Does Nikki Haley really have a shot at beating Donald Trump? Does any Republican?

On Monday afternoon, a basketball gym in Bluffton, South Carolina, was packed with people who had come to hear Haley’s latest sales pitch. Hundreds more were waiting outside. No Republican candidate besides Trump can reliably draw more than a thousand attendees, but about 2,500 showed up for Haley. (Granted, this speech was in Haley’s home state, where she formerly served as governor. Also, the gym was a stone’s throw from the Sun City retirement community, a place where, gently speaking, people may have had nothing better to do at 2 p.m. on a Monday.) One of Haley’s volunteers told me this weekday event had originally been booked at a nearby restaurant, but that, given the current excitement of the campaign, organizers pivoted to the gym, on the University of South Carolina at Beaufort campus. Everyone in Haley’s orbit is understandably riveted. She’s squarely challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for second place in the Republican presidential primary, no matter how second that place may be.

While the former president still floats high above his dwindling field of competitors, Haley is the only person who keeps rising in the polls. Her climb is steady, not a blip. Haley’s campaign and super PAC are planning to spend $10 million on advertisements over the next eight weeks across Iowa and New Hampshire. On Tuesday, she received an endorsement from the Koch brothers’ network, Americans for Prosperity Action, and along with it an undisclosed amount of financial support. (It will be a lot.) But this year-end, all-in effort to stop Trump ignores the fact that he is a singular vortex, a once-in-a-century figure, a living martyr with a traveling Grateful Dead–like roadshow. His abhorrent behavior and legal woes do not matter. Three weeks ago, at his rally in South Florida, vendors told me that items with Trump’s mug shot are their biggest sellers. How does a mere generational figure, as her supporters hope Haley might be, compete with that?

Haley bounded up onstage in a light-blue blazer and jeans. “We’ve been through a lot together,” she told the crowd. She meandered back and forth—no lectern, no teleprompter. When you ask people what they like about her, many point to her presence, her poise. Haley delivers her stump speech in a singsong voice. A few words, a pause, a smile. Speaking to the Low Country crowd, she seemed to be thickening her southern accent and peppering in a few extra-emphatic finger points for good measure. She’s just a down-home, neighborly southerner whose most recent job happened to be in Manhattan, serving at the United Nations. The volunteer who had bragged to me about the venue change later pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of himself and Haley at a wedding reception. He pointed to her bare feet. She’s so real, he said.

[Read: Nikki Haley offers an alternate reality]

Several women in the audience were wearing pink shirts with a Margaret Thatcher quote on the back: If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. Sue Ruby, a 74-year-old attendee from nearby Savannah, Georgia, was wearing a WOMEN FOR NIKKI button on her sweater. “I feel like we’ve given men a lot of years to straighten our society out, and they haven’t done so great, so let’s try a woman,” she said. Ruby told me she’s a Republican who begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the past two elections because she viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. A Sun City resident named Lorraine, age 79, told me that “it’s time for a woman,” but that she would nevertheless vote for Trump if he wins the nomination. “I don’t want to vote for the opposite,” she said, refusing to say Biden’s name. Carolyn Ballard, an 80-year-old woman from Hilton Head, South Carolina, told me she’s a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump twice, but that she believes he’s past his prime and that Haley is her candidate. “He just irritates people and he stirs up a lot of trouble,” she said of Trump. “Although he’s very smart, and he did a lot for the country. I mean, everybody was happy when he was president.”

Haley doesn’t lean as hard into gender dynamics as past female presidential candidates have. Nevertheless, she skillfully uses her womanhood and Indian heritage as setups for certain lines. “I have been underestimated in everything I’ve ever done,” she told the room. “And it’s a blessing, because it makes me scrappy. No one’s going to outwork me in this race. No one’s going to outsmart me in this race.” Or this: “Strong girls become strong women, and strong women become strong leaders,” which had a surprise left turn: “And none of that happens if we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports.” (Huge applause.)

Courting Never Trump voters, exhausted Trump voters, and, yes, even some likely Trump voters simultaneously is not an easy trick. She hardly ever criticizes her former boss. Here’s her most biting critique from Monday: “I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time … and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” (Note the passivity; she won’t even say Trump catalyzes the chaos.) Having already served as his ambassador to the UN, she may be under consideration for vice president. Compared with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, Trump has gone relatively soft on her, opting for the mid-century misogynistic slight “birdbrain.” Like most of her competitors, Haley has said she would pardon him.

Whereas Trump has tacked authoritarian and apocalyptic, Haley has mostly kept her messaging grounded. At the rally, she bemoaned the price of groceries and gas. “Biden worries more about sagebrush lizards than he does about Americans being able to afford their energy,” she quipped. (She also called out her fellow Republicans for adding to the deficit.) She’s a military wife, and spoke about her husband’s PTSD and the persistent problem of homeless veterans. Though she lacks Trump’s innate knack for zingers, she landed one about how things might change if members of Congress got their health care through the VA: “It’ll be the best health care you’ve ever seen, guaranteed.”

Although many of her fellow Republicans have adopted a nativist view of the world, Haley waxes at length about America’s geopolitical role. (And subsequently gets tagged as a globalist.) “The world is literally on fire,” she said Monday. She affirmed her support for both Israel and Ukraine, and went long on the triple threat of Russia, China, and Iran, paying particular attention to China as a national-security issue. In doing so, knowingly or not, she began to sound quite Trumpy. “They’re already here. They’ve already infiltrated our country,” Haley said. “We’ve got to start looking at China the way they look at us.” She called for an end to normal trade relations with China until they stop “murdering” Americans with fentanyl. She chastened the audience with images of China’s 500 nuclear warheads and its rapidly expanding naval fleet. “Dictators are actually very transparent. They tell us exactly what they’re going to do,” she said.

Perhaps Haley’s biggest advantage right now is her relative youth. She’ll turn 52 three days before the New Hampshire primary. Trump has lately been making old-man gaffes, drawing comparisons to Biden, who was first elected to the Senate the year Haley was born. She speaks wistfully of “tomorrow,” of leaving certain things—unspecified baggage—in the past. “You have to go with a new generational leader,” Haley proclaimed. Onstage, she endorsed congressional term limits and the idea of mental-competency tests for public servants older than 75. The Senate, she joked, had become “the most privileged nursing home in the country.” Throwing shade at both Trump and Biden, she spoke of the need for leaders at “the top of their game.” Hundreds of gray-and-white-haired supporters before her nodded and murmured in approval.

Monday’s event took place roughly 90 miles south of Charleston, where, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, hoping to start a race war. At the time, Haley was governor of South Carolina, and Trump—who had descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy for president just the day before—still seemed like a carnival act. Photos of Roof posing with a Confederate flag ricocheted across social media. Haley had the flag taken down from the South Carolina statehouse, a reversal from her earlier position on the flag. Five years later, after the murder of George Floyd, Haley tweeted that, “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.” During Monday’s rally, though, she sounded much more like an old-school Republican: “America’s not racist; we’re blessed,” she said. “Our kids need to love America. They need to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance when they start school.”

