Robert F. Kennedy Jr. smiled, threw up a stilted wave, and made eye contact with nobody in particular. He was shuffling into Puckett’s restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee, earlier this month for a plate of midday meatloaf. No advance team had peppered the room with stickers or buttons bearing his name. No one had tipped off the local media. Flanked by his press secretary and a couple of plainclothes security guards, Kennedy made his way toward a large table back near the kitchen, where he and I were scheduled to meet for an interview. The roughly two dozen lunch patrons didn’t appear to clock him, nor did the waiter.

Kennedy’s independent campaign for the White House has a loose, confounding energy to it. Most presidential candidates would glad-hand at a place like Puckett’s; Kennedy didn’t bother. Rather than run on a policy slogan—“Medicare for all,” “Build the wall”—Kennedy has opted for something closer to mysticism. He uses the word existential in nearly every speech. He spends an inordinate amount of time on podcasts.

“You know, so much of life, we see from the surface,” Kennedy told me that day. “It’s like the surface of the ocean. There’s a storm going on, there’s winds blowing, and we get preoccupied with ambitions, with fear, with, you know, trepidation. And then if you sink a few feet below the ocean, it’s calm there. And that, I think, is where we’re supposed to spend as much time as possible, in that place where it’s peaceful, where you understand everything is kind of an illusion. We’re walking through a dream, and our job is to be kind to people, to be open, to be tolerant.”

Despite this hazy rhetoric, establishment Democrats consider Kennedy to be a concrete danger to the future of democracy. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called Kennedy “a living, breathing false-flag operation” whose “whole campaign is being run by right-wing political operatives who have one objective: try to take down President Joe Biden.”

When I first interviewed Kennedy last year, many people derided him as a distraction who would quickly fade into obscurity. Five months out from Election Day, Kennedy is polling in the double digits and fighting for nationwide ballot access. His team insists that voters will be able to pull the lever for him in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many political observers have argued that, like past third-party candidates who have hurt Democrats, he is poised to draw more votes from Biden than from former President Donald Trump. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that Kennedy has particularly strong support among young voters and Latinos, two groups Biden needs more than Trump. Yet he’s also drawing support from Republicans and conservatives. Many of these voters are willing to look past his conspiratorial, anti-vaccination statements. Some may share his views.

[Read: The first MAGA democrat]

While Biden and Trump fight for first place, Kennedy is zigzagging around the country, talking about our need to reconnect with the Earth and rediscover our shared humanity. Born and raised an East Coast Catholic, he now resembles an aging California hippie preaching New Age mantras. He’s not running a winning operation so much as he’s on a public self-actualization journey. And America will have to live with the consequences.

Like with Biden and Trump, Kennedy’s mental state receives armchair diagnoses on a daily basis. But, unlike Biden and Trump, Kennedy says he once had a parasitic worm in his brain. I asked him if he would consent to undergoing a cognitive test. “The cognitive exam is called the debates. I would gladly take it,” he said. “I take a cognitive exam every time I do a podcast—I challenge the other candidates to take the cognitive test with me.” He added that he’d release his medical records if his chief opponents did the same.

Three nights before our lunch in Tennessee, I showed up at Kennedy’s rally in Austin, Texas. Outside the venue I spotted one attendee with colorful markers scribbling out a homemade sign: WORMS NOT WARS. The man, a 39-year-old named Steven Kinsey, told me he had spent his entire adult life supporting Democrats, including Biden. But several months ago he happened to hear Kennedy on Theo Von’s podcast when the episode came up on shuffle. “I was like, ‘Oh, isn’t that that crazy Kennedy?’” he said. “So I just left it on for entertainment purposes. And I was blown away. I was like, ‘This isn’t the same guy that everyone says is wacko.’”

[From the May 2024 issue: Is Theo Von the next Joe Rogan?]

