On December 14, 2016, President-elect Donald Trump crammed a handful of America’s most recognizable moguls into a conference room on the 25th floor of his Manhattan headquarters. The group included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Despite having just won the most powerful position on the planet, Trump assumed a sycophantic pose.

“There’s nobody like you in the world!” Trump exclaimed. “In the world!”

He wanted them to know: “I’m here to help you folks do well.”

At that early date, Trump was a somewhat unknown quantity, at least as far as these billionaires were concerned. They couldn’t be sure if he was actually aligned with their interests, given his support of tariffs, hostility toward immigration, and fulminations against globalism. Besides, it was an especially inflamed moment in American politics, and the executives had reason to fear that their workforces, not to mention their customers, might furiously protest an intimate working relationship with Trump. So after the meeting adjourned, Trump’s offer of an alliance was left dangling.

If Trump prevails on November 5, a version of the partnership he hinted at eight years ago will finally emerge, and in a far more robust form than he could have ever imagined at the time. That’s because many of the wealthiest Americans have reached the cold conclusion that the opportunities presented by Trump outweigh whatever social opprobrium might follow an embrace.

There’s a word for this type of cozy arrangement: oligarchy. The term conjures the corrupt illiberal system that governs Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But like fascism or democracy, the concept varies from country to country, a product of its native political culture and sources of wealth.

The Trumpist oligarchy that is taking shape is far different from the post-Soviet strain. What makes it distinct is that Trump is entering into a partnership with the most powerful technologists in the world. But the core problem of oligarchy is the same. The symbiotic relationship between a corrupt leader and a business elite always entails the trading of favors. The regime does the bidding of the billionaires and, in turn, the billionaires do the bidding of the regime. Power grows ever more concentrated as the owners and the corrupt leaders conspire to protect their mutual hold on it. In short order, this arrangement has the potential to deliver a double blow to the American system: It could undermine capitalism and erode democracy all at once.

Perhaps it will soon be possible to look back on the first Trump term with nostalgia. Back in those days, there was rampant corruption, but it was relatively small-time. Jared Kushner and the Trump kids traded on the family name. In the mix were old friends of the president like Tom Barrack, who allegedly attempted to parlay his presidential friendship to win clients in the Middle East. Supplicants usually ingratiated themselves with Trump by buying units in his buildings and hosting events at his resorts. When the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute wanted the administration’s help, it spent more than $700,000 on an event at a Trump golf resort. In a second term, that brand of blatant transactionalism will reappear, and likely get much worse, because it’s now clear that there are no consequences for engaging in it.

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

The biggest difference between Trump I and Trump II is that he would return to office at a uniquely perilous moment in the history of American government. Never before has the state been such a lucrative profit center for private business. And not since the Gilded Age has it been so vulnerable to corrupt manipulation.

In part, this is because of a bipartisan shift in ideology. Over the past decade, both political parties have come to embrace what’s called “industrial policy.” That is, to varying degrees, Republicans and Democrats agree that the government should play the role of investment bank, spending billions to subsidize sectors of the economy vital to the national interest—and to protect those domestic firms from foreign competition with tariffs.

At the same time, the federal government has become a massive consumer of technology, in the form of cloud computing and artificial intelligence and rockets, that it can’t efficiently produce itself. From 2019 to 2022, according to a study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the Pentagon and intelligence community spent at least $53 billion on contracts with Big Technology firms.

All that government spending comes at a time when the bureaucracy that oversees such expenditures is especially precarious. Over the summer, the Supreme Court issued a decision gutting the power of federal agencies. Trump would likely strike another grievous blow against it, extending his power to fire civil servants to purge a tier of experts, lawyers, and clerks hired to be neutral arbiters of the national interest so that he can replace them with his cronies.

Without that accountability, the vast sums the government spends can be more easily funneled to favorite firms; regulation can be more easily manipulated to punish rivals of those firms. Those billionaires with access to the government will have something close to unchallenged control of the economy’s commanding heights.

None of this would exactly resemble Putin’s oligarchy, which largely consists of old chums from the KGB and his childhood friends from St. Petersburg. Russia is an aristocracy of apparatchiks, whose primary goal is to protect ill-gotten wealth amassed during the country’s chaotic transition from communism, a mission that has required brutality and suppression.

