Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

How much time did you spend with peers in adolescence, and what effect did that have on the rest of your life? (Anecdotes illustrating how you spent that time and in what era are especially welcome.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Among Gen Xers, 60 percent say they spent most or all of their teen years hanging out in person with friends. The figure for Gen Zers is 40 percent. Among Gen Xers, 76 percent say they had a boyfriend or girlfriend at some point as a teenager. The figure for Gen Zers is 56 percent.

Those survey data are from a new American Enterprise Institute report on “Generation Z and the Transformation of American Adolescence.” Other data points of interest: “Gen Z is also significantly less likely than older generations to have regularly attended religious services, worked a part-time job, or consumed alcohol, pot, or cigarettes for at least part of their teenage years. Similarly, teenage participation in competitive sports and outdoor activities, such as hunting and scouting, is on the decline, though athletic participation among young women outpaces the oldest generations.”

The authors conclude that “Gen Z stands apart socially.”

The Role of Technology

Jonathan Haidt argues that technology is affecting girls and boys in Gen Z differently:

Back when I was focused on anxiety and depression as the dependent variables, the story of technology (as the independent variable) seemed to be a story that was mostly about girls. But once I read an early draft of Richard Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men, I realized that I had been focused on the wrong dependent variables. For boys and young men, the key change has been the retreat from the real world since the 1970s, when they began investing less effort in school, employment, dating, marriage, and parenting …

Zach Rausch and I have constructed a timeline of the digital revolution and shown how at every step—from the first personal computers in the 1970s through the early internet in the 1990s and the rise of online multiplayer games in the 2000s—the virtual world sent out a siren song that sounded sweeter, on average, to boys than it did to girls. Why? Among the most consistent and largest of all psychological sex differences is the “people vs. things” dichotomy. On average, boys are more attracted to things, machines, and complex systems that can be manipulated, while girls are more attracted to people; they are more interested in what those people are thinking and feeling.

In Persuasion, Freya India argues that Instagram and other social-media apps are harming girls. She imagines a hypothetical girl born in 1999 who was a pre-teen when Instagram was introduced:

Back then it was fairly benign: a platform to share pretty sunsets and candid pictures with friends. A few years in, the editing app FaceTune arrives (launched in 2014), and everyone on your feed starts to look perfect. You start editing yourself—smoothing your skin, reshaping your nose, restructuring your jaw. By the time you’re 16, your Instagram face is very different from your natural face, which you’ve come to despise.

And then the algorithms are introduced: your feed is no longer chronological but customized. Instagram now serves you not just photos of the friends you follow but of “influencers”—beautiful women from all over the world, selecting the ones that make you feel the most insecure. Soon you get ads to fix your flaws: Botox; fillers; Brazilian Butt Lifts! By the time TikTok comes out you’re 18, and your feed tracks you even faster. Hate your nose? Try this editing app. Not enough? Try this video editing app. Want it in real life? Nose jobs near you! Suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’ve transformed your style, your face, maybe even your body. And yet you are still insecure. You still hate how you look. And every day your feeds flash on with This is your sign to get a nose job!, The earlier you start Botox the better!, Get ready with me for a Brazilian butt lift! For many girls, this rewiring of their self-image, this pressure to alter their appearance, happened without them realizing it. It was gradual. Subtle. Drip-fed.

Make Walls Stone Again

In The Atlantic, Hannah Kirshner notes that concrete has a big carbon footprint and argues for greater reliance on an older method:

Reviving dry stone walling would be better for the environment—as well as preserve aesthetically and culturally valuable scenery. But building more stone walls would mean relying on traditional craftsmanship over modern engineering. I thought of stone walling as an expensive antique building method until I spoke with Reo Kaneko, a civil engineer who over the past 14 years has become an advocate for this time-tested craft …

A concrete retaining wall can last about 50 to 100 years, after which the degraded material must be hauled away for recycling or disposal ... By some estimates, producing concrete releases nearly a pound of CO2 per pound of usable material; under the right conditions, stone for a wall can be gathered on-site or quarried nearby. The rocks can be used without cutting them into uniform shapes, limiting waste. And the life span of a dry stone wall is potentially hundreds of years, in part because a well-built wall can shift to some extent without buckling when it freezes and thaws, or even in an earthquake.

Join or Die

Prior to last night’s GOP-primary debate, Jim Geraghty of National Review offered advice to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley:

Another six weeks of attempting to trash the other is only going to increase the already-high odds of Trump’s becoming the nominee. So why not skip the mutually assured destruction-like dynamic, the fight to be the last non-Trump candidate standing, and work out a unity ticket?

The pair would probably work well together on a ticket and in a presidency. DeSantis–Haley, or Haley–DeSantis? Work it out amongst yourselves; as Dick Cheney can tell you, the vice presidency can be an extremely powerful office if you play your cards right. If you actually want to influence federal policy and let someone else be the lightning rod getting all the criticism, the vice presidency might actually be a more appealing office.

Provocation of the Week

The civil-rights-era hero Bayard Rustin has received overdue attention recently, partly thanks to a recently released Netflix biopic. On January 19, 1987, Rustin delivered a speech at Harvard University Chapel setting forth his views on how the struggle for Black equality should proceed. The nation did not take the approach he urged, but it still could. His analysis and recommendations, later published in The New Republic, included the following:

The old form of racism was based on prejudging all blacks as somehow inherently undeserving of equal treatment. What makes the new form more insidious is its basis in observed sociological data. The new racist equates the pathology of the poor with race, ignoring the fact that family dissolution, teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, alcohol and drug abuse, street crime, and idleness are universal problems of the poor. They exist wherever there is economic dislocation and deterioration—in the cities, for example, dotting Britain’s devastated industrial north. They are rampant among the white jobless in Liverpool as well as among unemployed blacks in New York, And if the American underclass seems more violent, it is only because we, as a nation, are more violent.

The new forms of racism cannot be attacked frontally. Society will not combat the new racism, as has been naively suggested in the press, by asking people to be good or asking teachers to teach new courses on tolerance. Nor can it be attacked by adopting the strategy and tactics used so effectively by King in the 1960s. To combat bigotry and injustice today requires an analysis of structural changes in the economy … The technological revolution, automation, cybernation, and robots have taken jobs away from the poor and uneducated. And though some of these innovations create work, they do not create work for those without skills or, worse, those unable to attain them. Labor-intensive industries, which were prime vehicles for economic advancement for generations of white immigrants and black former slaves, have gone overseas, never to return.

To honor King we must look ahead, beyond the racial equality dream, to economic equity … The second phase of the revolution envisioned by King will require billions of dollars. But they are not dollars that will be spent on an exclusively black agenda. Continuing black economic progress and equal opportunity are not contingent on the government providing “special treatment” to blacks. Any preferential approach postulated along racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual lines will only disrupt a multicultural society and lead to a backlash. However, special treatment can be provided to those who have been exploited or denied opportunities if solutions are predicated along class lines, precisely because all religious, ethnic, and racial groups have a depressed class who would benefit.

Black economic progress is contingent upon the national economy performing well for all Americans. That can only happen if the federal government commits billions in resources to a comprehensive program that addresses this nation’s deteriorating economic position and the erosion of education and research and development. We need a national commitment to excellence in education and to federal vocational and job-training programs to help blacks and others enter an increasingly specialized and competitive job market, and to move on to new jobs when technological innovation eliminates old jobs.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

There has never been a graver test of America’s rule of law than the prosecutions of Donald Trump. He “stands alone in American history for his alleged crimes,” as Jack Smith put it in a recent court filing. No president has ever schemed for months to retain power after losing an election—and over the repeated advice of his advisers and lawyers—nor taken and concealed classified documents for many months following his return to civilian life. No behavior could more urgently call for criminal sanctions, in order to protect values essential to national survival.

