Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois, is best known for his service on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. He and Liz Cheney were the only two Republicans on that committee, and completely noncoincidentally, neither one is in Congress today. The new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is more typical of the House Republican caucus: He was a leader of the election deniers.

In his new book, Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, Kinzinger details his manifold struggles: with his conscience, with his ambition, and, ultimately, with the Republicans who attempted to subvert the Constitution. A six-term congressman and an Air Force veteran, Kinzinger today is chastened but still somewhat hopeful—not hopeful about the short-term future of the Republican Party, but hopeful that pro-democracy voters are still sufficient in number to turn back the authoritarians.

I first met Kinzinger in 2014, when we were both members of the late Senator John McCain’s delegation to the Munich Security Conference. Also in that delegation were Senator Lindsey Graham and then-Representative Mike Pompeo, who later became Donald Trump’s CIA director and secretary of state.

[Peter Wehner: The man who refused to bow]

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of a conversation I had with Kinzinger earlier this month on stage at the Democracy360 conference, sponsored by the Karsh Institute at the University of Virginia. We started by talking about that now-unlikely constellation of Republicans: Kinzinger, McCain, Graham, and Pompeo.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You guys were all in the same camp, the muscular internationalist Republicans. Two of you went one way, and two of you went another way. What happened?

Adam Kinzinger: Craven politics, craven power—that’s what it is. This is something I still try to grapple with every day, when I look back on January 6. I always thought everybody had a red line. Like, okay, we can play politics to a point, but there’s a red line we'll never cross. I’ve learned that’s not the case.

I’d say [we] are all still probably for a muscular foreign policy. The difference, though, between people that went one way or another is the recognition that U.S. foreign policy also means we have to have a healthy democracy at home, and that democracy-building overseas is fine, but having a strong democracy here, where people have faith in the voting system and faith that whoever gets the most votes will win, is just as important.

I think there are unfortunately too many people that got into the Trump sphere, that it  just became about power, identity, and not looking at the broader picture of your impact in this world.

Goldberg: So I want to stay on this for a while because I want you to name names.

Kinzinger: I can name names for an hour. A couple off the top of my head: One of the ones I’m most disappointed in generally is [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, because I always thought that McCarthy had some version of a political soul. And I’ve come to realize that to him it was all about just the attainment of power. Somebody like Ted Cruz never surprised me. He’s always been a charlatan. But Lindsey Graham has also been a big disappointment to me, because I’ve traveled with Lindsey, leading congressional-delegation trips around the world. I always thought he and I were eye to eye on a lot of these foreign-policy issues. And to watch him so closely adopt and closely support Donald Trump, when Trump was doing exactly what Graham was preaching against just prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene, was a pretty disappointing moment.

[Read: ‘We put sharp knives on the hands of children’]

During this speaker fiasco, I would listen to names during the roll call, people like Mike McCaul, people like Mike Gallagher, and hear them say the name Jim Jordan and know, for a fact, they have no respect for Jim Jordan. But it’s all about that determination to survive politically. I have come to learn that people fear losing their identity and losing their tribe more than they come to fear death.

Goldberg: You saw Lindsey Graham throughout this process. What were conversations like? Did you ever just say, “Lindsey, what are you doing?”

Kinzinger: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, our relationship hasn’t been that strong in the last few years, obviously. So I can’t say there were recent conversations, but it would just be like, “What’s going on? So Donald Trump did this thing. Why are you okay with that?”

People have given so much of their soul, of their values. They’ve compromised so much that at some point to stop compromising, or to recognize that this is a mistake and you need to correct course, would be an indictment against who you are and what you have done for the last four or five years. And I think Lindsey has been a victim of that. He liked the idea of being in the room with Donald Trump.

And I will tell you, I’ve met with Donald Trump a number of times; he is actually one of the most fun people to meet with, because he’s crazy, but it’s like a fun crazy. And he’s really good at drawing you in and making you feel seen at that moment, because he knows how to manipulate you. And it works perfectly with Lindsey. Lindsey says, “Now I have a seat at the table. I care about foreign policy.” But what he didn’t realize is that bargain came with selling who he was as a person.

Goldberg: If John McCain hadn’t died, would Graham have gone over?

Kinzinger: I don’t think so. I think Lindsey Graham needs a strong person to  mentor him or carry him, and it was John McCain. And when John McCain passed, the next guy, the strongman that Lindsey Graham was drawn to, was Donald Trump.

Goldberg: You got to Congress when the Republican Party is still the Republican Party you imagined it to be. One question that people like you always get is: Were you kidding yourself the whole time, or did something actually change?

Kinzinger: Looking back, I can say, “Oh, yeah, there were signs from the very beginning,” but I was part of the moderate Republicans, who constantly had this optimistic view that the Republican Party was this thing of smaller government, hope, opportunity, strong national defense, that kind of stuff. And I always just saw these elements of crazy nationalism, of authoritarianism, of racism exist in the party, but it’s a battle. And I’m fighting on the good side here to try to save the party. And then when Donald Trump came, we lost that fight.

I think the moment I started to realize, like, Okay, we have lost, was January 6. Before that point, I thought, Donald Trump is going to lose; people are going to wake up. Even on January 6 I said, “People are definitely going to wake up now.”

Now, with the benefit of time and looking back, I can say, “You know what? Those strains were there.” Some of them were hidden because it was not yet socially acceptable to say things like “Let’s throw out the Constitution.” I hear a lot of people say “You’re naive, because the Republican Party’s always been this way.” And inevitably those are people on the left that have always had a bad view of the GOP. I understand the viewpoint, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think there were a lot of really good factions in the GOP.

Goldberg: Explain the psychology there. What motivates this outburst of anger on the part of the voters that led to Trump’s triumph?

Kinzinger: I think the resentment came from Fox News and the right-wing-media echo chamber. Why do I say that? So this is something I take a lot of personal blame for being part of as well, although I think I did better than most.

In 2010, we learned that fear is the best way to raise money ever. If I send you an email and it says, “Dear Jeffrey, I want to lower tax rates and we need some help, blah, blah, blah,” you may give me money. But if I send you an email and it says, “Nancy Pelosi is trying to murder you and your family,” and in essence, I convince you that I’m the only thing standing between you and the life of you or your family, you’ll part with anything, including a significant part of your fixed income from Social Security. So in 2010, we learned this. And instead of using that kind of fire in a controlled way like politicians do, sometimes we let it burn. There was always this fire going, and we stoked it too far.

Goldberg: How do you reach people who haven’t been reached, to change their minds? There’s 30, 35 percent of the voters who are hard-core.

