After the second attempt on his life, Donald Trump accused his political opponents of inspiring the attacks against him with their rhetoric. The reality, however, is that Trump himself has a long record—singular among American presidents of the modern era—of inciting and threatening violence against his fellow citizens, journalists, and anyone he deems his opposition. Below is a partial list of his violent comments, from the 2016 presidential campaign until today.

November 22, 2015, in response to a Fox News host asking about a heckler at Trump’s rally in Alabama the day before

February 1, 2016, at a rally in Iowa

February 6, 2016, at a Republican-primary debate

Ethan Miller / Getty

February 22, 2016, about a protester who disrupted a Las Vegas rally

February 22, 2016, at a rally in Las Vegas

March 16, 2016, on what would happen if he wasn’t nominated at the upcoming Republican National Convention

Reuters

August 15, 2017, speaking at a press conference about the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

October 18, 2018, referring to then-Representative Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for physically assaulting a reporter

March 12, 2019, in an interview with Breitbart News

Reuters

May 29, 2020, posted on Twitter during the protests and riots in Minneapolis after George Floyd was murdered

June 2020, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s memoir, which [described] Trump having said this about protesters outside the White House (Trump has denied saying this)

September, 12, 2020, in a Fox News interview, praising police for killing the antifa supporter Michael Reinoehl, who was accused of killing a right-wing protester

Footage by Rise Images / Getty

September 29, 2020, addressing the Proud Boys during a presidential debate

January 6, 2021, just minutes before addressing the crowd at the Ellipse, Trump shouted this to his advance team, according to [testimony] from Cassidy Hutchinson (who served as assistant to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the Trump administration)

January 6, 2021, in a tweet before the election certification took place

Mandel Ngan /AFP via Getty

January 6, 2021, in claiming that the election was stolen and urging supporters to march to the Capitol

January 6, 2021, in a tweet, while rioters at the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence”

Reuters

January 6, 2021, in a video message to the insurrectionists at the Capitol

August 15, 2022, in a Fox News interview about the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago residence, which uncovered boxes containing classified documents

October 22, 2022, during a Texas rally

November 7, 2022, during a rally in Ohio

March 4, 2023, at the Conservative Political Action Committee summit

March 24, 2023, in a middle-of-the-night rant on Truth Social

Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty

March 25, 2023, during a rally in Waco, Texas

April 27, 2023, during a rally in New Hampshire

August 4, 2023, in a Truth Social post that U.S. prosecutors flagged as an indication that Trump might try to intimidate witnesses in the federal election-subversion case against him

September 22, 2023, on Truth Social, suggesting that General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed

September 29, 2023, speaking at the California Republican Party convention

November 11, 2023, during a Veterans Day speech

December 5, 2023, during a town hall in Iowa, in response to the Fox News host Sean Hannity asking Trump if he could promise not to abuse power or seek retribution if he wins

December 16, 2023, referring to illegal immigrants during a New Hampshire rally

January 9, 2024, to a group of reporters after a court hearing in which his team argued that presidential immunity should protect him from criminal prosecution for attempting to subvert the 2020 election

March 11, 2024, in a Truth Social post promising that he would pardon the January 6 insurrectionists if elected

March 16, 2024, during a speech about the U.S. auto-manufacturing industry in Ohio (Trump’s campaign later said that he was referencing a “bloodbath” for the automaker industry)

June 6, 2024, in an interview with Phil McGraw, host of Dr. Phil

September 7, 2024, at a rally in Wisconsin, referring to his mass-deportation plans

C-SPAN

September 29, 2024, proposing a violent crackdown by police to deal with crime, during a rally in Pennsylvania

October 13, 2024, in a Fox News interview

October 15, 2024, during a Fox News town hall

October 16, 2024, referring to the January 6 insurrection during a Univision town hall

US election 2024 explained: Why is Pennsylvania such an important battleground state?

For years, the dominant belief in both parties has been that Democrats need to run up a big lead in the national presidential popular vote to win an Electoral College majority. But in the dead-heat election of 2024, that may no longer be true. The distinctive dynamics of the 2024 campaign could allow Kamala Harris to eke out an Electoral College win even if Donald Trump runs better in the national popular vote this time than during his previous two campaigns.

The belief that Democrats need a big popular-vote win to prevail in the electoral vote hardened in the course of those two previous Trump campaigns. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by a resounding 4.5 percentage points in the popular vote but still only squeezed past him by relatively small margins in the three Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by two points in the national popular vote but narrowly lost those same three states, and with them the presidency.

