and 42 percent of the general-election vote.

The movement is seeking political power as a means to achieving a more transcendent goal: to bring under biblical authority every sphere of life, including government, schools, and culture itself, establishing not just a Christian nation, as the traditional religious right has advocated, but an actual, earthly Kingdom of God.

For that purpose, the movement has followers, each expected to play their part in a rolling end-times drama, and that is what Tami Barthen, who is 62, was trying to do.

I called her recently and explained that I was in Pennsylvania trying to understand where the movement was headed, and had found her on Facebook, where she follows several prominent prophets. She said that she was willing to meet but that I should first do three things.

One was to go see a film called Jesus Revolution, and this I did that afternoon, the 2 o’clock showing at an AMC Classic outside Harrisburg. As the lights dimmed, scenes of early-1970s California washed over the screen. What followed was the story of a real-life pastor named Chuck Smith, who opened his church to bands of drugged-out hippies who became known as “Jesus freaks,” a transformation depicted in scenes of love-dazed catharsis and sunrise ocean baptisms—young people rejecting relativism for the warm certainty of God’s one truth. The film, a full-on Hollywood production starring Kelsey Grammer and produced by an outfit called Kingdom Story Company, has earned $52 million so far.

The second thing was to visit a church in Harrisburg called Life Center, whose senior pastor had been among the original California Jesus freaks and now held the title of apostle. I arrived at a glass-and-cement former office building for the midweek evening service. In the lobby, screens showed videos of blue ocean waves. The books on display included Now Is the Time: Seven Converging Signs of the Emerging Great Awakening and It’s Our Turn Now: God’s Plan to Restore America Is Within Our Reach. The apostle was out of town, so another pastor showed visitors into the sanctuary, a 1,600-seat auditorium with no images of Jesus, no stained-glass parables, no worn hymnals, no reminders of the 2,000 years of Christian history before this. Instead, six huge screens glowed with images of spinning stars. On a stage, a praise band was blasting emotional, surging songs vaguely reminiscent of Coldplay. Rows of spotlights were shining on people who stood, hands raised, and sang mantra-like choruses about surrender, then listened to a sermon about submitting to God.

The last thing was to attend a touring event called KEY Fellowship, which stands for “Kingdom Empowering You.” So I headed to a small church in State College, Pennsylvania, the 44th city on the tour so far. On a Saturday morning, 100 or so attendees were arriving, a crowd that was mostly white but also Black, Latino, and Korean-American. They all filed through a door marked by a white flag stamped with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven—a Revolutionary War–era banner of the sort that rioters carried into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. “We thank you, Father, that you have chosen us,” said the woman who’d organized the event, explaining that its purpose was to “release spiritual authority” over the region. And then the releasing began. The band. The singing. The shouting: “Lord, have your dominion.” Several men stood and blew shofars, hollowed-out ram’s horns used in traditional Jewish worship, and meant in this context to warn demons and herald the gathering of a modern-day army of God. Out came maracas and tambourines. Out came long wooden staffs that people pounded against the floor. Others waved American flags, Israeli flags, more pine-tree flags. The point, I learned, was to call the Holy Spirit through the prefabricated walls of the church and into the sanctuary, all of this leading up to the moment when a local pastor, a member of the Ojibwe-Cree Nation, came to the stage.

She was there to declare the restoration of the nation’s covenant with Native American people, which, in the movement’s intricate end-times narrative, is a precondition for the establishment of the Kingdom. A sacred drum pounded. “Father, we pray for a holy experiment!” someone shouted. A white man cried. Then people began marching in circles around the room—flags, tambourines, maracas, staffs—as a final song played. “Possess the land,” the chorus went. “We will take it by force. Take it, take it.”

Once I had seen all of this, Tami said I could come.

The view from Tami’s house (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

The road to the mountain runs through the small town of Franklin, an hour or so north of Pittsburgh, then winds uphill and through the woods before branching off to a narrower road marked private. At the entrance is a Mastriano sign, left over from when Tami served as his Venango County coordinator.

“We don’t really do politics,” she was saying, riding onto the property with her husband, Kevin. “But then we heard God say, ‘You need to do this.’”

She had raised and homeschooled three children, been the dutiful wife of a wealthy Pennsylvania entrepreneur who traded metals, but as I came to learn over the next few weeks, so many new things had been happening since she started following the voice of God.

“All this is ours,” Kevin said, passing old cabins, a run-down trailer, and other buildings from the property’s former life.

“And right up here is where it all happened,” Tami said.

They parked and went over to a wooden footbridge, part of the only public path through the property. This is where they’d been walking when Tami had first seen the spot for their retirement cabin, at which point she had looked down and seen three blue interlocking circles stenciled onto the bridge, some sort of graffiti that she took as a sign.

“I said, ‘Kevin, we’re at the point of convergence,’” she recalled.

Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971.

That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in Bolivia, where he had noticed churches growing explosively and where he claimed to have seen signs and wonders, healings and prophecies. A professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Wagner began studying what he believed were similar forces at work in the underground house-church movement in China and certain independent Christian churches in African countries, as well as Pentecostal churches in the U.S. He eventually concluded that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way across the globe—a supernatural force that would erase denominational differences, banish demonic spirits, and restore the offices of the first-century Christian Church as part of a great end-times battle. By the mid-1990s, Wagner and others were describing all of this as the New Apostolic Reformation, detailing the particulars in dozens of books.

The reformation meant recognizing new apostles—men and women believed to have God-given spiritual authority as leaders. It meant modern-day prophets—people believed to be chosen by God to receive revelations through dreams and visions and signs. It meant spiritual warfare, which was not intended to be taken metaphorically, but actually demanded the battling of demons that could possess people and territories and were so real that they could be diagrammed on maps. It meant portals: specific openings where demonic or angelic forces could enter—eyes or mouths, for instance, or geographic locations such as Azusa Street in Los Angeles, scene of a seminal early-20th-century revival. It meant the rise of the Manifest Sons of God, an elite force that would be endowed with supernatural powers for spiritual and perhaps actual warfare. Most significant, the new reformation required not just personal salvation but action to transform all of society. Christians were to reclaim the fallen Earth from Satan and advance the Kingdom of God, and this idea was not metaphorical either. The Kingdom would be a social pyramid, at the top of which was a government of godly leaders dispensing biblical laws and at the bottom of which was the full manifestation of heaven on Earth, a glorious world with no poverty, no racism, no crime, no abortion, no homosexuality, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one God: theirs.

Wagner helped convene the International Coalition of Apostles in 2000. It became the model for what remains the loosely networked structure of a movement that is both decentralized and inherently authoritarian. Apostles would lead their own ministries and churches, sometimes with the counsel of other influential apostles. The movement grew rapidly, creating its own superstars whose power came from the following they cultivated, and who were constantly adding prophecies that sought to explain how current events fit into the great end-times narrative.

Broad-brush terms like Christian nationalism and white evangelicals have tended to obscure these intricacies. NAR’s growth has also gone largely undetected in conventional surveys of American religiosity, with their old categories such as Southern Baptist and Presbyterian. It is most clearly reflected in the rise of nondenominational churches—the only category of churches that is growing in this country—though not fully, because many followers do not attend church. A recent survey by Paul Djupe of Denison University hints at its scope, finding that roughly one-quarter of Americans believe in modern-day prophets and prophecies. Those who have tracked and studied the movement for years often say it is “hiding in plain sight.”

