The images and videos were hard to miss in the days leading up to November 5. There was Donald Trump with the chiseled musculature of Superman, hovering over a row of skyscrapers. Trump and Kamala Harris squaring off in bright-red uniforms (McDonald’s logo for Trump, hammer-and-sickle insignia for Harris). People had clearly used AI to create these—an effort to show support for their candidate or to troll their opponents. But the images didn’t stop after Trump won. The day after polls closed, the Statue of Liberty wept into her hands as a drizzle fell around her. Trump and Elon Musk, in space suits, stood on the surface of Mars; hours later, Trump appeared at the door of the White House, waving goodbye to Harris as she walked away, clutching a cardboard box filled with flags.

[Read: We haven’t seen the worst of fake news]

Every federal election since at least 2018 has been plagued with fears about potential disruptions from AI. Perhaps a computer-generated recording of Joe Biden would swing a key county, or doctored footage of a poll worker burning ballots would ignite riots. Those predictions never materialized, but many of them were also made before the arrival of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the broader category of advanced, cheap, and easy-to-use generative-AI models—all of which seemed much more threatening than anything that had come before. Not even a year after ChatGPT was released in late 2022, generative-AI programs were used to target Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Biden, and other political leaders. In May 2023, an AI-generated image of smoke billowing out of the Pentagon caused a brief dip in the U.S. stock market. Weeks later, Ron DeSantis’s presidential primary campaign appeared to have used the technology to make an advertisement.

And so a trio of political scientists at Purdue University decided to get a head start on tracking how generative AI might influence the 2024 election cycle. In June 2023, Christina Walker, Daniel Schiff, and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff started to track political AI-generated images and videos in the United States. Their work is focused on two particular categories: deepfakes, referring to media made with AI, and “cheapfakes,” which are produced with more traditional editing software, such as Photoshop. Now, more than a week after polls closed, their database, along with the work of other researchers, paints a surprising picture of how AI appears to have actually influenced the election—one that is far more complicated than previous fears suggested.

The most visible generated media this election have not exactly planted convincing false narratives or otherwise deceived American citizens. Instead, AI-generated media have been used for transparent propaganda, satire, and emotional outpourings: Trump, wading in a lake, clutches a duck and a cat (“Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”); Harris, enrobed in a coppery blue, struts before the Statue of Liberty and raises a matching torch. In August, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself and Musk doing a synchronized TikTok dance; a follower responded with an AI image of the duo riding a dragon. The pictures were fake, sure, but they weren’t feigning otherwise. In their analysis of election-week AI imagery, the Purdue team found that such posts were far more frequently intended for satire or entertainment than false information per se. Trump and Musk have shared political AI illustrations that got hundreds of millions of views. Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies the effects of misinformation, told me that the AI images he saw “were obviously AI-generated, and they were not being treated as literal truth or evidence of something. They were treated as visual illustrations of some larger point.” And this usage isn’t new: In the Purdue team’s entire database of fabricated political imagery, which includes hundreds of entries, satire and entertainment were the two most common goals.

That doesn’t mean these images and videos are merely playful or innocuous. Outrageous and false propaganda, after all, has long been an effective way to spread political messaging and rile up supporters. Some of history’s most effective propaganda campaigns have been built on images that simply project the strength of one leader or nation. Generative AI offers a low-cost and easy tool to produce huge amounts of tailored images that accomplish just this, heightening existing emotions and channeling them to specific ends.

These sorts of AI-generated cartoons and agitprop could well have swayed undecided minds, driven turnout, galvanized “Stop the Steal” plotting, or driven harassment of election officials or racial minorities. An illustration of Trump in an orange jumpsuit emphasizes Trump’s criminal convictions and perceived unfitness for the office, while an image of Harris speaking to a sea of red flags, a giant hammer-and-sickle above the crowd, smears her as “woke” and a “Communist.” An edited image showing Harris dressed as Princess Leia kneeling before a voting machine and captioned “Help me, Dominion. You’re my only hope” (an altered version of a famous Star Wars line) stirs up conspiracy theories about election fraud. “Even though we’re noticing many deepfakes that seem silly, or just seem like simple political cartoons or memes, they might still have a big impact on what we think about politics,” Kaylyn Jackson Schiff told me. It’s easy to imagine someone’s thought process: That image of “Comrade Kamala” is AI-generated, sure, but she’s still a Communist. That video of people shredding ballots is animated, but they’re still shredding ballots. That’s a cartoon of Trump clutching a cat, but immigrants really are eating pets. Viewers, especially those already predisposed to find and believe extreme or inflammatory content, may be further radicalized and siloed. The especially photorealistic propaganda might even fool someone if reshared enough times, Walker told me.

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

There were, of course, also a number of fake images and videos that were intended to directly change people’s attitudes and behaviors. The FBI has identified several fake videos intended to cast doubt on election procedures, such as false footage of someone ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania. “Our foreign adversaries were clearly using AI” to push false stories, Lawrence Norden, the vice president of the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. He did not see any “super innovative use of AI,” but said the technology has augmented existing strategies, such as creating fake-news websites, stories, and social-media accounts, as well as helping plan and execute cyberattacks. But it will take months or years to fully parse the technology’s direct influence on 2024’s elections. Misinformation in local races is much harder to track, for example, because there is less of a spotlight on them. Deepfakes in encrypted group chats are also difficult to track, Norden said. Experts had also wondered whether the use of AI to create highly realistic, yet fake, videos showing voter fraud might have been deployed to discredit a Trump loss. This scenario has not yet been tested.

Although it appears that AI did not directly sway the results last week, the technology has eroded Americans’ overall ability to know or trust information and one another—not deceiving people into believing a particular thing so much as advancing a nationwide descent into believing nothing at all. A new analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue of AI-generated media during the U.S. election cycle found that users on X, YouTube, and Reddit inaccurately assessed whether content was real roughly half the time, and more frequently thought authentic content was AI-generated than the other way around. With so much uncertainty, using AI to convince people of alternative facts seems like a waste of time—far more useful to exploit the technology to directly and forcefully send a motivated message, instead. Perhaps that’s why, of the election-week, AI-generated media the Purdue team analyzed, pro-Trump and anti-Kamala content was most common.