That history has weighed heavily on Democrats as a procession of recent polls has shown Trump shrinking or even erasing Harris’s national lead. But the pattern of differences among white, Black, and Latino voters found in most of those national surveys show how Harris could still potentially capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory—even if she wins the nationwide popular vote by much less than Biden did in 2020, and possibly by only about the same margin that Clinton got in 2016.

The principal reason is that these recent polls show Trump making most of his gains in national support by performing better among Black and, especially, Latino voters than he did in either of those previous elections. Even the most favorable surveys for Trump consistently find Harris polling very close to Biden’s level of support in 2020 among white voters, which had improved over Clinton’s performance with that group by several points. In other words, Harris will likely rely a bit more on white voters than her party’s past two nominees did.

That subtle shift is the crucial distinction from the earlier contests. It could allow Harris to scrape a win by sweeping the predominantly white, former “Blue Wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, even if Trump improves over his prior popular-vote results by gaining among Black and Latino voters (and Black and Latino men in particular).

[Read: Elon Musk wants you to think this election’s being stolen]

In each of his previous two races, Trump benefited because the decisive states leaned more Republican than the nation overall. In both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote for the winner—first for Trump, then for Biden. In 2016, Trump ran about three percentage points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally; in 2020, he ran nearly four points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

The fact that Trump each time performed much better in the tipping-point state than he did in the national popular vote is central to the assumption that Democrats can’t win the Electoral College without a popular-vote majority. But as the Center for Politics research demonstrates, that hasn’t always been true.

The tipping-point states in the three presidential elections preceding 2016—Ohio in 2004 and Colorado in 2008 and 2012—each voted slightly more Democratic than the national popular vote. And in none of those elections was the disjunction between the tipping-point-state result and the national popular vote nearly as big as it was in 2016 or 2020. In fact, the gap between the national popular vote and the tipping-point state in Trump’s two races was considerably wider than in any election since 1948, the Center found.

Polling in the past few weeks, however, has indicated that this gap has shrunk to virtually nothing. Trump and Harris remain locked in a virtual tie both nationally and in the swing states. With polls that closely matched, none of the swing states appears entirely out of reach for either candidate.

Still, professionals on both sides with whom I’ve spoken in recent days see a clear hierarchy to the states. Both camps give Harris her best chance for overall victory by winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; Trump is considered stronger across the Sun Belt in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada (ranked from most to least promising for him).

That separation reflects the race’s unexpected racial dynamics. If Trump’s polling gains among voters of color bear out in practice, that would benefit him the most in the Sun Belt battlegrounds. There, minority voters are such a large share of the electorate that even a small shift in their preferences—toward Trump—would greatly diminish Democrats’ chances.

Whatever happens in the Sun Belt, though, if Harris sweeps the Rust Belt big three, she would reach exactly the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win (so long as she held all of the other states that Biden carried by about three percentage points or more, which is very likely). All three of those major industrial states are much less diverse than the nation as a whole: In 2020, white people cast about four-fifths of the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and roughly nine-tenths of it in Wisconsin, according to census figures.

“One of the potential outcomes here is that at the end of the day, Trump will have gained with Blacks and Latinos and it may not have decided the Electoral College, if we don’t need [the Sun Belt states] to win,” Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster with long experience in Wisconsin, told me.

Obviously, Harris has no guarantee that she could survive a smaller national popular-vote margin than Biden: The polls showing national gains for Trump could be capturing a uniform uptick in his support that would deliver slim victories across most—and possibly all—of the seven decisive states. Even the most optimistic Democrats see marginal wins in the battlegrounds as probably Harris’s best-case scenario. But the prospect that she could hold the former Blue Wall states even while slipping nationally challenges the conventional wisdom that Democrats must amass a significant lead in the national popular vote to secure enough states to win the electoral vote.

“The Blue Wall states are the likeliest tipping point for either candidate,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter published by the Center on Politics, told me. “If the country moves two to three points to the right but those states only move a point or less, that’s where you start to get the tipping point looking pretty close to the popular vote.”

The Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, also believes that Harris could win the Electoral College with a smaller popular-vote advantage than most analysts have previously assumed. But he says the demographic characteristics of the swing states aren’t the primary cause of this possibility. Rather, the key factor is that those states are experiencing the campaign in an immersive way that other states are not thanks to huge advertising spends, organizing efforts, and candidate appearances.

That disparity, he says, increases the odds that the battleground states can move in a different direction from the many states less exposed to such campaigning. Both Podhorzer and Kondik note that the 2022 midterm elections supported the general thesis: Although broad dissatisfaction with Biden allowed Republicans to win the national popular vote in House elections, Democrats ran much better in statewide contests across the most heavily contested battlegrounds, especially in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

“It is really the difference between how well you are doing outside the battlegrounds and inside the battlegrounds,” Podhorzer told me. Inside the battlegrounds, he pointed out, voters have for years now been exposed at blast-force volume to each party’s arguments on all the major issues. “The cumulative effect of it is that they have an awareness of what is at stake, a different worldview, than people living outside those states,” he said.

