Yesterday, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted a skillful and revealing interview with New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. Over nine damning minutes, Sununu illustrated how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone.

The context for the interview is important. Governor Sununu is hardly a MAGA enthusiast. During the 2024 GOP primary, he supported Nikki Haley, and over the past several years, he’s been a harsh critic of Donald Trump. Sununu has referred to him as a “loser,” an “asshole,” and “not a real Republican.” He has said the nation needs to move past the “nonsense and drama” from the former president and that he expects “some kind of guilty verdict” against Trump. “This is serious,” Sununu said last June. “If even half of this stuff is true, he’s in real trouble.”

Most significant, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, five days after January 6, Sununu said, “It is clear that President Trump’s rhetoric and actions contributed to the insurrection at the United States Capitol Building.”

[Mark Leibovich: The validation brigade salutes Trump]

During the interview, Sununu didn’t distance himself from any of his previous comments; in fact, he doubled down on them. He reaffirmed that Trump “absolutely contributed” to the insurrection. “I hate the election denialism of 2020,” Sununu said. And he admitted that he’d be very uncomfortable supporting Trump if he were convicted of a felony. But no matter, Sununu reiterated to Stephanopoulos that he’ll vote for Trump anyway.

“Look, nobody should be shocked that the Republican governor is supporting the Republican president,” Sununu said.

It’s worth examining the reasons Sununu cited to justify his support for Trump. The main one, according to the New Hampshire governor, is “how bad Biden has become as president.” Sununu cited two issues specifically: inflation, which is “crushing people,” and the chaos at the southern border.

Let’s take those issues in reverse order. Any fair-minded assessment would conclude that Joe Biden has been a failure on border security—crossings at the southern border are higher than ever—and that the president is rightfully paying a political price for it. His record in this respect is worse than Trump’s.

But Trump’s record is hardly impressive. He never got close to building the wall he promised, and fewer people who were illegally in America were deported during the Trump presidency than during the Obama presidency. Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were nearly 15 percent higher in Trump’s final year in office than in the last full year of Barack Obama’s term—when Trump called the border “broken.” Illegal immigration has bedeviled every modern American president.

More incriminating is that earlier this year, Republicans, at the urging of Trump, sabotaged what would arguably have been the strongest border-security bill ever, legislation supported by Biden. So why did Republicans, who have lacerated Biden for his lax enforcement policies, oppose a bill that included so much of what they demanded? Because they wanted chaos to continue at the southern border, in order to increase Trump’s chances of winning the election. That tells you what the Republican priority is.

As for inflation: During the Biden presidency, it soared to more than 9 percent—inflation was a global crisis, not specific to the United States—but has cooled to about 3.5 percent. (When Trump left office, inflation was less than 2 percent.) America’s inflation rate is now among the lowest in the world. More important, wages are rising faster than prices for ordinary workers, and low-wage workers have experienced dramatic real-wage growth over the past four years and for the first time in decades.

More broadly, the American economy is the best in the world. The United States recovered from the coronavirus pandemic better than any other nation. Interest rates are the highest in decades, but America’s GDP significantly outpaced those of other developed countries in 2023. The economy grew by more than 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2023, which is higher than the average for the five years preceding the pandemic. Monthly job growth under Biden, even if you exclude “catch up” growth figures in the aftermath of the pandemic, has been record-setting. Trump’s record, pre-pandemic, isn’t close.

In 2023, we saw the highest share of working-age Americans employed in more than two decades, while the Biden administration has overseen more than two years of unemployment below 4 percent, the longest such streak since the late 1960s. At the end of last year, retailers experienced a record-setting holiday season. The stock market recently posted an all-time high; so did domestic oil production. The number of Americans without health insurance has fallen to record lows under Biden. Trump claims that crime “is rampant and out of control like never, ever before.” In fact, violent crime—after surging in the last year of the Trump presidency (largely because of the pandemic)—is declining dramatically. As for abortions, during the Trump presidency, they increased by 8 percent after 30 years of near-constant decline.

Even if Republicans want to insist that Biden’s policies had nothing to do with any of this, even if these positive trends are happening in spite of Biden rather than because of him, America during the Biden presidency is hardly the hellscape that MAGA world says it is and at times seems to be rooting for it to be. On Biden’s watch, for whatever constellation of reasons, a good deal has gone right. And deep down, Trump supporters must know it, even as they wrestle with reality in order to deny it.

