White House downplays differences over China and LGBTQ rights as the two sides pledge to cooperate on Ukraine.

The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.  

Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.

In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”

[Read: Trump’s rhetoric of white nostalgia]

Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.

“Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”

Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)

Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.

Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.

In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.

The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.

In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.

By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he's denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”

Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.

A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.

Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”

That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.

Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagam and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advanced reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

[Read: Eat, pray, pander]

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

[Read: The companies that are killing creativity]

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.

Malaysia banned the British band after its lead singer kissed a bandmate on stage and criticised country's LGBTQ laws.

I was a child soldier in the California grape strikes, my labors conducted outside the Shattuck Avenue co-op in Berkeley. There I was, maybe 7 or 8 years old, shaking a Folgers coffee can full of coins at the United Farm Workers’ table where my mother was garrisoned two to three afternoons a week. I did most of my work alongside her, but several times an hour I would do what child soldiers have always done: served in a capacity that only a very small person could. I’d go out in the parking lot and slip between cars to make sure no one was getting away without donating some coins or signing a petition. I’d pop up next to a driver’s-side window and give the can an aggressive rattle. I wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa, but I wasn’t playing any games either.

My parents were old-school leftists, born in the 1920s and children during the Great Depression. They would never, ever cross a picket line, fail to participate in a boycott, lose sight of strikers’ need for money when they weren’t getting paychecks. My parents would never suggest that poverty was caused by lack of intelligence or effort. We were not a religious family (to say the least), but I had a catechism: One worker is powerless; many workers can bring a company to its knees.

What I’m describing, of course, is a lost world, glimpsed only through history books or the memories of old people. It was a world already in the midst of death even as I was pumping fresh second-grade life into it. The great labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—of steelworkers, textile workers, railroad workers, coal miners—were in the past. Union membership peaked at 35 percent of the U.S. workforce in 1954. By the grape strike in 1965, it was already down to 28 percent. A decade and a half later, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, put collective bargaining in the dustbin of history by ordering striking air-traffic controllers back to work, and when they didn’t go back, he fired them. Today only 10 percent of workers have union protections.

Unions faltered for many reasons. Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws and various regulations forced companies to conform to standards of workplace safety or face serious penalties, and most states passed a minimum (subsistence) wage. And Americans are crap socialists, forever lighting out for the territory in the spirit of rugged individualism you hear so much about on truck commercials. Many of the biggest American corporations, such as Amazon, have become world-class union busters. As Cesar Chavez himself pointed out, repeatedly, large-scale immigration makes it all but impossible to keep a union together. Desperate people don’t make the terrible journey to this country to go on strike. They do it so they can send money to their impoverished families as quickly as possible.

But the real reason union membership is so low in this country is globalization. What that word means for Americans is that corporations found the ultimate means of union busting: They sent the jobs away. Good jobs that usually paid well in a union shop, and that once upon a time allowed one parent to support a family—they sent them to China and India and Mexico and Bangladesh, places where people will work for far less money and with far fewer “demands.”

All of this means that we have two or more generations of Americans who have no idea how labor politics work, and who believe that #boycotts are as effective as the real thing.

In 2018, two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on suspicion of “trespassing,” which ignited one of the many attempts to #BoycottStarbucks that have taken place over the years. It may have been the most successful of these efforts, in that it spurred the company to relax its policy regarding using the cafės and their bathrooms without buying anything. But the boycotters had no real power because nobody stopped buying Starbucks, which was apparently just a bridge too far. #Boycott the place, yes. Ankle it up the block to Peet’s? Come on. Starbucks eventually helped the boycotters out by staging a kind of self-boycott, closing thousands of stores for an afternoon of anti-bias training and thereby contributing a few hours of lost sales to the cause.

#BoycottChickFilA—initiated in reaction to the owner’s disapproval of gay marriage—began more than a decade ago, during which time the company has only grown. There are principles and there is the Spicy Chicken Sandwich, and one of them has got to give. Now there’s a counterinsurgency of Chick-fil-A #boycotters (it has something to do with “DEI = bad”), so conservatives and liberals can find common ground in cramming their mouths full of deep-fried chicken while #boycotting the company that makes it.

The same is true about #BoycottGillette and #BoycottNike. These #boycotts weren’t about labor disputes. They were about commercials and the perception that American corporations were in the pocket of “woke” leadership. They were puny and powerless. And they are the only kind of boycott that millions of young people have taken part in.