Notwithstanding what is at issue, the actions now under way to hold Trump to account are viewed by many with uncertainty, about both their wisdom and their chances of success. Respected people have expressed foreboding that Trump probably cannot be convicted, and that any actual prosecution may well damage the justice system, or otherwise have bad consequences. And the delay of two and a half years in bringing charges following January 6 has contributed to the sense of unease, raising further doubts about whether our system is up to the task of holding Trump to account.

A sounder perspective, urgently needed now, is to focus on how our adaptable and resilient system of justice is actually succeeding, with proceedings now moving forward at deliberate speed, and trial dates in two cases just a few months away. To get here, multiple obstacles blocking the path to legal accountability for Trump have already been overcome.

First, remember the world of January 2021. The coronavirus pandemic was reaching its peak, the program to administer the just-approved vaccines had to be organized and ramped up, and much-needed economic relief had to be—and was—enacted by bipartisan legislation within 60 days of the inauguration.

In the face of these challenges, directly following the election, President-elect Joe Biden was clear about his desire to avoid the distractions of investigating Trump. That view was in sync with a fairly broad consensus that the prosecution of a former president by a successor administration might occur in banana republics, but in America it would do more harm than good “to the nation and to the governing party in power.” Overcoming that premise would demand a fuller realization, in part through the testimonials of his own closest aides, of how thoroughly and willfully Trump had undermined the foundations of our system of government.

Another top priority at the start of the Biden administration was the need to restore public trust in a Department of Justice that Bill Barr had repeatedly misused to advance Trump’s personal and political interests. On the day of his nomination and in his first remarks to the department, Attorney General Merrick Garland placed great emphasis on the need to restore the norms of evenhanded, apolitical justice that had been “part of the DNA of every Justice Department employee since Edward Levi’s stint as the first post-Watergate Attorney General.”  

That concern also counseled that initial enforcement efforts relating to the events of January 6 should focus most attention on the violent offenders, against whom cases could most readily be made, with the idea of following leads upward to ultimately reach the organizers and leaders. The earnest pursuit of that project led to more than 500 arrests within six months of January 6, and ultimately made it the largest investigation in the department’s history, with charges filed against well over 1,000 defendants in almost all 50 states.

[David Frum: Trump’s reckoning with the rule of law]

All the while, without singling out Trump by name, Garland made clear that the department would “follow the facts … and charge what the evidence supports to hold all January 6 perpetrators accountable.” In particular, he emphasized that “there cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless” and that the investigation would reach perpetrators “at any level … whether they were present that day” or not.

A crucial contribution in realizing Garland’s promise to reach perpetrators “at any level,” the “powerful” as well as the “powerless,” was the extraordinary work of the House Select Committee, presented to the country in televised hearings over six months starting in June 2022. Through the testimony, mostly of Trump’s own former associates, often based on their firsthand observations, he was shown to have been the primary instigator of the entire project, who regularly overrode the contrary counsel of his closest advisers.

Another key element in expanding the prosecutorial reach to leaders including Trump was the availability of the special-counsel process, which allowed appointment from outside the Justice Department of an experienced attorney “with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking” to take primary responsibility and to “follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead, without prejudice or improper influence.”

The attorney general appointed Jack Smith in November 2022, right after Trump’s announcement of his candidacy, to take responsibility for cases likely to involve the leaders of the coup attempt but not the foot soldiers, as well as all matters related to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant for classified documents. With Smith in place, and Garland left only with a never-exercised power to modify Smith’s actions or remove him for cause, the claims of a political vendetta by Biden became even more unreasonable.     

Within nine months, Smith had filed the first-ever criminal cases against a former president, alleging, in the District of Columbia, the attempt to overthrow the election, and, in Florida, the criminal retention of classified documents. Two weeks after the federal indictment was filed in D.C., the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, filed state charges against Trump and 18 others for conduct aimed at corrupting the electoral process of that state.

The filing of charges in any criminal case is a watershed moment, ending what may be many months or years of laborious investigation with no predictable outcome. A criminal indictment states the claims of society against the defendant. At that point, the rights of both the defendant and the public to a speedy trial kick in, and the flow of events becomes more orderly and predictable.

That is not, of course, to say that the trial dates now scheduled—March 4, 2024, in D.C., and May 20, 2024, in Florida—are cast in stone, or even that we know for sure that at least one trial will proceed to a verdict well before the election. There is much work to be done, including pretrial motions on which the trial judge must rule, which will mainly address Trump’s legal theories of defense and the admissibility of evidence. The plausible legal motions for the defense are widely viewed as lacking in merit and unlikely to undermine the prosecutions, a perception confirmed by the December 1, 2023, ruling on the key absolute immunity, double jeopardy, and First Amendment motions filed by Trump in the District of Columbia federal case. At the same time, a small proportion of the possible motions are also subject to appeal before trial, and probably the greatest chance for delay will emerge in resolving that limited number of appeals.

With regard to all the events that will unfold from here on, we can take some comfort in the fact that these cases are now in the hands of trial judges who are, with the possible exception of Judge Aileen Cannon, highly competent and principled, and dedicated to seeing the cases resolved in a manner consistent with due process and the national interest. They understand what is at stake, and the need for expedition. They also know how to try a case fairly—how to select an unbiased jury, respect the rights of all parties, and proceed in accordance with the rules of evidence. In handling the appeals of any pretrial motions, the appellate courts can also be counted on to do their best to follow the law and give due consideration to the urgent national interest in expediting their resolution.  

As for the trials of the cases, no one can ask more than that the evidence be fairly presented to a properly instructed, unbiased jury, and there is good reason to believe that can be achieved. Because no fair trial in our system ever has a totally predictable outcome, this is a measure of uncertainty we must have the courage to accept. But the ample public record, including especially the many statements of Trump’s own associates about his conduct, gives grounds for expectations about what outcomes are likely to result from a fair airing of the facts.

In pursuing this path of justice for the former president, our rule of law may also serve the nation in another quite important way. Trump’s primary public appeal has always been closely tied to his defiance of the norms observed by normal people, and his claimed ability to make his own rules and define his own truth. But Trump’s engagement now in a prolonged and personal interaction with our judicial process does not sit easily with these claims to be above all authority.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump – a guide]

These three pending criminal cases—and the civil cases involving E. Jean Carroll and the New York attorney general’s allegations of systematic business fraud—all show him, day by day as events unfold, to be subject like everyone else to society’s rules of conduct. Not only the convictions that may well result, but the judicial proceedings themselves are graphic demonstrations for all to see that our democratic rule of law, and not Donald Trump, is indeed supreme.

In short, compared with the mire of uncertainty in which the nation has wallowed for the past several years, with no clear plan or path to deal with the most serious threat to our governmental system since the Civil War, we are now in a new and much better moment. Indeed, while the final chapters have yet to be written, it is not too soon for patriotic Americans to publicly take pride in what is now clear—that our rule of law is durable and works, even under the most challenging circumstances. A quiet celebration of that fact might begin with the suggestion made by the 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln when, in 1838, the country faced a different threat of mob rule: that by our renewed respect for the rule of law, we make it “the political religion of the Nation.”

Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and often talked in a way that would get him kicked out of church. In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could win over evangelicals, whose support he needed. Eight years later, a few weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question. In fact, there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth,” says Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

How did evangelicals shift from being reluctant supporters of Trump to among his most passionate defenders? How did some evangelicals, historically suspicious of politicians, develop a “fanatical, cult-like attachment” to Donald Trump? And what happened to the evangelical movement as some bought into Trump’s vision of America and others recoiled?

Alberta is a political reporter and also a Christian himself. After a dramatic and unexpected conversion, Tim’s father became a pastor at a prominent church in Michigan, which means Alberta grew up playing at the church, inviting dates to Bible study. He remains a believer. But he has watched with concern over the last few years as a lot of worship services have started to sound like “low-rent Fox News segments,” as he puts it—and as his own father, before his death, began justifying some of Trump’s behavior. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Alberta about the alliance between Trump and evangelicals, and what it means for the church he loves.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: The Iowa caucuses are coming up in just over a month, and despite the primary challengers, it’s very likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

Now, a lot has changed since 2016, when Trump first ran. Back then, one of the biggest questions he faced was whether he could win over evangelical Christians.

After all, he was a casino owner, used to hang out at the Playboy Mansion, and he was on his third wife. If he preached anything, it was the gospel of wealth.

Trump needed evangelicals back then and, eventually, they held their noses and voted for him.

Now the dynamic is very different. In this election, evangelical support is no longer a question. In fact, so popular is Trump that some evangelical leaders have come to think of him as a kind of messiah, the leader they have always been waiting for.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. And today: how Trump has transformed the evangelical movement.

[Music]

In the early 2000s I was a beat reporter for The Washington Post, and my beat was evangelicals. George W. Bush was president, and he was a self-declared born-again Christian. And I watched his relationship with evangelicals up close, but that’s nothing like what we have today.

Many evangelical leaders now have an intense devotion to Trump that I find mystifying.

So today on the show, we have Tim Alberta to help explain it. Tim is a staff writer at The Atlantic who just wrote a book called The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Also, Tim’s dad was a pastor, which meant Tim grew up in the Church.

Tim Alberta: So when I say that I grew up in the Church, I mean literally physically grew up inside the church. My mother was on the staff there. I spent my childhood playing hide-and-seek in the storage spaces, doing my homework in my dad’s office.

Tim Alberta watched the movement change during the Trump years. He watched his own dad change. It unsettled him. But it also gave him a unique insider’s perspective. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So first basic question: Why write a book about evangelicals right now? It’s not like they’re a new force in American politics. They’ve, you know, been around for a while. They’ve had influence for a while. So why now?

Alberta: Well, I guess I would have to give you both the macro and the micro answer. So the macro answer is that I really do sense that something new and something urgent and something dangerous, frankly, is happening in the evangelical world—specific to not just its alliance with Donald Trump, its alliance with the Republican Party, but its processing of everyday, run-of-the-mill, partisan political disputes through this prism that’s no longer red versus blue, no longer even, you know, conservatives versus progressives, you know, God-fearing Christians versus godless leftists. It’s good versus evil.

There is really a sense within American evangelicalism today that the end is near, that the sky is falling, that the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, we’re not just losing America. It’s not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself. So that is the macro.

The micro as to why I wrote the book now is because, I suppose for lack of a better way of putting it, I finally found the courage to do so. I finally found my voice in addressing this thing that I have known for a very long time to be a problem but just wasn’t brave enough until now to really speak out about it.

Rosin: So, okay, let’s get down on the ground and paint a picture for people. And possibly this is starting at the extremes, but there’s a church you wrote about called Floodgate.

Alberta: Floodgate is a church in Brighton, Michigan, which is my hometown. They had about 100 people, 125 people on an average Sunday for their worship services. So it’s a pretty small church—roadside congregation—in my hometown.

And I grew up, like, a few miles from there. I had never heard of it. Fast-forward to COVID-19: Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, had issued shutdown orders that implicated houses of worship. And most of the churches in the area, including very conservative churches—theologically, culturally, politically conservative—they decided to shut down for some period of time.

And that included my home church, where my dad had been the pastor—the church that I grew up in, you know, spent my whole life in. They closed down, and basically at that moment, this massive schism was opened in the community, not only in the community I grew up in, but in the faith community that I grew up in, sort of universally speaking when we talk about evangelicalism in America.

Because this same thing that happened in Brighton, Michigan, was happening all over the country, which was to say that churches that closed down had some number of their congregants who were up in arms, who were furious, who basically believed that the pastors there were cowards and that they were succumbing to the forces of secularism that had the Church in the crosshairs.

And meanwhile, churches like Floodgate that took a bold stance against the government and stayed open, those churches were doing the Lord’s work. And so what you saw at Floodgate was a congregation that had about 100, suddenly within about a year had gone to 1,500. And now they’re even much bigger today than they were at that time.

And so when you go into Floodgate on a Sunday morning, as I did many times, instead of some of the traditional Sunday-morning worship rituals—you know, the church creeds and the doctrines being read aloud, the doxology sung, you know, some of the standard stuff that you would become accustomed to in an evangelical space—really what you would see was the pulpit being turned into a soapbox and the worship service turning into a low-rent Fox News segment, with the pastor just inveighing against Anthony Fauci, against Joe Biden, against the Democratic Party, against the elites who are trying to control the population—very dark, very angry, very conspiratorial. And that’s what you would see inside of a church like Floodgate.

Rosin: It’s not exactly an evolution. It’s more like an intensification. And I’m curious how the dots got drawn between a theological argument and COVID-19 masking, and then went all the way to Fox News.

Alberta: Well, you’re right that it’s intensification. It is also evolution. I’ll explain, I think, what is the arc that led us to this place. To understand this moment is to understand the sweep of the last 50 or 60 years in the evangelical world. So, during the mid-to-late ’70s, and certainly into the ’80s through the Reagan years, the Moral Majority is ascendant.

You’ve got tens of millions of evangelicals who are suddenly energized, galvanized, mobilized politically. And then you begin to see, after the Iron Curtain falls and the Cold War ends and we move into this period of a kind of peace and prosperity, that some of that panic starts to fall away a little bit.

A lot of churches sort of ratchet it back, and things return to normal for a period. And you see that, you know, really into the early 2000s, with a notable exception, I would add, of the Bill Clinton impeachment, which I think was a major moment for a lot of evangelicals—certainly my own father, my own church, where a lot of evangelicals wanted to take that moment to emphasize that character matters, morality matters, and that our political system depends on having moral leaders.

And then you kind of fast-forward, and things are still at kind of a low simmer for a while there.

Rosin: I think at the same time during the period that you’re describing, we do come to think, in our cultural imagination, of evangelical as equivalent to conservative, eventually as equivalent to Republican conservative, and then eventually as equivalent to white Republican conservative. Those definitions are also getting hardened during the period that you describe as quiet.

Alberta: I think that’s right, and I think that some of that owes to just a self-identification phenomenon. So, you know, during George W. Bush’s presidency, he’s talking about his relationship with Billy Graham. He’s talking about evangelicalism. And so that is becoming a part of the political lexicon all over again.

I think really what starts to trip the alarms inside of evangelicalism is the end of the Bush presidency and the election of Barack Obama, for some reasons that are obvious (i.e., we’re talking about a white evangelical movement, portions of which, perhaps significant portions of which, are deeply uncomfortable with a Black president).

I also think that during Obama’s presidency, you see a significant move in the culture. I mean, even just on the issue of same-sex marriage, for example, Obama runs for president in 2008 opposed to same-sex marriage, and by the time he leaves office, he is in favor of it and the Supreme Court rules to legalize same-sex marriage nationally. All of that is happening in the space of, like, less than a decade, and you’re seeing major cultural movement toward the left. And a lot of evangelical Christians during this period of time are really beginning to sound the alarm.

