If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns.

But don’t be fooled. Americans are very invested, and very worried, about the future of artificial intelligence. Polling consistently shows that a majority of adults from both major parties support government regulation of AI, and that demand for regulation might even be growing. Efforts to curb AI-enabled disinformation, fraud, and privacy violations, as well as to support private-sector innovation, are under way at the state and federal levels. Widespread AI policy is coming, and the next president may well steer its direction for years to come.

On the surface, the two candidates couldn’t be further apart on AI. When AI has come up on the campaign trail, the focus has not been on substantive issues, but instead on the technology’s place in a supposed culture war. At a rally last winter, Trump railed against the Biden administration’s purported “use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens” (a contorted reference, perhaps, to an interview that week in which Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas denounced the “politicization” of public education around the dangers of AI, including misinformation). Trump also said he would overturn Joe Biden’s executive order on AI—a sprawling document aiming to preserve consumer and civil rights while also spurring innovation—“on day one.” Then, over the summer, the GOP platform lambasted the “dangerous” executive order as slowing innovation and imposing “Radical Leftwing ideas” on the technology, perhaps referring to the order’s stated “dedication to advancing equity.” Elon Musk, now the most powerful Trump surrogate in the world, recently invited his followers to “imagine an all-powerful woke AI.” Harris, for her part, hasn’t discussed AI much as a candidate, but she is leading many of Biden’s AI efforts as vice president, and her economic platform mentions furthering “the commitments set forth in the 2023 AI Executive Order.”

[Read: The real AI threat starts when the polls close]

Such rhetoric is par for the course this election cycle: Trump in particular has never been known for nuance or gravity, and tearing down Biden is obviously his default position. What no one seems to remember, though, is that Biden’s “dangerous” executive order echoes not one but two executive orders on AI that Trump himself signed. Many of the policies around AI that President Biden and Vice President Harris have supported extend principles and initiatives from Trump’s term—such as efforts to establish federal funding for AI research, prepare American workers for a changing economy, and set safety standards for the technology. The two most recent presidential administrations even agreed on ensuring that federal AI use is nondiscriminatory. Trump’s approach to the technology, in turn, built on foundations laid during Barack Obama’s presidency.

In other words, despite how AI has been approached by their campaigns (that is, barely, or only in the shallowest terms), both candidates have real track records on AI, and those records are largely aligned. The technology appeared to be a rare issue driven for years by substance rather than partisanship, perhaps because prior to the launch of ChatGPT, it wasn’t on many Americans’ minds. With AI now assuming national importance, Trump has promised to tear that consensus down.

Still, there’s a good chance he won’t be able to—that reason and precedent will prevail in the end, if only because there’s already so much momentum behind what began during his own administration. “To the extent that the Trump administration worked on issues of science and technology policy, it worked on AI,” Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who previously served as the acting director of Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told me. And in doing so, it was inheriting priorities set under a man Trump has called “the most ignorant president in our history.” Near the end of his second term, Obama directed several federal agencies to study and plan for the growing importance of “big data” and AI, which culminated at the end of 2016 with the publication of a report on the “future of artificial intelligence,” as well as a national strategic plan for AI research and development. Those included broad suggestions to grow the federal government’s AI expertise, support private-sector innovation, establish standards for the technology’s safety and reliability, lead international conversations on AI, and prepare the American workforce for potential automation.

A few years later, Trump began to deliver on those recommendations through his executive orders on AI, a 2019 update to that strategic plan, and his White House’s guidance to federal agencies on using AI. “The Trump administration made AI a national technology priority,” Michael Kratsios, who served as the country’s chief technology officer under Trump and helped design his AI strategy, told Congress last October. In that testimony, Kratsios, who is currently the managing director of the start-up Scale AI, lauded much of Obama’s previous and Biden’s current work on AI—even criticizing Biden for not doing enough to implement existing policies—and noted the continued importance of supporting “high-quality testing and evaluation” of AI products.

Biden and Harris have since taken the baton. Trump’s first executive order in particular did “have a lot of the ingredients that got much more developed in Biden’s EO,” Ellen Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School who has advised the National Telecommunications and Information Administration on the fair and responsible use of algorithms, told me. “So when Trump says he’s going to repeal it with a day-one action, one wonders, what is it exactly that’s so offensive?” Even specific policies and programs at the center of Biden and Harris’s work on AI, such as establishing national AI-research institutes and the National AI Initiative Office, were set in motion by the Trump administration. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, which Harris’s economic plan touts by name, originated with AI legislation that passed near the end of Trump’s term. Innovation, supporting American workers, and beating China are goals Harris and Trump share. Bluster aside, the candidates’ records suggest “a lot of similarities when you get down to the brass tacks of priorities,” Alexandra Givens, the president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy and civil rights, told me.

[Read: The EV culture wars aren’t what they seem]

To be clear, substantive disputes on AI between Harris and Trump will exist, as with any pair of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates on most issues. Even with broad agreements on priorities and government programs, implementation will vary. Kratsios had emphasized a “light touch” approach to regulation. Some big names in Silicon Valley have come out against the Biden administration’s AI regulations, arguing that they put undue burdens on tech start-ups. Much of the Republican Party’s broader message involves dismantling the federal government’s regulatory authority, Goodman said, which would affect its ability to regulate AI in any domain.

And there is the “Radical Leftwing” rhetoric. The Biden-Harris administration made sure the “first piece of work out the public would see would be the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” Nelson said, which outlines various privacy and civil-rights protections that anyone building or deploying AI systems should prioritize. Republicans seem to have a particular resistance to these interventions, which are oriented around such concepts as “algorithmic discrimination,” or the idea that AI can perpetuate and worsen inequities from race, gender, or other identifying characteristics.