More than a week after Trump’s victory, the use of AI for satire, entertainment, and activism has not ceased. Musk, who will soon co-lead a new extragovernmental organization, routinely shares such content. The morning of November 6, Donald Trump Jr. put out a call for memes that was met with all manner of AI-generated images. Generative AI is changing the nature of evidence, yes, but also that of communication—providing a new, powerful medium through which to illustrate charged emotions and beliefs, broadcast them, and rally even more like-minded people. Instead of an all-caps thread, you can share a detailed and personalized visual effigy. These AI-generated images and videos are instantly legible and, by explicitly targeting emotions instead of information, obviate the need for falsification or critical thinking at all. No need to refute, or even consider, a differing view—just make an angry meme about it. No need to convince anyone of your adoration of J. D. Vance—just use AI to make him, literally, more attractive. Veracity is beside the point, which makes the technology perhaps the nation’s most salient mode of political expression. In a country where facts have gone from irrelevant to detestable, of course deepfakes—fake news made by deep-learning algorithms—don’t matter; to growing numbers of people, everything is fake but what they already know, or rather, feel.

Nick Cave, one of the most physically expressive figures in rock and roll, was looking at me with suspicion. His eyebrows climbed the considerable expanse of his forehead; his slender frame tensed defensively in his pin-striped suit. I think he thought I was trying to get him canceled.

What I was really trying to do was get him to talk about being a man. For much of his four-decade career fronting Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave has seemed a bit like a drag king, exaggerating aspects of the male id to amusing and terrifying effect. He performs in funereal formal wear, sings in a growl that evokes Elvis with rabies, and writes acclaimed songs and books brimming with lust, violence, and—in recent years, as he weathered the death of two sons—pained, fatherly gravitas. His venerated stature is more akin to a knighted icon’s than a punk rocker’s; he has been awarded a badge of honor by the Australian government and a fellowship in the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature, and was even invited to King Charles’s coronation, in 2023.

So when I met the 67-year-old Cave at a Manhattan hotel in August, before the release of the Bad Seeds’ 18th studio album, Wild God, I suspected that I might not be alone in wanting to hear his thoughts about the state of masculinity. Meaning: Why are guys, according to various cultural and statistical indicators, becoming lonelier and more politically extreme? I cited some lyrics from his new album that seemed to be about the way men cope with feelings of insecurity and irrelevance, hoping he would elaborate.

Between the long pauses in Cave’s reply, I could hear the crinkling leather of the oversize chair he sat in. “It may be a need that men have—maybe they’re not feeling like they are valued,” he told me, before cutting himself off. “I don’t want to come on like Jordan Peterson or something,” he said, referring to the controversial, right-leaning psychology professor and podcaster who rails against the alleged emasculating effects of modern culture.

Cave seemed taken aback by the idea that he himself was an authority on the subject. “It feels weird to think that I might be tapping into, or somehow the voice of, what it means to be a man in this world,” he told me. “I’ve never really seen that.” In fact, he said, his songs—especially his recent ones—“are very feminine in their nature.”

“I’m criticized for it, actually,” he went on. Fans write to him and say, “ ‘What’s happened to your fucking music? Grow a pair of balls, you bastard!’ ”

When Cave was 12, growing up in a rural Australian village, his father sat him down and asked him what he had done for humanity. The young Cave was mystified by the question, but his father—an English teacher with novelist ambitions—clearly wanted to pass along a drive to seek greatness, preferably through literary means. Other dads read The Hardy Boys to their kids; Cave’s regaled him with Dostoyevsky, Titus Andronicus, and … Lolita.

Those works’ linguistic elegance and thematic savagery lodged deep in Cave, but music became the medium that spoke best to his emerging point of view—that of an outsider, a bad seed, alienated from ordinary society. When he was 13, a schoolmate’s parents accused him of attempted rape after he tried to pull down their daughter’s underwear; at the school he was transferred to, he became notorious for brawling with other boys. His father’s death in a car crash when Cave was 19, and his own heroin habit at the time, didn’t help his outlook. “I was just a nasty little guy,” he told Stephen Colbert recently. His thrashing, spit-flinging band the Birthday Party earned him comparisons to Iggy Pop, but it wasn’t until he formed the Bad Seeds, in the early ’80s, that his bleak artistic vision ripened.

[Read: Nick Cave is still looking for redemption]

Blending blues, industrial rock, and cabaret into thunderous musical narratives, the Bad Seeds’ songs felt like retellings of primal fables, often warning about the mortal dangers posed by intimacy, vulnerability, and pretty girls. On the 1984 track “From Her to Eternity,” piano chords stabbed like emergency sirens as Cave moaned, “This desire to possess her is a wound.” Its final stanza implied that Cave’s narrator had killed the object of his fascination—a typically grisly outcome in Cave’s early songs. His defining classic, 1988’s “The Mercy Seat,” strapped the listener into the position of a man on death row. It plumbed another of Cave’s central themes: annihilating shame, the feeling of being judged monstrous and fearing that judgment to be true.

As Cave aged and became a father—to four sons by three different women—his vantage widened. The Bad Seeds’ 1997 album, The Boatman’s Call, a collection of stark love songs inspired by his breakup with the singer PJ Harvey, brought him new fans by recasting him as a romantic tragedian. More and more, the libidinal bite of his work seemed satirical. He formed a garage-rock band, Grinderman, whose 2007 single “No Pussy Blues” was a send-up of the mindset of those now called incels, construing sexual frustration as cosmic injustice. (Cave spat, “I sent her every type of flower / I played a guitar by the hour / I patted her revolting little Chihuahua / But still she just didn’t want to.”) In his sensationally filthy 2009 novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, he set out to illustrate the radical feminist Valerie Solanas’s appraisal that “the male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others.” (The actor Matt Smith will soon play the novel’s protagonist, an inveterate pervert, in a TV adaptation.)

But the Cave of today feels far removed from the theatrical grossness of his past, owing to personal horrors. In 2015, his 15-year-old son Arthur fell off a cliff while reportedly on LSD; in 2022, another son, Jethro, died at 31 after struggles with mental health and addiction. “I’ve had, personally, enough violence,” Cave told me. The murder ballads he once wrote were “an indulgence of someone that has yet to experience the ramifications of what violence actually has upon a person—if I’m looking at the death of my children as violent acts, which they are to some degree.”

Nick Cave and his early band the Birthday Party at the Peppermint Lounge in New York, March 26, 1983 (Michael Macioce / Getty)

Music beckoned as a means of healing. The Bad Seeds’ 2019 album, Ghosteen, was a shivery, synth-driven tone poem in which Cave tried to commune with his lost son in the afterlife; by acclamation, it’s his masterpiece. Wild God marks another sonic and temperamental reset. Its music is a luminous fusion of gospel and piano pop: more U2 than the Stooges, more New Testament than Old. Compared with his earlier work, these albums have “a more fluid, more watery sort of feel,” he said. “Which—it’s dangerous territory here—but I guess you could see as a feminine trait.”