They’re really hand-wringing, saying, Okay, this is it. This is the apocalypse we’ve been warning about for 50 years. Even if that apocalypse was once sort of an abstract thing, something that they gave voice to but maybe didn’t really believe it, suddenly this convergence of factors is causing a lot of churches to become not just more conservative, not just more Republican, but really more militant in a lot of ways—in the rhetoric you hear from the pulpit, with the tactics that they will choose to engage in some of the culture-war issues with. And so that leads us to Trump coming down in the golden escalator.

And Donald Trump is not exactly a paragon of Christian virtue. The thrice-married, casino-owning Manhattan playboy who parades his mistresses through the tabloids and uses terrible, vulgar rhetoric—I mean, this is not someone who the rank-and-file evangelical would point to as an ally, much less as a role model.

Rosin: Right.

Alberta: And I reported extensively in 2016 on a really well-organized, well-financed effort to rally evangelical leaders around Ted Cruz, because they at least viewed him as one of their own. But he also had all of that same pugilism, all of that same attitude, that We’ve been pushed around too long, and now it’s time we fought back and we did something about this.

Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination, and then he realizes that he can’t get elected president without the support of these white evangelical voters and, frankly, without overwhelming support of those voters. And so, methodically, he starts his courtship of them.

He chooses Mike Pence as his running mate. He releases this list of Supreme Court justices. He promises explicitly that they will be pro-life Supreme Court justices, something that had never been done by a presidential nominee. He’s doing all of this signaling to evangelical voters. Perhaps most importantly, he goes to New York in the summer of 2016, and he meets with hundreds and hundreds of these prominent evangelical pastors from around the country, and he basically promises them, he says: Look, I will give you power. If you elect me, I will give you power, and I will defend Christianity in this country.

And so there’s sort of this transactional relationship where Trump gets the votes from these people, and they get not just the policies in return, but they get the protection in return. It’s almost as though Trump becomes, like, this mercenary who, on their behalf, is willing to fight the enemies out in the culture, in the government.

Anyone who is hostile to the Christian way of life as they view it, Donald Trump is going to fight on their behalf.

Rosin: Now, you use the word transactional. Did everybody understand it was transactional? I mean, from how you described it, Trump certainly understood it was transactional: I’m going to come out there and get your vote. How did evangelical leaders understand what was happening?

Alberta: The incredible part, Hanna, is that they really did. I mean, I have all of the reporting on the record from the time to back this up. I wrote about it in my first book, American Carnage. They understood exactly the relationship that they were entering into with Donald Trump. They were under no illusions that God’s hands were on him. They didn’t believe any of that.

They didn’t even bother trying to sell that to their flocks. Really, what they said was: Look, this is a crummy situation. We’ve got a binary choice. There are multiple Supreme Court justices hanging in the balance here. And if you care about abortion—which is the number-one issue for a lot of these folks—then you have an obligation to vote for this person, no matter how gross and wretched we find his personal conduct to be.

Rosin: This is the beginning of the first election. This is their attitude. Now we’re just at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Alberta: That’s right. And so what starts as this transactional relationship, it morphs into something else entirely. What we see today is this fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe. Now, I say some quarters because I really need to stress this point. When we talk about white evangelicals in this country, we’re talking about tens of millions of people, right?

They are not a monolith. We have to understand that these are points plotted across this vast spectrum. So on the one hand—on the one end of that spectrum, I should say—of course you have some of these folks who are just all in on Trump. They have almost sold their souls for Trumpism, and they view him as a messianic figure. They really do. And they’ll tell you that.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have some of these white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016, held their nose, begged for forgiveness after doing so, but they still cared so much about the abortion issue that they felt compelled to do so.

And then pretty quickly thereafter, they walked away from it all and washed their hands and said, I cannot be a part of this. Right?

And then in the middle, you’ve got the great majority of these folks who are floating somewhere in the middle of this, trying to figure out, you know, I find this guy abhorrent, but I’m also terrified of what I see from the left. I can’t possibly vote for Trump again, but I can’t vote for somebody who’s pro-choice either. What do I do?

There’s this identity crisis now deep inside the evangelical movement, where a lot of these folks feel completely lost and completely homeless. And their relationship with Trump is not something that can be sort of caricatured, because for a lot of these folks, even folks who voted for him a second time, in 2020, they find the man to be completely immoral and reprehensible.

And yet they still voted for him twice.

Rosin: Yeah, I understand the second group, the bargain they’re making. I understand the third group that regrets the bargain that they made. It’s the first group that is a mystery to me, how people came to be all in. So can you try and describe that first group to me?

Like, how did they morph from holding their nose and choosing a flawed leader to deciding that he was the messiah? How did that evolution happen?

Alberta: There are many, many, many Christians in this country who are deeply invested in the idea of sort of supernatural intervention and transformation and the idea that God speaks to us through the unlikeliest of sources.

And so for some chunk of that first group that you’re asking about, there’s no question. And I’ve talked with plenty of these folks. They believe Donald Trump is God’s instrument on Earth. And not only that, they believe that Donald Trump has become a Christian, that Donald Trump underwent a transformation while he was president, And why else would he be fighting for us the way that he’s fighting for us?

And it’s difficult to overstate just how meaningful that language of transformation is to people whose entire lives revolve around notions of transformation and of holy intercession.

Rosin: Can I ask, is there any part of you who’s familiar and knows that language that can believe that maybe he did have some kind of transformation?

Alberta: No.

Rosin: No.

Alberta: The short answer is no. And I don’t want—listen, I don’t want to be disrespectful. I don’t want to be cute in my answer here. But, you know, scripture says that by their fruit you will know them. You know, a good and healthy tree bears good and healthy fruit. If one were to just spend a day studying the language Donald Trump uses, the behavior he exhibits, the way that he treats others—you know, Jesus tells us to love our enemy and pray for those who persecute you, to turn the other cheek, to love your neighbor as yourself.

I have studied Donald Trump as closely as anyone in the last decade, and I have yet to see him exhibit any of those qualities or follow any of those biblical commands. So, I’m sorry, but no. It strikes me as entirely improbable that he has had a real encounter with the risen Christ and has committed his life to Jesus.

Rosin: One thing that is mystifying me is that now that evangelicals are so deeply in that us versus them—sort of, It’s us in a war against the evil Americans. The rest of you are not even Americans. You’re our enemies, basically—what is evangelizing?

I mean, I recall that when I spent a lot of time around evangelicals (and I am Jewish), there was nothing I could say or do or confess about myself that would prevent them from wanting to evangelize me. Like, I was always a reachable soul. Everybody was always a reachable soul. And now it seems like, What is evangelizing?

There’s a whole swath of America that just isn’t—they’re beyond contempt. You know, they’re the enemy. And so that seems very different to me than what it used to be.

Alberta: Hanna, first and foremost, people will ask, understandably, Well, what does it mean, evangelical? What does that even mean? Right? There’s always been some disagreement over the terminology itself.

And what I like to say is, Listen, at its core, there’s a verb in there, which is “to evangelize.” It is to take the gospel of Jesus Christ out to all the nations and to reach the unbelievers and to share with them this story—of not only of God’s perfect love, but of humanity’s brokenness and how God ultimately had to take on flesh and be fully God and fully man in the form of Jesus, and that Jesus was the mediator between a broken humanity and a perfect God—and to share that message with an unbelieving world so that they might see him and they might believe in him.