But even here, the groundwork was actually laid by Trump. His first executive order emphasized “safety, security, privacy, and confidentiality protections,” and his second “protects privacy, civil rights, [and] civil liberties.” During his presidency, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology issued a federal plan for developing AI standards that mentioned “minimizing bias” and ensuring “non-discriminatory” AI—the very reasons why the GOP platform lashed out against Biden’s executive order and why Senator Ted Cruz recently called its proposed safety standards “woke.” The reason that Trump and his opponents have in the past agreed on these issues, despite recent rhetoric suggesting otherwise, is that these initiatives are simply about making sure the technology actually functions consistently, with equal outcomes for users. “The ‘woke’ conversation can be misleading,” Givens said, “because really, what we’re talking about is AI systems that work and have reliable outputs … Of course these systems should actually work in a predictable way and treat users fairly, and that should be a nonpartisan, commonsense approach.”

In other words, the question is ultimately whether Trump will do a heel turn simply because the political winds have shifted. (The former president has been inconsistent even on major issues such as abortion and gun control in the past, so anything is possible.) The vitriol from Trump and other Republicans suggests they may simply oppose “anything that the Biden administration has put together” on AI, says Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a computer scientist at Brown University who previously advised the Biden White House on science and technology policy and co-authored the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. Which, of course, means opposing much of what Trump’s own administration put together on AI.

But he may find more resistance than he expects. AI has become a household topic and common concern in the less than two years since ChatGPT was released. Perhaps the parties could tacitly agree on broad principles in the past because the technology was less advanced and didn’t matter much to the electorate. Now everybody is watching.

Americans broadly support Biden’s executive order. There is bipartisan momentum behind laws to regulate deepfake disinformation, combat nonconsensual AI sexual imagery, promote innovation that adheres to federal safety standards, protect consumer privacy, prevent the use of AI for fraud, and more. A number of the initiatives in Biden’s executive order have already been implemented. An AI bill of rights similar to the Biden-Harris blueprint passed Oklahoma’s House of Representatives, which has a Republican supermajority, earlier this year (the legislative session ended before the bill could make it out of committee in the senate). There is broad “industry support and civil-society support” for federal safety standards and research funding, Givens said. And every major AI company has entered voluntary agreements with and advised the government on AI regulation. “There’s going to be a different expectation of accountability from any administration around these issues and powerful tools,” Nelson said.

When Obama, Trump, and Biden were elected, few people could have predicted anything like the release of ChatGPT. The technology’s trajectory could shift even before the inauguration, and almost certainly will before 2028. The nation’s political divides might just be too old, and too calcified, to keep pace—which, for once, might be to the benefit of the American people.

When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.”

By some estimates, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults are child-free—which is about three times the number of people who are childless, who want kids but cannot have them. Yet politicians have long ignored child-free adults, perhaps out of strategic necessity: The majority of the voters they’re trying to reach either have kids or want to someday, and the nuclear family is exalted in American culture. In a Pew Research Center poll from earlier this year, roughly half of respondents said that if fewer people chose to have children, it would negatively affect the country. As a result, the child-free rarely come up, Zachary Neal, a Michigan State University researcher who studies that population, told me: “Politicians don’t even want to touch it.”

The run-up to the general election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has underscored that point. Harris has no biological children, but her campaign has highlighted her role as a doting stepmom. Abortion has been a major issue, but pro-choice politicians tend to emphasize the stories of women who need one for, say, life-saving medical reasons, rather than those who simply don’t want a child. When a 2021 Fox News interview with J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, was re-aired—the one in which he calls Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”—much of the resulting conversation focused on childless adults, not child-free ones.

[Read: The post-liberal Catholics find their man]

So far, politicians haven’t had much reason to pander to the child-free; the group has been too fractured to be called a voting bloc. But when I spoke with child-free people for this article, they told me that Vance’s “cat ladies” comments were upsetting enough to inspire political action. Coulter believes that his remarks amounted to hate speech. Yet the response among many Democrats, she said, just seems to be We like babies too!—not exactly the defense she wanted. She founded a nonpartisan group called the Alliance of Childfree Voters and posted about a webinar with a panel of speakers; not long afterward, 500 people had registered—the limit for the Zoom call.

The alliance is still new. But the portion of American adults who say they don’t want children could amount to as many as 60 million voters, and that population has been growing. Eventually, Neal predicted, there will come a time when ignoring child-free voters will be riskier than acknowledging them—and “we may be approaching that sort of tipping point fairly soon.”

Child-free people are a pretty varied bunch. Politically, they’re quite diverse, skewing slightly liberal overall but encompassing plenty of conservatives; in surveys, many of them say they’re “moderate,” Neal told me. Data he collected with his colleague Jennifer Watling Neal show that not wanting children is more common among those who are men, white, or identify as LGBTQIA—but not by any overwhelming margins. And child-free people care about a wide variety of policy issues, not all having to do with being child-free. “There’s not really an effective way to speak to them as a single bloc in a way that would matter at the ballot box,” Neal said.

A scattered array of voters can consolidate, though; it’s happened before. Take evangelical conservatives. In the 1960s, evangelicals were seen more as a ragtag assemblage of hippies than as a Republican bulwark; abortion was not a political rallying point for them. But the group started shifting rightward in the ’70s, and some white evangelical leaders began to dream up how they might gain a political foothold. By the ’80s, they were organizing around a “pro-family” platform that included an anti-abortion agenda. Today, white evangelicals are one of the most powerful voting blocs in America; in 2016, 81 percent of them voted for Trump.

Of course, evangelicals already had something crucial in common: religious belief. If child-free adults are largely just connected by a lack of interest in something—well, that’s not necessarily a strong bond. When I interviewed Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at Pew, for a story on why secular congregations have struggled to take off, he told me: “Being uninterested in something is about the least effective social glue, the dullest possible mobilizing cry, the weakest affinity principle, that one can imagine.” I was reminded of that insight when Neal told me he’s found that child-free adults report feeling pretty neutral about other child-free adults, whereas parents say in surveys that they feel very warmly toward other parents. Amy Blackstone, a University of Maine sociologist and the author of Childfree by Choice, told me that when she and her husband started a local group for child-free adults, they pretty quickly ran out of things to talk about. “After a few meetings,” she said, “we realized we didn’t really have much in common with each other other than we opted out of having kids.”

