No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.

But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination. Donald Trump’s lead appears prohibitive, but no candidate has ever won his party’s nomination while facing four (so far) separate felony indictments. (Then again, no one has ever lost his party’s nomination while facing four separate felony indictments either.) Ron DeSantis is still barely clinging to his position as the leading challenger to Trump, but Nikki Haley has closed most of the distance with him—though the title seems ever more meaningless. Behind them is a large field of Republicans who are hoping for a lucky break, a Trump collapse, a VP nomination, or maybe just some fun travel and a cable-news contract down the road.

[David A. Graham: The first debate is Ramaswamy and the rest]

On the other side, Democratic hesitations about a second Joe Biden term have mostly dissolved into resignation that he’s running, but Representative Dean Phillips is making a last-ditch effort to offer a younger alternative. Biden’s age and the generally lukewarm feeling among some voters have ensured that a decent-size shadow field still lingers, just waiting in case Biden bows out for some reason.

Behind all of this, the possibility of a serious third-party bid, led by either No Labels or some other group, continues to linger; Cornel West is running, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has leapt from the Democratic primary to an independent campaign. It adds up to a race that is simple on the surface but strangely confusing just below it. This guide to the candidates—who’s in, who’s out, and who’s somewhere in between—serves as a road map to navigate that. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

[Read: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP was always fully behind Trump, and as his rivals have failed to gain much traction, he's consolidated many of the rest and built an all-but-prohibitive lead.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, and he very likely will.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run in a train wreck of an appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces on May 24.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers a synthesis of Trump-style culture warring and bullying and the conservative politics of the early-2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
From the advent of his campaign, DeSantis presented the prospect of a candidate with Trump’s policies but no Trump. But his fading polling suggests that not many Republicans are interested.

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

Can he win the nomination?
A better question these days: Can he hold on to take honorary silver in the race?

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Haley has tried to steer a path that distances herself from Trump—pointing out his unpopularity—without openly attacking him. She may also be the top foreign-policy hawk in the field.

[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina]

Who wants her to run? Haley is on the rise now, and seems to be challenging DeSantis for status as the top Trump alternative—but still lags far behind Trump himself.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 38-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling résumé (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J. D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.

Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like COVIDism, climatism, and gender ideology.”

Who wants him to run?
That remains a bit unclear—though his Republican rivals all seem to viscerally detest him. Ramaswamy had a summer surge when he was a new flavor, but it’s subsided as people have gotten to know and, apparently, dislike him.

Can he win the nomination?
Seems unlikely. Ramaswamy broke out of the ranks of oddballs to become a mildly formidable contender, but his slick shtick and questionable pronouncements have dragged him down.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, the formerly longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
Yes. Hutchinson announced on April 2 that he is running. It would have been funnier to announce a day earlier, though.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying that Trump disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the 2020 election. Hutchinson is also unique in the field for having called on Trump to drop out over his indictment in New York.

Who wants him to run?
Old-school, very conservative Republicans who also detest Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign in North Charleston, South Carolina, on May 22.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, is his first highish-profile endorsement. As DeSantis stumbles, he’s gotten some attention as a possible likable Trump alternative.

Can he win the nomination?
Doesn’t look like it. Scott has always been solidly in the second tier, but he’s running out of time to ever get anywhere.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as the governor of Indiana and a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
No! He shocked a Las Vegas audience by dropping out on October 28. He’d been running since June 7.

Why did he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. As the campaign went on, he slowly began to develop a sharper critique of Trump while still awkwardly celebrating the accomplishments of the administration in which he served.

Who wanted him to run?
Conservative Christians and rabbit lovers, but not very many people overall.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

Could he have won the nomination?
It wasn’t in the cards.

(Ida Mae Astute / Getty) Chris Christie

Who is he?
What a journey this guy has had, from U.S. attorney to respected governor of New Jersey to traffic-jam laughingstock to Trump sidekick to Trump critic. Whew.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on June 6 in New Hampshire.

Why does he want to run?
Anyone who runs for president once and loses wants to run again—especially if he thinks the guy who beat him is an idiot, as Christie clearly thinks about Trump. Moreover, he seems agitated to see other Republicans trying to run without criticizing Trump.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical donors, liberal pundits.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Doug Burgum

Who is he?
Do you even pay attention to politics? Nah, just kidding. A self-made software billionaire, Burgum is serving his second term as the governor of North Dakota.

Is he running?
Apparently! He formally
launched his campaign on June 7 in Fargo.

Why does he want to run?
It’s tough to tell. His campaign-announcement video focuses so much on North Dakota that it seems more like a reelection push. He told a state newspaper that he thinks the “silent majority” of Americans wants candidates who aren’t on the extremes. (A wealthy outsider targeting the silent majority? Where have we heard that before?) He also really wants more domestic oil production.

Who wants him to run?
Lots of people expected a governor from the Dakotas to be a candidate in 2024, but they were looking at Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Burgum is very popular at home—he won more than three-quarters of the vote in 2020—but that still amounts to fewer people than the population of Toledo, Ohio.

Can he win the nomination?
“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” he has said. “That’s a competitive advantage.” But it’s even better to have a chance, which he doesn’t.

What else do we know?
He’s giving people $20 gift cards in return for donating to his campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Will Hurd

Who is he?
A former CIA officer, Hurd served three terms in the House, representing a San Antonio–area district.

Is he running?
No. Hurd, who announced his campaign on June 22, dropped out on October 9 and endorsed Nikki Haley.

Why did he want to run?
Hurd said he had “commonsense” ideas and was “pissed” that elected officials are dividing Americans. He’s also been an outspoken Trump critic.

Who wanted him to run?
As a moderate, youngish Black Republican and someone who cares about defense, he is the sort of candidate whom the party establishment seemed to desire after the now-discarded 2012 GOP autopsy.

