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Prominent Republicans criticized Donald Trump for two years. So why are even these supposed moderates now pledging to support him?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is? The dual threat of Donald Trump Putin’s deal with wife killers

Career Over Country

Breaking up, Neil Sedaka told us many years ago, is hard to do. But it shouldn’t be impossible. When a Republican governor describes Donald Trump as a “three-time loser,” warns that the party will lose “up and down the ballot” if Trump is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, and calls the former president “fucking crazy,” it’s easy to imagine a responsible politician who has packed his bags and is waiting on the steps of the GOP’s Delta House for his taxi back to the world of sensible adults.

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, however, is not such a politician.

Sununu gained a lot of media attention and applause from the Never Trump Republicans for being one of the former president’s most brutal critics. But now that Trump is all but inevitable as the GOP nominee, Sununu is bashing Joe Biden and embracing Trump as the lesser of two evils. “Did you see [Trump’s] last visit to New Hampshire?” Sununu said to reporters earlier this month. “He was comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and talking about Jesus Christ being speaker of the House—it was kooky talk … He sounds almost as bad as Joe Biden.”

Almost as bad as Joe Biden? I will be the first to note, as I did here, that Biden’s reputation as a walking gaffe hazard is well deserved. He gets carried away, embellishes, and remembers things that didn’t happen (a sign, I think, more of his penchant for self-important Irish blarneying than of his age). He spent his life as a senator; senators talk a lot, and sometimes they say dumb stuff.

But to compare Biden’s blunders to Trump’s derangement is inane. Trump’s mind often slips the surly bonds of Earth: He has claimed that he won all 50 states in the 2020 election, invented people who invariably call him “sir,” lied endlessly about an astonishing number of things, embraced the QAnon conspiracy theories, and, as Sununu himself admits, compared himself to Jesus Christ.

Biden is a competent politician who sometimes stumbles or goes off the rails in his public statements. Trump is a disturbed, emotionally disordered person who, in Liz Cheney’s words, is “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”

So why is Sununu going to vote for Trump? Because Republicans have to win. That’s it. “I just want Republicans to win,” Sununu told Puck’s Tara Palmeri in a podcast released yesterday. “That’s all I care about.”

Perhaps if Sununu had been forced from office or personally threatened by Trump supporters, he might feel differently—or at least be less inclined to stand for such mindless hyper-partisanship.

Or perhaps not. Peter Meijer, the former GOP representative from Michigan who was primaried out of Congress and harassed because of his vote to impeach Trump a second time, has endured far worse than Sununu, and yet he, too, is backing Trump again. Meijer is running for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, and he seems to be trying to mollify the MAGA church long enough to carry a statewide election. Meijer, like Sununu, is laying his more-in-sorrow-than-anger shtick on the incumbent: “My overarching goal is to make Joe Biden a one-term president,” he told Adam Wren at Politico.

We could mine the statements of other Republicans for similar pyrite nuggets of shiny Trump criticism that amount to nothing. (Even Nikki Haley can bring herself to say only that Trump was the right guy at the right time—but now is the wrong time.) None of them, I would argue, really believes that Biden is a worse president than Trump was, and they all know the danger of a second Trump term. So why would they bend the knee one more time?

The Republicans coming back to Trump are driven by two factors: ambition and delusion.

Ambition is the easiest motive to explain. Mitt Romney, at 76 years old, is retiring: He can afford to say that he might vote for a Democrat rather than enable Trump again. He’s had it with his Republican colleagues and he wants to go home. But Haley is 51, Sununu is 49, and Meijer is 35. None of these people is ready, in Washington vernacular, to go spend more time with their family. They all probably expected Trump to be disgraced and driven from public life by now, and they had plans for their own future. They did not grasp that disgrace, in today’s GOP, is a fundraising opportunity, not a disqualification from office.

Numbed by opportunism, many Republicans will simply hunker down and try to survive the next five years. They’re all sure that, after that, it’ll be their time, and they will triumphantly cobble together a new GOP coalition out of independents, moderate Republicans, and what’s left of the MAGA vote, gaining that last group by assuring Trump’s base that no matter what they may have said about their idol, at least they never went over the fence and voted for a Democrat.

But these ambitious Republicans are also under a self-serving delusion that the next Trump term will be something like the first Trump term. They assume that adults will somehow restrain Trump and that the nation will function more or less normally while Trump goes off to his beloved rallies. They are committed to the fantasy that four more years of a mad king will be akin to weathering one more passing storm. (They have also likely convinced themselves, as Haley did while working for Trump, that they can best limit the damage by being in the mix of GOP politics, rather than by being excommunicated.)