Kennedy’s rhetoric—whether you believe it to be wacko or compelling—is full of contradictions. He views himself as a pacifist—an anti-war candidate who nonetheless falls to the right of many liberals on key issues of the moment, including Israel in its war with Hamas. Kennedy told me he is “very pro-Palestinian,” but like Biden, he is steadfastly supporting Israel. “I think, for Israel’s future, for Gaza’s future, Hamas has to be gotten rid of,” he said. “I don’t see what happens in a cease-fire. I don’t even understand what people, you know, expect out of it.”

Kennedy made headlines in early May for saying he supported abortion rights up until the moment of birth. But over lunch with me several days later, he explained why he had already modified his position, supporting abortion rights only to the point of fetal viability. “I’ve had 40 years that show that I’m pretty indifferent to a political cost of whatever issue,” he said. “If I’m wrong about something, if somebody shows me facts, I’m going to change my mind.” When I asked whether he’d enshrine abortion rights at the federal level, he was cagey. “Maybe an early—you know—before viability,” he said. “Listen, I don’t tell people I’m going to do something I don’t think can be done.”

In the early 2000s, Kennedy helped popularize the idea that vaccines cause autism, a theory that remains scientifically unproven. Last summer, he falsely claimed that the coronavirus pandemic may have been “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people, and that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” are most immune from the virus. Nevertheless, he rejects the anti-vax label. “First of all, virtually everything that the press has written about my opinion of vaccines is wrong,” he told me. He said he believes that his position on vaccines is “aligned with what 99 percent of Americans feel.” In a bit of revisionist history, he said his stance boils down to “If people want vaccines they should be able to get ’em. I’m not going to do anything to interfere with that.” He told me that he wants people to have “the best science” on risk and efficacy. “And that’s all I’ve been saying for years. And that the people who are injured by vaccines, there’s a certain amount of people who are injured, and that we ought to be listening to them, not telling them that they’re fine and gaslighting them.”

Kennedy has practically zero chance of winning the White House and turning these policy positions into laws. As of now, he won’t participate in the first presidential debate in June. During our lunch, I asked him which state he most believes he’ll win, or, more generally, if he has a viable path to 270 electoral votes. He mentioned a few spots where he’s gaining traction, but couldn’t answer either question definitively. “I’m only peripherally involved in that part of the campaign,” he said of state-level plans—he was saying, in other words, that he’s not involved in the part of the campaign that’s concerned with trying to win the election. He deferred my nuts-and-bolts queries to his campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter-in-law.

“You know, there’s a mathematical answer,” she told me by phone last night. “But there’s also an answer that really has continued to transcend math all the way through.” She referred to this as “the America that almost was and what could be,” paraphrasing the author Charles Eisenstein. “Part of what I think a lot of observers, at least at this stage in the cycle, get wrong, is looking at national races rather than looking at individual states and how together they deliver a new leader to the White House,” she said.

I asked her which individual states her campaign will win.

“Well, you know, John, I would love to tell you that list,” she said. “One of the aspects to our electoral map that’s extremely important is not signaling where we’re going to be focused, ensuring advertising rates and attention and so forth are affordable and achievable there. So I can’t share the states with you except to say that Bobby is speaking to all Americans, and most especially to Americans who’ve been completely ignored by the map of the two-party system for decades and decades and are ready to have a say in the system.”

I asked her again. She eventually said that her team has a list of 29 states, but refused to share any of them, raising the possibility that Kennedy’s opponents may try to infiltrate their campaign. “Where we see the strongest numbers right now is, you know, the matter of a lot of internal polling. I’m sure the other campaigns are doing their own internal polling. But in the balance of resources, it wouldn’t be wise for us to spend a lot of hours on polling and then share them publicly.”

Though Kennedy will almost certainly lose the election, he could still affect its outcome by being a spoiler. The Democrats sense this. The DNC recently hired the veteran operative Lis Smith to lead a team focused on attacking third-party candidates, Kennedy in particular. Outside Kennedy’s rally in Austin, a black box truck drove laps around the venue. Among the rotating messages on its exterior about Kennedy and his running mate: WHY IS TRUMP’S TOP DONOR SPENDING $20 MILLION TO PROP UP RFK JR. AND NICOLE SHANAHAN? Beneath Photoshopped images of the two candidates in MAGA hats was a disclaimer: PAID FOR BY THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE.