Yet Trump-allied political strategists, such as Roger Stone, understand the power of a movement that offers the GOP a largely untapped well of new voters who are not just old and white and Bible-clinging, but also young and brown, urban and suburban, and primed to hear what the prophets have to say. Recently, Stone told one interviewer that he saw a “demonic portal” swirling over Joe Biden’s White House. “There’s a live cam where you can actually see, in real time,” Stone said. “It’s like a smudge in the sky, almost looks like a cloud that doesn’t move.”

Like Many in the movement, Tami doesn’t use the phrase New Apostolic Reformation, but she first encountered its kind of Christianity in 2015, when a friend gave her a book called Song of Songs: Divine Romance. It is part of a series called The Passion Translation, described by its author, a pastor named Brian Simmons, as a “heart-level” version of the Bible.

At the time, Tami had just extracted herself from what she described as a long and difficult marriage. She had left the traditional evangelical church she’d attended for years, where she said the pastor tended to side with her wealthy husband. She was estranged from some of her family. She was alone and at a vulnerable point in her life when she opened Simmons’s book and began reading passages such as “I am overshadowed by his love, growing in the valley,” and “Let him smother me with kisses—his Spirit-kiss divine,” and “So kind are your caresses, I drink them in like the sweetest wine!”

She had never felt so loved in her life, and she wanted more. The friend who’d given her the book attended Life Center, and Tami signed up for a conference at the church called “Open the Heavens,” where she learned more about prophecy, spiritual warfare, and the idea that she herself had a role to play in advancing the Kingdom of God, if she could discern what it was.

Among the speakers she heard was a rising apostle named Lance Wallnau, a former corporate marketer whose social-media following had grown to 2 million people after he prophesied that Donald Trump was anointed by God. Tami had voted for Trump in 2016, but her interest in Wallnau at this point had more to do with what he’d branded as “the Seven Mountains mandate,” or 7M, the imperative for Christians to build the Kingdom by taking dominion over the seven spheres of society—government, business, education, media, entertainment, family, and religion. Wallnau gives 7M courses and holds 7M conferences, and that is how Tami learned about convergence: the notion that there are moments in life when events come together to reveal one’s Kingdom mission, as Wallnau writes, “like a vortex that sucks into itself uncanny coincidences and ‘divine appointments.’”

That was exactly how Tami felt as she considered buying the mountain. Divine appointments everywhere. At Life Center, a man told her that he’d had a vision of God “pouring onto the mountain” everything she would need. Someone else shared a vision of Tami as a princess riding a horse, which she found ridiculous but also, as a woman who’d always felt under the thumb of some man, compelling. And then she herself heard the voice of God telling her what to do.

“See that?” she said now, back in the car, passing a rusted oil tank where someone had spray-painted what appeared to be a yellow Z.

“I’ll explain that later,” Tami said.

An oil tank on Tami’s property (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

She and Kevin drove to the former camp director’s home where they now lived. Inside was a piano with a shofar and two swords on top, which Tami had bought to remind herself that she is a triumphant warrior for Christ. On a wall hung a portrait she had commissioned, which depicted her clad in medieval armor. An Appeal to Heaven flag was draped over a chair. She opened a sliding-glass door to a deck overlooking the Allegheny River, and explained what happened after she and Kevin had closed on the mountain: how they began to envision building a “Seven Mountains training center.” How that led to someone from Life Center introducing her to an apostle from the nearby city of New Castle, who visited the mountain and wrote Tami a prophecy—that what was happening was “bigger than whatever you could dream or imagine.” How he introduced her to a group of five men who claimed to be connected to anonymous Kingdom funders, and how, not long after that, the group came to the mountain, where Tami, full of nerves, presented a plan that included a lodge, a conference center, an outdoor stage, and some yurts along the river.

“The main thing they asked is whether we were Kingdom,” Tami said.

She told them that she and Kevin were Kingdom all the way; they told her that God wanted her to double the size of the project, and then told her to “add everything you can possibly dream of,” Tami recalled.

So they did—adding plans for an outdoor pistol range, an indoor pistol range, a tactical pistol range, and a rifle range, along with a paintball course, a zip line, and other recreational facilities. They printed brochures for the Allegheny River Retreat Center, which, Tami said, was now a $120 million project.

As they waited and waited for funding, the 2020 presidential election arrived. Tami again voted for Trump, this time in concert with prophets who said he was an instrument of God. She soon began listening to an influential South Carolina apostle named Dutch Sheets, who had for years advocated an end to Church-state separation and co-authored something called the “Watchman Decree,” a kind of pledge of allegiance that included the phrase “we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth.” Sheets was among a core group of apostles and prophets spreading the narrative that the election had been stolen not just from Trump, but from God. He began promoting daily 15-minute YouTube prayers and decrees, which were like commandments to those in the Kingdom. He branded them “Give Him 15,” or GH15, and at their peak, some videos were getting hundreds of thousands of views.

Tami began reading Sheets’s decrees aloud at sunrise every morning, videotaping herself on the deck overlooking the Allegheny River and posting her videos to Facebook.

“Lord, we will not stop praying for the full exposure of voter fraud in the 2020 elections,” she read on November 12.

“We refuse to take our cue or instructions from the media, political parties, or other individuals,” she read on November 17. “We believe you placed President Trump in office, and we believe you promised two terms. We stand on this.”

She started receiving lots of friend requests and was getting recognized around town. She bought an Appeal to Heaven flag, which Sheets had popularized as a symbol of holy revolution. She kept seeing signs that made her wonder whether the mountain might have a specific purpose in what she was coming to see as a global spiritual battle.

One day the sign was a dove flying across the sky as she read the morning decree, and the dove feathers she found on her doorstep after that. Another day, two women who’d seen her videos showed up at her door with bottles of water from Israel, saying they needed to pour it in “strategic” places along her riverfront that God had revealed to them. Another day, Sheets himself announced that he was holding a prayer rally at the headwaters of the Allegheny River—two hours north of Tami—part of a swing-state prophecy tour as Trump challenged election results.

Tami went. And when Sheets and other apostles and prophets urged followers to convene at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, she felt God telling her to go there, too. So she and Kevin boarded a bus that a friend had chartered to Washington, D.C., where she read the daily decree, the Washington Monument in the background, as Kevin held the Appeal to Heaven flag.

“Let the battle for America’s future be turned today, in Jesus’s name,” she said. From what she described as her vantage point outside the Capitol, the big story of the day was not that a violent insurrection had occurred but rather that a movement of God was under way, another Jesus Revolution. “It was one of the best days of my life,” Tami said.

When she got back to the mountain, she kept recording the daily decrees from her deck, in front of a pink flower pot with an American flag.

“We refuse to allow hope deferred and discouragement to cripple the growth of your people in their true identity—the army you intended them to be,” she read after Joe Biden took office.

She flew to Tampa, Florida, for a stop on the “ReAwaken America” tour. She drove to another one a few hours away from her home, then watched others online, events featuring a roster of prophets alongside the headliner, retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, who was now declaring the nation to be in a state of “spiritual war.” She always came home with a cellphone full of new contacts. She began introducing herself as “Tami Barthen, the one who bought a mountain for God.”