As her audience grows, she continues to tiptoe along a very fine line: not MAGA, not anti-MAGA. In lieu of Trump-style airbrushed fireworks and bald eagles and Lee Greenwood, she’s going for something slightly classier (leaving the stage to Tom Petty’s “American Girl”) while still seizing every opportunity to own the libs. At the rally, she attacked the military’s gender-pronoun training and received substantial applause. “We’ve got to end this national self-loathing that’s taken over our country,” she said. Early in her speech, she promised that she would speak hard truths. As she approached her conclusion, one hard truth stuck out: “Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. That is nothing to be proud of. We should want to win the majority of Americans.” It was the closest thing to a truly forward-thinking message that any serious Republican has offered this cycle.

In the most generous of interpretations, the race for the GOP nomination is now among three people: Haley, DeSantis, and Trump. Mike Pence is already out. Tim Scott, Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, dropped out two weeks ago. Vivek Ramaswamy, who has struggled to break out of single digits in the polls, recently rented an apartment in Des Moines and will almost certainly stay in the race through the Iowa caucuses. Ramaswamy has also unexpectedly become Haley’s punching bag: Her campaign said she pulled in $1 million in donations after calling him “scum” during the last debate.

At next week’s debate in Alabama, the stage will likely be winnowed to Ramaswamy, Haley, and DeSantis. (“When the stage gets smaller, our chances get bigger,” Haley told her rally crowd.) DeSantis seems to be betting his whole campaign on Iowa, and has secured the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. This weekend, DeSantis will complete his 99-county tour of the state. Haley needs to beat DeSantis, but she also needs his voters if she has any serious shot of taking on Trump. If DeSantis drops out before Haley, his supporters are far more likely to flock to Trump. So maybe Haley needs a deus ex machina. In 2020, Biden’s campaign was viewed as all but cooked when, here in South Carolina, with the help of Representative Jim Clyburn, everything turned around, propelling him to Super Tuesday and the nomination.

Haley’s campaign declined to let her speak with me. A spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas, instead emailed me the following statement: “Poll after poll show Nikki Haley is the best challenger to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That’s why the largest conservative grassroots coalition in the country just got behind her. Nikki is second in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and is the only candidate with the momentum to go the distance. Ron DeSantis has a short shelf life with his Iowa-or-bust strategy.”

[David A. Graham: Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis]

As rally-goers made their way to the parking lot, I struck up conversation with a man in a T-shirt that read NOPE NOT AGAIN, with Trump’s hair and giant red necktie decorating the O. He wore a camouflage baseball hat with an American flag on the dome. The man, Mike Stevens, told me he was a 25-year Army veteran, and that he was disgusted with Trump.

“He’s a bully. He’s not good. He causes hate and discontent,” Stevens said. “I mean, he didn’t uphold the Constitution. And now we’ve had a judge say that. First time ever—no peaceful transfer of power? Even Al Gore did it. I’ve always been a Republican, but if it’s him and Biden, I’ll vote for Biden, I guess.”

He was excited about Haley, and had been texting his friends and family about her rally—trying to wean them off their Trump addiction. But he also told me he had written Haley a letter: He was dismayed by her promise to pardon Trump, and he needed her to know that.

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

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Career Over Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of that is going to happen.

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

Today’s News

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

Evening Read

Bettmann / CORBIS / Getty

Must the Novelist Crusade?

By Eudora Welty

Published in the October 1965 issue of The Atlantic.

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

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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

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

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

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Shan Wang contributed to this newsletter.

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A press release that President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign issued last week offered a revealing window into his advisers’ thinking about how he might overcome widespread discontent with his performance to win a second term next year.

While the release focused mostly on portraying former President Donald Trump as a threat to legal abortion, the most telling passage came when the Biden campaign urged the political press corps “to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.”

That sentence probably says as much as any internal strategy memo about how Biden’s team plans to win a second term, especially if the president faces a rematch with Trump. With that exhortation the campaign made clear that it wants Americans to focus as much on what Trump would do with power if he’s reelected as on what Biden has done in office.

It’s common for presidents facing public disappointment in their performance to attempt to shift the public’s attention toward their rival. All embattled modern first-term presidents have insisted that voters will treat their reelection campaign as a choice, not a referendum. Biden is no exception. He routinely implores voters to compare him not “to the Almighty” but “to the alternative.”

But it hasn’t been easy for modern presidents to persuade large numbers of voters disenchanted with their performance to vote for them on the theory that the electorate would like the alternative less. The other recent presidents with approval ratings around Election Day as low as Biden’s are now were Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992. Both lost their bids for a second term. Continued cooling of inflation might allow Biden to improve his approval rating, which stands around 40 percent in most surveys (Gallup’s latest put it at only 37 percent). But if Biden can’t make big gains, he will secure a second term only if he wins more voters who are unhappy with his performance than any president in modern times.

The silver lining for Biden is that in Trump he has a polarizing potential opponent who might allow him to do just that. In the 2022 and 2023 elections, a crucial slice of voters down on the economy and Biden’s performance voted for Democrats in the key races anyway, largely because they viewed the Trump-aligned GOP alternatives as too extreme. And, though neither the media nor the electorate is yet paying full attention, Trump in his 2024 campaign is regularly unveiling deeply divisive policy positions (such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented immigrants) and employing extremist and openly racist language (echoing fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in describing his political opponents as “vermin”). Eventually, Trump’s excesses could shape the 2024 election as much as Biden’s record will.

[Read: Republicans can’t figure it out]

If the GOP renominates Trump, attitudes about the challenger might overshadow views about the incumbent to an unprecedented extent, the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff believes. McInturff told me that in his firm’s polling over the years, most voters usually say that when a president seeks reelection, their view about the incumbent is what most influences their decision about whom to support. But in a recent national survey McInturff’s firm conducted with a Democratic partner for NBC, nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president.

“I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff told me in an email. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

Through the last decades of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom among campaign strategists was that most voters, contrary to what incumbents hoped, viewed presidential elections primarily as a referendum, not a choice. Buffeted by disappointment in their tenure, both Carter and Bush decisively lost their reelection bids despite their enormous efforts to convince voters that their opponent could not be trusted with power.

In this century, it’s become somewhat easier for presidents to overcome doubts about their performance by inflaming fears about their rival. Barack Obama in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2004 had more success than Carter and the elder Bush at both mobilizing their core supporters and attracting swing voters by raising doubts about their opponent.

Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. “Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,” Abramowitz told me.

[Read: Will Republicans pay a price for extremism?]

While more voters than in the past appear willing to treat presidential reelections as a choice rather than a referendum, Biden may need to push this dynamic to a new extreme. Obama and Bush both had approval ratings right around 50 percent in polling just before they won reelection; that meant they needed to convince only a slice of voters ambivalent about them that they would be even more unhappy with their opponent.

Biden’s approval rating is much lower, and he is even further behind the majority approval enjoyed by Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 before they won decisive reelections.