On a level deeper than sound, Cave explained, his recent music is “feminine” because of its viewpoint. His lyrics now account not just for his own feelings, but for those of his wife, Susie, the mother of Arthur and his twin brother, Earl. In the first song on Ghosteen, for example, a woman is sitting in a kitchen, listening to music on the radio, which is exactly what Susie was doing when she learned what had happened to Arthur.

“After my son died, I had no understanding of what was going on with me at all,” Cave said. “But I could see Susie. I could see this sort of drama playing out in front of me. Drama—that sounds disparaging, but I don’t mean that. It felt like I was trying to understand what was happening to a mother who had lost her child.” His own subjectivity became “hopelessly and beautifully entangled” with hers. On Ghosteen, “it was very difficult to have a clean understanding of whose voice I actually was in some of these songs.”

That merging of perspectives reflects more than just the shared experience of suffering. It is part of what Cave sees as a transformation of his worldview—from inward-looking to outward-looking, from misanthrope to humanist. Arthur’s death made him realize that he was part of a universal experience of loss, which in turn meant that he was part of the social whole. Whereas he was once motivated to make art to impress and shock the world, he now wanted to help people, to transmute gnawing guilt into something good. “I feel that, as his father, he was my responsibility and I looked away at the wrong time, that I wasn’t sufficiently vigilant,” he said in the 2022 interview collection Faith, Hope and Carnage. He added, speaking of his and Susie’s creative output, “There is not a song or a word or a stitch of thread that is not asking for forgiveness, that is not saying we are just so sorry.”

On the Red Hand Files, the epistolary blog that Cave started in 2018, he replies to questions from the public concerning all manner of subjects: how he feels about religion (he doesn’t identify as Christian, yet he attends church every week), what he thinks of cancel culture (against it, “mercy’s antithesis”), whether he likes raisins (they have a “grim, scrotal horribleness, but like all things in this world—you, me and every other little thing—they have their place”).

At least a quarter of the messages he receives from readers express one idea—“The world is shit,” as he put it. “That has a sort of range: from people that just see everything is corrupt from a political point of view, to people that just see no value in themselves, in human beings, or in the world.” Cave recognizes that outlook from his “nasty little guy” days—but he fears that nihilism has moved from the punk fringe to the mainstream. The misery in his inbox reflects a culture that is “anti-sacred, secular by nature, unmysterious, unnuanced,” he said. He thinks music and faith offer much-needed medicine, helping to re-enchant reality.

[From the October 2024 issue: Leonard Cohen’s prophetic battle against male egoism]

Cave has been heartened to see so many people evidently feeling the same way. Back when Jordan Peterson was first making his mark as a public figure, Cave devoured his lectures about the Bible, he told me. “They were seriously beautiful things. I heard reports about people in his classes; it was like being on acid or something like that. Just listening to this man speak about these sorts of things—it was so deeply complex. And putting the idea of religion back onto the table as a legitimate intellectual concern.”

But over time, he lost interest in Peterson as he watched him get swept up in the internet’s endless, polarized culture wars. Twitter in particular, he said, has “had a terrible, diminishing effect on some great minds.”

The artist’s job, as Cave has come to see it, is to work against this erosion of ambiguity and complication, using their creative powers to push beyond reductive binaries, whether they’re applied to politics, gender, or the soul. “I’m evangelical about the transcendent nature of music itself,” he said. “We can listen to some deeply flawed individuals create the most beautiful things imaginable. The distance from what they are as human beings to what they’re capable of producing can be extraordinary.” Music, he added, can “redeem the individual.”

This redemptive spirit hums throughout Wild God. One song tells of a ghostly boy sitting at the foot of the narrator’s bed, delivering a message: “We’ve all had too much sorrow / Now is the time for joy.” The album joins in that call with its surging, uplifting sound. The final track, “As the Waters Cover the Sea,” is a straightforward hymn, suitable to be sung from the pews of even the most traditional congregations.

But the album is not entirely a departure from Cave’s old work; he has not fully evolved from “living shit-post to Hallmark card,” as he once joked in a Red Hand Files entry. “Frogs” begins with a stark reference to the tale of Cain and Abel—“Ushering in the week, he knelt down / Crushed his brother’s head in with a bone”—and builds to Cave singing, in ecstatic tones, “Kill me!” His point is that “joy is not happiness—it’s not a simple emotion,” he told me. “Joy, in its way, is a form of suffering in itself. It’s rising out of an understanding of the base nature of our lives into an explosion of something beautiful, and then a kind of retreat.”

A few songs portray an old man—or, seemingly interchangeably, an “old god” or a “wild god”—on a hallucinatory journey around the globe, lifting the spirits of the downtrodden wherever he goes. At times, the man comes off like a deluded hero, or even a problematic one: “It was rape and pillage in the retirement village / But in his mind he was a man of great virtue and courage,” Cave sings on the album’s title track. In Cave’s view, though, this figure “is a deeply sympathetic character,” he told me, a person who feels “separated from the world” and is “looking for someone that will see him of some value.”

As with Ghosteen, the album mixes Susie’s perspective with Cave’s. One song, “Conversion,” was inspired by an experience, or maybe a vision, that she had—and that she asked her husband not to publicly disclose in detail. “There is some gentle tension between my wife, who’s an extremely private person, and my own role, which is someone that pretty much speaks about pretty much everything,” Cave said.

In the song, the old god shambles around a town whose inhabitants watch him “with looks on their faces worse than grief itself”—perhaps pity, perhaps judgment. Then he sees a girl with long, dark hair. They embrace—and erupt into a cleansing flame, curing the man of his pain. As Cave described this moment in the song to me, he flared his eyes and made an explosive noise with his mouth. In my mind, I could see the old god, and he looked just like Cave.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Nick Cave Wants to Be Good.”

The pair, who met on Love Island and share a daughter, announced their split in August.

Tasha Morris lost her son Oscar during surgery after a serious car crash in August.

Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Russian border region in August.