Tami and Kevin in a demonstration of prayer (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic) Left: The flag that Tami hangs on her deck, where she reads prayers from Dutch Sheets at sunrise. Right: Tami shows a visitor the feathers that she found on her doorstep. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Occasionally she said this with a note of sarcasm, because the Kingdom funding had yet to come through, and at times she was not sure where all the signs were ultimately pointing. In those moments, she sought more prophecies.

She messaged a prophet who’d appeared on a Dutch Sheets broadcast, asking him what God might tell him about her project. “This is what I hear the Lord saying,” he wrote back. “God says this came forth from His heart and He has already orchestrated the completion.”

At a Kingdom-building conference in Oregon, she asked Nathan French, a prominent prophet, what God was telling him and recorded the answer on her iPhone: “I feel like that mountain is like Zion, and I feel like God is even saying you can name it Mount Zion … I see the Shekinah coming,” he said, using the Hebrew term for God’s presence, “the shock and awe.”

Tami had rolled her eyes at this grand new prediction, but when she got home, another sign appeared.

“The Z on the oil tank,” she said now, sitting on her porch.

It was spring. She took the Zion prophecy, which she had transcribed and printed on thick paper, and slipped it into a binder, where she archived the most meaningful ones in protective plastic covers. She was trying to figure out what it was all adding up to.

“Why was Dutch Sheets at the headwaters of the Allegheny? Why is there a Z on the oil tank? Why am I meeting all these people? There are all these pieces to the puzzle, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to be yet,” Tami said.

A new piece of the puzzle was that Trump had been indicted in New York on charges of falsifying business records related to payoffs to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Tami had watched coverage on an online show called FlashPoint, which has a cable-news format, except that the news bulletins come from prophets.

“This is not just a battle against us; this is a battle against the purposes of God,” one had said about the indictment, and Tami understood this to be an escalation. A few days later, an apostle named Gary Sorensen called. He was an engineer who had been among the group claiming to represent the Kingdom funders. He was calling to invite Tami on a private spiritual-heritage tour of the Pennsylvania capitol, which was being led by one of the most powerful apostles in the state.

Tami took it as another sign, and she and Kevin drove to Harrisburg.

She was slightly nervous. The apostle was a woman named Abby Abildness, who heads a state prayer network that was part of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, a fixture of the religious right. During the legislative session, she convened weekly prayer meetings with state legislators along with business and religious leaders. She had a ministry called Healing Tree International, which claimed representatives in 115 countries, and focused on what she described as “restoring the God-given destinies of people and nations.” She was just back from Kurdistan, where she had met with a top general in the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military. To Tami, Abildness was like a high-ranking Kingdom diplomat.

“So,” Abildness began. “The tour I do is about William Penn’s vision for what this colony would be. And it starts—if you look up, we have the words he spoke on the rotunda.”

Tami looked up at the gilded words beneath a fresco of ascending angels.

“There may be room there for such a Holy Experiment,” Abildness read. “And my God will make it the seed of a nation.”

“Wow,” Tami said.

They were the kind of words and images found in statehouses all over the country, but which Abildness understood not as historical artifacts but as divine instructions for the here and now.

They headed down a marbled hallway to the governor’s reception room.

“So this is William Penn,” Abildness said, pointing to a panel depicting Penn as a student at Oxford, before he joined the Quaker movement. “He’s sitting in his library and a light comes into the room, and he knows something supernatural is happening.”

They moved on to the Senate chamber.

“Here you are going to see a vision of what society could be if the fullness of what Penn planted came into being—a vision of society where all are recognizing the sovereign God,” Abildness said as they walked inside.

Tami looked around at scenes of kings bowing before Christ, and quotes from the Book of Revelation about mountains.

“You see here, angels are bringing messages of God down to those who would write the laws,” Abildness said.

They moved on to the House chamber.

“This is The Apotheosis,” Abildness said, referring to an epic painting that included a couple of Founding Fathers, and then she pointed to a smaller, adjacent painting, depicting Penn making a peace treaty with the Lenape people.

Tami listened as Abildness explained her interpretation: God had granted Native Americans original spiritual authority over the land; the treaty meant sharing that spiritual authority with Penn; later generations broke the covenant through their genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, and now the covenant needed to be restored in order to fulfill Penn’s original vision for a Holy Experiment. Nothing less than the entire Kingdom of God was riding on Pennsylvania.

Tami listened, thinking of something she’d always wondered about, a sacred Native American site across the river, visible from her deck, known as Indian God Rock. It is a large boulder carved with figures that academic experts believe have religious meaning. As the tour ended, she kept thinking about what it all could mean.

“People I hang with think we’re moving from a church age to a Kingdom age,” Sorensen was saying.

“It’s like, what are all these signs saying?” Tami said.

Left: Tami’s King Solomon sword. Right: A wall in her living room features a painting of her as a spiritual warrior. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Sorensen was involved in various organizations devoted to funding and developing Kingdom projects. There was Reborne Global Trust, and New Kingdom Global, and Abundance Research Institute, among others. He told Tami not to worry about her benefactors coming through. He said $120 million was peanuts to them. He said one funder was an Australian private-wealth manager. He said others were “international benefactors,” as well as  “sovereigns,” people he described as “publicly known royal and ruling families of well-known countries.”

“We are looking into establishing a Kingdom treasury,” he said, elaborating that some of the funders were setting up offshore banking accounts. “Outside the central banking system—so we can’t get cut off if we’re not voting right.”

Everything would be coming together soon, he told her.

Driving back to the mountain, Tami and Kevin listened to ElijahStreams, an online platform that launched after the 2020 election. It hosts daily shows from dozens of prominent and up-and-coming prophets, and claims more than 1 million followers.

There were so many apostles and prophets these days—the old standards like Dutch Sheets, and so many younger ones who had podcasts, apps, shows on Rumble. By now Tami followed at least a dozen of them closely, and what she had noticed was how politically involved they had become since the 2020 election and how in recent months, their visions had been getting darker.

Lance Wallnau, whom Tami thought of as fairly moderate, had spoken on Easter Sunday about hearing prophecies of “sudden deaths,” and he himself predicted that “the disciplinary hand of God” would be coming down.

Now, as she and Kevin were winding through the woods, she was listening to a young prophet from Texas named Andrew Whalen, who was being promoted on popular shows lately. He described himself as “close friends” with Dutch Sheets, and on his website, characterized the moment as a “context of war,” when “a new generation is preparing to cross over into ‘lands of inheritance’—places that Christ has given us authority to conquer.”

“I’m boiling on the inside,” he was saying, describing a dream in which he saw the angelic realm working with “earthly governments and militaries.” He continued, “I just say even today, let Operation Fury commence, God. We say let the fury of God’s wrath break forth against every evil work, against systems of demonic and satanic structure.”

Tami listened. And in the coming weeks, she kept listening as Operation Fury became a page on Whalen’s website where people could sign up to help “overthrow jezebel’s influence from our lives.” She kept listening as Trump was indicted a second time, for mishandling classified documents, and a prophet on FlashPoint described the moment as a “battle between good versus evil.”

She sometimes felt afraid when she imagined what was coming.

“It’s going to get bad. It’s going to get worse,” she said. “It’s spiritual warfare, and it’s going to come into the physical. What it’s going to look like? I don’t know. God said to show up at Jericho, and the walls came down. But there are other stories where David killed many people. All I can say is if you believe in God, you’ve got to trust him. If you’re God-fearing, you’ll be protected.”

The morning after her tour in Harrisburg, Tami went out on her deck and recorded the daily decree.