So the underlying premise that Sununu and MAGA world rely on to justify their support for Donald Trump—that if Biden wins, “our country is going to be destroyed,” as Trump said during a rally on Saturday—is false. Which raises the question: What is the reason Sununu has rallied to Trump?

It’s impossible to fully know the motivations of others, but it’s reasonable to assume that Sununu wants to maintain his political viability within the Republican Party. He’s undoubtedly aware that to break with Trump would derail his political ambitions. But for Sununu, like so many other Republicans, that partisan loyalty comes at the cost of his integrity.

Chris Sununu is not a true believer, like some in MAGA world. He’s not psychologically unwell, like others. He knows who Trump is, and what the right thing to do is—to declare, as Liz Cheney has done, that she will not vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances.

“I certainly have policy differences with the Biden administration,” she has said. “I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.”

Donald Trump has shown he’s willing to do that and more. Sununu is pledging fealty to a man who, among other things, attempted to overturn an election, summoned and assembled a violent mob and directed it to march on the Capitol, and encouraged the mob to hang his vice president. He sexually assaulted and defamed a woman, paid hush money to a porn star, and allegedly falsified records to cover up the affair. Trump controlled two entities that were found guilty of 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. He invited a hostile foreign power (Russia) to interfere in one American election and attempted to extort an allied nation (Ukraine) to interfere in another four years later. He has threatened prosecutors, judges, and the families of judges. And he has been indicted in four separate criminal cases, one of which begins today.

​​[David A. Graham: The GOP completes its surrender]

Trump has championed crazed and racist conspiracy theories, dined with avowed anti-Semites, and mocked war heroes, people with handicaps, and the dead. He has swooned over the most brutal dictators in the world, sided with Russian intelligence over American intelligence, abused his pardon power, and said we should terminate the Constitution. He obsessively told his staff to use the FBI and the IRS to go after his critics.

Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton look like Boy Scouts.

It’s not all that uncommon for politicians to put party above country, to bend and to break when pressure is applied. Courage is a rare virtue, and tribal loyalties can be extremely powerful. But this is not any other time, and Trump is not any other politician. He is a man of kaleidoscopic corruption. There is virtually nothing he won’t do in order to gain and maintain power. And he telegraphs his intentions at all hours of the day and night.   

Given all Trump has done, and given all we know, the claim that Joe Biden—whatever his failures, whatever his limitations, whatever his age—poses a greater threat to the republic than Donald Trump is delusional.

In his new book Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf reminds us of something that Steve Bannon, who served as a close adviser to Trump and is one of the most influential figures in the MAGA movement, once said: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Chris Sununu has now enlisted in that war. What is so discouraging, and so sickening, is how many others in his party have done so as well. They are Trump’s willing accomplices.

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.

My dentist is my enemy. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The truth about organic milk Britain is leaving the U.S. gender-medicine debate behind. Trump has transformed the GOP all the way down.

Clean Teeth, Weak Spirit

When you’re a kid, the dentist’s office is a frightening place full of loud noises and sharp instruments. But at least people speak softly to you, and at the end of all the scraping and scrubbing, you get a pat on the back and a little prize from a treasure box.

When you are an adult, there are no prizes. There is only pain.

The dentist’s office is the only place in the modern health-care system where I still expect to be unrelentingly shamed. My normal doctor tolerates me well enough, and the nurse who takes my blood pressure there is always warm and kind. My dermatologist laughs at my jokes. But my dental hygienist? She would never.

Seconds after entering the exam room, the hygienist—let’s call her Deb—is annoyed. She looks at the screen to see what she is dealing with and sighs as if to say, You again. She snaps on her rubber gloves. “All the way up,” Deb says, because I am not yet reclined on the chair. I smile nervously and go horizontal, as instructed, my legs sticking to the vinyl.

It’s important to mention, before we go any further, that I have a decent set of chompers. They are relatively straight, and a color I will call “pleasantly off-white.” I have never had a cavity as an adult; I do not drink soft drinks; I do not regularly eat candy. My breath is … fine, I think. Could I be flossing more? Sure. Should I be brushing more gently? Probably. But I am, at least in my own estimation, a pretty good—if not ideal—dental patient. Deb does not agree.

