Like many politicians, Representative Dean Phillips likes to look people in the eye. And because he’s a politician, Phillips can glean things, just as President George W. Bush did when he peered into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul.

“I’ve looked Benjamin Netanyahu in the eye,” Phillips told a group of students at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, last week.

And?

“I did not like what I saw,” Phillips said of the Israeli prime minister. “I do not like his government. He’s got to go.”

Philips has also looked into Donald Trump’s eyes. That, too, was ominous. It was a few years ago, and the former president had invited a bunch of new House members to the White House for an introductory visit.

“I looked him in the eye for the better part of an hour,” Phillips told me.

And?

“I saw right through him,” Phillips said. “I know exactly how to handle weaklings like Donald Trump.”

How?

“You’ll see,” he said. “Why would I give away my special sauce?”

Phillips was telling me this while tucked into the back of a minivan, having just set off on a 90-minute ride from Hanover to Manchester. He wore a down vest over a blue dress shirt and looked me straight in the you-know-what as he described the “gravity of this entire circumstance” he was now embarked upon.

[Read: Dean Phillips has a warning for Democrats]

He had just concluded one of his early days as an official primary challenger to President Joe Biden, the incumbent he must first dispatch before he can douse Trump with his proprietary Dean Sauce. Phillips is pursuing this mission despite long odds and an unsurprising chorus of how dare yous and not helpfuls from various Democratic gatekeepers. He has already said plenty about why he is doing this—about how Democrats are desperate for a Plan B to Biden, who Phillips says has no business seeking reelection at his age (81 on Monday), with his poll numbers and the catastrophic threat of his likely GOP opponent (yes, him). Phillips agonized over his decision and unburdened himself in multiple forums, including, quite expansively last month, to my colleague Tim Alberta.

I was in New Hampshire because I wanted to see Phillips transition from theoretical to actual challenger. It is one thing to scream warnings about alarming data, and another to segue into the granular doings of a campaign. “This is an all-hands-on-deck initiative,” he told me, his words landing somewhere between hyper-earnest and naive, with occasional tips into grandiose. Phillips, 54, is a figure of uncommonly big plans and weighty burdens, especially given his relatively modest station (he has represented Minnesota’s Third Congressional District since 2019). He seems sincere about what he’s doing, especially compared with the two-faced default of so many elected Democrats who tout Biden’s reelection in public while privately pining for some other candidate, like Gretchen Whitmer, the Rock, or whomever they want instead. In this sense, Phillips’s gambit is noble, even necessary. It can also be lonely and awkward to watch up close.

Since entering the race a month ago, Phillips has held a series of mostly low-key events in New Hampshire and has made a stop in South Carolina. I first encountered him during a heartfelt give-and-take with half a dozen members of the Dartmouth Political Union. “This is a beautiful American moment,” Phillips declared after a dialogue about abortion policy with a polite young Nikki Haley supporter. Later, at a town hall across campus, Phillips described that bridge-building exchange as “one of the most profound hours of engagement” he’s had in a long while and something “I will remember for years to come.”

Phillips told me that his initial campaign forays have only—surprise—reaffirmed the premise of his errand: “Other than some Democratic elected officials, and only a few of them, I’ve not yet encountered a single person who doesn’t feel the same way,” he said, about the need for a Biden alternative. His go-to weapon against the president is public opinion, for which Phillips keeps getting fresh ammunition. “I want to give you some simple data,” he said during a meet and greet with about 50 students, faculty, and community members before the town hall. He mentioned a recent survey of voters in battleground states that had Biden trailing Trump by four points, 48–44. “But then you look at how Trump does against a ‘generic Democrat,’” Phillips said, “and the generic Democrat wins 48–40.” Heads bobbed in the classroom; Phillips shook his in exasperation.

Phillips himself is polling at just 10 percent among likely New Hampshire Democratic-primary voters, according to a CNN survey released last week that had Biden at 65 percent. During our car ride, I suggested to Phillips that maybe he should change his name to “Generic Democrat.”

“I never in my life aspired to be generic,” he replied, chuckling.

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

Primary challenges to incumbent presidents have historically been associated with signature causes and fiery rhetoric. They tend to be ideologically driven—such as Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter from the left in 1980 and Pat Buchanan’s to President George H. W. Bush from the right in 1992. No one will mistake Phillips for a brawling populist. He is affable, well mannered, and extremely rich, with a net worth of about $50 million, some portion of it derived from the gelato-and-sorbet company—Talenti—that he co-owned before it was sold.

Still, Phillips frequently brings up the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, a fellow Minnesota Democrat, whose uprising against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 helped push Johnson to not seek reelection. The comparison is fraught in that Democrats wound up nominating another Minnesotan, Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose to Richard Nixon. Carter and Bush also lost their general elections. This tends to be the main critique of Phillips: that his project could weaken Biden against Trump.

One student at Dartmouth questioned Phillips about the 1980 example, arguing that Kennedy was the reason that Carter was ultimately blown out by Ronald Reagan. Phillips came back with a lengthy and somewhat defensive response. “Ted Kennedy didn’t cause Carter’s problems any more than I’ve caused Joe Biden’s problems,” he said. The student nodded and thanked the candidate, who in turn thanked the student—and another beautiful American moment was forged.

“I am the anti-defeat candidate,” Phillips said, describing his enterprise to me later. “I am the truth-telling candidate.” “Truth-telling” is of course subjective, in campaigns as in life. Phillips then told me about a visit he’d made to a Hanover restaurant that day. After a series of “wonderful conversations” with random diners, he’d encountered a young woman who “I sensed was not showing any compassion for butchered Israelis”—a reference to the Hamas attacks on October 7. So Phillips, who is Jewish, paused the conversation and asked a question of his own. “I said, ‘Are you telling me that you support Hamas?’” Phillips said. “And she goes, ‘Yes.’” At which point, he’d heard enough.

“I said, ‘Look, I really enjoyed our conversation, but I can’t continue this.’”

“Wait, did you really enjoy that conversation?” I interrupted, questioning his truth-telling.

“I’ll tell you what, that’s a good point,” Phillips acknowledged. “I did not enjoy it.”

In that spirit of engaging with people of different backgrounds and persuasions, Phillips frequently invokes his friendship with Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, who was censured by the House this month for her comments about Israel. Phillips refers to Tlaib as “my Palestinian sister” and to himself as “her Jewish brother.”

[Juliette Kayyem: Rashida Tlaib’s inflammatory language]

I pressed Phillips on the state of his relations with Tlaib. “It’s as difficult as ever and more important than ever,” he said. He then raised the stakes even higher. “I believe that as Rashida Tlaib and Dean Phillips go, so will the Middle East,” he said. (A lot of pressure there!)