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(Mandel Ngan / Getty) Francis Suarez

Who is he?
Suarez is the popular second-term mayor of Miami and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Is he running?
No. He suspended his campaign on August 29, less than three months after his June 15 entry.

Why did he want to run?
Suarez touted his youth—he’s 45—and said in October 2022, “I’m someone who believes in a positive aspirational message. I’m someone who has a track record of success and a formula for success.”

Who wanted him to run?
Is there really room for another moderate-ish Republican in the race? Apparently not! Despite dabbling in fundraising shenanigans, Suarez failed to make the first Republican debate (or any other splash).

Could he have won the nomination?
No way.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year, after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Hogan ruled himself out of the GOP race on March 5, saying he was worried it would help Trump win the nomination, but he is now rumored as a potential No Labels candidate, even though such a run might hand the presidency to … Trump.

Why does he want to run?
Hogan has argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.”

Who wants him to run?
Dead-ender centrists.

Could he win the nomination?
No.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he is the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and the son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
No. On June 5, after weighing a campaign, he announced that he would not run. Warning about the dangers of a Trump reprise, he said, “Every candidate needs to understand the responsibility of getting out and getting out quickly if it’s not working.” Points for taking his own advice!

Why did he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and saw his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism. He is also a prominent Trump critic.

Who wanted him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
No. On April 14, Pompeo announced that he wasn’t running. “This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again,” he said.

Why did he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wanted him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Could he have won the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
No. He spent much of 2023 refusing to categorically rule out a race but not quite committing. As Ron DeSantis’s Trump-alternative glow dimmed, Youngkin seemed to be hoping that Republican success in off-year Virginia legislative elections would give him a boost. After Democrats won control of both the state’s legislative chambers, however, he said he was “not going anywhere.”

Why did he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran for governor largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, but the legislative defeat makes that unlikely.

Who wanted him to run?
Rupert Murdoch, reportedly, as well as other wealthy, business-friendly Republican figures.

Could he have won the nomination?
Certainly not without running, and almost certainly not if he did.

(Sam Wolfe / Bloomberg / Getty) Mike Rogers

Who is he?
Rogers is a congressman from Alabam—wait, no, sorry, that’s the other Representative Mike Rogers. This one is from Michigan and retired in 2015. He was previously an FBI agent and was head of the Intelligence Committee while on Capitol Hill.

Is he running?
No. He thought about it but announced in late August that he would run for U.S. Senate instead.

Why did he want to run?
He laid out some unassailably broad ideas for a campaign in an interview with Fox News, including a focus on innovation and civic education, but it’s hard to tell what exactly the goal is here. “This is not a vanity project for me,” he added, which, okay, sure.

Who wanted him to run?
It’s not clear that anyone even noticed he was running.

Could he have won the nomination?
Nope.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Larry Elder

Who is he?
A longtime conservative radio host and columnist, he ran as a Republican in the unsuccessful 2021 attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Is he running?
Not anymore. Elder announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on April 20, but then disappeared without a trace. On October 27, he dropped out and endorsed Trump.

Why did he want to run?
Glad you asked! “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable,” he tweeted. “We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there. That’s why I’m running for President.” We don’t have any idea what that means either.

Who wanted him to run?
Practically no one.

Could he have won the nomination?
Absolutely not.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Rick Perry

Who is he?
Perry was a three-term governor of Texas before serving as energy secretary under Donald Trump. He’s also run for president three times: in 2012, 2016, and … I forget the third one. Oops.

Is he running?
Oh, right! The third one is 2024, maybe. He told CNN in May that he’s considering a run. Nothing’s been heard since. We’ll say no.

Why did he want to run?
He didn’t say, but he’s struggled to articulate much of a compelling case to Republican voters beyond the fact that he’s from Texas, he looks good in a suit, and he wants to be president, gosh darn it.

Who wanted him to run?
Probably no one. As Mike Pompeo already discovered, there wasn’t much of a market for a run-of-the-mill former Trump Cabinet member in the primary—especially one who had such a forgettable turn as secretary, mostly remembered for being dragged peripherally into both the first Trump impeachment and election subversion.

Could he have won the nomination?
The third time wouldn’t have been a charm.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Rick Scott

Who is he?
Before his current gig as a U.S. senator from Florida, Scott was governor and chief executive of a health-care company that committed massive Medicare fraud.

Is he running?
The New York Times says he’s considering it, though an aide said Scott is running for reelection to the Senate. He’d be the fourth Floridian in the race.

Why does he want to run?
A Scott campaign would raise a fascinating question: What if you took Trump’s pose and ideology but removed all the charisma and, instead of promising to protect popular entitlement programs, aimed to demolish them?

Who wants him to run?
Not Mitch McConnell.

Can he win the nomination?
lol

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Yes. Biden formally announced his run on April 25.

Why does he want to run?
Biden’s slogan is apparently “Let’s finish the job.” He centered his launch video on the theme of freedom, but underlying all of this is his apparent belief that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

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

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters that they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
Barring unforeseen catastrophe, yes. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person to be elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Joshua Roberts / Getty) Cenk Uygur

Who is he?
A pundit from the party’s left flank, Uygur is probably best know for his The Young Turks network. He was briefly an MSNBC personality and also ran for Congress in California in 2020.

Is he running?
Apparently. He announced his plans on October 11.

Why does he want to run?
Uygur believes that Biden will lose the 2024 election and thus wants to force him to withdraw. “I’m going to do whatever I can to help him decide that this is not the right path,” he told Semafor’s Dave Weigel. “If he retires now, he’s a hero: He beat Trump, he did a good job of being a steward of the economy. If he doesn’t, he loses to Trump, and he’s the villain of the story.”