The analogue to 2022 this year would be whether general disappointment in Biden’s economic record increases Trump’s popular-vote total in less-contested blue and red states alike, but Harris holds on to enough of the battlegrounds where voters are hearing the full dimensions of each side’s case against the other.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

The same national polls that show Trump gaining among voters of color this year do not show much, if any, improvement for him compared with his 2020 performance among white voters. The latest aggregation of high-quality national public polls published by Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster, found that Harris is almost entirely preserving Biden’s gains among white voters; that means Harris is also exceeding Clinton’s showing with them from 2016.

The comparison with Clinton is instructive. Among voters of color, Clinton ran better in 2016 than either Biden in 2020 or how Harris is polling now. But Clinton lagged about three to four points below both of them among white voters. If Harris wins the popular vote by only about the same margin as Clinton, but more of Harris’s lead relies on support from white voters, the vice president’s coalition would be better suited to win the Rust Belt battlegrounds. In that scenario, Harris would assemble what political scientists call a more electorally “efficient” coalition than Clinton’s.

Biden’s margins of victory in the former Blue Wall states were so slim that Harris can’t afford much erosion with voters of color even there. But two factors may mitigate that danger for her. One is that in the Rust Belt states, most voters of color are not Latino but Black, and Democrats feel more confident that they can minimize losses among the latter than among the former.

The other key factor is a subtle change in those states’ white populations. Calculations from the latest census data provided to me by William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, found that since 2020, white voters without a college degree—the demographic group in which Trump performs best—have declined as a share of eligible voters by about three percentage points in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and by about 1.5 points in Pennsylvania. In Michigan and Wisconsin, college-educated white voters, who now tilt mostly toward Harris, largely made up the difference; in Pennsylvania, the share of minority voters grew. In a typical election, these slight shifts in the electorate’s composition probably would not matter, but they could in a contest as close as this one.

“There is still room to grow in the suburbs [across the region], and two things are going to contribute to that growth: January 6 and the Dobbs decision,” Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant, told me, referring to the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 and the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. The racist slurs against Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last weekend could also cost him with Pennsylvania’s substantial Puerto Rican population.

Sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with a smaller national-popular-vote lead than Biden’s is nonetheless a high-wire assignment for Harris. A significant concern for Democratic strategists is whether the party has plausibly declined since 2020 only among voters of color, without suffering material losses among white voters as well.

One strategist with access to a wide array of party polls, who asked for anonymity to discuss that private research, told me that although many Democrats are optimistic that surveys overestimate Trump’s strength among Black voters, a risk also exists that polls underestimate Trump’s strength with white voters (something that has happened before). That risk will rise if Trump turns out unexpectedly large numbers of the blue-collar white voters who compose the largest share of infrequent voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.

However, the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me that he is seeing the same divergence between slipping non-white support and steady white backing for Harris in his surveys—and he sees good reasons for that pattern potentially persisting through Election Day. “The Hispanic and African American weakness [for Harris] is a function of a memory of the Trump economy being better for people who live paycheck to paycheck than the Biden-Harris economy,” Ayres said. “On the other hand, there are far more white voters who will be voting based on abortion and the future of democracy. There’s a certain rationale behind those numbers, because they are making decisions based on different issues.”

Democrats generally believe that they maintain a fragile edge in Michigan and Wisconsin, partly because many public polls show Harris slightly ahead, but even more because their party has built a better turnout operation than the GOP in those states. Pennsylvania looks like the toughest of the three for Harris and, in the eyes of many strategists in both parties, the state most likely to decide this breathtakingly close race.

“Looking statewide, I’ve always thought from the time she got in that Harris would do better in the suburbs and the cities than Biden, and Trump would do better in a lot of these redder counties, and the million-dollar question is what number is bigger and how much bigger,” Mikus, the Pittsburgh-based consultant, told me.

Biden carried the Keystone state by only 1.2 percentage points while winning the national popular vote by nearly 4.5 points. Whether Trump wins a second term to execute his dark vision of “retribution” against “the enemy from within” may be determined by whether Harris can hold Pennsylvania while winning the national popular vote by much less, if at all. It would be a fitting conclusion to this bitter campaign if the state that decides the future shape of American democracy is the same one where the nation’s Constitution was written 237 years ago.