Kinzinger: Well, if the January 6 committee didn’t do it and the people still believe the scandals, I’m not sure that 35 percent can be turned on a dime today. But here’s the two things we can do. We can convince their children. You would be amazed how many children have a different viewpoint than their parents, and how they can pull their parents off the ledge. I did that with my parents when I got elected. My dad would call, and he’s watching Fox News all the time. And I finally said, “Dad, I’m in the middle of this and I don’t have near the stress you do, and you can’t even see the difference. Right?” And he’s like, “You know what? You’re right.”

The other thing is, if only every one of those people running against Donald Trump in the primary would tell the dang truth, people would actually believe it. Donald Trump gets indicted with all these different indictments and then they ask, you know, ‘What do you think, Tim Scott?” “What do you think, Nikki Haley?” “What do you think, Vivek Ramaswamy? What are your feelings on these indictments?” But every one of those people say this is a witch hunt.

Goldberg: I appreciate the view. I’m not sure I believe you, though. The truest thing that Donald Trump ever said was that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him. It seems like he understood something elemental there.

Kinzinger: I guess I would caveat that. I don’t necessarily believe, if Nikki Haley alone came out and said it, that it would be game over for Donald Trump. I think this is a specific moment where if all these people told the base the truth, they could damage his support significantly.

Goldberg: Stay on this question of Trump and Trumpism. Who do you blame for his return?

Kinzinger: One person: Kevin McCarthy. And I’m going to tell you exactly why. So there was a period after January 6 for two or three weeks. It was quiet. And we’d meet in a room with all the Republican men and women of Congress. Kevin would stand up, all that stuff—if you’re in the room, you could sense there was this trepidation in the room about, like, “We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know where we’re going. What are we supposed to do?” Until the day Kevin McCarthy showed up with a picture of Donald Trump. And just like that, everything changed.

[David Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?]

Goldberg: You’re talking about his visit to Mar-a-Lago.

Kinzinger: His visit to Mar-a-Lago. Those of us that voted for impeachment were leading the charge against Donald Trump. People were actually coming up to us and asking us, “How do I do this?” We were talking about “How do we get the downtown PAC community to only support those that are pro-democracy?” We were going to set up our own scoring and vetting system to say This person voted against certification; this person voted for it, and only give money to the people that voted for it. And you think about the power that could have had.

Then that picture happened in Mar-a-Lago, and all of a sudden we went from considering doing a vote of no confidence against Kevin McCarthy because of his role in January 6 to a point where everybody turned against me, Liz Cheney, and the others that voted to impeach, all because of that picture.

Goldberg: So you must be at least a little bit happy about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall.

Kinzinger: I’m very happy about it. I’m very happy. I’ve got to be honest. I’m sorry. It’s not great for the country, but it’s really good.

Goldberg: You’re describing Kevin McCarthy as a person who went along with the radical pro-Trump, anti-democracy right and then he eventually got eaten by them.

Kinzinger: This dynamic to an extent has always existed. It would be people like me fighting against the Jim Jordans, but it was behind the scenes. Now it’s brought out to the open because for the first time you now see the people like me—I will call them the moderates, even though there’s really no moderates left. The moderates are finally standing up and fighting back with some of the tactics that Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan used.

Why is it that terrorists are so powerful? Because they’re willing to do something that most other people aren’t: you know, commit an act of terror if you’re a legislative terrorist, like John Boehner called Jim Jordan very accurately, and he’s willing to vacate the chair or Matt Gaetz is willing to vacate the chair. They’re powerful unless people push back. And that’s what’s happening. How does a Kevin McCarthy get to this point? A man who I thought had a red line, I always thought he was a very good politician and that he could play around the edges, but he wouldn’t cross [the line]. And in January, he cut a deal that made what happened a few weeks ago completely obvious. Everybody knew this would happen. That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are. And this is a moment where the Republican Party either will collapse in a heap of fire or they will actually fix themselves somehow through this.

The country needs a healthy Republican Party regardless of what you feel about the Republican Party, because we need a liberal and a conservative philosophy competing in the United States. That’s what a healthy democracy is.

Goldberg: Does Trumpism survive Trump?

Kinzinger: Five months ago, if we were sitting here and you said, “Does it survive past Trump?” I’d be like, absolutely. Because Trumpism has now been learned by others. But I’m starting to play with the idea that maybe enough Republicans are starting to get exhausted of Trump and maybe Trumpism doesn’t survive. Donald Trump got elected in front of a wave of people that wanted to break the system. But there is an undercurrent right now of people that are desperate to fix and heal the system. And when that right person comes along, like an Obama-type character, I think that may revolutionize the future, but I’m not sure.

Goldberg: Can you imagine yourself back in Congress as a Republican?

Kinzinger: That’s two different questions. Could I imagine myself back in the House? No. Could I imagine myself back in politics? Yes. Could I imagine myself back in politics as a Republican? Not in the current environment.

Goldberg: In other words, do you think that the fever would break to a point where the Republican Party would be a different party and have you back?

Kinzinger: I think someday; I just don’t know when that’s going to be. And it’s not now. I think if I ran as a Republican now, I wouldn’t do too well.

Goldberg: Are you still a Republican?

Adam Kinzinger: It’s an interesting question. I will not vote Republican. I voted Democratic last election. I intend to vote Democratic this election, not because I’ve changed my mind necessarily—I’ve moderated, you know, quite a bit—but because I think it is a binary choice. Do you like democracy or don’t you like democracy? And I think that the only thing we can vote on in 2024 is democracy. So I’m not giving up the title Republican yet, because I haven’t changed. They have. And I refuse to give them that satisfaction yet. But I feel like a man without a party.

Goldberg: Why do your colleagues want to stay in Congress so badly?

Kinzinger: I don’t know.

Goldberg: It doesn’t look like the greatest job.

Kinzinger: It’s not the greatest job. But, okay, when you walk into a room for five or 10 years and no matter what room you walk in, unless it’s the White House, you are the center of attention because you’re the highest-ranking person there and you’ve spent your whole life to attain this job—a lot of my colleagues spent everything to become that. Losing that freaks you out. As somebody that announced I wasn’t running again, the thing you fear the most is how do I feel the second after I put out that press release?

My co-pilot in Iraq sent me a text that said, “I’m ashamed to have ever served with you.” I had family that sent me a certified letter saying they’re ashamed to share my last name, that I was working for the devil. I used to laugh about it 10 months ago, but I’ve really allowed myself to accept what damage that’s done to me and my family. It’s not easy to go through. But I’m going to tell you, I have 0.0 percent regret for what I did, and I would do it all the exact same again.

In an interview last week on Fox News, the newly elected speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, told host Sean Hannity, “Someone asked me today in the media, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”

For many politicians, that would be a throwaway line. But not for Mike Johnson. When he told a Baptist newspaper in 2016, “My faith informs everything I do,” he meant it. His faith is his lodestar.