If I am due for an X-ray, Deb will spend the next few minutes jamming pointy shapes into all corners of my mouth, ignoring when I wince. Surely an X-ray would be a cinch, you might think to yourself. But you would be wrong. Normal body X-rays are straightforward, painless. Dental X-rays are stabby, pinchy. How have we, as a society, not yet found a pain-free way to send electromagnetic waves through jaws? I cannot ask Deb this question, because she is elbow-deep in my mouth, wedging plastic into my gums.

Next, we begin the cleaning process, which is very complex and involves more sighing from Deb. First, she scrapes the plaque off of my teeth with a tool that is ominously called a “scaler” and sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Then she uses her mechanical brush to grind gravelly mint toothpaste across my molars. So far, so good, I tell myself, breathing through it. Then the flossing begins. Deb performs the first vigorous round with regular floss, which breaks at least once. My gums burn and bleed. “Are we flossing regularly?” Deb asks, tilting her head to give me a better view of her judgmental frown. “Yes, but not this hard,” I reply. Then Deb does a second round of flossing with some kind of ice-cold water spout, and I dissociate.

After my soul has returned to my body, Deb offers to do a fluoride treatment for an additional $30 out of pocket. “No, thank you,” I reply politely, spitting blood into the sink. Deb frowns and says, “Next time.”

Now the dentist appears. In real life, I might find this smiling, bespectacled man sweet. But here, in this place, he is my enemy. He studies my X-rays and tells me the good news: no cavities, all clear. I start to feel hopeful; he starts to sell me Invisalign. He tells me how small and dangerously close together my teeth are. “You don’t have any issues now, but without Invisalign, you could have some serious problems down the road,” he says, a grave expression on his face. But I have already fallen for this once, when I purchased an ill-fitting Invisalign night guard for $300. “No, thank you,” I say again. I just want to go home.

“Get a new dentist!” you might advise. I have thought of this, my friend. Shopping for a new health-care provider requires time and motivation that I simply don’t have. But much more important, a new dentist doesn’t seem likely to solve the problem. Because the problem is with dentistry itself. It goes beyond the judgy bedside manner: The whole industry seems too focused on selling products and too eager to overtreat patients with expensive procedures. Plus, many standard dental treatments are “not well substantiated by research,” as Ferris Jabr once wrote in this magazine.

The dentist digs around in my mouth for a while, his cold metal tools clinging and clanging together. After a moment, he clears his throat and asks the very last question I am expecting to hear: “So, do you think Donald Trump could really win?” It is kind of my dentist to remember that I work as a political reporter; I’m sure he’s trying to brighten up this experience for me. But the only thing more unpleasant than trying to talk with your mouth full of sharp metal instruments is trying to talk about the 2024 presidential election with your mouth full of sharp metal instruments. I force a smile, as my mouth hangs open like a snake’s unhinged lower jaw. “Who knows!” I muster.

Finally, it’s over. My teeth are glimmering, but my spirit is weak. When I leave the room, Deb and the dentist watch me, their eyes downcast, as though they’re reluctant to let my teeth go home with me.

My ego will be sore for a week. So will my mouth. I have a cap on one of my front teeth because of an unfortunate apple incident a few years back. Two weeks ago at the dentist’s, that cap came loose after some overeager flossing and digging. I can feel it right now, wiggling slightly in the front of my mouth, taunting me. I’m trying to ignore it, because the truth is hard to face: The only fix is a return to the dentist.

Related:

The truth about dentistry Why dentistry is separate from medicine

Today’s News

The House passed a modified surveillance bill that reauthorizes a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years, two days after some House Republicans voted against an earlier version of the bill. President Joe Biden canceled $7.4 billion in student-loan debt, affecting roughly 277,000 people. The move is separate from his announcement earlier this week about a large-scale plan to forgive some or all student loans for some 30 million people. A driver ran an 18-wheeler truck into a Department of Public Safety office in Brenham, Texas, seriously injuring multiple people. The suspect is in custody, according to police.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The Children’s Bach, by Helen Garner, is an oblique and beautiful book, Gal Beckerman writes. Atlantic Intelligence: AI has drastically improved voice recognition—a technology that researchers have long struggled with, Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote this week.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Alamy