This is why the sweeping success of the boycotts of Bud Light and Target this spring has so many leftists confused and angry and hurt. Activists on the right deployed the old union tactic for frivolous causes, and it worked. Bud Light lost a quarter of its sales. Target lost more than $13 billion in market cap. All of us associate boycotts with some of the greatest fights of the past century—the Montgomery bus boycott, or the UFW boycotts and strikes. But a boycott has no inherent moral position. It’s just a strategy.

The seeds of both recent boycotts were similar, and ultimately had to do with the growing visibility of transgender people in mainstream culture. Bud Light engaged Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer, to make a 50-second promotional video released only on her Instagram account. Target’s annual display of Pride merchandise included a kind of women’s swimsuit that could disguise a penis. The display also had children’s clothes, which rang alarm bells for many conservatives.  

The boycotts themselves aren’t in any larger sense meaningful. Some men started drinking different brands of beer. So what? Some Target shoppers started going to Walmart. So what? You can buy whatever you want and you can not buy whatever you want. As every episode of Mad Men proved, people have deep and powerful associations with the brands they like, associations that have much more to do with advertising than with the relative merits of the products. Forget Don Draper; listen to Mick Jagger:

He can’t be a man

’Cause he doesn’t smoke

The same cigarettes as me.

It’s a big country, and people think and feel all kinds of things.

What is meaningful are the threats of violence that quickly accompanied the boycotts. On May 24, Target announced that it would be removing some of the Pride items because of “threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work.” It was a cautiously worded statement, and some couldn’t help but wonder whether Target was just weaseling a way to appease boycotters.

Then, in mid-June, Target stores in five states had to be evacuated because of bomb threats sent to local media outlets, many of which contacted the police. It seemed at first that this was the realization of the chain’s dark intimations about the far right. The truth was more complicated. A Vermont police chief said the threats included emails accusing Target of betraying the LGBTQ community. In Louisiana, a local news station reported on the email it received, which called the company “pathetic cowards who bowed to the wishes of far right extremists.”

You could tell how utterly confusing all of this is to the left by the response of the liberal press.  A Washington Post opinion piece revealed that the writer was game for the fight but deeply confused about the terms of engagement: “The free market is telling right-wingers something they refuse to hear: Transgender people exist, and they buy stuff.” But Target’s huge loss of market cap wasn’t the result of transgender people boycotting. It was the result of anti-transgender people boycotting. And the literal definition of the free market is the ability of consumers to shop wherever they want. The writer was on the right side of history but the wrong side of The Wealth of Nations.

There was also a counterfactual attempt to posit that the precipitous decline in Target’s stock was unrelated to the boycotts. CNN Business published an article called “Here’s the Real Reason Target’s Stock Is Dropping,” which located a mix of factors to explain the sudden development, “including broader changes in the US economy, the possibility of a recession, and Target’s over-exposure to discretionary merchandise.” (“Hey, Smitty, short Target for me. I think on Wednesday, shoppers are going to freak out about broader changes to the U.S. economy.”)

The New Republic published an article called “The Right’s War on Brands Is Stupid and Terrifying,” which bore the characteristic traits of the form: The writer’s outrage over the transphobic response forced him to present the boycotts as a heartless attack on defenseless … corporate America. “Cross the pissbabies, and your stock price will tank, your quarterly earnings will collapse, and your executives will be fired.” I haven’t encountered rhetoric like his since the Reagan administration. If a sign of the apocalypse is The New Republic fretting about the quarterly earnings and executive job security of a company like Anheuser-Busch, it’s time to get in the bunker.

Anheuser-Busch’s CEO earns about $12 million a year and its warehouse workers—at least in Southern California, where I live, and which is one of the most expensive regions in the country—start at $18 an hour. Temp warehouse workers must be able “to work with minimal supervision and in cold temperatures” and “to perform the physical requirements of the job.” Those physical requirements include being able to spend entire shifts loading and unloading trucks in a refrigerated warehouse. The benefits package includes some inspirational language and the promise of “Free Beer!” These workers should not earn $18 an hour while their CEO, sitting in ergonomic comfort and temperature-controlled ease, earns $5,700 an hour.

As for Target, where to start? Its stores are full of fast fashion, well known to be a human-rights and environmental disaster. The differential between its CEO’s pay and his workers’ pay is similarly shameful.