But faith, including the Christian faith, manifests itself in many different ways, with a wide range of presuppositions and perspectives. There is no single worldview among Christians—nor in the Bible itself, which is multivocal, written over thousands of years by dozens of different writers. Christians today disagree profoundly on countless doctrinal issues. And does any serious student of Scripture not see differences between the worldview of the Pentateuch and the prophets, between the slaughter of the Canaanites and the Sermon on the Mount?

So what do we know about the faith and the worldview of Mike Johnson?

Johnson, 51, has deep ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. He believes in a literal reading of the Bible, including the Book of Genesis. Johnson is a close friend of Ken Ham, the CEO and founder of Answers in Genesis, and provided legal services to that ministry in 2015.

[Joshua Benton: Where is Mike Johnson’s ironclad oath?]

Answers in Genesis rejects evolution and believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; to believe anything else would be to undermine the authority of the Bible. “We’re not just about creation/evolution, the age of the Earth or fossils,” Ham told Johnson and his wife, Kelly, on their podcast. “We’re really on about the authority of the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and helping equip people to have a true Christian worldview.” Johnson is enthusiastically on board; he has suggested that school shootings are the result of having taught generations of Americans “that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime.”

Johnson wants churches to be more politicized; he favors overturning the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which prevents churches from engaging in any political campaign activity if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. He also believes that churches are unceasingly under assault, and that Christian viewpoints “are censored and silenced.”

In the 2000s, Johnson was an attorney and spokesman for the Alliance Defense Fund, known today as Alliance Defending Freedom. It describes itself as “one of the leading Christian law firms committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” Johnson has written in favor of criminalizing gay sex. He has called abortion a “holocaust.” And he argued that “prevailing judicial philosophy” in the 2005 right-to-die case involving Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman, was “no different than Hitler’s.”

“Some people are called to pastoral ministry and others to music ministry,” he’s said. “I was called to legal ministry, and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war.’”

He has surely been that.

But in order to better understand Johnson’s worldview, it’s important to recognize the influence of David Barton on the new House speaker.

In 2021, Johnson spoke at a gathering where he praised Barton. Barton, while not well known outside of certain evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is significant within them. A graduate of Oral Roberts University with a degree in Christian education, Barton is the former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and has advised figures including Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and former Representative Michele Bachmann. He considers Donald Trump one of the five greatest presidents in American history.

Johnson said he was introduced to Barton’s work a quarter of a century ago; it “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” By all accounts that is true. If you listen to Johnson speak on the “so-called separation of Church and state” and claim that “the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” you will hear echoes of Barton.  

Although not a historian, Barton has for years been engaged in what he calls “historical reclamation,” by which he means showing that the Founders, including Thomas Jefferson, were Christian men determined to create a Christian nation. In 1988 he founded Wallbuilders, an organization that promotes the idea that the separation of Church and state is a myth.

“It’s really hard to overstate the influence that Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces,” the Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Politico. “For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation.”

“What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray,” she continued. “It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.”

“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the past to promote political agendas in the present, to paint a picture of America’s history as evangelicals would like it to be,” John Fea, the chair of the history department at the evangelical Messiah University, told NBC News. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, where Barton’s ideas are highly influential. It’s the air they breathe.”

In 2012, Barton wrote The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. Among other things, he argued that Jefferson was a “conventional Christian” despite the fact that Jefferson questioned many of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of religion, said it would have been better titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a piece of historical scholarship, the book is awful,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The book was so riddled with historical inaccuracies that it was recalled by its Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, because “basic truths just were not there.”

But Barton’s distorted views are hardly confined to history. He has said he doesn’t think medical authorities will ever find a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. This view is “based on a particular Bible verse,” Romans 1:27. He believes that AIDS is God’s punishment for sin; an AIDS vaccine would keep “your body from penalizing you”—which would be contrary to the teaching of the word of God. QED, though with a certain cruel twist.

Mike Johnson’s ascension to the speakership has made Barton and those within that evangelical subculture giddy; they know Johnson is one of them. This is the first time “in our lifetime” that Congress has appointed “a guy of this character, this commitment, this knowledge, this experience and this devout faith” as House speaker, Barton said on a podcast. He also said that he’s spoken with Johnson’s team, “talking with them about staff.”

“They need to be the people with his worldview,” Barton said. He added that Johnson will “make you smile before he hits you in the mouth so he won’t bloody your lips when he breaks your teeth.”

“I am a rule-of-law guy,” Mike Johnson told Sean Hannity last week. Elsewhere, according to The New York Times, he’s complained to student groups, “There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.”

At the same time, Johnson has been a pivotal figure in undermining the rule of law—specifically trying to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. In a carefully reported story on the 139 House Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral College count, three New York Times reporters wrote, “In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

Johnson also collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a groundless Texas lawsuit to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joe Biden.

According to a report in the Times, Johnson “sent an email to his Republican colleagues soliciting signatures for the legal brief in support of it. The initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson wrote, and the president was ‘anxiously awaiting’ to see who in Congress would step up to the plate to defend him.”

Johnson also claimed in a radio interview that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” According to Johnson, “The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion. Look, there’s a lot of merit to that.”

“The fix was in,” according to Johnson.

Actually, it was not. A statement by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process, declared that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.” Not been a single finding has refuted that claim, but many have confirmed it.  

A report by a group of lifelong Republicans took a careful look at the charges by Trump and his supporters. It showed the election was lost by Trump, not stolen from him. In coming to that conclusion, it examined every count of every case brought in six battleground states.

“Even now, twenty months after the election”—the report came out in July 2022—“a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time.”

We now know, too, that time and time again Trump’s own staff refuted his various allegations of voter fraud.

[David A. Graham: The House Republicans’ troubling new litmus test]

So in Speaker Johnson we have a man whose Christian worldview has led him into a hall of mirrors—historically, scientifically, legally, and constitutionally. A “rule-of-law guy” who laments a lack of “absolute standards of right and wrong” was a key participant in undermining the rule of law and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has done so much to shatter absolute standards of right and wrong.

From what I can tell, Mike Johnson—unlike, say, Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, or J. D. Vance and Lindsey Graham—is not cynical; he seems to be a true believer, and a zealot. A polite and mild-mannered zealot, to be sure, especially by MAGA standards, but a zealot nonetheless. And what makes this doubly painful for many of us is that he uses his Christian faith to sacralize his fanaticism and assault on truth. I can’t help thinking this isn’t quite what Jesus had in mind.

A decade ago, I arrived in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, for my first stint of field research into the island’s volatile politics. While unpacking in my hotel room, I heard sporadic celebrations erupting in the streets below. Confused, I asked a jubilant man what was going on.

