The art of flash fiction thrives on desire: Readers are given a brief tale that leaves them wanting more. This feeling is also a vital component in the act of writing, illuminating the search for new ways of depicting the world. Our shorter stories this year are based on the theme of desire; some authors have decided it worthy of interrogation in and of itself, while others use it as a path to altogether distinct ideas. What results is a thrilling array of voices, with stories ranging from ancient eroticism to modern longing. In the beginning there was desire, and then there was … that’s for you to find out.

Photographs by Molly MatalonIn GizaBy Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

It is Giza in the middle of the night and I’m wrecked by jet lag thinking about you and in the alley below the flat there is a chained-up dog barking. Bad pop music is blasting out by the pyramids and a gaudy light show plays over the Sphinx’s face and I am certain that when the world ends only the lights of Vegas will remain shining. Since I was a boy I’ve wanted to see the pyramids and there is a voice in me that says I’ve been waiting just as long to catch sight of you but if you did not know love is dead, which is to say so much for all these feelings! Everything is about sex except sex, which is about blah blah blah. I crossed a continent and an ocean and most of another continent and yet here in this desert city I feel like I’m home. Let me explain. There are boys and girls riding horses in the dirt streets and everyone is some shade of brown and the infrastructure here is barely holding together and this home of original empire has been breached and left to its own devices by so many invaders that it is clear Egypt is the original reservation of the world—and somehow in all this I am hopeful. Me and a friend are tracing the beauty that runs from this place of ancient sun to the Athenian peninsula with its Platonic aura still remaining and on to Rome, where the meeting of architecture and emperor was perfected, and still on from there until we find ourselves back in America. What my first glimpse of the Great Pyramid showed me was not a miracle structure of impossible stones but a dream shimmering some 4,500 years over the light-struck dunes. But … let’s get down to it, shall we? Let’s say for argument’s sake there is much good art and some great art and a thousand Great Pyramids’ worth of bad art, but the only art I give a fuck about is your ass. Am I being clear? Is this transmission doing its thing across time and space? Baby, am I … the best you ever had? A request: Don’t answer that. Another: Let’s do this like we’ve never done it, which is something I didn’t do even when I’d never done it. Innocence is a brave thing and almost no one in the age of Instagram has the courage for it. But also let’s do it like we have? Sweetheart, I’m supposed to write about longing, but here I am, writing about something else. Take note: That first kiss, like, my angle of approach, was off, and and and I am telling you! Since our first night together, I have been studying very diligently at the Royal Academy of Smooching. From here on it’s nothing but movie kisses worthy of deleted Indiana Jones scenes. Royal this, royal that. The fans turn slow overhead in the dim rooms of empire’s afterlife, and the shades of British accountants work through the heat and the day’s ledgers and their latest letter to Martha. If I correctly understand this book I mail-ordered from the back of a magazine in 1985, upon returning I am certain to be a master lover and the historians tracing the arc of my adoration for you will … maybe take note! Hieroglyphs are the GOAT of writing systems. Like, just look at that shit. It’s fucking sick. But also … maybe not so efficient. Even more than young men ready to die brilliantly and a willingness to enslave all and sundry to commit a pharaoh to eternity, an empire needs a good writing system. As indicated by an intensive Google search—I almost went to the second page—before it was the Great Pyramid of Giza in Arabic, it was the Pyramid of Cheops in Greek, and before that it was the Pyramid of Khufu in Egyptian, but we both know before that, it was called Pharaoh’s Love Shack in the first language there ever was. You could take your best girl there and get a strawberry shake and a side of mutton and later she might wear your gold-leaf letterman jacket, but only if you were the right kind of pharaoh’s son, which, you know, I am not. In the end it’s always your younger brother with the great traps and the hyenic smile who gets the girl, and you, you ugly brute, you get sent out to carve more arcane but strangely practical symbols into the timeless rock. Thoth, now there’s a true bro for a writer. A deity for language? For art and judgment? America, you absolute plebe, take note. Meanwhile, my friend the dog, who I am certain bears the dark and pointed visage of Anubis, is still barking down below, and with each hopeless yawp he gains my admiration. (In fact he reminds me of myself when I was that age.) Hear me out for real though: Only the losers are worth a writer’s time, and there are way too many winners in the world of American letters now. But—I have two questions for you. First off, did you know the pyramids were once covered in limestone, their walls pale and smooth and rising impossibly bright to the heavens? And two, do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? Jesus Christ on a velvet cross! As a true connoisseur of the high art of gaming, I can only say one thing: Baby, you’ve got me stun-locked. Speaking of spiritual masters, our tour guide is the truth and the light and the way in this city, with its many layers of time, you feel like you might be drowning. I see in him the hard-achieved irony won by way of pain, frustration, and the bewilderment of a high intelligence waiting for the world to, like, catch the fuck up. He leads us through his homeland with the sly smile and wink of a lesser god who is lesser only because he chose it. I said I was an American Indian and he put his hand on his head to indicate a feather and we both laughed. I have not thought about the Egyptian afterlife since I was but a young reservation boy in the Wild, Wild West but now here I am, thinking about feathers and hearts. This fine eve I would cut out my heart and place it upon the scales of judgment for a chance to strip you down and do things to you that would bring the UN to my doorstep. Whatever. I will go down like a true Hollywood gunslinger—shooting blanks—only to be resurrected once more by that pharaonic ass. I know, I know! I just wanted to say that word. Here’s another one: callipygian. That's Greek for “a great ass.” Say it in your best Pacino. We’ve got such a gumbo going here, this piece is surely a violation of the Great Literary Treaty of 20__. You remember the one, we traded irony for safety. Anyway. How about this: Is anyone as over the discourse as me, because I am terribly, murderously over it. Behind us only slaughter, ahead only more, and all these people—I need a term that fuses philistine and dilettante, somebody help me out here—can talk about is being offended. Well, this stupidity is harming me, and still there is still no legitimate talk about Indian Country and it’s pretty goddamn clear there never will be. But don’t worry, me and my peeps are used to it. We just throw up a jeep wave and crank up the volume. What I want to discuss, though, is how life lately looks like the barrel of a gun set to my temple. Maybe it’s in my mouth? You know, for variety’s sake. My love—can I say this, is it too soon, I don’t understand the rules, my sense of timing is appalling—maybe be my oasis and I’ll be yours? May we drink deeply from each other ’til the sun falls finally on our day. I kiss your neck a few times and feed you the gelato flavor of your own choosing and maybe … we eat some hot dogs? I don’t know. The guy driving me and my friend all over kingdom come has the most beautiful eyes I’ve seen. Second only to yours, of course! They are green and unguarded and he cannot speak a lick of this language of empire that is my only option and he has the genuine heart of someone from where I am from. He could be a cousin of mine. Did I tell you I once was a tour guide? I, too, took foreigners—some people call them Americans—through my many-thousand-year homeland and talked about the before times and if they liked me enough I got tipped! It was really something! An ex once told me she was tired of the Indian thing and, if you can believe it, that was the moment she became an ex! You said I could not compare you in any way to fruit but … I kind of like fruit. What if I said you were like a mango that was actually like a supernova I happened upon while perusing the night sky with the telescope of my bitter heart and there you were, a phenomenon of such scope and size one finds oneself tempted to use a parallel but nonetheless commensurate description such as: There you were, the smoking-hot gunner bitch on the back of the apocalyptic jeep at the edge of the world. (There’s a dog at her side. It’s me.) She wears designer sunglasses and always has a toothpick in her mouth, but she has a heart of—well, probably some kind of fruit. Being in the midst of one of the great, dry expanses of the world has me in a mood. I am thinking of a J.Lo track that, on occasion, comes up in my list of liked songs. When others hear it, they likely want to shake their asses to the sick beats, or discuss how dated the sound is, but when I hear it, my gaze, driven by the note of elegy threading through the song, drifts dramatically out to the horizon. There are pyramids out there, I am certain of it. They stand silent and implacable and contain still the fury and horror and religiosity of original vision, and all beauty begins with them and comes to us across time from them—I kid you not. At the end of the long hall of the mind they shimmer massively. I will put my hands on you. We will do the oldest thing.

The BoysBy Tess Gunty

The boys were born with their fists clenched. Motherless almost as soon as they arrived, flexible cartilage ossified in fields of hot dust. As babies, they dozed in acres of corn, drooled between sweet rows of genetically modified symmetry, and cried for milk, but most of the mothers were sick or buried or ash by then, so the boys sucked rubber from their fathers’ fists instead. No one understood the disease and there wasn’t enough money to care. Fathers rocked cottoned fat calm, kissed putty heads, loved for two.

The boys learned to hop and climb, operate scissors, fear strangers, count to 10. Fathers recorded first words and ticked door-frame heights in graphite. At the schoolhouse, the boys kicked each other’s shins and learned how it felt to hurt and be hurt. As teenagers, their bodies stormed alone. Sometimes they undressed each other. It made some feel found, some less lonely, others lonelier still. A sighting of a live girl or woman was rare—most had died off by then—but when one did occur, the boys stared without blinking, no matter her age or appearance. The boys collected pictures of female bodies to study them. They wondered if female heartbeats sounded different from their own. Older boys told stories: Girls can grow strawberries just by looking at dirt. Girls have scales when they’re born and can jump over 10 feet high. It was a girl who started the Water Tower Fire last year. Girls have tails.

At the high school, the boys studied agriculture, medicine, law enforcement.

By the time they began to work, most of the boys had developed asthma. Their cartilage calcified and their prefrontal cortexes matured. Bad habits became personalities, and tiny pieces of freedom crumbled away each year. After sweating for hours in the fields, they gulped buckets of hose water and pressed ice to their wrists. They collected food tickets, small paychecks, and nonperishables. Prepared themselves for a drought or a flood or a war.

The Department of Agriculture sent the boys gifts of cured meat at Harvest.

The land was starving the livestock and the livestock were starving the land—animal meat, milk, and skin waned sparse, imported, expensive. Soon it became too hot to grip metal tools without gloves, so hot each boy could only work in shifts of 30 minutes. Smoke stampeded the town from the west; gifts of cactus meat and dried cowpeas began appearing on doorsteps at Harvest instead of jerky.

Two nurses painted the death ward sky blue. Nine females left. Family visitors only. Eight, five, three. Eventually, none.

In their isolated plot of America, the boys launched spades into dirt, operated gleaming machines, sprayed chemicals to keep the crops alive, and beheaded cobs from their stalks. They stood quietly, obedient and theistic. Mr. Wolff promised them imported women. Each hoped to find the fabled girl, the one they heard stories about, hiding in a corncrib on the outskirts. Some invented tales about her for the younger boys. She eats raw birds. She eats nothing at all. She can go three weeks without water. You can’t imagine. And this last was their refrain: You can’t imagine.