“We use the sword of our mouths just as you instructed,” she read. “The king’s decree and the decrees of the king are hereby law in this land.”

After that, she went to her office.

On her desk were bills she had to pay. On a table were towers of books she’d read about spiritual warfare, demon mapping, the seven mountains. In a file were all the prophecies she’d tried to follow, all the signs.

She thought about Operation Fury, and what Abby Abildness had said about Pennsylvania, and Indian God Rock, and as she began putting all the signs together, she had a thought that filled her with dread.

“I don’t want this job,” she said. “What if I mess up? Why me?”

She pulled out a 259-page book called The Seed of a Nation, about what William Penn envisioned as a “Holy Experiment” in the colony of Pennsylvania, opening it to the last page she had highlighted and underlined.

“See?” she said. “I only got to page 47.”

She thought that maybe the funding was not coming through because she had missed a sign. Maybe she had not been obedient enough. Maybe she, Tami Barthen, was the one delaying the whole Kingdom, and now instead of listening to the voice of God, she was listening to her own voice saying something back: “I’m sorry.”

She thought for a moment about what would happen if she let it all go, if instead of being a Christian warrior on a mountain essential to bringing about the Kingdom of God, she went back to being Tami, who had wanted the peace of a retirement cabin by the river.

Tami in her driveway (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

“I can’t think of a Plan B,” she said, so she reminded herself of how she had gotten here.

She had been living her life, trying to pull herself out of a dark period, when she felt the love of God save her, and then heard the voice of God tell her to buy a mountain. And who was she to refuse the wishes of God?

So she had bought a mountain, 350 acres redeemed for the Kingdom. Now she would wait for word from the prophets. She reminded herself of a favorite Bible verse.

“He says, ‘Occupy until I come,’” Tami said. “Like the Bible says, ‘Thy kingdom come.’”

Chris Christie is the hottest candidate in the Republican presidential race right now. Oh, not with Republican voters. He’s still polling in the low single digits among the people who will actually choose the nominee. But among liberal pundits, Christie’s reputation is on the rise.

“Out of the miasma of Republican denial, a bold truth teller has emerged,” proclaims the Los Angeles Times’ Robin Abcarian, praising Christie’s “poetic” description of Donald Trump as “a lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog.” (If this is poetry, it is truly a demotic variety.)

Joe Klein watched Christie’s CNN town hall and found it “exhilarating,” explaining, “The surprise—and I must say, it was a relief—was the joy that came from watching a terrific stand-up politician at work. I had almost forgotten what that was like. Christie speaks plain English. He is self-deprecating. He was fluent and reasonable—even when I disagreed with his positions—on a broad swath of issues.”

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

Jim Newell of Slate is just enjoying the ride: “What Christie does bring to the race that no other non-Trump candidate has brought in a while is some life. A touch of energy. A little gosh-darn fun around here!” But Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post finds a higher purpose: “Chris Christie is not in it to win it. His task is more important.” The veteran Pennsylvania journalist Dick Polman concurs: “At a time when ‘the GOP-MAGA nomination contest reeks of weakness, moral rot, political capitulation and fear’ (in the words of ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt), it’s good to have an ass-kicker in the mix, regardless of his flaws. If democracy is to be saved, we must welcome all comers.”

It helps that Christie is … well, not charming, exactly. New Jersey is an acquired taste, and even New Jerseyans lost theirs for Christie over the course of two terms. But he’s entertaining, and he doesn’t speak with the guarded, poll-tested patois of many politicians. (Neither does Trump, of course.) My colleague Mark Leibovich breakfasted with Christie in April, and his account captures how he can be rollicking and yet a little unnerving.

[Mark Leibovich: Chris Christie doesn’t want to hear the name Trump]

Christie has become the Elizabeth Warren of the 2024 Republican field. If the primary was held entirely among members of the chattering class, he’d win in a stroll. (One difference is that some of those chatterers may have actually voted in Democratic primaries; fewer will cast a Republican ballot.) As with Warren, they love that he speaks fluently and bluntly and delivers witty retorts. Both candidates have even effectively ended a rival’s campaign live on a debate stage—Marco Rubio for Christie, Michael Bloomberg for Warren. And neither of them is going to be president.

To be fair, none of Christie’s new semi-fans is under any illusions about that. Each paean is loaded down with backhanded compliments and acknowledgments that Christie is going nowhere. Michelle Goldberg of, yes, The New York Times nails the underlying problem: “My enjoyment of his newfound Resistance shtick doesn’t bode well for Christie. The people he needs to win over are not liberal New York Times columnists, but voters who hate liberal New York Times columnists.”

Yet even with the self-awareness, many of these rosy impressions of Christie stem from a questionable vision of how to beat Trump. Christie’s appeal relates to an Aaron Sorkin–style theory of politics, in which the way to defeat Trump is to get onstage with him in a debate and say just the right thing—that with a verbal slap that is clever and cutting enough, Trump will deflate. Soaring music rises, the credits roll, and everyone returns happy to a pre-2016 world. Christie seems to subscribe to this theory himself, telling anyone who will listen—reporters, mostly—that he is the only person who can beat Trump. “It takes a brawler to fight a brawler,” Polman writes.

[Read: What happened to Elizabeth Warren?]

As it happens, only one person has beaten Trump in an election, and that isn’t how he did it. Joe Biden didn’t hesitate to criticize Trump in 2020, but he didn’t try to match Trump blow for blow, nor did he try to knock him out with a sharp turn of phrase. He succeeded by trying to lower the temperature and let Trump seem aberrant and horrifying. To be fair, Biden had the advantage of running against Trump with the general electorate. As I wrote recently, Trump remains beloved by the Republican base and disliked by Americans overall. The former president’s primary rivals can’t quite do the same thing.

One Republican is trying something a little similar to what Biden did: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. He’s running an optimistic campaign, the closest spiritually to Ronald Reagan’s sunny vision of any member of the field. He is neither running as a Trump critic, as Christie and Asa Hutchinson are, nor cozying up to Trump, in the manner of Vivek Ramaswamy. He praises Trump where he agrees with him but mostly avoids conversations that center around him. The result is that Scott is, according to NBC News’s Peter Nicholas and Alex Seitz-Wald, the candidate who many Democratic strategists think would pose the gravest threat to Biden in a general election.

Scott’s strategy probably won’t work. He’ll need a lot of things to go right, and Trump to utterly collapse, in order to have a real shot at the nomination. But Christie has the same hurdles, and Scott is polling roughly twice as high as him—at 3.4 and 1.7 percent, respectively, in the RealClearPolitics average. At least the press will have fun covering Christie in the meantime.

For many judicial nominees, a Senate confirmation hearing is one of life’s most grueling experiences—an hours-long job interview led by lawmakers who are trying to get them to face-plant on national television.

Not for Aileen Cannon. When the federal judge who will oversee former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial testified in 2020, the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t go easy on her so much as they ignored her.

Cannon, then a 39-year-old prosecutor, appeared on Zoom alongside four other nominees, her face framed by a wall of diplomas on one side and an American flag on the other. Her opening statement lasted all of three minutes and sounded like an Oscar winner’s speech—lots of thank-yous and little else. She didn’t say a word about her legal philosophy or how she would approach the job of a judge. The senators didn’t seem to mind: None of them addressed a question specifically to Cannon for the rest of the hearing. The committee’s chair at the time, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, skipped the proceeding entirely, as did each of the five most senior Republicans on the panel. The hearing was over after barely an hour. Three months later, while Trump was beginning his effort to overturn his defeat in the presidential election, a bipartisan Senate majority (including a dozen Democrats) voted to confirm Cannon’s nomination as a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida.