The Democratic pollster and strategist Ben Tulchin has recently been looking closely at two swing states, Arizona and Pennsylvania. In Arizona, in particular, Tulchin’s data indicate that Kennedy is a bigger threat to Biden than he is to Trump, especially among young people and Latinos. “I’ve been raising the alarm with the Democratic Party and anyone who will hear me in the Biden campaign,” Tulchin told me.

At the national level, though, a clear picture has yet to emerge. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told me in an email, “There is no evidence in the current polls that conclusively points to RFK pulling more support from either side.” He continued, “The problem is, of course, with expected close outcomes in a few key Electoral College states, any small spoiler effect that’s hidden in the polling margins can have major consequences. Sample polling may not be precise enough to find it, unless you can interview every voter. That type of polling is called an election.”

Kennedy keeps steadily attracting not just independents but a mix of Democrats and Republicans alike. This aligns with what I’ve noticed at his events—a diverse generational cross section: crypto bros, cowboys, crunchy hippies. Kennedy looks out from the stage and sees it, too—all the wide-eyed voters looking back.

To stiff-arm the spoiler characterization, Kennedy refers to his own polling that shows he’d defeat either Biden or Trump in head-to-head matchups. “I’m not a spoiler, because I can win,” he told me flatly.

Trump rallies brim with a dystopian, campy Americana. Biden rallies barely exist. Kennedy rallies, meanwhile, tend to feel like giant house parties. Opening acts usually include cover bands, and many attendees mingle while sipping drinks. Inside the downtown-Austin venue, nearly 1,000 people milled about multiple bars and listened to a band cycle through crowd favorites: Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?,” and, in an ironic twist, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.”

One of the first speakers that night was the regenerative-farming influencer Ryland Engelhart. He quoted the mystic poet Rumi and affectionately likened the RFK Jr. campaign to Noah’s Ark—“a big foolish project.” Engelhart told the crowd that he had been sitting on the toilet scrolling through his phone when he first discovered Kennedy and his message. He spoke wistfully about a recent fundraiser that ended with Kennedy joining his donors in a sweat lodge. He paraphrased another Rumi line at the end of his speech: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Then offered a 2024 addendum: “There is a president beyond Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I will meet you there.”

[Read: The RFK Jr. strategy clicks into focus]

Shanahan made a rare public appearance that night. A Silicon Valley businesswoman and reported billionaire, she has no political experience and is not a natural public speaker. Most of her message was not about the election, but about topics such as healthy soil and the danger of forever chemicals in food. “A lot of our most innovative solutions come from outside conventional politics—they are in the realm of what’s been called ‘alternative,’” she said. “Yes, I know that sounds so radical. It shouldn’t. I have seen the power of these little alternative ways of thinking in my own life. I have used alternative health practices to restore my health, my fertility … I know what is possible when you think with an alternative, creative mindset.”

When Kennedy took the stage, he told the crowd, “Every time I see her speak, I fall a little bit more in love with her.” He went on, “Most of the presidential candidates we have today, they sound like they’re doing a satire of Veep. And that’s not what you hear from Nicole—you hear a lecture about soil!” He warned that the more Americans spend on medicine, the unhealthier we get. “What is it that is causing us not to see that?” he asked. “What is it that is causing us to constantly feed this beast that is making us more and more sick all the time? It’s the corrupt political system. It’s the subversion of our democracy.” His message built toward a call-and-response finale. “If Nicole and I get into office, everything is going to change,” Kennedy said.

“Don’t you want everything to change?”

“Yes!” the crowd shouted.

“Is there anything that you want to keep the same?”

“No!”

Some of the people most concerned about Kennedy’s impact on the election are members of his own family. Last year, a few Kennedys began speaking out against what they saw as the dangers of his campaign. His brother Christopher Kennedy recently characterized RFK as “unreachable,” a “true believer” with “fringe thinking,” “crackpot ideas,” and “unsound judgment.” On St. Patrick’s Day this year, dozens of Kennedys gathered at the White House and took a family photo with Biden—an unsubtle message to RFK.