The younger ones countered, rolled their eyes, helplessly believed.

The boys punished the earth for its infertility and infidelity—for turning girls into dust. For killing their mothers. Despite the supercrops, which were resistant to heat and drought, malnutrition flared. Kernels were dried, ground, fried, grilled, baked, popped, boiled, consecrated, and hated. Motherless boys became men.

Some of the men considered abandoning the familiar, hot dust for someplace else, perhaps a place with women and water and sand, but travel required a vehicle and a passport and border fees and provisions, all of which required money they had never come close to possessing, and the essential things—wallets, ribs—had thinned. They were men of tanned necks, high-school diplomas, and meager savings. Some questioned the existence of other communities—they’d only seen images, all taken before the Water Tower Fire, the droughts, the floods. Perhaps this desiccated life was a kind of miracle. They loved each other, worked hard and laughed into dawn, always waiting for something essential to change. Lying on a hard bed of cornmeal, each man cried for milk until his fists unclenched.

GroceriesBy Sarah Wang

Oat milk. Eggs. Blueberries. Tortillas. Sour cream. Pilsner. What was he forgetting? JW switched the shopping basket from one hand to the other. His left wrist was still messed up. It had been six weeks. Too stoned at the gym. He blamed it on his new cannabis company.

The chip display was admirable, with boxes stacked elaborately into a proscenium arch. There were so many flavors now: special limited edition, mash-ups. He reached for the last bag of habanero dill ranch pizza. A tang alighted his tongue as the chips communicated to him through the propylene. Man, was he stoned.

“Excuse me!”

A shrill voice cut through the air.

“Hey!” a woman said. She was heading straight for him.

He looked around. Who was this lady talking to? Her cycling jersey and stretch shorts scared him.

“Do you know how to drive?”

She reached out to knock the chips from his hand. Instinctively, he lifted his arm. B-ball reflex. She jumped up and swatted at the bag, slamming him with the side of her body. The hard soles of her shoes clopped as she stumbled.

“You cut me off!” she shouted. “Asshole!”

JW stepped back. His hand was still in the air, not on account of any conscious intention but merely because his amygdala had taken over. The woman swiped the bangs out of her flushed face and lunged. He spun, dodging her flailing arm.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” JW said. “It’s not me.”

By this time, a few people had gathered around the two.

“What’s going on here?” a man asked.

“This murderer turned into the bike lane.” She crossed her arms over her heaving chest. “He’s endangering lives. He tried to RUN ME OVER!”

The people looked at the two of them, the angry woman and JW. He finally managed to lower his hand to his side, but the chip bag had popped in his grip. This was all happening so fast. The crowd multiplied. Now there were seven.

“I’m shopping,” JW said. He held up the basket as proof.

“After committing attempted vehicular manslaughter!” The woman began sobbing.

His mind was swaddled in a fog of THC. He wanted to run, but that would only make him look guilty. If he ran, people would give chase. It was animalistic.

“Wait, are you—” an older man looked at JW.

“You were on Dancing With the Stars!” a woman shouted.

The crowd stared at JW as if the cyclist were not there. He felt light-headed. This was not what he wanted for his Wednesday morning after therapy.

Sobbing turned into wailing as the woman tried to regain the crowd’s attention. She crumpled over, holding her face in her hands. The launched cries bounced off JW’s body, a horrible echolocation.

How could he have done whatever in the bike lane? Whatever she was saying. He’d been here for 20 minutes already. Aside from being stoned, he was a slow shopper. He liked to take his time. See what was new. What was on sale.

A teenager pointed her phone in the woman’s direction. A guy wearing a Zankou Chicken T-shirt pulled his phone out too and began filming. JW was thankful that they seemed to be exclusively filming the cyclist and not him. Couldn’t risk the investors pulling out. He stepped to the left in case he was in the frame, still holding the deflated bag and his basket of groceries. His wrist hurt. He must have twisted it just now. In the melee.

“Don’t film me. I’m not a criminal. I’m a victim,” she gasped. “Film HIM!”

“Lady, this man said he is not the person you’re looking for,” Zankou guy said.

A newcomer sidled up to the teenager. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“This lady is freaking out.” The teen shrugged.

“Oh, one of those,” the newcomer said.

“You don’t care about the environment. I do! I care!” the cyclist yelled, pointing at JW.

The newcomer looked at JW and did not look away. The woman who had recognized him from Dancing With the Stars was whispering to the older man. Then all three stared at JW. People didn’t recognize him as much anymore. Mostly just people in his community. Middle-aged women, sometimes. JW was middle-aged himself now. Too old to go viral. Not for this.

JW shook his head, as if to express sympathy for the cyclist. His media training kicked in. Keep the audience’s allegiance. He didn’t need to deflect. The cyclist was the only one in the camera’s frame. All he had to do was let it ride.

“Stop it!” the cyclist screamed. “Stop filming meeeee.”

She grabbed a bag of chips from the display and threw it at the teen.

More people showed up with grocery carts. A woman and her three children. A guy in a suit. Two store employees. A couple. A dude cradling low-fat milk and a box of French-toast cereal who also looked stoned. Some watched the cyclist as she ducked around the back of the chip display. Some watched JW, but he couldn’t tell if it was because they recognized him or because he was the accused.

“Help!” the woman screamed. “Help me!”

The cannabis line that JW had spent a decade trying to secure investors for had just launched last week. His garage was full of merch: T-shirts, Ping-Pong paddles, rolling papers, vapes, even waffle irons. His teenage face was on all of it.

“You don’t call the police. I call the police!”

Middle-aged yet suspended in adolescence. JW had decided, fuck it. Use his decades-old character for branding. Give them what they wanted. It was the only way to get funding. The ’90s were back: the rare guest-starring roles his agent booked, the series canceled after one season, his ex going to the press. He’d had to pay for lawyers and good PR because of her. Thankfully, only internet tabloids picked up the story, framing it as “jealous ex trying to get more alimony.” Charges dropped.

The cannabis line was the most media attention he had gotten in decades. Nothing could jeopardize it. What would he have left? JW inched close to an onlooker, positioning himself behind her.

“HEEEELLPP!”

The crowd encircled the cyclist. Half a dozen phones were out. She yanked bags off the display and threw them on the floor. Chip bags surrounded her clopping shoes. She stomped. Pop. Pop. Pop. Kicked broken chips across the polished linoleum.

“Your mother gave birth to rats. You’re all on welfare!”

He kept taking slow steps backwards, away from the crowd. Internet evidence of him at the scene would only bring ruin. His ex’s allegations would resurface; the bills from his PR team would pile up again.

In times like this, regret washed over JW. If he’d only pursued basketball instead of acting. He’d had the chance. In high school, the bleachers would rumble, the gymnasium resounding with people calling his TV character’s wildly popular name to cheer him on. Kids stomping, jumping. Cheerleaders flying through the air in his honor.

He could have had a career. NBA. Nike. Gatorade. American Express.

“Go back to where you came from. All of you!”

The woman who’d recognized him from Dancing With the Stars pivoted toward JW, aimed her phone at him. He lowered his head. His stomach dropped.

The manager was here now. The police were on their way.

His wrist throbbed. All he wanted was to go home and pour himself a pilsner. Work on the list his therapist had suggested making. Post the video of his daughter making a branded waffle. Try these chips.

Phoebe Moffat—The Early YearsBy Diane Williams

“Can I,” she asked, “sit here and lean up against you?”

He said yes at first, but then he said, “It’s too warm,” because he had reversed what was once one of his more conspicuous characteristics—his interest in her.

And to make a point about such conduct—Leonardo da Vinci once referenced shoemakers, of all things! He remarked that many men can take pleasure in seeing their own works worn out and destroyed.

And hadn’t Andre Bach formed and reformed this woman, so that she could be more to his liking? And she had once been confident she would get to spend as much time in his little house and on the grounds as she wished.

She had especially loved the open wood that was nearby, with its overhanging trees and masses of ferns, and she had adored hurrying across his green lawn. Then she was too free. Perhaps nobody is supposed to be.

“I must go now,” Andre said—“I am afraid.”

Andre ought to say something more to the woman than, “Aren’t you tired? I am.” But no matter—because Andre Bach had changed.