For low-profile nominations like Cannon’s, perfunctory hearings aren’t unusual. But the scrutiny she was spared in the Senate is coming her way now. After just two and a half years as a judge, Cannon will soon preside over a trial with no precedent in American history. The defendant is the former president who appointed her, and her rulings during the investigation that led to Trump’s indictment have already prompted many legal experts to fear that she will tilt the trial in his favor.

But some of the Democratic lawyers who have appeared in Cannon’s courtroom don’t share those worries. They say that she is a smarter, more deliberate, and more even-handed judge than the early criticism of her would suggest. “I think the government should be very happy that they have Judge Cannon,” says Richard Klugh, a longtime defense attorney in Miami who has dealt with Cannon both as a judge and when she served as a federal prosecutor there. Klugh, a lifelong Democrat, told me that aside from her “narrow” rulings on Trump’s case last summer, he had heard no complaints about Cannon from either prosecutors or defense attorneys. “She’s very confident, very honest … and very thorough,” he told me. “She’s confident enough to go through things independently.”

[Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?]

That may be, but she’s extremely inexperienced. Since taking her seat on the bench, Cannon has worked mostly out of a courthouse in Fort Pierce, a two-hour drive from Miami and a town that one local lawyer described to me as “a backwater.” She has presided over just four trials as a judge, none of which covered crimes remotely similar to the willful retention of classified documents that the government has accused Trump of committing. (She is set to oversee a far more complex trial involving alleged Medicare fraud in the coming months.)

Cannon was born in Colombia and is the daughter of Cuban refugees. In her brief statement to the Judiciary Committee, she described how her mother, at the age of 7, “had to flee the repressive Castro regime in search of freedom and security.” Cannon graduated from Duke University, and by the time she earned her law degree from the University of Michigan, she had already joined the conservative Federalist Society. After law school, she embarked on a fairly conventional legal career: She clerked for an appellate judge, spent several years at a large law firm, and then became an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami. In written responses to the Judiciary Committee, Cannon wrote that she considered herself both an “originalist” and a “textualist”—two approaches long identified with conservative judges—but that she would follow all precedents set by the Supreme Court and other appellate rulings.

Two South Florida lawyers told me that they were struck by Cannon’s overt religiosity, which has seeped into her pronouncements in court. She routinely tells defendants “God bless you” after they enter guilty pleas, said Valentin Rodriguez, a lawyer who has appeared before Cannon. “In my entire 30-year career I’ve never had a judge mention God to a client ever,” Rodriguez told me. “She does that as a matter of course.”

Although presidents formally nominate all federal judges, they frequently appoint district-court judges at the recommendation of home-state senators. Cannon told the Judiciary Committee that she was first approached about filling a judicial vacancy by the office of Senator Marco Rubio in 2019, nearly a year before Trump sent her nomination to the Senate. Her appointment came at a moment when Trump and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were trying to reshape the federal courts by filling as many open judgeships as possible with young conservatives in their 30s and 40s. Three previous nominations for judgeships in Florida’s Southern District had gone to men in their 40s. “It made sense that Trump would select a woman with good credentials who also happens to be Hispanic,” a South Florida defense lawyer who knows Cannon told me. (The lawyer requested anonymity to speak candidly about a judge in their jurisdiction.)

At the time of her nomination, Cannon had virtually no public profile outside of the courtroom. On her Senate questionnaire, she said she had never given a speech, served on a panel discussion, or testified before a legislative body. She had never held public office and told the Senate she had never participated in a political campaign, although she and her husband each contributed $100 to Ron DeSantis’s bid for governor in 2018. The only interview Cannon said she had ever given for publication was for a photo feature on TheKnot.com about her wedding. Her relative anonymity has caused headaches for publications that have searched in vain for a public photo of Cannon that hasn’t already been used repeatedly; almost every story features the same Zoom screenshot from her Senate testimony in 2020.

Like most Republican-appointed judges in Florida’s Southern District, Cannon is known as a tough sentencer. But there have been notable exceptions when she has handed down a shorter prison term than she could have, Rodriguez told me. He mentioned a case in which a 21-year-old defendant, Artavis Spivey, who had been incarcerated on and off since he was 11, pleaded guilty to armed carjacking. He and another defendant committed the crime just 18 days after Spivey had been released from prison. Cannon sentenced Spivey to 15 years, but Rodriguez said she could have added many more years to his term. “She could have thrown the book at him, and I think she saw redeeming qualities in the young man,” Rodriguez said. Spivey had grown up in a troubled home without a father, “kind of given up by his parents,” Rodriguez added. “That experience tended to make me appreciate the fact that she could look beyond just the retribution and vengeance of a sentence and look at the person.”

[Andrew Weissmann: A ruling untethered to the law]

Cannon also handed down a lighter-than-expected sentence to a 34-year-old man, Christopher Wilkins, who threw a chair at and threatened to kill a federal prosecutor after receiving a 17.5-year sentence on gun and witness-tampering charges. Cannon added six and a half years to his prison term, which was less than the sentencing guidelines called for. “I’ve heard stuff about tough sentencing. I can’t report that. I can report fair sentencing,” Wilkins’s lawyer, Jeffrey Garland, a Republican, told me.

Yet none of the decisions that Cannon has made in her young judicial career have stirred as much controversy as her rulings in the lawsuit that Trump filed after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago estate for unreturned classified documents last summer. Cannon initially appointed a special master to review the documents that federal investigators had collected, and barred the government from accessing some of them. The rulings were a gift to Trump at the time and delayed the FBI’s investigation. But in a sharp rebuke of Cannon, the conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overruled her decisions and said she should not have even heard the case.

Some legal experts have cited those rulings and the fact that Trump appointed Cannon as reasons for her to recuse herself or be taken off the case. A few of the Florida defense lawyers I interviewed—who, it should be noted, routinely argue against the government’s position—characterized Cannon’s orders as understandable considering how unprecedented the case was. The defense lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, however, was more critical. “That ruling was totally out of bounds,” the lawyer told me.

One of the most significant decisions Cannon now faces is whether to attempt to hold the trial in advance of the 2024 presidential election. Should Trump win the White House, he could quash the government’s prosecution of him. South Florida lawyers were dubious that Cannon could try the case before the election, noting the complexities surrounding classified documents that frequently slow down prosecutions at the federal level. Howard Srebnick, a Democratic defense lawyer on the Medicare-fraud case before Cannon, also praised her early performance on the bench. But he said that it still took 18 months for the Medicare case to get to trial even though it does not involve government secrets. “The notion that this case could go quickly? That’s absurd,” Klugh told me.

Still, Cannon has already issued her first order—one that could indicate she wants to move swiftly. On Thursday, she instructed lawyers who want to take part in the case to get security clearances by next week. That was the first of many decisions Cannon will make that, in ways big and small, will shape the first-ever federal criminal prosecution of a former president. They will change Cannon’s life, creating a reputation for favoritism or fairness where none existed. A young judge whose photograph had never appeared in a newspaper until last year is set to become a household name. As Rodriguez observed with a slightly nervous laugh: “She’s going to be famous for a long time.”