But Trump’s and Putin’s oligarchs share one important similarity. The Big Tech billionaires attracted to Trump would hope to protect their monopolies by providing essential services that make them indispensable to the government and the nation. This indispensability will also—so the theory goes—insulate them from antitrust enforcement. It’s far harder to make the case for breaking up a monopoly when that monopoly supplies the Pentagon with communications technologies and runs cloud-computing services for intelligence agencies.

[Read: Jeff Bezos is blaming the victim]

But there’s a distinct twist to the aims of the Big Tech oligarchs: They don’t simply want to insulate themselves from regulators and courts. Ultimately, they want to exploit their relationship with the government in order to supplant it. They want to be the ones who gain control of programs and systems that were once the purview of the state. Their alliance with Trump is, at bottom, a power grab.

Take space exploration. Musk and Bezos don’t just want the government to subsidize their rockets and supply the funds that will further grow their aerospace firms. They want to become the architects of human life in the heavens, to design celestial colonies, to shape the future of space. Then there are the tech billionaires promoting cryptocurrency. They don’t simply want to remove regulatory restraints on the industry. In their vision, their companies will replace the U.S. Treasury. And some of these businesses hope to fend off the regulation of artificial intelligence, so that they can exert more invisible control over the flow of information and commerce.

The central activity of an oligarchical system is the mutual scratching of backs. The head of state helps spread the lucre, but also collects a fee for his services. In Russia and Ukraine, presidents received actual monetary fees in the form of kickbacks. Oligarchs laundered money on their behalf, shifting cash into offshore accounts and buying them ornate villas. In essence, oligarchs serve as errand boys. If they own media, then they use their outlets to subtly make the case for their patron; they hire editors more inclined to spout the party line and to steer coverage in a preferred direction.

It’s hard to imagine transplanting Russian oligarchy to these shores, given the American rule of law and the higher standards of American capitalism. But it’s possible to glimpse how the CEOs have begun to play the game—the way Musk has used X to relentlessly extol Trump, or how Bezos canceled The Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris and hired an alumnus of Rupert Murdoch’s empire to serve as publisher.

Every oligarchical system writes its own informal rules, arriving at its own set of furtive understandings. In contrast to Putin, Trump is aligning with genuinely creative entrepreneurs. Yet that doesn’t make the American model better—just uniquely dangerous. Trump’s transactionalism will be tethered to people driven by greed, but also by messianic fervor, and the result will be like nothing you’ve ever seen.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

The thought of Election Day may bring a twinge of anxiety for some people. “A big event should prompt big feelings,” our staff writer Shayla Love recently observed. But waiting for the results also leaves plenty of downtime for many Americans, whose nerves are unlikely to abate until after the race is called. Today, The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What should you watch if you’re feeling overwhelmed by election anxiety?

What to Watch

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (streaming on Max)

When thinking of movies that ease my anxiety, election-related or not, this one is a no-brainer. Allow me to introduce you to Marcel, the shell with shoes on, who will likely give you some hope for the future.

In this mockumentary for all ages, Marcel (co-created and voiced by Jenny Slate) faces tough situations with incredible grace—something we could all aim to do right now. He takes care of his grandmother while also looking for the rest of his family and community, who all disappeared one night. But this heartbreaking situation is no match for Marcel’s relentless positivity, corny sense of humor, and cheesy-but-adorable observations (for example, he says that a documentary is “like a movie, but nobody has any lines and nobody even knows what it is while they’re making it”). And when things don’t go his way or he wants to back down, his grandmother steps in to show us where Marcel got his cheerfulness from—and to tell him to be more like Lesley Stahl from 60 Minutes.

— Mariana Labbate, assistant audience editor

The Verdict (available to rent on YouTube), Darkest Hour (streaming on Netflix)

I should probably recommend something uplifting and funny and distracting, but whenever I feel down or stressed, I return to two rather heavy movies that inspire me. Both of them are about the determination of one person to do the right thing, even when all seems lost.

Start with The Verdict, a 1982 courtroom drama starring Paul Newman as Frank Galvin, a down-and-out lawyer trying to win a medical-malpractice case against a famous Boston hospital. Once a rising legal star, Frank is now just a day-drinking ambulance chaser. But he rediscovers himself—and his sense of justice—as he fights the hospital and its evil white-shoe law firm.