Early WritingBy Eileen Myles

The thing about being written about that’s a problem is that nobody wants YOU to have the whole thing, to say it. I don’t want to be in your reality. I want to be in my girlfriend’s and I want her to be in mine and I think about a space that is this sweet overlap but for instance I don’t want to hear how she talks about our relationship to her friends. Every time I say something about her to my friend on the phone I think why is it so easy here to describe what she does but facing her my version melts. Writing, however, is the place where we are able to put them inside of our story and so they are like little tiny people in the palm of your hand. I loved when they  were both writers and we could be in this big story together. And nobody wrote it. The inside was jagged, happy we all could allude to it in our poems. And one time he told us his fantasies and they were disgusting. And hers were just like her poems and were filled with compensations for the sparse pleasures of her childhood and now there was an abundance of people as opposed to the grim few in Brooklyn. I enjoyed being a poet but even then I wanted a house like the one I have now. I was adamant that I needed to get famous then when I was young. I mean it’s interesting because if that person had gotten what they wanted I can’t even imagine how that would look. It’s easy to say I’d be dead and it might be true. When I think of Kurt’s 27-year-old body sprawled on the floor it just gets weirder and weirder. When I think of Will bleeding out in the bathtub. When I think of Heather leaning forward to her bed, strangling herself. Christina doing the same. Emma with a scarf in Italy. Tootsie, some lonesome place turned blue. I wouldn’t have died like them because I kept retracting my wishes. Though I may’ve bumbled into it. So the house I would have bought keeps disappearing with my dead body in it. My dog walks toward the door and sees that it’s a screen and shuffles back. I’ve trained her to be like that. I joke with friends that you break their spirit. I’m thinking about the impossibility of telling my young story while I was young. If I wrote anything larger than a poem or did a play again and again if it was good or read the poem that brought the house down a second night instead of needing to be different all the time no I just thought reaching for success seemed fraudulent. I thought a calculated arrival would never work because my hand would vanish as I was reaching, vanishing back into the mists of my shifting dream. I remember I wanted to be a rake, a large man in a leather jacket irresistible in his insouciance, French. I couldn’t tell my lovers who I was at 31 but in my dream he grew large. I would write a novel, a soft green story in which everyone I knew had slightly altered names and I would declare at least there who I wanted to be and I sat down daily in my apartment at my desk and I deployed the result. Not being satisfied with my house I built another one and I could even build another one inside of that. This is that. By the time I was writing my novel about our relationship it was already losing its elasticity and there was a need for other projects. I was bringing in the bread. In my head. Often the paper I wrote on was used and had some other typing on the other side. My friends were all poets making poetry magazines out of rough, thick paper that received the chemicals and the pounding of the keys to produce magazines and there were often too many copies of page 63 (I wrote on them) and I think I even had extra pages from my own little book and I would write my novel on the other side so that it indeed really felt like a draft. That paper was too thick to go someplace else. It wanted to be here. I had a way to be away from them now and not even me but a person in the future writing like this in a small apartment I made bigger by the effort of returning every day and it was like building another room or a tunnel to the world. Last winter she showed me several passages from her novel in which I appear from when she was obsessed with me. I have become in some ways the person I long ago planned to be but I am not that person. It just works that way having badly and then repeatedly and then successfully done that and now here they (I) walk out into the world to be pursued by her and rejecting her and eventually being depicted in print. I read it. First of all she didn’t use page numbers, my total pet peeve. Because I want everything to be over all the time. I’m waiting. What is that relationship to pleasure. Is there any. I am releasing and I am counting. All the time. I have a phone date in 11 minutes. It’s Sunday. I write in little bursts. So I appear in my friend’s novel as I bluntly wrote myself as I appear in the world and am not and therefore am hiding (happily) in the house inside the house inside the house. But that’s not it. That would be too cute. Her writing is very good and I even think she’s learned from me but not too much. It’s all her. That’s the thing that’s weird about the people who have taught you something and you dwelled for a while in that teaching and that love and they declare “I taught you nothing” but they tipped your hand and expanded your map if this doesn’t sound like fundraising prose the horse was gifted with a number of jumps but it’s still the horse and at first you stop at the jump and say no I don’t do that. And then you do and it’s odd but occasionally brilliant. And occasionally it sticks. Your love for a teacher enhances your game. They were not my teachers. They were my lovers. I would go to my home and I was in practice for my life. I had a collarless shirt. I wrote 58 pages. I showed it to him. She would not look. Firstly he was mad and ashamed that I depicted myself as an arrogant and lazy preening man. Putting him and his wife and his children inside my world was the worst hauteur. What about me? he cried. They were now in my little crystal ball and I was making those mesmerizing waving hands and the power of my childhood indeed the magic I saw had always been coming that way. I was Nature Boy. He would not look inside my ball and see the tiny family and his dream, which was merely patriarchal (“You’re predictable!”), was even worse. There-was-only-one-man-in-the-family-and-it-was-him. But I was cute and six feet tall and lazy. I wore a leather jacket. I had bangs. I was a mooch. They were utterly charmed by me and that was my hustle. No no he screamed. He sneered that the writing was bad. So terrible. It’s a miracle. I realize that deep in my archive is a folder that contains this very bad novel. If I have a bad day here—most days increasingly magic and trippy and not real—I am growing my life! I am growing another. I want my writing to be transporting. I want to take you away. But on bad days I am writing exactly like that large lazy seductive man until he had to do a thing and my poorly named characters (ho-ho) were a beloved jumble by confused this hung-over and amphetamine driven I was hungry, I was young I didn’t even know how to sit down I watch a cat walking stealthily across my yard and they know a dog is living here who is sleeping right near me in the tiny writing house the bad writing is the sleeping dog that just doesn’t know and what’s swift and good is the smart tippy-toeing cat that manages to make their way across the yard without a ruckus and here all here now here here in my crystal ball even the kindness I feel now toward the one who sits down writing badly, full of all their louche and sexy desires, frankly offensive, banging paper to make him a house that got them here. I hope it will be magic.

Ella StaywokeBy Kiese Laymon

Ella Staywoke’s real name was Ella Steward but we called her Ella Staywoke because she stayed saying woke things when DeVante and I least expected it.

Like, out of the blue, Ella told me she needed me and DeVante to drive her up north so she could go to the doctor. I asked her why and what procedure she had to get up north and she said, “Y’all mean.”

DeVante was probably the most gifted 14-year-old in the history of Jackson, Mississippi, next to Ella Staywoke. I was gifted as hell at 14, but slightly novice at being gifted at 16.

DeVante’s greatest invention, if you let DeVante tell it, was calling people “ol’ blank-blank-blank-ass nigga” without blinking.

Like, if you ate an apple too fast, DeVante would call you an “ol’ eating-apples-like-they-plums-raisins-grapes-ass nigga,” or if you failed a test, he’d call you an “ol’ TikToking-when-you-shoulda-been-stik-studying-ass nigga.”

If one of us called DeVante a name he didn’t like, DeVante could slap the taste out of your mouth better than any ninth grader, except for Ella Staywoke.

Slapping the tastes out of folks’ mouths, describing smells perfectly, staying woke and weird, memorizing everyone’s pass codes to their phones through her peripheral vision, and plotting revenge were just five parts of what made Ella Staywoke the most gifted new teenager in Jackson.

That was, until last week.

Last week, DeVante got jumped by two old 16-year-old MAGA-hat-wearing jokers from Pearl.

It all started when DeVante went out of his way to embarrass this snake-lipped kid who was also named DeVante. We called him Mean-White-Ass DeVante, or Mean-Ass DeVante for short. Mean-Ass DeVante called Our DeVante “a bowlegged transgender activist” in the parking lot of church. It hurt for a lot of reasons, mostly because DeVante actually was a 14-year-old bowlegged transgender activist, but also because no one had ever dissed someone by calling them any kind of activist before where we stayed. DeVante was pissed, but he appreciated how fresh Mean-Ass DeVante was with his disses for a white boy from Pearl.

When everyone looked his way, DeVante said out loud that he never knew that a white boy could smell like nut sack, urine, dookie, and rotten rutabagas through his MAGA drawers. I didn’t even know they made MAGA drawers. Then, as loud as he could, in front of the whole church parking lot and the one white person who went to church, DeVante called Mean-Ass DeVante an “ol’ mean catching-yo-dookie-in-a-MAGA-hat-then-wiping-yo-MAGA-ass-with-the-same-MAGA-hat-when-you-need-to-be-scrubbing-yo-stank-MAGA-ass-ass nigga.”

It wasn’t the most dynamic diss DeVante has ever slung, even though “ass” was used three times, but it did its job.

Even Mean-Ass DeVante’s own cousin started laughing. And when the Mean-Ass DeVante got in DeVante’s face, DeVante apparently slapped Mean-Ass DeVante across his mouth twice with both hands.

That’s four slaps right in the middle of the church parking lot.

Then he ran to tell Ella Staywoke and me what he did. The sad thing is that when he ran up on Ella Staywoke and me, I had on that new Axe and I was just starting to finally spit my game I’d been practicing for months. “You loud,” Ella Staywoke kept saying. “You real loud.”

Ella Staywoke said she wanted me to stop spitting game. But she only said it once, and she squeezed my hand when she said it. So.

I did not stop.

Anyway, when DeVante found Ella Staywoke and me in the woods, he told us what happened. Ella Staywoke did this strange thing where she grabbed his hand, thanked him, and then started crying. DeVante grabbed her other hand and he started crying. I wanted to cry too, but I didn’t know what we were supposed to be crying about.

That’s when DeVante told us that his mama and grandmama were most definitely going to beat his ass for saying the word “nigga” in front of white people, even if those white people were MAGA white people.

Ella Staywoke and I told DeVante we had to leave him in the woods because Uncle Robert said we could play this old Nintendo game called Duck Hunt in his old callus-smelling room at four that afternoon. Uncle Robert was in the top 30 singers in Jackson who still used Auto-Tune.

Uncle Robert never allowed DeVante in his room, because he said DeVante was “too girlish and too confused sexually” to be around his expensive clothes.

We hated Uncle Robert for that.

Before we left, DeVante hugged me for the first time in our lives. “Don’t ever be mean to folk who would never be mean to you,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s okay to be scared of hurting niggas.”

Then he hugged Ella Staywoke and whispered something in her ear too.

Ella Staywoke and me waited for an hour in Uncle Robert’s room, but Uncle Robert never showed. While Ella Staywoke was playing Call of Duty, I was going through Uncle Robert’s diary. He kept the turquoise diary at the bottom of a box of shotgun shells. The diary was covered in duct tape, and it had a lock on it. I’d asked Ella Staywoke if we should read his diary.

Ella Staywoke had helped me take the duct tape off the diary and let me use her pocketknife to break the lock.

“What you gone say if Robert finds out you broke in?” Ella Staywoke asked me.

“I’m gone lie,” I told her. “Shid. Listen to this sentence. Uncle Robert think he so smooth.”

“When she talked with me about sad memories, I would ask her why she rested her head in sad places. We could get rid of sad memories. She said I was becoming a sad memory …”

After I finished reading the entry, Ella Staywoke’s eyes started leaking but the rest of her face didn’t make a sound. I told her again that kissing me might feel better than she thought. Ella Staywoke fake-laughed and started biting the nail bed of her left thumb. When she got a nail sliver off, she used it to clean the dirt out of the nails on her right hand.

“Your uncle,” she said, “him and his friend, they was real mean to me and DeVante two months ago.”

“Mean how?”

“They just, you know, wrapped themselves up in some mean,” she said. “All of us. Now we gotta unwrap it.”

“Huh?”

“They made me and DeVante be mean to each other. That’s all.”

I asked Ella Staywoke if “wrapped themselves up in mean” was a new phrase she and DeVante had made up without telling me.

“Naw,” she said. “It ain’t new. I don’t really want to be in this room no more. Can we leave?”

“How come?”

“It’s too familiar.”

“Too what?”

Later that evening, Mean-Ass DeVante, the white boy who got slapped four times in the church parking lot, and another one of his friends dragged DeVante back into the woods. Our DeVante slapped, punched, kicked, and bit the best he could, but they ended up beating DeVante down with T-ball bats. They didn’t ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. DeVante’s body stayed spread out in those woods all night before we found him. We only found him because one of the boys put a video of the beating up on Instagram Live.

I told Ella Staywoke about my plan to kill Mean-Ass DeVante and his friends for what they’d done to DeVante. Ella Staywoke described the smell of sap oozing from a tree as “golden frozen time” and then said she wasn’t interested in killing anyone this year.

“They did what all y’all do sooner or later,” she said.

“Who is ‘y’all’?” I asked her.

“Y’all mean,” she said. And Ella Staywoke starting biting on the fingernail of her right thumb for what felt like two whole minutes.

I tried to hold her hand.

Ella Staywoke jerked back.

I tried again. Ella Staywoke slapped the taste out of my mouth. “Ask, nigga.”

“Ask?”

“Stop being so fucking mean,” she said. “And ask. Please. I don’t want y’all to touch me the way y’all want to touch me. It’s too familiar. I just want to go home.”

“Okay,” I told her. “Pick you up at seven tomorrow for the trip up north. You got the directions?”

“Yeah,” Ella Staywoke said. “I got the directions.”

“Wonder what the doctor’s office gone smell like up north?” Ella ignored my question and started walking home.

“Bleach,” I heard her say down the road a little. “Probably bleach.”

That night, the night of Our DeVante’s funeral, I walked home knowing I’d lost DeVante, Ella Staywoke, and myself to a mean we were all too young to name. And even though none of us were even 17 yet, that same mean—whose hard belly we giggled, wondered, and wiggled in—felt so familiar, so blank-blank-blank-ass-Mississippi.

Great Britain won 10 medals in Budapest to equal their best medal haul at a World Championships.

Great Britain's Keely Hodgkinson wins her second consecutive silver medal in the 800m at the World Athletics Championships as Kenya's Mary Moraa takes gold.

On Wednesday night, the 2024 campaign season officially began, and it was the weirdest season opener in recent memory. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, did not show up. And even though the contenders on the stage likely have no chance of winning the nomination, the debate was important, in that a lot was revealed about the future of the party.

Nikki Haley came across as the reasonable, truth-telling candidate. She got nowhere. Newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, offered a newer and shinier version of Trumpism. On this week’s Radio Atlantic, we talk with Atlantic staff writers McKay Coppins, reporting from the debate, and Elaine Godfrey about why Ramaswamy popped, why Ron DeSantis didn’t, and what all that means for the future of the party and the culture of politics.

Listen to the conversation here:

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. On Wednesday night, the 2024 campaign officially began.

Bret Baier [Archival Tape]: Tonight, the race for the White House takes flight. Welcome to the first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign. Live at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

Rosin: Fox News hosted eight Republican candidates for the first primary debate of the season. Although this one was unusual because it happened without the front runner.

Bret Baier [Archival Tape]: But we have a lot to get to in this second hour of this GOP primary debate policy discussions. Americans want to hear you all on, but we are going to take a brief moment and talk about the elephant not in the room.

Rosin: Former President Donald Trump skipped the event and instead recorded an interview with Tucker Carlson. And in fact, today as we are recording this, Trump will be arraigned on felony charges in Georgia, one of four cases he’s indicted in. Fox News even cut to a live shot of the jail during the debate.

Martha MacCallum [Archival Tape]: Right now you are looking live at Fulton County Jail, where former President Donald Trump will be processed tomorrow.

Rosin: Yeah, so definitely the weirdest launch of a campaign season I can remember, but still it revealed a lot about where the Republican party—and in fact, our entire political culture—is headed. So today we’re talking to Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, who was at the debate in Wisconsin. And is probably very tired. And staff writer Elaine Godfrey, who covers politics for the Atlantic. McKay, how much sleep did you get last night?

McKay Coppins: I got a wonderful three hours at the, Four Points Hotel, by the Milwaukee Airport, so I’m feeling great and ready for this conversation.

Rosin: And Elaine, you’re just jealous that you didn’t get to go ?

Elaine Godfrey: I love Milwaukee. I am jealous. (Laughs.)

Rosin: McKay, what was your and all the other political reporters’ expectations going in? What were you watching for?

Coppins: Well, I think everybody came in wondering if Ron DeSantis the Florida governor and second place candidate in the primaries could do anything to turn around his summer slide in the polls. As recently as April, he was only 15 points away from Trump. It looked like they were going to be the kind of two main guys in the race, and there were a lot of predictions about how DeSantis would, overtake Trump soon.

His campaign has not gone well. I think he’s now 40 points down from Trump. And so, without Trump at this debate, I think the question was: Will Ron DeSantis seize this moment? Somehow convince voters that he is a viable alternative to Trump and turn around his campaign?

Rosin: That isn’t the news coming out of the debate. It’s more about this newcomer, Vivek Ramaswamy. Elaine, he was essentially introducing himself to a lot of people.

ARX: So first, lemme just address a question that is on everybody’s mind at home tonight. Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage? I’ll tell you, I’m not a politician, Brett, you’re right about that. I’m an entrepreneur. My.

Rosin: You’ve seen him on the stump. What is it about him that stands out?

Godfrey: I saw Ramaswamy for the first time back in May. I just dropped by this event that he was at, expecting nothing basically. I hadn’t even Googled him before I went. And so, Vivek Ramaswamy is 38. He’s an entrepreneur from Ohio. He has a lot of money. Tall, skinny guy, pretty good looking, huge dazzling white teeth.

Rosin: Yes. The teeth.

Godfrey: He’s very teeth-forward.

Rosin: Yes.

Godfrey: And he just stands up on the stage in a black V-neck, black skinny jeans. His hair is gooped up very tall. And he just has this sort of electric personality that people are drawn to.

And it’s partly his youth. I think people are just like: Whoa. He’s sparkly and young. And it’s partly that he has this high-school debate captain vibe. The guy who’s always raising his hand in your Politics 101 seminar.

And I, I think last night, the world finally saw that on a mass stage. And I don’t know how it translated for voters. I think some people were probably annoyed by the way that he sort of—

Coppins: … certainly several of his opponents on stage were extremely annoyed by him. Which I actually found fascinating watching. For example, the former vice president Mike Pence—who’s somebody I’ve been writing about and covering for years—is like the most mild-mannered human being I’ve ever met. And he repeatedly kind of lost it on Ramaswamy.

He clearly had just let this guy get under his skin and was kind of taking stray shots at him for no reason and interrupting him and lobbing insults at him and it was really bizarre. But you actually saw several different candidates do that last night and it I think spoke to Ramaswamy’s effectiveness and also how much his style, and to a certain extent his worldview, irritates what you might call the old guard of the Republican party.

Rosin: Okay, so let’s unpack that for a minute. When political analyst says someone “won” a debate, I think what they mean is that person made the most lasting impression. But does that win actually mean anything? Or does that just mean he was the most annoying? Or the most different? I couldn’t tell what the pop that he was getting actually meant or translated into.

Godfrey: I think he’ll probably get a small bump in the polls from this. I think this is going to be good for him in terms of potentially being on the VP shortlist for Trump, or perhaps more likely being a cabinet pick. I think that would be a really easy thing to do. Kind of like the Pete Buttigieg of the Joe Biden administration.

But more broadly, the way that Ramaswamy presented himself—the sort of success he was able to have with people in the audience and that he has every time he speaks—I think is going to be real. I think we’re going to see more of it.

I think we’re going to see more candidates try to emulate that sort of young gunner. He was sort of being a stand-in for Trump. Like a young, bubbly Trump. And I just think he did it much more effectively than someone like DeSantis could .

Rosin: That is what this performance left me wondering about. I have long thought of Trump as a singular character. But watching Ramaswamy, I felt like Trumpism has morphed into a strategy. Like, maybe this is a new political type? Here is the young, not white, not Christian, techie version of Trump. And are there infinite other varieties out there? And is that terrifying?

Coppins: Well, I’m curious about this because what about him reminds you of Trump? Because while watching the debate, I was trying to identify what it was that made him Trumpy. Because I agree, and I think the other candidates on this stage, frankly, saw him as a proxy for Trump.

Trump wasn’t there, so they were almost kind of venting their frustrations with Trump at Ramaswamy saying: He’s a political neophyte. He’s a rookie. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he is putting everyone down. You could hear kind of shades of the frustration that they probably have with Trump, but don’t dare speak out loud.

When they were talking about Ramaswamy, he is very different in style in some ways. I mean, he talks fast. He does that thing where he has kind of the high-school debate, Model-UN patter that he thinks makes him sound smart, or, and I personally think kind of makes him seem like a salesman, but a lot of people respond to it.

He doesn’t totally sound like Trump, but it’s almost like he’s taken the core elements of Trumpism in style. It’s the kind of comic insult routine, the bluster. And in worldview, it’s the kind of right-wing populism, nationalism, the accusation that “all these other candidates were bought and paid for.” He said that a couple times or called his rival “super-PAC puppets.” He was drawing on some of those populist themes. But I think it’s an interesting question because I’ve long wondered how trumpism could be replicated. And I don’t think the answer is to do what Ron DeSantis has done, which is actually kind of literally mimic Donald Trump’s mannerisms and manner of speech, but rather to channel the kind of themes of Trumpism and then make it their own. Is that what you saw in Ramaswamy?

Godfrey: Well, to me, yeah. I mean , stylistically they’re very different. To me, Ramaswamy is just brighter, shinier than Trump. Faster talking. But yeah, he seems to have this sort of nothing-to-lose attitude that Trump also had and continues to have that makes him able to just raise his hand when no one else is or say whatever he’s thinking.

He appears as Trump did to me to have just arrived at a lot of these, conclusions about, right-wing populism. in the past couple of years of his life, he sort of seems to be trying out a lot of ideas and they’re working. So that’s what he believes now. That’s the familiar thing to me.

Coppins: I’m also struck by the extent to which he has channeled the kind of almost reckless distrust of all government institutions to the extent that he’s flirting with 9/11 trutherism, as our colleague John Hendrickson reported earlier this week. Donald Trump did the same thing when he kind of came on the scene in 2016.

He sounded different from other Republicans because his version of conservative, populist grievance, manifested in ways that were once considered too taboo for a Republican to venture into. He was, besmirching the Bush family and attacking the Iraq War and flirting with various conspiracy theories around 9/11 and vaccines and it seemed so kind of radical.

And I think now, the savvy politicians like Ramaswamy have realized that there really isn’t that much political cost to engaging in that kind of conspiracizing that was once seen as outside the Overton Window.

Rosin: Yeah. That’s what struck me about Ramaswamy as a template. It felt like modern technological thinking: There’s a disruption. Trump is the disruption. You take from that disruption and you perfect upon it. So I am Trump 2.0 or 3.0. You sort of morph it and twist it so that it’s sort of slightly better than the original disruption. That’s how it felt like he was operating, which made DeSantis feel like a sort of a broken coding or something like whatever it was that DeSantis was doing, just to finish the metaphor.

Coppins: You really landed the plane with that metaphor. I was impressed.

Rosin: Thank you. Anyway, let’s talk about DeSantis for a minute. So many moons ago, there was a notion that he might succeed Trump. Last night was a chance to bring that notion back. How is it looking now?

Coppins: I mean, I would say it’s not looking great. I’ve seen a few people make this observation that he seemed to perform as if he was the front runner trying to nurse his lead and protect his standing in the polls. But he’s not the front runner. He is down 40 points. He needed to do something dramatic to turn things around for his campaign. I don’t think he did it.

After the debate, in the spin room, I was talking to people from the DeSantis camp and they almost seemed like they were unwilling to acknowledge the actual state of affairs in this race. I talked to Congressman Chip Roy, for example, a Republican congressman who’s endorsed DeSantis.

And when I asked him about Trump’s 40 point lead in the polls, he kind of scoffed at me and said, “Oh, well look at where Ted Cruz was in the polls at this point 2015.” And I was kind of confused, and said: “Well, yeah, but Ted Cruz didn’t win.” And Chip Roy said, “Yeah, well, but he won Iowa.”

Boy, if the best case you can make for your candidate is that he is following the Ted Cruz 2016 trajectory, then you don’t have a great case for how well your candidate’s doing.

Rosin: Elaine, did you just watch DeSantis last night and think that’s it? That’s the end of the road for him?

Godfrey: I feel like I’ve watched DeSantis and thought that many different times during this campaign. Especially when, after the debate, the clip of him half-heartedly smiling really slowly after introducing himself was just all over my Twitter feed. Like it’s just cringeworthy now, and it's hard to fully understand why. I mean, it comes down to personality. Like, he has a really great ground game in Iowa. But again, so did Ted Cruz. And he may win Iowa, but that’s not enough. And people don’t connect with him. And he didn’t take any opportunities to seem less like a wax statue at this debate. And he should have. He totally should have. He had plenty of opportunities.

Coppins: I have to say, I was actually surprised. We were chatting before this debate and I thought that DeSantis would do better because where he’s struggled is on the campaign trail talking to regular voters. He’s come across as awkward. But I kind of thought in this context, behind a debate podium where he could have his one-liners pre-written and act domineering, that he’d make more of an impact.

But Ramaswamy ended up taking that role from him. I think also DeSantis is struggling with the fact that his key wedge, the thing that had propelled him to Republican stardom, was his handling of COVID. And he talked about it at the debate. Florida reopened schools earlier than a lot of states. He pushed back against vaccine mandates and mask mandates. And for certain element of the Republican party—and a good portion of the conservative base—he was seen as kind of a hero of pushing back against the excesses of COVID policies. But I don’t think that in the summer of 2023, many voters are thinking that much about COVID anymore.

I don’t think that’s where the conversation is. I don’t think anyone really wants to think back to when their kids’ schools were closed and the pandemic was wreaking havoc on the country. And so I think DeSantis has struggled because that was his main selling point, and it’s just not as potent as it was a year or two ago.

Rosin: Right. So the historical box then that he lands in is the box of presidential candidate who was a governor, who had some kind of moment, who rode some wave. Like Scott Walker or Jeb Bush. But it doesn’t translate. Is that who he becomes in our political future?

Coppins: I mean, this has been my suspicion about DeSantis from the beginning of the hype cycle. I just feel like I’ve covered politics long enough now that I’ve seen a lot of candidates go through this exact situation. You could even go back to Rudy Giuliani right after 9/11. He was “America’s mayor.” He seemed perfectly positioned. And then he flamed out. And I think that a lot of Republicans gain a certain amount of notoriety because of some big battle they’ve picked or victory they’ve scored for the conservative base that is no longer quite as relevant once they’re actually running for president. And I think that’s what’s happening to DeSantis.

Rosin: So one thing I was surprised about in the post-debate coverage is that not more people talked about Nikki Haley. She really surprised me in the way she called other candidates out on, basically, untruths they were saying on stage. Political realities. She used the word “accountant” and yet she didn’t get a lot of love. Why is that?

Godfrey: Nikki Haley is tough. I think she surprised me too. She did better than I thought. I mean, she said the same thing she says on the stump, but she just seemed so reasonable when, to the side of her, you had Pence and DeSantis and Ramaswamy fighting. And she was just like: Okay, boys, I’m going to talk about what matters.

And I think she did really well. She got some really big applauses. She definitely doesn’t have the sort of Vivek Ramaswamy sparkliness. But when she first made that transition about Margaret Thatcher saying: “If you want something done, ask a woman.” That kind of thing. People love that. My mom texted me. My mom, who is a Rachel Maddow-loving, MSNBC-watching liberal texted me: “I love Nikki Haley.” Which I thought was amazing—

Coppins: …though perhaps doesn’t bode well for her standing in the Republican primary. (Laughs.)

Godfrey: (Laughs.) Exactly! It bodes well if she makes it to a general, but she’s not going to.

Coppins: I had the same thing. A woman in my life who’s not a Republican primary voter texted me, “I thought Nikki Haley sounded really smart on abortion.” and there was that moment in the debate where she was pressing Mike Pence on the idea of a federal abortion ban.

Nikki Haley [Archival Tape]: Don’t make women feel like they have to decide on this issue when, you know we don’t have 60 Senate votes .

Mike Pence [Archival Tape]: 70% of the American people support legislation banning abortion after a baby is capable of experiencing pain.

Nikki Haley [Archival Tape]: But 70% of the Senate does not! (Cheers.)

Coppins: And she made this point from what she called a “unapologetically pro-life” perspective. So it’s not as if she was wishy-washy on abortion. She was just saying: let’s be realistic about this. I think that’s the kind of thing that reporters and voters and pundits appreciate. And I think that non Republican primary voters also seem to have appreciated it. At least based on the text messages Elaine and I received.

The question is whether Republican primary voters will appreciate it. I think there’s actually a case that the average Republican primary voter is not as doctrinaire on abortion as, for example, Mike Pence is. And so maybe Nikki Haley will make some headway with suburban Republican women with the way she talks about abortion.

But, to answer your question, Hanna, I think that the reason she’s not lighting the world on fire after this debate is that she does represent an old Republican party.

I think she’s very politically talented. I think she presents well. I think she’s smart. And she has a record in South Carolina she could run on as the former governor. But she doesn’t channel that same kind of visceral distrust of institutions that Trump and Ramaswamy and many of the most popular media figures on the right these days do.

You could see it in the way that she talked about even Ukraine. She had this kind of old-school idea of promoting democracy around the world. In America asserting its power abroad in idealistic ways. That was once the bread and butter of the Reagan-era, GOP, and even the Bush-era, GOP. And that now kind of sounds out of step with where a good chunk of the party’s base is.

Rosin: Right, like her failure and Ramaswamy’s success was, to me, the two data points I put together to think: oh, that’s the future of the Republican party. Because if I had to sit down and write who the perfect candidate is , it would be a non-white woman who was the governor of a conservative southern state who has international experience, who herself is very conservative, but can also appeal to non Republican voters.

On paper, she seems absolutely perfect. And yet, such is the future and style of Republican politics that she is going to get nowhere.

Godfrey: And they had that back and forth that was so illustrative of that. Which is Ramaswamy talking about Ukraine and Russia, and how we shouldn’t be helping Ukraine anymore, and she just looks at him and says: “You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.”

And that was a really great line. But that line doesn’t resonate with GOP primary voters. They don’t want to hear that. That is the old guards scolding the MAGA newbies.

Rosin: So outside these theatrics, there were also some other interesting displays of genuine policy differences, like the climate change moment. Fox News airs this question from a young student asking: What does my party intend to do about climate change?

McKay, can you describe what happened next?

Coppins: I actually have a question about this. So the question came up and Ramaswamy kind of seized the conversation by saying: “I’m the only candidate on stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this climate change is a hoax... the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

Now, I couldn’t tell from the media filing center. Maybe it was more clear on TV if you weren’t surrounded by 500 reporters. It sounded to me like Ramaswamy got booed when he said that? And I don’t know if he was getting booed for the climate change comment or for saying that everybody else on stage was bought and paid for. But I was actually struck that that was not the clear applause line that he thought it would be.

Vivek Ramaswamy [Archival Tape]: I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this: the climate change agenda is a hoax.

Coppins: I mean, this is a case of an issue where—and I’m kind of struck that Ramaswamy, as the millennial candidate at 38 years old, hasn’t picked up on this—but this is an issue where I actually think we’ve seen some movement in the Republican base.

And part of it is the conversation about how to address climate change has expanded to technological innovation and areas of rhetoric where conservatives are more comfortable. But I think, especially among younger conservatives, climate change is increasingly an issue that they care about the way that younger non-conservatives care about it. And I thought that was kind of an odd moment for Ramaswamy to kind of whiff.

But I think it also speaks to—and I’ll just say this—that every cycle there’s a candidate like Ramaswamy, in that it’s a young Republican who looks youthful and maybe idealistic, but that is actually playing the part of a young person to appeal to older Republican primary voters.

Rosin: It reminds me of a great Michael Kinsley line about what someone once wrote about Al Gore: that he was an old person’s idea of a young person.

Coppins: That’s exactly right. And I think we see a lot of that in politics. And I could see the average Fox News viewer in their upper sixties or seventies applauding that. But in the room, it did not go over well. Which I thought was interesting.

Rosin: So what does that actually mean about climate change in the Republican party? I mean, how many degrees was it in Wisconsin that day?

Godfrey: One million.

Coppins: A hundred degrees. It was over a hundred degrees! It was very hot. I mean, maybe this was just a reaction to a crowd that was sweaty and uncomfortable. (Laughs.)

Or maybe I’m being too optimistic. But I think that moment suggested that there might be an openness on the right among Republican voters to take climate change more seriously.

Rosin: Yeah, so maybe Republicans booing at this climate change moment was surreal, but for me, the most surreal moment was when we suddenly had this flash of local-news visuals on the national debate stage. It was an image of the Fulton County Jail at night where nothing was happening. It was just like...

Godfrey: Very spooky.

Rosin: It was extremely spooky. It was nighttime, with one light from the guard’s little booth. Because today, Trump is being arraigned in Georgia. I need you political reporters to incorporate this for me. I just find it so, so strange.

Did he plan this? Because that’s how you would do it on reality TV. You would crush the debate by bringing the spotlight back to yourself the next day immediately, such that all this irrelevance fades away, even if the spotlight is showing you getting a mugshot. Is that the logic of all of this?

Coppins: The answer to all of that was yes. (Laughs.)

Godfrey: Unequivocally yes.

Coppins: All of us have spent too much time inside Donald Trump’s head over the last 10 years. But I mean, this has been his strategy since 2015, right? He wants attention. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. And when it’s bad, it often helps him anyway. As long as he’s the center of the political universe, nobody can take him down. At least in the Republican party. I mean, he clearly programmed this as a way to draw attention back to himself.

I think this is his fourth indictment. I think he’s realized by now—and the data has borne out—that every time he’s indicted, it helps him in the Republican primary polls.

As perverse as that seems to us, he knew that this would probably be a good political moment for him. And so he engineered it so that he would be immediately in the aftermath of the debate, showing up at the Fulton County Jail to take a victory lap and get arraigned.

Godfrey: He is done persuading people to like him. He’s got the people he’s got. He’s giving those people what they want.

This is just like the Iowa State Fair. When DeSantis is there, he’s doing all the things candidates have to do. He’s talking with the governor. He is walking around. He is doing the sort of humiliating burger-flipping. And then Trump just shows up and flies over in his plane with “Trump” emblazoned on the side. Immediately, no one cares about DeSantis anymore. This man knows everything there is to know about attention and the media spotlight and how to get it.

Rosin: Right, but in one election that translated to victory. In the second election, it didn’t translate to victory. So what does it matter anymore? In the debate, in the moments that Trump did come up, except for Ramaswamy who was the most pro-Trump you could possibly get, everybody else was just kind of trudging along with the show. But it’s not going to get you where you want to go. He might not win. So what is it about?

Coppins: Well, I think that Republican voters who support Trump do think he’ll win. And I think that they are well past the point of rationally weighing the electoral pros and cons of Donald Trump’s nomination. There was a poll that came out over the weekend from CBS News and YouGov that found that, among supporters of Donald Trump, over 70% say that they will believe anything that Donald Trump tells them. And they went down the line and it was something like 40-something percent of them would believe what their religious leaders tell them. So that’s just as a point of reference.

Donald Trump tells them that he’s innocent, that he’s a victim of political persecution and that he’s going to beat the charges and win. And most of his supporters just basically take that at face value. And that’s been the case for eight years now. And that’s his biggest advantage, and why everybody else is struggling to kind of dent his inevitability.

Rosin: Right, and I get that, but has he also convinced them that Biden is weak and pathetic and anybody could beat Biden and so even though he actually lost to Biden, he’s somehow going to win this time.

Godfrey: I think that part of it is a lot of people think he didn’t lose in 2020. But also, Biden is older and Biden looks older than Trump. He just does. And I think that they’re really hoping—Team Trump and Republicans—are really hoping that that footage persuades people to give Trump a shot again.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Well there will be more debates, but from what you guys are saying, we’re just going to walk along with some entertainment, some disasters, but we’re basically marching towards the inevitable showdown. Right? Very few things could divert us from that?

Coppins: Well, nothing has changed that so far. I mean, it could change, but I will just say that, in the spin room, I heard from multiple people in different campaigns saying: Well, we hope that Trump will show up at the next one. We hope he’ll debate.

And so the strategy appears to be wishful thinking that maybe they can lure him back to the debate stage and beat him that way. But so far Trump has not signaled that he will be participating in any of the future debates.

Rosin: Great. So another season of magical realism. Anyway, McKay, we wish you a nice flight home. We’ll see you soon. And Elaine, thank you so much for joining me.

Godfrey: Thank you, Hanna.

Coppins: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid. And our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. And all of them are going to be about Republican debates. Just kidding.

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Lizzie: One night several years ago, Kaitlyn and I and a group of other friends ended up at a party in the South Street Seaport. It was at the apartment of someone none of us knew, and I can’t say for sure how we got there. We were excited to see what kinds of people lived in this gift-shop neighborhood, and what their apartment would look like. Would every room feature its own ship in a bottle? Would there be portholes instead of windows?

Of course, the reality couldn’t compare to our fantasy, as is standard for reality. It was a regular old apartment, with regular old IKEA furniture. There was a nice rooftop and cheap beer in the fridge. Eventually, the host requested that our group please leave the premises, probably because they’d realized that no one knew who we were, and also perhaps because Kaitlyn may have mildly insulted their taste in literature.

Anyway, it was this party that we reflected on last weekend as we headed to a sold-out Friday-night book club at McNally Jackson’s South Street Seaport location—where we’d be discussing, with strangers, the novel about weaseling your way into places you don’t belong that everyone’s been talking about this summer: Emma Cline’s The Guest.

Kaitlyn: The other thing I remember about that Seaport party was that someone there was blowing up a bunch of pool inflatables to use as roof furniture. (Imagine being at a party where most people are standing but some people are sitting down on pink inner tubes …) I want to be clear that we brought our own Bud Light Limes from a nearby Duane Reade and did not steal anything from those people, other than their view of the East River. I don’t remember being embarrassed about being asked to leave, and that’s because nothing is embarrassing when you have co-conspirators. (This is called the “Watergate burglar principle.”) It’s only when you’re alone that you can be humiliated (“Nixon principle”).

Lizzie has already covered the vibe of the South Street Seaport, but I also think you should know that one of its main features is a construction site that has been the subject of a lot of controversy for years and years, most of which is too boring to explain, but one of the issues is that it is on top of the rubble of a 19th-century thermometer factory and some people have worried that digging around could release a lot of mercury vapor. Anyway, I was in a bit of a mood the day of the Guest book club. I left work early and stomped downtown. Online, some had been referring to The Guest as “Uncut Gems for girls,” which I consider a spoiler and not accurate. While I was walking, I passed the AT&T Long Lines building, which is a hideous brown skyscraper known for having zero windows and maybe having some relation to the surveillance state. Looking up, I thought that someone should instead write “Underworld for girls.” (I love baseball and I’m very paranoid.) I also thought that people have been talking about “girls” too much lately.

I then passed what I have to assume is a temporary business, Malibu Barbie Café New York. I waited for Lizzie at the deserted end of Front Street, while staring at a bunch of garbage trucks parked under an overpass and regretting my choice to make a pre-book-club reservation for us at a bodega-and-speakeasy called The Little Shop. The chalkboard sign on the sidewalk said “purveyor of fine and junk foods.”

Lizzie: On my way to The Little Shop, I walked past a new pickleball court hogging the sidewalk in front of a Duane Reade. I wondered if the people playing in matching outfits were actors paid to create unthreatening “bustle” for the neighborhood. I stopped to buy a granola bar, and when I needed to throw out my wrapper, the only available trash can was one that looked like a barrel. In the South Street Seaport, gimmicks are the most important currency, and the neighborhood’s commitment to them continued at The Little Shop.

You walk through a “convenience store” to get to the bar in a back room, but the store felt more like a sanitized sitcom set than a convincing front. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the boxes of cereal and the cans of soup lining the shelves turned out to be empty. Is anyone actually shopping here for pantry goods? How often do they restock the Fruit Loops? I’m guessing never!

Kaitlyn: Lizzie thought that if you were taking a date to The Little Shop, a suave thing to do would be to pick up one of the boxes of pancake mix and say something like, “This is for tomorrow morning.”

It’s a clever set-up in The Little Shop, for sure. The idea is that you pick out your snacks, and then pay a 20 percent markup to have them “plated” for you. We had no problem with this fee. We did wonder why the only cheeses available were Cabot and Organic Valley. Even a Heluva Good would be more luxurious, don’t you think? Not to be snobs. But this is Manhattan. Also, if you buy a whole brick of cheese and then someone slices up the whole brick of cheese for you, that’s really too much cheese for two ladies to get through together at happy hour.

To their credit, The Little Shop does provide sandwich bags for your excess cheese. They also return your Pretzel Chips bag so you can put the rest of your Pretzel Chips back into it. So, after a short white-wine pregame, I tossed our snacks in my tote bag and Lizzie plucked a fake peacock feather out of a juice glass on the table to slip into hers. This behavior was what she called “going Guest-mode.” (In The Guest, the main character steals an expensive watch and a lot of prescription pills.)

We should say a little more about The Guest. Everyone in New York is reading it (or has read it). The book is about a generically pretty young woman named Alex who is more grifter than guest. She’s on the run from financial obligations and threats of violence in “the city,” and living with a rich man named Simon in his beach house, in what seems to be the Hamptons. He kicks her out (politely, through the staff, of course) after she embarrasses him at a pool party, and that’s when the real events of the novel start. She reasons that if she waits it out until Simon’s Labor Day party, he will no longer be mad at her, so she has five days to kill. Alex pinballs around town, manipulating one rich person after another into hosting her for an extra few hours or a night or two at a time. Of course, her plots get only more ill-considered and dangerous as she goes along. No spoilers!

Great cover. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: Our own plans that evening were possibly ill-considered, but not dangerous, and maybe this is where we went wrong. Had we better planned the night to thematically align with elements of The Guest, maybe I wouldn’t have had to take that fake feather for the thrill of it. Maybe Kaitlyn wouldn’t have had to carry around half a block of warm cheese for the rest of the night. But, like Alex, we had gone too far to back out now. It was time to leave the bar and head to the book club, without committing any crimes.

We didn’t know what to expect. The other day someone said to me, “No one’s talking about how Greta Gerwig directed Barbie,” and it occurred to me that there’s a universe where The Guest is a book that no one’s ever heard of. But this was the second McNally Jackson “After Hours” book club dedicated to the book, and New York magazine just published their own book-club newsletter about it, so we know that, anecdotally, NYC-based book clubs at least are ravenous for it.

Kaitlyn: If not dangerous, a book club is still a risk, especially with a book about modern-day “the city.” It’s too easy for people to say things like “This reminded me of my own life” or to talk about the characters as if they’re real people who they’ve met and know things about. But we were excited about this one because it would have professional guidance (a McNally Jackson moderator) and because anyone who RSVPs in advance to talk about a book on a Friday night must be serious. Probably more serious than us!

When we arrived, we chatted with the event organizer, Mikaela, who is very chic and has an Australian accent. She was wearing cream satin. She’d had cocktail napkins made up with a curly “After Hours” logo and conversation starters on them, and she’d also come up with the brilliant innovation of ordering people to shuffle into new mini-groups every 20 minutes or so. This prevented awkward silences and the horrible experience of having someone’s eyes wander up over your shoulder and around the room while you are talking to them.

Lizzie: The shuffle was welcome. Our first round was a little bit messy, so we can call it a warm-up. I couldn’t hear what the far end of the table was saying. One girl admitted that she hadn’t read the book and was just accompanying a friend who had. She seemed incredibly regretful. One guy mentioned that, compared with other books he had recently read, he actually didn’t have that much to say about this one.

A book club might not be the ideal place to find yourself at a loss for words, but maybe he was on to something. Maybe there was nothing left to say about The Guest. Or maybe we just needed to try harder.

Arguably we do live in the world of this book, but we're not happy about it. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: With those guys, I tried arguably way too hard. I wanted to make them feel better about their lack of interest in the book, so I ended up doing a little rant about how it was fun and well plotted but “unsubstantial.” It wasn’t doing much as a novel, I said. Well, I was being obnoxious, but I was coming from a good place. (And it isn’t Middlemarch; that’s just a fact.)

With our next set of conversation partners, two women roughly our age, we did better. The four of us talked about all the moralizing we’d seen in The Guest’s Goodreads comments. A lot of people on the internet were worried that Emma Cline wasn’t aware that the character she’d written was not a very good person. Maybe, by writing about this fictional girl, she was endorsing all of her made-up choices, they suggested. We’d all gotten sick of this aspect of the culture, we agreed. In fact, we’re so sick of it that we’re sick of being sick of it. Stop putting us in the position of defending fake people … and books we didn’t even love.

