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Most of America’s current political environment can be traced back to one moment: the election of Donald Trump. The bedlam continues—and, to understand the stakes in 2024, imagine how different the world would look if he’d lost.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Israel is walking into a trap. The progressives who flunked the Hamas test Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness. Computers are learning to smell.

One Single Day

Regret about “what might have been” is not a particularly productive emotion. Counterfactual history, however, is quite useful. I have used it for years in teaching international relations, to help students see that not everything in history is inevitable, that accidents and sudden turns can change the destiny of nations.

Also, as a science-fiction fan, I’m a sucker for the alternate-history genre, the kind of stuff where the Roman empire never rises or America loses the Revolutionary War. I loved NBC’s show Timeless, in which a team—including an academic historian!—has to run around stopping time-terrorists from messing with great events. I even liked Quantum Leap and the idea of one man traveling through the years to fix individual lives rather than alter the grand march of time.

As I continue to watch the GOP flail about—House Republicans have now chosen the execrable Representative Jim Jordan for speaker, replacing Steve Scalise, whose nomination lasted 48 hours—I have been thinking about an alternate history of a United States where Donald Trump lost the 2016 election. I am convinced that the chaos now overtaking much of the American political system was not inevitable: The source of our ongoing political disorder is because of a razor-thin victory in an election in 2016 decided by a relatively tiny number of voters.

I recognize that others will depict Trump’s victory as the inexorable result of long-term trends. Some, perhaps, would identify 1994, when Newt Gingrich proved that political nastiness was an effective campaign strategy, as the Year of No Return, or the election of 2010, when Americans rewarded the flamboyant jerkitude of the Tea Party with seats in Congress.

There’s a lot of truth to such explanations. Long-term trends matter, because over time, they frame debates and shape the choices available to voters. The Republicans have been moving further and further to the right, but I have always argued that 2016 was a fluke, a perfect storm with epochal consequences: The GOP field was fractured and feckless; Trump was a well-known celebrity; the Democrats ran Hillary Clinton instead of supporting Joe Biden for a shot at what would have been Barack Obama’s third term. And it was close, because of the structure of the Electoral College. (The headline of an article by Tina Nguyen, written a few weeks after Trump’s win, captures it nicely: “You Could Fit All the Voters Who Cost Clinton the Election in a Mid-Size Football Stadium.”)

Trump’s win set up a series of cascading failures. Winning in 2016 turbocharged Trump’s claims of leading a movement. His victory encouraged other Republicans to go into survival mode and adopt the protective coloration of Trumpism just to win their primaries, a process that led directly to the crapstorm deluging the House at this very moment. Most Republicans in Congress, as Mitt Romney has told us, hate Trump, and many of them probably wish that someone could jump into the Time Tunnel, go back to 2016, and persuade a few thousand voters in three or four states to come to their senses.

At the least, a Trump loss would have let other Republicans avoid sinking in the populist swamp. Elise Stefanik might be a relentless political opportunist, but without Trump, she and other GOP leaders could have pronounced Trumpian extremism a failure and stayed in something like a center-right lane. On the Earth Where Trump Lost, Fox-addicted voters might still have sent irresponsible performance artists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to Congress, but the institutional Republicans would have had every incentive to marginalize them. (Remember, Jordan’s been in the House since 2007, but attaching himself to Trump has helped to put the speaker’s gavel within his reach.)

Had Trump lost, someone might even have bothered to read (and act on) the so-called Republican National Committee “autopsy” of 2013, which argued that the future of the party relies on better appeals to immigrants, women, minorities, and young people. With Trump’s win, that kind of talk went out the window. Instead, the Trump GOP chained itself to the votes of older white Americans—a declining population. Republicans thus had to squeeze more votes out of a shrinking base, and the only way to do that was to build on Trump’s bond with his personality cult and defend him at all costs.

