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.”

Nuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.

But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.

Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.

In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.

This story contains some kernels of truth. The safety risk of nuclear energy is often wildly overblown. No one died at Three Mile Island, and later studies found that it didn’t have any adverse health effects on the local community. Even including the deadly meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power has most likely caused only a few hundred deaths, putting its safety record on par with wind turbines and solar panels, which occasionally catch fire or cause workers to fall. (The immediate areas around the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters have, however, been rendered uninhabitable for decades because of the potential dangers of radiation.) Nuclear waste can be harmful if mishandled, but isn’t difficult to store safely. Air pollution from fossil fuels, meanwhile, is estimated to kill anywhere from 5 million to 9 million people every year.

[Read: Nuclear is hot, for the moment]

The claim that excessive regulation single-handedly ruined the American nuclear industry, however, doesn’t hold up. The cost of building new nuclear plants was already rising before Three Mile Island. Several nuclear-energy experts told me that a major driver of those cost increases was actually a lack of industry standards. According to Jessica Lovering, the executive director of Good Energy Collective and a co-author of a widely cited study on the cost of nuclear energy, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, utilities kept trying to build bigger, more ambitious reactors for every new project instead of just sticking with a single model. (Lovering used to be the head of nuclear policy at the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that tends to warn against excessive regulation.) “It’s like if Boeing went through all the trouble to build one 737, then immediately threw out the design and started again from scratch,” she told me. “That’s a recipe for high costs.” The 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States today are based on more than 50 different designs. In countries such as France and South Korea, by contrast, public utilities coalesced around a handful of reactor types and subsequently saw costs remain steady or fall.

Lovering also noted that the overregulation story leaves out a crucial fact: Because of a slowing economy, electricity demand flatlined in the early 1980s, causing American utilities to stop building basically every electricity-generating resource, not just nuclear plants. By the time the U.S. finally did try to build them again, in 2013, the American nuclear industry had all but withered away. “In the 1970s, we had a whole ecosystem of unionized workers and contractors and developers and utilities who knew how to build this stuff,” Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me. “But when we stopped building, that ecosystem died off.” This became obvious during the disastrous Vogtle project, in Georgia—the one that ended up costing $35 billion. Expensive changes had to be made to the reactor design midway through construction. Parts arrived late. Workers made all kinds of rookie mistakes. In one case, an incorrect rebar installation triggered a seven-and-a-half-month regulatory delay. Experts estimate that by the time it was finished, the project was four to six times more expensive per unit of energy produced than plants built in the early ’70s.

Given the impracticality of nuclear energy, some environmentalists argue that we should focus on wind and solar. These technologies can’t power the entire grid today, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With enough advances in battery-storage technology, however, they could in theory provide 24/7 power at a far lower price than building nuclear plants. “The nuclear industry has been promising cheap, clean energy for decades at this point,” David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me. “Why waste our money on false hopes when we could be putting it towards technologies that have a real chance of working?”

He may be right about the technology. But just because it might one day be technically feasible to power the entire grid with renewables doesn’t mean it will ever be politically feasible. That’s because wind and solar require land—a lot of land. According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study, reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would involve placing solar panels on land equivalent to the area of Virginia and setting up wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. The more land you need, the more you run into the meat grinder of American NIMBYism. Efforts to build renewables are already getting bogged down by local opposition, costly lawsuits, and permitting delays. These challenges will only intensify as the easiest sites come off the board.

Transmission lines, which are needed to transport renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s used, may present an even bigger challenge. Some lines have taken nearly two decades just to receive their full suite of approvals. “There’s a chance we will suddenly get our act together and overcome the many, many constraints to deploying renewables,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me. “But I’m certainly not willing to bet the fate of the planet on that happening.”

The case for nuclear, then, is less about technological possibilities than it is about political realities. Nuclear can generate the same amount of power while using 1/30th as much land as solar and about 1/200th as much as wind. Reactors can be built anywhere, not just in areas with lots of natural wind and sunshine, eliminating the need for huge transmission lines and making it easier to select sites without as much local opposition. And nuclear plants happen to generate the greatest number of high-paying jobs of any energy source, by far. (On average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project does and pay those workers 50 percent more.) That helps explain why four different towns in Wyoming recently fought over the right to host a nuclear project. Nuclear power is also the only energy source with overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington, which makes Congress more likely to address future bottlenecks and hurdles as they arise.

[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]

As for how to make the economics work, there are two schools of thought. One holds that if America forgot how to build nuclear because we stopped doing it, we just need to start back up. Pick a design, build lots of plants, and we’ll eventually get better. Other countries have done this with great success; South Korea, for instance, slashed the cost of constructing nuclear plants in half from 1971 to 2008. Here, the Vogtle project carries a silver lining: The second of the plant’s two reactors was about 30 percent cheaper to build than the first, because workers and project managers learned from their mistakes the first time around. “I consider Vogtle a success,” Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me. “We learned all kinds of hard lessons. Now we just need to apply them to future projects.”

The second school of thought is that we’ve been building nuclear reactors the wrong way all along. This camp points out that over the past half century, basically every kind of major infrastructure project—highways, skyscrapers, subways—has gotten more expensive, whereas manufactured goods—TVs, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries—have gotten cheaper. Lowering costs turns out to be much easier when a product is mass-produced on an assembly line than when it has to be built from scratch in the real world every single time. That’s why dozens of companies are now racing to build nuclear reactors that are, in a phrase I heard from multiple sources, “more like airplanes and less like airports.” Some are simply smaller versions of the reactors the U.S. used to build; others involve brand-new designs that are less likely to melt down and therefore don’t require nearly as much big, expensive equipment to operate safely. What unites them is a belief that the secret to making nuclear cheap is making it smaller, less complicated, and easier to mass-produce.

Both paths remain unproven—so the Biden administration is placing bets on each of them. The president’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, included generous tax credits that could reduce the cost of a nuclear project by 30 to 50 percent, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to fund the construction of two new reactors using original designs. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is exploring different options for permanent nuclear-waste storage, investing in building a domestic supply chain for uranium, and helping companies navigate the process of getting reactor designs approved.

There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse. “We just have to be successful,” Mike Goff told me. “Failure is not an option.”

At this point, Americans will believe almost any story about Donald Trump. That is both a strength and a weakness for him. On the one hand, it means that nearly nothing he says, including for example that he wants to be a dictator, penetrates too deeply. On the other hand,  it means people rarely extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when it’s warranted.

That’s what happened yesterday, when Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video featuring fake newspapers with celebratory imagined headlines about Trump (IT’S A LANDSLIDE! TRUMP WINS!!). Below, a sub-headline referred to “the creation of a unified Reich.” Naturally, the combination of Trump and a “unified Reich” was combustible. “This man is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a [sic] simple garbage of a human being,” fulminated Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman. “Flush Trump down the toilet.” The controversy is illuminating about Trump and the presidential campaign, but perhaps not in the ways that it first appeared.

Trump’s account has removed the video, and his campaign said it did not create the video but reposted it from another user. It also said the post was done not by Trump but by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the “Reich” reference. Although Trump has a long history of blaming staffers for foolish posts, the excuse here is plausible. The video appears to have been made using a stock video template available online. And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

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

This election cycle has seen a slew of stories about how the Trump campaign is far more professionally run and regimented than in 2016 and 2020. That appears to be true, but only in a limited sense. Any competent campaign would have vetted such a video before it reposted it in order to avoid just this kind of mess. But Trump and his team can’t or won’t bother to look carefully at what he (or his staff) reposts on social media, and never have. In 2016, he posted an anti-Semitic meme with a Star of David and then tried to convince people it was a “sheriff’s star.” In 2017, he posted a GIF that showed him body-slamming CNN, created by a Reddit user who, whaddya know, also posted lots of anti-Semitic material. Earlier this year, a brief controversy broke out when Trump posted a video of a convoy of trucks decked out in pro-Trump swag, including an image of a bound and tied Joe Biden on one truck’s tailgate.

Despite having served as president for four years, and despite being a gifted political messenger, Trump has never grasped—or perhaps never cared—that sloppy words from someone in his position can be hugely consequential, and he resists guardrails that would protect him.

[Read: If Trump wins]

Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap. Not only did he attempt to steal the last election and promise to be a dictator, but he has also consistently disregarded checks and balances and suggested “termination” of the Constitution. He called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 “very fine people,” hobnobbed with white nationalists, and delivered menacing remarks about American Jews who do not support him—on Rosh Hashanah, no less. His former chief of staff says Trump once told him that “Hitler did some good things.” It’s no coincidence that so many of those past sloppy reposts came from supporters of his who hold hateful views. (It also doesn’t help that a staffer on the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a rival and would-be successor in the GOP presidential primary, was caught surreptitiously inserting Nazi imagery into social-media posts.)