This dream narrative ends with the normal Republicans emerging from their tornado shelters, surveying some limited and reparable damage, and restoring the center-right, conservative kingdom. President Haley or Senator Meijer will get the GOP back to cutting taxes and erasing government regulations, all while mending fences with millions of people who were horrified by the violence and madness of Trumpism.

None of that is going to happen.

Trump has made it clear that he has no regrets about any ghastly thing he did as president, that as president again he will bring a legion of goons and cronies with him into the White House (including seditionists and rioters whom he will pardon and release from jail), and that he fully intends to finish the job of burning down American democracy. Politicians such as Sununu or Meijer know all of this, but they apparently think they will remain untouched by it. They have put their party and their personal fortunes over their allegiance to the Constitution, perhaps hoping that they will at least have a chance to rule over whatever is left in the ashes of the republic.

Today’s News

A new CDC report shows that U.S. life expectancy at birth rose in 2022, in part because of falling COVID deaths. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted an Indian man on murder-for-hire charges over an alleged plot to kill a Sikh activist in New York. Officials from Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. are asking for an extension of the cease-fire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

Evening Read

Bettmann / CORBIS / Getty

Must the Novelist Crusade?

By Eudora Welty

Published in the October 1965 issue of The Atlantic.

Not too long ago I read in some respectable press that Faulkner would have to be reassessed because he was “after all, only a white Mississippian.” For this reason, it was felt, readers could no longer rely on him for knowing what he was writing about in his life’s work of novels and stories, laid in what he called “my country.” Remembering how Faulkner for most of his life wrote in all but isolation from critical understanding, ignored impartially by North and South, with only a handful of critics in forty years who were able to “assess” him, we might smile at this journalist as at a boy let out of school. Or there may have been an instinct to smash the superior, the good, that is endurable enough to go on offering itself. But I feel in these words and others like them the agonizing of our times.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The case that could destroy the government Photo essay: Holiday lights and holiday cheer

Culture Break

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Noel Celis / AFP / Getty; Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty.

Read. Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is a powerful story that seamlessly segues from Evangelista’s own life story into a riveting police procedural.

Listen. Is it possible to argue productively? On Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin explores some practical advice for handling both private and political disagreements.

Play our daily crossword.

Shan Wang contributed to this newsletter.

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For those trying to reach the US on foot, the deadly winds of Tehuantepec are just one among myriad existential threats.

US Treasury Department says Iran relies on brokers, front companies to finance proxies across region, including Hamas.

US federal prosecutors charge 52-year-old Indian man for alleged involvement in murder-for-hire conspiracy.

The plot targeted a US citizen in New York who was part of a Sikh separatist group, prosecutors say.

Bill Clinton sometimes joked that the White House was “the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system,” a sentiment shared by a few other presidents. In the 2024 presidential election, the winner will be remanded to the facility. But in a unique set of circumstances, the loser—whether it’s Donald Trump or Joe Biden—might also face incarceration, in a real federal prison.

Trump is up to his ears in legal troubles that he’d like to make disappear, and winning reelection would likely allow him to dispense with at least the federal cases against him. Former Representative Will Hurd made this point last summer, when he was running against Trump for the Republican nomination. “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again. Donald Trump is not running for president to represent the people that voted for him in 2016 and 2020,” Hurd told a crowd of Iowa Republicans. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”

As stump-speech material, this was not especially effective. Hurd has since dropped out of the Republican presidential primary, and Trump remains dominant. But Hurd’s point was good. Not only has reporting from Trump’s inner circle indicated that the fear of prosecution—and the power of a president to quash federal cases against him—has motivated Trump, but his defense attorneys effectively confirmed it in a filing this summer.

[David A. Graham: Trump confirms another liberal conspiracy theory]

A candidate who is running to potentially stay out of prison is a dangerous candidate. He is not just running for his own ideology or pride; he’s running for his very freedom. That warps his incentives, making him more likely to employ demagogic tactics, less concerned about the way history might judge him, and more inclined to use every avenue possible to win the election—even if it means bending or breaking the law.

Yet Trump may not be alone. In recent weeks, the former president has been more explicit about his intention, if reelected, to prosecute Joe Biden. And that means both leading candidates could have their freedom at stake.