“The army captured the militia’s sorcerer,” he told me. “The president just announced that soldiers seized all of the sorcerer’s diabolical objects—and they’ll soon be destroyed.”

Heavily armed criminal militias, known as the dahalo, had been terrorizing civilians in rural Madagascar. Now their sorcerer was in custody, and his talismans were broken and burned. The government and the public believed that the dahalo had suffered a severe blow, and that a more peaceful future was possible. The president, who had been in a precarious state politically, got a much-needed popularity boost.

The lesson was obvious: Whether the sorcerer or the talismans really had powers didn’t matter. What mattered was what people believed. Beliefs, true or false, rational or irrational, shape politics.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: This Halloween, let’s really think about death]

Almost exactly three years ago, I saw a similar spectacle unfold on television as the president faced a tough reelection bid. Early returns suggested that his time was up, but his chief spiritual adviser, known for warning the public about the dangers of “a demon prince in the form of a many-headed dragon,” had one more trick up her sleeve. She marshaled spiritual forces to save the embattled incumbent, calling on “angels of Africa” and denouncing the “demonic confederacies” who were channeling satanic forces in their quest to remove him from power.

Except this time, the spectacle was unfolding not in Madagascar but in the United States—and the speech was from Paula White, the woman whom Donald Trump had handpicked to lead prayers both at his inauguration and at his ill-fated rally on January 6, 2021.

The rationalists among us may scoff at supernatural beliefs and little imagine that politics could be decisively swayed by superstition, mysticism, and theories of demonic forces. But we don’t need to imagine. Forty percent of the global population believes in witchcraft, defined as the “ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” Surveys covering nearly 100 countries and published last year in a top scientific journal show that the prevalence of belief in witchcraft varies widely, from Tunisia (where 90 percent of the population believes it’s real) to Sweden and Denmark (where the figure is below 10 percent).

The phenomenon is not limited to any one region or level of economic development. Roughly two-thirds of Latvians, half of Brazilians, a third of Spaniards, and a fifth of French people self-report a belief in witchcraft. In the United States, the figure is 16.4 percent—one in six Americans. And in the United States, unlike, say, in France, a subset of those who believe in demonic forces and witchcraft have become a potent political force, exerting significant sway on right-wing elected officials. In turn, cynical figures in the MAGA movement have worked to co-opt these true believers for their political goals.

When trying to understand a political culture, you have to examine the society as it exists, irrational warts and all. And yet, most of us prefer to look at the world through a reverse fun-house mirror, in which the complex and sometimes-wacky beliefs of our fellow citizens are reflected back at us with the straight, clear-cut lines of reason and logic. We attribute voter behavior to policy proposals and economic data, rather than to the knock-on effects of widely held conspiracy theories or other nonrational beliefs.

In other words, most of us who professionally study human societies—or try to explain political systems in the press—have a severe case of rationality bias: We think of ourselves as purely rational agents, and we too often wrongly assume that everyone else thinks about the world the same way we do. This assumption distorts our understanding of how people actually make decisions, why they behave the way they do, and, by extension, how and why big social and political changes take place.

Figures vary, but by most estimates, about 85 out of every 100 people in the world believe in God. And yet, an analysis of top political-science-research journals found that only 13 out of every 1,000 articles published were primarily about religion (a rate of just over 1 percent). That figure is absurdly low—professional malpractice for a field that attempts to explain political systems. But the scholarship is even thinner on disorganized but widespread belief systems, such as acceptance of the power of witchcraft. The analysis didn’t provide data on how many research articles focused on other forms of supernatural belief, including shamanism, animism, and the like, which we can safely assume have received even lower billing. The upshot is that we political scientists have an enormous blind spot. Pundits are even worse: When’s the last time you heard a serious cable-news discussion about the political influence of witchcraft and demonic forces? A serious rift divides the way professional analysts explain political systems and the way voters within those systems actually see the world, whether in the United States or in societies where such seemingly strange beliefs are more openly discussed.

“There is little doubt,” writes Ronald Hutton, the author of The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, “that the majority of recorded human societies have believed in, and feared, an ability by some individuals to cause misfortune and injury to others by uncanny (‘magical’) means.” In modern times, such views are ridiculed among educated elites. But, as Hutton told me, “the overwhelming majority of Europeans still feared witchcraft until the early 20th century.” (The black cloak and pointy hat of popular Halloween attire were just what poor women wore in parts of 17th-century Europe.) Political elites mounted a concerted campaign to stamp out those beliefs over centuries, and its success was uneven, leaving some countries with far higher rates of belief in witchcraft and uncanny magic than others.

[From the May 2020 issue: Why is witchcraft on the rise?]

Anthropologists note that nonrational, magical, or superstitious beliefs appear in nearly all human societies, helping to make sense of a world in which individual lives can feel like the playthings of larger, unseen forces or, sometimes, random chance. When, say, cancer strikes, people look for explanations, and some fasten on literal demons. Nonrational beliefs can also allow believers to feel that they are harnessing unseen forces for their own purposes. They use witchcraft, voodoo, or other forms of uncanny magic to assert control in a world that feels uncontrollable. As a result, such worldviews tend to be most prevalent among those who feel powerless and face relentless calamities. Many believers view magic pragmatically, unsure of how an amulet or a talisman might work, but willing to try it nonetheless. As the Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin put it, superstition is a bit like the “modern car-driver, who does not know how his car works, but trusts it all the same, interested only in knowing which button to press.”

Mystical beliefs are not mere outliers to be edited out of our “rational choice” understanding of how and why political actors and voters behave, or how and why societies change over time. Rather, such nonrational beliefs have decisively shaped domestic and global affairs in countless cases.

For example, the United States nearly invaded Haiti in 1994, in “Operation Uphold Democracy,” in order to topple a brutal post-coup military regime. As American gunships anchored off the Haitian coast, voodoo priests drew curses outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince. A few days later, a plane crashed near the White House, and some houngans, or voodoo priests, interpreted this as evidence that the curse had worked. With that fortuitous sign, they prepared for battle, threatening to defeat U.S. forces with their own army of zombies. (A celebrity voodoo priest named Max Beauvoir and known as “houngan to the stars”—he had previously met Bill Clinton—eventually defused this crisis.)

In the first Liberian civil war of the 1990s, a preacher named Joseph Blahyi, who went by the nom de guerre General Butt Naked, led a particularly feared paramilitary unit. Said to be protected by magical amulets, Blahyi’s brigade fought naked to show their confidence that clothes and body armor were unnecessary. The unit committed mass atrocities and played a significant role in the outcome of the conflict.