I asked Kennedy what had gone through his mind when he saw that photo. He stared off at a refrigerator along the wall separating the restaurant’s dining room from its kitchen. He wiped his eye. He leaned forward with both elbows on the table. All told, it took him 34 seconds to formulate his answer. Kennedy acknowledged that he has family members who are “not enthused” about his candidacy, and some who are supporting him. “I don’t harbor resentments anymore,” he said. “I just don’t. I think they’re corrosive. They’re like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die.”

[Read: Where RFK Jr. goes from here]

He told me that he had expected to be polling well among his fellow Baby Boomers, because they were the ones with the most nostalgia for his father and uncle—the Camelot era. But so far, he said, younger people were his strongest bloc of support, people who likely didn’t think much about that history. I asked if he felt primarily like a Kennedy, someone carrying on a family legacy, or if he saw himself as just Bobby.

“Where do we get our sense of self?” he asked. “It comes from the principles which are the boundaries of that entity. The principles, the places where we say to ourselves, ‘I would never do that.’ And it comes from, you know, feelings that are the product of our history and our culture and our genes. You know, I grew up in this family. That lucky event, for me, has been one of the formative features and forces of my life. And has crafted everything I believe in as a person. It’d be hard for me to separate myself from my family.”

He characterized the past year of campaigning as “a very intense lesson on all the things that you’re supposed to learn in the course of your life.” Running for president, he said, teaches you how to process antipathy. “You got a lot of hatred coming in, and anger, and then, you know, the opposite of that, too.” The goal he chases is to treat “everything as an imposter,” even the adulation. But he seems to have a harder time with that last part.

“I think one of the inspiring things for me is how many people have put hopes in me for change. And I’m sure if you interview some of these people who are following me, it’s extraordinary to me that so many people show up,” he said. “A lot of them come to me crying and just voice their hopes. And it feels like a big responsibility.” He told me that this has changed him in a “fundamental” way. “It’s made me try to be the person that, you know, people hope I am.”

It’s hard to know who that person is, or what he stands for. Kennedy told me that he believes the worst things Trump did as president were instituting lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic and walking away from a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. He referred to Biden’s border policy as “a catastrophe.” He wants voters to distrust the government, yet he also wants to run the government. Kennedy remains a magnet for the disillusioned. His philosophy isn’t profound, but his supporters seem to know that he’s saying something, and that it’s a little dangerous and alluring. In an election with two deeply unpopular major-party candidates, that message—even if it doesn’t add up to much—is resonating.

On March 18, news broke that Donald Trump intended to restore the disgraced lobbyist Paul Manafort to the ranks of his campaign advisers. In any other moral universe, this would have been an unimaginable rehabilitation. Back in 2016, as revelations about Manafort’s work on behalf of pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine began appearing in the press, even Trump considered him a figure so toxic that he forced him to resign as chair of his campaign. Two years later, Manafort was locked up in federal prison on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, among other transgressions. His was one of the most precipitous falls in the history of Washington.

But at this stage in that history, it’s not remotely shocking to learn that the revolving door continues to turn. By the end of Trump’s term, Manafort had already won a presidential pardon. His unwillingness to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had earned him Trump’s unstinting admiration: “Such respect for a brave man,” he tweeted. Now it seemed that Manafort’s loyalty would be rewarded with the lobbyist’s most valuable tool: the perception of access, at an opportune moment.

In early May, under growing media scrutiny for international consulting work that he’d reportedly been involved in after his pardon, Manafort said that he would “stick to the sidelines,” playing a less visible role in supporting Trump. (He’d recently been in Milwaukee, part of meetings about this summer’s Republican National Convention programming.) But if Trump wins the election, Manafort won’t need 2024 campaign work officially on his résumé to convince corporations and foreign regimes that he can bend U.S. policy on their behalf—­and he and his ilk will be able to follow through on such pledges with unimpeded ease. A second Trump term would mark the culmination of the story chronicled by the brothers Luke and Brody Mullins, a pair of energetic reporters, in their absorbing new book, The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government.