Tupperware Is in Trouble

By Amanda Mull

For the first several decades of my life, most of the meals I ate involved at least one piece of Tupperware. My mom’s pieces were mostly the greens and yellows of a 1970s kitchen, purchased from co-workers or neighbors who circulated catalogs around the office or slipped them into mailboxes in our suburban subdivision. Many of her containers were acquired before my brother and I were born and remained in regular use well after I flew the nest for college in the mid-2000s …

The market for storage containers, on the whole, is thriving … But Tupperware has fallen on hard times. At the end of last month, for a second year in a row, the company warned financial regulators that it would be unable to file its annual report on time and raised doubts about its ability to continue as a business, citing a “challenging financial condition.” Sales are in decline. These should be boom times for Tupperware. What happened?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The homepage on the Black internet A home for kidnappers and their victims The AI revolution is crushing thousands of languages. Iran’s deadly message to journalists abroad The country that tried to control sex

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Savor. The cocoa shortage is making chocolate more expensive—and it might never be the same, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Watch. La Chimera (out now in theaters) is an entrancing fairytale about Italian grave robbers.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Rose Horowitch, an assistant editor who has written about the enrollment nightmare colleges are facing, the myth of the Gen Z gender divide, and why too many people own dogs.

Rose recently reread Anna Karenina and had “more of the intended takeaway” than she did the first time. She loves winding down with a good animal-rescue video, and she still can’t quite believe she got to see Bruce Springsteen in New Jersey.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Our May cover story: “This will finish us.” Matt Gaetz is winning. Clash of the patriarchs

The Culture Survey: Rose Horowitch

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The Morgan Library’s exhibit of Beatrix Potter’s drawings and letters. I’ve complained to friends about feeling disconnected from nature since moving to New York, and I hope that early drafts of The Tale of Peter Rabbit will cure me. (I’d also take any opportunity to visit the Morgan Library and marvel at the rows of well-worn books and the majesty of the ceilings.)

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Does anyone else watch cooking shows for pure entertainment? I usually get bored before I can finish a TV show in full (Gen Z attention spans and all that), so I like to throw something on that I don’t need to watch consecutively. Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home, with Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, is my favorite of the genre. It’s a cooking show, yes, but it’s so much more. It was filmed near the end of Child’s life, and Pépin somehow managed to always lift the heavy copper pots yet let Julia take the lead with recipes. Their friendship is endlessly comforting.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’m midway through The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride. I highly recommend it based on what I’ve read so far. For best nonfiction, I’m going to choose two, but I promise they’re connected: The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, two of Joan Didion’s later books. At age 23, I’ve never been married and never had a child, let alone lost one. But these books articulate a kind of disorientation that I don’t know how to put into words—one that I’m convinced every human being experiences. [Related: Lost histories of coexistence]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: “Hunter,” by Jess Williamson. I learned about this song from a Jack Antonoff interview. I blindly trust his taste in music, and I’m glad I do. Medium-quiet: “Instant Crush,” by Daft Punk. You have to listen to this song nine times in a row to love it, but afterward, it will be firmly installed among your favorites. Loud-ish: “Ship of Fools,” by World Party. A great song to have in your headphones as you walk outside. I challenge anyone to not scream-sing the chorus.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bruce Springsteen. My mom is an avid Springsteen fan, so this pick is partly about his musical prowess, partly about my own nostalgia. “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” seemed to always be humming in our car stereo when I was growing up. This past summer, I saw him in concert. I mostly remember my sister’s frenzied dancing and the oppressive heat in the nosebleed seats of MetLife Stadium. But I saw Bruce Springsteen! In New Jersey!

A piece of visual art that I cherish: Gustav Klimt’s Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (though what a clunky title). Greenery crawls up the side of the small house, and the open windows reveal colorful bouquets. One of the great joys of living in New York City is how its museums transport you to another place and time. The Klimt exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York brought me to the Austrian countryside (did I mention I miss nature?). It’s best paired with a slice of cake from the café downstairs.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: I had a borderline obsession with the Strokes. I listened to all of their albums, then their unreleased songs. Then I watched their performances on late-night shows and on grainy film from small sets in New York, and then I watched their concert documentary (which I could find only on YouTube). We’ve all aged some since then, but they’re still releasing albums, and I’m still listening.

