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At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.

“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”

Trump never did deploy the nickname against Biden in public. Yet the restiveness he felt during that stretch of the race foretold a dramatic shift in the tone and tenor of his campaign. Within weeks, Trump would survive an assassination attempt, Biden would abandon his candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris would replace him atop the Democratic ticket, and polls would show an election that once appeared finished suddenly reverting to coin-flip status. All the while, Trump became more agitated with what he saw as the trust-the-plan, run-out-the-clock strategy of his campaign—and more convinced that this cautious approach was going to cost him a second term.

[Read: This is exactly what the Trump team feared]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

Chris LaCivita, who co-manages Trump’s campaign with Susie Wiles, at an event in Phoenix (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Trump decided it was time to take matters into his own hands.

For the first 10 days following Biden’s departure from the race, Trump had listened dutifully as his campaign co-managers—a pair of longtime GOP consultants named Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita—explained that the fundamentals of their strategy remained solid. Nothing dramatic needed to change with Harris taking over the ticket, they told Trump, because she was inheriting the vulnerabilities they had exploited so successfully against Biden. They argued that whatever burst of money and enthusiasm had accompanied her entry into the race would prove short-lived—and warned him against overreacting. Staying the course, they told Trump, was the surest recipe for electoral success.

[Read: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

He went along with their plan—for a while. But every hour his campaign spent attacking Harris as if she were a credible opponent—rather than bludgeoning her as the airheaded, unqualified, empty pantsuit Trump was sure she was—gnawed at the former president. Finally, he ran out of patience. On July 31, during an onstage interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump publicly unloaded the sort of race-baiting barbs that his aides had, up until that point, succeeded in containing to his private diatribes.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump told the journalists onstage, eliciting gasps from the audience. “I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

In the days after his NABJ appearance—as staffers scrambled to satisfy their boss’s appetite for pugilism without indulging his racist and misogynistic impulses—Trump began to lose confidence in his team. He had long dismissed the warnings from certain friends, such as his former acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, that Wiles and LaCivita weren’t up to the job. But now he had reason to wonder. With Harris climbing rapidly in the polls and his own favorability numbers slipping, Trump was pondering, for the first time, a shake-up of his team. (Cheung said Trump never considered a change to his campaign leadership.)

In early August, Trump started courting two of his longtime allies and former campaign managers from 2016, Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, discussing what it might look like if they rejoined his political operation in a formal capacity. Trump told Lewandowski—who promptly agreed to come aboard—that he missed the “fun,” freewheeling nature of that first run for the White House. He told Conway, meanwhile, that he worried he was being overly “managed” by his current team.

Trump’s conversations with Conway troubled Wiles and LaCivita. They knew that she and Trump were talking more and more frequently; they also knew she loved to take credit for electing him in 2016, and wouldn’t be eager to share accolades with her successors. Conway’s back-channeled criticisms of the 2024 campaign had been subtle but pointed; in an effort to placate her, LaCivita increased her monthly retainer at the Republican National Committee from $20,000 a month to $30,000. But in private conversations, Conway continued to point out the campaign’s shortcomings—especially, in her view, the mistaken selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. When Wiles and LaCivita met Trump at a fundraiser in the Hamptons the evening of August 2—having been tipped off that their boss just spent the day talking strategy with Conway at his Bedminster club in New Jersey—the campaign’s top advisers fretted that their days running the show might be numbered. (As The New York Times was reporting on Conway’s visit to Bedminster, Trump called reporter Maggie Haberman and angrily denied that changes were afoot, saying he was “thrilled” with Wiles and LaCivita.)

In truth, the real threat was Lewandowski.

A tough-talking operative who had famously accosted a female reporter in 2016 and later allegedly made unwanted sexual advances toward a Republican donor’s wife, Lewandowski had promised Trump a return to the “killer” vibes of 2016. But the details of his new role were left open to interpretation. Lewandowski believed—and told anyone who would listen—that he would outrank the existing campaign leadership. Trump himself, meanwhile, assured Wiles and LaCivita that Lewandowski would be a utility man, serving as a key surrogate while helping organize election-security efforts and field operations in swing states.

The honeymoon period was nonexistent. Before Lewandowski worked a single day on behalf of the campaign, he complained to friends that Wiles and LaCivita had leaked the news of his hiring in an unflattering light that downplayed his role—and timed it to coincide with when he was traveling and off the grid, unable to speak for himself.

Determined to assert himself, Lewandowski arrived at Palm Beach headquarters in mid-August with designs on running the place. Wiles accompanies Trump nearly everywhere on the trail, and LaCivita, when not joining them, often works from his home in Virginia, leaving Lewandowski with a free hand in Florida. He began taking aside junior staffers and department heads alike, one at a time, informing them that he spoke for Trump himself. He made it known that he would be in charge of all spending, and that he needed people to tell him what wasn’t working so he could fix it. Meanwhile, he began calling the campaign’s key operatives in the battleground states, probing for weaknesses in Trump’s ground game and assuring them that a strategy shift was in the works.

Even as colleagues grew tired of hearing Lewandowski describe himself as the former president’s personal proxy, they realized he wasn’t wrong. His arrival coincided with a marked shift in Trump’s mood and behavior. Gone, suddenly, was the candidate of 2024, who despite all the inevitable outbursts was at least receptive to direction and aware of consequences; in his place, as the summer progressed, was the alter ego of 2016, the candidate who did and said whatever he wanted and ignored anyone who sought to rein him in.

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the former president shared a social-media post suggesting that Harris had performed oral sex in exchange for career advancement. He denigrated the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for military personnel, as less impressive than the civilian Medal of Freedom. He accused Harris of leading a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president of the United States.” He called into Fox News’s coverage of the convention and rambled so incoherently that the anchors cut his line 10 minutes into the interview. (Trump promptly dialed Newsmax to continue talking.) At a rally in North Carolina, after polling the audience about whether he should “get personal” with his attacks on Harris—the crowd responding rowdily to encourage his invective—Trump mused about firing his campaign advisers.

Around that time, Trump was asked by reporters about the tone of his candidacy. “I think I’m doing a very calm campaign,” he replied. “I have to do it my way.”

Kellyanne Conway at the Republic National Convention in July (Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic)

As Trump was settling on Vance as his vice-presidential pick, one of the arguments he found most persuasive centered on an injection of youthful verve: The freshman senator, then just 39 years old, could complement a running mate four decades his elder with a style and media savvy that broadened the campaign’s appeal. With that promise, however, came a certain peril. Vance maintained an entourage of Very Online influencers who had little experience winning campaigns but lots of owned libs in their social-media mentions. Now some of those right-wing agitators would be joining an operation that was already struggling to keep its principal on message.