As our nighttime ride persisted southeast down Interstate 89, the conversation took some quick turns.

“Is Kamala Harris prepared to step in if something happened to Biden?” I asked Phillips.

“I think that Americans have made the decision that she’s not,” he said.

I replied that I was interested in the decision of one specific American, Dean Phillips.

“That is not my opinion,” Phillips clarified. He said that every interaction he’s had with the vice president has been “thoughtful” and that “I’ve enjoyed them.”

“That said …” Phillips paused, and I braced for the vibe shift.

“I hear from others who know her a lot better than I do that many think she’s not well positioned,” he said of Harris. “She is not well prepared, doesn’t have the right disposition and the right competencies to execute that office.” Phillips also noted that Harris’s approval numbers are even worse than Biden’s: “It’s pretty clear that she’s not somebody people have faith in.”

But again, Phillips is not one of those people: “From my personal experiences, I’ve not seen those deficiencies.”

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

If Phillips had looked me in the eye at that moment—and granted, it was dark in the back of the van—he would have seen a slightly confused expression. Why was he hiding behind these Trumplike “many people are saying” attributions? Similarly, he often speaks in glowing terms about Biden’s performance in office—“his administration has been quite extraordinary”—while leaning heavily on “the opinion of others” or “the data” to make his case that the president himself needs to go. Phillips can seem torn at times as he attempts to hedge his way through somewhat contradictory impulses: to give Biden his proper due while also trying to end his career.

I asked Phillips what would happen if his campaign really takes off—he wins a bunch of primaries—and then Biden tries to placate the insurgents by dumping Harris in favor of their hero, Dean Phillips. Would he agree to serve as Biden’s new understudy?

I anticipated the “I’m not answering hypothetical questions” blow-off that they teach in Candidate School. But Phillips apparently skipped class that day. “That’s a really interesting question,” he said, before letting me down gently.

“President Biden will never replace Vice President Harris on the ticket, ever,” he said.

For the record—bonus nugget—Phillips predicts that Trump will select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his running mate. “And they will be very difficult to beat,” he fears. These are the kinds of empty punditing calories that get passed around during long drives on chilly campaign nights.

As we approached Manchester, Phillips flashed back to reality, or something. “I am the best positioned to defeat Donald Trump,” he said. “All I’m focused on right now is to run a spirited, thoughtful, and energetic campaign.”

“What about ‘vigorous’ and ‘robust’?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” Phillips said, nodding. It was getting late, and we were both getting a bit punchy.

“And bold,” he added.

Our van pulled into the Manchester DoubleTree just before 10 p.m. Phillips had to wake up in a few hours to catch a 6:15 a.m. flight back to Washington. He looked me in the eye. I’m not sure what he saw, or what I saw, but I wished him luck.

“I’ve enjoyed this,” Phillips said.

The fund, run by former CNN boss Jeff Zucker, says it has the money it needs to rescue the newspaper.

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The former president, after years of espousing authoritarian beliefs, has fully embraced the language of fascism. But Americans—even those who have supported him—can still refuse to follow him deeper into darkness.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk’s disturbing ‘truth’ The non-end of George Santos Why you maybe shouldn’t write a memoir

The Decisive Outrage

Readers of the Daily know that I am something of a stubborn pedant about words and their meanings. When I was a college professor teaching political science and international relations, I tried to make my students think very hard about using words such as war and terrorism, which we often apply for their emotional impact without much thought—the “war” on poverty, the “war” on drugs, and, in a perfecta after 9/11, the “war on terrorism.”

And so, I dug in my heels when Donald Trump’s critics described him and his followers as fascists. Authoritarians? Yes, some. Illiberal? Definitely. But fascism, a term coined by Benito Mussolini and now commonly used to describe Italy, Germany, and other nations in the 1930s, has a distinct meaning, and denotes a form of government that is beyond undemocratic.

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

I argued that for most of Trump’s time as a public figure, he was not a fascist but rather a wannabe caudillo, the kind of Latin American strongman who cared little about what people believed so long as they feared him and left him in power. When he would make forays into the public square, his politics were insubstantial and mostly focused on exploiting reflexive resentment and racism, such as when he called for the death penalty for the Black youths wrongly accused in the infamous Central Park–jogger case. But Trump in those days was never able to square his desperate wish to be accepted in Manhattan society with his need to play the role of an outer-borough tough guy. He was an obnoxious and racist gadfly, perhaps, but he was still a long way from fascism.

As a candidate and as president, he had little in the way of a political program for the GOP beyond his exhausting narcissism. He had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats. Even now, his rants contain little political substance; when he veers off into actual issues, such as abortion and taxes, he does not seem to understand or care about them very much, and he will turn on a dime when he thinks it is to his advantage.

Trump had long wanted to be somebody in politics, but he is also rather indolent—again, not a characteristic of previous fascists—and he did not necessarily want to be saddled with any actual responsibilities. According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)

After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

The events of the past month, and especially Trump’s Veterans Day speech, confirm to me that the moment has arrived.

For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words. Trump seized on this strategic error by his opponents and used it as a kind of political cover. Over the years, he has become more extreme and more dangerous, and now he waves away any additional criticisms as indistinguishable from the over-the-top objections he faced when he entered politics, in 2015.

Today, the mistake of early overreaction and the subsequent complacency it engendered has aided Trump in his efforts to subvert American democracy. His presence in our public life has become normalized, and he continues to be treated as just another major-party candidate by a hesitant media, an inattentive public, and terrified GOP officials. This is the path to disaster: The original fascists and other right-wing dictators of Europe succeeded by allying with scared elites in the face of public disorder and then, once they had seized the levers of government, driving those elites from power (and in many cases from existence on this planet).

It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.

More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Post that “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

What?

Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence" instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.

Related:

Fear of fascism Donald Trump, the most unmanly president

Today’s News

Representative George Santos will not seek reelection in 2024 after the House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” that he “violated federal criminal laws.” Last night, the Senate passed a stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown and fund federal agencies into the new year. A new CNN poll shows that Nikki Haley has moved into second place, behind Donald Trump, among likely voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Don’t be fooled by the AI apocalypse, Matteo Wong argues. Here’s a guide to understanding which fears are real and which aren’t. Time-Travel Thursdays: The Atlantic’s archives chronicle nearly two centuries of change in America, Adrienne LaFrance writes. Our newest newsletter takes you on a journey through them. Work in Progress: The future of obesity drugs just got way more real, Yasmin Tayag writes. Wegovy is about to go mainstream.