The confusion about these boycotts reveals something much larger than an infirm grasp of how the strategy works, and larger, even, than the pain and fear they produced in transgender people and their allies. It’s part of something that is so pervasive among Americans, and especially young Americans, that one hardly notices it anymore: the feeling of being powerless against huge forces that they understand to exist far beyond their control, including the questionable—or outright evil—actions of giant corporations.

Last year, The Nation ran an article titled “Don’t Boycott Amazon”: “They’re too big to be hurt by individual consumer choice. Instead, hit them where it really hurts.” When I first read it, I thought the piece was very funny, but in the months since I’ve found it poignant. The writer offers a complicated strategy: “Don’t just feel bad when you buy from Amazon. Make it count by kicking in twice as much to the Amazon Labor Union, and let Amazon know why.” The strategy also involves … buying Amazon stock. Jesus wept.

You could say that this writer would be well served by brushing up on the fundamentals of microeconomics and the institutes of logic. But it was the personal example of her sense of powerlessness against the machine that got my attention. She says that she’d been avoiding shopping on Amazon but then she slipped. Her cat’s veterinarian had recommended a certain product and had sent her an Amazon link to it, which the writer used to buy it: “Immediately, I felt the anger and guilt that comes with trying to be a person of conscience in a culture of pathological convenience. And I felt foolish for imagining that ethical consumerism can do anything other than temporarily assuage those feelings.”

That’s the sign of a demoralized person, one who feels herself to have no agency at all.

We haven’t left these young people much. Many of them are so terrified about global warming that they believe that bringing a child into this world would be wrong. The retreat from religion has perhaps unburdened many of them from unfounded claims—but what has replaced it? What provides a community of shared belief, social outreach, the sense of living for some larger purpose? Nothing. What is the reliable path into the middle class, one that requires only a willingness to work hard? It’s gone. Corporate America sent it away.

The Bud Light and Target boycotts have been the most successful American-consumer boycotts in a quarter century. They made two large companies sustain serious material losses. That isn’t cause for more ennui or alienation. It’s a beacon: It can be done. And it should be done.

I said that one of the reasons that union membership had dried up is that OSHA had made workplaces safer. But as this article was closing, a 16-year-old boy was killed while working at the Mar-Jac Poultry processing plant in rural Mississippi. According to The New York Times, Duvan Tomas Perez died “after becoming ensnared in a machine he was cleaning.”

His family posted an obituary describing him as having been a student at N. R. Burger Middle School, the mission of which is to “educate all students to become productive citizens of a dynamic, global community.”   

On Saturday he will be buried. The obituary noted the date of the visitation and that “a Mass of Christian Burial will follow at 11:30 a.m.,” at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

I am the resurrection and the life;

he who believes in me, though he die,

yet shall he live, and whoever lives

and believes in me shall never die.

My mother knew Cesar Chavez, which was one of the reasons she was so committed to his cause. And now, a literal lifetime later, a Central American boy has been killed on a factory floor and his education, his future, his life ended in what must surely have been an event of overwhelming terror and pain, dying in the same pitiless place where the chickens are killed.

And do you know what the company had to say about his death? It was, of course, a “tragedy,” but it wasn’t the company’s fault: “It appears, at this point in the investigation, that this individual’s age and identity were misrepresented on the paperwork.”

Do you know what I say to that?

Strike.

Boycott.

Shut it down.

A pregnant teenager writhing in pain as she suffered a miscarriage while trapped in the barbed wire that Texas has strung along miles of the state’s southern border.

A 4-year-old girl collapsing from heat exhaustion after Texas National Guard members pushed her away from the wire as she tried to cross it with her family.

Texas state troopers receiving orders from their superiors to deny water to migrants in triple-digit heat. Officers on another occasion ordering troopers to drive back into the Rio Grande a group of migrants, including children and babies, that they found huddling alongside a fence by the river.

These are all incidents that a medic in the Texas Department of Public Safety says he witnessed during recent patrols, according to an explosive email published this week by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic],” the medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote in the email.

These revelations capture not only the extreme tactics that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and state law-enforcement officials are employing against undocumented migrants seeking to cross the U.S. border with Mexico. They also show how aggressively Texas and other Republican-controlled states are maneuvering to seize control from President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration policy. To many immigration experts, these moves by Texas, like the harsh measures against undocumented migrants signed into law this spring by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, push to the edge the legal limits on states’ ability to infringe on federal authority over immigration.