After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app’s algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and Russian-seeded disinformation to huge numbers of people. (The U.S. director of national intelligence agreed, and in January 2017 declassified a report that detailed Russia’s actions.) At first, the company’s executives dismissed these concerns—shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg said it was “pretty crazy” to think that fake news on Facebook had played a role—but they soon grew contrite. “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it,” Zuckerberg would say 10 months later. Facebook had by then conceded that its own data did “not contradict” the intelligence report. Shortly thereafter, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of News Feed at the time, told this magazine that the company was launching a number of new initiatives “to stop the spread of misinformation, click-bait and other problematic content on Facebook.” He added: “We’ve learned things since the election, and we take our responsibility to protect the community of people who use Facebook seriously.”

Nowhere was the effort more apparent than in the launch of the company’s “war room” ahead of the 2018 midterms. Here, employees across departments would come together in front of a huge bank of computers to monitor Facebook for misinformation, fake news, threats of violence, and other crises. Numerous reporters were invited in at the time; The Verge, Wired, and The New York Times were among the outlets that ran access-driven stories about the effort. But the war room looked, to some, less like a solution and more like a mollifying stunt—a show put on for the press. And by 2020, with the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories and “Stop the Steal” groups, things did not seem generally better on Facebook.

[Read: What Facebook did to American democracy]

What is happening on Facebook now? On the eve of another chaotic election, journalists have found that highly deceptive political advertisements still run amok there, as do election-fraud conspiracy theories. The Times reported in September that the company, now called Meta, had fewer full-time employees working on election integrity and that Zuckerberg was no longer having weekly meetings with the lieutenants in charge of them. The paper also reported that Meta had replaced the war room with a less sharply defined “election operations center.”

When I reached out to Meta to ask about its plans, the company did not give many specific details. But Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson focused on election preparedness, told me that the war room definitely still exists and that “election operations center” is just another of its names. He proved this with a video clip showing B-roll footage of a few dozen employees working in a conference room on Super Tuesday. The video had been shot in Meta’s Washington, D.C., office, but Chambliss impressed upon me that it could really be anywhere: The war room moves and exists in multiple places. “Wouldn’t want to over-emphasize the physical space as it’s sort of immaterial,” he wrote in an email.

It is clear that Meta wants to keep its name out of this election however much that is possible. It may marshal its considerable resources and massive content-moderation apparatus to enforce its policies against election interference, and it may “break the glass,” as it did in 2021, to take additional action if something as dramatic as January 6 happens again. At the same time, it won’t draw a lot of attention to those efforts or be very specific about them. Recent conversations I’ve had with a former policy lead at the company and academics who have worked with and studied Facebook, as well as Chambliss, made it clear that as a matter of policy, the company has done whatever it can to fly under the radar this election season—including Zuckerberg’s declining to endorse a candidate, as he has in previous presidential elections. When it comes to politics, Meta and Zuckerberg have decided that there is no winning. At this pivotal moment, it is simply doing less.

Meta’s war room may be real, but it is also just a symbol—its meaning has been haggled over for six years now, and its name doesn’t really matter. “People got very obsessed with the naming of this room,” Katie Harbath, a former public-policy director at Facebook who left the company in March 2021, told me. She disagreed with the idea that the room was ever a publicity stunt. “I spent a lot of time in that very smelly, windowless room,” she said. I wondered whether the war room—ambiguous in terms of both its accomplishments and its very existence—was the perfect way to understand the company’s approach to election chaos. I posed to Harbath that the conversation around the war room was really about the anxiety of not knowing what, precisely, Meta is doing behind closed doors to meet the challenges of the moment.

She agreed that part of the reason the room was created was to help people imagine content moderation. Its primary purpose was practical and logistical, she said, but it was “a way to give a visual representation of what the work looks like too.” That’s why, this year, the situation is so muddy. Meta doesn’t want you to think there is no war room, but it isn’t drawing attention to the war room. There was no press junket; there were no tours. There is no longer even a visual of the war room as a specific room in one place.

This is emblematic of Meta’s in-between approach this year. Meta has explicit rules against election misinformation on its platforms; these include a policy against content that attempts to deceive people about where and how to vote. The rules do not, as written, include false claims about election results (although such claims are prohibited in paid ads). Posts about the Big Lie—the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—were initially moderated with fact-checking labels, but these were scaled back dramatically before the 2022 midterms, purportedly because users disliked them. The company also made a significant policy update this year to clarify that it would require labels on AI-generated content (a change made after its Oversight Board criticized its previous manipulated-media policy as “incoherent”). But tons of unlabeled generative-AI slop still flows without consequence on Facebook.

[Read: “History will not judge us kindly”]

In recent years, Meta has also attempted to de-prioritize political content of all kinds in its various feeds. “As we’ve said for years, people have told us they want to see less politics overall while still being able to engage with political content on our platforms if they want,” Chambliss told me. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing.” When I emailed to ask questions about the company’s election plans, Chambliss initially responded by linking me to a short blog post that Meta put out 11 months ago, and attaching a broadly circulated fact sheet, which included such vague figures as “$20 billion invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016.” This information is next-to-impossible for a member of the public to make sense of—how is anyone supposed to know what $20 billion can buy?

In some respects, Meta’s reticence is just part of a broader cultural shift. Content moderation has become politically charged in recent years. Many high-profile misinformation and disinformation research projects born in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection have shut down or shrunk. (When the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization that published regular reports on election integrity and misinformation, shut down, right-wing bloggers celebrated the end of its “reign of censorship.”) The Biden administration experimented in 2022 with creating a Disinformation Governance Board, but quickly abandoned the plan after it drew a firestorm from the right—whose pundits and influencers portrayed the proposal as one for a totalitarian “Ministry of Truth.” The academic who had been tasked with leading it was targeted so intensely that she resigned.

“Meta has definitely been quieter,” Harbath said. “They’re not sticking their heads out there with public announcements.” This is partly because Zuckerberg has become personally exasperated with politics, she speculated. She added that it is also the result of the response the company got in 2020—accusations from Democrats of doing too little, accusations from Republicans of doing far too much. The far right was, for a while, fixated on the idea that Zuckerberg had personally rigged the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden and that he frequently bowed to Orwellian pressure from the Biden administration afterward. In recent months, Zuckerberg has been oddly conciliatory about this position; in August, he wrote what amounted to an apology letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, saying that Meta had overdone it with its efforts to curtail COVID-19 misinformation and that it had erred by intervening to minimize the spread of the salacious news story about Hunter Biden and his misplaced laptop.  