Similar examples abound: In Myanmar, the former dictator Ne Win wrecked the economy by making banknotes worthless because they weren’t in denominations that were divisible by nine, his lucky number. In response, students organized mass protests on August 8, 1988, because they saw the number eight as powerful. Thousands of civilians were killed in the subsequent 8888 Uprising, as it became known, which still affects Myanmar’s politics today (it launched Aung San Suu Kyi to international prominence and is often compared to today’s anti-coup resistance).

Nonrational belief systems continue to drive geopolitical shifts. Recent research has shown that Chinese firms take significantly fewer financial risks during the company chairman’s zodiac year, which is said to bring bad luck. What’s more, ordinary Chinese citizens take fewer economic risks during their own zodiac years, too, affecting China’s wider economy.

And the United States doesn’t just have Paula White. Millions believe in QAnon, and more and more people are attending formal exorcisms, which often have overt political messages in support of Trump. The popular ReAwaken America tour was founded by a man who claims that COVID-19 vaccines are associated with the “mark of the beast.” A speaker at one such event warned that several diseases afflicting women are caused by “demon sperm.” The tour doesn’t just feature fringe characters with little influence; its speakers have included Michael Flynn, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Eric Trump, and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona. Across the aisle, self-described witches and “magical thinkers” attempted to curse Trump’s presidency with spells. Unlike their Republican counterparts, however, those groups have effectively zero influence on Democratic Party politics.

Beliefs drive politics—and irrational beliefs are widespread. Discussions of demons have become mainstream in Republican political gatherings and echo from the lips of influential MAGA firebrands. Political scientists and commentators shouldn’t dismiss these views because they seem outlandish. We need more research into these communities—and a better understanding of the political extremism they may unleash. We also need polling and survey research that tries to accurately measure these beliefs, so that we can better understand the reality of voter perceptions rather than asking only about more traditional concerns such as taxes and health care. Because, like it or not, those who worry about the potent force embedded in certain diabolical objects are not just to be found in places like Madagascar. They also have the ear of the man who may soon return to the White House.

Happy Halloween!

Today, only a few Westerners are still attending President Vladimir Putin’s showcase events, such as the Valdai conference in Sochi, which, before the war, was Russia’s most prestigious international gathering. This year, one of those foreign guests was a journalist from a German far-left newspaper, who asked Putin to explain a seeming contradiction: If Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, as Putin claims, why is the Kremlin maintaining high-level contacts with the far-right Alternative for Germany party?

The question had particular saliency because the AfD is growing in power and popularity across Germany. Earlier this month, it achieved historically good results in regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, two traditionally centrist states. Nationally, the AfD is polling at a record 21 percent, making it the second-most-popular party in Germany. After next year’s regional elections, it could even become the leading party of several states in its eastern-German stronghold.

Putin’s response was revealing. He questioned the notion that the AfD is far-right and defended his contacts with the group. He went on to suggest that the AfD was the victim of “Nazi methods” rather than a party “using them.” As evidence, he pointed to rumors of an assassination attempt on one of the party’s leaders during a recent campaign event. The German authorities have not confirmed that any such attempt took place, but the AfD tried to exploit the rumor in the days before this month’s regional elections. Putin’s surprisingly detailed knowledge of a little-known conspiracy theory involving the AfD points to the special interest that the Kremlin is taking in Germany’s far right.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Putin’s connection to Germany is personal. A country that he thought he understood, from his posting to East Germany as a young KGB officer, has turned its back on him. “I still have friends in Germany,” Putin said at Valdai. “And it may seem strange, but their number is growing.” The implication, when taken with his remarks about the AfD, was that he’s finding new friends among Germany’s right.

Putin seems to hope he can make an ally of Germany’s far right in an effort to sow discord in German society. This would meet an important goal in his broader campaign to dissolve Western unity and reduce support for Ukraine.

Living and serving in East Germany in the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union had a huge influence on Putin’s life and political priorities. Throughout his career, he has shown a consistent preoccupation with Russia’s relationship with Germany. “Russia has always had special sentiments for Germany,” he said in a speech—delivered in fluent German—to the Bundestag in 2001. Many times, he has tapped into German guilt over its World War II history and harped on the debt of gratitude Germany owes the Russian people for the country’s reunification. Putin’s tactics have been very effective, and Germany has long put its relationship with Russia before that with any of its Eastern European neighbors.

In 2014, Putin extended his arm-twisting by drawing a parallel between Germany’s reunification and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Just as the Russian people had supported the “desire of the Germans for national unity,” he said in a public address, so he expected Germany to “also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity.”

Although Germany joined the widespread European and American condemnation of the annexation of Crimea, the country’s dependence on natural gas, and Russian supplies of it, was growing. That vulnerability bolstered Putin’s confidence that Germany’s business-driven political system would not dare cutting ties, regardless of Russia’s aggressive actions elsewhere.

That belief was affirmed by his close relationship with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Putin has attended Schröder’s birthday parties, and once took Schröder on a Christmas sleigh ride in Moscow). After Schröder left office in 2005, he was appointed chairman of the boards of both Nord Stream AG and Rosneft, two major Russian-controlled energy companies. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Schröder fell into disgrace, and the Nord Stream 2 gas-pipeline project between Russia and Germany that he championed has been abandoned. Yet Putin continues to defend his friend as a “true son of his people.”

[David French: Hatred makes fools of us all]

The German response to Russia’s 2022 assault on Ukraine suggests that Putin did not know Germany as well as he thought. Even when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Germany—a move that many countries, including the United States, long feared would sway German decision making—Germany continued to support Ukraine. In fact, Berlin became Kyiv’s second-biggest military supplier after Washington. Although Germany has hesitated to step into a leading role in Europe—delaying the delivery of tanks and still debating whether to provide long-range missiles to Ukraine—the era of a special relationship between Russia and Germany is over.

Putin’s reaction to this has been to turn his false narrative about neo-Nazis in Ukraine back on Germany. “It’s unbelievable but true,” he said at an event earlier this year commemorating Soviet sacrifices during World War II. “We are again being threatened with German Leopard tanks.” (Germany had “panther” and “tiger” tanks in World War II, but no “leopards,” in fact.) Germans, however, thought of a different wartime analogy for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939. “Acting as an imperial power, Russia now seeks to redraw borders by force,” wrote Olaf Scholz, Germany’s current chancellor, and “my country’s history gives it a special responsibility to fight the forces of fascism, authoritarianism, and imperialism.”

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Putin appears to hope that a return to Russia’s pre-2022 relationship with Germany is possible. Because “one line of Nord Stream 2 has survived” (the other line was blown up last year), “tomorrow we open the valve,” he has offered—if Germany asks to resume its Russian gas supply. But this is something, he complained, that Germany’s “bosses in Washington” will not allow the country to do. (The idea that the U.S. dictates policy to Berlin is a favorite trope of his: The Americans “continue to occupy Germany,” he said on Russian TV earlier this year.)