Those comparisons make clear that one crucial question confronting Biden is how much he can improve his own standing over the next year. The president has economic achievements he can tout to try to rebuild his support, particularly an investment boom in clean energy, semiconductors, and electric vehicles tied to the trio of major bills he passed. Unemployment is at historic lows, and in recent months wages have begun rising faster than prices. The latest economic reports show that inflation, which most analysts consider the primary reason for the public discontent with his tenure, is continuing to moderate.

All of these factors may lift Biden, but probably only modestly. Even if prices for gas, groceries, and rent stop rising, that doesn’t mean they will fall back to the levels they were at when Biden took office. Voters appear unhappy not only about inflation, but about the Federal Reserve Board’s cure of higher interest rates, which has made it harder to purchase homes and cars and to finance credit-card debt. Biden also faces the challenge that some portion of his high disapproval rating is grounded not in dissatisfaction over current conditions, but in a belief that he’s too old to handle the job for another term. Better economic news won’t dispel that doubt.

For all of these reasons, while Biden may notch some improvement, many strategists in both parties believe that it will be exceedingly difficult for him to restore his approval rating to 50 percent. Historically, that’s been viewed as the minimum for a president seeking reelection. But that may no longer be true. The ceiling on any president’s potential job rating is much lower than it once was because virtually no voters in the other opposition party now ever say they approve of his performance. In that environment, securing approval from at least half of the country may no longer be necessary for an incumbent seeking reelection.

Jim Messina, the campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, reflected the changing thinking when he told me he does not believe that Biden needs to reach majority approval to win another term. “I don’t think it’s a requirement,” Messina said. “It might be if we are dealing with an open race with two nonpresidents. People forget that they are both incumbents. Neither one of them is going to get to 50 percent in approval. What you are trying to drive is the choice.”

For Biden, the key group could be voters who say they disapprove of his performance in office, but only “somewhat,” rather than “strongly.” The Democrats’ unusually good showing among those “somewhat” disapproving voters was a central reason the party performed unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterm election. But in an NBC national survey released earlier this week, Trump narrowly led Biden among those disenchanted voters, a result more in line with historic patterns.

Biden may have an easier time recapturing more of those somewhat negative voters by raising doubts about Trump than by resolving their doubts about his own record. Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection campaign, told me that it would be difficult for Biden to prevail against Trump if he can’t improve his approval ratings at least somewhat from their current anemic level. But if Biden can lift his own approval just to 46 or 47 percent, Sosnik said, “he can get the remaining points” he would need to win “pretty damn easily off of” resistance to Trump.

Current polling is probably not fully capturing that resistance, because Trump’s plans for a second term have received relatively little public attention. On virtually every front, Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.)

But comparisons between the current and former presidents work both ways. And polls show that considerable disappointment in Biden’s performance is improving the retrospective assessment of Trump’s record, particularly on the economy.

In a recent national poll by Marquette University Law School, nearly twice as many voters said they trusted Trump rather than Biden to handle both the economy and immigration. The Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg released a survey last week of the nine most competitive presidential states, in which even the Democratic “base of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQ+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.” Among all voters in those crucial states, the share that said they thought Trump did a good job as president was nearly 10 percentage points higher than the group that gives Biden good grades now.

Poll results such as those scare Democratic strategists perhaps more than any other; they indicate that some voters may be growing more willing to accept what they didn’t like about Trump (chaos, vitriol, threats to democracy) because they think he’s an antidote for what they don’t like about Biden (his results on inflation, immigration, and crime.) Jim McLaughlin, a Trump-campaign pollster, told me earlier this year that because of their discouragement with Biden’s record, even some voters who say “I may not love the guy” are growing newly receptive to Trump. “The example I had people use is that he is like your annoying brother-in-law that you can’t stand but you know at the end of the day he’s a good husband, he’s a good father,” McLaughlin said.

The problem for Trump’s team is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico. Trump’s coming trials on 91 separate criminal charges will test the public’s tolerance in other ways: Even a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in most of the key swing states found that the results could flip if the former president is convicted.

Trump presents opponents with an almost endless list of vulnerabilities. But Biden’s own vulnerabilities have lifted Trump to a stronger position in recent polls than he achieved at any point in the 2020 race. These polls aren’t prophecies of how voters will make their decisions next November if they are forced to choose again between Biden and Trump. But they are a measure of how much difficult work Biden has ahead to win either a referendum or a choice against the man he ousted four years ago.

In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated had hatred led to death on a horrifying scale.

“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”

Ndahiro pointed out that in 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, an influential political figure within the largest ethnic group in Rwanda, the Hutus, had openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi, the second-largest of Rwanda’s ethnic groups. Gitera referred to the Tutsi as “vermin.”

“The stigmatization and dehumanization of the Tutsi had begun,” Ndahiro wrote. It culminated in a 100-day stretch in 1994 when an estimated 1 million people were killed, the majority of whom were Tutsis. “The worst kind of hatred had been unleashed,” Ndahiro wrote. “What began with dehumanizing words ended in bloodshed.”

I THOUGHT ABOUT the events that led up to the Rwandan genocide after I heard Donald Trump, in a Veterans Day speech, refer to those he counts as his enemies as “vermin.”

“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,” Trump said toward the end of his speech in Claremont, New Hampshire. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.” The former president continued, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

When Trump finished his speech, the audience erupted in applause.

Trump’s comments came only a few weeks after he had been asked about immigration and the southern border in an interview with the host of a right-wing website. “Did you ever think you would see this level of American carnage?” Trump was asked.

“No. Nobody has seen anything like this,” Trump responded. “I think you could say worldwide. I think you could go to a banana republic and pick the worst one and you’re not going to see what we’re witnessing now.” The front-runner for the Republican nomination warned that immigrants pose an immediate threat. “We know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

In a September 20 speech in Dubuque, Iowa, Trump said, “What they’re doing to our country, they’re destroying it. It’s the blood of our country. What they’re doing is destroying our country.”

Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does. He portrays others as existential threats, determined to destroy everything MAGA world loves about America. Trump is doing two things at once: pushing the narrative that his enemies must be defeated while dissolving the natural inhibitions most human beings have against hating and harming others. It signals to his supporters that any means to vanquish the other side is legitimate; the normal constraints that govern human interactions no longer apply.

Dehumanizers view their targets as having “a human appearance but a subhuman essence,” according to David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor who has written on the history and complicated psychological roots of dehumanization. “It is the dehumanizer’s nagging awareness of the other’s humanity that gives dehumanization its distinctive psychological flavor,” he writes. “Ironically, it is our inability to regard other people as nothing but animals that leads to unimaginable cruelty and destructiveness.” Dehumanized people can be turned into something worse than animals; they can be turned into monsters. They aren’t just dangerous; they are metaphysically threatening. They are not just subhuman; they are irredeemably destructive.

THAT IS THE WICKEDLY SHREWD rhetorical and psychological game that Trump is playing, and he plays it very well. Alone among American politicians, he has an intuitive sense of how to inflame detestations and resentments within his supporters while also deepening their loyalty to him, even their reverence for him.