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

Who wants him to run?
We’ll see if anyone does. Uygur has a sizable audience—his YouTube channel has millions of subscribers—but that doesn’t mean he has any real presidential constituency.

Can he win the nomination?
No, and he has a deeper problem: He is ineligible to serve, because he was born in Turkey. This isn’t an interesting nuance of the law, as with misguided questions about Ted Cruz’s or John McCain’s eligibility, or disinformation, as with Barack Obama. Uygur is just not a natural-born citizen. He claims he’ll take the matter to the Supreme Court and win in a “slam dunk.” As Biden would say, if he were willing to give Uygur any attention: Lots of luck in your senior year.

(Bill Clark / Getty) Dean Phillips

Who is he?
Phillips, a mildly unorthodox and interesting figure, is a Minnesota moderate serving his third term in the House.

Is he running?
Yes. He launched his campaign October 27 in New Hampshire. That follows a Hamlet act to make Mario Cuomo proud—in July, he said he was considering it; in August, he said he was unlikely to run but would encourage other Democrats to do so; then, after finding no other Democrats willing to run, he said he was not ruling it out.

Why does he want to run?
In an in-depth profile by my colleague Tim Alberta, Phillips said he’s most concerned about beating Trump. “Look, just because [Biden’s] old, that’s not a disqualifier,” Phillips said. “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.” He added: “Someone had to do this. It just was so self-evident.”

Who wants him to run?
Phillips told Alberta that even some Biden allies privately encouraged him to run—but no one will say it openly. Though many Democrats feel Biden is too old, that doesn’t mean that they’re willing to openly back a challenger, especially a little-known one, or that Phillips can overcome the structural barriers to beating an incumbent in a primary. There’s a reason Phillips couldn’t draft another Democrat to run.

Can he win the nomination?
Almost certainly not in 2024—even if Biden leaves the race.

What else do we know?
His grandmother was “Dear Abby,” and he made a fortune running the Talenti gelato company.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden were to bow out, she’d be the immediate favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
Not right now.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden stepped away.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Not at this moment.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden dropped out, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
No.

Why would she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Not if she isn’t running.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Supposedly. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C., but the only peeps from her have involved staff turnover.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice: “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both a scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
No.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Not now.

THIRD-PARTY AND INDEPENDENT (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run for the Democratic nomination on April 19, but on October 9 he dropped out of that race to run as an independent.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition. His campaign is arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming”), but tending toward extremely dark places.

Who wants him to run?
Soon after he announced his campaign, Kennedy reached double digits in polls against Biden—a sign of dissatisfaction with the president and of Kennedy’s name recognition. It has since become clear that Democratic voters are not interested in anti-Semitic kookery, though some other fringe elements might be.

Can he win?
No. The relevant question is whether a third-party candidacy would help Biden, Trump, or neither. The short answer is no one knows, but he very well might boost the president’s chances.

(Tom Williams / Getty) Joe Manchin

Who is he?
A Democratic U.S. senator and former governor of West Virginia, he was the pivotal centrist vote for the first two years of Joe Biden’s term. I’ve described him as “a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.”

Is he running?
It’s very hard to tell how serious he is. He has visited Iowa, and is being courted by No Labels, the nonpartisan centrist organization, to carry its banner. He’s shown no signs of running, and would stand no chance, in the Democratic primary.

Why does he want to run?
Manchin would arguably have less power as a third-party president than he does as a crucial swing senator, but he faces perhaps the hardest reelection campaign of his life in 2024, as the last Democrat standing in a now solidly Republican state. He also periodically seems personally piqued at Biden and the Democrats over slights perceived or real.

Who wants him to run?
No Labels would love to have someone like him, a high-profile figure who’s willing to buck his party and has policies that would appeal to voters from either party. It’s hard to imagine he’d have much of an organic base of support, but Democrats are terrified he’d siphon off enough votes to hand Trump or another Republican the win in a three-way race.

Can he win?
“Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter,” he said in April. If that is true, do not expect to see him in the presidential race.

(Frederick M. Brown / Getty) Cornel West

Who is he?
West is a philosopher, a theologian, a professor, a preacher, a gadfly, a progressive activist, an actor, a spoken-word recording artist, an author … and we’re probably missing a few.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on the People’s Party ticket on June 5. Soon thereafter he switched to the Green Party, which might have gotten him the best ballot access. But as of October, he’s running as an independent.

Why does he want to run?
“In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States,” he said in his announcement video. West is a fierce leftist who has described Trump as a “neofascist” and Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal.”

Who wants him to run?
West was a high-profile backer of Bernie Sanders, and it’s easy to imagine him winning over some of Sanders’s fervent fans. Now that he is running as an independent, he will likely have trouble building a base of his own.

Can he win?
Let’s hear from Brother West: “Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he said. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.” Sounds like a no, but it should be a lively, entertaining campaign.

During the fall of 2022, my family and I lived in Tel Aviv, where my wife and I were visiting professors at Reichman University, in Herzliya. I taught a class called “Democracy and Dictatorship.” It was a fraught time. Almost all of my students were in the military or veterans. Several were deeply concerned that Benjamin Netanyahu would bring a new era of antagonistic nationalism to Israel, at a time when they felt the country needed cohesion instead. One said she would likely leave the country if he won.

As the former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, I was asked to speak at the university’s annual World Summit on Counter-Terrorism conference, on a panel about the dangers of far-right terrorism in the United States. In my presentation, I recounted a chilling conversation I’d had in June 2017 with a civil servant from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. He told me that Trump-administration officials had basically instructed his office to stop talking about white nationalists when they referred to domestic terrorism in the United States. He implied that this decision had been made for domestic political reasons.