“U.S. immigration law governs the border; Texas law doesn’t govern the border,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. Federal law, he noted, establishes a process for handling undocumented migrants seeking asylum in the United States. “It may not be a process that I like, or you like, or people in Texas like, but it’s a process,” Leopold added. “And that process does not include taking a 4-year-old child and throwing that child into the water … or depriving them of water when the temperatures are above 100 degrees. Those are not our values. Those are not our laws.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Why deterrence policies create border chaos]

Abbott has defended the state’s enforcement effort by arguing that Biden’s immigration policies have exposed his state’s residents to dangerous migrants and drug smuggling, and has endangered migrants themselves by encouraging them to make the arduous trek to the southern border. Responding to Wingate’s email, Abbott’s top law-enforcement officials issued a joint statement in which they maintained that “these tools and strategies—including concertina wire that snags clothing” were necessary to discourage migrants from making “potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings.”

The red-state offensive against undocumented immigration sits at the crossroads of two powerful trends in the Donald Trump–era Republican Party. One is the growing movement in the red states to roll back a wide range of civil rights and liberties, including voting rights, access to abortion, and LGBTQ protections.

The other is an arms race among Republican leaders to adopt ever more militant policies against undocumented immigrants. That dynamic is carrying the party beyond even the hard-line approaches that Trump employed in the White House.

Both DeSantis and Trump, for instance, have promised that if elected, they will move to end birthright citizenship, the guarantee under the Fourteenth Amendment that anyone born in the United States is automatically an American citizen. In his town-hall appearance on CNN, Trump suggested that he would reinstate his widely condemned policy of separating the children of migrants from their parents at the border to discourage illegal crossings. And he’s promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” That’s an idea Trump often discussed but never risked trying to implement as president.

DeSantis, meanwhile, has indicated that he would authorize federal border-enforcement personnel to use force against suspected drug smugglers. He’s also talked about deploying the Navy and the Coast Guard if Mexico does not act more aggressively to interdict the arrival of chemicals used to manufacture drugs.

Simultaneously, DeSantis and Abbott have been at the forefront of the red-state efforts to seize more control over immigration policy. The legislation DeSantis signed contains sweeping measures to crack down on undocumented migrants, including criminal penalties for anyone providing transportation for such a migrant in Florida.

Abbott, for his part, is building an enforcement apparatus outside the control of the federal agencies legally responsible for managing the border. His efforts represent one of the most tangible—and consequential—manifestations of what I’ve called the red-state drive to build “a nation within a nation” that operates by its own rules and values.

Abbott has not gone as far as conservative activists who claim that the Constitution gives states the right to set their own immigration policies, on the grounds that they are facing an “invasion” of undocumented migrants. During a campaign stop in Texas, DeSantis embraced that fringe legal theory and argued that it provides states, not just the federal government, deportation authority.

Most immigration-law experts are dubious that even the current conservative Supreme Court majority would agree, and Abbott has not claimed this power. Operation Lone Star, the expansive enforcement effort he launched in 2021, is not attempting to deport undocumented migrants it apprehends in the state. Instead, Texas has returned them to the border, arrested them, or bused them to Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. Abbott’s choice not to claim deportation authority under the invasion theory has generated a steady stream of criticism from some immigration hard-liners.

Yet the revelations in the emails from Wingate, the Texas state trooper, show how far the state has already moved toward usurping federal authority. It has lined its southern border with miles of concertina wire and sunk barrels wrapped in that wire into the river. Recently, the state placed floating buoys in the river to block areas that might be easier and safer to cross. State troopers and National Guard members are also using force to push migrants away from the barbed-wire barricades. Republican governors from nearly a dozen other states have sent law-enforcement personnel, equipment, or both to Texas to support Abbott’s efforts.

“In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” Abbott wrote in a letter asking other states to send resources.

Wingate, in his email, noted one consequence of these efforts: “With the [razor] wire running for several miles along the river in areas where it is easier for people to cross. It forces people to cross in other areas that are deeper and not as safe for people carrying kids and bags.”

He recounted the story of a woman who was rescued in the river with one of her children, while another one of them drowned. Wingate also reported that a man suffered “a significant laceration” on his leg while extricating his child from one of the wire-wrapped barrels sunken in the river.