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used to donate large sums of money to nonpartisan election infrastructure through their philanthropic foundation. They haven’t done so this election cycle, seeking to avoid a repeat of the controversy ginned up by Republicans the last time. This had not been enough to satisfy Trump, though, and he recently threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life if he makes any political missteps—which may, of course, be one of the factors Zuckerberg is considering in choosing to stay silent.

Other circumstances have changed dramatically since 2020, too. Just before that election, the sitting president was pushing conspiracy theories about the election, about various groups of his own constituents, and about a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. He was still using Facebook, as were the adherents of QAnon, the violent conspiracy theory that positioned him as a redeeming godlike figure. After the 2020 election, Meta said publicly that Facebook would no longer recommend political or civic groups for users to join—clearly in response to the criticism that the site’s own recommendations guided people into “Stop the Steal” groups. And though Facebook banned Trump himself for using the platform to incite violence on January 6, the platform reinstated his account once it became clear that he would again be running for president

This election won’t be like the previous one. QAnon simply isn’t as present in the general culture, in part because of actions that Meta and other platforms took in 2020 and 2021. More will happen on other platforms this year, in more private spaces, such as Telegram groups. And this year’s “Stop the Steal” movement will likely need less help from Facebook to build momentum: YouTube and Trump’s own social platform, Truth Social, are highly effective for this purpose. Election denial has also been galvanized from the top by right-wing influencers and media personalities including Elon Musk, who has turned X into the perfect platform for spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He pushes them himself all the time.

In many ways, understanding Facebook’s relevance is harder than ever. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 33 percent of U.S. adults say they “regularly” get news from the platform. But Meta has limited access to data for both journalists and academics in the past two years. After the 2020 election, the company partnered with academics for a huge research project to sort out what happened and to examine Facebook’s broader role in American politics. It was cited when Zuckerberg was pressed to answer for Facebook’s role in the organization of the “Stop the Steal” movement and January 6: “We believe that independent researchers and our democratically elected officials are best positioned to complete an objective review of these events,” he said at the time. That project is coming to an end, some of the researchers involved told me, and Chabliss confirmed.

The first big release of research papers produced through the partnership, which gave researchers an unprecedented degree of access to platform data, came last summer. Still more papers will continue to be published as they pass peer review and are accepted to scientific journals—one paper in its final stages will deal with the diffusion of misinformation—but all of these studies were conducted using data from 2020 and 2021. No new data have or will be provided to these researchers.

When I asked Chambliss about the end of the partnership, he emphasized that no other platform had bothered to do as robust of a research project. However, he wouldn’t say exactly why it was coming to an end. “It’s a little frustrating that such a massive and unprecedented undertaking that literally no other platform has done is put to us as a question of ‘why not repeat this?’ vs asking peer companies why they haven't come close to making similar commitments for past or current elections,” he wrote in an email.

The company also shut down the data-analysis tool CrowdTangle—used widely by researchers and by journalists—earlier this year. It touts new tools that have been made available to researchers, but academics scoff at the claim that they approximate anything like real access to live and robust information. Without Meta’s cooperation, it becomes much harder for academics to effectively monitor what happens on its platforms.

I recently spoke with Kathleen Carley, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, about research she conducted from 2020 to 2022 on the rise of “pink slime,” a type of mass-produced misinformation designed to look like the product of local newspapers and to be shared on social media. Repeating that type of study for the 2024 election would cost half a million dollars, she estimated, because researchers now have to pay if they want broad data access. From her observations and the more targeted, “surgical” data pulls that her team has been able to do this year, pink-slime sites are far more concentrated in swing states than they had been previously, while conspiracy theories were spreading just as easily as ever. But these are observations; they’re not a real monitoring effort, which would be too costly.

“Monitoring implies that we’re doing consistent data crawls and have wide-open access to data,” she told me, “which we do not.” This time around, nobody will.

Photographs by Wesaam Al-Badry

It’s the evening rush hour on the Friday before Election Day in Omaha, and about two dozen die-hard Democrats are making a racket. They’re standing on a bridge overpass, cheering, whooping, blowing whistles, holding up little American flags, and waving white signs emblazoned with a blue circle. Even in this Republican area on the outskirts of Nebraska’s biggest city, the cars passing by are honking in approval.

The signs say nothing—it’s just that big blue dot in the middle—but their message is no mystery here. “I don’t think there’s anybody in this city who doesn’t know what the blue dot represents,” Tim Conn, a 70-year-old retiree who has spray-painted a few thousand of the signs in his backyard, told me. More than 13,000 blue dots have popped up on Omaha lawns in the past three months, an expression of political pride in what has become a Democratic stronghold on the eastern edge of a deep-red state.

The blue dots embody a surge of enthusiasm for both Kamala Harris and Omaha’s outsize significance to the national election. Nebraska allocates some of its electoral votes by congressional district, and if Harris defeats Donald Trump in the Rust Belt’s “Blue Wall” states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—while losing the battlegrounds to the south, Omaha and its suburbs would likely deliver her the 270th vote that she needs to win the presidency. The district is so important that Trump and his allies repeatedly pressured Republicans in Nebraska’s legislature to change the rules in his favor. (The legislators rebuffed him a final time in September, and Trump has made little effort since to win Omaha the old-fashioned way—by earning more votes.)

Omaha could also determine control of Congress. Democrats view the GOP-held House district as one of their best opportunities to flip a seat and help recapture the majority. And in at least one postelection scenario, an upset victory by the independent Dan Osborn over Senator Deb Fischer—polls show the race is close—would give him the power to choose which party controls the Senate.

[David A. Graham: How is it this close?]

All this has made a region that’s hundreds of miles from the nearest swing state a potential tipping point for the balance of federal power. “Nebraska is literally in the middle of everything,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair, told me. “They try to say that we’re a flyover state, but ha-ha, joke’s on them.”

Nebraska began splitting up its electoral votes more than three decades ago, but only twice since then has Omaha’s vote in the Second Congressional District gone to a Democrat; Barack Obama won it by a single point in 2008, and Joe Biden beat Trump by six points in 2020.

This year, however, Harris is poised to carry the district by more than either of them. The area is filled with the white, college-educated voters who have largely recoiled from Trump since 2016, and a New York Times/Siena poll last week found the vice president leading by 12 points. Neither Harris nor Trump, nor their running mates, are campaigning in Omaha in the closing days of the election—a sign that both candidates see the district going to Harris.