[From the March 2018 issue: Franklin Foer on the origins of Paul Manafort]

As Trump dreams about governing a second time, he and his inner circle have declared their intention to purge what they call the “deep state”: the civil service that they regard as one of the greatest obstacles to the realization of Trump’s agenda. What they don’t say is that the definition of the deep state—an entrenched force that wields power regardless of the administration in the White House—now fits the business of lobbying better than it does the faceless bureaucracy. This is the deep state, should Trump emerge the victor in the fall, that stands to achieve near-total domination of public power.

Lobbying, like Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is a quintessentially American industry. The sector took root along the K Street corridor of gleaming glass-and-steel buildings in downtown D.C. during the 1970s. Though accurately capturing the scale of its growth is hard, a study by George Mason University’s Stephen S. Fuller Institute reported that, in 2016, the “advocacy cluster” employed more than 117,000 workers in metropolitan Washington (that’s more than the population of Manchester, New Hampshire). In theory, lobbying is a constitutionally protected form of redressing grievances. Businesses have every right to argue their case in front of government officials whose policies affect their industries. In practice, lobbying has become a pernicious force in national life, courtesy of corporate America, which hugely outspends other constituencies—­labor unions, consumer and environmental groups—­on an enterprise now dedicated to honing ever more sophisticated methods of shaping public opinion in service of its own ends.

The forerunners of the modern lobbyist were Tommy “The Cork” Corcoran, a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust, and Clark Clifford, who ran President Harry Truman’s poker games. Both men left jobs in government to become freelance fixers, working on behalf of corporate behemoths (the United Fruit Company, for example, and General Electric). Mystique was essential to their method. Corcoran kept his name out of the phone book and off his office door. If a company was bothered by a nettlesome bureaucrat—­­or wanted help overthrowing a hostile Central American government—they were the men ready to pick up the phone and make it so.

But Corcoran and Clifford were anomalous figures. In the late ’60s, only about 60 registered lobbyists were working in Washington. Most businesses, during the decades of postwar prosperity, didn’t see the point in hiring that sort of help. Management was at peace with labor. Corporations paid their taxes, while reaping ample profits. Then along came Ralph Nader, a young Harvard Law School graduate who ignited the modern consumer movement. By dint of his fervent advocacy, he managed to rally Congress to pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, which led auto­makers to install headrests and shatter-resistant windshields. Nader, a scrappy upstart, single-handedly outmaneuvered the great General Motors.

[From the October 1966 issue: Elizabeth Drew on the politics of automobile safety]

Slow to register an emerging threat, corporate America sat complacently on the sidelines while an expansive new regulatory state emerged, posing a potential obstacle to business imperatives: The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, followed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the next year, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972. Meanwhile, in 1971, a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, named Lewis Powell urged a counterrevolution, writing a memo that called on the corporate world to build the infrastructure that would cultivate pro-business intellectuals and amass political power to defend the free market. Later that year, Richard Nixon named him to the Supreme Court.

A figure from outside the conservative orbit became the ground commander of the corporate cause in the capital. Tommy Boggs was the son of the legendary Hale Boggs, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana. The Great Society was, in no small measure, Hale’s legislative handiwork, and Washington was in Tommy’s blood. (As a boy, he ran House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s private elevator in the Capitol.) He saw how he could become a successor to Corcoran and Clifford, but on a far grander scale. After a failed run for Congress in 1970, he devoted himself to expanding the lobbying firm Patton Boggs.

Boggs mobilized a grand corporate alliance (including television networks, advertising agencies, and food conglomerates) to roll back the liberal state—and then ferociously used his connections on his clients’ behalf. M&M’s and Milky Way (he was working for the Mars candy company) were among the beneficiaries of a major victory. Jimmy Carter’s Federal Trade Commission had threatened to regulate the advertising of candy and sugar-heavy cereals directed at kids. Boggs sent the deputy editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page, Meg Greenfield, material about the horrors of this regulation. The newspaper then published an editorial with the memorable headline “The FTC as National Nanny.” Senators thundered against the absurdity of the new vigilance. The FTC abandoned its plans.