After that, watch Darkest Hour, in which Winston Churchill—magnificently portrayed by Gary Oldman—fights to save Western civilization during the terrifying days around the time of the fall of France in 1940. The United Kingdom stands alone as British politicians around Churchill urge him to make a deal with Hitler. Instead, the prime minister rallies the nation to stand and fight.

No matter what happens on Election Day, both movies will remind you that every one of us can make a difference each day if we stay true to our moral compass.

— Tom Nichols, staff writer

Outrageous Fortune (available to rent on YouTube)

Bette Midler and Shelley Long star in this campy 1987 flick, which starts out as a satire of the New York theater scene before escalating into a buddy comedy slash action thriller (with a healthy dose of girl-power revenge).

Some scenes haven’t aged all that well. But the dynamic between the two stars as they careen into truly absurd situations is winning enough to carry the film. To keep track of who is who—and who mustn’t be trusted—you will need to put down your phone and focus (doubly true because some elements of the plot are slightly underbaked). The blend of slapstick antics and pulpy suspense should help take your mind off the race, as will the costume jewelry, shots of 1980s New York, Shakespeare references, and explosions. Through the plot’s various twists and turns, one takeaway is clear: The power of dance should never be underestimated. This movie may not exactly restore anyone’s faith in humanity, but it will definitely help pass the time as you wait for results to roll in.

— Lora Kelley, associate editor

The Hunt for Red October (streaming on Max)

There are three movies I’ll watch at the drop of a hat: Arrival, a genre-bender in which Amy Adams plays a linguist who learns to speak backwards and forward in time; The Devil Wears Prada, as long as we skip through the scenes with Andy’s annoying friends; and the Cold War underwater thriller The Hunt for Red October. I consider all three films a balm in anxious times, but this week, I’m setting sail with Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin.

Maybe because I write about war, I don’t consider a plotline centered on the threat of nuclear Armageddon an unusually nerve-racking experience. This movie transports me. The script is as tight as the hull of a Typhoon-class submarine. James Earl Jones is near perfect as an admiral turned CIA honcho. Baldwin was super hot then. And a bonus: The supporting performances by Scott Glenn, Courtney B. Vance, Sam Neill, and Tim Curry (Tim Curry!) are some of the most memorable of their careers. (Fight me.) If you haven’t seen this movie, treat yourself—if only for the opening minutes, so you can hear Connery, in Edinburgh-tinged Russian, proclaim morning in Murmansk to be “Cold … and hard.”

— Shane Harris, staff writer

How I Met Your Mother (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

The right sitcom can cure just about anything. If you, like me, somehow missed out on watching How I Met Your Mother when it first aired, it’s the perfect show to transport you back to a not-so-distant past when TV still had laugh tracks and politics was … not this. For the uninitiated, the series is exactly what it sounds like, featuring a dorky romantic named Ted as he tells his kids the seemingly interminable story of, well, how he met their mother.

The roughly 20-minute episodes are both goofy and endearing. Although the plot, which follows Ted and his four best friends, centers on the characters’ romantic entanglements, the story is fundamentally about friendship. As Kevin Craft wrote in The Atlantic in the run-up to the series finale, the show’s unstated mantra is “We’re all in this together.” Over the next few days, this is perhaps the most important thing we can remember.

— Lila Shroff, assistant editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Throw out your black plastic spatula. A future without Hezbollah What Orwell didn’t anticipate

The Week Ahead

Heretic, a horror-thriller film starring Hugh Grant, about a man who traps two young missionaries in a deadly game inside his house (in theaters Friday) Season 4 of Outer Banks, a series about a group of teenagers hunting for treasure (part two premieres Thursday on Netflix) You Can’t Please All, a memoir by Tariq Ali about how his years of political activism shaped his life (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Why You Might Need an Adventure

By Arthur C. Brooks

Almost everyone knows the first line of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Fewer people may remember what comes next—which might just be some of the best advice ever given to chase away a bit of depression:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Making new friends is tough. The Golden Bachelorette understands why. The celebrities are saying the loud part quietly. MomTok is the apotheosis of 21st-century womanhood. Eight nonfiction books that will frighten you “Dear James”: My colleague repeats herself constantly. Conclave is a crowd-pleaser about the papacy.