Still, the Harris campaign and allied groups have spent more than $4 million in the area, which has also imperiled Omaha’s Republican representative, Don Bacon. Trump has spent only around $130,000. “That’s the biggest undertow for us,” Bacon told me on Saturday before a GOP get-out-the-vote rally in a more conservative part of the district. Public polls have shown Bacon’s opponent, the Democratic state senator and former middle-school science teacher Tony Vargas, ahead by a few points. Last week, the Cook Political Report, a leading congressional prognosticator, shifted its rating of the race as a “toss-up” to one that Vargas is slightly favored to win.

Public polls show Tony Vargas, right, narrowly leading his opponent, Republican Representative Don Bacon.  (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

A retired Air Force general serving his fourth term in Congress, Bacon outran Trump in 2020, winning reelection by 4.5 points. He defeated Vargas by a slimmer margin two years ago, and Vargas is running again—this time with more money and more backing from prominent members of his party.

Bacon has positioned himself as a moderate—he’s a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus—and frequently criticized the conservative hard-liners who ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But Bacon has been reluctant to cross Trump, and he lost some supporters by backing the former president’s late push to award all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the statewide winner, which would have effectively stripped power from many of his own constituents. “They’re so mad about that,” Vargas told me on Saturday, noting that Bacon received an endorsement from Trump soon after he signed a letter supporting the change. “Now we know what Don Bacon actually is. He’ll sell out Nebraskans if it means holding on to his seat of power.” At an Osborn event the next day, I met a former Republican and Bacon voter, Paul Anderson, who told me that he wrote in a friend’s name on his ballot rather than support Bacon again. “He’s afraid of Donald J. Trump,” Anderson said.

Vargas’s previous campaign and his plentiful TV ads have made him a recognizable face in the district. When one elderly woman answered her door on Saturday and saw him standing on her stoop, her eyes widened as if he were Ed McMahon about to hand her a giant check. She assured Vargas that both she and her daughter would vote for him. “I’ll remember, don’t worry,” she said. As we walked away, Vargas showed me the canvassing app on his phone: The woman was a registered Republican.

For Nebraska Democrats, the most pleasant Election Night surprise would involve a race in which they haven’t even fielded a candidate. Osborn, a Navy veteran and local union leader, rejected the party’s endorsement and elected to campaign instead as an independent, and he’s stunned Republicans and Democrats alike by running nearly even with Fischer, a two-term incumbent who won both her previous races by more than 15 points.

Osborn has caught on with a cross-partisan, populist campaign that mixes support for abortion rights, labor unions, and campaign-finance reform with a hawkish, Trump-like stance on border security. Republicans in the state have accused him of being a Democrat in disguise, but he’s appealed to voters in Nebraska’s conservative rural west by backing so-called Right to Repair laws—popular with farmers. He has also hammered Fischer’s opposition to rail-safety measures and her vote that delayed the provision of benefits to military veterans injured by toxic burn pits. In one commercial, Osborn, a longtime mechanic, takes a blowtorch to a TV showing one of Fischer’s attack ads.

Mostly, though, he seems to be winning support by criticizing both parties, and his success is validating his decision to spurn the Democrats. “This wouldn’t be close if he were running as the Democratic candidate,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist who has written about the “two-party doom loop,” a term Osborn has used during the campaign. Osborn has vowed to stay independent and said that he would refuse to align with the GOP or the Democratic Party as a senator (unlike the four independents currently serving in the Senate, who all caucus with the Democrats).

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Osborn’s pledge has its doubters, including fans such as Drutman. If either party has a clear majority, Osborn might be able to stay independent. But if both Osborn and Harris win, and Republicans wind up with exactly 50 Senate seats, his refusal to caucus with either party would hand the GOP a majority—and with it the ability to block Harris’s agenda and potentially her nominees to the Supreme Court. “There’s going to be so much pressure on him,” Drutman told me, “and he’s going to have to build a pretty strong infrastructure around him to manage that.”

Osborn has insisted that he wouldn’t budge. “I want to challenge the system, because the system needs to be challenged,” he told me. Osborn acknowledged that leaders in both parties “are gonna come knocking on my door, and then that’s going to allow me to use leverage to make deals for Nebraska.” Yet he gave other indications that he’d want to empower Democrats. He told me, for instance, that he supported filibuster reform and would back the Democrats’ push to remove the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to pass a law restoring abortion rights—a move the party might be able to make only if he helped them assemble a majority.

Republicans are confident that, come Wednesday morning, the question of Osborn’s party alliance will be moot. The national GOP has sent money and reinforcements to rescue Fischer’s bid—Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was stumping for her on Saturday—and her campaign has released polls showing her ahead of Osborn by several points. Independent candidates have threatened Republican incumbents a few times in recent years, only to fall short when GOP voters rallied around their party’s candidate in elections’ final weeks; in Kansas in 2014, the independent Greg Orman was polling close to Senator Pat Roberts for much of the campaign, but he lost by more than 10 points.

Left: Veterans protest at Republican Senator Deb Fischer’s rally on Saturday. Center: Senator Tom Cotton stumps for Fischer. Right: Dan Osborn, Fischer’s challenger, has run nearly even with her in polling. (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

Fischer has kept a low profile as a senator, and Republicans privately say she initially did not take Osborn seriously enough as a challenger. She’s embraced Trump in the apparent hope that his coattails will carry her to victory. When I asked Fischer why the race was so close, she pointed at me and the other national reporters who had come to one of her final rallies. “I explain his success to you folks in large part,” she said, “because I think you wanted to see a race here and you believed a lot of his polls that he put out early. We are going to win this race, and we are going to have a strong, strong showing.”

For his part, Osborn is courting Trump voters aggressively, recognizing that he cannot win with Democrats and independents alone. He has refused to say whether he’s voting for Trump or Harris. “As soon as I say who I’m voting for, I become that,” he told me. But Osborn’s closing ads leave the distinct impression that he’s backing Trump. “I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border,” he says in one. “If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.”

Osborn’s rightward turn has made it awkward for Democrats like Kleeb, the state party chair, who is clearly rooting for him even if she can’t say so publicly. “Yeah, it’s complicated!” she said when I asked about Osborn, letting out a big laugh. Kleeb told me she’s frustrated that Osborn has backed Trump on border policy and even more so that he assails both Republicans and Democrats as corrupt. “It’s unfair to criticize us as the same,” she said. Still, Kleeb continued, it’s obvious that on most issues, Osborn is preferable to Fischer, a down-the-line Republican: “We’ve told all of our Democratic voters—you need to weigh the issues that you deeply care about and who is closest to you. That’s who we suggest you vote for.”