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.

Photographs by Sinna Nasseri

Do you like being by yourself ? How do you experience your own company? It’s a fundamental human question. I’d invited my friend John—razor intellect, gamma-ray eyeballs—to drive across America with me, to take a trip into America, but John was immobilized by difficulties with his teeth. So I was alone. Alone for 10 days at the wheel of a sky-blue 2009 Toyota Camry—my son’s car, which I was driving back from Los Angeles to our home in Boston because he was taking a leave of absence from college.

Alone, which has its advantages. I made the rules, I set the pace, autocrat of the pee break, and if I wanted another Filet-O-Fish, motherfucker, I was having one.

Alone, which is, let’s face it, getting worse. Being alone in the 2020s is a condition of oppressive subjectivity, of dank skull-centricity, in which the world—this tree, that building—seems to ding you endlessly with your own separateness. It hasn’t always been like this. It’s been a journey, this long withdrawal into the head. But we’re here now, and there’s no point pretending we’re not.

500 B.C.: A Greek artist paints a human foot from the front for the first time, thereby placing himself at a revolutionary new angle to nature.

1637: Descartes writes, “I think, therefore I am.”

1966: Owsley Stanley introduces LSD to the San Francisco underground at the Trips Festival, and the brain becomes the universe.

1991: I see a bumper sticker that says I claim my own power and lovingly create my own reality.

2016: Donald Trump is elected president.

That’s the evolution of consciousness, pretty much.

“Do you believe Jesus Christ died for your sins?” asks the woman sitting next to me on the flight to L.A. Not fervently, not dogmatically—we’re having a lovely conversation—she just wants to know. “Well, if he didn’t,” I say, “I’m in trouble.”

In L.A., prepping for the big drive, I instruct the fine mechanics at RM Automotive in Northridge to make the little Camry roadworthy. It needs some work—the shocks, the steering rack, the fluids, the whole (if I may) gestalt—so there’s a bit of downtime at a Holiday Inn in Chatsworth, in the San Fernando Valley

Downtime? Dreamtime. Out there on Devonshire Street I’m deep in L.A. space, which is tingling and car-swept and horizontal and prolific on a scale quite amazing to a Brit like me, raised in a blighted hedgerow on a diet of HobNobs and mushy peas. The Krav Maga studio and the hypnotism center, the barnlike sushi place and the U-Haul and the jolly old IHOP, the biker couple exiting the Star Bar with the tremendous, ponderous dignity of the totally smashed. Palm trees in the breeze, softly explosive California light, stony green-brown hillsides at the end of the street, dispossessed people on every corner. As I amble to the IHOP for lunch, a heavily layered man with an exposed psyche stalks jaggedly past me. My neck prickles. “I’m recording you on my phone, sir,” he says to me. Or at me. “I’m allowed to.”

Where am I? Where have I ended up? Only some mighty, hidden, continuously creative act seems to be holding all of these elements together, maintaining them in relationship. Inside the IHOP, an elderly woman with a Billy Idol haircut orders her meal. “This is gonna crack you up,” she promises her waitress. “I want a mushroom omelet without the mushrooms.”

And then I’m driving, escaping L.A., heading east, floundering along behind the trucks on Interstate 40. Okay, America: me and you. Let’s go.

[The Atlantic Daily: James Parker has an hour of music for your next road trip]

The first couple of days, despite everything done by the fine mechanics of RM Automotive, are spent in a paroxysm of anxiety that the little Camry is going to crap out, break apart beneath me at 80 miles an hour, shed glowing lumps like a space shuttle on reentry. The passage into the desert, into another world, impinges upon me only vaguely: I drive past signs for Barstow. Barstow? Barstow … And then I’m mumbling the first line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  : “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” On the edge of Kingman, Arizona, I breakfast at an uncharacteristically sluggish Denny’s that is somehow inside a gas station: It’s a Flying J Travel Center, with Torque and Recoil on the magazine rack and Prayers for Difficult Times for Men on the book stand. (“Jesus, my old abusive habits are tempting me today.”) My notebook records that despite the invigorating desert air, I feel bleak.

Tucson, Arizona (Sinna Nasseri)

The Grand Canyon? For me, a nonevent. I dawdle around one of the parking lots in confusion, about to ask somebody, “Excuse me, where is the Grand Canyon?,” when I sense the great vacuum pulling at me and go toward it. Mild vertigo kicks in as I approach the South Rim: I experience a weightlessness, a hollowness in the legs, that is curiously like anger. Plenty of people, plenty of phones: The air around me is full of that acoustically flattened chirping sound that humans make when confronted by the sublime. I stare. I gaze. I peer. I’m numb. My intention, my plan, was to affirm my existence in the face of the chasm, to assent—finally, ultimately—to my life as it is, to hurl an amen into the multicolored abyss, to shout like Allen Ginsberg in “The Lion for Real”: Terrible Presence! … Eat me or die! But it’s not happening. Ramparts of geology frown at me and I turn around, feeling better with every step away.

The Meteor Crater, in Winslow, Arizona, cures me of my Grand Canyon anomie. To the work of millennia, apparently, to the infinite patience of wind and stone and water, I can find no connection. But a single wildly destructive moment, a one-off, bomblike incident of cosmic mega-violence in the desert—that, I can relate to. That makes complete frigging sense to me. More than 50,000 years ago, an iron-nickel meteorite weighing several hundred thousand tons plowed into the ground east of what is now Flagstaff, producing a nuclear-level explosion upon impact and leaving a mile-wide hole. To quote from the excellently written pamphlet handed to me at the Meteor Crater & Barringer Space Museum: “In the air, shock waves swept across the level plain devastating all in their path for a radius of several miles. In the ground, as the meteorite penetrated the rocky plain, pressures rose to over 20 million pounds per square inch, and both iron and rock experienced limited vaporization and extensive melting.” The hole is huge and clean and narrows toward an inverted peak: an upside-down mountain of nothingness. I look into it and feel utterly peaceful.

My relationship with the little Camry is changing. No longer on the lip of terror, primed for her disintegration, I’ve begun to appreciate her durability, her reliability, her modest potency. I’m growing to love her. She holds her own in the woofing back drafts of the trucks on 40E; she slips gracefully between those shifting, barging volumes of air. She seems happiest at 85 miles an hour. In the mornings, outside whatever Red Roof Inn or Best Western I’m staying at, I see her crouched neatly in the parking lot, compact and ready, and I greet her with joy. I pat her steering wheel as we drive along. I call her Baby Blue.

[From the May 2020 issue: An ode to driving in America]

At a La Quinta next to the airport in Amarillo, Texas, I ask the receptionist where I can get some food. Half a mile back down Route 40, she tells me. Walkable? I ignore her suggestion that I drive it, set off on foot, and blunder instantly into a side-of-the-highway moonscape of dead grass, gopher holes, broken fences, torpid little ditches, and trash that was expelled from passing vehicles, two minutes ago or two years ago. Everything discarded, unattended, ripe with the mad physics of neglect. Unwalkable. Hostile to pedestrians, hostile to everybody. Instant exile. It feels very important somehow, as the trucks blow by with Chewbacca moans: I’m on the inside of the outside of America.