But recent events may be giving the child-free a stronger emotional tie. Vance’s suggestion that parents should get more votes than nonparents, the many Republicans claiming that only people with kids care about the country’s fate: This is the kind of rhetoric that could make child-free adults feel excluded from the cultural norm—and that they’re together on the margins. Studies suggest that when members of a group sense discrimination from the rest of society, it can increase the degree to which they identify with one another and feel proud of their collective identity, which can be politically mobilizing. One reason, researchers believe, is that members might feel they have a “linked fate”—regardless of other differences, they have certain shared interests or vulnerabilities that need protecting. (That’s one theory for why Black Americans, a historically marginalized group, tend to vote fairly cohesively despite being more and more economically diverse.)

[Read: One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgment of the child-free]

Child-free people have long been societal misfits to some degree. Studies have shown that nonparents tend to be perceived as less warm than parents, and couples understood as unlikely to have kids are viewed less positively than those seen as likely to have them. The child-free people I spoke with told me that they’d overcome a lot of shame in their own disinterest in having kids. Therese Shechter, a documentary filmmaker who directed My So-Called Selfish Life, about women who choose “not to become a mother,” told me that for a long time, she believed that she would have children, despite having no desire to do so. She spent her 30s filled with dread, imagining that parenthood lurked in the near future. Blackstone told me that when she finally decided not to have kids, she dealt with intrusive questions and inappropriate comments about her choice, something she finds many child-free people relate to.

And yet, Blackstone said that until this election, she had trouble convincing people that any stigma about the child-free exists. Now, with political rhetoric making animosity toward child-free adults plainly visible, such skepticism may finally have been squashed. “I think J. D. Vance did us a favor, because he made very public what most of us who are child-free have known our whole lives,” she said: “that there are people who are extraordinarily hostile toward us.”

With that prejudice confirmed, ironically, some child-free people may finally feel empowered to embrace their own choice—because if they don’t, who will? After Vance’s screed blew up, women started posting pictures or videos of themselves, sometimes with their actual cats, declaring themselves child-free and ready to vote. Shechter told me that it “was a great moment of solidarity”; Coulter said her feed was “lit up like a Christmas tree.” Around that time, she deleted the phrase cool aunt from her X bio. “I realized I had it there as kind of an apology,” she told me, a “way of softening myself for people who don’t know me.”

For a population to become a voting bloc, it needs shared policy goals—and the child-free have plenty. The people I spoke with said they care deeply about reproductive freedom, and specifically the freedom to not reproduce at all. Their concerns include not only abortion rights but also access to birth control, which many fear could be threatened by the 2022 Dobbs decision striking down federal abortion protections. Democrats introduced the Right to Contraception Act in Congress shortly after the decision, which fell short of the votes it needed to advance in the Senate; all but two Republicans voted against it. Meanwhile, many doctors refuse to perform permanent birth-control procedures, such as tubal ligations, for fear that a patient will regret it—a concern that often seems grounded not in actual legal barriers but in paternalism.

Birth control should fit squarely within the reproductive-rights conversations Democrats are already having. Yet politicians tend to focus on emotionally potent but less common stories—of emergency abortions, or IVF granting long-yearned-for families. Blackstone remembers hearing Tim Walz talk about how his family wouldn’t exist without fertility treatments, and thinking that she could say something similar about birth control. “My family of two”—herself and her husband—“would not have been possible had I not had access to the reproductive health care that I did,” she said. But “I don’t know that Tim Walz had families like mine in mind.”

[Read: More people should be talking about IVF the way Tim Walz is]

Another policy priority could be workplace equity. Many child-free people believe that they’re expected to work extra hours, or that they’re paid less than their colleagues with kids; in one 2022 survey, 74 percent of respondents—parents and nonparents alike—reported that people with children are treated better in their workplace than those without. That doesn’t mean child-free adults want flexibility taken away from parents: They’d like everyone to have fair working conditions, for pay to be transparent, and for people to understand that child-free adults have obligations outside work too—say, taking care of their own parents or babysitting godchildren. “We do all actually have families,” Shechter said. “They just might not look like someone else’s family.”

It’s unclear how Coulter’s group, the Alliance of Childfree Voters, will push for these policies. She’s polling members to figure out where their priorities lie; whatever comes next, this nascent voting bloc probably won’t swing the November election. But if one thing can pull the child-free population together in the future, Coulter told me, it might be “finally feeling pride.” Child-free adults don’t just want to be seen. They want to be seen as valuable—as mentors to the kids around them, agents of social change, volunteers in their communities and emotional rocks for the people in their life. “I would love to hear a leader one day refer to my family as a family, which I don’t think I will in my lifetime,” Blackstone told me. “If that happened before I die, I would just be overjoyed.”

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Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a tight race for a Senate seat, has been on the defensive about a manufacturing renaissance happening in her own backyard.

Thanks to incentives that President Joe Biden's administration has championed in the Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation, Michigan alone could see 50,000 or more new jobs by 2030 brought on by the boom in electric vehicles. And yet, in a new ad, Slotkin all but disavows EVs, telling voters, “I live on a dirt road, nowhere near a charging station, so I don’t own an electric car.”

“No one should tell us what to buy, and no one is going to mandate anything,” she says in the ad. “What you drive is your call—no one else’s.” Only in between such assurances does Slotkin allow that if an EV boom is happening, she’d rather those cars be built in Michigan than in China.

Normally, an economic explosion of this magnitude would be the kind of win that any politician would fight for and hinge reelections on. But Slotkin’s party is clearly not winning the information war over electric vehicles. The IRA is spurring General Motors, Ford, Volvo, BMW, and many others to retrofit old car plants and build new battery factories across the U.S., challenging China for control over the technology of the future. Economic stories like Michigan’s are playing out in Georgia, Nevada, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee, too. Yet, according to recent data from the nonprofit advocacy group American EV Jobs Alliance, more than 75 percent of the political messaging about EVs this election cycle has been negative. Donald Trump has been railing against what he and critics falsely call electric-vehicle “mandates” for drivers; Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t exactly been on camera ripping hard launches in an electric Hummer the way Biden did in 2021. Instead, she too has been reassuring crowds that “I will never tell you what car you have to drive.” Democrats have decided to treat what should have been one of the biggest manufacturing and job wins of the past century as a political liability.