Outwardly, neither man is taking the threat seriously. Trump dismissed Hurd’s claim, saying, “If I weren’t running, I would have nobody coming after me. Or if I was losing by a lot, I would have nobody coming after me.” The Biden campaign did not reply to a request for comment on Trump’s recent remarks.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged]

Whether Trump could really see the inside of a cell is a matter of intense debate even among legal experts, but this much is clear: The federal charges he faces are grave; some of the cases against him, particularly those related to refusing to hand over classified records, seem strong; and convictions on these charges can bring prison time.

As for Biden, the idea of a prosecution would seem absurd under any other circumstances. The president has not been charged with a crime, and long-running Republican investigations into his family have so far turned up plenty of proof of bad behavior by his son Hunter Biden, but no evidence of crimes by the president himself. Nonetheless, Trump has strongly suggested that he would concoct an excuse to indict and arrest Biden, as retaliation for what he sees as the political prosecution of himself. “They brought our country to a new level, and, but that allows—think of this—that allows us to do it to Biden, when he gets out,” he said at a rally in October. Later, in November, he sounded a similar theme: “They have done something that allows the next party—I mean, if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’”

[Read: Donald Trump’s absentee presidency]

Knowing how seriously to take Trump is impossible. His first term in office showed that he tries to follow through on some of his most dangerous rhetoric, but also that some of it is just talk. Trump didn’t attempt to lock up Hillary Clinton, despite the chants on the 2016 campaign trail, but in a recent interview with conservative media personality Glenn Beck, he said that he would jail rivals if he won: “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.”

The United States has never seen an election like this, largely because Trump is a sui generis phenomenon. Richard Nixon left office under threat of prosecution, but was quickly pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. Bill Clinton struck an agreement the day before leaving office to avoid prosecution for lying under oath, though he would have been unlikely to face prison time.

But examples elsewhere in the world show the danger of having leaders who fear that leaving office might imperil their freedom: Such presidents may alter their country’s system to remove checks and balances and weaken the rule of law in order to protect themselves.

In Turkey, opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have long claimed that he feels a need to stay in power lest he be locked up upon leaving office. Certainly, Erdoğan has faced several serious accusations of corruption over his many years in office. A 2010 WikiLeaks dump included diplomatic cables in which a U.S. ambassador to Turkey said that Erdoğan had Swiss bank accounts; Erdoğan threatened to sue. In 2014, leaked tapes appeared to capture him telling his son to dispose of fishy money. Erdoğan also successfully pressured the Trump administration to bring an end to the prosecution of a Turkish bank, which threatened to implicate Erdoğan himself.

[Read: What’s so bad about Trump calling Erdoğan?]

Trump—who, like Erdoğan, made his fortune in real estate and construction—is a big fan of the Turkish president. When Turkey held a 2017 referendum that brought new powers to the presidency, in a vote marred by irregularities, critics condemned Trump for quickly congratulating Erdoğan.

Unlike Trump, however, Erdoğan has never faced a credible investigation. “I don’t think [Erdoğan’s] running to stay out of jail, probably because it’s unlikely, given how [he] has packed the courts and the prosecutors,” Steven Cook, a senior fellow who studies the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.

Another possible parallel is Egypt, where the past two presidents—Hosni Mubarak, toppled in the 2011 Arab Spring, and Mohamed Morsi—were removed from office and imprisoned. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is “determined that he won’t let that happen to him,” Cook said. To that end, Sisi has presided over a crackdown on freedoms and on criticism of his government.

When a leader acts out of this kind of fear, he has incentives to take actions that don’t just help himself but that can corrupt government systems well past his own term in office—or, for that matter, in prison. Taking either Turkey or Egypt as a model for governance would be a tragedy for the United States, and warning signs abound, such as Trump’s demonstrated hatred of rule of law. A system in which a candidate fears that electoral defeat might lead him to prison on flimsy pretenses is a sick one. A system in which a candidate who might rightfully belong in prison could win is an even sicker one.

The tenacious wolverine is under threat as climate change threatens to melt away mountain habitats.

US class action lawsuit seeks huge damages for his promotion of the world's largest crypto exchange.

In June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte, the former mayor of Davao City, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, easily defeated four other candidates in the country’s presidential election. Within hours of taking office, the new president began to make good on his campaign promise: killing those whom he called the “sons of bitches” involved in the country’s illegal narcotics trade. The first corpse, described by the police as an “Unidentified Male Person” in his 20s, turned up around 3 a.m. in an alley just a five-minute walk from the sports complex where Duterte had declared victory. The victim had been shot once behind the left ear. The killers had placed a cardboard sign on his chest that read I AM A CHINESE DRUG LORD.