Approaching Oklahoma City, I panic. I haven’t had a proper conversation for hundreds of miles. Is this how I’m doing it, this road trip, sliding through America frictionless as a dolphin? I take an off-ramp, and on a grass verge on the edge of a gas station I spot a little group sitting in carnivalesque disarray. They appear to have been centrifugally dislodged from the main event and deposited here at the fringes, and they receive me with the instinctive graciousness of street people everywhere. Isis, a middle-aged woman with her shoes off and a tiny, pop-eyed dog called Dobby in her lap, leads the conversation. She and her friends, D.J. and Butterfly, are currently involved in two situations, parallel projects: They have to recover a stolen Schwinn bicycle with Mongoose rims, and they need to find enough money for another night at the Green Carpet Inn.

Left: Los Angeles, California. Right: Tucson, Arizona (Sinna Nasseri)

Isis is telling her story. “They say God only gives you what you can take. Well, I’ve said to him so many times, ‘I can’t take no more.’ I’ve had seven therapists, and they’ve all said to me, ‘Hey, if you wanna be a serial killer, with everything you’ve been through, you got the right.’ ” “Calm down,” Butterfly urges quietly, as the monologue begins to accelerate. “I could talk to this man all day!” Isis says. I ask her what the Green Carpet Inn is like. “Hell itself.” That bad? “The center of hell. And that’s where God’s throne of judgment will raise up.” Right there in the middle of the Green Carpet? “Right there. And everybody will get what’s coming to ’em.” “Be safe,” Butterfly says as I take my leave. “Don’t let nobody push up on you.”

[From the June 2020 issue: James Parker on being homeless in a city buffeted by plague]

(I Google the Green Carpet later and find that in between blasts of grievance from disgusted guests, it has some magnificent prank reviews, written—I like to think—by Isis and her friends: “We slipped into our free satin robes and pure cotton slippers and took a soke in our hot tub on our balcony. We had a free in room meal and the hotel cook even came to our room to prepare the meal and he served it to us. I never wanted to leave.”)

That night I get drunk with a couple of air-traffic controllers, in town for a spot of top-up training at Oklahoma City’s FAA Academy. I thrust myself rather clumsily into their conversation at the bar, having overheard one of them say that Joy Division is his favorite band. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Joy Division? I have to jump in.” And then I’m in it, for hours, in the beautiful loose warm magnanimous stream of American bar talk, which flows wittily and incoherently and aggressively and lovingly and expertly and ignorantly and eternally and momentarily out of orange-lit alcoholic portals from coast to coast. “People aren’t shitty,” one of my new friends insists. “If you give ’em 10 seconds, people are fantastic.” He’s a Florida punk rocker (his band once opened for a pre-famous Marilyn Manson) turned Christian. “When God calls,” he tells me, “you have to pick up.”

The next morning is the next morning. I am a hangover on wheels. I feel like I’ve rolled all night among huge, featherless birds. But it was worth it, and my spirits are high as I buzz across Oklahoma toward Arkansas.

Why are my spirits so high? Because of True Grit. God, I love True Grit—Charles Portis’s book, both of the movies, the entire mythic-historical True Grit landscape. Back when my son was of an age to be read to, we did True Grit three or four times, our responses deepening with each go-round.

[Read: The ‘uniquely southern storytelling’ of Charles Portis]

And Fort Smith, Arkansas, is True Grit Central. It was in real-life Fort Smith, in 1875, that Judge Isaac Parker—“Hanging” Judge Parker, American superego, charged by Ulysses S. Grant himself with the subduing of the boiling-with-criminality western frontier—established his infamous court. Hawklike he brooded over the hinterland. Left and right he strung them up: 79 hangings during his time on the bench. And it’s in the Fort Smith of True Grit that young Mattie Ross connects with Rooster Cogburn, U.S. Marshal, an officer of Parker’s court, grizzled growling boozer, played first in the movies by John Wayne and then by Jeff Bridges, and hires him to ride out into the Choctaw Nation and catch the man who killed her father.

I linger happily in the foothills of the Winding Stair Mountains, where Rooster’s old adversary Lucky Ned Pepper goes to ground with his gang, and in the tiny edge-of-Oklahoma town of Talihina I eat a vicious piece of fried catfish and exchange pleasantries with a hard-of-hearing senior named Chicken Johnson. Pure Portis.

The next morning, I present myself at the Fort Smith National Historic Site. I’m twanging with True Grit nerdery. And also with some kind of enhanced historical sense, because there’s a fault line here at Fort Smith, a crack in the American psyche: The wilderness meets the law. But what gets me, what moves me, what brings me weirdly to tears, is not the re-creation of Judge Parker’s courtroom. It’s not the crushingly low-ceilinged jail below the courtroom. It’s not even the restored gallows. It’s an art exhibition on the theme of justice by the students of Western Yell County High School. Saving Our Seas is a painting by Dylan, Samantha, and Madison; it features a blameless-looking turtle plying his way through a bright-blue element. On one side of him floats a Coke can, on the other an empty bag of Lay’s chips. Caption: “It’s Not Fair Your Trash End’s Up In Their HOME.” I think of G. K. Chesterton: “Children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

And now, leaving Arkansas, post–True Grit, I lose my mojo. On the road, in my head, I wither. The trip turns. Aloneness claims me. American space is too much for me. I’m not a pilgrim, existentially stripped, bare to the bliss of the heavens and the batterings of God’s grace. I’m a nervous man at the wheel of a Toyota Camry. I need more coffee. I need less coffee. I don’t dig this solitude. With whom can I connect? Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ / Into the fu-ture. The Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” is trailing me like a curse, a ’70s stoner hex. It’s floating at me from car windows and leaking from speakers by ATMs. Pure detachment boogie. Fly-y like an eagle, let my spirit carry me.

I wallow into Memphis, over the shimmery-shiny Hernando de Soto Bridge. A chatty dude in a record store, a cheery and welcoming couple in a bar—I’m talking, but I’m not getting through. I’m stuck in my brain again, diddling across the country like a cut-price version of Milton’s winged Satan: Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell. Steve Miller Band Satan, flapping like a depressed eagle. The only thing I can say for myself at this point in my trip is that I’m not online: I am actually, physically, more or less here. I head for Graceland.

A Waffle House in Tennessee (Sinna Nasseri)

“Elvis was an international star,” the guide on the doorstep of Graceland announces as we wait, a small disgorged busload, to be allowed into the house. “But he never performed across seas. Anybody know why?” We gape obediently. “Because,” she says, “because his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was a criminal across seas.” We’re being shuffled through the totalitarian Graceland system. Form a semicircle … Move up to the gold rope … A short man in front of me begins to boil: “I don’t like this being controlled. Standing around doing nothing!” But no insurrection occurs, and soon enough we’re inside the house.

Which is not at all the debauch of tastelessness I’ve been led to expect. Or have I just got bad taste? I find its proportions cozy and humane, and its variegated decor expressive of a thoughtful eccentricity. Touches of private chapel, safari lodge, and bridal boutique—I like it, I like it. The yellow-and-brown TV room with its multiple embedded screens: rather a nice place. Here Elvis, watching all of his TVs at once, previewed the coming fragmentation, the splitting of the screens and the splitting of the minds. He lounged there between the yellow cushions, enthroned in the future. “Elvis,” confides the voice of John Stamos in my headset, “watched news, sports, variety shows, and situation comedies.”