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Watch. Hulu’s Black Cake explores how marriage, migration, and motherhood can shift one’s sense of self.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Last week, when The New York Times and Siena College released a poll that showed President Joe Biden in trouble in battleground states, Democrats began to sound apocalyptic. The panic, turbocharged by social media, was disproportionate to what the surveys actually showed. Although the results in my home state, Nevada, were the worst for the president out of the six swing states that were polled, the findings are almost certainly not reflective of the reality here, at least as I’ve observed it and reported on it.

Nevertheless, they bring to the surface trends that should worry Democrats—and not just in Nevada.

The Times/Siena data show Donald Trump ahead of Biden in Nevada 52 percent to 41 percent, a much larger margin than the former president’s lead in the other battleground states. Could this be true? I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone. After the poll came out, I spoke with a handful of experts in both parties here, and none thinks Trump is truly ahead by double digits in the state, where he lost by about 2.5 points in the previous two presidential cycles. But Nevada is going to be competitive, perhaps more so than ever.

Some of the Times/Siena poll’s internal numbers gave me pause. Among registered voters in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located and where 70 percent of the electorate resides, the poll found Trump ahead of Biden 50–45. But Democrats make up 34 percent of active voters in the county, compared with Republicans’ 25 percent, and Biden won Clark by nine percentage points in 2020.

Other recent polls, not quite as highly rated as Times/Siena’s, have found the presidential race here to be much closer than the Times did. Last month, a CNN poll of registered Nevada voters found Biden and Trump virtually tied. Recent surveys from Emerson College, which has been unreliable in the state in the past, and Morning Consult/Bloomberg both had Trump up three points among likely voters. The Times/Siena polling outfit has a good reputation, but shortly before the 2020 election, it found Biden ahead of Trump in Nevada by six percentage points, more than double Biden’s eventual margin of victory.

[Read: Is Biden toast?]

Nevada is difficult to poll for a variety of reasons. Here as much as anywhere else, pollsters tend to underestimate the number of people they need to survey by cellphone to get a representative sample, and they generally don’t do enough bilingual polling in Nevada, where nearly a third of the population is Hispanic. Nevada also has a transient population, lots of residents working 24/7 shifts, and an electorate that’s less educated than most other states’. (“I love the poorly educated,” Trump said after winning Nevada’s Republican caucuses in 2016.) The polling challenge has become only more acute, because nonpartisan voters now outnumber Democrats and Republicans in Nevada, making it harder for pollsters to accurately capture the Democratic or Republican vote. (Since 2020, a state law has allowed voters to register at the DMV, and if they fail to do so, their party affiliation is defaulted to independent.)

Nevada matters in presidential elections, but we are also, let’s face it, a tad weird.

Still, Democrats have reasons to worry. Nevada was clobbered by COVID disproportionately to the rest of the country, because our economy is so narrowly focused on the casino industry. The aftereffects—unemployment, inflation—are still very much being felt here. Nevada’s jobless rate is the highest in the country, at 5.4 percent. That’s down dramatically from an astonishing 28.2 percent in April 2020, when the governor closed casinos for a few months. Although the situation has clearly improved, many casino workers still haven’t been rehired.

Democrat Steve Sisolak was the only incumbent governor in his party to lose in 2022, and his defeat was due at least partly to the fallout from COVID. Fairly or not, President Biden wears a lot of that too, as all presidents do when voters are unhappy with the economy. The Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll illuminated the bleak pessimism of Nevada voters, 76 percent of whom think the U.S. economy is going in the wrong direction.

Here, as elsewhere, voters are also concerned about Biden’s age, and that informs their broader views of him. Sixty-two percent of Nevadans disapprove of Biden’s performance, according to the Times, and only 40 percent have a favorable impression of him. Trump’s numbers, although awful—44 percent see him favorably—are better than Biden’s here, as well as in some blue or bluish states.

In Nevada, and in general, Biden is losing support among key groups—young and nonwhite voters. The Times/Siena poll found Biden and Trump tied among Hispanics in the state, despite the fact that Latinos have been a bedrock of the Democratic base here for a decade and a half. In the 2022 midterms, polls taken early in the race showed Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate, losing Hispanic support, though her campaign managed to reverse that trend enough to win by a very slim margin.

Democratic presidential nominees have won Nevada in every election since 2008. Democrats also hold the state’s two U.S. Senate seats and three of the four House seats, and the party dominates both houses of the legislature. But the state has been slowly shifting to the right—not just in polling but in Election Day results. In 2020, Nevada was the only battleground state that saw worse Democratic performance compared with 2016, unless you include the more solidly red Florida. Nevada’s new Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, is building a formidable political machine. Republicans have made inroads with working-class white voters here, leaving Democrats with an ever-diminishing margin of error.

[Ronald Brownstein: Republicans can’t figure it out]

Abortion, an issue that was crucial to Cortez Masto’s narrow victory, could help Biden in Nevada. The Times/Siena poll showed that only a quarter of Nevadans think abortion should be always or mostly illegal. A 1990 referendum made abortion up to 24 weeks legal here, and the law can be changed only by another popular vote. Democrats in Nevada, though, want to take those protections a step further next year and are trying to qualify a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to abortion. As the off-year elections last week showed, that issue, more than the choice between Biden and Trump, could be what saves the president a year from now. Nevada also has a nationally watched Senate race in 2024, in which the incumbent Democrat, Jacky Rosen, has already signaled that she will mimic her colleague Cortez Masto and put abortion front and center in her campaign.

So many events could intervene between now and next November, foreign and/or domestic, and we have yet to see how effective the Trump and Biden campaigns will be, assuming that each man is his party’s nominee. Democratic Senator Harry Reid was deeply unpopular here in 2009, then got reelected by almost six percentage points; Barack Obama was thought to be in trouble in 2011, then won Nevada and reelection.

Democrats clearly hope that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, many voters will see the election as a binary choice and will back Biden. But if the election instead becomes a referendum on Biden’s tenure, including the economy he has presided over, Trump could plausibly win Nevada—and the Electoral College.

It’s a year before the presidential election, and Democrats are panicking. Their incumbent is unpopular, and voters are refusing to give him credit for overseeing an economic rebound. Polls show him losing to a Republican challenger.

What’s true now was also true 12 years ago. Today, Democrats are alarmed by recent surveys finding that President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in five key swing states. But they were just as scared in the fall of 2011, when President Barack Obama’s approval rating languished in the low 40s and a pair of national polls showed him losing to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who would become the GOP nominee. Barely one-third of independent voters said Obama deserved a second term. A New York Times Magazine cover story asked the question on many Democrats’ minds: “Is Obama Toast?”

A year later, Obama beat Romney handily, by a margin of 126 in the Electoral College and 5 million in the popular vote. Those results are comforting to Democrats who want to believe that Biden is no worse off than Obama was at this point in his presidency. “This is exactly where we were with Obama,” Jim Messina, the former president’s 2012 campaign manager, told me by phone this week. For good measure, he looked up data from earlier elections and found that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton each trailed in the polls a year out from their reelection victories. Perhaps, Messina hoped, that would “calm my bed-wetting fucking Democratic friends down.”