The Biden campaign quickly pounced on the situation. “Trump posts a new ad foreshadowing a second Trump term that says he will create a ‘UNIFIED REICH,’ echoing Nazi Germany,” its official account posted on X. The Biden campaign is not stupid, which means both that it should have figured out the real origin of the post (and may well have) and also that it was not going to let an opportunity to savage its opponent pass by.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump’s menacing Rosh Hashana message to American Jews]

Biden’s team has been taking a more aggressive approach to Trump as the election nears. After years of elliptically referring to his “predecessor,” the president has begun naming Trump in attacks. The rest of his apparatus is also attacking Trump, trying to remind voters of the reasons they rejected him in 2020. In this case, the Biden campaign seems to have succeeded in manufacturing a controversy. Every major outlet has a headline this morning about the video (a representative example from The Washington Post: “Trump’s Truth Social Account Shares Video Referencing ‘Unified Reich’). These stories are not untruthful—he did share the video—but they are also a little misleading, though perhaps unintentionally so.

Whether the backlash to the video helps Biden beat Trump in November is anybody’s guess. Trump’s critics debate whether it is more effective to attack Trump as a threat to democracy, criticize his unpopular policy ideas, paint him as corrupt, or focus on Biden’s positive accomplishments. The incident shows exactly why Trump was so bad at being president. It probably doesn’t tell us anything new about Trump’s feelings regarding Hitler that we didn’t already know. The bizarre thing is that many voters may hear about the controversy and assume that it reveals Trump’s sympathy for the Third Reich, and then vote for him anyway.

The oldest president in American history has a problem with the nation’s youngest voters.

Support from voters under 30 has powered every Democratic presidential victory for the past half century; Joe Biden carried the demographic by 24 points in 2020, his biggest margin of any age group. But according to several recent surveys, the president’s support among young voters has plummeted. Polls covering six swing states released last week by The New York Times, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer found Biden losing to Donald Trump (though within the margin of error) among voters under 30. The two men were effectively tied in this month’s national poll from Fox News.

These results have prompted a mix of panic and disbelief among many Democrats, who see little chance of a Biden victory if he can’t win back one of the party’s core constituencies. Yet analysts who study the youth vote say the president’s standing with this key group isn’t nearly as bad as Democrats tend to think, and they attribute many of the struggles he is having to an underappreciated finding: Most first-time voters know surprisingly little about Trump. The most targeted data suggest that Biden maintains a double-digit lead over Trump among voters ages 18 to 29. It’s smaller than it was four years ago, but experts say Biden has a good opportunity to run it up.

Surveys that specifically poll voters under 30—as opposed to those in which young people are merely a subset of respondents—show Biden leading Trump by double digits. In the Harvard Youth Poll, a biennial survey considered the gold standard for measuring young voters, Biden led Trump by 13 points among registered voters. That advantage was virtually identical to the margin found in surveys (one national and one across several battleground states) commissioned this spring by Voters of Tomorrow and NextGen America, a pair of Democrat-aligned groups who are targeting the youth vote, according to summaries they shared with me. Pollsters place more trust in these findings because they sample a larger number of young people—and therefore have a smaller margin of error—than the surveys that have shown less favorable results for Biden.

[Read: The real youth-vote shift to watch]

Still, those margins aren’t close to what they were in 2020. Biden is polling worst with 18-to-22-year-olds, most of whom were children when Trump was president. In polls and focus groups, this cohort demonstrated little awareness of the major controversies of Trump’s term. “They didn’t fully know who Donald Trump was,” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, NextGen America’s president, told me. “Some of them were 10 years old when he was first elected. And if they had good parents, they were probably shielded from the images of crying babies being ripped from their mothers at the border, or from the sight of Heather Heyer being run over by white supremacists in Charlottesville.”

In polling conducted by Blueprint, a Democratic data firm, fewer than half of registered voters under 30 said they had heard some of Trump’s most incendiary quotes, such as when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, or when he told members of the Proud Boys, the far-right militia group, to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 debate. Just 42 percent of respondents were aware that, during his 2016 campaign, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

The youngest voters know Trump more as a ribald commentator than as a political leader. Santiago Mayer, the 22–year-old founder of the Gen Z group Voters of Tomorrow, which has endorsed Biden, told me that his 18-year-old brother and his friends see Trump as more funny than threatening. “They don’t know much about Donald Trump’s agenda, and Donald Trump is an entertaining character,” Mayer said. “They are gravitating toward him not because of their political beliefs but out of sheer curiosity.”

A related problem for Biden is that young voters don’t know much about what he’s done, either. The president has kept a lower profile than his two predecessors, and young people as a group aren’t as civically engaged as older Americans. As a result, pollsters have found that young voters are less aware of Biden’s accomplishments, even on issues that they say are important to them. Many of them don’t know, for example, that he signed the largest climate bill in history (the Inflation Reduction Act) or the most significant change to gun laws in decades (the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act), or that he has forgiven about $160 billion in student debt. “The more they pay attention, the more they approve of and are likely to vote for Biden,” John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, told me. “The biggest challenge for Biden,” he said, “is that an overwhelming number of young people do not appreciate the degree to which he’s delivered on promises he made in 2020. I hear that in every single city.”

Other factors are driving the disconnect between Biden and young voters as well. When Blueprint asked young voters what concerned them most about a potential second Biden term, their top worry was that he’d be too old for the job. Next on the list, however, was inflation. People in early adulthood are also less economically stable than their older peers and more sensitive to costs. So although campus protests over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza have dominated headlines, polls show that inflation is a much bigger drag on Biden’s support among young voters, and a more significant issue for them than for older people. “Young voters just think that Biden doesn't have his eye on the ball economically when it comes to inflation,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told me. “It is surprising but not inexplicable that voters under 30 associate lower price points with Donald Trump. But they do, because it’s just a hard fact that prices were lower and the rate of inflation was lower when Donald Trump was president.”

[Read: Biden’s weakness with young voters isn’t about Gaza]

“I think people would forgive age if they felt that Biden could bring prices down,” Smith added.

Still, Biden has advantages over Trump that could help him win back young voters by November. Voters under 30 have retreated from both parties and are more likely to register as independents than in the past. But they remain more progressive than the electorate as a whole, and in recent polls they align much closer with Biden on the issues than with Trump. In 2022, Tzintzún Ramirez said, young voters expressed antipathy toward the Democratic Party in polling but ended up backing Democratic candidates in the midterms. She and other analysts see a similar dynamic at play now, where young voters are telling pollsters they’re undecided or registering support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other third-party candidates as a protest against both Biden and Trump. Surveys show this to be especially true for young men and voters of color, many of whom have soured on Biden. But support for third-party alternatives typically drops as the election nears. Young voters also tend to make their choice later in the campaign.

Perhaps the best data point for Biden is that he’s hardly worse off among young voters than President Barack Obama was at this point in his 2012 reelection bid. Like Biden, Obama won big among voters under 30 during his first presidential victory but struggled to communicate his record to them. Della Volpe told me that in Harvard’s polling, Obama had the same 13-point advantage over Mitt Romney among registered voters in the spring of 2012 that Biden has over Trump now. He would nearly double that margin by the fall, thanks in large part to an aggressive ad campaign that portrayed the former Massachusetts governor and businessman as an out-of-touch and greedy financier.

Donald Trump would seem to need no introduction to voters—except, that is, to those who were too young or tuned out to fully remember his presidency. Giving them a well-funded history lesson could be Biden’s best hope for a second term.

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For years, leading Republicans have chosen to let their memory lapse about things they once said about Donald Trump. It’s a disingenuous forgetting that has deepened since Trump went on trial in New York.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

New 9/11 evidence points to deep Saudi complicity. The worst best economy ever Who would benefit from the Iranian president’s death?

The New Order for the Day

Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, works for the totalitarian Ministry of Truth, where his assignment is to produce lies. He rewrites history so that whatever the regime says today cannot be contradicted by something it might have said yesterday. (He ensures, for example, that Big Brother’s “Order for the Day” announcements about the regime’s achievements match up with everything the leader predicted in previous statements, and he excises any untidy references in the state media to people who have been arrested and disappeared.) Once history is fixed, Winston drops contradictory materials into “the memory hole,” a small opening near every desk that leads to a furnace, where the inconvenient past is quickly incinerated.

Leaders of the current GOP presumably do not have such memory holes in their offices, but they’re doing their best to replicate the effect. Republicans who once claimed to be against Donald Trump, and ridiculed him, are now expending kilocalories of political energy to convince their constituents and the rest of the American public that they have always been faithful to Trump.

Some of them, including Senators Lindsey Graham and J. D. Vance, have admitted to dramatic conversions, and like good members of any authoritarian party, they have come forward and sought mercy for their mistakes. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it,” Graham tweeted in May 2016 (after calling Trump a “kook,” among other things), and on the night of January 6, 2021, he declared himself to be done with Trump: “Count me out.”

Less than a month later, he was back in.

Vance, for his part, once described Trump as “cultural heroin” in this magazine—a wonderful phrase that I will never tire of repeating here. When Vance decided to run for the Senate, however, he apparently felt that it was time to see the light. “I’m not just a flip-flopper, I’m a flip-flop-flipper on Trump,” he told Time in the summer of 2021. Trump, he said, is “the leader of this movement, and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”

After this stirring statement of principle, Vance went all in. Last week, at the New York courthouse where Trump is on trial, he showed up in the required blue suit and red tie not only to affirm his allegiance (obligatory for anyone who hopes to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick) but also as part of his continual smearing of the entire American justice system. If Vance once had any reservations, they have gone into the memory hole.