The problem today is that we, in the modern American context, have taken the New Testament model of what a church should be, and we have completely flipped it on its head. What I mean by that is if you study the New Testament model of what the early Church looked like and how it operated, there was boundless, abundant grace and forgiveness and kindness shown to those outside of the Church, because the thinking was: They don’t know God. They don’t know any better, so we can’t possibly hold their behavior against them. We need to show them the love of God.

But inside the Church, for fellow believers there was strict accountability. There was a very high standard. In fact, they basically said, You are held to the highest of standards for your behavior, for your language, for your conduct inside of the Church, because you do know God. You do know better.

What we see today in the American context is the complete opposite. We see, inside of the Church—despite all of the scandal, the abuse, the misconduct, the terrible behavior, the damaging rhetoric—we see forgiveness. We turn a blind eye to it. We enable it. We justify it.

But when we see those outside of the Church who disagree with us, it is nothing but condemnation. It is nothing but fire and brimstone. There is no grace. There is no forgiveness. And I just—it breaks my heart because, in so many ways, the entire identity of the Church is rooted in that mission, in that purpose of evangelizing. But we today cannot reach the outside world with that gospel of Jesus Christ, because the outside world looks at us and says, We want nothing to do with you guys. We want nothing to do with evangelicals. And it’s just, it’s tragic.

Rosin: And also vice versa, I have to say. I mean, that’s so interesting what you just said. But I was thinking, as much as I resented the millions of times that as a reporter and, you know, a Jewish person I’d have to sort of sit through people trying to evangelize me as I was trying to do my work, at least they were talking to me.

Like, at least that was like a—that was a bridge, you know? That was like, they were interested. And now I look back at that and think, like, If I were out there now, that wouldn’t happen. You know, a lot of people just wouldn’t be interested. I might be the enemy.

Alberta: Yeah, they would view you with hostility. Right?

Rosin: Yes, exactly.

Alberta: And suspicion.

Rosin: Yeah, exactly.

Alberta: Right. Which is, you know, listen, I plead guilty at times to probably—although I was just talking with a dear friend of mine, a journalist friend who’s Jewish, who told me, You know, I’m only about halfway through the book, but I have to say, you’re kind of, you’re intriguing me with your case for Jesus here.

And I said, Listen, you know, I figured that I might be annoying some of my non-Christian friends with parts of the book that are unapologetically trying to evangelize. But, ultimately, that is what we are called to do, and if we annoy people in the process, so be it. But boy, I’d rather annoy people with the gospel than denigrate them and antagonize them and dehumanize them with a twisted version of the gospel.

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so we’ve talked about the evangelical movement as a whole. Let’s talk about your own story. Your father was a pastor.

Alberta: Yes, he was. The Dr. Reverend Richard J. Alberta. My dad was an amazing guy who would have been the unlikeliest candidate to ever become a pastor. He was an atheist, actually, and he was working in finance in New York and making a lot of money and had a beautiful house and a Cadillac and a beautiful wife, my mother, and they had it all. They were flying high, living the dream.

And my dad, he just felt this rumbling emptiness. Something was missing in his life. And what could it possibly be? I mean, you look from the outside in: What could you possibly be missing? And so, he set out looking. And that search led him to a little church in the Hudson Valley called Goodwill. And it was there that he heard the gospel for the first time, and he gave his life to Jesus that day.

And it was a pretty radical transformation in his life. Suddenly he was waking up at 4 in the morning to read the Bible for hours, silently meditating, praying. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. She was not a Christian at the time. And then things got even weirder, because not long after that, he felt the Lord calling him to enter the ministry. And my mom had just become a Christian at this point, but she and his brothers and parents and their friends—everybody who knew him—thought that he’d lost his mind. And he just said, Listen, I don’t know what to tell you, but I feel an anointing from God to do this with my life. And so he did.

They left everything behind. They sold all their possessions. They spent the next couple of decades living on food stamps, working in little churches around the country. And eventually they put down roots at a church called Cornerstone, in Brighton, Michigan, which is where I grew up.

Rosin: Wow, you know, no matter how many times I’ve heard conversion stories like that, it’s very hard for me to, like, know or understand what that spark is.

Alberta: It’s hard to describe just how radical of a change that was for him and for his life and how much he sacrificed for it.

And my dad’s always been my hero because of that, because I think there are very few people in this life with the courage to follow a conviction in the way that he did.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so let’s take those feelings that you have about your dad, and it seems like belief has lived on in you, and overlay them on the political transformation that you’re describing. Because it sounds like from what you write in the book, your father went through that whole political transformation.

He started out suspicious of politics. He started out thinking Trump was a narcissist and a liar. And then over time, you watched him go through the same changes that you watched the rest of the evangelical community go through, right? Like, it started to feel to you, as you write in the book, like he was justifying some of the things that Trump has done. Did I get that right?

Alberta: Yeah, that’s right. And I would be clear—not just, like, to defend my dad’s honor or whatever, because I’ve been very open in discussing all of this, and I try to just be completely transparent in the book—but my dad was never, like, a Trumper, but he did become sort of defensive around Trump.

And I think the explanation I ultimately reached there was that my dad felt guilty, frankly, about voting for Trump. I think he felt vulnerable almost, because, again, here was someone who had lived his life in such an incredibly upright manner, who taught his kids to know right from wrong, who wouldn’t cheat anybody out of a penny.

It just, like, you know, he set a standard for us. And then he votes for this guy who was, in so many ways, just, like, a walking rebuke to everything that he’d ever taught us about how to be a man, how to be a husband, how to be a neighbor. And I think he felt guilty about it.

And he and I would sort of go back and forth on this and, ultimately, I would say that to him, which I think was, like, the deepest cut of all.

I’d say, Pop, like, you’re the one who taught me right from wrong. Like, Don’t be mad at me for acting on it. Like, This guy, what he’s doing, what he’s saying, it’s wrong.”

And I think that when we would have those conversations, I could sense in him this feeling that, you know, attacks on Trump’s character became an attack on his character, that he processed criticisms of Trump as criticisms of him personally.

And I think a lot of evangelicals felt that way. And in some strange sense, that almost drove them deeper into the Trump bunker, where if they were to concede any criticism, any attack on Trump as being legitimate, then it was sort of ipso facto a legitimate attack on them. And that was the sort of weird dynamic that took hold in my relationship with my dad.

Rosin: So, okay, here we are coming on another election. What do you think the future of evangelicals is in the near future, the next election?

Alberta: So Trump is obviously the runaway favorite to win the Republican nomination, and that is due, in no small part, to his continued stranglehold on the evangelical vote. What’s interesting, I would add as a quick aside, is that we really saw, for the first time, Trump’s support with those voters beginning to dip after the 2022 midterms, when Republicans underperformed so badly.

And then Trump responded to the results of the midterms by throwing the pro-life movement under the bus, basically saying it was their fault that Republicans had lost all these races. And Trump saw his numbers decline pretty noticeably with those voters.

But then something happened. Alvin Bragg delivered that first indictment of Donald Trump, which was, of course, then followed by all these subsequent indictments. And you saw Trump’s numbers with those same evangelical voters who had started to bail on him, they went right back up, and they have continued apace.

And I mention all that just to say that this idea of a persecution complex is so deeply embedded in the evangelical psyche. When Donald Trump goes to these rallies and says, you know, We are under siege. They’re coming for us. They’re coming for me first so that they can get to you, these people, they believe that deep in their bones. That is their entire political consciousness at this point.