Vance’s first two months on the ticket were largely uneventful. His awkward, halting appearances fueled a sense of buyer’s remorse among some Trump confidants, but he made no mistakes of any real consequence. (The talk of “childless cat ladies” preceded his appointment to the GOP ticket, as did his remarks that he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”) And then came September 9. It was one day before Trump would meet Harris in Philadelphia for their first and only debate, and Vance, according to people familiar with the situation, was feeling punchy. Over the past several days, the young senator had marinated in right-wing agitprop stemming from Springfield, Ohio, where it was rumored that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets. When Vance’s allies on the campaign learned that he’d already spoken out about related issues in Springfield—how the influx of thousands of Haitian migrants who came legally to fill jobs had stressed the city—they urged him to seize on this conspiracist catnip and turn it into a crusade for the Trump campaign.

One staffer in particular—a young activist named Alex Bruesewitz—helped convince Vance and his team that this was an opportunity to put his stamp on the campaign. Vance agreed. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” the senator posted on X, catching the Trump campaign’s leaders entirely off guard. Figuring there was no use in half measures, Bruesewitz led Vance’s minions in blasting the social-media post around their networks and urging officials on other GOP campaigns, as well as at the Republican National Committee, to join Vance’s assault on the migrant community of Springfield. (Bruesewitz did not respond to a request for comment about this story.)

Most Republicans refused to go along. But Trump himself found the shtick irresistible. Even as he was sequestered in debate prep, word reached him that Vance had amplified the sensational claims about Springfield. The former president’s advisers were bewildered by Vance’s post. Though they went out of their way to avoid any talk of Springfield for the duration of the debate prep, there was an ominous feeling that Trump wouldn’t be able to help himself.

Yet somehow, by the time Trump charged ahead onstage the following night—“They’re eating the dogs; the people that came in, they’re eating the cats”—his campaign was facing a more serious crisis.

Several days earlier, Trump had fielded a phone call from one of his superfans: Laura Loomer. A right-wing agitator best known for racist and conspiracist bombast—she has celebrated the deaths of migrants and called school shootings fake events put on by crisis actors—Loomer had remained one of Trump’s most loyal and vocal supporters even in the darkest moments of his post–January 6 exile at Mar-a-Lago. That loyalty gave her a direct line to the former president. After she had joined the candidate aboard his plane during crucial trips to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the year, campaign officials discussed ways to sideline Loomer without causing a scene. They neutralized a volatile situation at the convention this summer, for example, by providing Loomer with a front-row seat for Trump’s acceptance speech—putting her in close physical proximity to her idol while keeping her far from the VIP area that cameras would be shooting live.

But now, in the first week of September, Loomer was getting antsy. She called Trump and demanded to know why the campaign had been keeping her at bay; why she hadn’t been allowed back on the plane as the Republican nominee toured the country. Trump told Loomer not to worry: He would personally see to it that she was invited aboard the plane for his next trip. Later that day, when Trump relayed this request to Wiles—who, since the beginning of the campaign, had controlled the flight manifest—she registered disbelief. “Sir, our next trip is to Philadelphia for the debate,” Wiles told Trump, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Trump shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just stick her in the back of the plane.”

Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man “no” one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.

When Trump’s jet touched down in Philadelphia on September 10, and photographers captured Loomer disembarking, some of the former president’s allies were apoplectic. Republican elected officials began texting campaign aides demanding to know why she was traveling with Trump. But outside of Wiles and LaCivita, Trump’s own staffers hadn’t known she was on the manifest. They were as bewildered—and furious—as everyone else. (Why Trump’s employees find Loomer uniquely noxious, when their boss consorts with known racists and trafficks in cruel conspiracy theories himself, is a separate question.)

As the night unfolded, with Loomer watching the debate backstage and then joining other GOP surrogates in the spin room, campaign leaders weighed their next move. Yanking her from the plane risked turning the story into something bigger and messier: a jilted Loomer lashing out against corrupt RINO deep-state simps in the aftermath of Trump’s miserable debate performance. Wiles decided that Trump’s special guest would remain on the manifest for the duration of the itinerary. The only problem? They were headed straight from Philadelphia to New York City for a memorial ceremony the next morning, honoring victims of 9/11—which Loomer, naturally, had described as an inside job.

After the cameras showed Loomer standing near Trump at Ground Zero, the former president’s own phone lit up. For the rest of the day, friends and associates and donors dialed his number with a manic urgency. Some read him old tweets that Loomer had sent; others demanded that whoever let this woman aboard the plane be fired. Senator Lindsey Graham asked Trump if he was trying to lose the election. To all of this Trump pleaded ignorance. He began complaining to aides that nobody had ever explained to him, specifically, why Loomer was so toxic. They responded by pulling up Loomer’s most incendiary posts and showing them to the boss. Trump winced at some and seemed unaffected by others. But he agreed, by the end of the trip, that Loomer needed to go. What sealed Loomer’s fate, according to two people who were part of these conversations, wasn’t just her racist diatribes but also her appearance: Trump, who is generally appalled by plastic surgery, was disgusted to learn about the apparent extent of Loomer’s facial alterations. (When asked for comment, Cheung told me, “Laura was a hard worker in the primaries and President Trump appreciates a fighter.”)

Trump regarded the Loomer episode as a one-off nuisance. His advisers, however, feared that something more fundamental had gone amiss. The past month had seen the campaign spiral into a free-for-all. Lewandowski was going rogue. Morale was plummeting among the rank-and-file staff. And Trump himself seemed intent on sabotaging a message—curbing immigration, fighting inflation, projecting strength on the world stage—that had been engineered to win him the election. Privately, Wiles confided to friends that she and LaCivita felt they’d lost control of the campaign.

When she and LaCivita sat down with Trump in the middle of September, Wiles urged her boss to realize just how badly things were going. These recent mistakes could not be repeated; this current path was unsustainable. “We need to step back and think hard about what we’re doing,” Wiles told him, according to several people familiar with the conversation. “Because this can’t go on.”

Trump doesn’t take well to admonishment. Yet the only other time he’d heard Wiles address him like this was in late 2022, shortly after he’d announced his candidacy, when he’d dined with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump seemed to recognize now, as he had then, that he was engaging in self-sabotage. He told Wiles that he agreed: It was time to tighten things up.

Trump thought the conversation was over. But there was one more thing on Wiles’s mind.

Corey Lewandowski at the Republican National Convention (Jim Bourg / Redux)

Days before departing for that doomed East Coast swing through Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan, Lewandowski had told Trump that they needed to talk. There was information, he said, that the candidate deserved to know.