To most Democrats in Omaha, the choice is easy. When I visited Jason Brown and Ruth Huebner-Brown, I found an Osborn sign on a front lawn festooned with campaign placards. None were bigger, however, than the one Jason created: the blue dot.

The Browns have been Harris enthusiasts since 2019, when she was their first choice in the crowded field of Democratic primary contenders then campaigning over the Iowa state line a few miles away. Inspired by the Democratic National Convention’s exhortation to “do something,” Jason began tinkering in their garage. He cut off the top of a bucket, used it to outline a circle, and spray-painted over a sign for a local lawn service. He showed it to Ruth and asked if he should add any writing, like Vote or Kamala. “No,” she replied. “It makes you stop and think for a second. Just leave it plain.”

Attendees pray at a Fischer rally (left), and the Browns make blue-dot signs (right). (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

They put the sign up in their yard in August, and soon after, neighbors started asking where they had gotten it and whether they could get one too. Before long, the Browns were ordering blank white signs from Amazon, first by the tens, and then by the hundreds. Jason made the first couple thousand by hand in their backyard, and then they enlisted the help of another neighbor, Conn, who had better equipment. After they had distributed 5,000 blue dots, the Browns finally gave up and started having them mass-produced by a political-sign company.

Jason and Ruth were telling me the story as we sat at their dining-room table, where they resembled the kind of superfans you might see satirized in a Christopher Guest movie. Both wore blue-dot T-shirts over blue jeans and blue long-sleeved shirts. Jason, 53, had a Kamala hat and blue shoes—he also has blue-shaded sunglasses—while Ruth, 58, wore blue-dot–shaped earrings. As we were speaking, the doorbell rang: A pair of young men were there to pick up more signs. (They give them out for free, though most people make donations that cover their costs.) The Browns have taken a leave of absence from their consulting business through the election; earlier this fall, they postponed a long-planned cruise.

At first, they told me, they saw the signs as part of an education campaign, because they found that many Omaha voters did not appreciate the city’s importance in the presidential election. Although the Second District has had its own electoral vote since the 1990s, the reapportionment following the 2020 census has made it more important for Harris than it was for past Democratic candidates—a result of shrinking blue states losing electoral votes to growing red ones. (In 2020, Biden wouldn’t have needed the district’s vote to reach 270, so long as he carried the Blue Wall states; he ultimately won 306 electoral votes.)

[Ronald Brownstein: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

As the blue dots took off, the Browns said they came to represent a sense of local pride, as well as inspiration to Democrats who feel isolated and powerless in red states. Ruth has tried to keep the vibe positive—she calls the signs “happy blue dots”—but she told me that the anxiety Democrats feel about the election has also played a part in the movement’s popularity. “I think there’s more enthusiasm because people are more scared this time,” she said.

I mentioned that I had spoken with one Democrat who worried that if Omaha delivered the election to Harris, Trump would make another attempt to lean on Republicans in the legislature to hand him all of Nebraska’s votes before the Electoral College meets in December. The Second District’s vote was saved in September by a GOP holdout, Mike McDonnell, who resisted pressure from other Republicans. Would he hold firm if he was all that stood in the way of Trump’s election?

Jason told me he’s sure that Republicans would come for the blue dot again, and he’s prepared for one more fight. If Omaha is responsible for electing Harris, “we’ll be running up and down that street, waving flags, tears of joy,” he said, “followed by, Oh, shit.”

At least 30 minors were charged with treason and inciting a military coup after they took part in August protests.

On August 18, 2020, Americans marked the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and of women’s right to vote. The next day, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for her current role, vice president of the United States. The consonance punctuated an already historic candidacy: Harris was the first woman of color to seek that office on a major-party ticket. She acknowledged the moment’s gravity at the beginning of her acceptance speech, thanking Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many of the other women whose paths had led to the ground she broke that evening.

Harris now seeks to go further still, aiming for the U.S. presidency. But the history-making possibilities of her campaign have been easy to overlook, in large part because of the man Harris faces in her bid. Donald Trump, so ignorant of the past and so careless about the future, is a present-tense kind of candidate. The history he has brought to his fight for a second term—the attempt to overturn an election; the promises of deportations and retributions and violence; the racism; the misogyny; the incompetence, lies, and fraud; the assault; the boast that he has grabbed women “by the pussy”; the installation of judges who have grabbed away women’s rights—has imbued the 2024 contest with a sense of latent emergency. His flaws, as so often happens, have become someone else’s problem.

If the Democrats’ 2020 campaign was a “battle for the soul of America,” its 2024 counterpart has been a battle for the national body: the policies and practicalities that allow the country to function as a democracy. An opponent whose party is “Republican” but whose posture is “dictator” turns talk of history-making into a luxury. Harris rarely mentions her gender or race on the campaign trail. Her recent ads, MSNBC noted, have described her childhood primarily in terms of class. During the nomination speech she delivered at the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris briefly described her background—her South Asian mother, her Jamaican father—but focused on her career as a prosecutor. (The most conspicuous mention of history-making came from Hillary Clinton, whose speech acknowledged the structural integrity of “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”) As Vox’s Constance Grady put it, “A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it.”

[Read: Kamala Harris’s ambition trap]

That reticence may well be good strategy. Clinton’s 2016 loss chastens strategists still: once bitten by the Electoral College, twice shy. And the brevity of Harris’s campaign—Joe Biden’s decision to step down in July left her just over three months at the top of the ticket—has required her to triage her messaging. “Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris told NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. Better, she suggested, to spend the time she had telling voters what they might not already know. “My challenge,” she said, “is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote.”

You could read Harris’s disinclination to talk about history-making as, in its own way, historic. She is campaigning to become the president, full stop, no other qualifier required. This doesn’t mean she has not focused on traditionally feminist priorities—reproductive freedom and care-related policies are at the center of her campaign messaging. She just hasn’t made her identity an explicit part of her pitch. This is a notable departure from the era of “I’m with her.” Progress can be exhilarating. It can also be condescending. (After Biden promised early in his 2020 campaign that he would name a woman as his running mate, the satirical website Reductress offered a headline that neatly captured the resulting discourse: “Biden Says VP Pick Is Between Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and a Beautiful Lady Ostrich.”)