Yet the comparison between Biden today and Obama in 2011 goes only so far. The most obvious difference is that Biden, who turns 81 this month, is nearly three decades older than Obama was at the time of his second presidential campaign. (He’s also much older than Clinton and Bush were during their reelection bids.) Voters across party lines cite Biden’s age as a top concern, and a majority of Democrats have told pollsters for the past two years that he shouldn’t run again. Obama was in the prime of his political career, an electrifying orator who could reenergize the Democratic base with a few well-timed speeches. Not even Biden’s biggest defenders would claim that he has the same ability. Put simply, he looks and sounds his age.

[Watch: America’s aging presidential front-runners]

In a recent national CNN poll that showed Trump with a four-percentage-point lead over Biden, just a quarter of respondents said the president had “the stamina and sharpness to serve”; more than half said the 77-year-old Trump did. Privately, Democratic lawmakers and aides have fretted that the White House has kept the president too caged in for fear of a verbal or physical stumble. At the same time, they worry that a diminished Biden is unable to deliver a winning economic message to voters.

“The greatest concern is that his biggest liability is the one thing he can’t change,” David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime chief strategist, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on the day that The New York Times and Siena College released polls showing Trump ahead of Biden by as much as 10 points in battleground states. “The age arrow only points in one direction.” Axelrod’s acknowledgment of a reality that many senior Democrats are hesitant to admit publicly, and his gentle suggestion that Biden at least consider the wisdom of running again, renewed concerns that the president and his party are ignoring a consistent message from their voters: Nominate someone else.

Tuesday’s election results, in which Democratic candidates and causes notched wins in Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, helped allay those concerns—at least for some in the party. “It’s way too early to either pop the champagne or hang the funeral crepe,” Steve Israel, the former New York representative who chaired the Democrats’ House campaign arm during Obama’s presidency, told me on Wednesday. “Biden has the advantage of time, money, a bully pulpit, and, based on last night’s results, the fact that voters in battleground areas seem to agree with Democrats on key issues like abortion.”

The Biden campaign embraced the victories as the continuation of a trend in which Democrats have performed better in recent elections than the president’s polling would suggest. “Time and again, Joe Biden beats expectations,” the campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told reporters Thursday morning. “The bottom line is that polls a year out don’t matter. Results do.”

The Democrats’ strength in off-year elections, however, may not contradict Biden’s lackluster standing in a hypothetical matchup against Trump. The political realignment since Obama’s presidency—in which college-educated suburban voters have drifted left while working-class voters have joined Trump’s GOP—has given Democrats the upper hand in lower-turnout elections. The traditionally left-leaning constituencies that have soured on Biden, including younger and nonwhite voters, tend to show up only for presidential votes.

As Messina pointed out, the overall economy is better now than it was in late 2011 under Obama, when the unemployment rate was still over 8 percent—more than double the current rate of 3.9 percent. But voters don’t seem to feel that way. Their biggest economic preoccupation is not jobs but high prices, and although the rate of inflation has come down, costs have not. Polling by the Democratic firm Blueprint found a huge disconnect between what voters believe Biden is focused on—jobs—and what they care most about: inflation. “It’s very alarming,” Evan Roth Smith, who oversaw the poll, told reporters in a presentation of the findings this week. “It tells a lot of the story about why Bidenomics is not resonating, and is not redounding to the benefit of the president.”

Nothing stirs more frustration among Democrats, including some Biden allies, than the sense that the president is misreading the electorate and trying to sell voters on an economy that isn’t working for them. “It takes far longer to rebuild the middle class than it took to destroy the middle class,” Representative Ro Khanna of California, a former Bernie Sanders supporter who now serves on an advisory board for Biden’s reelection, told me. “No politician, president or incumbent, should be celebrating the American economy in the years to come until there is dramatic improvement in the lives of middle-class and working-class Americans.” Khanna said that Biden should be “much more aggressive” in drawing an economic contrast with Trump and attacking him in the same way that Obama attacked Romney—as a supplicant for wealthy and corporate interests who will destroy the nation’s social safety net. “Donald Trump is a much more formidable candidate than Mitt Romney,” Khanna said. “So it’s a harder challenge.”

Just how strong a threat Trump poses to Biden is a matter of dispute among Democrats. Although all of the Democrats I spoke with predicted that next year’s election would be close, some of them took solace in Trump’s weakness as a GOP nominee—and not only because he might be running as a convicted felon. “Donald Trump, for all of his visibility, is prone to making big mistakes,” Israel said. “A Biden-versus-Trump matchup will reveal Trump’s mistakes and help correct the current polling.”

[David Frum: Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling]

The New York Times–Siena polls found that an unnamed “generic” Democrat would fare much better against Trump than Biden would. But they also found that a generic Republican would trounce Biden by an even larger margin. “Mitt Romney was a much harder candidate than Donald Trump,” Messina told me. (When I pointed out that Khanna had made the opposite assertion, he replied, “He’s in Congress. I’m not. I won a presidential election. He didn’t.”)

None of the Democrats I interviewed was pining for another nominee, or for Biden to drop out. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota hasn’t secured a single noteworthy endorsement since announcing his long-shot primary challenge. Vice President Kamala Harris is no more popular among voters, and all of the Democrats I spoke with expressed doubts that the candidacy of a relatively untested governor—say, Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—would make a Democratic victory more likely. Messina said that if Biden dropped out, a flood of ambitious Democrats would immediately enter the race, and a free-for-all primary could produce an even weaker nominee. “Are we sure that’s what we want?” Messina asked.

Others downplayed Biden’s poor polling, particularly the finding that Democrats don’t want him to run again. Their reasoning, however, hinted at a sense of resignation about the coming campaign. Israel compared the choice voters face to a person deciding whether or not to renew a lease on their car: “I’m not sure I want to extend the lease, until I looked at other models and realized I’m going to stick with what I have,” he explained. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that voters he talks to don’t bring up Biden’s age as an issue; only the media does. “I don’t know. He’s old, but he’s also really tall,” Murphy told me. “I don’t care about tall presidents if it doesn’t impact their ability to do the job. I don’t really care about presidents who are older if it doesn’t impact their ability to do the job either.” He was unequivocal: “I think we need Joe Biden as our nominee.”

For most Democrats, the debate over whether Biden should run again is now mostly academic. The president has made his decision, and top Democrats aren’t pressuring him to change his mind. Democrats are left to hope that the comparisons to Obama bear out and the advantages of incumbency kick in. Biden’s age—he’d be 86 at the end of a second term—is a fact of life. “You have to lean into it,” Israel told me. “You can’t ignore it.” How, I asked him, should Biden lean into the age issue? “I don’t know,” Israel replied. “That’s what a campaign is for.”