Catch Up on The Atlantic

A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks Trump suggests training guns on Liz Cheney’s face. The Democratic theory of winning with less

Photo Album

A competitor paddles in a giant hollowed-out pumpkin at the yearly pumpkin regatta in Belgium. (Bart Biesemans / Reuters)

Check out these photos of people around the world dressing up in Halloween costumes and celebrating the holiday with contests, parades, and more.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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

The revelation that North Korean troops have been gathering in Russia, ostensibly to assist President Vladimir Putin in his brutal invasion of Ukraine, has stoked Western fears of autocratic states banding together to undermine the interests of democracies. There is an authoritarian coalition, but it’s rickety—and it depends on China’s tolerance for chaos.

The war in Ukraine has been a showcase for cooperation among four states—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—that share an antipathy toward the United States and the international order it represents. Since invading its neighbor in 2022, Russia has sourced drones and missiles from Iran. In October, Washington sanctioned Chinese companies for working with Russian firms to produce drones. According to U.S. officials, China has also been supplying Russia with vital components that help sustain its war machine. And now North Korean troops have come to Russia, where, Ukrainian officials believe, they are preparing to join the invading forces. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that if the troops did participate in the war, it would be a “very, very serious issue” with potential implications in both Europe and Asia.

Yet this cooperation masks divisions among the world’s major autocracies. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran don’t necessarily agree on how to achieve their shared goal of countering American domination. Putin has chosen an expansionist war. North Korea and Iran—impoverished, isolated from the West, and zealously anti-American—have little to lose, and something material to gain, from assisting Russia. But China’s calculus is more complicated, because its desire to change the current world order is tempered by its reliance upon that very same order. The Chinese economy remains too dependent on the United States and its partners to risk being heavily sanctioned for shipping arms to Putin.

Constrained by these competing interests, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has taken a generally cautious approach to his global ambitions. He apparently aims to preserve a measure of global stability to protect the Chinese economy while he steadily expands China’s power. At the same time, however, he has deepened his relationships with Russia and Iran, even as their leaders foment chaos in Europe and the Middle East.

Washington is pressing Beijing to intervene and curb North Korea’s cooperation with Russia, but Xi has not shown much interest in leveraging his influence to rein in his autocratic friends. He met with Putin just the day before the Biden administration revealed the presence of North Korean troops in Russia. What passed between the two isn’t known, but the troops remained.

A case can be made that China is not only allowing but indirectly bankrolling all this disruption. The U.S. has sanctioned Russia, Iran, and North Korea, leading all three countries to become heavily dependent on China. Trade between China and Russia reached a record $240 billion last year. Russian business is even turning to the Chinese currency, the yuan, to replace the U.S. dollar. China buys nearly all of Iran’s oil exports, and accounts for 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade. These three countries might have pursued their wars, nuclear programs, and terror campaigns without economic ties to China. But Beijing’s support is undoubtedly helping, and Xi is apparently willing to accept the result.

[Read: China might be the Ukraine war’s big winner]

The destabilizing activities of other autocracies might seem like a win for China, because they effectively drain the West’s resources and undercut its standing in the world. But they are also risky, because the turmoil they create could backfire on China. For instance, a wider war in the Middle East could puncture energy markets and hurt China’s economy. Xi isn’t in a diplomatic or military position in the Middle East to contain the damage. Meanwhile, the North Korean deployment to Russia is threatening to escalate the war in Ukraine: South Korea’s president has warned that Seoul may respond by supplying Ukraine with offensive weapons. China’s leadership has little to gain from concentrating the efforts of America’s European and Asian allies against Russia. In the event that the war widens, American and European leaders could step up sanctions on China to get it to curtail its support for Moscow.

The conundrum of China’s foreign policy is that it seeks at once to completely upend the international order in the long term and to preserve it in the short term. Xi’s solution to this problem is to reduce China’s reliance on the United States and the global system it dominates in the medium term. He is pursuing “self-sufficiency” and encouraging tighter ties of trade and investment with the global South to wean the Chinese economy off Western technology and consumer markets. Then China would have greater freedom to support autocracies such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea in their destabilizing activities.

But that’s the future. For now, Xi is willing to tolerate a world in flames, in the hope that China won’t get burned. By feeding tensions with the West, he stands to damage China’s economy and complicate its geopolitical ambitions. What will the Chinese leader do if this gamble doesn’t go his way? With friends like Xi’s, he may not need enemies.

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.

Pro-EU incumbent Maia Sandu faces off Russia-friendly rival in elections amid claims of fraud and Russian meddling.

President Maia Sandu is in a race seen as a choice between Europe and a return to Russian influence.