So Donald Trump is almost surely going to win the Republican nomination, but transitioning to the general election next November, I don’t necessarily foresee any great defection of these white evangelical voters away from Donald Trump. He’s won roughly 80 percent of them in the last two elections. And if he is the Republican nominee in 2024, as we expect, he’ll probably win about that same rough percentage.

However, the thing that I have observed, and the thing that I would point out to our listeners to keep a very close eye on in the coming year, is that this is the first post-Roe v. Wade presidential election held in this country. And for so long, for 50 years, single-issue evangelical voters have been mobilized to turn out in presidential elections because of the abortion issue, because of the federal stakes, because of Supreme Court vacancies hanging in the balance. This is the first election where that will no longer be the case.

We now have abortion as a decentralized, defederalized issue. So you see all of the mobilization at the grassroots level in the states over abortion, but not in a federal framing.

Now with Roe v. Wade having fallen, there’s real consideration being given by a lot of these folks to either vote for a third party or even just perhaps to stay home and not vote at all, because they no longer feel obligated, they no longer feel compelled to choose the lesser of two evils in a presidential context because the abortion issue is pretty much off the table.

So you could see some significant drop off in terms of the raw votes cast by evangelicals in this upcoming election, and that would be unprecedented.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so what happens if Trump wins? What happens if Trump loses? What do those two scenarios look like?

Alberta: Well, if Trump wins, the folks around him who are advising him, they have made no secret of the fact that there will be elements of an explicitly Christian nationalist agenda pursued in a second Trump term. In fact, the West Wing will be populated by some individuals who would openly identify as Christian nationalists.

Some of them would probably even openly identify as theocrats, or at least if you stuck the needle of truth serum into their veins. So when Donald Trump, for instance, recently on the campaign trail, floated this idea of no longer allowing non-Christian migrants to enter the country, Trump said that a few weeks ago, and I mean, we just barely even batted an eye, right?

But that is the sort of idea now circulating inside Trump’s orbit, and there are a lot of people around him who really, truly, deeply believe in this idea now of partisan politics as a proxy for good versus evil.

And these are the folks who will be helping to shape the legislative agenda inside of the Trump White House. I think we need to buckle up if, in fact, Trump is elected, because some of this talk of a holy war, of a spiritual battle, good versus evil—we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what we could see if Trump were to be elected again.

Rosin: Oh, that sounds very undemocratic and un-American to me. Okay, and what if he loses?

Alberta: Well, if he loses, boy, I mean, I think the question becomes, for a lot of these folks, you know, Donald Trump was able to sell himself as a martyr once, right—in 2020 with the “Stop the Steal” and “the election was rigged” and all of this—and if he loses again, does the label of “consistent loser,” does that somehow break the spell?

Is there some opportunity here for some of these evangelicals to sort of step back and reevaluate their relationship with Trump and wonder? Okay, maybe we’ve been investing too much in the political arena. If, in fact, we believe that there are these great moral problems in America, then maybe the solutions aren’t political. Maybe we need to reevaluate.

That could happen. I pray that it does. Or the exact opposite could happen. There could be a doubling down or a tripling down. And there could be an attempt to—I mean, I hate to even voice this, but I mean, January 6 was not an outlier. It was not something that we should have been surprised by.

And if you study some of the behavior, some of the calls to arms—figurative and literal—that we see coming out of some of these far-right evangelical spaces, this could turn into something really dangerous.

And I think that is why, even if you are not an evangelical Christian yourself, even if you are not a believer, even if you are not an adherent to any sort of religious tradition, you should be paying very close attention to this. And I wrote this book for you as much as for anyone else, because we have to understand that in the interest of holding together a pluralistic society, these schisms inside the Church, they have to be addressed, and they have to be addressed soon.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. I think we’re going to hang on to the phrase, or it sounds like you’re going to hang on to the phrase, break the spell. I mean, that’s what you’re hoping for.

Alberta: That is what I’m hoping for. I think we should all be hoping for it, but I’m not holding my breath at the same time.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, you’ve explained a lot to me. Thank you for coming on the show.

Alberta: Thank you for having me, Hanna. This has been great.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes.

Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. He attempted to strip California of the authority it has wielded since the early 1970s to set its own, more stringent pollution standards.

[Read: Trump’s war on blue America]

In Trump’s final year in office, he opened a new, more ominous front in his campaign to assert control over blue jurisdictions. As the nation faced the twin shocks of the coronavirus pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump repeatedly dispatched federal law-enforcement agents to blue cities, usually over the opposition of Democratic mayors, governors, or both. Trump sent an array of federal personnel to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect a federal courthouse amid the city’s chaotic protests; reports soon emerged of camouflage-clad federal agents without any identifying insignia forcing protesters into unmarked vans. Trump responded to the huge racial-justice protests in Washington, D.C., by dispatching National Guard troops drawn from 11 states, almost all of them led by Republican governors. Later he sent other federal law-enforcement officers to combat rising crime in Kansas City and Chicago, a city Trump described as “worse than Afghanistan.”

Trump has signaled that in a second presidential term, he would further escalate his war on blue America. He’s again promising federal legislation that would impose policies popular in red states onto the blue states that have rejected them. He has pledged to withhold federal funding from schools teaching critical race theory and “gender ideology.” He says he will initiate federal civil-rights investigations into liberal big-city prosecutors (whom he calls “Marxist local District Attorneys”) and require cities to adopt policing policies favored by conservatives, such as stop-and-frisk, as a condition for receiving federal grants.

Even more dramatic are Trump’s open pledges to launch militarized law-enforcement campaigns inside blue cities. He has proposed initiatives that cumulatively could create an occupying federal force in the nation’s largest cities. Trump has indicated that “in cities where there’s been a complete breakdown of public safety, I will send in federal assets, including the National Guard, until law and order is restored.”

[Read: Why the 2020s could be as dangerous as the 1850s]

Trump envisions an even more invasive door-to-door offensive against undocumented immigrants. In an early-2023 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said he “will use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Stephen Miller, who was his top immigration aide in the White House, later added that Trump envisions establishing massive internment camps for undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation. Trump has also promised “to use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets,” and move them to camps as well. (On this front, Trump has said he would work with states, but in practice that would likely involve partnering with Republican governors to impose policies to clear the streets opposed by their own Democratic mayors.)

Michael Nutter, a former mayor of Philadelphia, told me that if a reelected Trump sought to implement these policies, the result would be “chaos, confusion,” and “massive demonstrations.” “Nobody is going to allow that to just happen,” Nutter said. “You are just going to see standoffs. It is going to be the Philadelphia Police Department versus the National Guard. Neighbors are going to be surrounding people’s houses. Folks are going to rush and seek safety in churches and synagogues and mosques and temples.”

Of course, Trump would face other obstacles in attempting to implement these plans. The president’s legal authority to deploy federal forces over the objections of local officials is murky. And the relatively small number of federal law-enforcement officers under his direct control at agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection could limit his options, according to Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University Law School who studies relations among cities, states, and the federal government.

But in Trump’s final months in office, he got creative about augmenting the forces at his command by drawing on National Guard troops provided by sympathetic Republican governors. His advisers are already talking about doing the same to staff his deportation agenda, as well as using the emergency authority he cited to fund his border wall to build his camps for undocumented immigrants without congressional approval.

Briffault told me that the inevitable court challenges to any Trump-ordered projections of force into blue cities would likely pivot on the courts’ interpretation of how much authority the president possesses under various emergency statutes. His advisers have already discussed invoking the 19th-century Insurrection Act, for example. As legal scholars have pointed out, the scope of the president’s emergency powers is much broader than most Americans recognize, and Trump is clearly signaling that if he returns to the White House, he intends to test the outer boundaries of that authority. The question for the courts will be “to what extent can he engage directly in law enforcement and having militarized law enforcement in the United States, in the absence of a request by a governor or a mayor that there is a riotlike condition or civil disorder?” Briffault said. “Can he declare an emergency even though he’s not being asked for it?”