For more than 25 years, some of reality TV’s most memorable—and villainous—contenders have declared that they’re “not here to make friends.” But on The Golden Bachelorette, the second Bachelor-franchise installment focused on a romantic lead older than 60, friendship isn’t a fruitless distraction from the main event. The new series follows the 61-year-old widow Joan Vassos and an eclectic group of men hoping to win her over—some of whom have also lost their spouse. In a pleasant break from standard reality-TV convention, including within the Bachelor franchise, many of the show’s most charming moments focus on the friendships formed among Joan’s suitors.

By highlighting the men’s bonds with one another, the new series builds on The Golden Bachelor’s refreshing exploration of finding love after grief, and the ways a person’s identity can shift in late adulthood. Together, the men wrestle with profound changes brought on by widowhood, retirement, divorce, and other big transitions. In its inaugural season, The Golden Bachelorette has offered a rare window into some of the distinct social and emotional challenges that Americans encounter later in life—and the varied connections that help them mitigate such weighty stressors.

Last year, Joan was an early favorite on The Golden Bachelor, where she quickly captured the septuagenarian widower Gerry Turner’s interest. But after just three episodes, the mother of four walked away from the show to care for her newly postpartum daughter. Yet being on the program offered Joan an emotional reward beyond finding a permanent partner. During her brief time as a contestant, “My heart kind of got a little fix from Gerry,” she said during a tearful exit. “As you get older, you become more invisible. People don’t see you anymore.” Her words resonated with many Golden Bachelor viewers, especially franchise newcomers and other women around her age. Now, with Joan at the fore, The Golden Bachelorette sheds light on the inner complexities of the men who are hoping she’ll see them. And by turning its attention to the unlikely intimacy forged among the male contestants, the show pushes beyond the one-dimensional stoicism that’s common in depictions of men their age.

Most of the two dozen men competing for Joan’s affections, who are between 57 and 69, have experienced bereavement or devastating heartbreak. Although the world of The Golden Bachelorette—where the suitors live with one another under the same roof—is obviously a staged environment, the losses the contestants have suffered are very real: As of 2023, more than 16 percent of Americans who are 60 or older (about 13 million people) were widowed. Losing a spouse has tremendous consequences for the surviving partner’s physical, mental, and emotional health—which can begin even prior to bereavement, especially for caregiving spouses. And yet, “we as a society are not necessarily super skilled and comfortable at talking about death and loss,” Jane Lowers, an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, told me. “Some people will back away from engaging with somebody who’s going through grief.” A partner’s death can also lead to a crisis of self, she added, if the bereaved spouse had come to see caregiving, or being half of a marital unit, as their essential identity.

On The Golden Bachelorette, loss largely brings people together, even as it prompts difficult internal reckonings. Many of Joan’s most meaningful conversations with her suitors make reference to her late husband, the milestones they shared, and her conflicting feelings as she attempts to find love again. But even when she isn’t around, the men speak candidly about grief—Joan’s, as well as their own. When one suitor announces that he’s leaving the mansion because his mother died, the others rally around him, with some tearing up as they offer their condolences and reflect on how beautiful his interactions with Joan have been.

[Read: Reality (TV) is getting kinder]

Another moving exchange involves a widower named Charles, who has spent almost six years racked with guilt, wondering if he could’ve done something to save his wife from a fatal brain aneurysm. Speaking with Guy, an emergency-room doctor, Charles shares that one detail of his wife’s death has always troubled him—and he looks visibly relieved when Guy reassures him, after explaining the science, that there was nothing he could have done. Later, as Charles recalls this conversation when talking with Joan, he tells her that “it changed my life.” These scenes aren’t just a striking contrast to the hostile atmosphere that’s typical of many dating-oriented competition series in which the contestants spent time together; they’re also an instructive representation of relationship-building among older men. Rather than peaceably keeping to themselves, the Golden Bachelorette men prioritize vulnerability and openness with one another. “I came in, arrived at the mansion with sadness, missed my wife,” Charles says when he leaves midway through the season. “After several weeks here at the mansion, it really helped me … the remaining friends, we bond together. We opened our hearts.”

The silent anguish that Charles describes has dangerous real-world ramifications: After the death of a spouse, widowers experience higher rates of mortality, persistent depression, and social isolation than widows do. “It’s in part because they don’t have these close friendships like we’re seeing on the show,” Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Boston University and the author of Golden Years? Social Inequality in Later Life, told me. “Their social ties often were through work, and then that diminishes once they retire—or their former wives did the role.”

But widowers aren’t the only demographic represented on The Golden Bachelorette. And today’s older Americans have far more complex social lives than in years past, partly because marriage, companionship, and caregiving all look different—and, often, less predictable—than they did several decades ago. Now about 36 percent of adults who get divorced are older than 50, a rising phenomenon known as gray divorce. As Carr put it, “We’re certainly moving away from that ‘one marriage for life’”—which shifts how single adults past 50 see their romantic prospects.