Over the following months, the killings spread across the Philippines. Men wearing masks burst into homes and shot people in front of their children. They snatched others off the streets in unmarked cars and disposed of their bodies in trash heaps. Dealers—most selling crystal meth, or shabu, the drug of choice of the Filipino poor—as well as addicts, former addicts, and small-time criminals became targets. National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa described a rising tide of bodies: “The dead who were just found floating along canals, the dead who were dumped along the road with their hands tied and their faces, eyes, and mouths taped.” Dela Rosa classified those deaths as unsolved homicides. In the first six weeks of Duterte’s presidency, according to the police count, 899 people were killed in “deaths under investigation.” In many other cases, the police took responsibility but always claimed that they had acted in self-defense. Three years into his administration, when I traveled to the Philippines to report on the drug war, the number of estimated extrajudicial killings neared 30,000.

Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is, on one level, a powerful story of disillusionment. The granddaughter of a Manila newspaperman, Evangelista grew up in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 “People Power Revolution” that brought down the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, an exhilarating transformation that she describes early in the book. It was “one part myth, two parts magic, peopled by giants, all thunder and power and bright yellow hope.” A prodigy on the debate stage in college, she embraced journalism as a means of safeguarding the country’s hard-won democracy. Evangelista began her career as a reporter for the country’s biggest broadcaster, ABS-CBN, where she distinguished herself covering political killings. In 2011, she joined Rappler, a feisty online start-up co-founded by the investigative reporter and future Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa.

[Read: Maria Ressa on how to fight fascism before it’s too late]

Then, five years later, Duterte swept into office. Evangelista seamlessly segues from her own life story into a riveting police procedural. Joining up with a band of photographers who were sometimes called “nightcrawlers,” a term derived from a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, she prowled the slums of Manila after dark, chasing tips and interviewing survivors, family members, neighbors, and police. All along she was tormented by the question: How did a country that had won admiration for its peaceful ousting of a dictator choose, one generation later, a murderous autocrat as its leader? Evangelista reaches back into her own past to examine how infatuation with charismatic authoritarians, apathy, and instincts for self-preservation might have induced people to make such a choice. In one withering moment, she describes her shock and sense of betrayal upon learning that her grandfather, whom she had believed was a fervent democrat, was actually a supporter of Marcos.

Marcos was a U.S.-backed kleptocrat who ruled the Philippines for two decades, most of that time under a state of emergency that granted him absolute power. On August 21, 1983, a year before Evangelista was born, the opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. defied Marcos’s warnings and returned to Manila from a self-imposed exile in the U.S. Moments after stepping off China Airlines Flight 811, he was shot dead by a soldier in front of horrified journalists and supporters. Marcos denied that he was behind it. But abuses and corruption were sapping the government’s authority. In 1984, I visited Samar, a large, jungle-covered island about 400 miles south of Manila; a leftist priest told me that “80 percent” of the island was in the hands of the anti-Marcos Communist New People’s Army. Two years later, U.S. President Ronald Reagan pressured Marcos to hold elections, and Corazon Aquino, Ninoy’s widow, defeated him. The Philippine armed forces backed Aquino, and the dictator and his wife, Imelda, flew into exile in Hawaii. “We Americans like to think we taught the Filipinos democracy,” declared the CBS correspondent Bob Simon that night, referring to the country’s nearly five decades as a U.S. colony. “Well, tonight, they are teaching the world.”

At the moment that Aquino was consolidating her power in Manila, a young prosecutor was beginning his political rise in Mindanao. The son of the provincial governor, Duterte was a crudely charming figure with a violent streak: At 27, he had shot and wounded a fellow law-school student. The circumstances of the shooting were unclear and no charges were filed. Elected Davao City mayor in 1988, he allegedly created the Davao Death Squad, which gunned down drug dealers, drug users, petty thieves, and, eventually, political rivals.  

Reports about Duterte’s hit squads were well-known when he announced his candidacy for president in 2016. And he made no secret of his intention to run Malacañang Palace the same way he managed Davao’s city hall. “There’s been enough warning during the campaign,” he declared just after his victory. “There will be no blaming here. I told [the drug dealers] to stop. Now if anything happens to them, it’s on them. They asked for it.”