Two months later, Charlottesville was invaded by multiple violent white-nationalist militias who’d plotted their attack secretly on the gaming chat app Discord. Federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the Department of Justice, supposedly dedicated to preventing just this sort of incident, were absent from the scene.

[Read: The end of Netanyahu]

Elizabeth Neumann, Trump’s assistant secretary at DHS for counterterrorism and threat prevention, resigned in 2020 in protest of the administration’s ideological approach to violent right-wing extremists. She gave an interview that exposed in detail how the administration not only failed to “inoculate [conservatives] from that recruitment and that radicalization,” but also took actions that had “the opposite effect. We have the president not only pretty much refusing to condemn, but throwing fuel on the fire, creating opportunities for more recruitment through his rhetoric.”

After the panel ended, I walked outside. It was a beautiful blue autumn day; the blazing desert heat of the Israeli summer had only recently receded. A slender, dark-haired, curiously intense man approached me. He introduced himself as an official with the “Office of the Prime Minister” and asked if I would be interested in briefing his “colleagues” on some of our lessons from the United States.

Of course, I said. Inquiring with my own colleagues afterward, I learned that the department name was a euphemism. I was being invited to brief Shin Bet, Israel’s FBI, which usually referred to itself as the “Office of the Prime Minister” for confidentiality reasons.

Over the next couple of months, the man and I had several exchanges over WhatsApp about my talk, and I was invited in person to the headquarters for a prep session, where I was treated to coffee and a fruit plate. My interlocutor and a colleague advised that, although much of my talk had focused on averting the internal indecision and lack of planning that had plagued the response to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, they were most interested in the point I’d emphasized through the anecdote about the State Department official: What lessons might they draw about the dangers of political co-optation to government agencies dedicated to intelligence and counterterrorism?

In mid-December 2022, I showed up at Shin Bet’s headquarters. After being ushered through several layers of security, I was greeted by a room of a couple dozen friendly faces. I went over the events before, during, and after the notorious riot in Charlottesville, and the group, as predicted, homed in on the danger that domestic intelligence agencies can be co-opted by ideological extremists. They repeatedly asked about my observation that the federal agencies—DHS, DOJ, and the FBI—had not intervened.

They were particularly interested to learn that independent investigations had proved the link between ideology and lack of preparedness. As The New York Times Magazine reported in a 2018 exposé on the Trump administration’s cozy relationship to white nationalism, white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for the majority of fatalities in domestic terror incidents from 2008 to 2017, as compared with Islamic extremists. Nevertheless, according to P. W. Singer, a national-security expert at the think tank New America who had met with Trump-administration officials, the agencies were focused instead only on “foreign-born” terrorists.

Shin Bet’s questions were precise and apolitical. My questioners were, I realized, concerned. Watching them, I was reminded of the fathers and mothers of my friends growing up in Arlington, Virginia—civil servants in federal agencies, who were at a remove from the politicians who came and went in their agencies. I saw that these Israeli civil servants were worried about further tremors from the political earthquake that had just occurred in Israel, with the reelection of Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition.

Although they took pains not to be too specific with me, an outsider, about their worries, their questions suggested that a primary concern was how the right-wing bias of the new politicians could, as in Trump’s government, distract or deter them from the work of protecting the public.

The questions about ideological capture ended up consuming most of the meeting. How did the ideological capture happen? (Trumpism drew on nationalist sentiments that had significant currency among aggrieved white Americans.) How did the federal failures intensify the conflict in Charlottesville? (A state-level DHS memo drawing attention to the potential for domestic terrorism four days before the rally was marked “confidential” and never reached Charlottesville’s city council or the litigation that was under way to stop the rally from occurring.)

The Shin Bet meeting took place on our last day in Israel. We flew out that night, after a final meal of hummus and shakshouka at Tel Aviv’s popular restaurant chain Benedict on Ben Yehuda Street. We were close to the Mediterranean Sea, almost within earshot of the hundreds of people playing beach volleyball, yet we were overseen by dozens of security cameras bristling on poles. We were a 20-minute walk from the site of a terrorist attack on Dizengoff Street that killed 22 civilians in 1994.   

We came home to a country that, despite projections of a “red wave,” seemed to have rejected a takeover by ideological extremism. Republicans had not won a supermajority of the Senate; they were not going to impeach and convict President Joe Biden. But back in Israel, the convulsions were only just starting. I stayed in touch with several friends who played leading roles in the summer’s protests. One, a captain in the army reserves, helped close down the airports in protest of Netanyahu's policies. Another, a conservative professor, found himself joining the demonstrations together with his young family.

These were valiant attempts to halt the new government’s march to shut down an independent judiciary. Yet the sparkle of what appeared to be an awakening constitutionalism in Israel hid a deep rot. In the days since Hamas’s horrifying attack on southern Israel, I’ve been haunted by my conversations with Israeli civil servants—by both what the politicization of their jobs augured for Israel’s security and what their experience suggests for the United States.

I’ve realized since my visit that, like a virus to a new host, ideological capture can have many strains. Reports are emerging of just how dysfunctional the Netanyahu government has been at the agency level. One Associated Press review explores how a number of agencies were paralyzed by the coalition’s focus on nationalistic enterprises, subverting the independent judiciary, and then dealing with the massive protests in response. Gideon Rahat, a political-science professor at Hebrew University, told the AP reporter, “When you are a populist government and all you do is talk and tweet and write posts instead of doing real things, when you are needed you don’t know what to do.”

This misplacement of priorities particularly undermined the intelligence community. Indeed, as The Times of Israel reports, Ronen Bar, Shin Bet’s head, warned in August that terrorist attacks by Jewish Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank were fueling Palestinian terrorism. Two of Netanyahu’s coalition lawmakers then opined that “ideas of the left have reached the top” of the security agency and that senior defense officials do not know how to “distinguish between the enemy and your own people.”