The Golden Bachelorette chronicles what it takes for contestants to open themselves up to love, romantic or otherwise. As these changes happen in real time, the show keeps an eye toward the importance of emotional transparency when navigating later-in-life relationships. The men on the show sometimes acknowledge that they were raised to feel uncomfortable with overt displays of sentimentality, but they appear to recognize the long-term toll of suppressing their feelings. Carr added that she was pleased to see how quickly a group of men with so little in common came to embrace one another. “Even though it’s an artificial situation,” she noted, “a lot of those lessons can be imported to other men.”

On The Golden Bachelor, the isolated production environment ended up nudging the women toward one another, too. “We were all sequestered in this mansion without our phones and television and social media, so it made it very easy to connect with people very quickly at a deep level,” Kathy Swarts, one of the contestants, told me. When we spoke, Kathy was just leaving Pennsylvania, where she’d been visiting Susan Noles, one of her closest friends from The Golden Bachelor. Both told me, in separate conversations, that they counted joining the show as a transformative choice, and that their age also gave them a unique perspective on discovering love—whether with Gerry or with new friends. For Susan, watching the men navigate the same journey has been fascinating—and it’s different from watching the franchise’s earlier seasons, or other reality shows, because the contestants are mostly parents and grandparents.

“We’ve given our lives to our children,” Susan explained, adding that younger contestants have “not experienced what we have—we’ve had the ups, the downs, the horrible, the broken hearts, the happy moments.” By the time they enter the mansion, the Golden contestants largely know who they are and what they want. That changes what it means to win: Though they may not come to the show looking for new platonic bonds, we see the participants recognize the beauty of forging friendships with peers who meet them as individuals—not as extensions of their families or employers. This season’s men may have begun as strangers, but they leave The Golden Bachelorette having found a “group of brothers,” as one departing participant calls his competitors.

What matters to them in the crucial state of Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania officials reject claim that "illegal voters" were able to apply for mail-in ballots.

Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.

It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character. And for what?

Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.  

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

[Read: Elon Musk has reached a new low]

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

There are three major components to this tool. The first is that X exposes its users to right-wing political content frequently, whether they want it or not. To test this theory, I recently created a new X account, which required me to answer a few onboarding questions to build my feed: I told X that I was interested in news about technology, gaming, sports, and culture. The first account the site prompted me to follow was Musk’s, but I opted instead to follow only ESPN. Still, when I opened the app, it defaulted me to the “For You” feed, which surfaces content from accounts outside the ones a user follows. A Musk post was the first thing I encountered, followed quickly by a post from Donald Trump and another from an account called @MJTruthUltra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower: “Vote, arm yourself, Stock up 3-4 Months Supply of Food and Water, and Pray.” After that was a post from a MAGA influencer accusing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of “censoring patriots,” followed by posts from Libs of TikTok (a video from a school-board meeting about girls’ bathrooms), MAGA influencers Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec, and Dom Lucre, a right-wing personality who was once banned from the platform for sharing an explicit image of a child being tortured.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

X is also experimenting with other algorithmic ways to surface rumors and discredited election news. The platform recently launched a new AI-powered “stories for you” feature, which curates trending topics without human review and highlights them prominently to selected users. NBC News found five examples of this feature sharing election-fraud theories, including debunked claims about voting machines and fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona.

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk's right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

The third and final element of X’s bullshit engine is Musk himself, who has become the platform’s loudest amplifier of specious voter-fraud claims. Bloomberg recently analyzed more than 53,000 of Musk’s posts and found that he has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic, garnering roughly 10 billion views. Musk’s mask-off MAGA boosterism has also empowered other reactionaries with big accounts to shitpost in his image. When they do, Musk will frequently repost or reply to their accounts, boosting their visibility. Here’s a representative example: On October 23, the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire posted that he’d heard a rumor from a senator about more ballots being mailed out in California than the number of legal voters. “Can anyone confirm or deny this?” he asked his more than 166,000 followers on X. Musk replied to the post, noting, “I’m hearing one crazy story after another.”

[Read: Elon Musk says he would recognize a Harris election victory]

On this point, I believe Musk. The billionaire is inundated with wild election speculation because he is addicted to the rumormongering machine that he helped design. This is the strategy at work, the very reason the volume of alarming-seeming anecdotes about a stolen election work so well. Not only are there too many false claims to conceivably debunk, but the scale of the misleading information gives people the perception that there is simply too much evidence out there for it all to be made up. Musk, whether he believes it or not, can claim that he is “hearing one crazy story after another” and coax his bespoke echo chamber to proffer evidence.