Trump’s opponents, including the press, are “truly the enemy of the people.” He demanded that the parent company of MSNBC and NBC be investigated for “treason” over what he described as “one-side[d] and vicious coverage.” He insinuated on his social network, Truth Social, that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for committing treason. At a Trump event in Iowa, days after that post, one Trump supporter asked why Milley wasn’t “in there before a firing squad within a month.” Another told NBC News, “Treason is treason. There’s only one cure for treason: being put to death.”

Trump has taken to mocking the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which left him with a fractured skull that required surgery and other serious injuries. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has brought two indictments against the former president, is a “Trump-hating prosecutor” who is “deranged” and a “disgrace to America”—and whose wife and family “despise me much more than he does.” The former president posted the name, photo, and private Instagram account of a law clerk serving Judge Arthur Engoron, who is currently presiding over Trump’s civil fraud trial and whom Trump despises and has repeatedly attacked, describing him as “CRAZY” and “CRAZED in his hatred of me.” (Trump later deleted the Truth Social post targeting the law clerk, whom he called a “Trump Hating Clerk,” but not until after it had been widely disseminated.)

And in the first rally of his 2024 campaign, held in Waco, Texas, Trump lent his voice to a recording of the J6 Prison Choir, which is made up of men who were imprisoned for their part in the riot at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The song “Justice for All” features Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance mixed with a rendition of the national anthem.

“Our people love those people,” Trump said at the rally, speaking of those who were jailed. “What’s happening in that prison, it’s a hellhole … These are people that shouldn’t have been there.”

The Washington Post “identified five of the roughly 15 men who are featured in the video. Four of them were charged with assaulting police, using weapons such as a crowbar, sticks and chemical spray, including against Officer Brian D. Sicknick, who died the next day.”

At the Waco rally, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice.” He added, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there that have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Trump has described 2024 as “our final battle.” He means it; so do tens of millions of his supporters.

TRUMP’S RHETORIC IS CLEARLY fascistic. These days, Trump is being “much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at NYU, told PBS NewsHour. That doesn’t mean that if Trump were elected president in 2024, America would become a fascistic state. Our institutions may be strong enough to resist him, though it’s an open question. But Trump can do many things short of imposing fascism that can do grave harm to America.

Trump, after all, has been impeached twice, indicted four times on 91 counts, and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Courts in New York have found that he or his companies have committed bank fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, and charity fraud. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He was the catalyzing figure that led to a violent attack on the Capitol. And he has argued for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

In our nation’s history, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served in four Republican administrations and was part of the Republican leadership in the House, “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”

That Trump would say what he’s said and done what he’s done is no surprise; he is a profoundly damaged human being, emotionally and psychologically. And he’s been entirely transparent about who he is. The most troubling aspect of this whole troubling drama has been the people in the Republican Party who, though they know better, have accommodated themselves to Trump’s corruptions time after time after time. Some cheer him on; others silently go along for the ride. A few gently criticize him and then quickly change topics. But they never leave him.

By now I know how this plays out: For most Republicans to acknowledge—to others and even to themselves—what Trump truly is and still stay loyal to him would create enormous cognitive dissonance. Their mind won’t allow them to go there; instead, they find ways to ease the inner conflict. And so they embrace conspiracy theories to support what they desperately want to believe—for example, that the election was stolen, or that the investigation into Russian ties to the 2016 Trump campaign was a “hoax,” or that Joe Biden has committed impeachable offenses. They indulge in whataboutism and catastrophism—the belief that society is on the edge of collapse—to justify their support for Trump. They have a burning psychological need to rationalize why, in this moment in history, the ends justify the means.

As one Trump supporter put it in an email to me earlier this month, “Trump is decidedly not good and decent”—but, he added, “good and decent isn’t getting us very far politically.” And: “We’ve tried good and decent. But at the ballot box, that doesn’t work. We need to try another way.”

This sentiment is one I’ve heard many times before. In 2016, during the Republican primaries, a person I had known for many years through church wrote to me. “I think we have likely slipped past the point of no return as a country and I’m desperately hoping for a leader who can turn us around. I have no hope that one of the establishment guys would do that. That, I believe, is what opens people up to Trump. He’s all the bad things you say, but what has the Republican establishment given me in the past 16 years? First and foremost: BHO,” they said, using a derogatory acronym for Barack Obama that is meant to highlight his middle name, Hussein.

If I had told this individual in 2016 what Trump would say and do over the next eight years, I’m confident he would have laughed it off, dismissing it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—and that he would have assured me that if Trump did do all these things, then of course he would break with him. Yet here we are. Despite Trump’s well-documented depravity, he still has a vise grip on the GOP; he carried 94 percent of the Republican vote in 2020, an increase from 2016, and he is leading his closest primary challenger nationally by more than 45 points.

White evangelical Protestants are among the Republican Party’s most loyal constituencies, and in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, more than eight in 10 white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump, as had 81 percent of those who attend less frequently. That’s an increase over 2016. Trump’s support among white evangelicals is still extremely high: 81 percent hold a favorable view of him, according to a poll taken in June—after Trump was indicted for a second time.

The evangelical movement in America has been reshaped by the sensibilities of Trump and MAGA world. For example, in one survey, nearly one-third of white evangelicals expressed support for the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

It is a rather remarkable indictment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus that they would continue to show fealty to a man whose cruel ethic has always been antithetical to Jesus’s and becomes more so every day. Many of the same people who celebrate Christianity’s contributions to civilization—championing the belief that every human being has inherent rights and dignity, celebrating the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan, and pointing to a “transcendent order of justice and hope that stands above politics,” in the words of my late friend Michael Gerson—continue to stand foursquare behind a man who uses words that echo Mein Kampf.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Taking a stand for conscience, even long after one should have, is always the right thing to do.

“When we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric and promote dehumanizing images,” the best-selling author Brené Brown has written, “we diminish our own humanity in the process.” We are called to find the face of God in everyone we meet, she says, including those with whom we most deeply disagree. “When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our humanity.”

Far too many Christians in America are not only betraying their humanity; they are betraying the Lord they claim to love and serve.

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.

On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The teachers, police officials, social workers, hiring-department personnel, and others who gathered that day in April had simply run out of ideas about what to do about them.

“Education does not have importance to these people as it does to us,” observed one schoolteacher. “They work for a day or two, and then you see them no more,” grumbled an employer. “Some don’t want modern facilities—if they have a bathtub, they don’t use it,” another meeting attendee claimed. And the charges they leveled only descended from there: “They let their children run wild.” They left their trash in the street and refused to go to the doctor. They misspent what little money they had. They fought and drank with abandon. Some were even rumored to disregard “laws here, such as it being a felony to have sexual relations with a member of their own family or with a girl who consents.”

Marshall Bragdon, the long-serving executive director of an advisory commission to municipal government known as the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, had conceived of this daylong “Workshop on the Southern Mountaineer in Cincinnati,” as the gathering was billed. Though he did not like what he heard, he was hardly surprised. A key objective of the workshop, Bragdon would explain, was to “de-stereotype the city man’s and urban agency’s views of and attitudes toward hill folks,” so that they might be better able to assist this growing population of poor rural newcomers to the city. As the litany of complaints poured forth during the workshop’s opening bull session, it was clear that there was much de-stereotyping to do.