Boggs ignited not just a revolution in American government, but a cultural transformation of Washington. Before his ascent, patricians with boarding-school pedigrees sat atop the city’s social hierarchy, disdainful of pecuniary interests and the ostentatious flaunting of wealth. Boggs, very highly paid to work his wonders, rubbed his success in Washington’s face. He would cruise around town in one of the firm’s fleet of luxury cars with a brick-size mobile phone plastered to his face, a cigar dangling from his mouth.

The story that unfolds in The Wolves of K Street features an ironic twist: Liberal activists figured out how to mobilize the public to care about important issues and how to inspire them to become democratically engaged. K Street fixers saw this success, then adapted the tactics to serve the interests of corporations. In the Mullinses’ narrative, this evolution found its embodiment in Tony Podesta. An activist who came of age during the anti-war movement of the 1960s and a veteran of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Podesta made his name running the TV producer Norman Lear’s group People for the American Way, a progressive counterweight to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. In 1987, Podesta helped rally the left to sink Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee.

Not long after, Podesta left the world of public-interest advocacy and began to sell his expertise—­at first primarily to liberal groups, then almost exclusively to businesses. Using the techniques he learned while working with Lear, he specialized in deploying celebrity figures to influence public attitudes, counting on citizen sentiment to in turn sway politicians. To block the FDA from regulating vitamins in 1993 (his client was a group of dietary-supplement manufacturers), he cut an ad with the actor Mel Gibson that depicted a SWAT team busting him at home for possessing vitamin C. “Call the U.S. Senate and tell them that you want to take your vitamins in peace,” Gibson said in a voice-over.

With stunning speed, Podesta—a bon vivant who went on to amass one of Washington’s most impressive private collections of contemporary art—had gone from excelling in impassioned advocacy to becoming promiscuous in his choice of client. To fund his lifestyle, the Mullinses write, he helped Lockheed Martin win approval of the sale of F-16s to Pakistan, even though the Indian government, another client of the Podesta Group, opposed the deal. He represented the tire manufacturer Michelin and its competitor Pirelli. Over the objections of his staff, he joined forces with Paul Manafort to polish the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt pro-Kremlin politician who ruled Ukraine until a revolution ousted him in 2014.

As K Street boomed, the Mullinses show, its denizens remade American life well beyond Washington culture. They report that the firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, also a central player in their book, aided the Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch in overcoming regulatory obstacles and extending his corrosive media empire in the United States. In the ’80s, the firm became masters at deregulating industries and securing tax breaks for the powerful—$130 million for Bethlehem Steel, $58 million for Chrysler, $38 million for Johnson & Johnson—helping to usher in an age of corporate impunity and gaping inequality.

The Wolves of K Street is full of cautionary tales about the normalization of corruption. Revolving-door practices—leaving government jobs and parlaying insider connections into lucrative lobbying work—became part of the system. Meanwhile, the culture fueled fraudulent self-aggrandizing of the sort on lurid display in the sad case of a relatively fringe figure named Evan Morris. A kid from Queens who first arrived in town as a college intern in the Clinton White House, he quickly grasped that K Street represented the city’s best path to power and wealth. He scored a coveted job at Tommy Boggs’s firm while in law school, arriving just as lobbyists became essential cogs in a whole new realm: the machinery of electioneering.

The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002—campaign-finance legislation intended to wean the political system off big donors—prevented corporations and individuals from writing massive checks to political parties. Unable to rely as heavily on big donors, campaigns were happy to outsource to lobbyists the arduous job of rounding up smaller contributions from the wealthy: Lobbyists became “bundlers,” in fundraising parlance. As a 20-something, Morris proved to be one of the Democratic Party’s most exuberant solicitors, promising donors VIP access to events that he couldn’t provide, or intimating that he was asking on behalf of Boggs himself, which he wasn’t. Despite his relative inexperience, he managed to schmooze with the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

He went on to work for Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, and hatched a kind of campaign that he described as “black ops.” Amid the bird-flu outbreak of 2005, the Mullinses write, he began urging the government to stockpile the antiviral medication that Roche produced. He hired consultants to promote news stories that stoked public panic about the bird flu. He compiled studies touting the benefits of the drug, including some written by people who had at one point received money from Roche. The government bought more than $1 billion worth of the antiviral.