Something I recently revisited: A former teacher once told me that we reread books not to uncover something new in them but to see how we’ve changed. I recently reread Anna Karenina, firmly my favorite book. The first time I read it, I idolized Anna (embarrassing confession: I dressed like her at my high-school prom). The second time, I think I had more of the intended takeaway. [Related: When people—and characters—surprise you]

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: Earlier this year, I picked up Strangers to Ourselves, the journalist Rachel Aviv’s book. It’s about mental illness, but it’s more about the stories we tell ourselves and how they exert control over our psyche. She focuses each chapter on an individual, and bookends the work with her own story and that of a young woman she met in treatment. Aviv is a marvel of a writer, and her careful focus on people reveals more than an abstract, analytical story ever could. [Related: The diagnosis trap]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: This will surprise no one who knows me, but I spend much of my time watching animal-rescue videos. It’s a varied genre, one that includes efforts to hoist elephants out of mud piles and unsnare sea turtles from fishing nets. I particularly enjoy watching dogs recover from illness and find a forever home. My favorite rescuer personality is Niall Harbison, who helps sick and injured strays in Thailand. His videos are the greatest thing X’s “For You” tab has ever shown me.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Rabbit Hill, a novel by Robert Lawson, has the Pixar quirk of being marketed toward children but clearly meant for adults. It’s about woodland creatures but also about family and generosity—an irresistible combination.

A good recommendation I recently received: My boyfriend put me onto Your Queen Is a Reptile, an experimental jazz album by Sons of Kemet. It’s so different from what I usually listen to; it’s frenetic, and each note is unexpected. It’s wholly mesmerizing.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Last year, I went to the Refik Anadol exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I’m not usually a big fan of modern art (this probably says more about me than about modern art), but Anadol’s work was beautiful and overwhelming. He trained a machine-learning model on the museum’s digitized collection and then displayed the result on a wall of LEDs. The machine generated crests of color that I can best describe as some undulating fourth state of matter.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Spring and Fall,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, will never fail to make me cry. The Goldengrove description. The meditation on aging. The last two lines! This poem entered my life just as I needed it. I like to think it ushered me into adulthood, and I keep it open in a tab on my computer for emergency reads.

The Week Ahead

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, an action film directed by Guy Ritchie about a team of highly skilled World War II soldiers who use unconventional methods to fight the Nazis (in theaters Friday) The Sympathizer, a thrilling and satirical miniseries about a double agent for the Viet Cong who flees to the United States and moves into a refugee community (premieres today on Max) New Cold Wars, a book written by David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks, about America’s unstable modern-day rivalry with China and Russia (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Adrian Ace Williams / Hulton Archive / Getty; H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty; Getty.

The 67-Hour Rule

By Derek Thompson

One of the hard-and-fast laws of economics is that people in rich countries work less than their peers in poorer countries. The rule holds across nations …

But something strange happens when we shift our attention from individual workers to households. In the 1880s, when men worked long days and women were mostly cut off from the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged just over 68 hours of weekly paid labor. In 1965, as men’s workdays contracted and women poured into the workforce, the typical American married couple averaged 67 hours of weekly paid labor—just one hour less. In the early 2000s, the typical American married couple averaged, you guessed it, almost exactly 67 hours of weekly paid labor. In 2020? Still 67 hours.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Tupperware is in trouble. Civil War was made in anger. The alluring mystique of Candy Darling The wasteland is waiting for you. America is sick of swiping. Are pitchers pitching too hard? A rom-com you might have written Welcome to kidulthood.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Maine is a warning for America’s PFAS future. Trump has transformed the GOP all the way down. The RFK-curious women of Bucks County

Photo Album

The hands of a mother and an infant gorilla, seen in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Uganda (Michael Stavrakakis / World Nature Photography Awards)

Check out the winning photos from this year’s World Nature Photography Awards, including images of gorilla kinship, the cloud cover above a volcano, and more.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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In the days after the November election in 2020, I traveled from Laredo, Texas, down along the Rio Grande into one of the great heartlands of Mexican America, a place locals proudly refer to by its area code, “the 956.” Along this stretch of the Texas border, towns are up to 98 percent Latino; Spanish is so common that Anglos have to learn the language if they want to order at restaurants. Yet on Election Night, residents had shocked the country by turning out for Donald Trump in record numbers.