“I think the great, irritating tragedy to all this is the actual story of EVs and auto jobs is a very good one,” says Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican political consultant who co-founded the American EV Jobs Alliance and also runs the EV Politics Project, which is dedicated to pushing Republicans towards EV adoption. His group found that most political messaging about EVs references people being forced to drive electric someday under some kind of “gas car ban” that starts with layoffs now and will ultimately kill the American auto industry. None of that is true; nowhere in the U.S. has “mandates” that every person must drive an electric car. Trump has also repeatedly and misleadingly said that EVs “don’t go far” (their ranges can rival gas vehicles) and are “all going to be made in China” while comically overstating the cost of building electric-vehicle chargers. Somehow, it seems to be working. During this election, the narrative has spun out of control, particularly in Michigan, Murphy told me. Tens of thousands of new manufacturing jobs are coming to Michigan because of EVs, Murphy said. “The problem is that it’s the biggest secret of the campaign.”

The Biden administration did set a goal of increased EV sales—that 50 percent of all new cars sold in 2030 would have zero tailpipe emissions. Functionally, that means developing a robust local battery-manufacturing ecosystem after America and the rest of the world spent decades outsourcing it to China. And the IRA was meant to give carmakers and parts suppliers the teeth to actually do that work. Ample evidence suggests that the act’s plans are working as intended—especially in red and swing states. The Hyundai Motor Group has sped up the opening of Georgia’s biggest-ever economic-development project, its new $7.6 billion EV-making “Metaplant.” Last week, Scout Motors—a classic American brand revived by the Volkswagen Group—unveiled an electric truck and SUV that it aims to manufacture in South Carolina at a new $2 billion factory by 2027. Tennessee is becoming an epicenter for battery-making, thanks to some $15 billion invested for various EV projects. And Kentucky is also seeing billions in job-creating investments from Toyota, Rivian, and other companies as it seeks to become what Governor Andy Beshear has called “the EV capital of the United States.” Cleaner cars, manufactured at home, with battery technology no longer firmly in the hands of a geopolitical adversary—from an electoral perspective, what’s not to like?

Yet Democrats on the campaign trail are reluctant to talk about any of this. And so far, American car buyers simply aren’t as willing to buy EVs as policy makers and automakers hoped. EV sales have risen significantly since the early days of the Biden administration, but they haven’t taken off the way automakers believed they would. GM, for example, once projected 1 million EVs produced by 2025 but will have scored a major victory if it can sell 100,000 by the end of this year. Those slower-than-expected sales, plus the fact that automakers are getting crushed on still-high battery costs, have led several companies to cancel or delay new EV projects. Plenty of Americans have little to no personal exposure to cars outside the gas-powered ones they’ve been driving for a century, and still regard EVs as expensive toys for wealthy people on the coasts.

Democrats have not yet figured out how to square these two realities: American voters might support the jobs that EV manufacturing creates, but they can be fearful of or even hostile toward the product. Instead, the party has ceded rhetorical ground to Trump’s line of attack: that Biden’s (and presumably Harris’s) policies are meant to force Americans to someday buy a car they don’t want, or even “take away your car,” as the Heritage Foundation has put it. “The Republican Party in the Senate race has been pounding, pounding, pounding on the [internal-combustion engine] ban, which is a scary thing that tests pretty well if you want to scare voters, particularly in Michigan,” Murphy said. The GOP’s anti-EV sentiment has been helped along, too, by the fossil-fuel industry’s ad campaigns.

Meanwhile, the CEOs of Ford, General Motors, and the EV start-up Rivian have all expressed dismay about how politicized vehicle propulsion has become. The Tesla CEO Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be much help: Trump has repeatedly said that Musk has never asked him to go easier on EVs, something Musk cheerfully reaffirmed on X. Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s EV “mandate” on day one of his presidency; whether he can without an act of Congress is the subject of intense speculation in the auto industry. Then again, a Trump sweep could mean he’d get the firepower to do exactly that, by targeting the tax breaks to buy EVs, the incentives to manufacture them, or both. Trump is unlikely to be able to halt a transition happening at car companies all over the world, but he could delay it or put the U.S. further behind the curve.

In theory, no red-state governor or member of Congress should want to give up the jobs that the EV boom is creating. (Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, has contended that EV manufacturing will mean job losses for the auto industry overall, even though Honda and LG Energy Solution are committing some $4 billion to its future electric “hub” in Vance’s home state of Ohio.) But the success of this manufacturing boom in Georgia or Michigan does hinge on people actually buying those products. One recent survey by an automotive research group found that a person’s political identity has become less associated with EV acceptance. But Republican rhetoric could reverse that. Murphy pointed to one recent poll his group conducted showing that 62 percent of Michigan respondents said the government’s push to adopt more electric vehicles is a bad thing for the state. Until recently, he told me, he felt that the auto industry’s leaders weren’t spooked by the political push against EVs. Now, he said, “they ought to be.”

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On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been very clear about the shape of his revenge against the mainstream media. He’s mused, a few times, about throwing reporters in jail if they refuse to leak their sources. He’s talked about taking away broadcast licenses of networks he’s deemed unfriendly. He’s made it clear that he will notice if any member of the press gets too free with their critiques and do his best to get in their way. These last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a signal that maybe his threats are having an impact. Both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had prepared endorsements of Kamala Harris, and their owners asked them at the last minute not to run them. Media reporters floated the obvious question of whether the owners backed off to appease Trump.

In this episode, we talk to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. This year, The Atlantic made the decision, rare in its history but consistent during the Trump years, to endorse a presidential candidate. (You can read the magazine’s endorsement of Kamala Harris here.) Goldberg talks about navigating both pressures from owners and threats from the administration. And we discuss the urgent question of whether the media, pummeled and discredited for years by Trump, is ready for a second Trump administration.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Journalists who have covered Donald Trump’s rallies—and I am one—know that it’s an uncomfortable situation. He’ll be giving a speech and mention the “fake media” or talk about reporters as the “enemy of the American people,” and then the crowd will all turn towards the press area and start pointing and booing.