When they met at Mar-a-Lago, Lewandowski laid it all out. He’d spent several weeks digging into the finances of the campaign, he told Trump, and things weren’t adding up. Far too much money was being spent on programs insignificant to his electoral success, and there had been no apparent oversight of contracts and arrangements that created a windfall for certain campaign employees. Lewandowski told Trump that he’d taken the liberty of bringing in a private consultant—personally escorting this outsider into the campaign’s offices—to study the books. This person’s conclusion, Lewandowski said, was: “Your people are either completely incompetent, or they’re stealing from you.”

Trump seemed conflicted. Nothing angered him more than the idea of being taken advantage of. Then again, if there was one person in politics he’d come to rely upon—one person who, he believed, would never steal from him—it was Wiles. Ultimately, Trump instructed Lewandowski to take his concerns to her.

When Lewandowski did so, on a plane ride that same week, things quickly went sideways. He made no accusations about specific individuals, but shared his belief that certain tactical decisions had been made with big paydays in mind. Wiles told him that she took offense at such conjecture—and that she didn’t need to justify anything to him. Still, Wiles spent the next hour walking Lewandowski through the choices made about vendors, contracts, and costs. When he continued to suggest that things weren’t on the level, Wiles ended the conversation, preferring to focus on preparing Trump for the upcoming debate.

Once the debate was behind them—and with many on the inside fearing that the campaign was falling apart—Wiles sensed that Lewandowski was about to make a move. He had repeatedly gone back to Trump, asking for control over hiring and firing as well as veto power over all spending decisions, which would effectively put him in charge of the campaign. Now he was going all in, telling Trump that Wiles and LaCivita had invested tens of millions of dollars in direct-mail outreach aimed at mobilizing supporters during the early-voting period—money that just so happened to line the pockets of certain campaign staffers, including LaCivita, and that could have been spent instead on television advertising. Lewandowski understood that the only tactical component of campaigning that Trump cared about was TV ads. He was telling Trump not just that he was being stolen from, but that the money in question would have made him ubiquitous on TV.

On September 12, when Wiles told Trump, “This can’t go on,” she added that she wasn’t just talking about Loomer and Springfield. Lewandowski had parachuted into a well-run campaign and rolled grenades into every department, Wiles told Trump, sowing distrust and spreading rumors and making it impossible for her to do her job. “If there’s something you’re skeptical of, something you want answers to, let’s talk about it,” Wiles told her boss. “But if you don’t have confidence in me and Chris, just say so.”

It was an ultimatum. And if Trump struggled with the decision before him—fire Wiles and LaCivita, or keep them and banish Lewandowski—he didn’t let on. Then and there he gave Wiles a vote of confidence. The next day, on the campaign plane, Trump convened Wiles, LaCivita, and Lewandowski around a table in the front cabin, in a meeting first reported on by Puck. He spoke directly to Lewandowski. “We can’t afford to lose these guys,” Trump said, motioning toward Wiles and LaCivita. “They’re in charge.”

Lewandowski knew the fight was lost. “Sir, I’m the only fucking person on this plane who isn’t getting paid to be here right now,” he grumbled, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting. “I’m happy to go back to fucking New Hampshire.”

“No, I want you on TV for me every day,” Trump said. He paused. “And go win me New Hampshire, while you’re at it.”

Lewandowski slapped the table. “You’re not going to win New Hampshire,” he said. “But okay.”

When passengers reboarded the plane for the next leg of their trip, Lewandowski was not on it. Being evicted from the plane is a signature insult in Trump’s political sphere. Lewandowski told friends that he’d planned all along to fly commercial to his next destination; the former president told his traveling aides that Lewandowski’s absence was meant to send the message that dissent would no longer be tolerated. Trump had lost a lot of ground to Harris over the previous month, and victory was possible only if everyone on the campaign fell back in line.

Things appeared to stabilize from there. As September gave way to October, and Harris launched a major media offensive aimed at connecting with voters who still felt no familiarity with her, Trump’s campaign was delighted to cede the spotlight. Wiles and LaCivita believed that every moment Harris spent in front of live cameras translated to more Republican votes. Instead of trying to book Trump onto major networks, where his comments might produce negative news cycles, his team arranged a tour of podcasts, most of them aimed at young men. The effort was led by Bruesewitz, the impulsive young Vance sycophant who maintained an impressive network of right-wing influencers. The strategy appeared to work: For the first three weeks of October, Trump’s internal polling showed Harris’s momentum stalled—measured in both net favorability and vote share—while Trump’s numbers inched upward.

By the middle of October, Trump was being hounded with requests from Republican candidates for joint appearances—requests that had been conspicuously few and far between just a month earlier. Even vulnerable incumbents, such as Representative Ken Calvert of California, tried to grab hold of Trump’s coattails, campaigning with him in his decidedly purple district. Surveying the narrative shift, Trump’s allies marveled at how simple it had all been. Keeping voters’ attention on Harris—while, to the extent they could, keeping Trump out of his own way—had produced the most significant movement in his direction since her entry into the race.

Not that Trump wasn’t doing his best to muck things up. The 40 minutes he spent onstage in Pennsylvania swaying silently to music prompted aides to exchange frenzied messages wondering whether the audio could be cut to get him off the stage. (Ultimately, they decided, letting him dance was less dangerous than letting him rant.) A week later, back in the all-important commonwealth for another event, he left aides slack-jawed by marveling at the ample genitalia of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer.  

Even as the political class settled on Trump as the betting favorite, his allies couldn’t shake a pair of very bad feelings. The first was about ground game: With much of their party’s resources being diverted to legal efforts, the GOP’s field operation was struggling to keep pace with the Democrats. The patchwork strategy left Republicans heavily dependent on outside help. But good help is hard to find. Elon Musk’s canvassing program was fast becoming a punch line in Republican circles. Several GOP consulting firms saw young staffers take short leaves to knock doors for Musk, lured by the enormous commissions he offered. His new system proved easy to game, allowing workers to inflate the number of contacts they reported, and to pocket the rewards. (Musk’s political entity, America PAC, did not respond to a request for comment.)

The more urgent concern, however, was the acrimony that had fractured the Republican nominee’s political operation. Lewandowski had, within a month of his defenestration at 30,000 feet, worked his way back into Trump’s inner circle—and even, at times, onto the plane itself. Wiles had, around the time of their showdown with Lewandowski, told LaCivita that she could no longer deal with the headache of handling the manifest. She charged him with the thankless duty for the remainder of the campaign, making for awkward encounters whenever Trump announced that he wanted Lewandowski to accompany him somewhere.