[Michael Powell: A Democratic senator defends ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’]

The 1954 Cincinnati workshop is a little-known episode in 20th-century American history, yet it would prove to be extraordinarily consequential. In its aftermath, municipal coalitions in a host of midwestern cities that were likewise on the receiving end of an influx of white migrants from the Appalachian South were inspired to take similar action. The workshop introduced new and influential ways of thinking about poverty in the postwar city, which would circulate broadly within liberal policy-making circles and, before long, would even come to shape the development of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

This essay was adapted from Max Fraser’s new book.

At the same time, the Cincinnati workshop also revealed a yawning cultural divide separating the middle-class professionals in attendance from the white working-class objects of their reform-minded concern, one that was replicated throughout the region and in Washington, and that would only grow deeper and wider over the decades to come. Although none of the workshop participants was overheard talking about a “basket of deplorables,” the resonance between their descriptions of their new hillbilly neighbors and that more recent political malapropism—which might have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election—is unmistakable. Then, as now, liberalism found itself confronting a white working-class problem at least partially of its own creation. The sequence of events set in motion by the 1954 workshop offers important insights into our current political impasse—and into the lessons the modern Democratic Party has failed to learn for more than half a century.

In the two decades that followed World War II, when the great 20th-century migrations out of the rural South were at their zenith, the “hillbilly ghetto” appeared as a suddenly ubiquitous and more and more problematic feature on the landscape of the urban Midwest. In neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill in Cincinnati, Uptown in Chicago, Stringtown in Indianapolis, Briggs and the Cass Corridor in Detroit—and in similar neighborhoods in smaller cities and towns across the region—growing clusters of poor southern white newcomers alarmed longer-term residents and amplified concerns about an onrushing crisis of the American inner city.

Residents of these hillbilly ghettos, as they were commonly referred to by public officials and in media accounts at the time, stood out for their rural mannerisms and regionally alien cultural markings, for being, as Cincinnati’s director of health education put it, “different—different in speech, in dress, in culture, in habits and mores, in education, in social status, in work experience, and in health.” The neighborhoods themselves, meanwhile, were marked by rates of unemployment, housing insecurity, poverty-related medical issues, and crime and policing that more closely resembled predominantly Black urban neighborhoods such as Avondale, Paradise Valley, and Bronzeville than the postwar era’s growing middle-class suburbs.

That the inhabitants of the hillbilly ghetto were white confounded many of their mid-century contemporaries, who struggled to reconcile them with their more familiar bigotries. “The so-called hillbillies, who now constitute a major slum problem in several midwestern cities … are about the only sizable group of white, Protestant, old-line Americans who are now living in city slums,” opined a columnist for Fortune. “The trouble with the latter, as with the rural Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, is that they simply don’t know how to live in cities.”

Marshall Bragdon may have felt more sympathetic to Cincinnati’s Appalachian migrants, but otherwise he largely agreed with that assessment. The 1954 workshop was intended to focus the city’s attention on what Bragdon called “the struggle for urban adjustment,” which, as he saw it, had left Cincinnati’s rural newcomers ill-prepared to succeed in the industrial city and was turning neighborhoods such as Over-the-Rhine and Lower Price Hill into intractable and dysfunctional pockets of poverty.

Believing that most city agencies “don’t know how to help the migrants,” Bragdon invited Roscoe Giffin, a sociologist based at Berea College, in Kentucky, to help set the workshop attendees straight. In his talk, Giffin explained that the “pathological quality” of the city’s hillbilly ghettos could be attributed to a series of “culturally determined patterns of behavior which the Southern Mountaineers bring with them when they come to live north of the Ohio River”—among them a low regard for “formal education,” an instinctual emphasis on fulfilling “immediate” needs and desires, a “clannish” hostility toward outsiders, and a “fatalistic” resignation to present conditions. These behaviors, Giffin noted, had originated as natural and even rational adaptations to their impoverished rural circumstances. But they became counterproductive and self-defeating “when such people came to live around Liberty and Sycamore Streets of Cincinnati.” The solution, Bragdon and Giffin counseled the assembled city representatives, was time, understanding, and, above all, patient instruction in the expectations of modern urban society. “The basis of all human-relations work with all people,” Giffin reminded his audience, “is that you have first to accept them as they are before they are willing to modify their behavior.”

The workshop proved to be a hit. The Cincinnati residents in attendance appreciated their new insights into the root causes of hillbilly pathology (“It gave me the positive side,” one social worker remarked; “my previous observations of them had been only on the negative”) and were further gratified to be reassured that it was the migrants’ behavior, and not the city itself, that was in need of “modification.” News of the workshop spread quickly through networks of municipal officials, and soon copycat workshops were being staged in other cities across the region, many featuring Roscoe Giffin as an invited speaker.

“Urban adjustment,” meanwhile, became the prevailing paradigm for addressing the overlapping issues of migration, poverty, and inner-city decline. In 1957, Chicago created a Committee on New Residents—the first public body of its kind in the country—“based on a recognition of the adjustment problems presented by the migration to Chicago of Southern Whites, Negros, Puerto Ricans and American Indians seeking increased economic opportunity.” Detroit followed suit with its own Committee on Urban Adjustment shortly thereafter, designed “to try to change some of the values, attitudes, and behavior patterns … of the existing and continually arriving members of the rural lower class.”

The Ford Foundation picked up on the urban-adjustment framework as well. Ford was then at the leading edge of the behavioral revolution in mid-century social-science research (its Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences opened at Stanford the same year the Cincinnati workshop was held), and Bragdon and Giffin’s focus on the more psychological and attitudinal ramifications of rural-to-urban migration struck a chord. Ford would agree to fund an expanded version of the Cincinnati workshop at Giffin’s home institution of Berea College in the summer of 1958, which brought representatives from seven midwestern cities down to Kentucky for three weeks to “study the mountaineer migrants in their native habitat.”

The Berea workshop became, in the words of Ford’s Director of Public Affairs Paul Ylvisaker, “the first real entry point” for the foundation’s growing programmatic engagement with the complex of issues surrounding “community disorganization” and the unfolding urban crisis. The Berea workshop was restaged annually for the next nine years, during which time delegates from more than two dozen cities would attend. Subsequent initiatives spearheaded by Ylvisaker’s Public Affairs Division at the beginning of the 1960s, such as the Great Cities School Improvement Program and the Gray Areas Program, would funnel tens of millions in foundation dollars toward a variety of municipal efforts aimed largely at “citifying the in-migrant population” clustered in the country’s declining urban core. “I had the sense that we were dealing with people problems, not bricks and mortar and not power-structure problems so much, and that we were witnessing the vast migration into the central city—and I shifted at that point, to a concern with the migrant flows and what could be done about that,” Ylvisaker would reflect in a later interview. “Appalachia gave us a chance to touch off the concern with the whole process.”