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Barton Gellman on how Trump’s next coup has already begun]

As president, Trump seemed to view himself less as the leader of a unified republic than as the champion of a red nation within a nation—one that constitutes the real America. If anything, Trump has assumed that factional role even more overtly in his 2024 campaign, promising that he will deliver “retribution” for his supporters and dehumanizing his opponents. Powered by such fetid resentments and grievances, the agenda Trump seeks to impose on blue cities and states could create the greatest threat to the nation’s cohesion since the Civil War.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A War on Blue America.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

“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,” Donald Trump said this past November, in a campaign speech that was ostensibly honoring Veterans Day. “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

[David A. Graham: Trump says he’ll be a dictator on “day one”]

What immediately leaps out here is the word vermin, with its echoes of Hitler and Mussolini. But Trump’s inflammatory language can overshadow and distract from the substance of what he’s saying—in this case, appearing to promise a purge or repression of those who disagree with him politically.

This sort of language isn’t entirely new. Trump spoke in Manichaean terms throughout his first campaign and term, encouraging chants to lock up Hillary Clinton in 2016, and in 2018 referring to undocumented immigrants as “animals” who would “infest our country.” Over time, the shock of Trump’s rhetoric has worn off, making it easy to miss the fact that his message has grown even darker.

Trump himself has changed, too—the old Trump seemed to be running for office partly for fun and partly in service of his signature views, such as opposition to immigration and support for protectionism. Today’s Trump is different. His fury over his 2020 election defeat, the legal cases against him, and a desire for revenge against political opponents have come to eclipse everything else.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: David Frum on the revenge presidency]

In the past few months, the former president has described himself as a “very proud election denier.” He has repeatedly threatened and intimidated judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and even the family of prosecutors involved in the cases against him, going so far as to say that his legal opponents will be consigned to mental asylums if he’s reelected. He has suggested that the man he picked for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed on grounds of treason. He’s called for investigating NBC and possibly yanking the network off the air, also on grounds of treason—one of his most direct attacks on the First Amendment. And he’s vowed to arrest and indict President Joe Biden and other political opponents for no apparent reason other than that they oppose him.

The fact that Trump’s ideas have become more authoritarian is not yet fully appreciated. One reason is people have heard Trump say outlandish things for so long that they can’t identify what’s new, or they’ve become numb. Another is venue: Once Trump left the White House and stopped tweeting, his vitriol became less noticeable to anyone who didn’t attend his rallies, seek out videos of them, or join Trump’s own Truth Social network.

Even when a comment is so extreme that it does break into the mainstream, what happens next is predictable. The first time Trump says something, people react with shock and compare him to Hitler. The second time, people say Trump is at it again. By the third time, it becomes background noise—an appalling but familiar part of the Trump shtick.

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

This is just the sort of “normalization” that Trump’s critics warned against from the start, but it’s also a natural human response to repeated exposure. The result is that Trump has been able to acclimate the nation to authoritarianism by introducing it early and often. When a second-term President Trump directs the Justice Department to lock up Democratic politicians or generals or reporters or activists on flimsy or no grounds at all, people will wring their hands, but they’ll also shrug and wonder why he didn’t do it sooner. After all, he’s been promising to do it forever, right?

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Isn’t Bluffing.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through.

Since the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, legal and civil rights for people on the margins have tended to expand. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were followed by voting provisions for Indigenous people and non-English speakers, a Supreme Court guarantee of the right to abortion, increased protections for people with disabilities, and formal recognition of same-sex marriage. The trend mostly continued under presidents of both parties—until Trump. Though his administration could be bumbling, the president’s actions matched his rhetoric when it came to eroding civil-rights enforcement.

[From the March 2021 issue: American democracy is only 55 years old—and hanging by a thread]

Under Trump, the Justice Department abandoned its active protection of voting rights. The Environmental Protection Agency ignored civil-rights complaints. The Department of Housing and Urban Development scaled back investigations into housing discrimination. Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court, for their part, have whittled away at landmark civil-rights legislation and presided over the end of affirmative action.

In a second term, the most effective way for Trump to continue rolling back protections would be to dismantle disparate-impact theory. Under the theory, the federal government can prohibit discriminatory practices not just in instances of malicious and provable bigotry, but also in cases where a party’s actions unintentionally affect a class of marginalized people disproportionately.

The theory is important because discrimination can be perpetuated without ill intent; even seemingly benign or neutral policies can perpetuate a legacy of bias, or create new inequities. But disparate impact is also essential because landlords, business owners, and municipal officials who do wish to discriminate have learned how to operate without expressing overt bigotry. Under disparate impact, the government’s burden is not to prove that these actors intended to discriminate, only that their actions resulted in discrimination.

For decades, lawyers have invoked disparate impact as a means of fighting discrimination. The standard has been applied across the federal government. After the housing crisis of 2008, the DOJ brought a series of lawsuits against banks that had charged higher mortgage rates and fees to minority borrowers, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from the lenders. In 2015, the DOJ released a damning report on the practices of the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, after an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a police officer. Disparate impact was mentioned at least 30 times in the report, including in its main takeaway: “African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system.”

[Adam Serwer: Trump is making it easier to get away with discrimination]

Many conservatives have long been suspicious of disparate impact. The most principled objections center on the claims that it invites government overreach and inefficiency, that it impedes state and local policy development, and that it always entails some degree of ghost-chasing—in a country as unequal as America, discerning what exactly contributes to a disparate outcome can be difficult.

But these philosophical and practical objections to the theory have always served to disguise a more visceral disdain. Many conservatives simply believe that ensuring equality is not a legitimate federal priority. In the Trump era, as the Republican Party has embraced white nationalism, its leaders have been emboldened to abandon the guise. They edge closer to the line once held by the architects of Jim Crow: Equality is undesirable because people are not equals; some of us might not even be people.

Trump himself has always had a preternatural gift for identifying and channeling grievance; white backlash against civil-rights legislation was one of the major forces behind his advancement to the presidency, and that backlash can be traced directly to disdain for civil-rights legislation and enforcement. Once Trump was in office, one of his early targets was HUD. In 2020, the department finalized a rule that demolished its discriminatory-effect standard, which had been the basis for enforcement at the department for at least 40 years. Trump’s HUD secretary, Ben Carson, said that the move would spur efficiency at the local level without undermining the department’s antidiscrimination work. But Carson has long been a skeptic of desegregation; during his 2016 presidential campaign, he described desegregation efforts in cities as “failed socialist experiments.” Ultimately, Carson’s attempt to undermine the discrimination standard was stymied by lawsuits. But the cause of fighting bias suffered nevertheless. In 2020, at the end of Carson’s tenure, the number of secretary-initiated complaints had gone from several dozen in 2015 to three.

Trump did serious damage to disparate impact as president; there’s little question that he would finish the job if given another chance. A second Trump administration could go beyond simply abandoning the theory, perhaps even bringing lawsuits seeking to declare the entire concept unconstitutional. Trump could thus attack civil-rights law from both sides, sabotaging the government’s capability to adjudicate cases while also arguing that it should not have that capability in the first place. If this two-pronged strategy succeeds, it will be difficult for any future administration to undo the changes. With today’s conservative-dominated judiciary and high levels of political polarization, any substantive changes Trump makes to civil-rights enforcement could effectively become permanent.

