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There’s Donald Trump, and there’s everyone else. At the moment, the former president of the United States appears unbeatable in the 2024 Republican primary race. But perhaps inevitable is a trickier word than it seems.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Ukraine after the deluge The misunderstood reason millions of Americans stopped going to church One more COVID summer?

It’s Iowa Time

What happens when you say the unsayable? Former Congressman (and current GOP presidential contender) Will Hurd found out the hard way Friday night. “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again,” Hurd told the Republican masses inside the Iowa Events Center. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”

The boos rained down, and, rest assured, they were mighty.

Hurd was one of 13 candidates who had trekked to Des Moines for the Iowa GOP’s cattle-call event known as the Lincoln Dinner. Prospective voters and donors gathered roughly six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus to remind themselves of their importance, which may or may not be waning. The night was ostensibly a chance for Iowans to listen to a range of electability pitches. Former Vice President Mike Pence told the room he would reinstate a ban on transgender personnel in the U.S. military and endorsed the idea of a national abortion restriction after 15 weeks. The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy rattled off a list of government agencies he would shut down: the FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, and IRS. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis boasted that he had refused to let his state “descend into a Faucian dystopia” during the pandemic and called for term limits in Congress. (One dinner attendee, the 89-year-old Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley—currently serving his eighth term—probably didn’t like that one.)

The whole spectacle—including the after-parties where you could snap selfies with candidates or, at the DeSantis event, knock down a pyramid of Bud Light cans—felt like a study in performative competition.

Each speaker was given a democratizing 10-minute time limit to deliver his or her remarks (poor Asa Hutchinson suffered the embarrassment of having his mic cut off), but all were merely warm-up acts for the headliner. When Trump finally took the stage, he seemed tired, bored, and annoyed with this obligation. A lack of teleprompters meant that Trump spent the bulk of his 10 minutes looking down at printed notes, only occasionally making eye contact with the audience or ad-libbing. He got a few chuckles out of his old pandemic go-to, the “China virus.” He notably referred to his White House predecessor as “Barack Hussein Obama.” The only newish development was that Ron “DeSanctimonious” had been shortened to the easier-to-say but far more confusing “DeSanctis.”

Trump is not running as an incumbent, but it sure seems that way. A New York Times/Siena College poll out today shows Trump with a 37-point lead over DeSantis, who was the only other candidate able to crack double digits among respondents. Did January 6 matter? Do the indictments matter? Does anything remotely negative about Trump matter? Not yet. Trump remains the Katie Ledecky of the 2024 contest—so far ahead of the pack that it feels wrong to even call it a race. Trump knows it too. He may not even bother to show up at the first Republican debate next month, in Milwaukee.

These factors would suggest that the Republican Party is delaying the inevitable, that the GOP base earnestly wants to “Make America great again” … again. And yet, the various campaign buses keep on rolling across Iowa and New Hampshire. The noble attempts at retail politics and down-home charm continue apace. Pence strategically name-dropped the Iowa chain Pizza Ranch. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tweeted a video of himself fist-pumping after sinking a bag in cornhole. (“If God made you a man, you play sports against men,” Scott said onstage Friday night.) Expect much more of this at the Iowa State Fair, which kicks off in just over a week.

I was in the press pen at the Lincoln Dinner on Friday night, and I spent the weekend in Iowa speaking with various Republicans about all things 2024. I came away with the sense that a not-insignificant portion of conservatives is willing to accept Trump’s dominance, but that many are still quietly hoping for a deus ex machina to avoid a 2020 rematch. The still-rolling indictments don’t seem to have much effect—too many Republican voters argue that the legal cases against Trump are politically motivated. He shows no signs of giving up his nickname, “Teflon Don.”

The fact that Trump is running from a stance of inevitability is paradoxically both emboldening and hindering. Trump doesn’t seem to want to actually be president (as Hurd suggested). Maybe he just wants to prove he can win again. Will that motivational gap matter to voters? Will anything matter?