Perhaps most important, a Trump loss would have prevented (or at least delayed) the normalization of violence and authoritarianism in American politics. This is not to say that the Republicans would today be a healthy party, but Trump’s victory confirmed the surrender of the national GOP to a sociopathic autocrat. There’s a difference between a dysfunctional party and a party that has decayed into a mindless countercultural movement, and that rail switch was thrown in November 2016.

An irony in thinking through the 2016 counterfactual case is how many people, including Trump and the herd of sycophants who coalesced around him, would have been better off if Trump had lost. Excellent books by the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris and by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich have described the kind of people who formed up behind Trump, and it is striking how many of them are now facing personal and political ruin. Perhaps someone like Seb Gorka feels that he did well by jumping from academic obscurity to fish-pill sales, but others whose associations with Trump opened the door to greater scrutiny and eventual disaster—think of Matt Schlapp, Peter Navarro, or even the pathetic Rudy Giuliani—would all have been better off had Trump had flamed out.

But no one should wish for the Guardian of Forever to open a gate back to 2016 more than Trump himself. Had he lost, he could have fulfilled what was likely his true wish, to go back to his life in New York as a faux-capitalist fraudster while traveling the country as a pretend president, holding rallies and raking in money from credulous rubes. Instead, he faces humiliation, financial failure, and criminal indictments.

Measures such as impeachment that could have taken Trump out of American political life were destined to fail because of 2016. The 2020 election proved Trump’s toxicity, but by then, too many Republicans had made too many compromises and they could no longer just walk away. Their fates (which for some might include prison) are sealed.

All of this chaos and misery was avoidable—and all of it stemmed from one election and the choices of a tiny number of Americans who could have averted these disasters. As Trump tries to regain his office, voters should remember that nothing is inevitable: Choices matter. Elections matter. A single day can matter.

Related:

What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers

Today’s News

Palestinians are fleeing northern Gaza after the Israeli military ordered more than 1 million people to evacuate; the United Nations has called the evacuation “impossible … to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Representative Steve Scalise backed out of the race for speaker of the House yesterday. Jim Jordan has been nominated to succeed him. Kaiser Permanente has reached a tentative deal with its health-care workers after a three-day walkout.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Mary Gabriel’s new biography documents Madonna’s indelible position in pop, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Culture Break

Read. Rich Paul’s new memoir, Lucky Me, explores the good luck of a hard life.

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P.S.

Speaking of alternate histories, a year ago, I suggested that you watch Counterpart, which I said then was “the greatest television series that not enough people have seen,” and which I think has been unjustly ignored as one of the greatest series in the history of television.

Counterpart ended its two-season run in 2019 (you can stream it on Apple TV+ and Amazon), so I’ll reveal a bit more of the plot: Scientists in East Germany at the end of the Cold War accidentally open a portal to a parallel universe. It is at first identical to ours in every way, including the people in it, but different choices make them into different people. The show asks disturbing questions about how our lives, and even the fate of the world, can change because of one decision. The lead character, Howard Silk (an amazing performance by J. K. Simmons), often has discussions with his “other,” his counterpart. One Howard is a tough, bitter bastard; the other is a kind and loving husband. When one Howard says that he wonders how things in life could go so wrong, the other Howard says, “Or so right?” Later, Howard says, “We all would like to be the better version of ourselves. I just—I just don’t know if it’s possible.”

The series is full of such moments, along with wonderful little touches of weirdness. (Over in the parallel universe, Prince is still alive.) It might just be a TV series, but even now I still think about it, which is the highest compliment I can pay to good entertainment.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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One of my all-time-favorite Jay-Z songs is a deep cut called “Lucky Me.” Jay is talking about how success brings envy, jealousy, and danger, how people think his life is perfect, but he’s dealing with more than they could ever know. It’s a powerful, mournful, and somewhat sarcastic song, with a hook that goes: “You only know what you see / You don’t understand what it takes to be me.”

That’s exactly how I feel about my life. Some people say I’m lucky, and in one sense they’re right. At 22, I had a random encounter with a teenager named LeBron James that led me to become one of the most powerful agents in American sports. Bad luck can seem good for a while, like money that comes too fast; good luck might be hard to understand. My luck often arrived in disguise, in the form, for example, of an absent mother who in the end needed my forgiveness and understanding.