Few Trump sycophants play this game better than New York Representative Elise Stefanik, who this weekend got a smidge tetchy with the Fox News anchor Shannon Bream after Bream had the temerity to snatch back some of Stefanik’s history from the furnace. Bream quoted from a lengthy 2022 New York Times profile in which Stefanik’s friends noted the representative’s transformation from Republican moderate to Trumpian conspiracy theorist. Stefanik immediately snapped at Bream for quoting unnamed sources from the hated Times.

But Bream was having none of it: “Folks can go read that article for themselves,” she countered. “There are plenty of names, people who went on the record. And we’ll leave it there.” The article is more devastating than Bream let on; as an opportunist, Stefanik leaves even a dedicated newcomer like Vance in the dust. But her approach worked. “In the beginning,” one of her voters told my Atlantic colleague Russell Berman after Trump lost in 2020, Stefanik wasn’t a big Trump backer. “But I’ll tell you, she’s come around.”

Indeed she has. “To say that Stefanik displays the zeal of a convert,” Russell wrote in a follow-up profile earlier this year, “doesn’t do justice to the phrase.” She is now a reliable voice echoing almost anything Trump says, including his attacks on the rule of law and the American election system.

I am an adult, and I have worked for politicians. I know hypocrisy is endemic to politics. I know that liberals and conservatives both have made excuses for their preferred candidates. I know that, yes, everyone does it. And people are allowed to change their mind when facts change. But nothing about Trump has changed. This GOP embrace of Trump’s nihilism is not some standard-issue, “my guy, right or wrong” defense of the party leader. What Republicans are doing now is a deeper and more stomach-churning abandonment of dignity, a rejection of moral agency in the name of ambition.

The defense of Trump and the memory-holing of any vestige of past adherence to principle is, of course, rooted in expediency and fear, but it also reflects a deep-seated resentment among people such as Vance and Stefanik.

The fear is obvious: Republicans are afraid of their own voters, sometimes even with a direct concern for their personal security. As my colleague McKay Coppins reported in his biography of Mitt Romney, “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety.” Likewise, the crackling-static cloud of opportunism that surrounds so many Republicans—especially the hyper-ambitious gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy—generates a political version of ozone so strong that its metallic odor practically seeps through the screens of TVs and smartphones.

But do not underestimate the power of resentment among Stefanik, Vance, and the others now circling Trump like the cold fragments of a destroyed planet. They resent the people who stuck to their principles and did not take the deal that required trading decency for power. Stefanik and Vance, of course, still have jobs in Congress, but they now must pretend to be tribunes of an electorate with whom they have almost nothing in common and among whom they seem to have no interest in living. (Vance once argued that people in depressed rural areas should move out, and he himself did not have a primary residence in Ohio until 2018.)

The cognitive dissonance produced by this self-knowing resentment encourages extremism, not moderation. The shame of signing on with Trump again means that any memento of an earlier political life must be shoved into the memory hole. The only way to prove loyalty is to take the new line, and to repeat Big Brother’s new Order for the Day more energetically than all of the other comrades. Each time, they will shout louder—to rise above the din of the mob, and to silence the fading voice of conscience that tells them that this self-abasement is terribly, inexcusably wrong.

Related:

Why Republican politicians do whatever Trump says The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and the Iranian foreign minister were found dead after their helicopter crashed yesterday. Iran’s Supreme Leader announced that the first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, will become the acting president; he must set up elections for a new president within 50 days. The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. They are all charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Michael Cohen wrapped up his last day of testimony for the prosecution in Trump’s criminal trial in New York. The prosecution rested its case, and the defense will continue its case tomorrow.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: It’s powerful to hear our family’s stories, Isabel Fattal writes. Sometimes our loved ones need a nudge to share a bit more than they might’ve otherwise.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Matt Eich

God’s Doctors

By Matt Eich and Bryce Covert

Nearly 20 million people gained health-insurance coverage between 2010 and 2016 under the Affordable Care Act. But about half of insured adults worry about affording their monthly premiums, while roughly the same number worry about affording their deductibles. At least six states don’t include dental coverage in Medicaid, and 10 still refuse to expand Medicaid to low-income adults under the ACA. Many people with addiction never get treatment.

Religious groups have stepped in to offer help—food, community support, medical and dental care—to the desperate …

These groups operate out of trailers and formerly abandoned buildings; they are led by pastors and nuns, reverends and imams. In many cases, they are the most trusted members of their communities, and they fill care gaps others can’t or won’t.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“The lynching that sent my family north” The algorithmic radicalization of Taylor Swift The bird-flu host we should worry about Bad regimes are winning at sport’s expense.

Culture Break

Hopper Stone / Max

Watch. What’s the key to understanding The Sympathizer? Think of the show (out now on Max) as a ghost story, Paula Mejía writes.

Listen. The latest episode of How to Know What’s Real examines what we can learn from real-life urbanization to improve online living.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Joe Biden is, at the moment, losing his reelection campaign. And he is doing so while presiding over the strongest economy the United States has ever experienced.

The jobless rate is below 4 percent, as it has been for nearly two and a half years. Wage growth is moderating, but it is higher than it was at any point during the Obama administration; overall, Biden has overseen stronger pay increases than any president since Richard Nixon. Inflation has cooled off considerably, meaning that consumers’ purchasing power is strong.

Yet Biden’s approval rating is below 40 percent. His disapproval rating is 56 percent. Donald Trump is beating him handily in most key swing states. And there’s a chance that Trump might edge out Biden in the popular vote, particularly if he continues to expand his popularity with Black and Latino voters in blue and purple states.

This reality has engendered panic among many Democratic campaign operatives, and no small degree of dismay too. What does it mean if Biden can’t win a campaign as an incumbent in an economy like this—during an election in which most Americans say the economy is the most important issue to them?

Voters’ dissatisfaction with Biden and Biden’s economy seems to have two central components: Americans think less of the economy than the headline numbers suggest, and they are thinking less about the economy at all.

Indeed, the sunny numbers about the economy—the low jobless rate, strong wage growth, soaring wealth accumulation, and falling inequality—fail to account for some cloudier elements. Americans remain stressed by, and ticked off about, high interest rates and high prices. Homes and cars, in particular, are unaffordable, given the cost of borrowing and insurance. And inflation has moderated, but groceries and other household staples remain far more expensive than they were during the Trump administration.

The majority of Americans are better off because their incomes have grown faster than prices. But most people, understandably, think of their swelling bank account as a product of their own labor and price increases as a result of someone else’s greed. People want prices to come down. That’s not happening.

Americans also tend to say that even though they are personally doing well, the overall economy is doing poorly. Political scientists think this has to do with the news they are consuming, which tends to focus on the negative or to caveat good trends: Wage growth poses challenge for the Federal Reserve! Holding economic conditions constant, financial reporting has gotten more negative over the past four decades. This negativity gap was big during the end of the Trump administration, and it’s even bigger during the Biden administration. Social media puts a gloomy filter on the news too. Folks click on and share dire stories more than they do upbeat ones.

At the same time, American voters’ perception of the state of the economy has become heavily mediated by their partisan biases: Republicans tend to think the economy is a wreck if Democrats are in charge, and Democrats tend to think the economy is a disaster when Republicans are in the White House. That is dampening voters’ overall assessment of the economy right now. “The size of the partisan divide in expectations has completely dominated rational assessments of ongoing economic trends,” Joanne Hsu, the director of the University of Michigan’s surveys of consumers, has concluded.

Yet even many Democrats are not convinced that this is a good economy. In one recent poll, just 22 percent of self-identified liberals said they were better off now than they were a year ago. That’s perhaps because they’re all reading and watching those glum news reports. And it is perhaps because Democrats are clustered in coastal states battered by the cost-of-living crisis.

The direction of the economy seems to be a factor as well. At least some leading indicators are declining, pointing to a “fragile—even if not recessionary—outlook,” according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit think tank. Debt is rising; fewer building permits are being issued; in some states, unemployment is up. (California’s jobless rate has increased 0.8 percentage points in the past year.) “Economic indicators are not speaking with one voice,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Given the salience of inflation relative to other factors, it’s easy for the public to feel bad. It’s easy for reporters to write stories about bad things.”

Still, the stock market is booming. Millennials are catching up to Baby Boomers in wealth accumulation and homeownership rates. Low-wage workers are making huge income gains. In terms of growth, the United States is trouncing its high-income peers around the world. There’s a massive boom in new-business formation. Consumers, their grumbling about high prices aside, keep spending.

Yet voters don’t seem to care. The public’s perception of Biden’s economy has proved remarkably stable—even as prices have moderated, even as stocks have taken off, even as the unemployment rate has remained at historically low levels. That fits with research showing that voters pay more attention to downturns than to upturns: They seem more apt to punish a party in power if there is a recession than they are to reward a party in power for overseeing a boom. The economy might be less salient for voters when it is good than when it is bad.