Morris’s job was to bend perception—and he also tried to bend the way that Washington perceived him. In 2009, he was hired to head the Washington office of Genentech, a Roche subsidiary. He became relentlessly acquisitive: three Porsches, multiple Cartiers and Rolexes, humidors filled with the finest cigars. Apparently, many of Morris’s extravagant purchases were bought with Genentech’s money, including a condo in San Francisco and a GMC Yukon.

Such a brazen scheme didn’t escape his superiors’ notice. While being presented by investigators with damning evidence of his malfeasance, Morris left the room to take a bathroom break and never returned. That afternoon, he went to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia, which he had paid a $150,000 initiation fee to join. That night, he retreated to a quiet corner of the club grounds and shot himself with a Smith & Wesson revolver. He was 38.

Yet such downfall narratives feel strangely dissonant. Although a handful of lobbyists may suffer a dramatic tumble from grace, the industry itself does nothing but boom. Each time a new reform surfaces, aimed at curtailing K Street’s power, influence peddlers figure out how to exploit the rules for greater influence and profit. Although Trump promised to drain this swamp, the swamp flourished. From 2016 to 2018, spending on K Street increased 9 percent, rising to $3.5 billion.

Washington lobbying firms have ballooned into conglomerates, resembling the multinational corporations that hire them. K Street currently consists of data analysts, pollsters, social-media mavens, crisis managers, grassroots organizers. Lobbying firms are one-stop shops for manipulating opinion—and are experts at image management, including their own: Their employees’ business cards identify them as “consultants” and “strategists,” now that everyone associates lobbying with sleaze.

Lobbying has disguised itself so well that it is often barely visible even to savvy Washington insiders. The Mullinses tell the story of Jim Courtovich, the head of a boutique public-relations firm and a close collaborator of Evan Morris’s. Courtovich’s business plan featured splashy parties that attracted top journalists and other prominent figures with whom he hoped to trade favors. Mingling with the media, the Mullinses write, Courtovich encouraged stories that might help his clients; in one case they cite, the goal was to damage a Saudi client’s rival. Starting in the fall of 2015, many such gatherings were hosted at a house his firm owned on Capitol Hill; presumably, the reporters who attended them had no idea that Saudi investors had financed the purchase of the building. In 2016, the authors note, Courtovich began working for the Saudi-government official who would later allegedly orchestrate the murder of The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi, a colleague of the journalists he assiduously cultivated.

As lobbying has matured, it has grown ever more adept at turning government into a profit center for its clients. Even Big Tech, which once treated Washington with disdainful detachment, seems to have felt the irresistible, lobbyist-enabled pull of chunky contracts with the feds. Such possibilities were part of the pitch to Amazon, for example, to erect a second corporate headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, enticed by the prospect of pursuing multibillion-dollar contracts with the likes of the CIA and the Pentagon. (Amazon has said that political considerations played no part in the company’s decision.)

For eager beneficiaries of government largesse—not to mention for their equally wolfish facilitators—a second Trump administration would represent a bonanza, unprecedented in the history of K Street. Trump’s plan to overturn a bureaucratic ethos that has prevailed since the late 19th century—­according to which good government requires disinterested experts, more loyal to the principles of public stewardship than to any politician—opens the way to installing cronies who will serve as handmaidens of K Street. The civil service, however beleaguered, has acted as an imperfect bulwark against the assault of corporate interests. Its replacement would be something close to the opposite. The hacks recruited to populate government departments will be primed to fulfill the desires of campaign donors and those who pay tribute to the president; they will trade favors with lobbyists who dangle the prospect of future employment in front of them. This new coterie of bureaucrats would wreck the competence of the administrative state—and the wolves of K Street will feast on the carcass of responsible governance.

This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “The Industry That Ate America.”