By the time Ylvisaker was tapped to sit on the White House’s Task Force on Poverty, convened in early 1964 to begin drafting the legislative foundations of a massive federal campaign to eliminate poverty, it was undeniable just how far and wide the ideas first introduced a decade earlier in Cincinnati had resonated. Ylvisaker’s Gray Areas Program—in its spatial focus on inner-city ghettos populated overwhelmingly by poor rural migrants, and in its programmatic emphasis on replacing deficient migrant cultures with more efficacious forms of “community action”—was the clearest prototype for what became the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, signed into law by Johnson that August. “A lot of the ideas that ended up actually in the legislation,” noted William Capron, who worked on the task force with Ylvisaker and oversaw domestic spending in Johnson’s Bureau of the Budget, “really were developed out of the Ford experience.”

As unlikely as it may have seemed when Bragdon first convened his skeptical colleagues in the spring of 1954, the hillbilly ghetto had helped set in motion a series of events that had culminated in the enactment of one of postwar liberalism’s most ambitious social-policy experiments.

There were always other ways to think about the issue of urban adjustment, of course. Southern Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati, like other groups of rural migrants and low-income residents in the city, were also contending with limited employment options, predatory slumlords, and overcrowded and under-resourced public schools—not to mention an openly hostile police force, which by the middle of the 1950s was arresting white Appalachian natives at roughly four times the rate they appeared in the city’s general population. In Detroit, 10 years after pouring into the Arsenal of Democracy in search of wartime defense work, migrants from the rural South made up fully half of the population crammed into the city’s blight-ridden downtown core, an area already riddled with “thousands of dwellings in various stages of decay and deterioration, the majority of which are utterly unfit for human habitation,” according to the city’s charitable agencies. In Uptown—“seedy, dreary, congested, despairing,” as the Chicago Daily News would describe it, “Appalachia in Chicago”—more than one in four apartments lacked adequate plumbing, and residential overcrowding was exceeded only in the poor Black neighborhood of Lawndale. By the time the Johnson administration was rolling out the War on Poverty, fewer than half of Uptown’s adult residents were able to secure full-time work.

In its focus on “culturally determined patterns of behavior” as opposed to structural factors such as these, the urban-adjustment framing introduced at the Cincinnati workshop consistently mistook the symptoms of the postwar urban crisis for its causes. Instead of recognizing the already accelerating flight of jobs and tax revenues to the suburbs as an early preview of larger-scale disruptions to come, officials used urban adjustment as a rationale for blaming rural poor people for their inability to adapt.

In this way, urban adjustment also anticipated the notion of a separate and self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” first introduced by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959 and then widely popularized by the journalist and social critic Michael Harrington over the next few years. Lewis developed his influential theory in ethnographic studies of poor families from Mexico and Puerto Rico. But the catalog of pathological behaviors and attitudes that he identified among his subjects—“a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence and inferiority”; “a lack of impulse control, a strong present-time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism”—in many cases directly echoed Giffin’s portrayals of maladjusted Appalachian migrants.

Before long, a distorted and punitive version of Lewis’s ideas would win both liberal and conservative adherents and find its way to the very center of postwar social policy, first as a means of explaining why certain groups of people became dependent on social assistance and then as an argument for curtailing or altogether eliminating those very forms of public support. As it did, the urban-adjustment framework’s earlier focus on the cultural habits of the rural poor, broadly defined, gave way to the culture of poverty’s near-singular association with the more and more distressed Black inner city.

The consequences of that shift would reverberate to the present. For poor Black communities, the racialized discourse around poverty would be an unmitigated disaster. The slow death of federal poverty-reduction programs begun under Richard Nixon, the massive expansion of a racially targeted war on urban street crime during the 1970s and ’80s, and the culminating assault on welfare “as we know it” during the Clinton years would all be executed under the logic of eradicating a culture of poverty that was said to be the defining hallmark of a new Black underclass.

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

The new preoccupation with race would also further obscure the one redeeming feature of the urban-adjustment framework. In its focus on the common circumstances confronted by populations of the rural dispossessed clustered around the margins of affluent society—Black, white, Hispanic, and otherwise—urban adjustment held out the prospect of a more materially grounded kind of analysis, one that might have seen beyond the cultural or racial explanations for poverty and grasped the larger social and political forces beginning to undermine the postwar economy. The window for turning the language of urban adjustment into a multiracial, bottom-up politics of the poor, though, was always small. By the end of the ’60s, it had been shut for good.

As a final consequence of all this, the white poor and working classes would come to occupy a more marginal position in the worldview of Democratic liberalism over subsequent decades. After playing a crucial role in catalyzing liberal attention to the social effects of the postwar urban crisis, the hillbilly ghettos of the urban Midwest largely disappeared from view after the formal launch of the War on Poverty. Meanwhile, as deindustrialization, automation, off-shoring, and new waves of import competition brought ever-widening devastation to the blue-collar workforce of the country’s industrial heartland, professional-class interests elevated by the new knowledge-and-service economy moved to the center of the Democratic Party’s agenda. These “New Democrats” offered the occasional promise to retrain out-of-work miners and factory hands as computer programmers—but in downwardly mobile white working-class communities throughout the region, precious little came of it. Instead, right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump would find a rich soil in which to plant the seeds of populist resentment, creating one of the more consequential class realignments in modern American political history.

Hillary Clinton had these voters in mind, back in 2016, when she wrote off “half of Trump’s supporters” as a “basket of deplorables.” Whatever truth there was in her description of the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” nature of Trump’s base—and subsequent events would indicate that there was clearly some truth to it—it was the wrong message for the moment, easily construed as casually elitist and politically tone-deaf. Rightly or wrongly, Clinton seemed more interested in modifying the behavior of these voters than in trying to understand the material foundations of their grievances. When about a quarter of white working-class Obama voters forsook Clinton for Trump in that fall’s election, it was hard not to attribute the results at least in part to Clinton’s failure to convince that portion of the electorate that the party had anything to offer them beyond condescending disregard.

If anybody seems to have learned the lessons of Clinton’s faux pas, it is Joe Biden. Since entering the White House, Biden has done more than any Democratic president of the past 75 years to reinvigorate American industrial policy, all while steering its focus toward those parts of the Midwest and South that suffered the effects of deindustrialization most acutely and where the Republican Party has made the most gains among working-class voters. Might this be enough to overcome liberalism’s decades of pathologizing poor and working-class whites? Recent polling suggests that Biden faces an uphill battle among these voters in crucial midwestern swing states. But to paraphrase Roscoe Giffin, a party has to first understand where it’s gone wrong before it will be willing to change its behavior.

This essay is adapted from Max Fraser’s book Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Former President Donald Trump has never been moderate in rhetoric and action. But there’s a real sense out there that, as he comes under further legal pressure, he’s become more apocalyptic: During a Veterans Day speech, echoing the language of authoritarian dictators, he described his political foes as “vermin.”  

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, a rash of angry altercations erupted this week. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, allegedly elbowed fellow GOP Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee in the kidneys, and Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, challenged a hearing witness to a fight.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more are Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, a co-author of The Washington Post’s Early 202 newsletter and an anchor on Washington Post Live; Idrees Kahloon, the Washington bureau chief at The Economist; and Elaina Plott Calabro, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Read the full transcript [here].