“We have a governor who is literally using the full force of his government to inflict physical harm and even death on people,” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas told me. “The fact that he is using the government doesn’t make it any less horrific and it certainly doesn’t make it lawful.”

Beyond the human costs, the red-state border-enforcement effort raises pointed questions about legal authority. Escobar and six other Democratic U.S. representatives from Texas last week wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asking them to investigate whether Abbott’s buoys violate U.S. and international law, including the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. Escobar told me she believes that not only should the Justice Department take legal steps to stop Abbott’s enforcement program; the Biden administration should be “sending in federal personnel to remove all of” the physical barriers Texas has constructed.

[Adam Serwer: A crime by any name]

The White House this week condemned the actions disclosed in the email; The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have reported that the Justice Department is already investigating whether Operation Lone Star is violating federal civil-rights laws. A spokesperson said Wednesday. that the department is assessing Wingate’s allegations, and it seems likely that the administration may soon announce further actions.

White House spokesperson Abdullah Hassan told me via email late yesterday that while the White House "won't be getting ahead" of the Justice Department assessment, it condemns "Governor Abbott’s actions in the strongest terms.” Abbott's actions, Hassan charged, "are putting the lives of migrants and Border Patrol agents in danger, and are creating chaos at a time when our border enforcement plan has brought unlawful border crossings down to the lowest levels in years.”

But many immigration advocates have joined Escobar in arguing that Biden should be challenging the red-state encroachments on federal immigration authority more forcefully.

“There needs to be federal investigations of this,” David Leopold told me. “The Biden administration should be out front in demanding that the creation of chaos at the southern border by these southern governors stops now.”

Angela Kelley, a former senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, told me that the Biden administration generally sought to minimize conflict with Abbott early on, while it was struggling to redirect many of Trump’s federal immigration policies. But Texas, she said, is now pursuing “actions [that] actually exceed the atrocities of Trump’s child separation policy.” If Biden feels pressure from congressional Democrats and advocacy groups, “I think that they will act, because it will be an embarrassment that this administration sat back and let” Texas pursue such policies “in an arena that is really the federal government’s responsibility,” said Kelley, now the chief policy adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Ironically, Texas is pursuing these severe approaches just as the administration’s own program finally appears to be reducing the pressure of undocumented migration. Despite predictions of chaos when Biden ended Trump’s pandemic-era Title 42 policy this spring, conditions appear to be stabilizing somewhat at the border: On Tuesday, the administration reported that encounters with undocumented migrants at the southwestern border had fallen by more than 40 percent from May to June, to the lowest monthly level recorded since early 2021. But with polls consistently showing that most Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of immigration and trust Republicans more on the issue, Abbott and his fellow Republican governors clearly have felt comfortable embracing ever more extreme tactics.

In response to the Wingate revelations, Texas Department of Public Safety officials launched an internal investigation and denied that they had implemented a policy of refusing water to apprehended migrants or pushing them into the river. But in his statement after the disclosures, Abbott made clear that he has no intention of retreating from Operation Lone Star. Conservative Texas state legislators are already calling on Abbott to maintain the effort, and local political observers told me they are dubious that he will back down in any way.

As long as the Texas program continues in its current form, more abuses may be inevitable. Doris Meissner, the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton, points out that even if the state has not instituted a blanket policy ordering such belligerent actions as denying water to migrants, “it is highly predictable that this kind of overreach will happen” in individual units because the state is trying to enforce immigration law with people who are “not trained to do this.” Several other Texas public-safety officers told The New York Times on Thursday that they had received orders to deny water to migrants and to tell them to return to Mexico.

Abbott’s willingness to pursue such a militant enforcement campaign, and the decision by so many Republican governors to assist him, provides another measure of the same impulse evident in the proliferating red-state laws restricting or banning abortion, rolling back voting rights, and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors. All capture a determination to slip the bonds of national authority and impose a set of rules and policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the primarily older, white, nonurban and Christian coalition that has placed these states’ leaders in power.

That impulse, as Leopold says, is producing a dangerous “balkanization” of the country reminiscent of the years before the Civil War. It has also motivated the leadership of the nation’s second-largest state to conclude that the threat of undocumented immigration is sufficient to justify, both legally and morally, entangling children and pregnant women in coils of razor-sharp wire.