In Zapata County, where Trump became the first Republican to win the presidential vote since Warren Harding in 1920, I asked Cynthia Villarreal, a longtime Democratic organizer, what explained Trump’s success after four years of immigration raids and family separation. Villarreal told me that, in South Texas, many Mexican Americans don’t identify as immigrants; her own ancestors lived on the Rio Grande before Texas even existed. In Starr County, where Trump had almost quadrupled Republican turnout, the then–county chair of the GOP, a retired colonel named Ross Barrera, said that he and many other Latinos in Texas wanted a border wall. He felt pity, but no solidarity, for those crossing the border; he explained that some South Texans call them mojaditos—Spanish for the slur “wetback.”

Since 2020, Texas politicians have seemed to absorb the lesson that many Latinos will tolerate border crackdowns. In early 2021, Republican Governor Greg Abbott sent thousands of state police and National Guardsmen into Texas’s southernmost counties as part of his “Operation Lone Star.” Residents appeared to reward him: Even if the police SUVs and razor wire were an eyesore, in the 2022 governor’s election Abbott improved on his 2018 results in almost every border county.

[Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court has itself to blame for Texas defying its orders]

But soon, Texas Republicans could test just how harsh an immigration policy Latinos really want. In a raucous legislative session last year, the state’s Republican supermajority sent Abbott a monumental bill, S.B. 4. The law, currently on hold in the courts, would essentially give Texas its own immigration system, making “illegal entry”—traditionally enforced by the federal government—into a state crime. If the law goes into effect, a police officer anywhere in the state will be able to stop, question, and arrest anyone they suspect might have crossed the Rio Grande illegally. Judges will be able to coerce defendants to auto-deport to Mexico by threatening them with serious prison time.

S.B. 4 would go far beyond Operation Lone Star, potentially moving immigration enforcement into the state’s interior. Razor wire along the river is meant to control who gets into the state; policing cities such as Dallas and Houston is about getting people out. Will the Latinos in Texas who have welcomed Republicans’ border crackdown feel the same way if state police start arresting their neighbors?

The history here looks grim for the GOP. When Republicans in California and Arizona tried to create the same sort of “show me your papers” system—California’s Proposition 187 and Arizona’s S.B. 1070—the measures backfired. Both laws reeked of racial profiling. People who were around in each state, including my father in California, have told me stories from those years. In Latino neighborhoods, many people came to see the laws not as immigration policy, but as a population control: an attempt to make their state less Latino. They responded by organizing into coalitions that eventually eroded Republican power in both states—and perhaps gave birth to the popular assumption that Latinos vote mostly on immigration.

In California, my father was one of the people for whom Prop. 187 fundamentally changed the way they saw themselves and their place in this country. Growing up in a Mexican American family in San Antonio, he didn’t think of himself as an immigrant. Like Villareal’s family, our roots in Texas run deeper than the state, back to when it was called Coahuila y Tejas. And, like Barrera, my dad heard other Mexican kids at his school smear more recent immigrants as mojaditos. When he moved to California in the 1980s, my father thought of himself as a political moderate. He was an entrepreneur and a family man, besides being Mexican by heritage. He voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential race (“Just like everyone else in America,” he joked to me recently).

Things changed when the Republican governor of California, Pete Wilson, championed Prop. 187. California was in the midst of a historic immigration surge, and as many as 1.3 million undocumented immigrants were living in the state; Wilson was flagging in his 1994 reelection bid. The measure passed, and he held on to his office. When the law went into effect, it instructed public employees—not just cops, but teachers, nurses, and anyone else who worked for the state—to report anyone they suspected might be undocumented.

“I had to start thinking: Was the name ‘Herrera’ probable cause?” my dad said. Prop. 187 erased the conceptual difference he might have felt between himself and noncitizens. He came to believe that, no matter how he thought of himself, some people in this country would only ever see him as Mexican, as an outsider. He never voted Republican again.