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In an unserious Republican primary race, low blows have been flying—including about candidates’ footwear. The insults are petty, but they help reveal what’s become of national politics in 2023.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The day after Netanyahu The West must defeat Russia. Most Americans are better off.

Cowbot Boots and a Suit

Republican primary candidates are avoiding the elephant in the room. None of the candidates at this past Wednesday’s debate have a good shot at beating Donald Trump, and instead of taking him on, some have stooped to petty jabs and personal attacks. As my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in this newsletter yesterday, the debate was an unserious spectacle. One particularly unserious topic of conversation? Footwear.

At the debate on Wednesday, Vivek Ramaswamy used the phrase “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” to describe Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, to which Haley retorted that she was actually wearing five-inch heels. The exchange was somewhat eye-roll-inducing, but it’s also a telling sign of how national politics has devolved. Politicians have always been subjects of public consumption. But Trump, a literal reality-television star, brought political figures further into the territory of entertainment and celebrity, with the surface-level fascinations that are characteristic of those realms. Trolling has become a dominant form of political campaigning, especially on the right, and we saw plenty of that onstage this week, especially from Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy’s jabs were undeniably petty, but politicians are public figures aiming to amass tremendous power, and their choices—including sartorial ones—are fair game for public scrutiny. How politicians present themselves says a lot about how they want to be perceived among voters. Their shoes in particular can either disappear into the background or make a strong statement. My colleague Amanda Mull, who covers consumer culture for The Atlantic, told me that, especially in conservative circles with relatively circumscribed dress norms, accessories are a place where taste and personality can shine through. “Shoes are a particularly powerful accessory,” she told me, “because not only do they hold the power to convey personality, but they also undergird the entire structure of your body. Shoes can change your height, your posture, and how you move through space, which are all things that engender social responses from the people around you.”

Shoes like stilettos can project a mastery of the feminine, and wearing cowboy boots under a suit, as DeSantis does, conveys a desire to send the message that you’re “not really some kind of desk-job dweeb, but a man’s man who chafes under urban coastal formality,” Amanda said. (Ramaswamy’s taunt at Wednesday’s debate alluded to allegations that DeSantis wears hidden lifts in those cowboy boots, which DeSantis strenuously denies.)

Haley’s embrace of her own heels is part of a long history of foregrounding her feminine footwear. As Vanessa Friedman noted in The New York Times, “Ms. Haley has pre-emptively weaponized her wardrobe for herself. She owns the heels in this race, just as she owns the skirt.” Friedman noted that Haley frequently references kicking rivals with high heels. When she was South Carolina governor in 2012, she said, “I wear high heels, and it’s not a fashion statement—it’s for ammunition … I’ve got a completely male senate. Do I want to use these for kicking? Sometimes, I do.” She’s returned to versions of that line several times since. So the DeSantis cowboy-boot allegations—surfaced in Politico by Derek Guy, the so-called “menswear guy”—landed nicely in her thematic wheelhouse. Sure enough, Haley gleefully teased DeSantis about it on The Daily Show last week: “We’ll see if he can run in them,” Haley told Charlamagne tha God, the show’s guest host.

Haley is savvy to try to get ahead of the scrutiny about her clothes and style choices that female politicians are often dogged by. Such criticism can follow a politician throughout her political life: Theresa May wore a pair of loud leopard-print pumps early in her career, and the story trailed her for years; British tabloids have obsessively cataloged her shoe choices ever since. When she became prime minister in 2016, she reportedly wore another pair of leopard-print pumps.

For male politicians, shoes can be a symbol of belonging, of joining a fraternity of power. The so-far-all-male line of American presidents has enjoyed bespoke shoes from the same cobbler since 1850: A company called Johnston & Murphy makes custom shoes for each commander in chief. Woodrow Wilson, a natty dresser, apparently broke with the trend of muted dark dress shoes and received white buckskin shoes. In 2015, the company’s CEO told CNN that it was prepared to make shoes for a female president, though so far the opportunity has not arisen.

Public figures’ shoes can also signal interests and priorities at different stages of a career: After leaving office, Barack Obama began appearing in public wearing Allbirds, wool sneakers favored by the tech industry, signaling his entry into a postpresidential tech-bro-chic life as a podcaster and a media mogul. As GQ noted in 2020, the shoes align with Obama’s identity—and help set him apart from his peers: “The outfit was nearly a decade behind the rest of the menswear world—but, grading on a presidential curve, Obama may as well have been Russell Westbrook in the pregame tunnel.” (The presidential cobbler does great work, but presidents are not known for their stylish footwear choices.)

Politicians can use footwear to put out whatever messages they want. But how we interpret them is a different matter. As Amanda noted, sometimes projections of cultural affinity through dress fall flat. “Simply invoking this kind of signal doesn’t guarantee it will be convincing. Cowboy boots with a suit are a little tricky to pull off,” she said, when everyone knows that you’re from the Tampa Bay area and went to Harvard.

Related:

The secret presidential-campaign dress code Why the pantsuit?

Today’s News

Senator Joe Manchin announced yesterday that he will not run for reelection in West Virginia, putting Democrats’ Senate majority at risk. The White House announced that President Joe Biden will meet with President Xi Jinping next Wednesday in an attempt to smooth over relations. House Republicans continue to disagree over spending but are expected to propose a stopgap spending measure tomorrow to prevent a partial government shutdown.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: A nonfiction writer’s biggest challenge is to break down how the world works without being boring, Emma Sarappo writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

By Alex Tizon (From 2017)

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

Read the full article.

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Reuters, AP, CNN and the New York Times have denied any prior knowledge of the 7 October attack.

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.

On October 7, the terrorist group Hamas perpetrated the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. More than 1,400 Israelis were murdered and kidnapped, overwhelmingly civilians, including babies and Holocaust survivors. Children were shot in front of their parents. Parents were killed in front of their children. Families were incinerated in their homes.

Hamas, which filmed many of its atrocities and posted them on social media, has never been shy about its motivations. Its charter uses “Jews” and “Zionists” interchangeably; claims that Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, [and] broadcasting stations”; and promises “struggle against the Jews” and the destruction of Israel. Last week, a spokesperson for the group vowed that “we will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated.” Not all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, but the anti-Zionism of Hamas certainly is.