X’s current political project is clear: Musk, his PAC, and his legion of acolytes are creating the conditions necessary to claim that the 2024 election is stolen, should Kamala Harris be declared the winner. But the effects of that effort are far more pernicious. If you spend enough time scrolling through the Election Integrity Community feed and its unending carousel of fraud allegations, it isn’t hard to begin to see the world through the paranoid lens that X offers to millions of its users. It is disorienting and dismaying to have to bushwhack through the dense terrain of lies and do the mental calisthenics of trying to fact-check hundreds of people crying nefarious about things they haven’t even bothered to research. Worse yet, it’s easy to see how somebody might simply give in, beaten into submission by the scale of it all. In this way, even though X is Musk’s project, it may actually be built in the image of the MAGA candidate himself. A $44 billion monument to Trump’s greatest (and only real) trick, as he put it in a 2021 speech: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.”

On Sunday, at a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, Donald Trump and his supporters gave their closing argument. It began with offensive, identity-based jokes straight from the ’80s; continued with a shout-out to a Black man involving watermelon; and at some point implied that Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, was a sex worker. Along the way were sprinklings of anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic comments, including this gem from the Trump adviser Stephen Miller: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

The vitriolic event included some choice lines about Latinos from Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian chosen by the Trump campaign to kick off the event. Hinchcliffe, who is also a podcaster, began with juvenile sex jokes about Latinos—“They love making babies”—before moving on to describe Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

As a Nuyorican—what New Yorkers from the Puerto Rican diaspora affectionately call ourselves—I am keenly attuned to any mention of the island and my people. And for most of this campaign, little has been said. So it was a surprise to see that on the same day that Hinchcliffe spoke at Madison Square Garden, Vice President Harris released a video outlining her plan for Puerto Rico and visited a Puerto Rican restaurant on the campaign trail in Philadelphia.

The coincidence was fortuitous, because it offered Puerto Ricans a real-time split screen. Many saw Harris attempting to learn and address the concerns of Puerto Ricans; Trump showed that he was willing to welcome Latinos to his tent only if they were complicit with his racist worldview. The language used at the Trump rally “was so simple, and it just very genuinely showed how they really feel,” Paola Ramos, the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, told me.

After getting blowback for the “island of garbage” remark, the Trump campaign attempted to distance itself. (As everyone knows, Harris is responsible for everything anyone around her does, but Trump is innocent even of things for which he’s been found guilty.) “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump,” a campaign representative said.

As much as the campaign may try to disavow Hinchcliffe’s joke, it can’t avoid the way that that language merely reinforced the sense of disdain that Puerto Ricans had already experienced from Trump. The insult gave Democrats the perfect opportunity to remind Latino voters—and Puerto Ricans in particular—of something Harris raised in her video: Trump’s anemic, and insulting, response to islanders after Hurricane María, in 2017.

[From the November 2022 issue: Let Puerto Rico be free]

Hurricane Harvey had hit Texas a month earlier; there, FEMA had approved $142 million in individual assistance to hurricane victims within nine days. Nine days after María, FEMA had approved just $6.2 million for Puerto Ricans. In Texas, there were far more helicopters, meals, water, government personnel. When then-President Trump did finally visit the storm-ravaged island—nearly two weeks after the hurricane had passed—he told residents they were lucky they hadn’t endured “a real catastrophe, like Katrina,” and, in lieu of more meaningful assistance, threw rolls of paper towels to the crowd at a media event.

This year, Puerto Rican celebrities including Marc Anthony have already been working to remind voters of all of this while campaigning for Harris. After Sunday’s rally, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez shared Harris’s video and announced that they were voting for her. Lopez will appear with Harris tomorrow.

But none of these endorsements have as much significance as that of the musician Bad Bunny’s. His fan base is enormous and young, and includes both men and women. And unlike many stars who avoid bringing politics to their platforms, San Benito, as he’s known to his fans, has made politics, and particularly the politics of colonialism, central to his art. He’s been active as Puerto Rico has approached its election for governor, also happening on November 5, purchasing billboards arguing that a vote for the ruling party is a vote for corruption. His take has weight.

For months, as megawatt celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have thrown their support behind Harris, I’ve heard people asking where Bad Bunny has been. Why hasn’t Bad Bunny been helping Harris? The answer seemed obvious to me: Despite being a U.S. citizen and a global superstar, Bad Bunny can’t vote in presidential elections.

Bad Bunny is a resident of Puerto Rico, and disenfranchisement is just one of the many inequities that define islanders’ second-class citizenship. But even if Puerto Rican residents can’t vote, they can influence the diaspora on the mainland, which can. And that’s what Bad Bunny is doing.