The New York Times recently published a startling exposé of the security failures leading up to the attack, including the revelation that Israeli security officials spent months trying to warn Netanyahu that the “political turmoil caused by his domestic policies was weakening the country’s security and emboldening Israel’s enemies.” Yet Netanyahu refused to listen, according to the article, or even meet a senior general who “came to deliver a threat warning based on classified intelligence.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant voiced support for the civil service in a statement: “Thanks to the members of the Shin Bet and their leader, who operate far from the public eye, the lives of Israeli citizens are saved every day … Any attack by public figures against the Shin Bet harms the security of the state and its citizens.”

But by and large, the nationalism of Netanyahu’s coalition led his political appointees to neglect and underestimate intelligence about Hamas. The New York Times reported that as recently as late September, senior Israeli officials expressed concern that Israel might be attacked soon on several fronts by Iran-backed militia groups, but ignored the potential for Hamas to initiate a war with Israel from the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, American spy agencies, acting on cues from Israel, had largely stopped collecting intelligence on Hamas and its plans, “believing the group was a regional threat that Israel was managing.”

The reckoning is only beginning, as is the political infighting and ideological positioning. The chief of Shin Bet has apologized for the failure of Israeli intelligence to foresee the attack: “As the one who is at the head of the organization, the responsibility for this is on me.” But the ideological politician–Netanyahu–later issued an early-morning tweet stating that “all the defense officials, including the heads of Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet assessed that Hamas was deterred.” Outrage within his emergency government forced Netanyahu to delete the tweet and retract the political assault on the country’s professional agencies. But the damage was done. One wonders about further chilling effects on the independence of Israel’s intelligence agencies.

[Read: The Israeli government goes extreme right]

Israel plainly has enough to worry about in terms of getting its house in order. Its experience also holds an important lesson for the United States. Heading into next year’s presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies are promising to double down on their earlier pledge to root out the “deep state.” As The Atlantic has reported, immediately upon his inauguration, Trump would most likely “seek to convert thousands of career employees into appointees fireable at will by the president.” He would assert full White House control over agencies, including the Department of Justice, that for decades have operated with either full or partial independence.

[Read: The open plot to dismantle the federal government]

America devised its civil service during the Progressive era precisely to ensure that a major part of the government could work free from political pressure. Civil servants earn pensions, keep their job regardless of the political appointees who are “layered” on top of them, and ensure that the work of the government proceeds with continuity despite elections. After all, most government work, including the gathering of intelligence, does not burp forth in four-year increments timed to election cycles.

Civil servants are unfortunately often fair game for politicians. They are made fun of and attacked, described as, variously, bureaucrats or members of the deep state. But Americans should have no illusions about the new phase their democracy is entering. As in Israel, the United States is engaged in a grand battle not only over extremism, but over whether the state can stand separate from extremism. The fight is therefore not just about politics, but about the viability of government itself. As both Israel and the United States show, federal agencies are democracies’ gates against chaos. They must be defended, lest the barbarians truly take over.

“Anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” former President Donald Trump asked last night. “He was a nice fellow. But that’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

The leader of the Republican Party—and quite likely the 2024 GOP nominee—was on an extended rant about mental institutions, prisons, and, to use his phrase, “empty insane asylums.” Speaking to thousands of die-hard supporters at a rally in South Florida, Trump lamented that, under President Joe Biden, the United States has become “the dumping ground of the world.” That he had casually praised one of the most infamous psychopathic serial killers in cinema history was but an aside, brushed over and forgotten.  

This was a dystopian, at times gothic speech. It droned on for nearly 90 minutes. Trump attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. Those unnamed people were similar to, yet different from, the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C.—a place Trump famously despises, and to which he nonetheless longs to return.

His candidacy is rife with a foreboding sense of inevitability. Trump senses it; we all do. Those 91 charges across four separate indictments? Mere inconveniences. Palm trees swayed as the 45th president peered out at the masses from atop a giant stage erected near the end zone of Ted Hendricks Stadium in Hialeah. He ceremoniously accepted an endorsement from Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary. He basked in stadium-size adulation and yet still seemed sort of pissed off. He wants the whole thing to be over already. Eleven miles away, in downtown Miami, Trump’s remaining rivals were fighting for relevance at the November GOP primary debate. “I was watching these guys, and they’re not watchable,” Trump said. His son Donald Jr. referred to the neighboring event as “the dog-catcher debate.”

[Read: Trump’s rivals pass up their chance]

Though not a single vote has been cast in this election, Trump’s 44-point lead and refusal to participate in debates has made a mockery of the primary. And though many try to be, no other Republican is quite like Trump. No other candidate has legions of fans who will bake in the Florida sun for hours before gates open. No one else can draw enough people to even hold a rally this size, let alone spawn a traveling rally-adjacent road show, with a pop-up midway of vendors hawking T-shirts and buttons and ball caps and doormats and Christmas ornaments. Voters don’t fan themselves with cardboard cutouts of Chris Christie’s head.

Multiple merchandise vendors told me that the shirts featuring Trump’s mug shot have become their best sellers. Some other tees bore slogans: Ultra MAGA, Ultra MAGA and Proud, CANCEL ME, Trump Rallies Matter, 4 Time Indictment Champ, Super Duper Ultra MAGA, Fuck Biden. “Thank you and have a MAGA day!” one vendor called out with glee. As attendees poured into the stadium, some of the pre-rally songs were a little too on the nose: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “Jailhouse Rock.” Kids darted up and down the aisles between the white folding chairs, popping out to the snack bar for ice cream and popcorn. The comedian Roseanne Barr, who a few years ago was forced out of her eponymous show’s reboot after posting a racist tweet, took the stage early and thanked the MAGA faithful for welcoming her in. “You saved my life,” she said. Feet rumbled on the metal bleachers. People danced and embraced. In the hours before the night’s headliner, this felt less like a political event and more like a revival.