[Adam Serwer: Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism]

The same is true of Hamas’s far more powerful sponsor, Iran. Whether or not Tehran directly ordered the October massacre, no one disputes that the regime is the primary funder and supplier of Hamas, whose wanton violence it publicly celebrated. Iran’s theocratic rulers are similarly open about their genocidal ambitions. They have built a physical countdown clock to Israel’s destruction, have been accused of plotting terrorist attacks against Jews around the world, and even hosted cartoon contests for Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites. Iran’s military has displayed missiles emblazoned with Death to Israel in Hebrew.

Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, has spent years denying the Holocaust while threatening another one. He has repeatedly referred to Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, in eliminationist terms, labeling it a “cancerous tumor” that must be “uprooted and destroyed.” And these anti-Zionist threats have been backed up by bullets. Not just from Hamas, but from Hezbollah—the much more capable terrorist group based in Lebanon.

Though it has received less attention, Hezbollah—which is not Palestinian and has no significant territorial dispute with Israel, unless one counts its very existence—has been firing rockets and anti-tank missiles at civilian areas in Israel’s north since the first day of the current war, killing several people and causing nearly 200,000 others to evacuate their homes. Hezbollah, too, is not coy about its endgame. In 2002, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, predicted in a speech, “The Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine, not in order to bring about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, but rather … to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place … and there the final and decisive battle will take place.”

And then there are the Houthis, the Iran-backed militant group that rules Yemen and has also been shooting ballistic missiles at Israeli towns. Helpfully for those trying to determine whether the group is after Jews or merely Israelis, its official motto is “Death to America, death to Israel, curse to the Jews, victory to Islam.”

Much recent media coverage and commentary has focused on the darker expressions of anti-Israel activism at American universities. And it’s true that the largest pro-Palestinian movement on campus, Students for Justice in Palestine, came out in support of the Hamas massacre and abduction campaign, declaring in its national response that “today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” But whatever one thinks of these students, they mostly have placards; Iran and its militias have guns, and they are happy to use them.

Four years ago, I sat onstage at the annual conference of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil-rights organization, and listed all the ways a person could be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. This was not what the audience typically comes to hear, but I thought it was important to explain, because the legitimate Palestinian national cause should not be conflated with anti-Jewish prejudice. Among other points, I noted that it was absurd to expect Palestinians to embrace Zionism, which they experienced as the displacement of their people and the dispossession of their homeland. Likewise, principled secular anti-nationalists who oppose all sectarian and ethnic states, ultra-Orthodox Jews who reject a return to the Jewish homeland before the arrival of the Messiah, and Jewish progressives who focus on Israel’s sins because they are particularly upset by how the country appears to act in their name are also not anti-Semites.

I still believe everything I said that day. I do not think that criticizing Israel—something I’ve done repeatedly in these pages—its current far-right government, or even its existence as a Jewish state is necessarily anti-Semitic. But outside the realm of intellectual abstraction, it has become all too apparent that anti-Zionism has an anti-Semitism problem in practice. What’s more, the inability to separate good-faith criticism from bad-faith bigotry is corrupting the conversation about Israel-Palestine at precisely the moment when we most need to be having it.

The most consequential form of anti-Zionism today is the one that deploys guns and rockets, supported by an array of apologists who justify their use. Any discussion of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic needs to center that reality, instead of focusing on theories or edge cases that are less objectionable, but also far less prevalent in the real world.

The first step to solving this problem is admitting that we have one.

“Tomorrow evening, it will be my pleasure and my honor to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I have also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well. Unfortunately, the Israelis would not allow them to travel here, so it is going to be only friends from Hezbollah … The idea that an organization [Hamas] that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labeled as a terrorist organization by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.”

This deranged declaration was made not by a 21-year-old activist at a university this past month, but in 2009 by Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist leader of the British Labour Party from 2015 to 2020.

The growth of anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism on college campuses is troubling—as are draconian attempts to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech in response. But I am more concerned about the many powerful and influential people like Corbyn—politicians, activists, celebrities—who have spent years expressing or excusing anti-Jewish bigotry in an anti-Zionist guise, and building a global permission structure in which it is now acceptable to justify or even celebrate mass Jewish death.

The list of such people is long. There is the foreign minister of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country of 231 million people, who claimed on CNN in 2021 that Israel controls the media with its “deep pockets.” (Oddly, the Zionists invited him on the air in the first place.) There is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a NATO leader, whose inner circle produced a propaganda film in 2015 that detailed, in the words of the Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol, “how ‘the children of Israel’ want to dominate the world, subjugate other peoples and thus surround the world like a ‘giant octopus.’” To date, Erdoğan has refused to condemn Hamas, some of whose top officials reside in his country.

It’s not just anti-Zionist politicians who turn out to be anti-Semites. Greta Berlin, a co-founder of the Free Gaza activist group, wrote on Twitter in 2012 that “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews.” She and another Free Gaza co-founder, Mary Hughes-Thompson, later suggested that Israel’s Mossad was behind the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in France. (An al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility.) The celebrated author Alice Walker joined one of Free Gaza’s missions to Gaza, and later refused to allow The Color Purple to be reissued in Hebrew. She also spent years posting baldly anti-Semitic material on her personal blog, and even promoted—in The New York Times—a wildly anti-Jewish book by the conspiracy theorist David Icke that claims that Jews bankrolled the Holocaust. When criticized for her conduct, she retorted that “the attempt to smear David Icke, and by association, me, is really an effort to dampen the effect of our speaking out in support of the people of Palestine.” And the less said about the anti-Jewish outlook of the Israel-boycott advocate and former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, who recently questioned whether Hamas committed atrocities, the better.

The far right is no exception to this trend. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, perhaps the most infamous white nationalist in America, is also a virulent anti-Zionist, regularly regurgitating classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and replacing the word Jew with Zionist. (A typical sample of the genre: “The Zionists occupy most of the American media and now control much of American government.”) And Duke’s successors have dominated the social-media discourse surrounding the current Gaza war. As Rolling Stone reported this month, “The online alt-right has been enormously successful at co-opting the Palestinian cause to line their pockets and advance separate agendas … Huge swaths of X users have accepted them as reliable authorities on a fast-developing crisis in the Middle East, and thereby introduced new strains of propaganda into their media diet without realizing it.”