Related:

The revenge of the normal Republicans The secret presidential-campaign dress code

Today’s News

A state judge in Georgia rejected Trump’s bid to derail the investigation into his attempts to overturn election results in the state. A Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown, killed at least six people, including a 10-year-old girl and her mother, and wounded dozens more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for Sunday’s suicide bombing of a political rally in Pakistan that killed at least 54 people.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: In 1980, the film critic Roger Ebert argued that movies were better in theaters. The recent success of Barbenheimer is evidence—and points to the ongoing magic of communal experiences, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

The Myopia Generation

By Sarah Zhang

A decade into her optometry career, Marina Su began noticing something unusual about the kids in her New York City practice. More of them were requiring glasses, and at younger and younger ages. Many of these kids had parents who had perfect vision and who were baffled by the decline in their children’s eyesight. Frankly, Su couldn’t explain it either.

In optometry school, she had been taught—as American textbooks had been teaching for decades—that nearsightedness, or myopia, is a genetic condition. Having one parent with myopia doubles the odds that a kid will need glasses. Having two parents with myopia quintuples them. Over the years, she did indeed diagnose lots of nearsighted kids with nearsighted parents. These parents, she told me, would sigh in recognition: Oh no, not them too. But something was changing.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What “fitboxing” is missing “Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it.” The weird, fragmented world of social media after Twitter America is drowning in packages.

Culture Break

Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

Read. “I Wish I Could Remember,” a new poem by Michael White.

“It’s just a dream, / I’d tell myself. But dreams are how / we travel through the dark”

Watch. Biopics tend to be “functional to a fault,” better at showcasing an actor than creating challenging art—but these 20 movies manage to break the mold, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last week, the podcast host Jack Wagner went viral on Twitter (er, X) with a prompt: “serious question: if the grateful dead is not the greatest band of all time from the united states then who is?” Thousands of responses poured in: The Beach Boys, The Allman Brothers Band, and The Velvet Underground kept surfacing among the many retorts (as did Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty; I don’t think you can really count either, because even though they play with backing bands, they’re solo artists.) I’m a Deadhead, but the strongest contender I saw was Creedence Clearwater Revival. CCR’s Willy and the Poor Boys remains one of the greatest rock records ever. You likely know “Fortunate Son” and “Down on the Corner,” but the album also features an awesome cover of “The Midnight Special”—I love the moment when the whole band kicks in just after the one-minute mark.

— John

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Former US president has 54 percent support among likely Republican primary voters, New York Times/Siena poll finds.

At key Iowa dinner only one Republican opponent challenged Trump head on - and he was roundly booed.

One day after new federal charges were filed against him, Former US President and 2024 Republican candidate, Donald Trump, addressed Iowa voters.

Trump launches new attack on closet rival Ron DeSantis at conservative event in Iowa.

Until now, Mr Trump has largely shunned appearing at events with rivals over whom he maintains a big lead.

Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith secured a superseding indictment in the classified-documents case against Donald Trump and his aide Waltine Nauta in federal court in Florida. The revised indictment adds a new defendant, Carlos de Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago, as well as two new obstruction-of-justice counts for attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence.” The new charges stem from allegations that Trump, Nauta, and de Oliveira together attempted to delete surveillance-video footage at Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2022. This all allegedly occurred amid the FBI’s attempts to secure the return of a huge quantity of classified documents that Trump took from the White House—a frustrated effort that culminated in the government’s execution of a search warrant at the property on August 8.

The superseding indictment also adds a new count under the Espionage Act related to a document marked top secret and identified as a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country,” which Trump is described as waving around to people without security clearances at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club. It also charges de Oliveira with repeatedly lying to the FBI when asked about his knowledge of the boxes stored and moved around at Mar-a-Lago.

The case is only getting more damning for Trump.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Recall that the original indictment alleged that in May 2022, Nauta removed—at Trump’s direction—64 boxes of documents from “the Storage Room” at Mar-a-Lago. Nauta removed 11 more boxes on June 1, according to the indictment. Several photographs depicting stacks of disheveled boxes—one with what looks like a copy machine nearby—were reproduced in the indictment. The new obstruction charges involve the storage room and nearby security cameras, which could have picked up footage of people moving boxes after Trump’s lawyers claimed to the FBI on June 3, in a certified statement, that Trump had returned everything in his possession.

The superseding indictment alleges that Trump orchestrated a failed attempt to destroy the surveillance-video footage the day after he learned from his lawyer, on June 22, that they were expecting a grand-jury subpoena for production of “any and all surveillance records, videos, images, photographs and/or CCTV from internal cameras,” including from the “ground floor (basement).” On June 23, Trump called de Oliveira and spoke with him for 24 minutes. The subpoena was issued on June 24. The same day, a staff member texted Nauta, who was at Bedminster, that Trump wanted to see him. In less than two hours, Nauta changed his plans to travel to Illinois, instead heading to Mar-a-Lago. On June 25, Nauta and de Oliveira went to the ground-floor basement, “with a flashlight through the tunnel where the Storage Room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”

On June 27, after confirming that the club’s IT director, referred to as “Employee 4” in the indictment, was available, de Oliveira walked with that person through the basement tunnel, where they had a conversation meant to “remain between the two of them.” De Oliveira told him that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted.” Employee 4 refused, saying that he would not “have the rights to do that.” De Oliveira responded, “What are we going to do?”

Later that day, according to the indictment, Nauta and de Oliveira “walked through the bushes on the northern edge of The Mar-a-Lago Club property to meet.” Approximately two hours later, Trump called de Oliveira “and they spoke for approximately three and a half minutes.” Later in the summer, two weeks after the FBI conducted its search (it obtained the surveillance footage in July, and the warrant was issued in early August), Nauta called another Trump employee, saying, “Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good.” The employee responded that de Oliveira “was loyal” to Trump, who called de Oliveira “the same day” and told him that he’d get him an attorney.

A few things jump out from this narrative, all of which are bad for Trump. The attempt to erase the video footage occurred in direct response to a grand-jury subpoena for the video footage—not prophylactically, routinely, by mistake, or for some other noncriminal reason. This is a big deal for purposes of proving the crime of obstruction, and Trump’s role and influence in the effort to destroy potentially incriminating evidence of interest to a federal grand jury is unmistakable. The fact pattern also bolsters the government’s case that Trump’s efforts to induce others to hide and tamper with evidence were made “knowingly” and “with intent” under the relevant obstruction statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1512(b)(2). (The new Espionage Act charge also blows apart Trump’s claim to the Fox News host Bret Baier that there “was not a document per se” involved in the audio recording of him discussing what appear to be military war plans with folks lacking security clearances.) Meanwhile, the superseding indictment rests on a stream of corroborating evidence—including, according to the indictment, surveillance-video footage; the testimony of several employees; and a trove of text messages and phone records between the key players, among them Trump himself.

The Mar-a-Lago case is one of two criminal trials Trump is facing so far—the other was brought by the Manhattan district attorney over alleged financial wrongdoing—with at least two more possibly impending, including one stemming from Trump’s involvement in the violent attempt to thwart the peaceful transition of presidential power on January 6, 2021, and another out of Fulton County, Georgia, over his recorded effort to sway the Georgia secretary of state to “find” enough votes to swing that state into his electoral column. In all of these cases, prosecutors’ task is unique in that the defendant is a former president of the United States and the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024—both historical firsts. Criminal juries must be unanimous in Manhattan and in federal court, so Trump’s legal team need only secure a single loyalist who will not convict in order to achieve an acquittal.

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s ‘horrifying news’]

Which is why it’s significant that the narrative underlying the new obstruction charges is so compelling. The tale is reminiscent of the hero’s journey in mythology and literature that was first articulated by Joseph Campbell in 1949 and that underpins countless Hollywood blockbusters, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter. In this narrative, Employee 4 emerges as the hero who rejected Trump’s villainous urges and then came forward with the truth, at his own peril. Prosecutors and law-enforcement officials involved in the case have already faced substantial threats and harassment, both online and in person. Trump last week called Jack Smith “deranged.” Let’s hope this story ends well for the good guys.

Supreme Court rulings are meant to be the law of the land, but Alabama is taking its recent opinion on the Voting Rights Act as a mere recommendation. In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district.

Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.

[Read: A Supreme Court ruling that could tip the House]

More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, but the state’s Republican majority has racially gerrymandered that population into a single district out of seven because it fears those voters might elect Democrats. The partisan motive is no excuse for racial discrimination—1870s Democrats also had a partisan interest in disenfranchising Black voters, who were then reliably Republican. After failing to get the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2, Alabama decided that following the law was optional.

Alabama’s open rejection of a Supreme Court ruling comes in the midst of a conservative campaign accusing liberals of “delegitimizing” the Court by criticizing its lurch to the right and the coziness of the Republican-appointed justices with billionaire political donors who have interests before the Court.