There aren’t many secrets that John Brennan doesn’t know. He spent 25 years in the CIA, became the White House homeland-security adviser, and then returned to the CIA as its director. If a question interested him, he could’ve commanded legions of analysts, officers, surveillance networks, and tools to find the answer. Yet in a December 2020 interview with the economist Tyler Cowen, Brennan admitted, somewhat tortuously, that he was flummoxed by the wave of recent reporting about UFOs: “Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact, be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something that we don’t yet understand and that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.”

This article has been adapted from Graff’s new book.

That roundabout and convoluted comment piqued my interest. Anything that puzzled Brennan was worth looking into. For the next two years, I dove into the history of the U.S. government’s involvement in UFOs as part of writing my new book, and along the way I’ve become convinced that a cover-up is real—it’s just not the one that you think. Plenty of revelations, declassified documents, and public reports suggest active, ongoing deception. Even today, the government is surely hiding information about its knowledge and working theories about what exists in the skies above.

But the cover-up that I believe exists is far more mundane than concealing intelligence that would forever alter our understanding of ourselves and our universe. There are some basic, obvious reasons why the government is withholding knowledge about what are now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs. Some public UAP reports are likely the government’s secret projects, technologies, or operations. According to the CIA, test and development flights of the U-2 and the Oxcart spy planes “accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s.” The military has more secret test flights, development projects, and special craft than most people realize. (The Pentagon’s new next-generation B-21 stealth bomber just had its first test flight this month.)

[Read: UFOs are officially mainstream]

Other reported UFO sightings are advanced technologies from foreign adversaries—such as Russia, China, and Iran—being tested against U.S. defenses. The government doesn’t want to give away what’s been detected and what hasn’t. Rare announcements from officials confirm this, such as when the Pentagon said at a congressional hearing in 2022 that what first appeared to be out-of-this-world, glowing, triangle-shaped crafts were actually just terrestrial drones photographed through night-vision lenses. Plenty of strange incidents, like a mysterious swarm of objects that harassed Navy ships off the coast of California in 2019, indicate that there’s a lot more to say about foreign programs being tested against U.S. defenses.

Perhaps certain agencies are silent on those programs because they don’t have enough information. The government is a maze of operations, classified efforts, and so-called Special Access Programs (SAPs) that make up the defense, homeland security, and intelligence world. No single entity or bureaucrat has a full understanding of what the others are doing, leading to repeated confusion about whether a UFO or UAP sighting is genuine. In 1947, after a civilian pilot reported a strange encounter in the Pacific Northwest that sparked a national fascination with “flying saucer” sightings, FBI executives became convinced that these peculiar crafts were a secret military program. A more tragic incident occurred the following year, when Air Force Captain Thomas Mantell was dispatched to pursue a UFO reported to the Kentucky State Police. He died racing after it, crashing on a farm along the Tennessee border. Military officials were perplexed: Did a UFO down a U.S. fighter pilot? The answer remained unknown until the 1950s, when the Air Force’s UFO-hunting unit, Project Blue Book, pieced together that the “UFO” Mantell chased was actually a secret Navy research balloon under development by a defense contractor—the cereal manufacturer General Mills.

However, I believe the UFO cover-up is about more than state secrets. The government routinely hides information important and meaningless on all manner of subjects, regardless of whether legitimate national-security concerns are involved. Its default position is to stonewall, especially to conceal embarrassing revelations. After reading thousands of pages of government reports, I believe that the government’s uneasiness over its sheer ignorance drives its secrecy. It just doesn’t know very much.

Officials are, at the end of the day, clueless about what a certain portion of UFOs and UAPs actually are, and they don’t like to say so. After all, “I don’t know” is a terribly uncomfortable response for a bureaucracy that spends more than $900 billion a year on homeland security and national defense.

Decades of declassified memos, internal reports, and study projects create the sense that the government doesn’t have satisfying answers for the most perplexing sightings. In internal documents written before the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966, officials, who had no sense that ordinary civilians would read their work, admit that they simply lacked credible explanations. In a then-classified 1947 letter that led to the Air Force’s original effort to study these “flying saucer” reports, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining seemed as baffled as anyone, writing that some of the reported craft “lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely.” Project Sign, as the effort became known, looked at 273 sightings. After a year, it issued a secret report. Although many UFO sightings were either “errors of the human mind and senses” or “conventional aerial objects,” it said, it couldn’t explain all of them. Some sightings were just too weird to rule on one way or another. “Proof of non-existence is equally impossible to obtain unless a reasonable and convincing explanation is determined for each incident,” the Project Sign team wrote.   

Subsequent attempts to “solve” the mystery have consistently come up short. In 1953, the CIA—with its director and the head of scientific intelligence both bewildered by ongoing UFO reports—convened the Robertson Panel, a secret research group chaired by the Caltech physicist Howard P. Robertson. After hearing from experts and examining sighting reports, the panel concluded that there was “no evidence” that UFOs posed a threat to national security. But it used a sleight of hand to arrive at that conclusion: The researchers looked closely at only a small number of sightings, decided they seemed mundane, and extrapolated that the rest probably weren’t very interesting either. The Robertson Panel couldn’t explain all UFO sightings in the end—it just reckoned that, whatever they were, they weren’t threatening.

Similar efforts to identify UFOs and UAPs for the past 80 years have stalled on a stubborn subset that appears truly mysterious. Usually examiners find that 5 to 20 percent of all sightings have no known explanation. Though some of that is surely a data problem—not all sightings contain enough information to solve one way or another—some really are mysteries.

[Read: NASA learns the ugly truth about UFOs]

Many people who study UFOs end up frustrated by the government’s ignorance rather than its secrets. J. Allen Hynek, a distinguished Ohio astronomer who was involved with Project Sign and Project Blue Book, came to believe that government agencies tried to dodge questions about UFOs not because they were hiding something but because they had no actual knowledge to hide. For decades, Hynek traveled to UFO sightings around the country. He became so professionally fascinated with them that he wrote several books on the topic, coining the phrase “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and playing a bit part in the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name. He was a constant presence in the government’s UFO work from the 1940s to the 1970s. Along the way, he was repeatedly frustrated by the poor answers military colleagues and higher-ups used to brush away sightings—explanations he doubted as a scientist and ones that didn’t square with witness testimonies. (Once Hynek was told by his Air Force superiors to publicly dismiss a series of high-profile UFO sightings in Michigan as “swamp gas.” The statement, which he delivered at a 1966 Detroit press conference, was widely mocked and so outraged the local congressman, a rising GOP star named Gerald Ford, that he pushed for the first congressional hearings on UFOs later that spring.)

After leaving government and founding the independent Center for UFO Studies, Hynek said he doubted that there was a grand government conspiracy. “There are two kinds of cover-ups,” he explained in 1977. “You can cover up knowledge and you can cover up ignorance. I think there was much more of the latter than of the former.”