Even when Lewandowski wasn’t around, his presence was felt. In one instance, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—with whom Lewandowski was reported to have carried on a romantic relationship (they have both denied this)—boarded the Trump plane after an event and joined the former president for a strategy briefing with his aides. As the candidate received a series of positive updates from the ground—early-voting metrics, state-based internal polling—Noem interrupted to say that the campaign was lagging behind the Democrats in terms of voter-registration numbers. Trump’s aides were stunned: Not only was she contradicting their own data, but those present were convinced that Lewandowski had put her up to it in order to make Wiles and LaCivita look bad. (Noem, through a spokesperson, denied this and took offense at the notion that “she needs a man to put her up to anything.”)

As the race moved toward its conclusion—and as the constellation of helpers and hangers-on surrounding Trump began positioning themselves to take credit or deflect blame—more than a few people close to the candidate were shopping dirt on their internal rivals. A sense of foreboding settled in over the campaign. There was so much bad blood, several aides told me, that something was bound to spill out into the open.

Sure enough, on October 15, the Daily Beast published an explosive story alleging that LaCivita had skimmed huge amounts off the top of TV ads, direct mail, and other expenditures, netting him some $22 million from his work on behalf of the campaign and a pair of related super PACs. Multiple campaign sources told me that the nature of these arrangements was exaggerated, and that although LaCivita had made plenty of money—and perhaps more than some people were comfortable with—it was nowhere near that amount. (“Not only is the $22 million number manufactured out of thin air,” LaCivita told me in a statement, “but it’s defamatory.”) His objections hardly mattered: Trump was livid. Even when Wiles tried to calm him down, arguing that Lewandowski had planted the story to eliminate LaCivita, the former president kept fuming, saying the story made him look like a fool and demanding to know why the campaign hadn’t stopped it from being published.

With everyone in the campaign watching to see how their boss would respond to the article, Trump made it known that LaCivita was not welcome on the plane for a planned trip to Georgia that evening. Trump was still beside himself a day later, ranting about the article and telling friends that he’d fire LaCivita—and possibly his entire team—if it weren’t for the PR hit that would cause just weeks out from Election Day. (Cheung denied that Trump was upset by the Daily Beast report, saying, “Everyone recognized it came from disgruntled individuals.”)

LaCivita was abruptly summoned to Trump Tower on the morning of Friday, October 18. There, he found himself climbing into the lead car of the former president’s motorcade, a limousine in which Trump often rides alone to recharge between events. On this occasion, there was another passenger, the businessman Howard Lutnick, who had recently been named a co-chair of Trump’s White House transition team. The three of them made small talk all the way to LaGuardia Airport, as LaCivita waited for the hammer to drop. It felt, LaCivita would later tell several friends, like an episode of The Apprentice: beckoned by the boss, shoved into the limo with a spectator on hand, only to ride in suspense for what seemed like an eternity, believing that at any moment Trump would turn and say, “You’re fired.”

Instead, when they arrived at LaGuardia and boarded the campaign plane, Trump signaled for LaCivita to join him in the cramped, four-seat office at the front of the cabin. As they settled across from each other, Trump reached for a small stack of paper: a printout of the Daily Beast story. LaCivita, in turn, produced a much thicker stack of paper. These were the exhibits for the defense: Federal Election Commission reports, bank-account statements, pay stubs, vendor agreements, and more. For the next half hour, according to several sources with knowledge of the exchange, the two men had it out—profanities flying but voices kept intentionally low—as LaCivita insisted to Trump that he wasn’t ripping the candidate off. Trump, the sources said, seemed to vacillate between believing his employee and seething over the dollar figure, wondering how something so specific could be wrong. Finally, after a couple of concluding f-bombs, Trump seemed satisfied. “Okay, I get it, I get it,” he told LaCivita, holding up his hands as if requesting that the defense rest. He added: “You should sue those bastards.”

The air was more or less cleared: Trump has not raised the issue of LaCivita’s pay since, aides told me, save for several episodes of the candidate teasingly—but conspicuously—calling LaCivita “my $22 million man!” Nevertheless, the alliance remains fragile. Less than a week after the détente, CNN unearthed LaCivita’s Twitter activity from January 6, 2021, including his having liked a tweet that called for Trump to be removed via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita was dead to him—that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.

That was just fine by LaCivita; he had always viewed himself as a hired gun, and his reservations about working for Trump weren’t exactly a secret. Still, the word that Trump had iced one of his two key lieutenants sent a shiver through the rest of the staff. Many had noticed new faces poking around, asking questions about finances and compliance. With Trump’s suspicions piqued, every staffer, as well as every decision, would be under the microscope through Election Day.

Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.

Donald Trump at a rally in Phoenix in June (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Standing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden on the evening of Sunday, October 27, an irate group of Trump staffers, family members, and loyalists was looking for someone to blame.

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous. Elected officials—Democrats, and, before long, Republicans too—blasted the comedian’s remarks. Headlines from the world’s leading news organizations described the event as every bit the hate-fest Republicans had promised it wouldn’t be. Trump aides were blitzed with text messages from lawmakers and donors and lobbyists wanting to know who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign.

In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It didn’t take long to get to the answer: Alex Bruesewitz.

Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves.

Now, with their grand celebration quickly morphing into a public-relations nightmare, Trump’s allies stewed. Two decisions needed to be made, and quickly: whether to inform the man of the hour about this disaster before he took the stage, and whether to issue a statement rebuking Hinchcliffe and his remarks. Some staffers feared throwing Trump off his game at such a crucial moment, and others argued that showing any weakness would just make things worse. But LaCivita dictated a short statement to the communications team that was blasted out to reporters across the arena, distancing the campaign from Hinchcliffe, while Wiles pulled the former president aside and explained the situation. (Trump, aides told me, was merely annoyed at the time; only after watching television coverage the next morning would he rage about how Wiles, LaCivita, and Caporale had “fucked this up.”)

Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.

The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”

Why has this election season featured so many stories about animal cruelty? The 2024 campaign has contained many remarkable moments—the Democrats’ sudden switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris; the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the emergence of Elon Musk as the MAGA minister for propaganda; the grimly racist “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden. But the bizarre run of stories about animal abuse has been one of the least discussed.

In late October, the National Rifle Association was supposed to hold a “Defend the 2nd” event with a keynote address by Trump, but it was canceled at the last minute, because of what the NRA described as “campaign scheduling changes.” Here’s another possible reason: Earlier last month, the NRA’s new chief executive, Doug Hamlin, was outed as an accessory to cat murder.