Before his stump speeches in his reelection campaign last year, Ron DeSantis liked to play a video montage that showed him being gratuitously rude to reporters at press conferences. It was petty, graceless—and warmly received by the Florida governor’s base. At a DeSantis rally in Melbourne, Florida, last fall, I watched the video from an elevated press pen alongside a gaggle of local reporters. The disconnect between the unflagging politeness that DeSantis’s young volunteers showed the press corps and the ostentatious douchebaggery of the candidate was stark.

Last night, though, Dunking Ron was replaced, briefly, by Conciliatory Ron. His decision to grant CNN’s Jake Tapper a sit-down interview in South Carolina was a reflection of how far behind Donald Trump he is trailing in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But more than that, the interview was a rejection of one of the Florida governor’s most cherished principles: Mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt. DeSantis’s problem is that his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong. He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil. Now, belatedly, the Florida governor appears to have decided that the only way to save his campaign is to execute a pivot from peevishness.

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

DeSantis played that montage in Melbourne, I think, because he had seen Trump railing against “fake news media” and leading his supporters in Two Minutes Hate sessions at his rallies, and he had drawn an entirely wrong conclusion. Despite being a smart guy, DeSantis apparently had not grasped that Trump’s routine was all for show. An act. All his life, Trump has phoned reporters to gossip. After leaving office, he welcomed multiple authors to Mar-a-Lago to spill his guts for their various books about his White House. Trump doesn’t hate the press; if anything, he likes it too much. This is a man who once pointed at the reporter Maggie Haberman and said, “I love being with her; she’s like my psychiatrist.”

DeSantis, by contrast, seems to genuinely hate the media, with their intrusion and attention and awkward questions. He has an unfortunate habit of waggling his head like a doll on a dashboard when receiving an inquiry he considers beneath him; he did it on a visit to Japan just before he formally announced his presidential campaign, when someone had the temerity to ask whether he was running, which he obviously was. The move creates an odd effect where his eyeballs seem to stay in the same place as the rest of his head oscillates around them. It’s a startling tell that he’s irritated or uncomfortable. Please let me play poker against this man.

Facing Tapper, though, DeSantis kept the wobble in check, offering instead a performance of earnest dullness. He stonewalled over whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and whether the ex-president should face criminal charges, claiming that he preferred to “focus on looking forward.” He admitted that many people who attack “wokeness” can’t even define the term. And he dodged a question on whether he would extend Florida’s new six-week abortion restrictions countrywide by asserting broadly that he would be a “pro-life president” and claiming that, in any case, a Democratic Congress would try to “nationalize abortion up until the moment of birth” and even permit “post-birth abortions.” (Tapper did not challenge this at the time but later clarified the meaning with the campaign, which said it was referring to medical care being denied to any fetus that survived the abortion procedure.) The governor’s only gaffe was claiming that “the proof was in the pudding” when it came to suggestions that his campaign was failing, which brought to mind an unkind story, denied by the candidate, that he once ate a chocolate dessert with three fingers straight from the tub.

Let’s not go as far as the CNN pundit Bakari Sellers, who claimed that in the interview, DeSantis “started to give the vibe that he could be president of the United States.” But this was a far more emollient version of the Florida governor than any journalist an inch to the left of Fox News has ever encountered before. That’s because he now needs establishment media to treat him as a credible threat to Trump: The polls are bad, the vibes are shifting, and his campaign laid off several staff members last week. Added to that, although DeSantis raised an impressive $20 million from mid-May to June, his reliance on high rollers has become a problem. “More than two-thirds of DeSantis’ money—nearly $14 million—came from donors who gave the legal maximum and cannot donate again,” an analysis by NBC found. Those rich backers are also more likely to act strategically than grassroots true believers; they don’t have any interest in backing a loser because they admire his principles. In a similar vein, the formerly supportive Murdoch empire’s ardor for the Florida governor has noticeably cooled in recent weeks.

Hence DeSantis’s venture out of the warm shallows of Fox News and weirdo partisan sites and into the shark-filled ocean of journalists who might actually ask him difficult questions such as “Who won the 2020 election?” He needs to prove he is more than just the most popular of the also-rans, yet the whole race still revolves around the former president. “Team DeSantis refuses to see the race for what it is,” the Washington Monthly’s politics editor, Bill Scher, tweeted recently. “The race is not about who has the best tax plan. The race is: Trump, yes or no.” Even the airing of the CNN interview offered further evidence of the problem: It was pushed later in the hour by a potential third Trump indictment. It also competed with news of the Michigan attorney general charging 16 people accused of filing false claims that Trump won the 2020 election.