I saw the GOP operative Roger Stone and his small entourage saunter past the food trucks to modest applause. Onstage, Trump complimented Stone’s political acumen. (Stone, who is sort of the Forrest Gump of modern American politics, has played a role in seemingly every major scandal from Watergate to January 6, not to mention the Brooks Brothers riot that helped deliver Florida to George W. Bush in the 2000 election.)

That afternoon, seeking air-conditioning at a nearby Wendy’s, I met Kurt Jantz, who told me he’s been to more than 100 Trump rallies. Jantz had driven down to Hialeah from his home in Tampa. His pickup truck is massive, raised, and wrapped in Trump iconography. (He has an image of Trump as Rambo with a bald eagle perched on one shoulder, surrounded by a tank, a helicopter, the Statue of Liberty, and the White House, plus a background of exploding fireworks. That’s only one side of the truck.) Jantz has found a niche as a pro-MAGA rapper—he performs under the name Forgiato Blow. Tattoos cover much of his body, including a 1776 on the left side of his face. He rolled up his basketball shorts to show me Trump’s face tattooed on his right thigh. “Trump’s a boss. Trump’s a businessman. Trump has the cars. Trump has the females. Trump’s getting the money. He’s a damn near walking rapper to the life of a rapper, right? I want a Mar-a-Lago.” Jantz said he’s met and spoken with Trump “numerous times,” as recently as a couple of months ago at a GOP fundraiser. Trump, he said, was aware of the work Jantz was doing to spread the president’s message, not only through his music. “I mean, that truck itself could change a lot of people’s ways,” he said.

Though people travel great distances to experience Trump in the flesh—I spoke with one supporter who had come down from Michigan—many attendees at last night’s event were local. Dalia Julia Gomez, 61, has lived in Hialeah for decades. She told me she fled Cuba in 1993 and supports Trump because she believes he loves “the American tradition.” Hialeah is more than 90 percent Hispanic and overwhelmingly Republican. Onstage last night, Trump warned that “Democrats are turning the United States into Communist Cuba.” People booed. Some hooted. He quickly followed up, seemingly unsure of what to say next: “And you know, because we have a lot of great Cubans here!”

Trump won Florida in 2016 and 2020. His closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has just been endorsed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, but has otherwise been struggling to connect with voters for months. Trump has already secured many key Florida endorsements, including from Senator Rick Scott. (Senator Marco Rubio has yet to endorse.)

[Read: Inside Ivanka Trump’s dreamworld]

The night was heavy on psychological projection. “We are here tonight to declare that Crooked Joe Biden’s banana republic ends on November 5, 2024,” Trump said. Later, he vowed to “start by exposing every last crime committed by Crooked Joe Biden. Because now that he indicted me, we’re allowed to look at him. But he did real bad things,” Trump said. “We will restore law and order to our communities. And I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist, and reverse enforcement of the law on day one.”

He seemed to tiptoe around the idea of January 6, though he did not mention the day, specifically. Instead, he said: “We inherit the legacy of generations of American patriots who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to defend our country and defend our freedom.” Earlier in the day, I spoke with Todd Gerhart, who was selling Trump-shaped bottles of honey, with a portion of the profits going to January 6 defendants (Give the “Donald” a Squeeze: $20). Gerhart lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and is among the vendors who follow the Trump show around the country. He told me that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, is a fan of his product, as is General Michael Flynn. He introduced me to a woman from Tennessee named Sarah McAbee, whose husband, Ronald, was convicted on five felony charges related to January 6 and is currently awaiting sentencing. She told me she’s able to speak with him by phone once a day. Yesterday she informed him she was going to the Trump rally. “It’s a one-day-at-a-time sort of thing,” she said.

About 100 yards away, people were lining up to meet Donald Trump Jr., who was scheduled to sign copies of his father’s photography book, Our Journey Together. Junior smiled and scribbled as his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, snapped selfies with fans. Walking around yesterday afternoon, I heard a rumor: Not only had Trump already picked his next vice president, but there was no one it could conceivably be besides his loyal namesake, Don Jr.

A little while later, I saw Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, milling about. I asked him about this rumor explicitly. He gave me an inquisitive look. “President Trump’s not ready to announce his VP pick yet,” he said. “Can you even have someone from the same family? I know you can’t have two people from the same state. So that rules it out right there.”

Family remains a confounding part of the Trump story. His daughter Ivanka spent the day in Manhattan testifying in the case that could demolish what’s left of the family’s real-estate empire. Trump himself had taken the witness stand on Monday. The occasion seemed to still be weighing on him, and at the rally, yielded a microscopic moment of familial self-reflection. “Can you believe—my father and mother are looking down: ‘Son, how did that happen?’” (For this he did an impression of a parental voice.) He quickly pivoted. “‘We’re so proud of you, son,’” he said (in the voice again). It didn’t make much sense. He rambled his way to the end of the thought. “But every time I’m indicted, I consider it a great badge of honor, because I’m being indicted for you,” Trump told the crowd. “Thanks a lot, everybody.”

During my conversation with Miller, I asked him if the campaign had discussed the logistics—or practicalities—of Trump getting convicted and having to theoretically run the country from prison. “There’s nothing that the deep state can throw at us that we’re not going to be ready for,” he said. “We have a plane, we have a social-media following of over 100 million people. We have the greatest candidate that’s ever lived. There’s nothing they can do. Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”

What about something like a house arrest at Mar-a-Lago?

“Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.”