In 1980, according to contemporary news accounts unearthed by The Guardian, Hamlin and four buddies at the University of Michigan pleaded no contest to animal cruelty following the death of their fraternity’s cat, BK. The cat’s paws had been cut off before it was set on fire and strung up, allegedly for not using the litter box. “I took responsibility for this regrettable incident as chapter president although I wasn’t directly involved,” Hamlin wrote in a statement to media outlets after the Guardian report appeared.

In April, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s Republican governor, scuttled her chances of becoming Trump’s running mate when her memoir revealed that two decades ago, she shot her wirehaired pointer, Cricket, in a gravel pit after the puppy had attacked some chickens and then bit her. (“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, adding that she later killed an unruly goat in the same spot.) More recently, during his only debate with Harris, Trump painted immigrants as murderers of American cats and dogs, repeating unsubstantiated internet rumors that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating “the pets of the people that live there.”

[Read: The link between animal abuse and murder]

American political figures have long showcased their pets to humanize themselves—remember Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and Socks, Bill Clinton’s cat? But the relationship between animals and humans keeps growing in salience as our lifestyles change. Domestic animals have moved from being seen as ratcatchers, guards, and hunting companions to pampered lap dogs that get dressed up as pumpkins on Halloween. Half of American pet owners say that their animals are as much part of the family as any human, and many of us mainline cute videos of cats and dogs for hours every week. These shifting attitudes have made accusations of animal abuse a potent attack on political adversaries—and social media allows such claims to be amplified even when they are embellished or made up entirely.

At the same time, we make arbitrary distinctions between species on emotional grounds, treating some as friends, some as food, and some as sporting targets. Three-quarters of Americans support hunting and fishing, and the Democratic nominee for vice president, Tim Walz, was so keen to burnish his rural credentials that he took part in a pheasant shoot on the campaign trail. Similarly, only 3 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and 1 percent are vegan, but killing a pet—a member of the family—violates a deep taboo.

Noem, who seemed to view Cricket purely as a working dog, was clearly caught off guard by the reaction to her memoir. “The governor that killed the family pet was the one thing that united the extreme right and the extreme left,” Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor who studies human attitudes toward animals, told me. “There was this moral outrage. She was just oblivious.”

Herzog, the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, has been interested in how people think about animal cruelty since he researched illegal cockfighting rings for his doctorate several decades ago. He told me that the people who ran the fights, who made money by inflicting great pain on the roosters involved, “loved dogs and had families. But they had this one little quirk.” Politicians can trip over these categories—our deep-down feeling that some animals can be killed or hurt, and others cannot—without realizing it until it’s too late.

I had called Herzog to ask what he made of someone like the NRA’s Hamlin—a prominent man who was once involved in the torture of an animal. Should a history of animal cruelty or neglect—or just plain weirdness—be disqualifying for a politician, a corporate leader, or an activist? In his media statement, Hamlin maintained after the fraternity story came out that he had not done anything similar again. “Since that time I served my country, raised a family, volunteered in my community, started a business, worked with Gold Star families, and raised millions of dollars for charity,” he declared. “I’ve endeavored to live my life in a manner beyond reproach.” Could that be true—could someone be involved in such a sadistic act without it being evidence of wider moral depravity?

“What strikes me about animal cruelty is that most people that are cruel to animals are not sadists or sociopaths; they’re everyday people,” Herzog told me. A review of the literature showed that a third of violent offenders had a history of animal abuse—but so did a third of the members of the control group, he said. Then Herzog blew my mind. “To me, the greatest paradox of all is Nazi animal protection.”

I’m sorry?

“The Nazis passed the world’s most progressive animal-rights legislation,” he continued, unfazed. The German regime banned hunting with dogs, the production of foie gras, and docking dogs’ tails without anesthetic. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, “wrote that he would put in a prison camp anyone who was cruel to an animal.” When the Nazis decreed that Jews could no longer own pets, the regime ensured that the animals were slaughtered humanely. It sent their owners to concentration camps.

[Read: A single male cat’s reign of terror]

The Nazis dehumanized their enemies and humanized their animals, but Herzog thinks that the reverse is more common: Many people who are good to other humans are often cruel to animals. And even those who claim to love animals are nonetheless capable of causing them pain. Circus trainers who whip their charges might dote on their pets. People who deliberately breed dogs with painfully flat faces to win competitions insist that they adore their teeny asthmatic fur babies. “These sorts of paradoxes are so common,” Herzog said.

The lines separating cruelty from the acceptable handling of animals have a way of shifting. I’m old enough to remember the 2012 election cycle, when Mitt Romney was reviled for having driven his station wagon with a kennel strapped to the top containing the family dog, Seamus. Midway through the 12-hour drive from Boston to Ontario, the dog suffered from diarrhea, obscuring the rear windshield. Like Noem, Romney was also blindsided by the scandal: Animal activists described his actions as cruelty, and a Facebook group called Dogs Against Romney attracted 38,000 fans. By the standards of a dozen years ago, Seamusgate was a big story, but it’s mild in comparison with this year’s headlines. When Romney was asked about Noem’s memoir earlier this year, he said the two incidents were not comparable: “I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.”

One of the most reliable sources of strange animal stories this cycle has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmentalist with a lifelong interest in keeping, training, and eating animals who has frequently transgressed the accepted Western boundaries of interaction with the natural world. In July, Vanity Fair published a photograph that it said Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, had sent to a friend. In it, he and an unidentified woman are holding a barbecued animal carcass up to their open mouths. The suggestion was that the animal was a dog. “The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness,” the magazine reported. (In response, Kennedy said that the animal was a goat.)

A month later, Kennedy admitted that he had once found a dead bear cub on the side of a road in upstate New York and put it in his trunk. He said he had intended to skin it and “put the meat in my refrigerator.” However, that never happened, because, in NPR’s glorious phrasing, Kennedy claimed to have been “waylaid by a busy day of falconry” and a steak dinner, and instead decided to deposit the carcass in Central Park. (He even posed the dead bear so that it appeared to have been run over by a cyclist.) “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he later told the comedian Roseanne Barr in a video that he released on X. He was 60 when the incident occurred. What made the idea of picking up a dead bear sound so strange to many commentators, when the falconry would have caused, at most, a raised eyebrow—and the steak dinner no comment at all?

Kennedy’s animal antics still weren’t finished. In September, he released a bizarre video in which he fondled an iguana and recounted how in some countries, people slit open the lizards’ stomachs to eat the eggs inside. Then another old anecdote surfaced: His daughter Kick recalled a trip home from the beach with parts of a dead whale strapped to the roof of the car. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told Town & Country. She added that this was “just normal day-to-day stuff” for her father. Not everyone was so quick to minimize Kennedy’s conduct. “These are behaviors you read about in news articles not about a candidate but about a suspect,” my colleague Caitlin Flanagan observed.