After Trump’s rally, Bad Bunny shared a segment of Harris’s Puerto Rico video to his 45.7 million Instagram followers several times. Specifically, he selected the segment in which Harris says, “There’s so much at stake in this election for Puerto Rican voters and for Puerto Rico,” and where she reminds people of Trump throwing paper towels to island residents after the hurricane.

Harris’s plan for Puerto Rico involves creating what she calls an “opportunity economy” on the island by shoring up the power grid, providing clean-energy credits to islanders, and developing affordable housing, job-creation incentives, and investment in Puerto Rican entrepreneurs and creators, among several other major initiatives. Her plan noticeably evades the big colonial issues, such as repealing the Jones Act—the 100-year-old tariff on produce and goods shipped to the island that costs residents an estimated $692 million a year. Nor does it address taking up the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act—a bill that Representatives Nydia Velázquez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have championed, which would allow islanders to vote on Puerto Rico’s status as a commonwealth. However, what Harris’s plan does offer are thoughtful solutions to many of the problems that have afflicted the island, especially in recent years, which is more than anyone can say of Trump.

The more that the “floating garbage” line is repeated—on television, on the radio—the more riled up Puerto Ricans are getting. More Puerto Ricans live on the mainland than on the island now. One result of the botched response to María has been, ironically, the migration of thousands of islanders—many to swing states such as Pennsylvania, where there are now nearly half a million Puerto Rican residents. Tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans currently reside in Georgia and Arizona as well. The Democratic strategist José Parra told The Hill that what happened at Madison Square Garden might make a real difference: “If Pennsylvania swings toward the Democrats, I think you can look back on this as a pivotal moment.”

Much has been made of the growing support for Trump among Latinos, and this offense is unlikely to sway any of his true believers. But it may motivate some Latinos who’d planned on sitting the election out. Victor Martinez, who owns a local Spanish-language radio channel in Pennsylvania, told Politico that a large portion of the community there had been on the fence about voting at all. The Trump rally shifted that. “If we weren’t engaged before, we’re all paying attention now,” he said.

Puerto Ricans love their island—even those who have never had the chance to go there. Yes, it has stunning beaches, lush green mountains, the sound of the coqui. But what we love most is the warmth of our culture: the music, the dance, the food, the art, our people. It is a place that calls to us when we’re far away and embraces us when we come home. The joke was not just an insult; it was a reminder of the neglect and disrespect the place and its people have faced for decades at the hands of the United States government, and especially during the Trump administration.

Once, when Bad Bunny was asked about his political engagement, he said, “I am not getting involved in politics; politics gets into my life because it affects my country, because it affects Puerto Rico.”

The Republican presidential candidate surrounded himself with Latino surrogates in Allentown as he weathered scandal.

From 11:09 a.m. to 11:14 a.m. yesterday, I thought Francis Fukuyama had died. When an X account that seemed connected with Stanford University announced the legendary political scientist’s passing, many people were fooled. Much to my chagrin, I was among them. And then the account declared itself to be a hoax by Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian prankster. Minutes later, Fukuyama himself posted on X, “Last time I checked, I’m still alive.”

Debenedetti, whom I could not immediately reach for comment, has previously issued many fake death announcements, including for the economist Amartya Sen (still alive), the pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante (still alive), the Cuban leader Fidel Castro (dead as of 2016). In 2012, Debenedetti told The Guardian that his purpose was to reveal how poorly the media do their job, arguing that “the Italian press never checks anything, especially if it is close to their political line.” But fooling people undercuts the idea of shared truth—a cornerstone of liberal democracy itself.

That the hoax was targeting Fukuyama, one of liberal democracy’s greatest defenders, made the situation all the more striking. In 1989, as communism was on the verge of collapse, Fukuyama published an essay called The End of History, which argued that modern liberal democracy had outcompeted every viable alternative political system. Humanity, he argued, had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” (He later expanded the essay into a book, The End of History and the Last Man.)

[Francis Fukuyama: More proof that this really is the end of history]

But how durable is liberal democracy? Although Americans are experiencing far greater material prosperity than their forebears, fears of political violence are growing, and the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is using authoritarian language. Fukuyama foresaw the potential for trouble in 1989. “The end of history will be a very sad time,” he wrote back then. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

Wondering what Fukuyama thought of yesterday’s hoax—and our current political moment—I requested an interview. The transcript below has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s great to find you alive and well. How are you feeling?

Francis Fukuyama: Yeah, that was an unusual event.

Demsas: How did you learn about your “death”?

Fukuyama: One of my former students, I guess, tweeted that this had happened and that it was a hoax. And then I went back and looked at the original tweet, and then it just went viral, and everybody was tweeting about it, so I decided I should actually assert that I was still alive. So it got a lot of attention.

Demsas: What was your reaction when you saw it?