The trend also fits with emerging political-science and polling literature showing that economic factors are weighing less heavily on voters’ assessment of the president. Gas prices used to be a good proxy for the public’s feelings about the performance of the White House. But there has been “hardly any association” for the past decade, Kyle Kondik at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics has found. Similarly, presidential approval used to be strongly correlated with the consumer-sentiment index, the political scientist Lee Drutman has shown, but that stopped being the case back in 2004.

Why is the link between the economy and political sentiment fraying? Ironically, the dramatic improvement in material well-being over the past 50 years might be part of the answer: As countries get richer, voters have more latitude to vote their values, putting topics such as environmental protection, LGBTQ rights, and racial equality ahead of issues such as taxes, jobs, and wealth redistribution. This election cycle, voters might cite the economy as being the most important issue to them when talking to pollsters and journalists, but they may ultimately show up to vote (or change their vote) on the basis of another issue—abortion, say, or immigration.

Plus, American voters have become more partisan in recent decades—more likely to be immovably aligned with one party or another, and to see their political affiliation as a major component of their personal identity. Polarization “attenuates” the effect that the economy has on elections: Reliable Republicans just aren’t going to vote for Biden, and reliable Democrats just aren’t going to vote for Trump.

That leaves a sliver of persuadable voters. Drutman describes these folks as “disaffected from both parties, and mostly disengaged. They skew less wealthy, and younger, than the rest of the electorate. They defy easy ideological categorization. They vote sometimes, if they can be convinced the stakes are high enough to pay attention, or a new candidate breaks through and energizes them.” At the moment, neither candidate seems to be doing a great job of engaging those pivotal voters, many of whom don’t seem to like either of them.

A strong economy did not save Trump from becoming a one-term president. It might not save Biden either.

Nearly 20 million people gained health-insurance coverage between 2010 and 2016 under the Affordable Care Act. But about half of insured adults worry about affording their monthly premiums, while roughly the same number worry about affording their deductibles. At least six states don’t include dental coverage in Medicaid, and 10 still refuse to expand Medicaid to low-income adults under the ACA. Many people with addiction never get treatment.

Religious groups have stepped in to offer help—food, community support, medical and dental care—to the desperate.

Over nine months last year, the photographer Matt Eich documented the efforts of five such organizations in his home state of Virginia. These groups operate out of trailers and formerly abandoned buildings; they are led by pastors, nuns, reverends and imams. In many cases, they are the most trusted members of their communities, and they fill care gaps others can’t or won’t. —Bryce Covert

The Health WagonWise, Virginia A doctor visits with a patient at the Health Wagon in Wise, Virginia. March 14, 2023.

The Health Wagon is the oldest mobile free clinic in the country. It was founded in 1980 by Sister Bernie Kenny, a Catholic nun and nurse practitioner, who first offered care out of a Volkswagen Beetle. Today it has four mobile units that operate out of RVs, plus two buildings that offer medical and dental care. It plans to soon open the first nonprofit pharmacy in the region.

This is Appalachia—the western tip of the state, near the Kentucky border. The place has been hit hard by the opioid crisis, and residents suffer from high rates of cardiovascular disease, mental-health problems, diabetes, asthma, and cancer. “We’re the Lung Belt, we’re the Heart Belt, we’re the Kidney-Stone Belt,” Teresa Owens Tyson, who has been with the clinic since its early days and is now its CEO, told me. Most of the people the Health Wagon serves either don’t have insurance or have such high copays and deductibles that they can’t afford to use their policies. Tyson said she’s seen lines of people 1,600 deep waiting at the clinic at 6 a.m. Dental services are in particularly high demand: A 12-year-old recently came in whose teeth were so decayed, the child already needed dentures.

Dr. Robert Kilgore takes a dental impression for dentures. March 14, 2023. A conference room at the Health Wagon. March 14, 2023. The RecLuray, Virginia Audre King, Director of The REC in Luray, Virginia on Friday, June 16, 2023.

Reverend Audre King grew up in Luray. He went away to college, got married, and was living hours away in Northern Virginia when he says God told him in a dream to go back home and begin a ministry there.  

He tried to buy a long-abandoned building on his childhood block, but no bank would give him a loan. Finally, the owner agreed to sell it to him for cheap if he used it to serve the community. Digging out all of the dirt and dead animals and hooking the place up to electricity and water took months, but in 2017, the Rec was up and running.

It now serves hundreds of hot meals in area where many people live in motels without kitchens. It also provides mental-health programming, kids’ activities, a computer lab, and fitness classes. “Our goal is that anything, for whatever reason, the town or county can’t or won’t be able to fund—a resource they won’t provide—we want to be that help,” King told me.

All of its services are provided almost entirely by volunteers; the only person who gets paid is a bus driver who transports kids from their schools and homes to the Rec and back. King doesn’t take a salary for either the Rec or at the Eternal Restoration Church of God in Christ, where he serves as minister; he works for a gas company.

When he preaches at the church, he’s teaching the Gospel, he told me; but at the Rec, he’s “living the Gospel.” He pointed to Matthew 25:35–40: “For I was hungry and you gave me food … I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me.”

Audre King guides kids across Main Street before a group outing to a playground on Friday, June 16, 2023. Audre King and Damon Mendez play basketball with participants from the REC. June 16, 2023 Left: Lunch time at the REC. Right: Damon Mendez carries a speaker into the REC. June 16, 2023 CrossOver Healthcare MinistryRichmond, Virginia Marilyn Metzler, a registered nurse who has volunteered for 27 years, speaks with Father Markorieos Ava Mina at CrossOver Healthcare Ministry in Richmond, Virginia. June 1, 2023.

Last fiscal year, CrossOver treated more than 6,700 patients, over half of whom came from other countries as immigrants and refugees. Most undocumented immigrants can’t access Medicaid; those who can may still struggle to navigate the complex health-care system, especially if English isn’t their first language. The interdenominational group runs two free clinics offering primary care as well as cardiology and pulmonology, OB-GYN care, dental and vision care, behavioral-health services, pediatric care for children over 3, and a low-cost pharmacy. CrossOver relies on more than 400 volunteers to see patients, and still can’t open up enough appointments for everyone who comes seeking care: “We turn away about 30 to 35 people a week,” Julie Bilodeau, the group’s CEO, told me.

Scenes from CrossOver Healthcare Ministry. June 1, 2023. Maria Santiago Morente receives an ultrasound from Laurel Wallace, D.O., a volunteer at CrossOver Healthcare Ministry on Thursday, June 1, 2023. Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network

Chantilly, Virginia

About 10 years ago, Yahya Alvi applied for a job at the Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network, half an hour from Washington, D.C. The organization’s president told him that his dream was to open a free clinic. “That is my passion,” Alvi responded. He started by securing empty space at a nearby mosque and taking free equipment from a clinic that was giving it away. At the beginning, he employed only one doctor and himself, and the clinic was open just one day a week.

Today, it operates six days a week and has two paid nurse practitioners in addition to the two doctors. The clinic was founded by Muslims, but it accepts anyone without insurance or the money to pay for medical care, from anywhere in the country and practicing any religion. “Our religion says that all human beings are created by God almighty,” Alvi told me. “And all deserve equal treatment.”

ADAMS Compassionate Healthcare Network in Chantilly, Virginia. November 13, 2023. A patient receives an eye examination from a volunteer doctor at Adams. August 12, 2023. Left: Tori Finney, a volunteer, measures a patient at Adams. August 12, 2023. Right: Dr. Fathiya Warsame helps a patient at Adams. November 13, 2023. Dr. Sadia Ali Aden, the executive director of Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network. November 13, 2023. Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network. November 13, 2023. Madam Russell United Methodist

Saltville, Virginia

Pastor Lisa Bryant at Madam Russell Memorial United Methodist Church in Saltville, Virginia. March 13, 2023.  

One day in 2021, Steve Hunt was on the side of the road, trying to hitchhike to a grocery store about seven miles from his home in Saltville, Virginia. Hunt had lost his sight a few years earlier, after an infection in his leg went septic and he fell and knocked his retinas loose. Lisa Bryant saw him when she pulled up at a stop sign. She’s a pastor, and she had just finished a service at one church and had to be at another in an hour. She was in a hurry. But just the week before, she had preached about Jesus calling his followers to bring the blind and suffering to him. She gave Hunt a ride.  

The interaction came at a crucial time for Hunt. “I was at bottom at that point,” he told me. His house was strewn with glass shards because he kept breaking things. He was struggling with addiction. “Everything was falling down around me, mentally and emotionally,” he said. “I was asking God to kill me that day she picked me up.”

Instead, Hunt started going to the new 12-step program Bryant had started at her main church, Madam Russell United Methodist. “They just kind of pulled around me, supported me,” he said of the congregation. He’s helped Bryant expand that program, the only one in a town where opioid use is rife but all the addiction-recovery programs are oversubscribed. Bryant has also set up community-service opportunities at her church for people convicted of drug offenses, and is working to secure transitional housing for people dealing with addiction.  