He wasn’t alone. In 1984, 45 percent of Latinos in California had, like my father, voted for Reagan. By 1996, that support had cratered: More than 71 percent of Latinos voted for Bill Clinton (a 16 percent increase over his own 1992 result). Turnout among Latinos in California also increased dramatically each election year after Prop. 187. New Latino voters were far more likely to register as Democrats; in Los Angeles County, for instance, six times as many Latinos registered with the Democratic Party than the GOP.

Prop. 187 “created a multigenerational, anti-Republican coalition” among Latinos in California, Mike Madrid, the political director of the California Republican Party from 1996 to 1998, told me. Madrid, who grew up in a Mexican American family in Sacramento, spent years trying to get Republican campaigns to understand Latinos’ complexity. He thought then, and still thinks today, that the party’s best chance of courting Latino voters was with a message geared toward the working class, an “aspirational conservatism.” But Prop. 187 essentially turned hundreds of thousands of Latinos into single-issue voters. Today some of the more prominent Latino officials in the country, including the former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro and Senator Alex Padilla of California, trace their political roots to their opposition to Prop. 187.

“You can build a multigenerational coalition when a community is perceived to be personally, individually, and as a community under attack,” Madrid said. “If I was naturalized, or my kids were born here, or my grandchildren—everyone came home” to Democrats after Prop. 187. (Madrid clashed with the Republican Party in a very public way when Donald Trump was nominated in 2016.)

[From the March 2022 issue: There’s no such thing as ‘the Latino vote’]

Prop. 187 died in the courts; judges ruled that it violated the supremacy clause in the Constitution and infringed on the federal government’s exclusive jurisdiction over immigration. Almost 15 years would pass before Republicans tried again, this time in Arizona, where Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070 in 2010. Seeking to stop undocumented immigrants from accessing public services, the law mandated that all immigrants over age 18 carry their “papers” with them at all times, and it empowered cops to arrest anyone caught without proper ID.

Academics are still studying how S.B. 1070 changed Arizona. When the bill passed, the state had not only a Republican governor but two Republican senators. Now a Democrat is in the governor’s mansion, along with one and a half Democrats in the senate (Kyrsten Sinema became an independent in 2022). Since S.B. 1070, turnout has exploded in Latino communities, far outstripping population growth. In 2008, just 291,000 Latinos voted in Arizona. By 2012, turnout had increased to 400,000; by 2016, it was more than 550,000. Voter registration has heavily favored Democrats. According to analysis by Televisa Univision, as of 2022, just 17 percent of Latinos in Arizona are registered as Republican, compared with 44 percent as Democrats and 39 percent as independents.

In 2020, more than 813,000 Latinos showed up to vote in Arizona. While some Latino communities in Arizona saw a rightward shift, it was much more muted than it was in Texas; some areas even shifted left. In all, Latino Arizonans voted overwhelmingly for President Joe Biden, sealing his victory in the state.

Underneath Biden’s win was a large network of activists and a get-out-the-vote infrastructure that had first gotten organized in response to S.B. 1070. Belén Sisa, who immigrated with her parents from Buenos Aires at the age of 6, was in high school when the law passed. “I was homecoming queen, varsity cheerleader—like, the last person you would think would be the undocumented girl,” she told me. On the school bus each morning in Florence, Arizona, she looked out at an ICE detention center that employed some of her classmates’ parents, and imagined getting locked up there.

In the years after the law passed, Sisa and her family saw cities like nearby Mesa become relative “ghost towns” as immigrants left the state in large numbers. Sometimes, her family watched protests, but they were too frightened to join in. When Sisa went to college at Arizona State University, she began meeting other undocumented young people, many of whom had started openly identifying as “Dreamers.” She became part of a group of activists that grew throughout the state, often supporting Democrats’ electoral efforts. By 2020, Sisa herself was working as the national Latino press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down the sections of S.B. 1070 that made immigration violations state crimes—though it allowed Arizona police to continue to question the immigration status of the people they stopped or detained. At the time, some wondered whether the Supreme Court had handed a victory to Democrats by keeping part of the law in place, because of how strong Latino opposition to it was.

Sisa recalled having conversations with other Latinos, some of whom had citizenship.“I could say: ‘You’re a lot closer to my situation than you will ever be to people that are white and born here,’” she said.