Trump has said he would jail reporters who don’t reveal sources or take away broadcast licenses for outlets he doesn’t like. So there’s been a longtime standoff between the free press and a possible future president—which, in these last few days leading up to the election, has gotten a lot more real.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Recently, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, at the 11th hour, decided not to endorse a political candidate, because their owners asked them not to. Both of these papers were going to endorse Kamala Harris, so the last-second decision certainly makes it look like they were backing off to appease Trump.

Motives aside, though, this moment raises an urgent question: Can The Washington Post; the L.A. Times; us, The Atlantic; all of American journalism stand up to a second Trump administration? Today, days before the election, we have with us our own editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to talk about what’s at stake in this endorsement story.

Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: As you know, the L.A. Times and The Washington Post made news for announcing they would not be endorsing in this presidential race. What was your reaction to that news?

Jeffrey Goldberg: My reaction was that they are not masters of excellent timing. If they had decided that, which is a perfectly fine position to take—and in retrospect, I kind of, sort of wish we took that position in 2016.

Rosin: You do?

Goldberg: Kind of. I just said, “kind of, sort of.” That, I think, connotes ambivalence. Look—I see both sides of the issue, but that’s not the issue right now with the L.A. Times or The Washington Post.

If you’re going to decide that, decide it deliberately. Decide it, well, I would say, any time except two weeks before the most contentious and possibly closest election in American history.

The timing was exquisitely bad. I mean, you could not have chosen a worse time to make these decisions, and it’s mind-boggling.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is: It’s perfectly legitimate for us to have a debate and for newspapers, internally, to have a debate about whether endorsements or not are appropriate. Because, you know, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, gave reasons in his op-ed for why he didn’t think endorsements were appropriate. So that’s a totally legitimate debate. It’s just that the timing of it is not right.

Goldberg: Yeah. The timing was awful in that it created mistrust, anger, anxiety. It’s way too late to make that decision. I mean, there’s a separate issue. I do believe that it’s the owner’s prerogative to decide if a newspaper should endorse X person or Y person.

Put aside the practical arguments, which, you know—does it really change anybody’s mind? Does it really do anything? I think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to say that no journalism organization should speak in that kind of declarative voice.

You have a bunch of columnists. You have opinion writers. You have all kinds of people, podcasters. They should talk about what they think is going on in the election. They could talk about who they think is better and who is worse. I get all the sides of it. It’s just—it’s a little late in the process to announce that you’re not going to endorse.

Rosin: The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos—he did defend the decision in his op-ed, saying, Americans don’t trust the news media, and this is a move to restore that trust. Setting the timing aside for a minute, what do you think of that defense?

Goldberg: Horseshit. I think it’s horseshit. I thought the whole first three, four paragraphs of that were horseshit, blaming the victim. I mean, it’s true. It’s true. The media is very, very low in polls of trustworthiness, lower than even Congress at this point, but there’s a reason for that. And a very large reason is that there’s a concerted, multiyear, billion-dollar campaign to undermine public trust in traditional modes of American journalism.

I mean, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are just two of the people who are organizing a campaign to make sure that Americans don’t trust fact-based journalism. Fact-based journalism doesn’t work for them, and so they are literally killing the messenger. And so for Jeff Bezos to write that we, in the press, have a problem and that no one trusts us, without alerting people to one of the huge reasons why, strikes me as ridiculous.

Rosin: I see. So it’s horseshit because (A) it doesn’t apply to The Washington Post—The Washington Post is not part of the problem—and (B) he didn’t elaborate in any even remotely brave way about what he meant.

Goldberg: There’s a war going on against the quote-unquote mainstream media. People who do not want to be investigated by mainstream journalists, by investigative reporters who are professionally trained to uncover things that powerful people don’t want uncovered—the powerful people have organized themselves in a way to make sure that no citizen trusts The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the networks, the Associated Press, Reuters, plus a whole bevy of other investigative outfits.

They want to destroy our ability to communicate to people that we’re trying—I mean, look: I’m not saying that we always get things right. We don’t always get things right. But they have a vested interest in making sure that people don’t trust those outlets, because those outlets are investigating them. And for Jeff Bezos—who is part of the oligarchic class, obviously—for Jeff Bezos to write this op-ed or have it written for him without acknowledging this fundamental fact seemed to be absurd.

Rosin: So readers, as we know, reacted by canceling their subscriptions, 250,000 so far. And I have—

Goldberg: Which is crazy.

Rosin: Crazy. I have many friends who work on the Post. It’s adding up to what? Is it a tenth or an eighth of their subscription base?

Goldberg: I think it’s 10 percent of their subscription base.

Rosin: Which has already been waning over the last many years.

Goldberg: Well, I mean, it did grow. I mean, it grew in the Trump era. A lot of people believed them, as they should have, when they said that Trump was a threat to the democratic order and to the American idea. They made their motto literally “Democracy dies in darkness.”

A large number of people who were opposed to Trumpism became subscribers. What do they think is going to happen to those subscribers? The feeling of betrayal. I mean, I’ve talked to so many people who canceled or were thinking of canceling. The feeling of betrayal was deep in ways that I was even surprised. And here was an example of Jeff Bezos not understanding the consequences of his decision making.

Rosin: One obvious conclusion—or even mild conclusion—is that Jeff Bezos is concerned about what Trump thinks, which leads me to think that if Trump wins, lots of newspapers might have to account for that in their decision making and thinking. Like, it feels like that’s how a chilling effect comes to be, is that you have to take into account what Trump thinks, even if it’s minor. Like, I’ll lose some customers, or I won’t get this contract or another contract, that you have to be thinking about that, and that becomes part of the decision making.

Goldberg: Yeah. Look: no reason to disbelieve Bezos when he says that the meeting between Trump, Trump’s people, and the Blue Origin—his space company—the CEO of that space company that happened that same day was coincidental. He didn’t even know. He runs a very large organization. That’s completely plausible that he had no idea that the timing was just terribly bad for him.