[Pagan Kennedy: New York’s grand dame of dog poisoning]

I’m as guilty as anyone of making illogical distinctions—though I would like to stress that I have never murdered a cat or dismembered a dead whale. Having recently driven across Pennsylvania, where I counted three dead deer by the side of the road on a single trip, I support the right to hunt—population control is essential. Yet the infamous photograph of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump posing with a dead leopard on a safari trip more than a decade ago disturbs me far more than the unproven assertion that one immigrant, somewhere, has eaten a dog or cat for sustenance. You can tell from the Trump sons’ expressions that they are extremely proud of having killed a rare and beautiful creature purely for their own entertainment. The image is grotesque. It reminds me of Atticus Finch’s instruction that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, because “mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

As it happens, hunters, many of them animal lovers in their everyday life, have a complicated code of ethics about what counts as a fair chase. Hence the backlash over the former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s support for shooting Alaskan wolves from an aircraft. Most of us are okay with killing animals—or having them killed on our behalf—as long as the process does not involve unnecessary cruelty or excessive enjoyment.

In the end, arbitrary categories can license or restrict our capacity for cruelty and allow us to entertain two contradictory thoughts at once. We love animals and we kill animals. We create boundaries around an us and a them, and treat transgressors of each limit very differently. In a similar way, some of Donald Trump’s crowds applaud his racist rumors about migrants—when they might not dream of being rude to their neighbor who was born abroad. “What we see in animals,” Herzog told me, “is a microcosm of the big issue of how humans make moral decisions.” In other words, illogically and inconsistently. The same individual is capable of great humanity—and great cruelty or indifference.

Donald Trump’s presidency was mitigated by his ignorance, idleness, and vanity. Trump did not know how the office worked. He did not invest any effort to learn. He wasted much of his time watching daytime television.

Defeat in 2020—and Trump’s plot to overturn that defeat—gave him a purpose: vengeance on those who bested him.

A second Trump presidency will have a much clearer agenda than the first. No more James Mattis to restrain him, no more John Kelly to chide him, no more Rex Tillerson to call him a “fucking moron.” He will have only sycophants.

Trump has told the world his second-term plans.

He has vowed to round up and deport millions of foreign nationals. Because the removals will be slow—permissions have to be negotiated with the receiving governments, transportation booked, people forced aboard—Trump has spoken of building a national network of camps to hold the rounded-up immigrants. Deportation is a power of the presidency: Trump can indeed do all of this if he is determined to.

Trump has pledged huge increases in U.S. tariffs, not only on China but on friends and treaty partners, such as Mexico. Congress has historically delegated the president’s broad authority over trade. A restored President Trump will have the power to impose tariffs, and will also have the power to exempt industries and firms that bid for his favor.

Trump intends to shut down legal proceedings, state and federal, against himself. A friendly Supreme Court appears to grant him wide leeway to do so. He has promised to pardon people serving sentences for the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. The president has the power to do that also. He has spoken of prosecuting people who donate to Democratic candidates and of retribution against media companies that criticize him. Although it’s uncertain how far the courts would let him succeed, Trump is seeking a stooge attorney general who will at least try to bring such prosecutions.

Trump ordered his allies in Congress to oppose further military aid to Ukraine and got his way for six deadly months. Trump chose as his running mate one of the GOP’s harshest critics of the Ukrainian cause. Trump boasts that he will end the fighting within weeks. That is code for forcing Ukraine to submit to Russia.

One of Trump’s former national security advisers, John Bolton, predicts that Trump would withdraw from NATO in a second term. Trump does not have to withdraw formally, however. NATO ultimately depends on the U.S. president’s commitment to upholding the treaty’s mutual-defense clause and assisting threatened NATO members. As president, all Trump has to do to kill NATO is repeat what he once said as a candidate: that unless they pay up, he won’t protect this or that ally from attack. No further action required; the deed is done.

Some Trump apologists put a gloss on his pro–Vladimir Putin instincts by arguing that abandoning Ukraine will somehow strengthen the U.S. against China. Really? China will be impressed by a United States that walked away from Ukraine’s successful war of self-defense against Russian aggression because the American president is infatuated with the Russian dictator?

Whatever theory Trump allies may confect, Trump himself made it clear in a July interview that Taiwan cannot count on him any more than Ukraine can. Trump conceives of the U.S. alliance system as a protection racket, not as an association of democracies. In his preelection interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump made the Mafia comparison explicit. He said of Taiwan and other allies: “They want us to protect, and they want protection. They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know? The mob makes you pay money, right?” A vote for Trump isn’t a vote for some Pacific-first strategy, however misconceived or addled. It’s a vote for international gangsterism. Trump feels most at home with dictators (including Xi Jinping, China’s president for life) and with client states, such as Saudi Arabia, that pay emoluments to him and to his family via their businesses.

Yet a second-term Trump will not travel a smooth path to autocracy at home and isolation from abroad. If Trump does return to the presidency, it will almost certainly occur after a third consecutive loss of the popular vote: by 3 million in 2016, 7 million in 2020, and who knows how many millions in 2024.

Since the end of the Cold War, a Republican candidate for president has won more votes than his Democratic counterpart exactly once, in 2004. Even so, the GOP has enjoyed three presidencies, and soon perhaps a fourth. Minority rule begins to look like not merely a feature of Republican administration, but actually a precondition for it. Trump Republicans may now insist, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” But most Americans assumed that we were a democracy—and believe that, to the extent we’re not, we should be.

If a president who comes to office without a majority democratic mandate starts doing the radical things Trump wants to do—building detention camps, pardoning January 6 culprits, abandoning Ukraine—he’s going to find himself on the receiving end of some powerful opposition. A president hoisted into office by a glitch of the Electoral College cannot silence criticism by invoking his popular mandate. A president who has been convicted of felonies and who fires prosecutors in order to save himself from being convicted of even more is not well positioned to demand law and order.

Trump may forget, but his opponents will not, that he was the man who wrecked the country’s centuries-long record of a peaceful transition of power. That particular clock reset itself to zero in 2021. The American tradition is now shorter than those of Moldova and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both of which have a record of peaceful transition of power stretching all the way back to 2019.

A second Trump administration will be even more of a snake pit of craziness, incompetence, and intrigue than the first was. Elon Musk will imagine himself to be the real power in the land: After all, he bought the presidency, didn’t he? Vice President J. D. Vance will scheme to shoulder aside an elderly Trump, whom he never respected. It’s amazing what a vice president can get done if he arrives at the office at six in the morning and the president doesn’t show up until nearly noon. The lower levels of the administration will see a nonstop guerrilla war between the opportunists who signed up with Trump for their own advantage and the genuine crackpots.