Rebuffed by Germany’s centrist politicians, Putin has been forced to look for allies on the more extreme margins of German politics. A supposed lack of national sovereignty and independence is a popular narrative among far-right parties and conspiracist movements in Germany. For example, AfD is calling for emancipation from the United States and rapprochement with Russia in its platform for the candidates it’s running in next year’s European parliamentary elections. The rhetoric of Germany’s continued “occupation” is also echoed by the ultra-reactionary Reichsbürger movement, whose members do not accept the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic and wish for the restitution of the “German Reich” that ended with the defeat of the Nazis.

[Anne Applebaum: Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable]

AfD politicians have repeatedly argued that Germany should move away from the European Union’s sanctions and reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. As well as calling for an end to support for Ukraine, they have also blamed NATO expansion for provoking Russia. For its part, Moscow has cultivated relations with the AfD, including a 2020 meeting between senior party members and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. The Kremlin has also brought AfD members on all-expenses-paid trips to Russia and invited them to act as “election observers” in Crimea. In August, an investigation by Der Spiegel found that an AfD staffer in the Bundestag who was preparing a lawsuit against the German government over its arms supplies to Ukraine had taken multiple trips to Russia, returning with large sums of cash and suspected contacts to Russian intelligence.

The attitudes of the AfD and movements like Reichsbürger conveniently align with some of Putin’s views about Germany. Reichsbürger is growing in strength, and now has more than 20,000 members. A regional branch of Germany’s domestic-intelligence service last year warned that Russia is actively encouraging the movement in online disinformation campaigns.

The likely reasons for Putin’s interest in his new friends are not hard to discern. The rise of Germany’s far right makes it easier for Russia to undermine social cohesion and public consensus. The political center in Germany is growing weaker: The three parties in the governing coalition—the Greens, the Social Democrats, and the Free Democrats—are not performing well. No major party has given any indication of being willing to include the AfD in a coalition. That makes it very unlikely that the AfD will gain power at the federal level. But its strength in local and regional elections is eroding the firewall that Germany’s political center has tried to build between itself and the far right.

[David Frum: Can Germany resist the Trump disease?]

To make things worse, a new nationalist left-wing party just launched by the charismatic politician Sahra Wagenknecht echoes some of the AfD’s positions on Russia. In the past, the Kremlin has also targeted Germany’s far left with hopes of establishing an anti-war coalition between the far left and the far right. Wagenknecht’s party may draw votes away from the AfD, but even if it succeeds in doing so, the presence of two populist antiestablishment and pro-Russian parties threatens to further destabilize the political center.   

By backing the AfD and other extreme actors in German politics, Putin is betting not only on diminishing support for Ukraine in Germany, but also on European and American fatigue with the war effort. As major elections approach in Western countries in 2024 and 2025, Russian interference and disinformation efforts are bound to increase. Its support for far-right groups in the West is not just about weakening democratic societies; it is part of a geopolitical strategy. At a time when the world faces political turmoil on several fronts, the success of Putin’s tactics will be decided at ballot boxes across Europe and in the United States.

It prevents him from criticising court staff, prosecutors and possible witnesses between now and his trial.

The US president's support for genocide in Gaza is hardly surprising given his country's settler-colonial past.

On August 16, 1867, a young farmer named Alfred McDonald Sargent Johnson walked into the courthouse of Cherokee County, Georgia. He had an oath to swear.

The effects of the Civil War were still visible in Canton, a village of about 200 people and the county seat. For one thing, that makeshift courthouse was inside a Presbyterian church—its predecessor having been torched by William Tecumseh Sherman’s men shortly before their march to the sea. For another, Georgia was still under military rule as federal officials debated how best to reconstruct the former Confederate states. How does a government reintegrate the men who, not that long ago, were engaged in a treasonous rebellion?

[Read: Elon Musk’s anti-semitc apartheid-loving grandfather]

Johnson had, like many of his neighbors, taken up arms against the United States. At age 21, he’d joined Company F of the 3rd Georgia Cavalry. The Third had fought in the Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns, and Johnson had even been captured as a Union prisoner at New Haven, Kentucky. But he was just a foot soldier in a much larger war. Johnson had not grown up in a stereotypical plantation “big house”; his family’s farm was modest in size and census records do not list him or his father as having owned slaves. He ended the conflict as a private, just as he’d entered it. Johnson might not even have cared much for his war experience; Confederate records list him as having gone AWOL for a period in 1863.

Still, the federal government had decided that even men like him could not return to political power without making at least a gesture of reconciliation. A few months earlier, Congress had passed, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, an act that required the men of Georgia and other southern states to swear an oath in order to regain their voting privileges. That oath was why Alfred M. S. Johnson was in the courthouse that August day.

There had been much debate in the North, during the war and after it, about how to reintegrate former Confederates into political life—and how forgiving to be of their rebellion. The most radical Republicans wanted to require an “Ironclad Oath” swearing that the prospective voter had “never voluntarily borne arms against the United States” nor given “aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement” to the Confederacy. Such language would have disenfranchised most white southern men.

The Wade-Davis Bill of 1864 would have required a majority of white men in each state to take the Ironclad Oath before full readmission to the union. Lincoln pocket-vetoed that bill, considering it too harsh. He’d backed a much more lenient plan requiring only 10 percent of a state’s pre-war voters to swear an oath before that state could be readmitted. And his version was more forgiving than the Ironclad Oath, requiring only future loyalty—that they would “henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of the States thereunder.”

The oath Alfred Johnson would take had been defined in Congress’ Reconstruction Acts, and it was closer to Lincoln’s than to the Ironclad Oath. Like Lincoln’s, it treated the leaders of the Confederacy with less mercy than it did enlisted men. Johnson had to swear that he had:

never been a member of any State Legislature, nor held any executive or judicial office in any State and afterwards engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof;

that I have never taken an oath as a member of Congress of the United States, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State Legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, and afterwards engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof;

that I will faithfully support the Constitution and obey the laws of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, encourage others so to do.

So help me God.

Johnson had never been a state legislator, or a federal judge, or a member of Congress, so it would not have been a particularly difficult oath to take. The rebellion’s leaders would have to wait a bit longer to be allowed back into full political citizenship.

[J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe: The constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again]

The worst class of rebels, the oath seemed to argue, was those who had joined the attempted insurrection after already been elected or appointed to trusted positions of power—the ones that require an oath to support the Constitution. Both Lincoln and President Andrew Johnson had made similar exceptions for public officials who had rebelled, requiring a more difficult route to amnesty. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was then before the states for ratification, made the same distinction—as Donald Trump is now discovering.