The larger point is: If you have multifarious business dealings with the federal government, and you’re worried about a revenge-minded president with authoritarian predilections, it’s asking a lot of a CEO not to take the threat that that president poses into account when you make decisions, which suggests to me that he’s not equipped to be the owner of a newspaper.

The owner of a newspaper should place him or herself in a structurally oppositional frame of mind, which is: You have to be counter-opportunistic. Oh, the government’s gonna cut my $3 billion contract. Screw them. I’m going to do what’s right, and I’m going to stand up for the newspaper.

If you’re not equipped to own a publication, you really shouldn’t. You just really shouldn’t. And, you know, the shame of this is that, from everything I could see and everything that we all could see, he was pretty good at owning The Washington Post for a while.

Rosin: Well, that makes me wonder if the industry, as a whole, is ready for a possible second Trump administration. I mean, what you just described sounds like a kind of steeling and bravery that you have to be prepared for. And if Jeff Bezos, who has a huge amount of power, you know—like, if he loses a chunk, what does it matter?

If he can’t do it, doesn’t that make you worry about the industry in general?

Goldberg: Well, it depends, person to person. I mean, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, is in a different category. He and his family, apparently, just believe in meddling. I mean, they believe that—look: Let me take one step back and note that ownership in the American system—ownership of a publication or a quality publication or a putatively quality publication in the American system—is very complicated and counterintuitive.

You buy a thing. As a rich person, you buy a publication, a business, and then you have to promise not to interfere with the running of the business. That’s the way it’s worked, traditionally. You have to—literally, there’s no other business that I could think of where, you know, you go out and buy a bakery, and the first thing the bakery manager tells you is, Do not tell us what kind of bread to make, and if you do, all your employees are going to excoriate you publicly. You’d kind of be like, Well, I thought the fun part of owning a bakery is getting them to make bread I like, you know. And that’s what journalism is, and this is my relationship with our owner at The Atlantic.

You know, she turns over to me decision making on all editorial matters. We have a relationship of trust, and we communicate, and I use her as a sounding board all the time, and it’s a healthy relationship. But she accepts the line that our culture has devised and that a healthy democratic culture devises so that ownership is separate from editorial.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Earlier this month, The Atlantic endorsed Kamala Harris, which is the fifth time that the magazine has made an endorsement: Lincoln, LBJ, and then three times in the last three elections, all while Trump was the candidate and while you’ve been editor in chief.

Goldberg: Well, the first time, actually, was becoming editor, but I wasn’t yet editor. I had a lot to do with the editorial, but just technically speaking.

Rosin: Okay, so why did you break the mold here?

Goldberg: The Atlantic promises its readers that it’s going to be of no party or clique. That’s written to the founding manifesto of The Atlantic, written in 1857 and signed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne and all the rest. And, you know, I do not want to screw with those guys, right? (Clears throat.)

I just don’t want their ghosts haunting me. So we try very, very hard to be of no party or clique. But to me, the issue of Donald Trump is not an issue of party. I believe, and I think The Atlantic has expressed this belief in its journalism for 160-plus years: We believe that a strong conservative party, a strong conservative strain in American thinking, and a strong liberal strain—that makes a democracy healthy.

Let these ideas battle it out, and let the people decide who has the better idea. So we are a big tent, where we try to have differing opinions, but we don’t support a particular party. And if Hillary Clinton in 2016 were running against Mitt Romney, John McCain, Marco Rubio, you know, Jeb Bush—name the list—we would have felt no urge whatsoever to endorse.

But I looked back, and others looked back at the 1964 endorsement of Lyndon Johnson to try to understand what that was about. And it was not about Barry Goldwater’s positions on taxation or about privatization of government resources or even, in a way, foreign policy. It was about his demeanor. It was about his character. It was about his extremism.

And so the endorsement of LBJ was less an endorsement of LBJ than a warning about Barry Goldwater’s characterological defects. So when the subject of Trump comes up, we’re not looking at what he thinks we should do about the taxation of tips, or even his position on NATO, as ridiculous as I personally find it.

It’s about his honesty. It’s about his mental fitness. It’s about his moral fitness. It’s about his racism. It’s about his expressed misogyny. It’s about all those things. So it’s not about party. It’s not about ideas. It’s about behavior and disposition and the threat that he poses.

And so in 2016, and then again, for reasons of consistency, if nothing else, in 2020 and now in 2024, we felt a need to endorse—again, not because he’s a conservative, because he’s not actually a conservative.

Rosin: Now, in any of these times, did you ever have doubts—like, real, serious doubts that you should do it?

Goldberg: No. Again, in retrospect, getting into it, I understand where, you know, if Bezos had announced a year ago, You know what? We just don’t want to do this anymore—I totally understand the arguments for not doing it. We did it with Hillary. And remember: We were also, like everybody, in shock, in a kind of shock.

People who cover politics and know American politics—we were shocked that the Republican Party chose this person to be its standard-bearer four years after it picked Mitt Romney and eight years after it picked John McCain. How is this even possible?

So in that shock, in disbelief, I think we are more predisposed to say, You know what? This is so abnormal that we must say something. Then once you say it in 2016 and you see what he’s done over four years, then in 2020, how is it not possible to do the same thing? And then after January 6, 2021, it seemed pretty obvious to me that we would have to keep going with these anti-endorsements.

Rosin: And in your mind, does that shift the magazine’s position to less of an observer-critic and more of a participant in the election?

Goldberg: The magazine is a participant in the election in that members of the writers collective of The Atlantic are pretty clear, in many different ways, about how they feel about Donald Trump, what they think about Donald Trump.

And by the way, we’re not a resistance magazine, and I’ve said this over and over again. If we could run pro-Trump material that could pass through our fact-checking process, I would print it. Our goal is to say things that are true, right?

And so we do have pieces, from time to time, that come in that do argue that “X Trump policy is smart.” We ran a piece recently by H. R. McMaster, his former national security advisor, who said, You know what? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some of the things that he’s done may be for the wrong reasons. Maybe he executed them stupidly. But these ideas are good ideas.

So we’ll run pieces like that. Again, it just has to get through fact-checking. So yes—it’s a definitively different kind of decision when you speak in an institutional voice, no byline, and say, The Atlantic believes that X person should be president and not Y person.