For DeSantis to recover, he must overcome four factors—three within his control and one outside it. The first is his squeamishness about criticizing Trump directly; you can’t defeat a bully if you look scared. The second is his decision to run to the right of Trump on several big cultural issues, including COVID policy, LBGTQ rights, and abortion. That strategy could be poison in the general election, but it’s not even paying off in the primary. The third is that DeSantis still looks lightweight on foreign and economic policy; he briefly minimized the importance of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, apparently to curry favor with Tucker Carlson, before revising his view. His book The Courage to Be Free and his campaign speeches are heavy on his pandemic policies and his fight against Disney, and notably light on pocketbook issues.

[Read: The forgotten Ron DeSantis book]

Granted, Trump has taken wildly inconsistent positions on any number of subjects and probably couldn’t identify Ukraine on a map. But that brings us to DeSantis’s fourth problem, the one he can’t seem to control: his personality. He is not naturally funny, entertaining, or charming. Just as he doesn’t understand the pro-wrestling-style kayfabe involved in Trump’s ostensible hatred of media outlets, he doesn’t understand that Trump’s regular flirtations with bigotry are softened with a knowing wink.

In recent days, the DeSantis team shared a video made by a Twitter user who goes by “Proud Elephant,” which attacked Trump for saying in a 2016 speech that he would “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.” The clip was nakedly homophobic, and I mean that literally—rippling male abs featured prominently, between approving citations of headlines about DeSantis passing “anti-trans” bills. In response, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.” Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, offered an even sharper verdict: “This is actually very gay.” Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing LGBTQ members of the party, tweeted: “Conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women’s sports, safeguard women’s spaces and strengthen parental rights, but Ron DeSantis’ extreme rhetoric has just ventured into homophobic territory.” Take away the clownishness and the cartoonishness of Trump, and what is left is overtly, obviously repellent—even to many within the GOP.

Last night, DeSantis told Tapper that he had been consistently written off, whether in his first race to be governor or in his battle against Disney. He pointed out his proven fundraising abilities. He did not need to say, because everybody knows, that Trump might be in deep legal jeopardy by the time the election comes around. The race is still open. But by granting the interview at all, DeSantis conceded that his biggest problem is not that the establishment media hate him—as he regularly claims—but that his reluctance to confront Trump directly makes him all too easy to ignore.

Swiss watchmaker says in lawsuit watches 'not in any way capable of causing any disruption to public order or morality.'

Harajuku fashion influencer Ryuji Higa, better known as ryuchell, was found unconscious in Tokyo on Wednesday.

Even by the standards of today’s political ads, the video that recently roiled the Republican presidential race is not particularly subtle. In it, a talking head accuses Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of producing “some of the harshest, most draconian laws that literally threaten trans existence.” Headlines like “DeSantis Signs ‘Most Extreme Slate of Anti-Trans Laws in Modern History’” flit across the screen. The twist: This was not an attack ad against DeSantis. The clip was shared by his own team on Twitter, and presented as an attack on Donald Trump for being too soft on LGBTQ issues.

With its slapdash presentation and internet-meme imagery, the video could easily be dismissed as the half-baked output of a floundering campaign. But in fact, DeSantis’s anti-trans rhetoric is part of a pattern—and an essential component of his plan to win the Republican primary.

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

This might seem like a strange claim at first glance. After all, most Americans oppose discrimination against transgender people, even as many express reservations about medical transition for minors or trans competitors in women’s athletics. But the DeSantis clip, like his other incendiary interjections on this topic, was not targeted at most Americans. It was directed at one of the most socially conservative and politically important constituencies in Republican politics: evangelical voters in Iowa.

On paper, DeSantis’s campaign is in dire straits: He’s trailing the front-runner, Trump, by a two-to-one margin in national polls. But there is no national primary, only individual state contests—and the first of these will take place in Iowa in early 2024. The outcome of that showdown has the potential to shape the entire primary to follow, and by pivoting hard to the right on social issues including abortion and gender, DeSantis has been methodically positioning himself to win it.

In February 2020, the New York Times reporter Astead Herndon went to South Carolina and interviewed Black voters in churches across the pivotal Democratic-primary state. He discovered a groundswell of support for former Vice President Joe Biden, who had been written off by many observers after falling short in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Biden went on to sweep South Carolina and capture the nomination.