Alfred M. S. Johnson went back to farming after that August day. Not long after, he had a son and named him Andrew Johnson—presumably in honor of the man who succeeded Lincoln in the presidency and had pardoned all ex-Confederates by the end of 1868.

Andrew Johnson eventually moved west to Hempstead County, Arkansas. There, he had a son named Garner James Johnson. As a young man, Garner Johnson left farming and moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, taking a job on the Kansas City Southern Railroad. He begat Raymond Ralph Johnson, who begat James Patrick Johnson, who begat James Michael Johnson.

On October 25, 2023, James Michael Johnson—better known as Mike Johnson—was elected the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives.

[Read: A speaker without enemies–for now]

Like his great-great-great-grandfather Alfred, Mike Johnson was part of an attempt to oust the duly elected government of the United States and replace it with one more to his liking. In Alfred’s day, the tools were secession and battle; Johnson’s were spurious claims of voter fraud and trumped-up legal arguments.

After Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Mike Johnson worked hard to prevent the transition of power. In the days after the vote, he told interviewers that the allegations of rigged Dominion voting machines had “a lot of merit,” that there were “credible allegations of fraud and irregularity,” and that a voting system was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”

In December 2020, Johnson organized an effort to get his fellow House Republicans to sign on to an amicus brief for a lawsuit challenging election results in the four states that would, if their votes were thrown out, give Trump a second term. He sent them all an email with the subject line “**Time-sensitive request from President Trump**” saying the president would be watching to see which GOP members of Congress signed on and which did not.

About three-quarters of the House Republicans who objected to the Electoral College count on January 6 cited legal arguments Johnson had made, leading The New York Times to call him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.” He gave what one fellow Republican member called “a fig-leaf intellectual argument” for overturning the election.

Johnson’s attempts were unsuccessful. The Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit in a brief, unsigned opinion. The 147 Congressional Republicans who, like Johnson, objected to the electoral vote count were outnumbered in the end.

But America was once again forced to ask: What do you do with men after they have fomented a rebellion against an elected government? After the Civil War, the federal response was generally lenient. Among the Confederacy’s top leaders, only Jefferson Davis served prison time, and then for just two years. President Johnson pardoned the overwhelming share of ex-Confederates barely a month after Lincoln’s assassination; he spent the remainder of his presidency pardoning the rest. Within a dozen years, conservative white southerners once again ruled the South—a control often achieved through great violence by former Confederate soldiers.

Mike Johnson didn’t lead a civil war, of course. But he did try to overturn an election and impose a president Americans hadn’t voted for. And it is striking how small the repercussions have been for those who did likewise. For members of Congress, opposing false claims of voter fraud has been much more politically dangerous than supporting them. Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Tom Emmer each endorsed Johnson’s spurious legal arguments, and each has been nominated for speaker this year. And now, at the mention of Johnson’s actions, the House Republican caucus does little but laugh and boo.

I keep coming back to Alfred McDonald Sargent Johnson, Mike’s great-great-great-grandfather, and the oath he had to take that day in Cherokee County, pledging not to engage in rebellion again. Mike Johnson wasn’t a lowly foot soldier stuck in a war he played no role in starting. He was its architect, its author and finisher. And yet the only oath he’s been asked to take is as speaker of the House of Representatives.

She will have to testify in a $250m business fraud case against her father and brothers, a New York judge rules.

To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.

But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a Vietnam War that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.

Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.

“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”

This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.

“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”

Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.

“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”

In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.

“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”

The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”

Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.

Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.

Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”

But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”

Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”

If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?

“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”

Phillips no longer wonders if there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country.  If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.

Over the course of a weekend with Phillips on his farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?

“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”

Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.

Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.

And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.

He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.

It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)

When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—with party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuking him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?

[Read: So much for Biden the bridge president]

Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.

Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.

But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.

“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”

Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”

Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”

With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”

[Read: Why not Whitmer?]

By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.  

“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”

Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.

Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.

In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.

In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.

Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.

No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.

Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.

“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.

“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”

The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.

“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”

Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”

Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.

[Andrew Ferguson: Leave Lincoln out of it]

He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.

“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”

Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.

Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make good-bye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?

“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”

On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.

When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?

Phillips decided the answer was no.

Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.

“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”

It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.

With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive “DEAN”-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”

The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.

At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.

Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.

Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.

All this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?

At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.

“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” he trailed off.

Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.

“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.

He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”

Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.

“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”

As president, Donald Trump imposed an array of deeply divisive immigration restrictions on both Latinos and Muslims. And yet from 2016 to 2020, he increased his share of the vote among both groups. Even some Latino and Muslim voters who opposed Trump’s immigration agenda moved to support him anyway because of his record on other issues, particularly the economy and conservative social priorities.

Now Trump and several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are doubling down on the bet that they can target each group with harsh immigration policies without paying an electoral price.

For months, they have proposed an escalating succession of hard-line measures aimed at deterring mostly Latino undocumented migrants from crossing the southern border. And following the Hamas terror attack on Israel earlier this month, they rolled out a wave of exclusionary proposals aimed at Muslims. Trump has pledged that, if returned to the White House, he will restore his travel ban on people from a number of majority-Muslim nations, expand ideological screening of all potential immigrants to ensure that they agree with “our religion,” and deport foreign students in the United States who express hostility to Israel.

Trump and other GOP 2024 candidates such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have unveiled these proposals even as many Democratic-leaning activists warn that support for President Joe Biden is suffering in Latino and Muslim communities. Polls have consistently shown widespread discontent among Latinos over inflation and the economy. And many Muslim Americans are angry at Biden for his strong support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he pursues his military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza. “There is a level of disgust and disbelief and disappointment at the administration’s handling of the crisis so far,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told me.

The movement of some of these voters away from Biden produces a powerful incentive for Republicans to escalate their rhetorical and policy offensive against immigrant communities. It means that Trump could achieve the best of both worlds politically: offering a harsh anti-immigrant agenda that energizes the most xenophobic white voters in his coalition while still maintaining, or even growing, his support among immigrant communities drawn to him (or repelled by Democrats) on other issues.

That process already seems well under way in the agenda that Trump and other Republicans are advancing about the southern border. The fact that Trump’s vote among Hispanics improved in 2020, even after he implemented such aggressive policies as starting the border wall and separating migrant children from their parents, has undoubtedly encouraged him to go even further with his new proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants in the U.S. and military action against Mexico (both of which DeSantis has also endorsed).

Likewise, if Trump wins the 2024 election and more Muslim Americans vote for him than in 2020, despite his threats to target Muslim immigrants, he will undoubtedly feel emboldened in a second term to impose more exclusionary policies on that community. Stephen Miller, the hard-line architect of much of Trump’s immigration agenda as president, offered a preview of the deportation agenda that might be ahead when he posted a video of a recent pro-Palestinian demonstration and wrote that ICE agents “will be busy in 2025.”