Last note of importance: Before book club, our dearest friend Ashley, who was off on an actual beach vacation, had asked us to find out what everyone thought happened at the end of The Guest. The last 10 pages or so are kind of mystical and vague, and a reader has to make some guesses about what’s literally going on because [SPOILER] the main character is a bit out of it and possibly concussed. There’s been a lot of discussion about this. Like some of the Reddit commenters, Ashley was sure that the book ended with [SPOILER] murder, and she also was sure that everyone else aside from me and Lizzie would agree with her. Well, not one real-life book-club person did. As they say in English class, the theory wasn’t supported by the text … Sorry, Ash!

Lizzie: The “she was murdered” theory was floating around online, but in real life it was met with blank stares. Ah, well. Maybe we just didn’t ask the right people. But time wasn’t on our side! Like a 20-something scammer on her way to party in the Hamptons, we also had places to go and people to see.

We were back on the cobblestone streets of the Seaport by 8 p.m., headed out to the second halves of our respective nights, with tote bags full of items we stole (just kidding!).

On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, and Gallivanting, a collection of Famous People letters from the past five years, is available now from Zando Projects and The Atlantic.

Photographs by Danny Wilcox Frazier

Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner.

Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment.

That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a large notebook. It was on a flight like this, he told me, where he sketched out his 10 “truths”:

God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

“I just wrote down things that are true,” he said flatly. “It took me about 15 minutes.”

Ramaswamy doesn’t consider himself a culture warrior; he insists that he is merely speaking the truth. He presents his ideas as self-evident, eternal truths. I asked him if he believes that truths can change over time. For instance, what did he make of the fact that most white Americans used to view it as a “truth” that Black people were genetically inferior—that they weren’t fully human?

“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.

“It is true,” I said. “That’s partly what justified slavery.”

“But it was a justification; it wasn’t a belief,” he said. “Look at emperors—Septimius Severus in Rome. He was Black. He had dark skin. They viewed dark skin as the way we view dark eyes.”

This is how a debate with Ramaswamy unfolds. He’ll engage with your question, but, when needed, he’ll expand its parameters. If that fails, he’ll pivot to thoughts on the existence of a higher power. “I don’t think that human beings ever accepted that Black people were not created equal in the eyes of God,” he said. (His favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, believed exactly that.)

Here’s where else he’s gone in his quest for the truth. He has tantalized audiences with the idea that Americans don’t know “the truth about January 6” and has argued that those who stormed the Capitol have been lied to and “suppressed.” He argues that people who identify as transgender suffer from a mental-health disorder: “I think there is something else going wrong in that person’'s life, badly wrong,” he has said. He calls race-based affirmative action “a cancer” and vows to end it “in every sphere of American life.” He endorses using the military to secure America’s borders, brokering a deal that would cede a huge chunk of Ukraine to Russia, and defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression “only as far as 2028.” His grandest vision might best be described as the inverse of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a demolition of the federal government—FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, IRS—gone.

Ramaswamy radiates confidence: steady eye contact, knowing nod, satisfied smile. He campaigns for up to 18 hours a day. He mostly keeps to a uniform of black pants, black T-shirt, and a black blazer. He operates in a world of declarative statements and punctuates his sentences with “right?” and “actually,” like a tech bro. He’s currently in third place in most national polls. At last month’s Turning Point USA conference, in Florida, Ramaswamy had a breakout moment when 51 percent of straw-poll respondents said he was their second choice for president. “Pretty remarkable how far he’s come in a very short amount of time,” Charlie Kirk, the organization’s founder, tweeted.

Last week, leaked documents designed to inform Ron DeSantis’s strategy at Wednesday’s first presidential debate portrayed Ramaswamy as the candidate to beat. The Florida governor’s super PAC advised him to “take a sledgehammer” to the 38-year-old outsider. Many potential voters will likely be intrigued when they hear Ramaswamy speak his truths onstage this Wednesday. He is living a life they can only dream about: Start a company or two, make half a billion dollars, say whatever you want. And then, naturally, run for president.

The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on his phone after a taping of the PBS political talk show Firing Line With Margaret Hoover.

A colossal American flag hangs on the outside of Ramaswamy’s spare-no-expense campaign headquarters in Columbus. The property is a former barn; the word TRUTH is plastered everywhere. One communal work area, for phone banking, is roughly the size of a basketball court. He has his choice of two production studios from which to record his never-ending stream of cable-news hits, podcast appearances, and social-media videos.

During my visit, John Schnatter—a.k.a. Papa John—flew in from Kentucky via private helicopter to speak his truth on Ramaswamy’s own nascent podcast, The Vivek Show.

Papa John told the candidate how he became very rich—how his single pizza shop grew into a chain of over 5,000 stores—then turned to a long, complicated story about his downfall. He claims that he was set up by a PR firm that goaded him into saying a racial slur during a private coaching session and that this firm is connected to Hillary Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the PR firm referred me to a recent partial summary judgment against Schnatter in the firm’s favor.) He used the words “demonic” and “satanic” to describe the American left. At one point, the conversation veered toward Russia and Hunter Biden’s laptop. “I don’t know why the Creator put me through this,” Papa John said.

[Read: A bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism]

All the while, Ramaswamy nodded, smiled, or, when applicable, shook his head in disbelief. This was his media-forward candidacy, distilled: a morning behind the mic inside a posh podcast setup chatting with a fellow entrepreneur about the perils of woke capitalism. When the episode aired, he’d have a cautionary tale for listeners, a potentially viral clip that would get him in front of new voters.

The night before, I watched Ramaswamy speak to a couple hundred young conservatives at the Forge Leadership Summit. He looked around the room and preached that “hardship is not a choice, but victimhood is a choice.” It’s one of his favorite lines, and a nod to his second book, Nation of Victims. The crowd that night was almost exclusively white, and Ramaswamy’s inflection was temporarily suffused with twang.

“We’re starved for purpose and meaning and identity at a time in our national history when the things that used to fill our void—faith, patriotism, hard work, family—these things have disappeared,” he said. He rattled off a list of “poisons” that have filled the void, pausing for dramatic beats between each one: “Wokeism. Transgenderism. Climatism. COVIDism. Globalism. Depression. Anxiety. Fentanyl. Suicide.” The crowd murmured.

He kept rolling. He said that Russia’s war against Ukraine is “really just a battle between two thugs on the other side of Eastern Europe.” He warned that incremental change within American institutions is impossible.

Right now, he said, we have reached a “1776 moment” in this country.

“Do we stand on the side of reform?” he asked. “Or do we stand on the side of revolution?”

When he finished, half the people in the room jumped to their feet.

Vivek Ramaswamy with his son, Karthik, before speaking at a house party and fundraiser in Hubbard, Iowa.

Ramaswamy hurried out and ducked into an SUV: He feared he’d be late for his prime-time interview on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show. During the ride, he revisited one of the more challenging audience questions. A woman had asked if, as president, he would commit to making abortion illegal at the federal level. He told her that he is “unapologetically pro-life,” but a strict constitutionalist—an originalist. He said he viewed recent state-level abortion restrictions as victories for federalism. The woman seemed unsatisfied.

Ramaswamy knew that abortion questions would keep coming up. “I do feel like I’m being bullied a little bit on this issue,” he told his aides. They ran through his options. A video? A public address? Suddenly the subject seemed fraught. “Eh, probably an abortion speech isn’t a good idea, to be honest with you,” he said.

After the Cuomo interview, we drove to Ramaswamy’s house. It’s bright and white with giant ceilings—suburban palatial. One of the family’s two nannies appeared and started putting together a spread: chili, kale, watermelon salad, tofu tacos.

Throughout his professional life, Ramaswamy has aimed to be perceived as an American traditionalist who is simultaneously ahead of the curve. He is the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu. As a high-school student at St. Xavier, a Jesuit prep school in Cincinnati, he quickly got up to speed on all things Bible. On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes spirituality, and his message has the feel of old-school Christianity.

[Read: What the polls may be getting wrong about Trump]

Growing up, he loved hip-hop, especially Eminem, and his own performances under his alter-ego “Da Vek” as a Harvard student landed him in The Crimson. He still occasionally leans into it. The day we met, he had just freestyled on Fox News. Earlier this month, he grabbed the mic and did an Eminem impression at the Iowa State Fair.

Though now running as a Republican, he long identified as a libertarian. He cast his first vote, when he was a 19-year-old, in the 2004 election, supporting the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. (He sat out every subsequent presidential election until 2020, when he voted for Trump.)

Ramaswamy told me a story about how in eighth grade, he was pushed down a flight of stairs at his public school. Though he underwent hip surgery afterward, he was careful not to portray himself as a victim. Instead, he described the event as the catalyst for his arrival at St. Xavier.

I asked him about coming of age in the post-9/11 world, when many ignorant Americans assumed that anyone with brown skin might be a terrorist. He told me about the experience of being singled out and questioned while flying to Israel—that unique sensation of being the last passenger permitted to board. “I didn’t chafe at that, though, because, honestly, in some ways it was data-driven,” he said. I asked if he considered the action itself to be racist. “No, I think racism has to involve some level of animus, actually,” he said. “I have experienced racism, to be clear. But that’s not—I don’t think that entails animus. So it doesn’t qualify as racism to me.”

He told me he doesn’t believe his race will negatively affect his electability in 2024. He said that among most GOP voters, the No. 1 political problem is “not, like, Arabs right now.” He spoke of what he saw as other underlying American anxieties, such as “the feeling of being victimized right here at home,” he said. “Forces that are different than Mohamed Atta,” he added, alluding to one of the 9/11 hijackers.

The entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Republican Party of Iowa's 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, which featured 13 Republican presidential hopefuls including former President Donald Trump.

Ramaswamy’s wife, Apoorva, was leaning on the kitchen island, listening to our conversation. After her husband slipped away to hop on a Zoom call with “a bunch of people from Silicon Valley,” she joined me at the table. She was fighting a cold but nonetheless happy to make time for a stranger in her home at nearly 10 p.m. on a weeknight. Besides, she said, she wanted to wait up for Vivek when he was done for the day.

The couple met at a house party in 2011, when they were both graduate students at Yale. They struck up conversation, realizing they were neighbors. Apoorva was following in her father’s footsteps, studying medicine, while Vivek was pursuing a law degree after a few years working in finance in New York. “He just seemed awesome, like someone who was interesting and someone who was full of life,” she said. “I was pretty sure pretty early on that I was going to probably end up marrying him.”