Some Filipinos dismissed his talk as political rhetoric. Others had grown weary of the ineffectual outgoing president, Benigno Aquino III (the son of Ninoy and Corazon), and disgusted by corruption. Evangelista describes an oft-used scam in which airport security staff planted bullets in the luggage of travelers at Manila’s airport and then demanded payoffs in return for not arresting them. Duterte—a macho populist with a fondness for profanity and a “tell it like is” message—exerted an almost-religious hold over his supporters. Like Donald Trump, to whom he has frequently been compared, Duterte had a performer’s instincts, an  earthy humor, a misogynistic streak (he often made comments seeming to endorse rape, which his fans shrugged off as jokes), and a visceral message. Aware that many Filipinos were terrified to walk in their barrios after dark, Duterte promised to take care of the problem—without regard to cumbersome, tainted judicial procedures. “She saw him on television,” Evangelista writes of one Duterte enthusiast, in what could also be a description of a MAGA acolyte. “It was like seeing Jesus.” To vote for Duterte, Evangelista writes, in one of the many lyrical—and chilling—passages that run through the book, “you had to believe in certain things”:

You had to believe, for example, that he was a righteous man … You had to believe that God had a peculiar preference for deadly autocrats, because the presidency is destiny and Rodrigo Duterte was destined to lead … You had to believe that a mayor who kept peace by ordering the undesirables out of his city could succeed in a country where undesirables were citizens too. You had to believe the intended dead would be drug lords and rapists, only drug lords and rapists, and not your cousins who go off into Liguasan Marsh to pick up their baggies of meth. You had to believe there would be a warning before the gunshots ring out.

Duterte’s language became more vicious as the killing campaign intensified. In August 2016, he claimed to have 144,202 names on a drug watch list. “If your name is there, son of a bitch, you have a problem, I will really kill you,” he declared. Street dealers, meth addicts, and small-time pushers would “have to perish,” he said later in his administration. He would “slaughter those idiots,” and hang them with sharpened barbed wire so that “when you drop, you leave your head behind when your body falls.” But the exact circumstances of the murders were deliberately kept vague, and a new vocabulary arose that reflected the murkiness. People weren’t murdered, they were salvaged—an English-language euphemism derived from the Spanish salvaje, or “wild.” Tokhang, a portmanteau from the Visayan words for “knock” and “plead,” was allegedly a police policy that encouraged low-level dealers to identify themselves and surrender, but that often resulted in their executions.

Evangelista introduces a memorable cast of villains, heroes, and victims. Lieutenant Colonel Domingo, the commander of a prolific death squad, is presented as an affable killer fond of bestowing nicknames on reporters. Domingo takes a liking to Evangelista and, against her wishes, keeps calling her “Trish”—a sinister reminder of who holds the power in their relationship. Efren Morillo, a fruit vendor who survived a police attack that killed four others, found the courage to testify against the murderers. After Morillo’s testimony and the abduction-murder by the police of a South Korean businessman in October 2016, Duterte seemed to turn his back on the hit squads, calling the police “corrupt to the core.” Evangelista was one of the first journalists to report on a shift in tactics: the use of local vigilante groups to carry out the homicides, with the police compiling target lists and directing their movements in the shadows. No hard evidence links Duterte to this change of policy, but Evangelista makes the case that the president had, with a wink and a nod at least, given it his approval.

[Read: The paradox of Rodrigo Duterte]

By the time I arrived in the Philippines in 2019, Duterte’s drug war was still playing out—though the numbers had dropped significantly from the dozens of corpses that had filled Manila’s streets each night early in his presidency. When I visited Malacañang Palace, Duterte’s spokesperson was unrepentant about the killings, insisting that hundreds of police had died in shootouts while trying to arrest drug dealers. And Duterte remained wildly popular. At a political rally I attended in Davao for the senate candidates from his party, supporter after supporter told me how grateful they were that Duterte had cleaned up their neighborhood. This may have been more perception than reality: In 2020, the head of drug enforcement for the Philippine National Police said that “drug supply is still rampant” and that the “shock and awe” of the Duterte years had not worked.

Duterte reburied Marcos, who had died in exile in Hawaii, as a hero at the national cemetery in Manila. Obliged by the Philippines’ constitution to step down after one term, he endorsed Marcos’s son, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Jr., to be his successor. The country had come full circle. Evangelista’s book is an extraordinary testament to half a decade of state-sanctioned terror. It’s also a timely warning for the state of democracy in 2024. Eight years ago, most Filipinos shrugged off Duterte’s homicidal rhetoric as political buffoonery. The horrors that followed suggest that demagogues with a violent message might well be taken at their word.

The US was happy to neglect the Palestinian issue for years. Why is it talking of a ‘reinvigorated’ peace process now?