And yes, you can create an image out in the world that you are now aligned with a party. That’s why I’m so sensitive on this question of being of no party or clique, because this is not about Republican—

If, in the next election, the Republicans nominate, God knows, near anybody, I don’t feel, you know—as long as they adhere to basic notions of rule of law, as long as they exercise self-restraint in their behavior and speech, as long as they haven’t been proven to try to have overthrown the government.

I mean, I was down there on January 6. I saw, I heard his speech. And then I walked down to the Capitol. I know what he did. You know, there’s two candidates in the race right now. One tried to overthrow the government; the other didn’t. It’s not that hard to say, as an institution, We’re against overthrowing the government.

And so yeah, there are consequences to all these decisions, but I’m comfortable with the decision. As I said, there’s a part of me that wishes that we hadn’t gotten involved in that, but I’m also proud of the fact that we took these stands.

Rosin: In what?

Goldberg: In institutional endorsement.

Rosin: Like, if you could avoid it, you would?

Goldberg: Well, look: The Atlantic. I mean, one of the lessons of looking back at The Atlantic, you know, one of the great mysteries, by the way—I haven’t been able to figure this out: 1860, The Atlantic endorses Lincoln for president. 1864, no endorsement. It’s like, What does a guy have to do?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.

Goldberg: You know, jeez louise. I don’t know. I mean, I would love to find the papers, if there are papers, that communicate why they didn’t run an endorsement. (Laughs.) But anyway, you go from 1860 to 1964. You jump 104 years into the future before they endorse again. You know, as the editor in the Trump presidency, in the Trump era, I’ve got to say, Hmm, for 105, 104 years, they managed not to endorse. That means something. And so, you know, obviously, there’s going to be ambivalence in my thinking.

Rosin: Okay. Time to leave Lincoln and enter the future. After the break, we talk about what a second Trump era might look like.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So you’ve touched on some of the stakes. Let’s contemplate an actual Trump era. Like, we’re living in a Trump era. You yourself have faced specific—well, I’ll take that back. The Atlantic has faced specific threats—

Goldberg: No. You could say me. It’s true.

Rosin: —from Trump. And, specifically, in response to your reporting. So in 2020, you reported that Trump called veterans and fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” which has clearly remained on Trump’s mind. Your recent reporting that he wished he had “the kind of generals Hitler had” also struck a chord. He’s not a fan. He’s interested in settling scores. Do you actually run through scenarios about the actual things that the magazine could face under a Trump presidency?

Goldberg: Sure. I don’t want to go into specifics, but there are, obviously—and again, I’m not trying to be dramatic here. I don’t expect storm troopers to come and try to padlock the doors of The Atlantic on January 20 if Trump should win or Trump should seize power in some manner or form.

But there are, obviously, ways that someone bent on revenge could take his revenge, not just on The Atlantic but a lot of the press and other institutions in American life. So of course we think about it. But you know, there’s exactly zero choice here. If you find out something that’s true, and it’s relevant for your readers, you just gotta—I don’t mean to sound self-righteous or anything, but that’s literally the job. So you’ve got to do it, regardless of what the threat may be.

Rosin: I mean, I actually do think about what it looks like, because this is a relatively new situation for Americans, for American journalists. I do have trouble imagining what it would look like to operate in that kind of atmosphere. Like, how does a president get in the way of American journalism?

Goldberg: Right. I mean, look: There are—I’m not talking about us, specifically, now—but there have been discussions broadly across journalism. Obviously, one thing that Trump has talked about again and again is changing the libel laws, right? And this would require the Supreme Court to overturn a decision made in the 1960s about what constitutes libel.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if they—and people who are supportive of Trump fund efforts to make it harder for journalists to do their jobs vis-à-vis, you know, nuisance lawsuits and trying to get legislation changed and trying to get the Supreme Court behind this legislation that would make it much easier to win libel suits against journalism organizations.

So there’s that. That’s a threat. There are other things that can happen, obviously. Something that’s been talked about a lot is the use of the IRS against enemies. I mean, obviously, in normal-behaving administrations, you’re not allowed to politicize the tax-auditing process, but I don’t put that past them, obviously.

There are a bunch of things that you can do that don’t involve, you know, frog-marching journalists to jail. I go back to this point: They’re helping to create an atmosphere that’s comprehensively hostile to work that previous American presidents—I’m going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson now—previous American presidents understood was indispensable to the smooth functioning of democracy. Which is to say: have a robust, independent press that could not be punished, jailed, silenced by a government.

Rosin: So that’s the thing that I most worry about, is the shifting understanding of facts and truth. In your conversation with Barack Obama a couple of years ago, it was very interesting. He talked about how, in his campaign, he used to be able to show up in places, say swing-voter places, and convince people to change their minds about him.

And then he told you that he doesn’t really think that that would be true anymore, because there’s a world where new information, a new fact, a truth—it doesn’t really move people. And I wonder if you think journalism is in a similar position. Like, we used to be able to show up and give people new information, new facts, and we would hope that those things would move them. And now it seems to work less that way.

Goldberg: Well, yeah. I’ll give you an example from my own work to buttress your point. So four years ago, I published a story based on sources that Donald Trump has repeatedly used the terms suckers and losers to describe American war dead and American war wounded.

Obviously, a very damaging story. And the criticism from the White House—Donald Trump’s White House at the time—was, Well, you don’t have any evidence. You don’t have any people on the record or using their names, so it’s all made up. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that became the discourse. Right?

Last year, John Kelly came out—John Kelly, former chief of staff, former Marine general, chief of staff to Donald Trump in his White House—came out and said, on the record with his name: Oh yeah. That’s true. He used to say “suckers” and “losers” all the time. He’s confirmed it to any number of publications. He confirmed it on the record to me. And so what I get, even today, are people saying, Well, you never proved it.

And I said, Well, actually, John Kelly’s now said that he’s heard Donald Trump. They say, You’ve never had any sources on the record. Well, John Kelly says it happened. Well, John Kelly’s a liar.