One such influencer, Lucas Gage, wrote on October 7 that “it’s hard to have much sympathy for the Israeli regime when they helped perpetrate this attack on my country,” and illustrated his post with images from 9/11. Gage later added some Holocaust denial into the mix, writing, “Now that you’re seeing all these Jewish people getting caught making up atrocities, doesn’t that make you wonder if they lied about past ones?” Gage has since doubled his following, gaining nearly 100,000 followers. Another far-right influencer, Jackson Hinkle, told his 2 million followers on X that Israel greatly inflated its death toll and that most of the murdered Israelis were killed not by Hamas, but by tank shelling from the Israeli army. He falsely sourced these lies to Israel’s premier left-wing paper, Haaretz, which was then forced to repudiate them.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]

The scale of this influence campaign is new, but the substance isn’t. When the Republican politician Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video on Facebook alleging that “Zionist supremacists” were “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands,” and later accused the Rothschild banking dynasty of causing forest fires with a space laser, she was drawing from this fever swamp. When the Trump supporter Kanye West (now known as Ye), during his 2022 anti-Semitic implosion, declared that “culture is controlled by the Zionist media,” he was simply reflecting ideas that had long circulated on the fringes of the American right, but have become steadily more mainstream. Trump himself has claimed that Israel “literally owned Congress” and told Republican Jews that “you want to control your own politician”—and that was before he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and the anti-Semitic influencer Nick Fuentes. Seen in this context, it should not be surprising that the website antizionism.org is run not by Palestinians, but by neo-Nazis.

That so many anti-Jewish bigots have found a home in anti-Israel groups or appropriated their language might seem surprising. But it’s actually quite predictable. If half of the world’s Muslims resided in one place, we would expect that place to draw the ire of Islamophobes. Israel is no different. As the address of so many Jews, it is an irresistible target for those who hate them. For this reason, any movement to critique or penalize Israel for its conduct will naturally attract not just principled advocates of human rights, but committed opponents of Jewish life, because criticism of Israel provides a respectable cover to launder their uglier aims. Unfortunately, they have been quite successful.

When Jewish institutions around the world are targeted for vandalism and violence, when Jews are hunted by a mob in a Russian airport, and when Jewish students are threatened and physically assaulted on college campuses, it is not some freak accident or aberration. It is the inevitable end result of a movement unwilling or unable to expel its extremists.

On the night of Friday, October 6, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg laid their hands on the head of their 23-year-old son, Hersh, so that they could bless him, a ritual of the Sabbath. They recited in Hebrew: May you feel God’s presence within you always, and may you find peace.

It was an exquisitely temperate Jerusalem evening, and the Goldberg-Polin family made the most of it, dining al fresco at a long table of friends. Hersh’s presence was an unexpected blessing. He had only recently returned from several months of traveling across Europe by himself, occasionally meeting up with his boyhood friends. Earlier in the week, Hersch had told his mother that he would be away for the weekend, attending a music festival in the north. But that festival’s organizers had neglected to obtain the necessary permits, and the event ended prematurely.

As Rachel stared at her son from across the table, she marveled at his hard-earned sense of ease. When the Goldberg-Polin family emigrated from Richmond, Virginia, in 2008, when Hersh was 7, he had initially struggled to adapt, to learn the language, to shake his sense of being an outsider. But here he was, vividly recounting picaresque stories of his time abroad. He said that the thing he’d enjoyed most about Europe was that he didn’t need to bathe, because rivers were so ubiquitous and he could always plunge into one.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘We’re going to die here’]

Geography, travel, and the endless wonders of the planet were his lifelong passions, and wanderlust his state of equilibrium. Before his bar mitzvah, he told those invited that he wanted gifts of maps and atlases. Although his parents never asked probing questions about the career he might pursue, his father imagined that Hersh’s curiosities might lead him to become a journalist for National Geographic.  

At 11 p.m., Hersh told his mother that he was leaving to meet up with his friend Aner Shapira. He didn’t go into detail about his plans, but he was wearing his backpack. He kissed her and then left her to sip her tea and pick at the remnants on her plate of desserts, to savor the respite of Shabbat.

At 7:30 the next morning, Jon Polin left for synagogue. He’d been assigned to serve as that morning’s gabbai, charged with orchestrating the logistics of the service. On his walk, he heard the distant sound of explosions. A stranger stopped him in the street. “There is a strong attack in the south.” Polin thanked the man and went on his way.

Not long after, sirens began blaring, the cue for residents to make their way to bomb shelters. At the family’s home, Rachel woke her two daughters and led them to the basement. When they emerged, after the warnings abated, she decided that circumstances demanded she check her phone, breaking the prohibition of using devices on the day of rest. Two text messages from Hersh instantly appeared.

“I love you.”

“I’m sorry.”

Rachel knew that Hersh would only apologize like that for causing her pain and worry. She called his phone, but reached voicemail.

“Are you ok?” she texted.  

And again, “Let me know you’re ok.”

Her daughters began to scan social media furiously, where they encountered videos from a music festival in the south, images of screaming youths, sounds of gunfire. Is this where he went? Rachel didn’t know.

Rachel sent the link to the festival’s website to Hersh’s friend Yaniv. “Are they here?” He quickly replied that they were.

Jon returned early from synagogue, where the congregants had agreed to cancel the remainder of services, after their third trip to the building’s shelter. But he didn’t have an inkling of his son’s peril until Rachel showed him the text messages from Hersh and told him, “I think we have a problem.”

Their laptops and phones, now turned on, began to unfurl the horrors of the morning: the massacres at the kibbutzim, the reports of hundreds dead at the festival, the others abducted by Hamas.

Another friend, Omer, took it upon himself to design a digital missing-persons poster, with a photo of Hersh and Aner, which he posted on social media and circulated widely.

Suddenly, there was too much information to sort through: so many horrifying videos to watch, so many eyewitness reports, so many text messages, except for the one text message they most deeply wanted.

It was strange that he hadn’t called. Rachel began to tell herself stories to explain away that fact. Maybe he lost his phone in the chaos. Maybe Hersh and Aner ran into the bush and were now walking the hundred kilometers to Jerusalem. Maybe they were in a place with no cell signal. Maybe, maybe, God willing, just maybe.  

Then came the knocks on the door, as a cavalcade of concerned friends began to show up at the apartment. By 2 p.m., there were eight of them, working the phones, scouring the internet. They found a list of survivors clustered at one kibbutz, then a separate list from a different village. They saw Hersh’s and Aner’s names. But when the friends made calls to verify the lists, they learned that they were inaccurate.

As the hours mounted, Rachel knew that the stories she was telling herself weren’t believable either. There’s no way that nobody in the entire south has a phone he can use to just say, “I’m alive.”  

Earlier in the day, Rachel and Jon had reported Hersh as missing. When the police finally called, they asked them to bring anything with Hersh’s DNA to the station. They found an old toothbrush and stray hairs on his pillowcase—quotidian traces of his life that could be used to confirm his death.

What felt like a breakthrough came late at night: The friends found a photo from a bomb shelter near the festival. Amazingly, they could see Aner standing in the doorway. And there was Hersh, along with kids wearing sunglasses casually perched on their head, some checking their phones. By Israeli standards, the scene looked strangely normal. They began to hear reports that the terrorists had killed hundreds of festival-goers, but now they possessed material evidence that Hersh could plausibly be among the living.