Bryant doesn’t think the point of being a Christian is just to get to heaven after death, but to see the kingdom of heaven on Earth, too. She’s realized that “giving these people a new community, a healthy community, is one of the best things we can do for them,” she said. “We all need each other. That’s just how we’re created.”

People gather before a meeting of the Saltville 12 Step Recovery Group in the basement of Madam Russell Memorial United Methodist Church. March 13, 2023. Saltville, Virginia. March 13, 2023.

Support for this story was provided by the Magnum Foundation, in partnership with the Commonwealth Fund.

Photographs by Olivia Joan Galli

Last fall, on an overcast Sunday morning, I took a train from New York to Montclair, New Jersey, to see Auntie, my mother’s older sister. Auntie is our family archivist, the woman we turn to when we want to understand where we came from. She’s taken to genealogy, tending our family tree, keeping up with distant cousins I’ve never met. But she has also spent the past decade unearthing a different sort of history, a kind that many Black families like mine leave buried, or never discover at all. It was this history I’d come to talk with her about.

Auntie picked me up at the train station and drove me to her house. When she unlocked the door, I felt like I was walking into my childhood. Everything in her home seemed exactly as it had been when I spent Christmases there with my grandmother—the burgundy carpets; the piano that Auntie plays masterfully; the dining-room table where we all used to sit, talk, and eat. That day, Auntie had prepared us a lunch to share: tender pieces of beef, sweet potatoes, kale, and the baked rice my grandma Victoria used to make.

When Auntie went to the kitchen to gather the food, I scanned the table. At the center was a map of Mississippi, unfurled, the top weighted down with an apple-shaped trivet. Auntie told me that the map had belonged to Victoria. She had kept it in her bedroom, mounted above the wood paneling that lined her room in Princeton, New Jersey, where she and my grandfather raised my mother, Auntie, and my two uncles. I’d never noticed my grandmother’s map, but a framed outline of Mississippi now hangs from a wall in my own bedroom, the major cities marked with blooming magnolias, the state flower. My grandmother had left markings on her map—X’s over Meridian, Vicksburg, and Jackson, and a shaded dot over a town in Hinds County, between Jackson and Vicksburg, called Edwards.

I wondered whether the X’s indicated havens or sites of tragedy. As for Edwards, I knew the dot represented the start of Auntie’s story. Following an act of brutality in 1888, my ancestors began the process of uprooting themselves from the town, ushering themselves into a defining era of Black life in America: the Great Migration.

I first learned about the lynching of Bob Broome in 2015, when Auntie emailed my mother a PDF of news clippings describing the events leading up to his murder. She’d come across the clippings on Ancestry.com, on the profile page of a distant family member. Bob was Victoria’s great-uncle. “Another piece of family history from Mississippi we never knew about,” Auntie wrote. “I’M SURE there is more to this story.”

I knew that her discovery was important, but I didn’t feel capable then of trying to make sense of what it meant to me. As I embarked on a career telling other people’s stories, however, I eventually realized that the lynching was a hole in my own, something I needed to investigate if I was to understand who I am and where I came from. A few years ago, I began reading every newspaper account of Bob Broome’s life and death that Auntie and I could find. I learned more about him and about the aftermath of his killing. But in the maddeningly threadbare historical record, I also found accounts and sources that contradicted one another.

Bob Broome was 19 or 20 when he was killed. On August 12, 1888, a Sunday, he walked to church with a group of several “colored girls,” according to multiple accounts, as he probably did every week. All versions of the story agree that on this walk, Bob and his company came across a white man escorting a woman to church. Back then in Mississippi, the proper thing for a Black man to do in that situation would have been to yield the sidewalk and walk in the street. But my uncle decided not to.

A report out of nearby Jackson alleges that Bob pushed the white man, E. B. Robertson, who responded with a promise that Bob “would see him again.” According to the Sacramento Daily Union (the story was syndicated across the country), my uncle’s group pushed the woman in a rude manner and told Robertson they would “get him.” After church, Robertson was with three or four friends, explaining the sidewalk interaction, when “six negroes” rushed them.

All of these stories appeared in the white press. According to these accounts, Bob and his companions, including his brother Ike, my great-great-grandfather, approached Robertson’s group outside a store. The papers say my uncle Bob and a man named Curtis Shortney opened fire. One of the white men, Dr. L. W. Holliday, was shot in the head and ultimately died; two other white men were injured. Several newspaper stories claim my uncle shot Holliday, with a couple calling him the “ring leader.” It is unclear exactly whom reporters interviewed for these articles, but if the reporting went as it usually did for lynchings, these were white journalists talking to white sources. Every article claims that the white men were either unarmed or had weapons but never fired them.

Bob, his brother Ike, and a third Black man were arrested that day; their companions, including Shortney, fled the scene. While Bob was being held in a jail in nearby Utica, a mob of hundreds of white men entered and abducted him. Bob, “before being hanged, vehemently protested his innocence,” The New York Times reported. But just a few beats later, the Times all but calls my uncle a liar, insisting that his proclamation was “known to be a contradiction on its face.” Members of the mob threw a rope over an oak-tree branch at the local cemetery and hauled my ancestor upward, hanging him until he choked to death. A lynch mob killed Shortney a month later.

[From the May 2022 issue: Burying a burning]

In the white press, these lynchings are described as ordinary facts of life, the stories sandwiched between reports about Treasury bonds and an upcoming eclipse. The Times article about Bob noted that days after his lynching, all was quiet again in Utica, “as if nothing had occurred.” The headlines from across the country focus on the allegations against my uncle, treating his extralegal murder simply as a matter of course. The Boston Globe’s headline read “Fired on the White Men” and, a few lines later, “A Negro Insults a White Man and His Lady Companion.” The subtitle of The Daily Commercial Herald, a white newspaper in nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi, read: “Murderous and Insolent Negro Hanged by Indignant Citizens of Utica.”

The summary executions of Bob Broome and Curtis Shortney had the convenient effect of leaving these stories in white-owned newspapers largely unexamined and unchallenged in the public record. But the Black press was incredulous. In the pages of The Richmond Planet, a Black newspaper in Virginia’s capital, Auntie had found a column dismissing the widespread characterization of Bob as a menace. This report was skeptical of the white newspapers’ coverage, arguing that it was more likely that the white men had attacked the Black group, who shot back. “Of course it is claimed that the attack was sudden and no resistance was made by the whites,” the article reads.

The author and her aunt at her aunt’s home in New Jersey (Olivia Joan Galli for The Atlantic)

The newspapers we found don’t say much more about the lynching, but Auntie did find one additional account of Bob Broome’s final moments—and about what happened to my great-great-grandfather Ike. A few days after the lynching, a reader wrote to the editor of The Daily Commercial Herald claiming to have been a witness to key events. “Knowing you always want to give your readers the correct views on all subjects,” the letter opens, the witness offers to provide more of “the particulars” of my uncle’s lynching. According to the letter writer, when the lynch mob arrived the morning after the shooting, the white deputy sheriff, John Broome, assisted by two white men, E. H. Broome and D. T. Yates, told the crowd that they could not take the prisoners away until the case was investigated. Bob, Ike, and the third Black man were moved to the mayor’s office in the meantime. But more men from neighboring counties joined the mob and showed up at the mayor’s office, where they “badly hurt” Deputy Sheriff Broome with the butt of a gun. The white men seized Bob and hanged him, while Ike and the other Black man were relocated to another jail. The witness’s account said the white Broomes “did all that was in the power of man to do to save the lives of the prisoners.”

I don’t know whether or how these white Broomes were related to each other or to the Black Broomes, but unspoken kinship between the formerly enslaved and their white enslavers was the rule, rather than the exception, in places like Edwards. I believe that whoever wrote to the paper’s editor wanted to document all those Broome surnames across the color line, maybe to explain Ike’s survival as a magnanimous gesture, even a family favor. If the witness is to be believed, the intervention of these white Broomes is the only reason my branch of the family tree ever grew. As Auntie put it to me, “We almost didn’t make it into the world.”

Each time I pick up my research, the newspaper coverage reads differently to me. Did my uncle really unload a .38-caliber British bulldog pistol in broad daylight, as one paper had it, or do such details merit only greater skepticism? We know too much about Mississippi to trust indiscriminately the accounts in the white press. Perhaps the story offered in The Richmond Planet is the most likely: He was set upon by attackers and fired back in self-defense. But I also think about the possibility that his story unfolded more or less the way it appears in the white newspapers. Maybe my uncle Bob had had enough of being forced into second-class citizenship, and he reacted with all the rage he could muster. From the moment he refused to step off the sidewalk, he must have known that his young life could soon end—Black folk had been lynched for less. He might have sat through the church service planning his revenge for a lifetime of humiliation, calculating how quickly he could retrieve his gun.