[Read: Against all odds, LeBron James is still getting better]

People who call me lucky don’t realize what kind of assembly line I was built on. I spent the early years of my life in Glenville, Ohio, sleeping on floors and couches as my mother suffered in the grip of a drug addiction. When I was a boy in the ’80s, my father brought my mom, siblings, and me to live in an apartment above his store, R&J Confectionary. Some days I opened the store with him and worked until about 8 a.m., when he saw me off to school. After school, I came right back to work at the store, stocking shelves and running the cash register and the lottery machine, not to mention playing video games, eating Doritos, and drinking Hawaiian Punch. From my post behind the counter, I observed that selling food, beer, and cigarettes was just the surface level of my father’s success.

This article is adapted from Rich Paul’s new book, Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds.

The same way I overheard conversations about my mother’s drug problems and understood them at a young age, I listened to my dad interacting with people and came to understand how he became successful and admired. The bedrock of the business was the way he respected all of the people he interacted with, no matter their station in life. The education I got from everyone and everything around me was a gift. And when the door cracked open for me, it was those experiences, not a professor or an office job, that prepared me for my next life, the one that’s not supposed to happen to a guy who’s barely 5 foot 8 and who grew up with a pair of dice in one hand and a pistol in the other.

My first stroke of luck was being born into a world that forced me to be focused and prepared. Luck was learning how to recognize friendship, loyalty, love, and justice, and how to cultivate those values in life and business. It was learning how to confront systems of power and not flinch, how to walk on a razor’s edge and never fall.

People who see my success now and don’t know how I got here often reduce the narrative to one famous story: LeBron James, then still in high school, spotted me wearing a vintage Warren Moon jersey, struck up a conversation, and handed me my future. Yes, he was one of the biggest athletes to join my newly formed agency in 2014. But very few people know or respect what I had to go through to reach that point, or what I’ve done since then to reach where I am now. This disrespect comes from preconceived notions about Black men who come from the bottom.

LeBron and I hit it off from the moment we met in 2001. Our vibe was organic—our mothers went through the same struggles with addiction, and his part of Akron, Ohio, was another version of Glenville. I knew his friend Maverick from playing Catholic-school basketball. I also think LeBron was intrigued by how I carried myself. When a group of us went to a club, we walked right in. VIP section? No problem. I knew about restaurants that most guys had never heard of. LeBron saw that I was independent and had my own thing going. I wasn’t asking for anything, and I didn’t have an angle; we just enjoyed being around each other. Everything was authentic and real. I understood the depth of who he was, the good and the bad.

That’s the core of our relationship, and the core of my work today with Black athletes. Our minds tend to move in the same ways, on an individual and a collective basis. I’ve been through so many of the experiences that define the hard side of Black life in America that I can always find common ground with someone, no matter who they are.

And, of course, I’ve worked with athletes who are white; athletes from Europe, Asia, all over the world. The Black American experience resonates with so many lives. In an elevated way, the story of our struggles is the essence of the human struggle. Every person on this planet needs love, dignity, and purpose.                                                             

My next life truly began one summer day in 2014 at the Arrogant Butcher, a restaurant in downtown Phoenix. Eric Bledsoe and I were having lunch when the phone on the table lit up. I looked over at Bled and answered the call. The Phoenix Suns had offered him $7 million a year over four years—$28 million total—to play the game of basketball.

This was life-changing money for us. Where I grew up, on the East Side of Cleveland, or where Bled grew up, in Birmingham, Alabama, the only way to make even a small fraction of that kind of money was to risk your life. But we were in a different world now. Bled was about to hit his first free-agent jackpot, and I was negotiating my first contract as an official agent for my company, Klutch Sports Group.

I hung up the phone and relayed the offer to Bled. He was 24 and had just enjoyed a great season for Phoenix, establishing himself as a cornerstone of the franchise. The smile on his face broadcast happiness and relief. He was ready to sign on the dotted line.