Much of the time, discussions about artificial intelligence are far removed from the realities of how it’s used in today’s world. Earlier this year, executives at Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and other AI companies declared in a joint letter that “mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” In the lead-up to the AI summit that he recently convened, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned that “humanity could lose control of AI completely.” Existential risks—or x-risks, as they’re sometimes known in AI circles—evoke blockbuster science-fiction movies and play to many people’s deepest fears.

[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]

But AI already poses economic and physical threats—ones that disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable people. Some individuals have been incorrectly denied health-care coverage, or kept in custody based on algorithms that purport to predict criminality. Human life is explicitly at stake in certain applications of artificial intelligence, such as AI-enabled target-selection systems like those the Israeli military has used in Gaza. In other cases, governments and corporations have used artificial intelligence to disempower members of the public and conceal their own motivations in subtle ways: in unemployment systems designed to embed austerity politics; in worker-surveillance systems meant to erode autonomy; in emotion-recognition systems that, despite being based on flawed science, guide decisions about whom to recruit and hire.

Our organization, the AI Now Institute, was among a small number of watchdog groups present at Sunak’s summit. We sat at tables where world leaders and technology executives pontificated over threats to hypothetical (disembodied, raceless, genderless) “humans” on the uncertain horizon. The event underscored how most debates about the direction of AI happen in a cocoon.

The term artificial intelligence has meant different things over the past seven decades, but the current version of AI is a product of the enormous economic power that major tech firms have amassed in recent years. The resources needed to build AI at scale—massive data sets, access to computational power to process them, highly skilled labor—are profoundly concentrated among a small handful of firms. And the field’s incentive structures are shaped by the business needs of industry players, not by the public at large.

“In Battle With Microsoft, Google Bets on Medical AI Program to Crack Healthcare Industry,” a Wall Street Journal headline declared this summer. The two tech giants are racing each other, and smaller competitors, to develop chatbots intended to help doctors—particularly those working in under-resourced clinical settings—retrieve data quickly and find answers to medical questions. Google has tested a large language model called Med-PaLM 2 in several hospitals, including within the Mayo Clinic system. The model has been trained on the questions and answers to medical-licensing exams.

The tech giants excel at rolling out products that work reasonably well for most people but that fail entirely for others, almost always people structurally disadvantaged in society. The industry’s tolerance for such failures is an endemic problem, but the danger they pose is greatest in health-care applications, which must operate at a high standard of safety. Google’s own research raises significant doubts. According to a July article in Nature by company researchers, clinicians found that 18.7 percent of answers produced by a predecessor AI system, Med-PaLM, contained “inappropriate or incorrect content”—in some instances, errors of great clinical significance—and 5.9 percent of answers were likely to contribute to some level of harm, including “death or severe harm” in a few cases. A preprint study, not yet peer reviewed, suggests that Med-PaLM 2 performs better on a number of measures, but many aspects of the model, including the extent to which doctors are using it in discussions with real-life patients, remain mysterious.

“I don’t feel that this kind of technology is yet at a place where I would want it in my family’s healthcare journey,” Greg Corrado, a senior research director at Google who worked on the system, told The Wall Street Journal. The danger is that such tools will become enmeshed in medical practice without any formal, independent evaluation of their performance or their consequences.

The policy advocacy of industry players is expressly designed to evade scrutiny for the technology they’re already releasing for public use. Big AI companies wave off concerns about their own market power, their enormous incentives to engage in rampant data surveillance, and the potential impact of their technologies on the labor force, especially workers in creative industries. The industry instead attends to hypothetical dangers posed by “frontier AI” and shows great enthusiasm for voluntary measures such as “red-teaming,” in which companies deploy groups of hackers to simulate hostile attacks on their own AI systems, on their own terms.

Fortunately, the Biden administration is focusing more intently than Sunak on more immediate risks. Last week, the White House released a landmark executive order encompassing a wide-ranging set of provisions addressing AI’s effects on competition, labor, civil rights, the environment, privacy, and security. In a speech at the U.K. summit, Vice President Kamala Harris emphasized urgent threats, such as disinformation and discrimination, that are evident right now. Regulators elsewhere are taking the problem seriously too. The European Union is finalizing a law that would, among other things, impose far-reaching controls on AI technologies that it deems to be high risk and force companies to disclose summaries of which copyrighted data they use to train AI tools. Such measures annoy the tech industry—earlier this year, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, accused the EU of “overregulating” and briefly threatened to pull out of the bloc—but are well within the proper reach of democratic lawmaking.

The United States needs a regulatory regime that scrutinizes the many applications of AI systems that have already come into wide use in cars, schools, workplaces, and elsewhere. AI companies that flout the law have little to fear. (When the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 for data-privacy violations, it was one of the largest penalties the government had ever assessed on anyone—and a minor hindrance to a highly profitable company.) The most significant AI development is taking place on top of the infrastructures owned and operated by a few Big Tech firms. A major risk in this environment is that executives at the biggest firms will successfully present themselves as the only real experts in artificial intelligence and expect regulators and lawmakers to stand aside.

[Read: Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating?]

Americans shouldn’t let the same firms that built the broken surveillance business model for the internet also set self-serving terms for the future trajectory of AI. Citizens and their democratically elected representatives need to reclaim the debate about whether (not just how or when) AI systems should be used. Notably, many of the biggest advances in tech regulation in the United States, such as bans by individual cities on police use of facial recognition and state limits on worker surveillance, began with organizers in communities of color and labor-rights movements that are typically underrepresented in policy conversations and in Silicon Valley. Society should feel comfortable drawing red lines to prohibit certain kinds of activities: using AI to predict criminal behavior, making workplace decisions based on pseudoscientific emotion-recognition systems.