Across Elvis Presley Boulevard is the other Graceland, the blue-gray complex of buildings where you can gorge your imagination on the Grand Canyon–size posthumousness of Elvis. The Elvis-ness of Elvis. His pompadour like the plume of Achilles. Squint, squint, squint into the vacancy and you can just about see—can you?—the wriggling, brilliant germ of rock and roll way back in there, hear the slap and shudder of the upright bass on “Hound Dog,” the jangled bones of his dancing.

I find myself in a museum with the trappings of his late, mortal period all around me: the Tiffany Jumpsuit, the Gospel Suit, the Black Cisco Kid Suit with the red-leather shoulders, each outfit emptied of Elvis, each outfit throbbing with discrete and barbarous flamboyance on its tailor’s dummy. My God, this is a magical country. American space is crisscrossed with enchantments. Look at Elvis’s gear, this crazy high-priestly clobber with its bejewellings and emblazonings. Summon the man in his final phases, blubbering and sweating and suffering and clanking onstage to “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” He was a visitant. He was ziggier than Ziggy Stardust. But he never played across seas; America wouldn’t let him. America held him close.

On, Baby Blue, on. It’s Saturday night in Nashville: Broadway is heaving, American party time, and all the bar bands are doing covers. From one doorway I hear a tepid “Enter Sandman,” from another a fairly rocking “Jealous Again” (Black Crowes, not Black Flag). Anyone here not doing covers? Any rock and roll to save my soul? Any raw power? Through a window, I see a tattered and promisingly punky-looking unit plugging in and tuning up, so I go in. “I like your jacket, man,” says the bouncer. Well, that’s something. The band starts playing: Dang-a-nang! Chikka-chikka-chikka-dang-a-nang! … God help me, it’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

By the time I get to the NASCAR rally, at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, it’s late in the day. The gates are wide open, they’ve stopped checking tickets, and there’s a dizzy, entropic vibe about the place. Gas smell, tire smell, grill smell. Iridescent oil-atoms in the soft evening air. I look around: trucks and vans and encampments, a mechanized shire, flags flying, spreading in merry medieval disorder to the outer verges and knolls of the farthest parking lots. And from the bowl of the speedway itself, as if from some enormous reactor, rise the great shearing gyres, the centripetal suck-you-in spirals of tire-sneer and engine-roar. What a sound. I stagger toward it like a supplicant.

The cars are all in a bunch, circuit after circuit, an American mantra. Repetition is holy. The void receives their fury. Carry me to heaven on a helix of NASCAR noise. Here we’re all tuned to the same vibration. Every 30 seconds or so, as the cars pass, it baptizes you like a power chord: nnNNEEEEEOOO!*!$$$*!VVWWWMMFFHHHhhsss … Your whole body sings with it.

Somebody must be winning, right? “Can you tell me what’s going on?” I ask a gray-faced man in protective headphones. “It’s a race,” he says. More hospitable is a writhing, octopoidal crew of drunken tattooed kids with their shirts off. Their messy energy is spilling over into the seating section next to me, which appears to be reserved for people in wheelchairs. A yellow-shirted steward guards this section like an avatar: When the kids get too close, when their flailing tattooed limbs infringe, she beats them back with fierce yet somehow soothing motions. I tell one of them it’s my first time at NASCAR. “MINE TOO!” he yells. “I DON’T GO FOR THIS REDNECK SHIT!”

Canyon Lake, Texas (Sinna Nasseri)

And now I have an amazing piece of luck: I meet a generous and voluble NASCAR aficionado. Eloquent, crisply excited, beer in hand but ablaze with relative sobriety, he tells me about the recent makeover and resurfacing of the Atlanta track, how the banking on the turns is now four degrees steeper, and how the cars that race the circuit must have restrictor plates on their engines to control the flow of air and thereby limit their speed. Atlanta is not his favorite speedway; that would be Talladega. “I’ll be honest, though,” he says, having taken stock of my non-NASCAR-ness. “You’re gonna see some things there you don’t like.” What could he mean? Some kind of Trumpist Sabbath? I don’t care. I am incoherent with arousal. “This fucking SOUND,” I shout. “I love it! It’s like when I saw Metallica at Woodstock, you know? ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ ! Ba-ba-ba-BAAA-ba-ba-ba-BUUUH … You know?” He nods approvingly, his eyes never leaving the race. “That’s a very good analogy.”

“Maybe,” someone said to me at a warehouse rave in San Francisco in 1992, “maybe the problem isn’t that you’ve taken too much acid. Maybe the problem is that you haven’t taken enough.” I was in a state of temporary insanity—but not so insane that I couldn’t appreciate the neatness of the observation.

America, have I had too much of you or not enough? In search of you, I have scaled the mountain of nothingness and sat on the top—which is actually the bottom, because the mountain of nothingness is upside down. I came off my road trip, my lonely-man road trip, when I met up with my son and my nephew in South Carolina. There were still 1,000 miles to drive to Boston, long, yawning hours at the wheel of Baby Blue, but my solitude, and thus my journey into America, was ended.

Things continued to happen, of course—American things. In Richmond, Virginia, as I wandered the nighttime streets in a condition of mild banishment (my son had kicked me out of our hotel room so he could Zoom with his therapist), a man approached me, wanting cash. Then he wanted to sell me some sneakers. We compromised on my buying him some chicken wings and walked to a chicken-wing place that was glowing helpfully nearby. He ordered 20 wings. “Hold on,” I said. “I’ll get you five.”

On the afternoon ferry from Orient Point, Long Island, to New London, Connecticut, I did some weighing and balancing. Salt wind, grinding of the screws, ocean clouds with their dowry of gold … Could I get a handle on everything I’d seen, everyone I’d talked with? My blunderings and my blurtings? Doubtful. It would take a poet or a paranoid, wouldn’t it—or an idiot—to roll all of this together into a meaning. Into a grand theory. To connect the leering, oily-black rest-stop-haunting ravens of the Southwest, and the Amazon freight cars beetling through the desert, to the woman standing behind her housekeeping trolley in the hallway of a Hampton Inn outside Greenville, South Carolina, taking a long, meditative pull from her 12-ounce can of Red Bull. (“That’s a big can,” I said. “I’ve got ADHD,” she said, “and this stuff levels me out.”)

I’ll say this: American space embraced me. Then I fell out of it, or was kicked out, like Lucifer, son of the morning, for the sin of great solipsism. Then it embraced me again. The hard, compulsive generosity of this country—there’s nothing like it. Raise your game, it says. Raise your game. Each encounter seems to tune you up for the one that’s coming next, more resonant, more of a gift, more desirous of your understanding. And that’s pilgrimage, like it or not.

Three weeks after we get home, we’re in a bar on gray Route 1A, outside Boston, my son, my dog, and I. Our other car—not the saintly Baby Blue—blew its fuel injector and we came slewing into the lot of this bar in a cloud of panic and gas fumes. Now we’re having a beer and waiting for AAA. A patron making his unsteady way to the men’s room stoops to pet my dog as he passes. My dog—a bag of nerves—neither growls nor sneers with anxiety, and I express surprise. “Dogs love me,” the man says. “Women, on the other hand …” And there we are, suddenly inside a country song. Roots music.

Bits and pieces, America. The glare of nonstop revelation refracted through a zillion facets. Day to day. Place to place. Your gorgeous, heartbreaking cities, your openhanded people. Winter sunlight glancing off a metal barn roof, glimpsed from a moving car. And all of us going through it, going through you, never more together than when we feel ourselves alone, because if we’re all feeling it, loneliness is over.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “America Inside Out.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.