As any Texan will tell you, things are different down here. Latinos in the state are more socially conservative than their counterparts farther west. Not only do many of them not see themselves as immigrants—many identify as racially white. Across the country, immigrants are also becoming a smaller percentage of the Latino population. It’s tough to predict how S.B. 4 will play out if it goes into effect.

“Unlike, say, people in New York, I think Hispanics in Texas are more open to the idea that we need to close that border and do the right thing,” Jason Villalba, who served as a Republican in the Texas house from 2013 to 2019, told me.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Texas pulls an ugly stunt on the border]

As controversy around S.B. 4 has grown, and connections to laws like Prop. 187 have been drawn, some Republican architects of the bill have begun signaling that they intend for the law to target recent border crossers, not immigrants already living in the state. Texas Solicitor General Aaron Nielson told judges at a hearing last week, “There wouldn’t be probable cause in almost all cases, unless a Texas officer sees somebody crossing the border.” Abbott has been ambiguous: After the law was blocked, he said, “Texas has the legal authority to arrest people coming across the razor-wire barriers on our border.”

But legislators have frequently referred to statewide enforcement. When the Fort Worth chief of police released a video in March arguing that immigration enforcement should be left to the feds, Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house, wrote on X: “Any local law enforcement agency that refuses to enforce Senate Bill 4 is abandoning their sworn duty to uphold the rule of law.” State Senator Charles Perry, the author of the bill, has said in interviews that Texas essentially was forced to pass S.B. 4, because of what lawmakers see as inaction by the Biden administration. The Constitution makes exceptions to federal supremacy during times of “invasion,” and Perry and other Republicans argue that migration constitutes an invasion, one that the feds have failed to prevent. “We’re not challenging federal supremacy. We’re saying you got supremacy. You just chose not to do anything with it. We’re going to take that role for you,” Perry told conservative news site The Texan. (Perry did not respond to an interview request.)

Villalba, the former Republican lawmaker, told me he is a believer in border security; for him, and for many other Latinos in Texas, the fact that the state wants more of a say in what happens on its own border makes sense. “But this is different,” he said about S.B. 4. “On a Saturday afternoon, when I take my son to go play hockey, and I’m wearing a baseball cap, and, you know, and a T-shirt that might not be as clean and crisp as I normally wear, and I have brown hair and brown eyes and brown skin, are they going to do that to me”—ask for his papers—“in front of my son?”

Deep south in the Rio Grande Valley, Tania Chavez is the executive director of LUPE, a direct-aid organization founded by the labor-rights icon Cesar Chavez (no relation). She and her team have spent months running “know your rights” clinics for community members to help them prepare for S.B. 4. She said she has talked with parents about what will happen if they get arrested. “Who’s going to take legal guardianship of their kids? … Who else is listed on your bank account? … What is going to happen to your property? Those are all the things that we’re planning and thinking,” she told me. At one recent meeting, Chavez said she saw something she hadn’t seen before: Two groups of young people had driven all the way from Houston and Corpus Christi to join.

“We’re starting to see a lot of new faces,” she said.

On March 19, the Supreme Court briefly allowed S.B. 4 to go into effect, sending the law back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges issued a new injunction less than 24 hours later. Oral arguments are ongoing, and Texas’s defense has gotten less vociferous. Last week, Nielson, Texas’s lawyer, told judges: “Now, to be fair, maybe Texas went too far. And that’s the question this court is going to have to decide.”

But, during those few hours the law was in effect, I felt an alien thought cross my mind as I sat in my home in Austin: Should I start carrying my passport? I won’t exaggerate how worried I felt; I’m insulated by citizenship and light-beige skin. Just having that thought, however, made me dissociate: It was like someone else had forced the worry into my brain.

It’s a species of fear many people live with daily. In the Rio Grande Valley, Chavez spent two decades of her life undocumented; she knows what it’s like driving to work each day wondering if a broken taillight will bring her time in this country to an end. She said that feeling is what gets many young citizens engaged in organizing in the Valley.

But when asked if she thinks S.B. 4 might change the minds of Latinos who aren’t immigrants, who have so far supported Texas’s border crackdown, Chavez was dubious.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen until those people start getting arrested,” she said.