Apoorva, like her future husband, grew up a practicing Hindu. The couple is now raising their two toddlers, Karthik and Arjun, in the faith. Apoorva’s parents also came to the United States from India. “I think, as a child of immigrants, we defaulted toward being Democrats insofar as we thought about it at all, which was honestly not very much,” she said. In recent years, she told me, her mom and dad had become Trump supporters. “They chose this country—they love this country more than any country in the world, and they believe in it,” she said. “And it was cool” for them “to see someone who was unapologetic about it.”

I asked Apoorva if she could recall the first time Vivek told her he wanted to become president.

“I think that, like, on a serious level, it was …” she paused for a long moment. “This December.” Vivek, she said, saw the presidency as one of “the different options open to him.” Other young, rich men unsure of what to do next with their life have bought a yacht or a big-city newspaper, or run for governor of Texas. Ramaswamy chose the presidency.

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

Apoorva is a head-and-neck-cancer surgeon at the Ohio State University. I asked her if, as a physician, she supported vaccines. She told me that she and her entire family had received COVID shots, but like her husband, she endorses the idea of personal choice over government mandates. This libertarian approach permeates many aspects of their life. Instead of sending their kids to public school, they have “some educators who come to the house.” (She pointed to the special relationship between Alexander the Great and his private tutor, Aristotle, as a model.) Like Vivek, she’s ambitious and career-driven. She told me she doesn’t necessarily plan to give up her job at OSU even if her family moves into the White House. “I think Jill Biden did show that it is possible to be a spouse who is working,” she said.

“This is a totally new world for me, and the concept of being a political spouse is not, like, the fifth thing I would call myself,” she said. “It’s, you know, this is the thing we’re doing, for sure. And I’m proud to support my husband in it. But I think this is about him and his vision. This is not about me.”

The next day, in Des Moines, Ramaswamy periodically stepped away from our interview aboard his campaign bus to play with his older son, Karthik, who had come along for the trip. I asked Ramaswamy if his friends and family were surprised when he told them he was running for president.

“Not shocked, but a combination of excited and personally concerned for me, actually—just knowing how dirty this is,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising. And I think most people have an impression that politics is a dirty sport where you have to, you know, be compromised.”

I brought up something Papa John had told him: This wasn’t a knife fight, but a gunfight.

“I mean, I would phrase it differently, but I would say you need a spine of steel to play this sport, for sure,” Ramaswamy said. “Some people who have been coddled in their siloed kingdoms, mini kingdoms they’ve created for themselves, have not been ready for when they’ve shown up for the real thing. I think it was an advantage not to be surrounded by people who heaped false praise on me in one of the 50 states of the union—I think that’s a trap that certain governors almost every cycle have fallen into.”

He smiled, making it clear that he was going out of his way not to invoke his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, by name.

While DeSantis spent the first stretch of his campaign blackballing the mainstream media, Ramaswamy has taken a different approach. His presidential candidacy was preceded by a profile in The New Yorker, and though he himself is perpetually on cable news, he said he hardly ever tunes in. With one exception: “I think Tucker Carlson was great, actually. I really enjoyed watching him.”

“I think Tucker had something to say,” he said. “We’re not slaves to a partisan orthodoxy. I don’t have a particular affinity for the Republican Party apparatus, and I think neither does Tucker.”

He told me he admired how Carlson wasn’t a “delivery mechanism” for something that showed up on the teleprompter. I asked if he had read any of the evidence that came out in the discovery process of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, the case that ultimately led to Carlson leaving the network. “I really didn’t,” Ramaswamy said. “It didn’t strike me as super interesting because it seemed like a lot of inside baseball.” I told him that Carlson had been saying certain things on air and, in some cases, texting the direct opposite to his producer. For instance: He said he hates Trump. “Did he say that?” Ramaswamy asked.

For a moment, he seemed genuinely surprised.

The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a live event with Elon Musk and David Sacks on X Spaces (formerly known as Twitter).

“Most people have barely heard of me,” Ramaswamy admitted to Elon Musk. He was pacing barefoot around his 30th-floor downtown–Des Moines hotel room, doing a live Twitter (X) Spaces broadcast. It was late Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Lincoln Dinner. Half-eaten takeout was idling in clamshell containers. Ramaswamy had been going nonstop but didn’t seem remotely tired.

Musk and his Silicon Valley friend David Sacks had been trying to make the social network’s shaky audio platform a virtual destination on the 2024 campaign trail, with intermittent success. I could hear Musk’s voice through Ramaswamy’s earbuds. Over and over again, he’d interrupt the candidate. If Ramaswamy was frustrated, he didn’t let it show. After having watched several of his media hits in a row, I noticed how Ramaswamy had developed an array of tricks to wrangle attention, such as when he brought up “our mutual friend Peter,” as in Thiel. He told Musk how much he “loved” the Twitter Files. By the end of the broadcast, he seemed to have made a new fan. Last week, Musk called him “a very promising candidate.”

He continues to find support among a group of very online iconoclasts. “That Vivek guy is very interesting,” Joe Rogan said recently. “He’s very rational and very smart.” Jordan Peterson has praised him as “hard to corner in the best way.” Andrew Yang, who ran as a freethinking businessman in the 2020 Democratic primary, told me he believes that people are just waiting for others to rally behind Ramaswamy. “Vivek’s going to have his moment. There’s going to be a wind at his back. And then when that wind hits, I think people will be stunned at how quickly his support grows.”

At the Iowa Events Center, more than 1,000 people listened politely as 13 Republican candidates (pretty much the entire field except Chris Christie) each made a 10-minute case for themselves. DeSantis announced that “The time for excuses is over!” before clomping away in his heeled boots. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina preached the value of hard work, telling the room that President Joe Biden and the left were selling “a narcotic of despair.” Former Vice President Mike Pence trudged through his speech and received hardly any applause when endorsing the idea of a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

[Read: The bow-tied bard of populism]

Just after 8 p.m., Ramaswamy was waiting offstage, looking over his notes. He bounded up the steps to the sounds of Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America.”

“It’s good to be here, back in Iowa. I feel like I live here now!” Ramaswamy told the crowd.

He was speaking slower than usual, and he had ditched the twang from the previous night. He seemed utterly at ease. He talked about securing our southern border “and our northern border too.” He received lively applause after saying he would shut down scores of three-letter government agencies. He cycled through his list of poisons and his 10 truths. The clapping waxed and waned. His line about “two genders” was a hit, as was his finale about the Constitution. All in all, he received one of the strongest responses of the night: When the speech concluded, he was treated to a partial standing ovation. He paused for a few extra moments to take it all in, waving at the crowd with both hands.

Downstairs, Ramaswamy glowed in his after-party suite. “Eye of the Tiger” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” and a series of country songs blared from speakers. He told the few dozen people before him that he was prepared not only to win the nomination but to deliver a Ronald Reagan–style landslide victory. Some seemed convinced.

The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy leaves American Dream Machines after he and his son, Karthik, visited the vintage-car shop between campaign events. Ramaswamy’s son joined the candidate on the two-day campaign trip to Iowa.

The next morning, as his campaign bus lumbered to rural Hubbard, I asked Ramaswamy if he had heard what his fellow Republican Will Hurd had said at the event. Hurd, a former Texas congressman, was booed off the stage after telling the Lincoln Dinner crowd “the truth”: that Trump was running only to stay out of prison. “I know the truth,” Hurd said. (Loud boos.) “The truth is hard.” (Louder boos.)

Ramaswamy waved away Hurd’s assertion. He told me that if Trump weren’t running, “they” wouldn’t be prosecuting him. With each passing month, with each new indictment, Ramaswamy has doubled down on his public promise to pardon Trump if elected. He told me that he believes doing so would be “the right thing for the country.” He said the indictments, so far, were “obviously politically motivated.”

During one of his “truth” monologues at the Lincoln Dinner, Ramaswamy told the crowd, “We can handle the truth about what really happened on January 6.” As the bus rolled north, I asked him: What is the truth about January 6?

“I don’t know, but we can handle it,” he said. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?”

Then, suddenly, he was talking about 9/11.

“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to. Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of,” he said. “‘Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who are unarmed.’ What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right?”

I pressed him on the comparison, and suddenly, the bold teller of truths was just asking questions. “Oh yeah, I don’t think they belong in the same conversation,” he said. “I think it’s a ridiculous comparison. But I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the January 6 commission.”

[Read: A star reporter’s break from reality]

But is he actually confused about who was behind the 9/11 attacks? It was hard to get a straight answer from him. “I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11,” he said. “I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.” Some truths, it seems, can be proudly affirmed; others are more elusive. (Asked to clarify Ramaswamy’s views on 9/11, his spokesperson pointed me to a 1,042-word tweet from the candidate, in which he suggested that the U.S. government covered up involvement by Saudi intelligence officials in planning the attacks.)

Ramaswamy told me he’s not interested in being Trump’s vice president, or serving in Trump’s Cabinet. “Reporting in to somebody is not something I’m wired to do well,” he said. “I’m not in this to be a politician. I think there’s a chance to lead a national revival, cultural revival, that touches the next generation of Americans. I don’t think I’m going to be in a position to do that if I’m in an administrative role.”

Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy has signed the “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual GOP nominee—a prerequisite for participation in the debate. He also told me that he would commit to accepting the results of the election. So far, the closest he’s come to ever actually criticizing Trump is saying that 30 percent of the country became “psychiatrically ill” when he was in office. Throughout our discussions, it was clear that Ramaswamy seemed to view Trumpism as something he could tap into. He told me that his path to winning involved recognizing and celebrating Trump’s accomplishments, and promising to build on them.

“I believe with a high degree of conviction that I will win this election,” he said.

If, for whatever reason, that didn’t come to pass, he told me he would “probably just go back to what I was doing”—business, writing books, hanging out with his family. “And I might take a look at the future.”

During our final conversation, I asked Ramaswamy if he felt understood or misunderstood as a candidate. He didn’t hesitate to answer.

“Mostly misunderstood.”

What do you think people misunderstand about you?

“My motivations,” he said.

“I’m not aggrieved by that. I’m patient. But I hope that by the end of this, actually—it’s a deep question—but I think I would rather be properly understood and lose because people decided that the real me is not who they want, than to lose because people never got to know who I really am. That would bother me. And it would be hard to reconcile myself with that. But if people across this country really know just who I am and what I stand for, and then that’s not what they want in a leader, I am 100 percent at peace with that. I have no problem. So that’s kind of my goal in this process.”

The bus pulled onto a sprawling private property in the middle of nowhere. Ramaswamy and his aides hopped off. The millionaire outsider candidate, beholden to no one, was preparing to speak his truth before a wealthy Iowa donor and his friends.

When the pandemic hit, people clung to their jobs. But just months later, we saw an onslaught of people changing roles, which we at LinkedIn called The Great Reshuffle.

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