The public has every right to demand independent evaluation of new technologies and to publicly deliberate on these outcomes, to seek access to the data sets that are used to train AI systems, and to define and prohibit categories of AI that should never be built at all—not just because they might someday start enriching uranium or engineering deadly pathogens on their own initiative but because they violate citizens’ rights or endanger human health in the near term. The well-funded campaign to reset the AI-policy agenda to threats on the frontier gives a free pass to companies with stakes in the present. The first step in asserting public control over AI is to seriously rethink who is leading the conversation on AI-regulation policy and whose interests such conversations serve.

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For years, Ivanka Trump has meticulously cultivated her public image. Today, compelled to testify in the Trump Organization’s civil trial, she was thrust back into the spotlight against her will.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Republicans can’t figure it out. What if psychedelics’ hallucinations are just a side effect? When anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic Rashida Tlaib’s inflammatory language

Dispositional Opposites

A procession of Trump family members, including the former president himself, have testified in a New York civil trial about the Trump Organization’s financial practices. Today, Ivanka, Trump’s oldest daughter, who has long tried to thread the needle between supporting her family and keeping her own image separate from that of her father, took the stand.

In public, Ivanka is her father’s dispositional opposite. In sharp contrast to Trump’s courtroom antics earlier this week—he hurled insults at Attorney General Letitia James and called the proceedings “a very unfair trial”—she answered lawyers’ questions with characteristic polish (and sometimes even a smile, per courtroom reports). But both father and daughter are masters at managing their images—Trump with brash force, and Ivanka with tight control. In a 2019 profile, my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro wrote that “the founding myth of Ivanka Trump is that she is a ‘moderating force.’” For years, Ivanka has carefully protected her public presence, sometimes using her connection to her father to her advantage while at others trying to insulate her own reputation. Ivanka is skilled at toggling the release valves of information as she sees fit. Of Ivanka’s approach during Trump’s first campaign, Plott Calabro wrote, “By saying nothing to anyone, Ivanka could be everything to everyone.” But now, Ivanka is being compelled by law to say something to the courtroom—and to an interested public.

This is not the first time Ivanka has faced an appraisal of her father’s actions: In 2022, she testified to a House panel about the January 6 attack without being subpoenaed, telling lawmakers that she agreed there hadn’t been enough evidence of fraud to overturn the election. This time, Ivanka testified only reluctantly. An appeals court dismissed her as a defendant in the case in June, and her attorney (she hired her own lawyer separate from her father’s team) has been trying to get her out of taking the stand, saying that, as a Florida resident with young children, she would suffer “undue hardship” if she had to appear in court in New York during the school week. But the motion was denied. In his initial demand that Ivanka testify, Judge Arthur Engoron said that she had “clearly availed herself of the privilege of doing business in New York,” and thus was required to testify there.

Ivanka’s attempts to avoid taking the stand suggest that she’s aware of the downsides of getting pulled back into the story of her father’s scandals. Ivanka “has absolutely nothing to gain” from testifying, Caroline Polisi, a white-collar defense lawyer and lecturer at Columbia Law School, told me. That’s evidenced by her many attempts to evade doing so, Polisi added. In court today, Ivanka contended that she had not been privy to her father’s personal financial statements, which are key to the case. (Lawyers for Donald and Ivanka Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment, though Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Donald Trump, apparently said of his client on Monday that “in 33 years, I have never had a witness testify better.”)

Ivanka stepped away from her position at the Trump Organization in 2017 and took a vague, unpaid advisory role in her father’s White House administration. Since Trump left the White House, in January 2021, she has distanced herself from his political activities. She now lives with her husband and children on an island near Miami; when Trump announced his bid for reelection last year, she stated that she does not “plan to be involved in politics” and instead wants to prioritize her family and their private life.

In their testimony earlier this week, her brothers Eric and Donald Jr., loyal foot soldiers in their father’s empire, each tried to distance himself from the inflated valuations at the core of the case. (Don Jr. described a letter to his outside accounting firm as a “cover your butt” move, and Eric portrayed himself as a construction guy, not a finance guy.)

Meanwhile, the patriarch of the family treated his testimony almost like a stump speech. He appeared in court as a candidate poised to parlay this event into grist for his base. Indeed, Trump is already fundraising off of his court appearance. The judge seemed aware of this dynamic: At one point, he admonished Trump that “this is not a political rally,” after repeatedly asking Trump’s lawyers to tell their client to stop making speeches and just answer the questions.

This trial is unusual in that testimony won’t be used to establish guilt; the judge has already said that the defendants, including Trump and his two elder sons, are liable for fraud. The stakes are high for the family because the judge’s decision may bar them from doing business in New York, and they may have to pay fines of up to a quarter of a billion dollars. Ivanka Trump’s testimony could further wrinkle her image. But the real stakes of this trial are about the sanctity of the courts. As the legal scholar Kimberly Wehle wrote in The Atlantic yesterday, even if Trump’s testimony shifts little for this case, the way he comported himself represents the erosion of yet another respected norm in American life.

Related:

Inside Ivanka’s dreamworld A court ruling that targets Trump’s persona

Today’s News

Ohio approved a ballot measure protecting a right to abortion in its state constitution. In a significant rebuke, the House passed a resolution censuring Representative Rashida Tlaib for her comments on the Israel-Hamas war. The third Republican presidential debate will be held in Miami tonight.

Evening Read

Bettmann / Corbis / Getty / The Atlantic

A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement

By Joshua Coleman

Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy. As a psychologist specializing in family estrangement, my days are spent sitting with parents who are struggling with profound feelings of grief and uncertainty. “If I get sick during the pandemic, will my son break his four years of silence and contact me? Or will I just die alone?” “How am I supposed to live with this kind of pain if I never see my daughter again?” “My grandchildren and I were so close and this estrangement has nothing to do with them. Do they think I abandoned them?”

Since I wrote my book When Parents Hurt, my practice has filled with mothers and fathers who want help healing the distance with their adult children and learning how to cope with the pain of losing them.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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