Over his four years in office, Trump instituted policies more resistant to immigration than any president had since the 1920s, and repeatedly disparaged immigrants with openly racist language (including calling Mexicans “rapists” and decrying immigration from mostly Black “shithole countries”). He is now pushing beyond even that agenda. “What comes next will be … spectacular,” Miller posted recently.

As just a first step, Trump has proposed to reinstate all of the key policies he implemented that raised nearly insurmountable hurdles for those who sought to claim asylum in the U.S., including the “remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to stay in that country, typically in crowded and dangerous makeshift camps, while their cases were adjudicated. He’s promised to finish his border wall. And during his CNN town hall last spring, Trump refused to rule out reinstating the separation of migrant children from their parents, his most controversial policy. The Biden administration has reversed all of these policies, and it recently settled a lawsuit in which the federal government agreed not to restore the child-separation policy. Still, experts say that a reelected Trump would almost certainly seek to void or evade that agreement.

After the Hamas attack in Israel, Trump also pledged to bring back his travel ban. A bitterly divided Supreme Court upheld the rule in a 5–4 vote in 2018; if reelected, Trump could unilaterally restore the policy through executive action. “The legal framework,” Mitchell from the Council on American-Islamic Relations told me, “is still there just waiting to be used.”

But Trump has new ideas too. These include ending birthright citizenship (though his legal authority to do so is highly questionable) and launching military actions against Mexican drug cartels. In a speech to a conservative group earlier this year, he promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

He is also calling for requiring prospective immigrants from any country to pass intensified ideological screenings: “If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you’re disqualified; if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you’re disqualified; and if you’re a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified,” he said earlier this month in Iowa. Monday in New Hampshire, Trump raised the ante when he said he would bar entry for those who “don’t like our religion,” without explaining how he defined “our religion.” He’s pledged to deport students and other immigrants who express what he called “jihadist sympathies.”

David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says Trump’s record as president shows that it would be a mistake to dismiss even the most extreme of these proposals as simply campaign rhetoric designed to stir his crowds. “Every word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth ought to be taken seriously,” Leopold told me. If Trump returns to power, he said, we will see a version of his first term’s “anti-immigrant policy on steroids.”

While Trump was president, and his agenda was in the spotlight, most of his core immigration policies provoked majority opposition in polls. In a compilation of results from its annual American Values Survey polls late in Trump’s presidency, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that just over half of Americans opposed his Muslim travel ban, about three-fifths opposed his border wall, and fully three-fourths opposed the child-separation policy.

But public tolerance for some of these ideas may be growing amid dissatisfaction with Biden’s record in managing the border and immigration. Less than a third of adults overall—and only about one-fourth of independents—said they approved of Biden’s handling of those issues in the latest annual American Values Survey, released yesterday. A recent national Marquette University Law School Poll found that Americans preferred Trump over Biden on controlling the border by nearly two to one.

A recent Quinnipiac University national poll found that a majority of Americans support building a border wall for the first time since the pollsters initially asked about the idea, in 2016. “With frustration building” over Biden’s record on immigration, “it looks to me that some of these more extreme ideas are gaining traction in the country,” Robert P. Jones, the president of PRRI, told me.

Even many in the communities that Trump’s immigration plans would most directly affect appear more focused on other issues. Every major data source on voting behavior agreed that Trump grew his vote among Latino voters from about three in 10 to nearly four in 10 from 2016 to 2020, largely around economic issues, but also because of gains among cultural conservatives. Though the GOP advance among Latinos stalled between the 2020 and 2022 elections, polls continue to record widespread dissatisfaction among them about inflation, which could further erode support for Democrats in 2024.

The Muslim American community is much smaller—Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the total U.S. population—so reliable information on its voting behavior is less available. Youssef Chouhoud, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, told me that Trump’s vote among Muslim Americans nationwide improved from about one in six in 2016 to roughly one in three in 2020. Key to those 2020 gains, he said, was sympathy to conservative GOP arguments on issues such as LGBTQ rights and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

Now, Chouhoud and others note, those Republican gains are being reinforced by the backlash among many Muslim activists against Biden’s expansive support for Israel in the conflict with Hamas. Waleed Shahid, a Muslim American Democratic strategist who has worked for several liberal groups and candidates, says that leading Democrats are underestimating the visceral anger over Biden’s words and actions. “I think, unfortunately, Democratic leadership has their heads in the sand about this,” he told me.

Both Chouhoud and Shahid told me they believed that Trump’s return to anti-Muslim rhetoric reduces the odds that any significant number of voters from that community will abandon Biden to vote for the former president. But they both said they considered it likely that some Muslim American voters disillusioned with Biden might stay home or drift to third-party candidates. “The fact that this chorus” in the Muslim community “is so loud” in criticizing Biden, “even given the full knowledge” of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, “is telling you that there is a groundswell of real animosity toward the policies that the Biden administration is enacting right now,” said Chouhoud, who is also a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan group that studies issues concerning Muslim Americans. This discontent could matter most in the swing state of Michigan, where Muslims are a sizable constituency: A mobile billboard drove through the Detroit area this week displaying a message proclaiming that “Israel Bombs Children” and “Biden Pays For It.”

Shahid says he fears that the 2024 election won’t look like 2020’s—when Democrats of all stripes unified behind the common mission of ousting Trump from the White House. Instead, he thinks, the next election will more closely resemble that of 2016, when a decisive sliver of Democratic-leaning voters, particularly younger ones, backed the third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein rather than Hillary Clinton.

“The Democratic base did not turn out for Hillary in 2016, even though Trump was a right-wing extremist,” Shahid told me. “People somehow have collective amnesia about this. But Biden is historically unpopular with the Democratic base.”

Of course Biden may regain Muslim voters’ trust if he can jump-start renewed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians after the fighting concludes. Similarly, very few Latinos may now be aware of Trump’s proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants and military action against Mexico; if he’s the nominee, that would likely change—and prompt substantial resistance, especially among Mexican Americans.

Still, these tensions reveal a larger dynamic underpinning the potential 2024 rematch between the two men. On almost every front, Trump has formulated a 2024 agenda even more confrontational to Democratic constituencies and liberal priorities than he pursued during his four years in the White House. Yet disenchantment with Biden’s performance could be eroding the will to resist that agenda among key components of the party’s coalition, particularly young people and voters of color.

The pressure that the Middle East crisis is placing on Muslim American support for Biden, even as Trump directly threatens that community, shows how hard it may be for Democrats to maintain a united front—even against an opponent whom they consider an existential threat to all that they value.