At 4 a.m., Jon received a message from a cousin. “I feel terrible sending this to you, but it was sent to me and I feel like I have to show it to you. Don’t show it to Rachel.” It was an article from an Indian publication about the murder of a young man named Hersh Goldberg-Polin, his body found in the West Bank. Jon felt sick to his stomach. But he also paused at the incongruities. The article noted that Hersh was a 25-year-old student. He was neither 25 nor a student. And how would his body have ended up in the West Bank?

Jon did show the article to Rachel, and she sent it to a reporter from ABC News who had contacted her earlier in the day and struck her as a sympathetic soul. “Please, can you send this to a fact-checking desk for confirmation?” The reporter said he would—and eventually, he relayed that his team had debunked the account.

After daybreak, Rachel and Jon called a retired police officer they knew. She told them, “I’m coming over now.” She drove them to an improvised police station, next to Ben Gurion Airport, set up for families of the missing—an ingathering of the dazed. They made their way through a crowd of hundreds of others searching for their loved ones. It wasn’t chaotic; everyone was too stricken for that. As Rachel remembered the scene: “It was like we all walked in with third-degree burns. That’s how the police were treating us. They were just so careful, and they knew nothing. So we were doing everything we could do, but there was nothing to do.”

At home, they heard about a girl who’d just been released from the hospital. In the photo from the bomb shelter, Hersh sat next to her, his arm around her. Jon and Rachel desperately wanted to talk to her, to glean whatever she knew about his fate.

Rachel called the girl’s mother, who said that her daughter was too traumatized to talk. Rachel responded, “I’m a mother and I understand, but we don’t know if Hersh is dead or alive, and your daughter might know something. So when she is ready, and I know she can’t do it tonight, please have her call me.”

At the end of the day, the couple told their friends that they wanted to get some sleep. But really, they needed time to themselves. In the privacy of their bedroom, they allowed themselves to say a fatalistic thing: We’re the parents of a boy who’s dead. They began to talk about how they might need to pick themselves up, for the sake of their daughters. It was a rare time in their marriage that Rachel saw Jon heaving, and witnessed the uncontrolled rush of tears.

The next morning, another survivor from the bomb shelter called. They placed the phone on the coffee table and put her on speaker. They asked their friend Rotem to take the lead in the conversation. Jon and Rachel, both natives of Chicago, spoke Hebrew with a foreign accent. Rotem didn’t, and they hoped that might make this young woman feel more comfortable reciting uncomfortable truths.

Haltingly, carefully, she began to narrate. The last time she saw him, Hersh was alive, but he had hurt his hand. The Hebrew word yad can mean hand or arm. And the way she used it struck Rotem as curious. “Was it a serious injury or did he just hurt his hand?” She replied, “He’s okay, but he definitely hurt his hand.”

After they hung up, Rotem called the survivor back, without Rachel and Jon in the room. He pressed her to be less cautious. It turned out that the Hamas assailants had lobbed grenades into the bunker. Aner had picked them up and hurled them back outside. And then she revealed the hard truth she had blunted earlier: Hersh lost his arm, from the elbow down, in the attack.

As Rotem relayed the information to Hersh’s parents, Rachel was beside herself. Hersh is left-handed—and that was the arm he now longer possessed. She exclaimed, “Did he just die in that field? Did he? How much can this child take?”

Rotem also needed them to know that he had collected an even more gruesome piece of testimony in the course of his efforts. He had spoken with a man in search of his own son. On October 7, he’d entered the bomb shelter and found seven young Israelis lying under a carpet of corpses, feigning their own death for four and a half hours. He told them, “I’m Israeli. I’m a private citizen. I’m here with my vehicle. Anybody who’s still conscious, get up right now and I’m taking you to the hospital.” The man told Rotem, “Based on what I saw in that bomb shelter, I’m sorry to say that there’s no chance that Aner is alive.”

With each day that passed, their chronology of October 7 thickened. One woman recounted to Rachel and Jon how Hamas terrorists had pulled Hersh from the bunker, his arm now wrapped in a tourniquet, and aggressively loaded him onto a truck. The police said that they had traced Hersh’s cellphone, and that they had last encountered it on the border with Gaza.

Although the government assigned them two case workers, the authorities seemed to have no independent sense of the timeline of that day, and no hard information about Hersh’s condition. Almost everything substantial that the Goldberg-Polins learned came from the investigation that they had conducted themselves. As the grim new reality of their lives settled over them, the couple made a calculated decision: They would push on every door. Whenever the global news media asked for an interview, they granted one. One American TV anchor tried to nudge Rachel to wear makeup: “You might make viewers uncomfortable.” Rachel replied, “I want to make them feel uncomfortable.”

Hope, or what now constituted hope, came in the form of Anderson Cooper. In the course of filming a long segment about October 7, the CNN anchor came across footage on the phone of an Israeli soldier. As he saw the video, Cooper gasped, “Jesus Christ.” He recognized Hersh’s face. There was Hersh hoisting himself onto a pickup truck with his remaining arm, his nondominant one. It was a terrible image: Blood was everywhere, on his face, on his leg. Cooper tried to break the news gently to Jon and Rachel: “I have a video of your son and I’m going to send it now. It’s a hard video to watch.”

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

Still, they could see Hersh using his own two feet; they could see that he possessed the power to lift himself onto the flatbed, despite his loss of blood. Jon told me, “You live in a reality where you want to hear that your kid was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza, because that’s better than the alternative. It frames for you the alternative reality that we live in, which enables me to take strength from seeing my son with a blown-off limb.”

When I spoke with Hersh’s parents via Zoom, they were in their apartment in the southeast quadrant of Jerusalem, sitting on a couch in front of an unadorned wall. Rachel told me that they had both lost substantial weight. The Jewish impulse to feed the suffering felt like an affront, which they both resisted. “I’m not sure if Hersh is alive. I am not going to be eating cake,” Rachel said.

They narrated their story with a sense of detachment, the numbness that allows the mind to function in the midst of a living nightmare. I noted that fact to Rachel, who wore a sticker with a 26 on her T-shirt, the number of days since Hamas had blown off her son’s arm and abducted him. She didn’t disagree. “I tell everyone that I’m going to go downstairs and cry now and that I’ll be back in a few minutes. And I’ll go into our bedroom and I’ll cry, and I’ll scream into a T-shirt, and I’ll just be beside myself. Then I’ll wipe my face and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got work to do.’ And I come back upstairs.” Each interview is a shout in the darkness, an exhaustion of their obligation to avail themselves of every opportunity to remind the world of Hersh’s existence.

I told her that I wanted to help Hersh get started in journalism, if that’s what he wanted and if he managed to survive. She thanked me, then corrected me: “Please, it’s when, not if.”