In the Black press, Bob’s willingness to defend himself was seen as righteous. The Richmond Planet described him in heroic terms. “It is this kind of dealing with southern Bourbons that will bring about a change,” the unnamed author wrote. “We must have martyrs and we place the name of the fearless Broom [sic] on that list.” Bob’s actions were viewed as necessary self-protection in a regime of targeted violence: “May our people awaken to the necessity of protecting themselves when the law fails to protect them.” My mother has become particularly interested in reclaiming her ancestor as a martyr—someone who, in her words, took a stand. Martyrdom would mean that he put his life on the line for something greater than himself—that his death inspired others to defend themselves.

[From the September 2021 issue: His name was Emmett Till]

In 1892, four years after my uncle’s murder, Ida B. Wells published the pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in which she wrote that “the more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.” In that pamphlet, an oft-repeated quote of hers first appeared in print: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” After the Civil War, southern states had passed laws banning Black gun ownership. For Wells, the gun wasn’t just a means of self-defense against individual acts of violence, but a collective symbol that we were taking our destiny into our own hands.

The gun never lost its place of honor in our family. My great-grandmother DeElla was known in the family as a good shot. “She always had a gun—she had a rifle at the farm,” my mother told me. “And she could use that rifle and kill a squirrel some yards away. We know that must have come from Mississippi time.” My mother’s eldest brother, also named Bob, laughed as he told me about DeElla’s security measures. “I always remember her alarm system, which was all the empty cans that she had, inside the door,” he told me. “I always thought if someone had been foolish enough to break into her house, the last thing he would have remembered in life was a bunch of clanging metal and then a bright flash about three feet in front of his face.”

The lynching more than a decade before her birth shaped DeElla and her vigilance. But as the years passed, and our direct connection to Mississippi dwindled, so did the necessity of the gun. For us, migration was a new kind of self-protection. It required us to leave behind the familiar in order to forge lives as free from the fetter of white supremacy as possible. My northbound family endeavored to protect themselves in new ways, hoping to use education, homeownership, and educational attainment as a shield.

After we studied my grandmother’s map of Mississippi, Auntie brought out another artifact: a collection of typewritten pages titled “Till Death Do Us Join.” It’s a document my grandmother composed to memorialize our family’s Mississippi history sometime after her mother died, in 1978. I imagine that she sat and poured her heart out on the typewriter she kept next to a window just outside her bedroom.

According to “Till Death Do Us Join,” my family remained in Edwards for another generation after Bob Broome’s death. Ike Broome stayed near the place where he’d almost been killed, and where his brother’s murderers walked around freely. Raising a family in a place where their lives were so plainly not worth much must have been terrifying, but this was far from a unique terror. Across the South, many Black people facing racial violence lacked the capital to escape, or faced further retribution for trying to leave the plantations where they labored. Every available option carried the risk of disaster.

[The Experiment Podcast: Ko Bragg on fighting to remember Mississippi burning]

A little more than a decade after his brother was murdered, Ike Broome had a daughter—DeElla. She grew up on a farm in Edwards near that of Charles Toms, a man who’d been born to an enslaved Black woman and a white man. As the story goes, DeElla was promised to Charles’s son Walter, after fetching the Toms family a pail of water. Charles’s white father had provided for his education—though not as generously as he did for Charles’s Harvard-educated white half brothers—and he taught math in and served as principal of a one-room schoolhouse in town.

A newspaper clipping from 1888 that
mentions Bob Broome’s killing (The Boston Globe)

Charles left his teaching job around 1913, as one of his sons later recalled, to go work as a statistician for the federal government in Washington, D.C. He may have made the trek before the rest of the family because he was light enough to pass for white—and white people often assumed he was. He was demoted when his employer found out he was Black.

Still, Charles’s sons, Walter and his namesake, Charles Jr., followed him to Washington. But leaving Mississippi behind was a drawn-out process. “Edwards was still home and D.C. their place of business,” my grandmother wrote. The women of the family remained at home in Edwards. World War I sent the men even farther away, as the Toms brothers both joined segregated units, and had the relatively rare distinction, as Black soldiers, of seeing combat in Europe. When the men finally came back to the States, both wounded in action according to “Till Death Do Us Join,” DeElla made her way from Mississippi to Washington to start a life with Walter, her husband.

Grandma Victoria’s letter says that DeElla and Walter raised her and four other children, the first generation of our family born outside the Deep South, in a growing community of Edwards transplants. Her grandfather Charles Sr. anchored the family in the historic Black community of Shaw, where Duke Ellington learned rag and Charles Jr. would build a life with Florence Letcher Toms, a founding member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Occasionally, aunts would come up to visit, sleeping in their car along the route because they had nowhere else to stay. The people mostly flowed in one direction: Victoria’s parents took her to Mississippi only two times. According to my mother, Victoria recalled seeing her own father, whom she regarded as the greatest man in the world, shrink as they drove farther and farther into the Jim Crow South.

Later, after receiving her undergraduate degree from Howard University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Victoria joined the faculty at Tennessee State University, a historically Black institution in Nashville. During her time there, efforts to desegregate city schools began a years-long crisis marked by white-supremacist violence. Between her own experiences and the stories passed down to her from her Mississippi-born parents, Victoria knew enough about the brutality of the South to want to spare her own children from it. As a grown woman, she had a firm mantra: “Don’t ever go below the Mason-Dixon Line.” Her warning applied to the entire “hostile South,” as she called it, though she made exceptions for Maryland and D.C. And it was especially true for Mississippi.

Keeping this distance meant severing the remaining ties between my grandmother and her people, but it was a price she seemed willing to pay. My mother recalls that when she was in college, one of her professors thought that reestablishing a connection to Mississippi might be an interesting assignment for her. She wrote letters to relatives in Edwards whom she’d found while paging through my grandmother’s address book. But Victoria intercepted the responses; she relayed that the relatives were happy to hear from my mom, but that there would be no Mississippi visit. “It was almost like that curtain, that veil, was down,” Mom told me. “It just wasn’t the time.”

Yet, reading “Till Death Do Us Join,” I realized that maintaining that curtain may have hurt my grandmother more than she’d ever let on. She seemed sad that she only saw her road-tripping aunts on special occasions. “Our daily lives did not overlap,” my grandmother wrote. “Sickness or funeral became occasions for contacting the family. Death had its hold upon the living. Why could we not have reached into their daily happiness.”

I sense that she valued this closeness, and longed for more of it, for a Mississippi that would have let us all remain. But once Victoria had decided that the North was her home, she worked hard to make it so. While teaching at Tennessee State, my grandmother had met and married a fellow professor named Robert Ellis. He was a plasma physicist, and they decided to raise their four children in New Jersey, where my grandfather’s career had taken him. My grandparents instilled in their children, who instilled it in my cousins and me, that you go where you need to go for schooling, career opportunities, partnership—even if that means you’re far from home.

My grandfather was one of the preeminent physicists of his generation, joining the top-secret Cold War program to harness the power of nuclear fusion, and then running the experimental projects of its successor program, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, after declassification. His work has become part of our family lore as well. My mother has her own mantra: “Same moon, same stars.” It appears on all of the handwritten cards she sends to family and friends; I have it tattooed on my right arm. It signifies that no matter how far apart we are, we look up at the same night sky, and our lives are governed by the same universal constants. The laws of physics—of gravity, inertia, momentum, action, and reaction—apply to us all.

In 2011, when I was 17, Victoria died. She’d suffered from Alzheimer’s, which meant that many things she knew about Mississippi were forgotten twice: once by the world, and then in her mind. Auntie and I shared our regrets about missing the opportunity to ask our grandmothers about their lives, their stories, their perspective on Mississippi.

But Victoria’s prohibition on traveling south also passed on with her. The year Victoria died, my mother took a job in Philadelphia, Mississippi, as one of two pediatricians in the county. Two summers later, she started dating the man who became my stepfather, Obbie Riley, who’d been born there before a career in the Coast Guard took him all over the country.

Mom and I had moved quite a few times throughout my childhood, but this relocation felt different. I was surprised by how quickly Mississippi felt like home. Yet the longer we stayed, and the more I fell in love with the place, the more resentment I felt. I envied the Mississippians who’d been born and raised there, who had parents and grandparents who’d been raised there. I’d always longed to be from a place in that way.

My stepfather has that. With a rifle in his white pickup truck, he spends his Sundays making the rounds, checking in on friends and relatives. He’ll crisscross the county for hours, slurping a stew in one house, slicing pie in another, sitting porchside with generations of loved ones.

This is what we missed out on, Auntie told me in her dining room. If our family hadn’t scattered, we would better know our elders. To keep all my ancestors straight, I refer to a handwritten family tree that my grandmother left behind; I took a picture of it when I was at Auntie’s house. Every time I zoom in and scan a different branch, I’m embarrassed by how little I know. “The distance pushed people apart,” Auntie said. “I think there is some strength from knowing your people, some security.”

[Read: They called her ‘Black Jet’]

The traditional historical understanding of the Great Migration emphasizes the “pull” of economic opportunity in the North and West for Black people, especially during the industrial mobilizations of the two world wars. Certainly such pulls acted on my family, too: The lure of better jobs elsewhere, as my grandmother put it, gave Ike Broome’s son-in-law the chance to make a life for himself and his family in Washington. But this understanding fails to explain the yearning that we still have for Mississippi, and the ambivalence my grandmother had about shunning the South.

