Microsoft deployed a generative AI model on Thursday for U.S. intelligence agencies to analyze top-secret information, Bloomberg reports. Microsoft announced the AI offering at the 2024 SCSP AI Expo for National Competitiveness in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. The GPT-4-based model was created to be entirely divorced…

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A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was “surging,” a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.

I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime spiked in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn’t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “Nobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.”

Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was dropping—but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic’s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.

[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]

I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn’t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.

Welcome to MAGA world.

I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing it again this year.

“If he wins,” Trump said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”

Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.

But as I recently argued, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)

For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.

But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?

Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.

But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.

Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.

Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.

For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.

An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.

Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.

But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”

“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement’s architects, told The New York Times’ Charles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”

Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.

Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him—as it has for the entire Biden presidency—is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people—Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers—he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.

[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]

In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump’s supporters hold dear will die. This isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” champions of law and order, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.

Even as Donald Trump’s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent—he has become ever more revered by his supporters.

I imagine that even some of the Republican Party’s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It’s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it’s not done.

The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands.

The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs. Still, British Ambassador Karen Pierce’s real duty is to lobby for her country and offer advice on delicate matters during heated international moments. And the job of an ambassador—even one representing a close ally—has become far more complex because of the strident partisanship that has taken hold in D.C.

Part of Pierce’s mission recently has been to represent the British government’s firmly pro-Ukraine position on providing military aid—even when the Biden administration’s matching desire became mired in Congress because of protests by a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans.

[Elaine Godfrey: Trump’s VP search is different this time]

Pierce had not only lobbied hard on Capitol Hill ahead of last week’s long-awaited congressional vote on aid; she’d also traveled with Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, to Mar-a-Lago to try to get buy-in from Donald Trump. (She has been tight-lipped about their meeting, and was certainly claiming no credit, but the former president’s toned-down opposition to the bill probably did help the package pass—even though more Republican lawmakers voted against it than for it.)

In an era when populist politics and rising nationalism are challenging the institutions of the international liberal order, diplomacy can seem like a quaint relic of bygone etiquette.

The more public side of an ambassador’s job seems much easier. Over the past three years, Pierce has become well known for throwing lively and well-attended Pimms-fueled bashes, especially in the D.C. social season surrounding the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Underneath the surface frippery, though, Pierce is a serious operator. The true art of her diplomacy is the very English thing of working hard to make it all look totally effortless.

One evening last week, I watched Pierce at work. During a party two days before the WHCD, she buzzed around the lush green garden of her Washington residence, chatting with various politicos.

The 64-year-old Pierce grew up in northwest England and has worked for the U.K.’s Foreign Office for 43 years. She’s held positions in Japan, in Ukraine, and in the Balkans during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. For a year, she lived in Kabul as Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, and she represented the U.K. at the United Nations for three years. Although she was made a dame in 2018, Pierce’s working-class background makes her a relative outsider in the foreign service, which is otherwise a bastion of the upper-class elite. Being Britain’s first female ambassador to the U.S. does too. She leans into it.

The day I saw her, she was wearing a vivid chartreuse dress and black tights, with her feet tucked daintily into a pair of black-and-white kitten heels. Despite being shorter than everyone else at the party, she still commanded the attention of all the people in her vicinity. Pierce has worn tangerine suits to state events, and baby-pink silk dresses with huge round sunglasses. Once, to attend a UN summit, she wrapped herself in what looked like a maroon feather boa. Such displays aren’t just a sartorial choice; they’re a strategy.

“When you’re an ambassador, you want people to remember you,” she told me. So I made note of her leaf-patterned sheath dress, shiny blue blazer, and cheetah-print headband. About that feather boa; it wasn’t one. “It was a fur, but it was fake,” Pierce insisted. “Though the Russians tried to say it was an exotic fur.” She rolled her eyes. “The Russians will go for anything. They really have no scruples whatsoever.”

[Read: What a former U.S. ambassador to Russia learned from Condoleezza Rice]

The wall behind the desk in Pierce’s office, a cheerful, sunlit room in an otherwise sterile building, is covered in magnets collected from around the world (“The tackier the better,” she told The Washington Post). Orchids decorate the tables.

Entertaining is part of the job. But don’t call them parties: “We would call them receptions, because we treat them as work events,” she chided me. In the days surrounding the WHCD on April 27, Pierce hosted an embassy reception that provided not only a selection of assorted British pasties, but a cigar room and Scotch bar as well. She also made appearances at half a dozen events put on by various Washington bigwigs and media outlets, and emceed a Sunday brunch in the embassy garden. Pierce’s drink of choice? “I like lots and lots of cocktails, but the more pink they are, the better, I’m afraid.”

Pierce’s first job in D.C. was as private secretary to the then-ambassador. She arrived in 1992 with her husband, former U.K. Treasury Secretary Charles Roxburgh, and her first of two children, an infant at the time. “The fact that politics is in the air is just—and also the fact that you’re in the capital of the leading nation in the world—I get a real buzz out of that,” she said.

In 1995, Pierce watched as Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, and American politics grew more polarized. When she came back to serve as ambassador in March 2020, she saw that trend intensify, culminating in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “I watch all of these developments, and we spend a lot of time evaluating them and finding historical context for them,” she told me.

But Pierce wasn’t particularly eager to discuss current politics—or the ex- and possibly future president who has sent that polarization into overdrive. Her caution made sense: Pierce’s predecessor, Kim Darroch, resigned from his position after leaks revealed that he’d criticized the Trump administration as “inept and insecure.” When I asked her about the former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose time in office famously lasted only about as long as a head of lettuce stayed fresh, and who has recently cozied up to the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Pierce’s expression was steely. “She’s a private individual, and she’s welcome to pursue her politics,” she said. “It’s not where the British government is.”

[Read: America’s Trumpiest ambassador]

The day after we met in her embassy office, Pierce showed up early at the Hilton Hotel, in a rich-blue gown and a pair of cascading diamond earrings, greeting as many people as possible before the Correspondents’ Dinner officially began. This year’s dinner was probably Pierce’s last spring soirée; a new British ambassador is expected to replace her by the end of 2024.

Leaving will be hard, Pierce said during a Politico podcast taping—“I’ll have to be dragged out of [here] by my fingernails”—not least because this is an election year. A return to the Oval Office for the resident of Mar-a-Lago could mean a challenging new dynamic between the U.S. and the U.K. Pierce joked about being reluctant to leave America, but her concern about a possible end of aid to Ukraine seemed obvious.

That aside, her domestic assessment was surprisingly rosy—or at least highly diplomatic. “I personally do not worry about America,” she told me. “I have a lot of faith in American democracy and in Americans, and I think you have very strong institutions.” Pierce’s faith in what an ambassador to America can achieve seemed unshaken, even amid the capital’s current dysfunction. She didn’t hesitate to assert that confidence when I asked her advice for her soon-to-be-announced successor: “Make the weather.”