Without disparate impact, the DOJ would lose its primary tool for addressing brutality in police departments, and current efforts to finally enforce environmental laws in communities of color and hold cities accountable for creating slums in Black and Latino neighborhoods would be stalled. Given the damage that has already been done by the courts, there is a future—perhaps a likely future—in which the remaining foundations of the civil-rights era are undone. If Trump were to win in 2024, he would see the victory as a mandate to tear everything down now.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Civil Rights Undone.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to think that feigning sympathy for queer people was good PR. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” he promised. Then, while in office, he oversaw a broad rollback of LGBTQ protections, removing gender identity and sexuality from federal nondiscrimination provisions regarding health care, employment, and housing. His Defense Department restricted soldiers’ right to transition and banned trans people from enlisting; his State Department refused to issue visas to the same-sex domestic partners of diplomats. Yet when seeking reelection in 2020, Trump still made a show of throwing a Pride-themed rally.

[Carter Sickels: Being trans shouldn’t exclude me from health laws]

Now, recognizing that red-state voters have been energized by anti-queer demagoguery, he’s not even pretending to be tolerant. “These people are sick; they are deranged,” Trump said during a speech, amid a rant about transgender athletes in June. When the audience cheered at his mention of “transgender insanity,” he marveled, “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that.” He pantomimed weak applause. “But you mention transgender, everyone goes crazy.” The rhetoric has become a fixture of his rallies.

Trump is now running on a 10-point “Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity.” Its aim is not simply to interfere with parents’ rights to shape their kids’ health and education in consultation with doctors and teachers; it’s to effectively end trans people’s existence in the eyes of the government. Trump will call on Congress to establish a national definition of gender as being strictly binary and immutable from birth. He also wants to use executive action to cease all federal “programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” If enacted, those measures could open the door to all sorts of administrative cruelties—making it impossible, for example, for someone to change their gender on their passport. Low-income trans adults could be blocked from using Medicaid to pay for treatment that doctors have deemed vital to their well-being.

The Biden administration reinstated many of the protections Trump had eliminated, and the judiciary has thus far curbed the most extreme aspects of the conservative anti-trans agenda. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the assertions of Trump’s Justice Department, the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the investigations that Governor Abbott had ordered in Texas. But in a second term, Trump would surely seek to appoint more judges opposed to queer causes. He would also resume his first-term efforts to promote an interpretation of religious freedom that allows for unequal treatment of minorities. In May 2019, his Housing and Urban Development Department proposed a measure that would have permitted federally funded homeless shelters to turn away transgender individuals on the basis of religious freedom. A 2023 Supreme Court decision affirming a Christian graphic designer’s refusal to work with gay couples will invite more attempts to narrow the spaces and services to which queer people are guaranteed access.

[Listen: When the state has a problem with your identity]

The social impact of Trump’s reelection would only further encourage such discrimination. He has long espoused old-fashioned ideas about what it means to look and act male and female. Now the leader of the Republican Party is using his platform to push the notion that people who depart from those ideas deserve punishment. As some Republicans have engaged in queer-bashing rhetoric in recent years—including the libel that queerness is pedophilia by another name—hate crimes motivated by gender identity and sexuality have risen, terrifying a population that was never able to take its safety for granted. Victims of violence have included people who were merely suspected of nonconformity, such as the 59-year-old woman in Indiana who was killed in 2023 by a neighbor who believed her to be “a man acting like a woman.”

If Trump’s stoking of gender panic proves to be a winning national strategy, everyday deviation from outmoded and rigid norms could invite scorn or worse. And children will grow up in a more repressive and dangerous America than has existed in a long time.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Stoke a Gender Panic.”

Anyone watching the fourth Republican primary debate tonight would be forgiven for thinking Nikki Haley was the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination next year.

Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy sure were acting like it. Neither man had finished answering their first question before they began attacking the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador. “She caves any time the left comes after her, anytime the media comes after her,” warned DeSantis, the Florida governor. Ramaswamy went much further. He called Haley “corrupt” and “a fascist” for suggesting that social-media companies ban people from posting anonymously on their platforms.

The broadsides continued throughout the two-hour debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama: DeSantis and Ramaswamy used every opportunity to go after Haley, even when they were prodded to criticize the Republican who is actually dominating the primary race, Donald Trump.

“I’m loving all the attention, fellas,” Haley said at one point. What she’d love even more is about 30 additional points in the polls. As well as Haley has been doing lately, she is capturing just about 10 percent of Republican voters nationwide, according to the polling average. Time is running out for her—or any other GOP candidate—to catch Trump. He skipped this meeting of the Republican also-rans, just as he did the three previous debates. This debate narrowed to four Trump alternatives, but the evening devolved into a familiar dynamic: Most of the challengers largely declined to criticize—or even discuss—Trump.

[Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: a cheat sheet]

Chris Christie was the exception, as usual. The former New Jersey governor lit into Trump and mocked his rivals for being too “timid” to do the same. “I’m in this race because the truth needs to be spoken: He is unfit,” Christie said. Acting the part of pundit as much as candidate, Christie noted ruefully how little Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy wanted to talk about Trump and how fearful they seemed to be of angering him. DeSantis tiptoed toward criticism of Trump when he warned Republicans not “to nominate somebody who is almost 80 years old.” “Father Time is undefeated,” DeSantis said. But when he danced around the question of whether Trump was mentally fit to serve again as president, Christie bashed him. “This is the problem with my three colleagues: You are afraid to offend.”

Ramaswamy was next to speak. Instead of contradicting Christie and confronting Trump, he held up a handwritten sign that read, NIKKI=CORRUPT.

The reluctance of Trump’s rivals (aside from Christie) to attack the former president has frustrated Republicans who are rooting against his renomination. But on some level it makes sense. Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy aren’t actually running against Trump—at least not yet. The best way to think of these Trump-less debates is as a primary within a primary. The four Republicans on stage tonight were battling merely for the right to face off against Trump. In sports terms, these preliminary matchups are like the divisional round of the NFL playoffs, except that Trump has already earned a bye to the league championship. (The general election would be the Super Bowl.)

The all-important question is whether one of these four can break away from the others in time to wage a fair fight against Trump. The window for doing so is closing fast, but it is not shut completely. Although Trump is capturing nearly 60 percent of Republican primary voters in the national polling average, he remains below 50 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, the early states where his challengers are campaigning most aggressively. A majority of Republicans in both Iowa and New Hampshire are backing someone other than Trump at the moment, suggesting at least the possibility that Haley or DeSantis could consolidate the anti-Trump vote and overtake him in one or both states. Trump’s lead has been consistent—and it has actually grown since the debates started without him—but historically, primary races are most volatile in the final few weeks before voters begin casting ballots.

[Read: The Republican primary is slipping away]

The debate stage has shrunk by half since the first GOP primary forum in August, when eight candidates met the Republican National Committee’s criteria for participation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his bid after appearing in last month’s debate in Miami, as did North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who did not qualify.

Yet four candidates might be as small as it gets. No more RNC-sanctioned debates are scheduled before the Iowa caucuses on January 15 or the New Hampshire primary eight days later. If Trump wins both states against a divided field—as polls suggest he will—his nomination would likely seem unstoppable.

The most likely path to preventing Trump’s nomination is the same as it was when the primary began: for anti-Trump Republicans to agree on a single candidate to go up against him one-on-one. Nikki Haley is making her move. But if tonight’s debate revealed anything, it’s that her Republican competitors aren’t ready to let her have that chance.

Only former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie sought to attack the Republican frontrunner.