But I wasn’t smiling.

“We’re not taking this deal,” I said.

Bled is a quiet guy, but I could sense the disappointment beneath his blank expression.

“Here’s why,” I said. “I don’t want you stepping on that court night in and night out, playing against guys who you’re better than, guys you’re outperforming, but you make less than they do. You deserve way more than $28 million. I don’t know exactly how much more, but I’m going to get you what you’re worth.”

He agreed to turn down the contract offer.

Phoenix had actually made their first offer at the start of the previous season, but we’d said no thanks. As Bled played with the unresolved contract hanging over his head, all of the other top free-agent guards got deals worth roughly $48 million over four years—$12 million a year. The Suns came up to that number, but I held out for a fifth year on the contract. Bled felt antsy. I was calm, though.

My life had never had any room for panic. I was able to transmit some of that calm to Bled, and he trusted me, based on all of the love I had poured into him since he first came into the NBA, the months he’d spent living at my house during summer workouts, the care embodied in a simple act such as me carrying his sneakers to the gym—all of the ways my friends and I had once leaned on one another to survive.

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that America doesn’t dominate basketball]

The season ended, and the months passed. September arrived, training camp was approaching, and Bled was the only high-level free agent still on the market. His situation was in the news every day. I told him to leave his house in Phoenix and lie low back in Birmingham. Don’t pick up the phone when the team calls you. Other players told him to take the latest offer. No, Bled, trust me. We’re not budging. As comparable players came off the board and signed to other teams, our leverage grew.                                    

By the time September ended, I knew that Bled was worth a maximum contract. Finally, the Suns offered five years and $70 million—$14 million a year. The next day, Bled signed the biggest contract of any restricted free agent that off-season. That was the first real money Klutch Sports Group ever made. It sent a message to the entire NBA and laid the foundation for where I stand today. If I had botched that deal, there would be no Klutch, which now represents more than 150 athletes, coaches, and executives, with $3 billion in total contracts. But we made our luck—we rolled the dice and won.

There was a point in my NBA-agenting career when people realized just how much my company and I intended to disrupt the system, when they tried to get rid of me. In 2019, the NCAA passed a rule saying that you needed a college degree in order to represent players entering the draft. While it lasted, which wasn’t long, people called it the Rich Paul Rule. Basically, a lot of people were upset that someone like me had the audacity to unapologetically represent some of the biggest stars in the sport. They were upset that I had rejected their criteria for admission and was working to remake a system that historically has only benefitted them. And they were threatened by the fact that they could never have what I have: my experiences. So they tried to outlaw me.

What they thought were disqualifications became my selling points. College or not, I know I’m as well prepared as anybody for the business I’m in. After everything I’ve endured, there’s very little that their system can teach me. Nobody else in my business knows what it’s like to put two and two together out of zero. I know what it’s like to serve somebody, and watch out for the police, and watch out for the rival crews, and watch out for the jackers, and watch out for the people I’m serving because they too might have a pistol. I know how to keep working even if in a split second, my life might be over. ​​Not a day goes by that I don’t remember that life.

What none of these critics knew is that long before I entered the world of the NBA, I learned that life is full of gambles. Smart gamblers know how to manage the risks, move with intention and integrity, control what they can control—and, in the end, they have the heart to let the dice fall where they may. I’d been gambling my whole life, not for as much money, but for higher stakes. Growing up like I did, gambling was weighing the odds of getting shot if you walked down a hostile block. Gambling was being 13, taking thousands of dollars from men in a craps game, and then riding home on my bike. Gambling was giving my mom $40 and hoping she didn’t use it to get high. So when it was time to negotiate my first contract and to bet that the Phoenix Suns would give Bledsoe a better deal?

That is the gamble my life prepared me to win. Society accepts that upbringings like mine instill a hunger, drive, and savvy in great athletes. It’s long overdue for society to accept that these circumstances can produce great executives, too.

This article is adapted from Rich Paul’s new book, Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds.