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.

What if everyone’s wrong? What if Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign is savvier, more organized, and more cunning than it’s been given credit for? This past weekend, Kennedy’s “We the People” party gamed an Iowa loophole to secure his spot on the state’s 2024 election ballot. Instead of spending months gathering thousands of signatures, Kennedy’s allies persuaded hundreds of voters to show up in the same place on the same day and partake in something akin to a potemkin political convention. The summit barely lasted two hours. It was a bold gambit, and it worked.

On Saturday in West Des Moines, Kennedy “accepted” his nascent party’s nomination for president, then spoke extemporaneously (no teleprompters, no printed remarks) inside the historic Val-Air Ballroom. Twenty years ago on this same stage, Howard Dean gripped the mic and emitted a guttural “YAHHHHHH!”—a gargling, alien howl that many believe doomed his 2004 campaign. Kennedy’s vibe was tamer, though his language crackled with a fiery, burn-it-down ethos. He assured the room that the most confounding spoiler campaign of the year would rage on, even if no one knows exactly where it will all lead.

Kennedy is officially on the ballot in Utah, and his team (and super PAC) says he has met the necessary qualifications in Nevada, Idaho, Nebraska, North Carolina, and New Hampshire, in addition to Iowa. Depending on whom you ask, he’s either making a mockery of America’s electoral process for his own ego and enrichment, or he’s righteously revealing the system’s fatal flaws through a prolonged, patriotic, chaotic protest. Perhaps he’s doing a bit of both.

[Read: Where RFK Jr. goes from here]

Can voters trust him? Can anyone? At the lectern, Kennedy warned his followers against putting their faith in any government leader. He promised that, as president, he’d instruct members of the media to rediscover the journalistic virtue known as “fierce skepticism.” He also said this: “Don’t even believe me! You shouldn’t!”

This week marks one year since Kennedy launched his campaign, and he has settled into a comfortable groove: a flame-throwing extremist posing as a mellow unifier. Kennedy paints President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump as equally villainous leaders of equally villainous parties propping up a supremely villainous power system. He argues that he, the conspiratorial anti-vaxxer condemned by multiple members of his family, is the only sensible voice in this race. Kennedy deftly plays up his lineage, often deploying the phrase When my uncle was president. For virtually his entire life, like his uncle and father and dozens (hundreds?) of others with his surname, Kennedy was a staunch Democrat. Then, six months ago, standing outside the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, he declared his “independence” from the DNC and the tyrannical political duopoly. Rather than challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination, he announced his intent to go it alone and “spoil” the election—for both sides.

Kennedy may condemn Trump and Biden equally, but these days he certainly sounds much more like Trump than Biden. In Iowa, he began his “acceptance speech” by telling the crowd that he had just participated in a backstage interview with ABC News. Right on cue, a member of the audience yelled “Fuck them!,” prompting Kennedy to flash a mischievous, Trumpian smile. He shared that ABC had asked him about a recent New York Times/Siena poll showing him at only 2 percent. This led to a rant against what he believed to be the rigged poll. To be fair, Kennedy may have had a bit of a point: Survey respondents weren’t automatically supplied Kennedy’s name, as they were Trump’s and Biden’s. That methodology may have hurt Kennedy and other third-party candidates, but it doesn’t constitute “rigged.” Still, to him, this was fresh evidence that the corrupt media are part of the crooked system he’s intent on demolishing.

In most polls, Kennedy hovers between 10 and 20 percent of support—notably high numbers for any third-party contender, though history suggests his numbers will shrink as Election Day nears. Tony Lyons, the iconoclastic book publisher who runs the pro-Kennedy American Values super PAC, recently told me that Kennedy’s pivot to independence led to a major increase in fundraising. His newly announced running mate, the Silicon Valley businesswoman Nicole Shanahan, will bring even more money to the operation.

Many people believe that Kennedy will ultimately draw more votes from Biden than from Trump in November. But the results will vary depending on the state. In Iowa, where Trump won in 2016 and 2020, I spoke with several attendees who identified as Republicans. Most of them were former Trump voters. A 63-year-old farmer named Howard Vlieger had driven four hours that morning to do his part to help get Kennedy on the ballot. (State regulations required the campaign to find at least 500 “eligible electors” from at least 25 of Iowa’s 99 counties; in the end, it was able to notch well over 600.) Around noon, I noticed Vlieger standing in the sun near the venue’s mid-century neon DANCING sign, clutching a large cardboard box. What’s inside? I asked. An assortment of GMO-free summer sausage from his family’s livestock, packed on ice—a gift for Kennedy. Vlieger was wearing a bolo tie engraved with a cross, much like the one on his belt buckle. He told me he’d been a registered Republican for most of his life. “I did vote for Trump in 2016,” he said. “I thought he was genuine, but he definitely proved me wrong.”

Another man, a 54-year-old named Dan (no last name given) wearing an American-flag bandanna, rolled up to the ballroom on his vintage red-white-and-blue Sears Roebuck bicycle with a Kennedy yard sign splayed across its handlebars. He, too, had been a lifelong Republican. Ten years ago, he was diagnosed with a rare cancer. He underwent chemotherapy but, as time passed, grew skeptical of conventional medicine. He had refused to get a COVID shot and told me uses only “God’s grass” to manage his pain. If he could go back in time, he told me, he probably wouldn’t agree to the chemo.

[Read: The first MAGA Democrat]

A young couple, Brady and Madison, 20 and 21 years old (no last names given), had driven a couple of hours southwest from Black Hawk County to get here. Brady told me that he works at Dollar General, and that this would be his first time voting. He said he had latched onto Kennedy after listening to him on several podcasts. “I would say that, like, even if some people think it’s a waste, it’s definitely better than not voting,” Brady said of his Kennedy support. “And definitely better than voting for the other two options.”

Kennedy isn’t courting MAGA world so much as slyly raising the flap of his circus tent and offering a safe space for some Trump folks. Much like Trump, Kennedy’s campaign merchandise has a coyness to it. By far the most popular shirt I saw Saturday read NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO SECRET SERVICE, with a black-and-white photo of Kennedy sitting barefoot at an airport gate. One item for sale was a camouflage trucker hat with Kennedy’s name in orange lettering, conspicuously similar to one of many current iterations of the MAGA hat. Kennedy described his campaign as an “idealistic journey to restore everything that we have in our country”—a tad ganglier than “Make America great again.” The official new slogan sounds like it was made by ChatGPT: “The future starts now.”

Beyond the obvious presence of many former and current Republicans, Kennedy’s “convention” featured perhaps the biggest cross-section of people I’ve ever witnessed at an Iowa event. I saw a blend of young people, old people, flat brims, sun brims, billowy blazers, Harley-Davidson shirts, earth tones, floral prints, tie-dye, work boots, and more. I overheard one woman admonish her fellow volunteer for drinking out of a plastic water bottle instead of a reusable aluminum container. I also saw attendees clutching cans of Miller Lite. (Cold beer is, and will always be, a bipartisan unifier.) Like MAGA, RFK Jr.–ism has become a real movement, a club, a place of belonging. A bit later in the afternoon, I ran into a Trump caucus captain whom I had spoken with at the former president’s pre-Christmas rally in Waterloo, Iowa. Roughly 1,000 people had now filed in to see Kennedy. He told me that only two candidates could draw these sort of numbers in Iowa: his guy, and this guy. He was here for the show.

Like Trump, Kennedy peppered call-and-response sections into his speech, giving the event the air of a church revival. And who owns all those pharmaceutical companies? Black Rock! He soon segued into an attack on processed foods. (The venue’s snack bar had Domino’s pizza on offer, and more than a few attendees were chowing slices.) He warned that we could soon see “more pandemics,” using his fingers to turn air quotes into scare quotes. In response, one audience member screamed “Plandemic!”—a reference to a movie packed with conspiracy theories that had gone viral in 2020. As Kennedy spoke, people in the crowd periodically raised their fists in emphatic support, no matter the topic.

“If you give me a sword and some ground to stand on, I will give you your country back,” Kennedy promised. It was the ultimate needle-thread. Not only did this statement sound Trump-esque, but the “sword” was perhaps a sly reference to Camelot—the nickname of his uncle’s White House.

When I interviewed Kennedy for a profile last spring, he was traveling with an extremely small crew anchored by his press secretary, Stefanie Spear. On Saturday, I spotted Spear hovering by the VIP section inside the ballroom. She looked tanned and rested—the opposite of someone who had just spent a year on a grueling presidential campaign. Everything was falling into place. Spear told me that the campaign was ahead of all of its milestones and that she was confident Kennedy’s name would appear on the ballot in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

Nevertheless, both Democrats and Republicans have been trying to thwart Kennedy’s progress with legal challenges. Spear told me that the campaign had figured out some workarounds. The Iowa “one-day convention” was unique; in many states, her team is engaging in clock management: The campaign has the requisite signatures to land Kennedy on multiple state ballots right now, but it’s waiting until closer to the final deadlines to submit the paperwork. This way, the DNC and RNC will have less time to mount their legal oppositions.

Democrats are finally reckoning with the threat Kennedy poses to Biden’s reelection. The DNC recently hired operatives to take on third-party candidates, namely Kennedy. Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are reportedly planning to boost Kennedy (and other third-party candidates) in swing states. “The path to victory here is clearly maximizing the reach of these left-wing alternatives,” the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently told The New York Times.

Liberal voters who say they plan to abandon Biden on account of his support of Israel in its war in Gaza won’t necessarily find comfort in Kennedy, who falls to the right of the president on the issue. On Saturday, I spoke with an attendee named Priscilla Herrera, a transcendental-meditation instructor from Fairfield, Iowa. She wore a red Kennedy baseball hat and had brought along her three-month-old son. She told me she’d been a fan of Kennedy ever since watching him on The Joe Rogan Experience last year. “There are some policies that I don’t agree with,” she said. “And he may have lost a lot of people, a lot of younger people, when he didn’t speak out against what was happening in Palestine, the atrocities against the people in Gaza. And I get chills, because I was really upset about that, too,” she said. “But despite that, I think I’m still going to vote for him.”

Kennedy is no doubt counting on wooing more voters like her. Maybe they’ve heard him speak his truth on a podcast, maybe they think Biden’s too old for another term, or maybe they like that he seems like a crunchier version of Trump—an outspoken outsider, seemingly afraid of no one. Someone who appears willing to say almost anything and worry about the consequences later.

As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.

Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades, propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle.

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)

[Adrienne LaFrance: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand journalism]  

Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them. Neil Patel, a co-founder (with Tucker Carlson) of the Daily Caller, told me that the tech giants want “to crush any independent media that was perceived to have been helpful to Trump’s rise.” Patel calls this a form of “Big Tech–driven viewpoint discrimination” that “should scare any fair-minded individual.”

A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.

And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has mostly continued south. Among the big losers over the past year are The Washington Free Beacon, whose traffic was down 58 percent, and Gateway Pundit, down 62 percent. Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate’s was up 14 percent.

For conservative media publishers, the financial consequences of such a steep decline in readership are hard to know for certain. None of the best-known names publicly reports revenue figures, and many are supported by rich patrons who may not be in it for the money. But the situation can’t be good. Digital media still rely on advertising, and advertising still goes to places with more, not fewer, people paying attention. Traffic also drives subscriptions.

More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful faithful by recirculating, amplifying, and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.

[Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?]

The Daily Caller’s Patel insisted that faltering traffic alone isn’t a death sentence for the onetime lords of the conservative web. With the addition of a subscription service and tighter financial management, the Daily Caller’s financial health is solid and improving, he said. Outlets like his own can still succeed with people who “have lost trust in the corporate media and are actively seeking alternatives.”

The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times, and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble. “There’s a lot of choice,” Polskin said. “Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there.”

The DIY ethic is embodied by the likes of Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Steve Bannon, and Carlson, who became conservative celebrities while working for established media organizations but have maintained their profiles after leaving them in disgrace. Since being fired by Fox News last year, Carlson has moved his contentious commentaries and interviews (including one with Vladimir Putin) to X. Kelly has come back from a messy divorce with NBC in 2019 (which followed an unhappy exit from Fox News in 2017) to host a massively popular podcast. O’Reilly, likewise forced out of Fox in 2017, has kept talking via newsletters, video streams, and weekly appearances on the NewsNation cable channel. And Bannon, the former Trump consigliere who left Breitbart, which he founded, after publicly criticizing the Trump family, has gone the podcaster route himself; his War Room podcast was ranked as the leading source of false and misleading information in a broad study of the medium by the Brookings Institution last year.

The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.