Mississippi had its own pull, even as violence of the kind visited on Bob Broome made life there grim for Black families. A 1992 study by Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck indicated that a main predictor of migration by Black people from southern counties before 1930 was the cumulative number of lynchings in those counties. The collective memory of those lynchings was a force that compounded over time. Hope and despair commingled for my family, as it did for so many others. As the physicists in my family might describe it, these forces worked in tandem to push my ancestors north, and tear them from the South.

Only after I learned the details of Bob’s death did I feel that I truly comprehended my family’s path. In returning to Mississippi, my mother and I were part of a new movement of Black Americans, one in which hundreds of thousands of people are now returning to the states where they’d once been enslaved. I think of this “Reverse Great Migration” as a continuation of the original one, a reaction, a system finally finding equilibrium. I feel like we moved home to Mississippi to even the score for the tragedy of the lynching in 1888, and for all that my family lost in our wanderings after that. We returned to the land where DeElla Broome hurried between farmhouses fetching water, where Charles Toms ran the schoolhouse.

It took well over a century for my family to excavate what happened in Edwards, buried under generations of silence. Now we possess an uncommon consolation. Even our partial, imperfect knowledge of our Mississippi history—gleaned from my grandmother’s writing and from newspaper coverage, however ambiguous it may be—is more documentation than many Black Americans have about their ancestors.

[From the November 2017 issue: The building of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice]

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates lynching victims; it is the nation’s only site dedicated specifically to reckoning with lynching as racial terror. Bob Broome is one of more than 4,000 people memorialized there. I’ve visited the memorial, and the steel marker dedicated to those who were lynched in Hinds County, Mississippi—22 reported deaths, standing in for untold others that were not documented. Although those beautiful steel slabs do more for memory than they do for repair, at least we know. With that knowledge, we move forward, with Mississippi as ours again.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The History My Family Left Behind.”

To tell a story is to place a frame around wayward events. The storyteller points to scenes unfolding within the frame and says, This is important. The implication is that what transpires beyond those borders is less consequential, or not so at all. Susan Sontag offered a similar assessment in one of the final speeches she gave before her death: “To tell a story is to say: This is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.”

In the United States, many of our recent cultural battles about history are actually conflicts over where to place the frame. Does the American story start with a group of English pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620? Or with the arrival of slaves at the British colony of Virginia a year before? Should we merely admire an ancient artifact we encounter in a museum, or extend our imagination to consider how it came to be there in the first place? In many fields—artistic, historical, political—people find themselves on opposite sides of a widening divide: those who believe that the frames we’ve inherited capture reality effectively, and those who believe that they must be expanded, adjusted, or perhaps jettisoned altogether.

Claire Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, can be read in the context of this cultural shift. In many ways, it is a traditional tale, a multigenerational narrative that stretches from 1927 to 2010, and takes place across multiple continents, following the life and times of the Cassars. They are a French family from Algeria, part of the large expatriate community that arrived with the colonization of the country starting in 1830 and became known as pieds-noirs. (The novel, as Messud reveals in her author’s note, is based on her own family history.)

The pieds-noirs owed their presence to a conflict between France and Algeria tracing back to 1827. As a character in Messud’s novel puts it: “Basically, France owed a good deal of money to Hussein Dey, the Algerian leader, and rather than pay it, especially after he insulted us by hitting our consul with a fly whisk, we invaded the country.” The Indigenous population endured brutal treatment from the French (famously documented by Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism) and eventually instigated a revolution in 1954. The conflict raged until 1962, when Algeria achieved independence.

[Read: The patron saint of political violence]

This Strange Eventful History is set, at least initially, against this backdrop, and its contours suggest a story that has been told by many artists, such as Graham Greene in The Heart of the Matter and Sydney Pollack in the film adaptation of the memoir Out of Africa: an elaborate narrative about the travails of a relatively privileged colonial family whose members feel both connected to and estranged from the distant metropole. In these stories, the native people, living just beyond the borders of the frame, remain unacknowledged, or appear intermittently as background characters. Yet at the outset of her book, Messud hints at her intention to gently expand the limits of her novel to include perspectives that are not central to her story but nevertheless shape the lives and world of her main characters. Throughout this unfailingly ambitious work, Messud oscillates between modes, from a saga about a family that is defined by the loss of their adopted home to one that, in fits and starts, moves beyond the confines of its frame.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of This Strange Eventful History is Messud’s seeming ambivalence about how to start it. The prologue announces her theory of storytelling through Chloe, the novel’s narrator and the character who serves as Messud’s stand-in. In a formulation that seems to contradict Sontag’s, Chloe says: “A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.” She then describes how this perspective complicates her work: “And so this story—the story of my family—has many possible beginnings, or none … all and each a part of the vast and intricate web. Any version only partial.”

Messud passes back and forth before several possible doors through which she might enter her novel, all of them entryways to potentially rich and meaningful stories. The door that she spends the most time considering opens to her family’s remorse about its past and origins:

I could begin with the secrets and shame, the ineffable shame that in telling their story I would wish at last to heal. The shame of the family history, of the history into which we were born. (How to forget that after attending the birth of his first grandson, my father, elderly then, tripped on the curb and fell in the street, a toppled mountain, and as he lay with the white down of his near-bald head in the gutter’s muck he muttered not “Help me” but “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”?)

It’s an arresting scene; the elderly man, brought low by gravity and maybe guilt as well, seems to be arriving at a kind of end-of-life awareness—if not comprehension of his direct culpability for the history into which he was born, then, perhaps, a flicker of understanding that his relative comfort might have come at the expense of others. Yet Messud-as-Chloe does not elaborate, and quickly moves on. This is emblematic of her approach throughout the novel; she does not focus solely on the story of the colonizers or the colonized, but does something more subtle. During the period of French rule in Algeria, the Indigenous population was subjected to appalling abuse (in A Dying Colonialism, Fanon describes “the overrunning of villages by the [French] troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of women, the pillaging of a country”). Messud’s decision to foreground the struggles and sorrows of the Cassars amid these circumstances doubles as a recognition of how humans metabolize suffering: Our particular experiences assume paramount importance, while political events are often folded into our personal dramas.

Messud eventually chooses an entry point—she opens in 1940 with a character named François, who is based on her father, writing a letter to his own father, who lives in Greece. François has recently traveled from Greece to Algeria with his younger sister, Denise; his mother; and his aunt. His father, a French naval officer, sent them away because of the rapidly accelerating conflict between the Allied and Axis powers. The children have never lived in Algeria, though their parents consider it home. As his mother makes clear to a young François, “This was where his family belonged, and where they had been from for a hundred years.”  

In the next section, the novel dashes ahead several years; François, as a college student in Massachusetts, reminisces about his childhood in Algeria, a place he too now considers home. For the most part, This Strange Eventful History proceeds accordingly, skipping years and darting across the map, charting the stories of its central characters’ lives as they move around the world; as they get married, have children, and contend with life’s various trials.

[Read: A redacted past slowly emerges]

Yet there are notable moments when Messud widens her frame. In the following chapter, we meet an older Denise, now a law student in Algiers. One day, she writes to François in America about how she and her friends were recently struck by a car as they were gossiping outside a coffee shop. As Messud describes it:

The car attacked her from behind like a shark, a blue Deux Chevaux, it mounted the curb and took a bite, as it were, and then slipped back into the ocean, back onto the road—but the car wasn’t going fast—it could really have injured her if it had been going fast, right? It was perfectly calibrated—the speed, the silence, the suddenness—as if the driver had planned the whole thing, maybe a joke, but maybe to terrify, or terrorize her, if you’d rather, to make her afraid just to walk down the street laughing with her friends. To make her afraid to be. Why would someone do that? To Denise, who wouldn’t hurt a fly?

Denise is initially unsure whom she sees in the passenger seat of the departing car, but she suspects it is a “Berber girl from the provinces” whose name she cannot remember. By the time she recalls the girl’s name, however, she wonders if she is thinking of the right person: “Zohra, yes, Zohra, the name came back to her even as her certainty evaporated; maybe it hadn’t been her?” Only years later, after Zohra achieves notoriety as a resistance fighter, does Denise “insist that she had definitely seen Zohra Drif in the Deux Chevaux that morning.”

Messud’s decision to include this anecdote is essential for many reasons. First, the sudden appearance of the blue car represents a literal incursion into the blithe and serene reality that Denise and her friends inhabit, untroubled by the profound anguish of their Indigenous Algerian neighbors, such as Drif herself (the real Drif, now in her 80s, spoke with The Washington Post in 2021 about her time as a resistance fighter). It also represents a narrative incursion into the story of a pied-noir family that, despite its own desire for freedom and happiness, largely seems unable to recognize the struggles of Indigenous Algerians to achieve the same. And it is notable that Denise remains unsure about Drif’s presence at the scene of the crash until Drif’s fame motivates Denise to become the star of her own personal drama, an innocent who survived an “early salvo of the insurgency” with “only torn stockings and a constellation of bruises.” In her self-mythologizing, Denise narrows the “spread and simultaneity” of narrative possibilities—including the possibility that Drif wasn’t there—until she is the only person staring at us from the frame.