After The New York Times and Politico revealed in 2017 that the Pentagon had a small-scale secret program studying UAP sightings and paranormal phenomena, and documenting bizarre encounters with seemingly unexplainable craft, Congress pressed the Department of Defense and the intelligence community to take the subject more seriously. The newly constituted All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office reported in 2022 that of 366 recent UAP sightings it had collected, a little more than half seemed normal—either drones, balloons, or trash in the sky it described as “clutter.” Still, that left 171 incidents unsolved.

The AARO has consistently said that it hasn’t found evidence of extraterrestrials. And the government believes that better data will show that most UAP sightings are “ordinary phenomena,” according to a comprehensive report released last month. On Halloween, AARO’s director, Sean Kirkpatrick, announced that his office had started a big push to collect better data from current military personnel who have UAP encounters and from former government employees or contractors who may have had experience with the subject in the past.

Many—perhaps most or nearly all—UAP sightings have conceivable explanations: classified projects, adversarial technology, sky trash. But there are almost certainly some world-changing revelations hidden among UAP reports, even if none of them turn out to be visiting aliens. Investigating them could lead to new discoveries in meteorology, astronomy, atmospheric science, and physics. Hynek’s words about the government’s cluelessness hint at a more intriguing truth: There is something—or, more likely, many things—out there, and none of us yet know what.

This article has been adapted from Garrett M. Graff’s book UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—And Out There.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power The nameless children of Gaza Don’t expect U.S.-China relations to get better. The unexpected poignancy of second-chance romance

Culture Break

Listen. Streaming is about to change. Hanna Rosin discusses the poststrike future of Hollywood with staff writers David Sims and Shirley Li in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

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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Fiction can be riveting, as the many lies that supported Representative George Santos’s political career have demonstrated. But facts can also be entertaining too—a point made by the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into the New York Republican, released today.

The report is full of language that, even in the formal tone of congressional documents, is scorching. Here’s the short version: “Representative Santos’ conduct warrants public condemnation, is beneath the dignity of the office, and has brought severe discredit upon the House.” Furthermore, “Representative George Santos cannot be trusted.”

And here’s a longer version, too precise and cutting to quote in part:

Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit. He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit. He reported fictitious loans to his political committees to induce donors and party committees to make further contributions to his campaign—and then diverted more campaign money to himself as purported “repayments” of those fictitious loans. He used his connections to high value donors and other political campaigns to obtain additional funds for himself through fraudulent or otherwise questionable business dealings. And he sustained all of this through a constant series of lies to his constituents, donors, and staff about his background and experience.

And this is all in addition to the already well-known fabrications on his résumé. The 56-page investigative report goes on and on like this, not stinting on details such as Santos’s use of campaign funds on OnlyFans and Botox. The whole thing is carefully footnoted with text messages and credit-card applications, and laid out in charts with everything but circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is.

The one thing missing is testimony from Santos himself. The subcommittee noted that though Santos pledged publicly and privately to cooperate fully, “that was another lie.” What he did offer “included material misstatements that further advanced falsehoods he made during his 2022 campaign.” The members considered issuing him a subpoena but decided against, reasoning that it would take too long, his attorney had already said that his client would take the Fifth, and beyond that—they add drily—“Representative Santos’ testimony would have low evidentiary value given his admitted practice of embellishment.”

[David A. Graham: The George Santos saga isn’t (just) funny]

Whew. Santos responded to the report’s careful findings by taking full responsibility and agreeing—to no of course he didn’t, come on. In a lengthy post on X, he called the report a “smear” and said, “If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the ‘Ethics committee’, they would have not released this biased report.” He said that the investigation into him proved that the nation needs a constitutional convention. Santos wrote that he was dismayed to see such vitriol in “the hallowed halls of public service,” and whatever else you can say about the man, he has enough of a sense of camp that we can assume this was delivered with a hefty dose of self-aware irony.

But Santos did say that he would not run for reelection in 2024. This promise, like most of his, is not worth the pixels it’s printed on, but it’s also a formality; Santos could be expelled from the House as soon as this month, and he stood nearly zero chance of winning a reelection bid. He also faces a 23-count federal indictment in New York, and the House Ethics Committee voted to refer their report to the Justice Department, so he could be facing more charges in the future.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: A resigned politican’s advice for George Santos]

“Public service life was never a goal or a dream, but I stepped up to the occasion when I felt my country needed it most,” Santos wrote. What need was he filling for the country? Comic relief? As I have written, the Santos story is both funny and appalling: “If you’re unable to laugh at these stories, you should check your pulse. But if you’re only laughing at them, you should check your head.” Like the antics of a good jester, his act puts an uncomfortable mirror up to the audience—in this case, both the other members of Congress and the American people.

Santos is simply the most extreme version of a new approach by American politicians to dealing with scandal, showing the disappearance of shame from public life. At one time, a scandal-ridden politician would resign in disgrace and quietly leave the scene. Even President Richard Nixon, not one to shrink from a fight, resigned and slunk back to San Clemente. Later, politicians learned that they could apologize, perhaps with tears in their eyes, but obstinately stay in office—an approach popularized by President Bill Clinton and emulated by Senator David Vitter and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

[David A. Graham: Bob Menendez never should have been a senator this long in the first place]

But in retrospect, that looks like merely a transition phase to the new phase, in which an embattled politician doesn’t apologize, doesn’t resign, and in fact insists he’s a righteous martyr. The epitome of this approach is former President Donald Trump, who faces 91 felony counts for, among other things, trying to steal an election and absconding with highly classified material and then allegedly lying to the government, repeatedly, when asked to return it. Rather than back down, Trump is running for president again on a campaign of personal immunity from consequences and political retribution, and tells supporters, “They’re not after me, they’re after you … I’m just standing in the way!”

Others have adopted the Trump model, like Senator Robert Menendez. The New Jersey Democrat, who was found to have piles of gold bars and stacks of cash hidden in jacket pockets in his closet, insists that his prosecution for corruption is all just a scheme to get him because he’s a powerful Hispanic legislator.

And then there’s Santos. It is hilarious to imagine that a bipartisan group of House members, backed by reams of evidence, are persecuting him for reasons darkly hinted at but never detailed. No one believes that, not even Santos. But no one has to believe it. Unlike Santos’s other lies, he’s not telling this one because he thinks anyone will fall for it. He’s simply refusing to accept any sort of responsibility.

[Read: George Santos, the GOP’s useful liar]

Shame had a purpose. It kept some bad actors from public life, and it chased other ones from public life. With its decline, people like Santos will blithely charge into office and make a mockery of representative democracy. Bodies like the House Ethics Committee can fight valiant rearguard actions like this one, but they can’t and don’t serve much preventative function.

This may be the end of George Santos’s time as a member of the House, but Santos will be back. Perhaps it will be as a contestant on Dancing With the Stars, or some lower-tier reality competition. Maybe he’ll try to reinvent himself as a conservative radio host, or as an Instagram influencer. Or he could try a political conversion narrative, positioning himself as a reformed man and a political progressive. The substance doesn’t really matter. The point is that hucksters like him are always going to be trying for their next act. So Santos won’t go away—and neither will the behavior he exemplifies, so long as shame is absent from politics.