From the viewpoint of millions of Americans, a second Trump presidency would be the result of a foreign cabal’s exploitation of defects in the constitutional structure to impose un-American authoritarianism on an unwilling majority. It enrages pro-Trump America that anti-Trump America regards Trump and Vance as disloyal tools of Russian subversion—but we do, we have the evidence, and we have the numbers.

If Trump is elected again, world trade will contract under the squeeze of U.S. protectionism. Prices will jump for ordinary Americans. Farmers and other exporters will lose markets. Businesses will lose competitiveness as Trump tariffs raise the price of every input in the supply chain, including such basic commodities as steel and such advanced products as semiconductor chips.

As Americans quarrel over Trump’s extreme actions, the most prominent predators—Russia, China, and Iran—will prowl, seeking advantage for themselves in the U.S. turmoil. Ominously, Trump’s weakness may make great-power conflict more likely.

Putin, Xi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un may imagine that because they can manipulate and outwit Trump, they can discount the United States entirely. China especially may misinterpret Trump’s dislike of allies as an invitation to grab Taiwan—only to trigger a U.S. reaction that may surprise China and Trump alike. Until such a desperate moment, however, former allies will look elsewhere for protection. As a French cabinet minister said, only days ago: “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of the voters of Wisconsin every four years.”

Under a returned President Trump, the American century will come to a close, in the way darkly foreseen by a great 20th-century novel of Washington power, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, from 1959:

In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others … rise and rise and rise—and then … the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it.

[McKay Coppins: This is not the end of America]

Trump’s ascent has driven many to wonder how U.S. politics became so polarized, so extreme. That question, so often repeated, is also profoundly misplaced. We all regularly encounter fellow Americans who hold views different from our own. Almost all of those encounters unfold with calm and civility.

The speech and behavior modeled by Trump are emulated by only his most fervent admirers, and even then only in safe spaces, such as on social media and at his rallies. The most pro-Trump employer in America would instantly fire any employee who talked about women, racial minorities, international partners, or people who lived in big cities the way that Trump does. An employee who told lies, shifted blame, exulted in violence, misappropriated other people’s property, blathered nonsense, or just wandered around vacantly as Trump does would be referred to mental-health professionals or reported to law enforcement.

Trump’s conduct is in fact so disturbing and offensive even to his supporters that they typically cope either by denying attested facts or by inventing fictional good deeds and falsely attributing them to him: secret acts of charity, empathy, or courtesy that never happened.

Trump’s political superpower has not been his ability to activate a small fan base. If that’s all he were able to do, he’d be no more a threat to American institutions than any of the other fanatics and oddballs who lurk on the edges of mainstream politics. Trump’s superpower has been his ability to leverage his sway over a cult following to capture control of one of the two great parties in U.S. politics. If all we had to worry about were the people who idolize Trump, we would not have much to worry about. Unfortunately, we also must worry about the people who see him as he is but choose to work through him anyway, in pursuit of their own goals.

For that reason, Trump’s rise has imposed a special responsibility upon those of us with backgrounds in conservative and Republican politics. He arose because he was enabled not just by people we knew but by people we also knew to despise him.

For that reason too, his rise has generated a fierce and determined internal refusal of a kind not seen before in presidential politics. “Never Trump” is both a label for the reaction of some of the most prominent Republicans, such as Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney, and a movement that has helped tip into the Democratic column congressional seats once held by George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, and many other former party stalwarts. These did not use to be “swing seats” by any definition: Bush’s seat had been Republican-held for more than half a century until it went Democratic in 2018. Through the 2024 primaries, about one-fifth of Republicans voted against Trump to the very end, even after all of his opponents ended their campaigns.

Pro-Trump Republicans dismiss this internal refusal as unimportant. They also rage against the refusers as party traitors. I have felt that fury because I number among the refusers.

About two weeks ago, I received an email from a reader who demanded, not very politely, that I cease describing myself as a conservative if I did not support Trump’s return to the presidency:

I know a lot of you NeverTrumpers want to pretend otherwise, but the Trump presidency was a very conservative presidency, and a lot of policy objectives of the Conservative Movement were achieved in his presidency … There is never a conservative case for voting for a Democrat over a Republican due to the simple fact that in any given election (whether its federal or state or local), the Republican candidate is to the right of the Democratic candidate.

One lesson of the Trump years, however, is about how old concepts of “right” and “left” have fallen out of date in the Trump era. What was conservatism once? A politics of gratitude for America’s great constitutional traditions, a politics of free markets and free trade, a politics of American global leadership. This was the politics that excited me, as a very young man, to knock on doors for the Reagan-Bush ticket in the election of 1980.

Ronald Reagan liked to describe the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” As Trump closed his 2024 campaign, he derided the country as “the garbage can for the world.” In his first inaugural address, Reagan challenged the country “to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds.” He concluded: “And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.” Trump instead condemns the United States as a “stupid country that’s run by stupid people.”

In 1987, Reagan traveled to Berlin, then still divided by the Iron Curtain, to urge the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Three years later, Trump gave an interview to Playboy in which he condemned Gorbachev for not crushing dissent more harshly and praised the Chinese Communist Party for the murderous violence of Tiananmen Square:

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength … Russia is out of control, and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.

Reagan saluted a common American identity bigger than party. In 1982, he honored the centenary of the birth of his great opposite number among 20th-century presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Like the Founding Fathers before him, F.D.R. was an American giant, a leader who shaped, inspired, and led our people through perilous times. He meant many different things to many different people. He could reach out to men and women of diverse races and backgrounds and inspire them with new hope and new confidence in war and peace.

Forty-two years later, Donald Trump describes his Democratic adversaries, including the most recent Democratic speaker of the House, as enemies “from within.” Trump also mused about using the National Guard and the U.S. military against “the enemy within.” He has repeatedly spoken of using state power to retaliate against politicians and journalists. As president, he pressed his attorney general to prosecute his critics and perceived adversaries. Privately, he often spoke and speaks of arresting and executing opponents, including General Mark Milley, the most senior member of the military who incurred his displeasure. He has endorsed proposals to haul former Republican Representative Liz Cheney before a military tribunal to be punished for voting for his impeachment.