Messud’s strange and eventful novel leaps across space and time occasionally and subversively, including episodes that reveal the larger backdrop against which the lives of her characters take shape. Throughout, Messud seems to be transmitting a message to her readers about our contemporary relationship with stories: As our understanding of history becomes more complicated and nuanced, so too must the stories we tell about the past, and the way we tell them.

Open a map of the United States. Select a big city at random. Chances are, it has recently approved or is on the verge of approving a lavish, taxpayer-funded stadium project for one or more of its local sports teams. This is true in Las Vegas, where the team currently known as the Oakland Athletics will soon be playing in a new ballpark up the street from the home of the NFL’s Raiders, also formerly of Oakland. Combined, the two stadiums will end up receiving more than $1.1 billion in public funding, not counting tax breaks. Something similar is happening in Chicago, where Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the White Sox, wants roughly $1 billion in public funding for a new stadium in the South Loop, while the Halas-McCaskey family, which owns the Bears, is requesting $2.4 billion for a new football stadium on the lakefront. Likewise in Cleveland, which has one of the nation’s highest childhood poverty rates, as well as in Phoenix, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. In Buffalo, the Bills recently received $850 million for new digs, and in Nashville, politicians approved a record $1.26 billion subsidy for the Titans.

Economic research is unequivocal: These subsidies are a boondoggle for taxpayers, who have spent nearly $30 billion on stadiums over the past 34 years, not counting property-tax exemptions or federal revenues lost to tax-exempt municipal bonds. Stadiums do not come close to generating enough economic activity to pay back the public investment involved in building them—especially when they’re coupled with lease agreements that funnel revenue back to owners or allow teams to play in the stadiums rent-free. Even as an investment in your city’s stores of community spirit, stadium subsidies at this price are hard to justify. As the economist J. C. Bradbury told the Associated Press, “When you ask economists if we should fund sports stadiums, they can’t say ‘no’ fast enough.”

[Read: Sports stadiums are a bad deal for cities]

You would think that three decades’ worth of evidence would be enough to put an end to the practice of subsidizing sports stadiums. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. America finds itself on the brink of the biggest, most expensive publicly-funded-stadium boom ever, and the results will not be any better this time around.

Until the 1980s, super-rich sports franchise owners generally did not seek or receive extravagant public subsidies. Three events changed that. First, in 1982, Al Davis, the Raiders’ owner, left Oakland for Los Angeles because officials refused to fund renovations to the Oakland Coliseum, which the city had built in the ’60s. (They would later cave on this; the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995, lured by public funds.) Second, in 1984, Robert Irsay, the owner of the Baltimore Colts, moved the team to Indiana after being offered a sweetheart deal at the publicly funded Hoosier Dome. Finally, a few years later, Maryland approved hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding—along with a historically lopsided lease agreement—for a new stadium for the Orioles, now Baltimore’s only remaining team. “If you want to save the Orioles,” Maryland House Speaker R. Clayton Mitchell said at the time, “you have to give them this kind of lease.”

Camden Yards turned out to be beautiful—a downtown shrine of hand-laid brick and cast-iron gates that evoked the odd-angled “Golden Age” of American ballpark design. Major League Baseball, sportswriters, and obliging local politicians were also quick to credit Camden Yards with spurring a revival of Baltimore’s downtown—and, with it, of inspired downtowns elsewhere. “No longer would communities across America build stadiums devoid of character,” Major League Baseball mythologized in a press release celebrating the park’s 30th anniversary, “but instead would build them to flow seamlessly in existing and historic neighborhoods, playing key roles in the revitalization of urban America.” This turned out to be a trap; now politicians could convince themselves that capitulating to team owners was sound public policy. Never mind that, in Baltimore’s case, Camden ultimately didn’t do all that much reviving. (The neighborhoods surrounding Camden Yards actually shed employers in the decades after the park opened, while unemployment and crime rose, according to Bloomberg.) Owners have made the idea central to the way they sell stadium projects ever since.

In the early ’90s, for example, boosters pitched Cleveland’s Jacobs Field in a newspaper ad that promised “$33.7 million in public revenues every year” along with “28,000 good-paying jobs for the jobless” and “$15 million a year for schools for our children.” Now, here’s how Dave Kaval, president of the Oakland A’s, described the benefits of the $855 million subsidy that the A’s were trying to extract from Oakland, in 2021, before the team decided to relocate to Las Vegas: “Seven billion dollars in economic impact. 6,000 permanent and mostly union jobs. 3,000 construction jobs. We’re building more than a ballpark here.”

[Read: Stadiums have gotten downright dystopian]

Stadiums don’t actually do these things. The jobs they create are seasonal and low-wage. They tend not to increase commercial property values or encourage much in the way of economic activity, besides a bit of increased spending in bars and restaurants surrounding the venue—which is mostly being substituted for dollars that were previously being spent elsewhere. Tax revenues attributable to stadiums fall well short of recouping the public’s investment. Economically speaking, stadium subsidies mostly just transfer wealth from taxpayers to the owners of sports franchises.

This became clear to economists early into the previous subsidy boom. For a time, cities and states appeared to have wised up. Taxpayers covered 68 percent of the costs of major sports venues built or renovated between 1992 and 2008, but only 31 percent of the costs from 2009 to 2020, according to research that Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of Holy Cross, shared with The Athletic. Unfortunately, this turned out to be just a lull. Team owners tend to demand stadium upgrades at the end of their leases, which typically last 30 years. Camden Yards, which spurred the last subsidy boom, was built 32 years ago. We are merely reentering stadium-subsidy season.

This time, the costs promise to be even higher, the consequences even more depressing. As the expense of stadium construction has gone up, so has the size of the subsidies owners ask for—along with the shamelessness and determination with which they seek them out. That’s one reason so many teams have threatened to relocate in just the past few months. The American major leagues are all more profitable than they’ve ever been—Major League Baseball alone made a record $11.6 billion in 2023, the NFL $19 billion—while individual teams are more valuable, thanks in part to subsidies. As Matheson told me in 2022, “Any time a team gets a new stadium, you immediately see its valuation rise.”

The situation presents a classic collective-action problem. American cities would all be better off if stadium subsidies disappeared. But individual political leaders seem to be afraid to buck the trend unilaterally, lest they be blamed for the departure of a beloved franchise.

The obvious solution is federal legislation. A good start would be to reverse the existing, obscure statutory provision that helped make the stadium-subsidy cycle possible. Congress made interest on municipal bonds tax-exempt in 1913 in order to encourage public infrastructure spending. The intention was not to finance private construction, and in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, Congress tried to cut off that form of misappropriation. What the law should have done was simply revoke access to tax-exempt bonds for use on private projects, such as stadiums. Instead, it left a loophole. It enabled state and local governments to issue tax-exempt bonds for private projects as long as they finance at least 90 percent of the cost of the project themselves and pay no more than 10 percent of the debt service using revenues generated by the project. Essentially, a city could access the bonds only if it was willing to drain its own funds for the benefit of sports-franchise owners. The assumption was that no city would be stupid enough to accept such a bad bargain—but that assumption turned out to be deeply mistaken. Lawmakers have introduced bills seeking to correct the oversight several times over the years, but none has become law.

In the meantime, change is up to sports fans. As beloved as sports are in America, socializing stadium construction remains unpopular. Indeed, when stadium subsidies are put to voters, many of them fail, as a referendum on a sales-tax extension to pay for new stadiums for the Chiefs and Royals recently did in Kansas City. Some groups, such as the Coalition to Stop the Arena at Potomac Yard, which organized against a proposed $1.5 billion subsidy for Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Wizards and Washington Capitals, have recently even managed to stop subsidized projects before that point. “Teams need a place to play, and if local governments told them to pay a fair rent or go pound sand, owners would have little choice but to go along,” Neil deMause, a co-author of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit, told me.

[Matt Connolly: Enjoy your awful basketball team, Virginia]

Telling owners to pound sand, however, would require cities, and fans, to call a billionaire’s bluff. That is no small thing. Teams don’t usually relocate, but when they do, it’s painful; as an Oakland sports fan, I know this from experience. I empathize with the impulse to tell politicians to do whatever it takes to keep a team. Especially when I think of all the A’s games I won’t be able to take my son to.

But “whatever it takes” is an untenable stance, especially when the bill from last time has not yet fully been paid, and the likelihood of a return on the investment is so demonstrably dubious. In Alameda County, where I live, taxpayers are still paying off the debt issued to renovate the Oakland Coliseum in 1995. When the tab is finally settled, the subsidy will have cost us $350 million, paid for mostly out of the general fund. In that time, Oakland has contended with several historic budget shortfalls and struggled to address its competing crises, including homelessness and rising crime. Giving $855 million to John Fisher, the A’s owner, would not have solved these problems. The evidence suggests, in fact, that it would have only made things worse. One wonders how much more evidence will have accumulated 30 years from now, when the next subsidy boom threatens to begin.