Fukuyama: I couldn’t figure out what the motive was, and I also couldn’t figure out why anyone would take the time to produce a tweet like that. It was a pointless exercise. I guess the other reaction is that X, or Twitter, has become a cesspool of misinformation, and so it seemed it was a perfect thing to happen on X that might not happen on other platforms.

Demsas: Do you know who Tommaso Debenedetti is?

Fukuyama: No.

Demsas: He is an Italian who has claimed responsibility for a series of hoaxes, including the fake announced death of Amartya Sen. He told The Guardian years ago that the Italian press never checks anything. This seems like a part of his broader strategy to, I guess, reveal the problems with fact-checking in the media. What do you make of this strategy?

Fukuyama: Well, first of all, it wasn’t very successful. The fact that you can propagate something like this on Twitter doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the media. People debunked it within, I would say, seconds of this having been posted, so I’m not quite sure what kind of a weak link this exposes.

Demsas: This sort of informational ecosystem seriously weakens liberal democracy, right? If there cease to be shared facts, if it becomes difficult for voters to transmit their feelings about the world, culture, the economy to elected officials, it weakens the legitimacy of democratic signals.

Fukuyama: When I wrote my book Trust back in the mid-1990s, I described the United States as a high-trust society. That’s just completely wrong right now. And a lot of that really is due to the internet or to social media. This is a symptom of a much broader crisis, and it’s really hard to know how we’re going to ever get back to where we were 30 years ago.

Demsas: Does it say anything about the strength of liberal democracy that the democratization of media erodes trust?

Fukuyama: The classic theorists of democracy said that just formal institutions and popular participation weren’t enough, and that you had to have a certain amount of virtue among citizens for the system to work. And that continues to be true. One of the virtues that is not being cultivated right now is a willingness to check sources and not pass on rumors. I’ve caught myself doing that—where you see something that, if it fits your prior desires, then you’re very likely to just send it on and not worry about the consequences.

Demsas: Next week we have the election between Trump and Kamala Harris, and there are a great deal of normal policy distinctions between the two candidates. And when you look at why people are making their decisions, they often will point to things like inflation or immigration or abortion. But there’s also a distinction on this question of democracy too, right? Why does it feel like there’s this yearning for a more authoritarian leader within a democracy like the United States?

Fukuyama: What’s really infuriating about the current election is that so many Americans think this is a normal election over policy issues, and they don’t pay attention to underlying institutions, because that really is what’s at stake. It’s this erosion of those institutions that is really the most damaging thing. In a way, it doesn’t matter who wins the election, because the damage has already been done. You had a spontaneous degree of trust among Americans in earlier decades, and that has been steadily eroded. Even if Harris wins the election, that’s still going to be a burden on society. And so the stakes in this thing are much, much higher than just the question of partisan policies. And I guess the most disappointing thing is that 50 percent of Americans don’t see it that way. We just don’t see the deeper institutional issues at stake.

Demsas: We’re in a time of great affluence—tons of consumer choice, access to goods and services, bigger houses, bigger cars. George Orwell once wrote, in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf, that people have a desire to struggle over something greater than just these small policy details. [“Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet,” Orwell observed.] Does that desire create a problem for democracies?

Fukuyama: There’s actually a line in one of the last chapters of The End of History where I said almost exactly something like if people can’t struggle on behalf of peace and democracy, then they’re going to want to struggle against peace and democracy, because what they want to do is struggle and they can’t recognize themselves as full human beings, unless they’re engaged in the struggle.

Demsas: In The End of History, you wrote that “men have proven themselves able to endure the most extreme material hardships in the name of ideas that exist in the realm of the spirit alone, be it the divinity of cows or the nature of the Holy Trinity.” And I worry that liberal democracy is unable to provide the sorts of ideas that make people want to struggle or fight for it. Does it feel to you like it’s doomed?

Fukuyama: Well, I don’t think anything is doomed. This is the problem with peace and prosperity. It just makes people take [things] for granted. We’ve gone through periods of complacency, punctuated by big crises. And then in some of these prior cases, those crises were severe enough to actually remind people about why a liberal order is a good thing, and then they go back to that. But then time goes on so you repeat the cycle, with people forgetting and then remembering why liberal institutions are good.

Demsas: After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, I had friends say, do you think your entire view of the American public would change if 120,000 people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had voted differently? And I wonder if that’s a question to ask ourselves now, if Trump wins again. Does it really say that much about people’s views on democracy?

Fukuyama: It has much deeper implications. The first time he won, he didn’t get a popular-vote majority. You could write it off as a blip. But everybody in the country has lots of information now about who he is and what he represents. So the second time around, it’s going to be a much more serious indictment of the American electorate.