Even if Trump is only partly successful in crushing dissent, the authoritarian direction in which he wishes to lead the country is unmistakable. Since 2021, Trump has bent the Republican Party to his will even more radically now than he did as president. Republicans have made their peace with Trump’s actions on January 6. They wrote tariffs into their 2024 party platform. They let Trump plunder party funds for his own legal defense, and then, because they were broke, turned over their get-out-the-vote operation to Elon Musk’s personal super PAC. The Republican Party has lost its immunity to Trump’s authoritarianism.

Trump himself has only become more vengeful and bloodthirsty. He told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 about his response to two impeachments: “I became worse.” This personal instinct will guide the entire administration, and that is the meaning of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which functions as Trump’s first-year operating plan (in part because Project 2025 is the only plan Trump’s got).

If you are inclined to vote for Trump out of some attachment to a Reaganite idea of conservative Republicanism, think again. Your party, the party that stood for freedom against the Berlin Wall, has three times nominated a man who praised the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Forty years is a long time in politics. The four decades from 1924 to 1964 saw the Democratic Party evolve from one that nominated a segregationist and refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan to the party that wrote and implemented the Civil Rights Act. Over a similar interval, the Republican Party has rotated from being one of freedom and enterprise to one of authoritarianism and repression. Yet many inside the Republican world and outside—including my email correspondent—insist on pretending that nothing has changed.

A few weeks ago, a researcher released a report that tallied political contributions by almost 100,000 executives and corporate directors at almost 10,000 firms from 2001 to 2022. The tally showed a pronounced trend away from Republican candidates and conservative causes. When reported in the media, the headlines pronounced that “CEOs Are Moving Left.” Are they? Or are they instead recognizing that the party of Trump and Vance has become virtually the opposite of the party of Reagan and Bush?

Consider this example: In his 1991 State of the Union address, Bush discerned an “opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order, where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance.” Campaigning this year, Vance appeared at the Turning Point USA convention alongside the far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who announced: “We’re bringing down the new world order!”

Trump is opposed by almost every member of his first-term national-security team, and by his own former vice president; he has the support of the anti-vax crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the propagandist for Russian imperialism Tulsi Gabbard. Something revolutionary has happened inside the Republican Party: If you placed your faith and loyalty in Reagan and Bush’s party of freedom, you need to accept that the party of Trump and Vance has rejected your ideals, discarded your heroes, defiled your most cherished political memories. This GOP is something new and different and ugly, and you owe it nothing.

[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

“I believe in America.” Those words open a great American movie, The Godfather. Although, in the film, those words pulse with heavy irony—they are spoken by an undertaker to a gangster as they together plot an act of revenge against a bigoted failure of American justice—they also pulse with power. We can recognize that there is so much to doubt about America, yet we believe in it all the same.

In 1860, Americans voted on whether to remain one country or to split over slavery. In 1964, Americans voted on whether to defend equal rights before the law. So also will the election of 2024 turn on one ultimate question: whether to protect our constitutional democracy or submit to a presidency that wants to reorder the United States in such a way that it will become one of the world’s reactionary authoritarian regimes.

Some rationalizers for Trump want to deceive you that you face an unhappy choice between two equally difficult extremes. That is untrue. One choice, the Trump choice, deviates from the path of constitutional democracy toward a murky and sinister future. The other choice allows the United States to continue its cautious progress along the lines marked by the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment toward the aspiration of a “more perfect union.”

If elected, Kamala Harris will be the first woman president: a dramatic breakthrough in U.S. history. Yet, in so many ways, her presidency will be constrained. She’ll almost certainly face a Republican-controlled Senate from the start; very possibly, a Republican House, too. Even if the Democrats somehow win a majority in a single chamber of Congress in 2024, they’ll almost certainly lose it in 2026. Besides a hostile Congress, she would also face adverse courts and a media environment in which a handful of ultra-wealthy owners can impose ever-stricter limits on what may be said and who will hear it.

Yet within these inevitable limitations, Harris offers one big idea: the equal right of the female half of the American people to freedom and individuality.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, American women have become the targets of a campaign of surveillance, policing, and control. In many places, they have lost the right to protect themselves from the consequences of sexual violence. A study in an American Medical Association journal estimates that some 65,000 rape-caused pregnancies a year are occurring in the 14 states where abortion is now banned. State governments have inserted themselves into the medical care of women who miscarry their pregnancies, restricting the treatment their doctors can offer—sometimes with permanent loss of fertility or worse as a result of the government’s order.

Some conservative states are weighing restrictions on the right of pregnant women to travel across state lines to seek abortions in more liberal jurisdictions. In a 2022 interview, Vance declared himself sympathetic to such authoritarian measures:

I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation—let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity—that’s kind of creepy … And it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?

In his 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, Senator Barry Goldwater answered those who asked what he, as president, would do about this or that particular constituent interest. His words echo to this day: “I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

America’s main interest remains liberty. The election of 2024 will sway federal policy on a huge range of issues: climate change; economic growth; border security; stability on the European continent, in the Middle East, in the Indo-Pacific. Supreme above all of these issues, however, is preserving the right of the American people to govern themselves according to their constitutional rules.

Trump is not an abstract thinker. When he thinks about the presidency, he thinks about enriching himself, flattering his ego, and punishing his enemies. Yet, as he pursues his impulsive purposes, he is also advancing a bigger cause in which he has many more intelligent partners, and one that will outlast his political career. That cause is to rearrange the U.S. government so that a minority can indefinitely rule over the American majority.

As hemmed in as her presidency may be, Harris will also have a great cause to advance. Her cause will be what Lincoln’s was, and Roosevelt’s, and Reagan’s, too: to protect the right of the American majority to govern itself in defiance of domestic plutocrats and foreign autocrats. Every domestic-policy challenge—climate change, economic growth, budget deficits, border security—will follow from this prior question: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people—or government of some people, by some people, for some people?”

Voting has begun. This great ritual of American democracy reaches its climax on November 5. The right vote to cast in 2024 is both progressive and conservative: conservative because it conserves the great things Americans have already done together and progressive because it keeps alive the possibility of doing still greater things in the future. The near-term policy outlook matters far less than stopping a small cabal of sinister and suspect power-seekers from blocking forever the right of the American majority to do any great things at all.

In the immediate shock of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I posted these words:

We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

Over the succeeding four years of Trump’s term, I lived almost every day in a state of dread. Perhaps you did, too. Yet the American people proved equal to the work required of them. The guardrails shook, and in some places they cracked, yet when the ultimate test came, in January 2021, brave Americans of both great parties joined to beat back Trump’s violent attempted seizure of power.

Now here we are again. You are needed once more. Perhaps you feel wearier than you did seven years ago. Perhaps you feel more afraid today than you did then. Yet you must still find the strength to answer your country’s call. You can do it. We can do it. We believe in America.