And it’s like, Okay, it doesn’t matter. My point is: It seems not to matter when you present people with what you consider to be evidence or what, in traditional journalism modes, is considered evidence. It doesn’t matter anymore. People are impervious to new information if it doesn’t conform to what they would like to believe.

And so we see that writ large, where, you know, the bubble around a certain group of people in America—let’s say the hardcore Trump voters—the bubble is impermeable, right? There’s no way of penetrating and saying, No. You said you wanted more evidence. Here’s evidence.

Nope. That evidence—that’s a deep fake. That evidence—nope. The person who says it to you is lying.

Rosin: Yes, Jeff, but that’s our tool. Like, that’s what we got. That’s what we do. Like, what we do is evidence, facts. We present those evidence and facts, and if those just drop dead to the ground, then what’s our role? Like, what are we doing?

Goldberg: Well, first of all, I never give up, because why would you give up trying to convince people (A)?

(B) and look: I do think this is a unique proposition of The Atlantic at this moment. I understand 30 percent of the people in America are really not going to believe, or say they don’t believe, The Atlantic at this moment. So we’re writing for the 70 percent, but I also think we’re writing for the 30 percent.

I think just because you’re banging your head against the wall doesn’t mean that wall is not eventually gonna crack. And we have to find new ways of communicating, new ways of buttressing our reporting.

I also believe that people change all the time. And just because this is the pattern, and this is the path we’re on, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be this way forever. I mean, I guess I’m optimistic in the sense that I think, you know, we’re in a fever period right now and that the fever will break.

You know, my colleague—our colleague—Caitlin Flanagan, always says that “the truth bats last.” And I hope she’s right. It’s just harder and harder.

I mean, this calls back to a little bit of the Jeff Bezos piece in which he doesn’t acknowledge that the reason the press is mistrusted is because powerful people are trying to get ordinary citizens to mistrust the press—for their own selfish business reasons or political reasons. So we just have to keep going.

I have a lot of criticism of publications—let’s call them elite publications—that are written for, let’s say, the 20 percent most liberal portion of America and don’t even try to get to other people anymore. Like, maybe it’s a great business model. And fine. You know, everybody should do their thing. Whatever.

But I don’t feel like The Atlantic is that. I think we have to try to build a bridge between, let’s say, these two bubbles: You know, the bubble in which quote-unquote mainstream media lives and the bubble in which the hardcore Trump supporters live. It’s a frustrating question because I don’t know the answer. I haven’t heard anybody come up with a formula for this, but we’re just gonna have to keep trying because the alternative, giving up, is pure nihilism to me.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, we are days before the election. We’ve lived through a Trump presidency. People are talking about this Trump presidency returning without the guardrails of the last one. So how do you see our role, your role in that kind of administration?

Goldberg: I imagine that a coming theoretical second Trump administration is going to be somewhat to very different from the first one in that—I mean, you’ve heard all these clichés before: There will be no grown-ups. Trump and his people know how to manipulate the workings of government better. The velociraptors have learned how to turn the door handles.

You’ve heard all of the lines about it. So we can have more drama and more threats to the constitutional order and more threats to what we used to think of as normative political behavior. But I don’t see our role changing, in the sense that we’re just gonna write about it every day. And we’re gonna cover it.

And, you know, I’ve said this to the staff before: The point of journalism—or the satisfaction of journalism—is not necessarily in changing the world for the better. If you change the world through your journalism to bring more light and truth and justice into the world, great. But you can’t wake up every day assuming that’s what’s going to happen, because most of it is frustrating, just like any job in the world is going to be frustrating. And progress, however you define it, is going to be incremental, and you’re not going to see it for a while, and so on.

But I think to myself, Look—we’re in a democratic emergency. I want to be able to tell myself, as an old man, that I did everything that I could do to try to bring the country back to some kind of normalcy, to hold people who are behaving abnormally accountable.

And I want, especially, the younger people at The Atlantic to think to themselves that, 40 years from now, 50 years from now, when their grandchildren say, What did you do in that antidemocratic era? I want them to be able to say, I did everything that I could do. And that’s important to me. I held my own standards up. I held the standards of my magazine up. And I invested, in a non-nihilistic way, in the future of this country, in the future of the ideas that animate it.

And, you know, that’s enough. All you can do is try using your journalism techniques, using the techniques of journalism to bring more illumination to the things that, in this case, a Donald Trump might do.

So all we can do is go to work and write about what they’re doing and cover what they’re doing and hold it up to the light and let people judge for themselves if what they’re doing is good or bad. So, you know, it’s anticlimactic in a way. It’s not overly dramatic. The thing that we can do is go to work and do our jobs, the jobs that we were trained to do.

We were not expecting, people my age, your age, whatever—we’ve been in journalism for a while, never really expecting a presidency like the first Trump presidency and certainly what could be a second Trump presidency. Never really expecting anything like this, but here we are.

So just cover the hell out of it, and make sure that you have put into the public record truth and reality and evidence, and, you know, tell truth to power. You know, you can’t do anything more than that. And so all we’re going to do is just do what we do.

Rosin: I really appreciate that. I feel exactly the same way. There are words out there like anxious, afraid, apathetic. I don’t feel any of those things. I feel alert.

Goldberg: Alertness is great. We have the tools to alert people to these changes. We don’t have to sit there just passively or impotently. So work as hard as you can to bring as much information and analysis to people who need it. That’s great—great to have a job, great to have a role.

Rosin: Thank you for being inspirational, Jeff.

Goldberg: You want me to sing outtakes from Sound of Music?

Rosin: I wouldn’t mind if you could stand on the desk while doing it. It would be even better.

Goldberg: “Climb Every Mountain?” I’ll sing “The Battle Hymn of the”—look: If we have another Trump presidency, we’re gonna get the staff every morning on Zoom to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” together.

Rosin: Sounds good. I’ll practice.

Goldberg: Yeah. I’m sure people are gonna really enjoy that.

Rosin: Sounds good. (Laughs.) All right, Jeff. Thank you so much for joining us.

Goldberg: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Halloween. Get lots of candy. And don’t forget to vote. Thank you for listening.