This year, Herndon visited churches in Iowa, and discovered a different surge for a seemingly struggling contender, who was gaining ground on a surprisingly shaky Trump. “We believe the former president’s hurdles are so significant, that most likely, he gives the Democrats the best opportunity to win in 2024,” Bob Vander Plaats, the head of the Family Leader, the state’s politically influential evangelical umbrella group, told him. “So we believe we’re doing our base a great service by trying to say who would be a good alternative to the former president.” Who might that be? At Eternity Church, one of the largest in the area, Herndon found that “a surprising number of people are turning to DeSantis,” who had visited the congregation in May. The pastor himself revealed that he’d donated to the Florida governor—and repeatedly referenced “gender” as one of his top issues.

These voters have outsize importance. Because of Vander Plaats’s well-organized political machine, conservative evangelicals and their preferences have determined the winner of the Iowa caucus for the past three Republican presidential primaries. In 2008, they chose the former pastor Mike Huckabee. In 2012, they gave the nod to the culture warrior Rick Santorum. And in 2016, they handed the first victory of the primary season not to the twice-divorced playboy Donald Trump, but to Ted Cruz.

None of this would seem to bode well for DeSantis. After all, Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz all lost the nomination. Most other states are not as dominated by the white-evangelical electorate that prevails in Iowa. So why would the Florida governor invest so much effort in courting a community that has previously failed to deliver a durable victory? Probably because taking Iowa is his only chance to take the nomination.

According to recent polls, about half of Republican voters don’t actually want to nominate Trump again. But as long as other small-time candidates such as Nikki Haley and Mike Pence are in the race, DeSantis has no hope of consolidating this constituency. To beat Trump, he needs to turn the 2024 primary into a head-to-head contest between himself and the former president. And to do that, he needs to win Iowa and demonstrate to Trump-skeptical voters that he is their only realistic option. Just as Biden’s dominant showing in South Carolina convinced establishment Democrats that he was their best chance to beat a surging Bernie Sanders, a DeSantis upset in Iowa could anoint him as the most viable alternative to Trump.

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

Iowa won’t determine the ultimate victor, in other words, but it could determine the contenders. “Iowa’s job isn’t to select the nominee,” Vander Plaats told Herndon. “Iowa’s job is to narrow the field.” In the past, winning Iowa failed to vault the likes of Cruz and Santorum into serious contention, because they were factional candidates without name recognition or major appeal outside the religious right. But DeSantis is a better-positioned candidate with comparable favorables to Trump, thanks to his national profile and prolific appearances on Fox News. If he can quickly narrow the primary field to a one-on-one contest, he has the underlying numbers to make it competitive. If he can’t, his campaign may be over before it really begins.

Of course, there’s a cost to running a campaign designed to appeal to your party’s most fervent partisans. By staking out unpopular positions to win the primary, a candidate puts himself at a disadvantage in the general election, where independent voters tend to punish perceived extremism. We’ve seen this quite recently. In the 2022 midterms, Trump handpicked many GOP congressional candidates who echoed his 2020 election-fraud claims. But although these individuals easily won their primaries, nearly all of them lost their races. What thrilled the Republican base alienated the broader electorate.

The same trap has also ensnared non-Trumpy politicians. Just ask another former Republican presidential hopeful. In 2012, Mitt Romney began his campaign with a reputation as a problem-solving moderate who had successfully governed the blue state of Massachusetts. But by the end of the primary, he had dubbed himself “severely conservative” on the debate stage and committed to an array of policy stances that dogged him throughout the election.

At the time, a senior Romney adviser infamously assured the media that his candidate would simply wipe the slate clean after winning the Republican nomination: “You hit a reset button for the fall campaign … It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch.” It didn’t quite work out that way. “After running for more than a year in which he called himself ‘severely conservative,’” Barack Obama cracked, “Mitt Romney’s trying to convince you that he was severely kidding.”

Such political sleight of hand might have worked when voters didn’t have immediate access to video recordings of everything a candidate said on the campaign trail. But as Romney discovered, in the age of the internet and viral social-media clips, it’s much harder to escape one’s past pronouncements. Put another way, today’s pro-DeSantis ads boasting of his anti-trans legislation are tomorrow’s anti-DeSantis ads warning voters about his radicalism.