“This is another front in the political campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court, with a goal of tarnishing its rulings and subjecting it to more political control,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized in May about Democratic hearings on potential ethics legislation. “Most of all, the Court is no longer a backstop legislature for progressives to impose policies they can’t get through Congress.”

Whatever else this Court may be, it can now be fairly described as a backstop legislature for conservatives to impose policies they cannot get through Congress. Also, the Court hasn’t had a liberal majority since the Nixon era, so conservative complaints that the Court was a “backstop legislature for progressives” are not an expression of opposition to “political control” over the Court, but a lament that Republican appointees possessed only a slim one-vote majority for most of that time, which meant they didn’t get their preferred outcomes as often as they wanted. And the way that the conservative movement seized the Court was precisely by “tarnishing its rulings” for more than a half century. At one point, the right-wing legal martyr and originalist Robert Bork was so frustrated by the Court being insufficiently conservative that he declared, “As our institutional arrangements now stand, the Court can never be made a legitimate element of a basically democratic polity.” In the right’s view, the judiciary was an “imperial judiciary,” an “out of control branch of government.”

Indeed, although it now accuses the Court’s liberal critics of “delegitimization,” the Journal defends the current Court by saying it is merely undoing the “legal mistakes of recent decades.” What the Roberts Court’s defenders truly fear is the political strength of a critique of the Court as overreaching and out of touch with the majority of the electorate, because as conservatives well understand, that is a critique that has the power to influence elections and ultimately shape the Court itself. They understand this because that is one reason the 6–3 right-wing majority on the Court came to be in the first place. This is why questioning the Court’s legal reasoning and sweeping power is a privilege that must be exclusively reserved for conservatives.

The fear is clearly not that rogue actors will ignore the Court’s rulings. If the pervasive right-wing alarm over liberal criticism of the Court as “delegitimizing” has been deafening, the conservative response to Alabama openly flouting the Court’s ruling has been muted. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, for example, so protective of the Court’s “legitimacy,” when it comes to substantive public criticism, did not view Alabama’s refusal to obey the justices as an event worthy of comment.

One would think that verbal criticism of powerful institutions, an essential part of life in any democracy, would be less an act of “delegitimization” than an open challenge to the rule of law. But Alabama is defying the rule of law in pursuit of conservative causes—more Republicans in Congress; voiding constitutional prohibitions on racial discrimination—and so it’s fine.

[From the October 2022 issue: John Roberts’s long game]

All of this renders the Journal’s hand-wringing rather ironic: It is clear the right that views the Court as a political instrument for imposing conservative policy, and when the Court fails to heed its obligation to do so, they can simply ignore it. This is consistent with the movement’s Trumpist turn toward the belief that the legitimacy of any practice or institution—elections, fundamental freedoms, the state itself—is conferred not by the consent of the governed but by the consent of the right. You have an inalienable access to the franchise as long as you vote Republican. You have free speech as long as you say conservative things. The free market is free only when it leads to conservative outcomes. The Supreme Court’s rulings are the law of the land, except if those rulings are not what conservatives want.

Alabama’s maps will likely be challenged in court. But one reason the state’s Republican leadership may feel comfortable with ignoring the justices in the first place is that Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts were so clearly holding their noses in overturning a clear act of racial discrimination in voting that they might not be inclined to do it a second time. As Matt Ford reminds us, in striking down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Roberts argued that “things have changed dramatically” in the South, and so those protections could be disregarded. That was naive at best then; Alabama is intent on illustrating why now.

Maybe Alabama is bluffing. Or maybe it simply doesn’t believe that someone like Roberts, who has been dreaming of gutting the Voting Rights Act since he was in his 20s, really means it. Or perhaps Alabama is reminding the Republican-appointed justices that the Court’s legitimacy depends on its obedience to the conservative movement, whose view is that the only legitimate outcomes—or laws, or governments, or presidents, or Supreme Court rulings—are conservative ones.

It is that position, and the Court’s reliable adherence to it, that has precipitated its loss of legitimacy. No liberal criticism could be as devastating to the Court’s credibility as the justices’ own actions, or the expectations of their defenders.

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.

The 81-year-old senator abruptly stops speaking before Republican colleagues escorted him away.