The candidate who has most directly acknowledged the historical nature of Harris’s candidacy has been, instead, her opponent. After “Sleepy Joe” stepped aside, Trump began auditioning insults with the frenzy of a Hollywood casting agent, suggesting by turns that Harris “happened to turn Black”; that she is “mentally impaired”; that she has the “laugh of a crazy person”; that she will be seen by world leaders as a “play toy”; that she’d traded sexual favors to propel her rise to power. In a rally held shortly after Biden left the race, Trump made a great show of mispronouncing the name of a politician who has been nationally famous for years—butchering “Kamala” more than 40 times over the course of a single speech. J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, tried to denigrate Harris by accusing her of membership in that shadiest of cabals: “childless cat ladies.”

Americans tend to talk about history’s march as a matter of physics: movements, momentum, progress, resistance. The language can imply that the advancement is inevitable, an arc that moves ever forward as it bends toward something better. It can, as such, mislead. Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America’s Women, was premised on the fallacy, expressed repeatedly in the American media of the time, that feminism’s fights had by that point been, essentially, won. Clinton’s 2016 loss, and the many other kinds of losses that followed, served as a further rebuke: Gains can be ungained in an instant. Rights are inalienable, until they’re not.

Backlash was published the year before a record number of women ran for, and won, national office. Media outlets, in a fit of ahistorical optimism, dubbed it the “year of the woman.” What they might not have realized was that the “year of the woman” had already been proclaimed (as an analysis in Slate found) in 1966. And in 1968, 1984, and 1990. It would be declared again to describe the electoral results of 2008, 2010, 2016, 2018, and 2020.

History warns, in that way, against the easy comforts of “making history.” The progress and backlash that Faludi identified tend not to take turns—the one giving, the other taking away—but instead to crash together. The 2016 election failed to produce a woman president and in that sense preserved the status quo, but many more people voted for Clinton than for Trump, and this was its own bit of progress. Polls attempting to measure Americans’ opinions about a potential woman president have reflected a fairly steady increase in comfort since the idea was first tested, in the mid-1930s. But the endurance of such surveys—their treatment of a woman in the White House as a question to be debated, a disruption to be endured—is, itself, a concession.

[Read: Pop culture failed to imagine Kamala Harris]

Harris has had to contend with these tensions in her campaign. She has navigated them by emphasizing what her presidency might do rather than what it might mean. (“I am running,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash, “because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”) Along the way, though, she has also navigated backlash in human form. Some of the enduring images of the 2016 debates captured Trump looming over Clinton, blithely and menacingly, belittling her not only with his words but with his movements. He has been attempting to do something similar to Harris, even from a distance: Take up her space. Get in her way. Put the whole thing on his terms. The moments when his campaign has seemed the most flummoxed, the most pessimistic, are the ones when everyone seems to be paying attention to her, not him.

Trump has a unique kind of gravitational pull—a way of forcing everything else into his orbit, however strongly it might resist. And he has brought those brute physics to the 2024 campaign. When Harris delivered her “closing argument” speech in Washington on October 29, the location chosen for the event was the same one Trump had used for the speech that preceded the January 6 insurrection. And the address did not merely evoke Trump; it discussed him. As she spoke, Harris emphasized the disparities between herself and her opponent. She warned of what a second Trump presidency could do to the country. She expressed her desire to “turn the page.” She emphasized the future she wants to prevent more than the history she herself wants to make.

This was the right speech, the rousing speech, the prudent speech—the speech Harris needed to deliver. In its message, though, the candidate who has argued that she is the “best person” for the presidency “regardless of race and gender” was consigned to the stereotypically feminine role: He acts, she responds. The man so accustomed to taking what he wants robbed her of her full moment, and the moment of its full meaning. Crises fix things to the present. They demand sacrifice for the sake of the future. In pursuing the presidency, Harris is “not concerned about being the first,” a campaign official said. “She’s concerned about making sure she’s not the last.”

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Maybe it was always building to this: thousands of people singing and dancing to “Macho Man,” some sporting neon safety vests, others in actual trash bags, a symbolic expression of solidarity with their authoritarian hero whose final week on the campaign trail has revolved around the word garbage.

Where will the MAGA movement go from here? Trump had an answer last night, at least for the short term. He wasn’t telegraphing an Election Day victory—he was preparing, once again, to label his opponents “cheaters” and to challenge a potential defeat.

The evening’s host, Tucker Carlson, said that for most of his life as a journalist, he’d imagined that one would have to be “bereft of a soul” to stand onstage and support a politician. “And here I am with a full-throated, utterly sincere endorsement of Donald Trump.”

On with the show.

As I wandered around Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, last night, this iteration of Trumpism felt slightly different, if not wholly novel. Nine years ago, Trump held one of his first MAGA rallies not far from this venue. “Donald Trump Defiantly Rallies a New ‘Silent Majority’ in a Visit to Arizona” read a New York Times headline from July 11, 2015. Charlie Kirk, one of last night’s warm-up speakers, put it thusly: “This state helped launch the movement that has swept the globe.” All of the elements Trump needed to stoke the fire back then were still here last night: the Mexican border debate, inflamed racial tensions, metastasizing political extremism. Trump’s movement has grown, and his red MAGA hat has become a cultural touchstone. As the Arizona sun set, though, his nearly decade-long campaign of fear and despotism also had a surprising air of denouement.

Trump told Carlson he doesn’t like to look back. But last night, as he rambled (and rambled), he was sporadically reflective about all that had led to this point in his life. Trump sat in a leather chair with just a handheld mic—no teleprompter, no notes. He mostly ignored Carlson’s questions and instead tossed out ideas at random—what he calls “the weave.” In reality, it’s less lucid than he believes; more of a zigzag across years of personal triumphs and troubles. Remember “Russia, Russia, Russia”? Remember the “China virus”? Remember the time he courageously pardoned Scooter Libby? Remember how good he used to be at firing people on The Apprentice? Remember the crowd at that one Alabama rally? All of this, in his mind, amounted to something akin to a closing argument.

The event was a hurricane-relief benefit billed as Tucker Carlson Live With Special Guest Donald J. Trump. But Carlson barely spoke. Instead, he sat back in his own chair, occasionally picking at his fingers, looking somewhat mystified that this was where he’d ended up in his career, hosting Inside the Authoritarian’s Studio. He had taken the stage to the sounds of Kid Rock, but he looked as preppy as ever in a navy blazer, a gingham shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He insisted, twice, that he had bent the knee to Donald Trump without shame. Trump, he marveled, had shown him what a sham D.C. was. He lamented how those inside the Beltway treated Trump “like he was a dangerous freak, like he’d just escaped from the state mental institution.”

Carlson has grown more radical since Fox News fired him. Last night, he claimed, for instance, that the CIA and the FBI have been working with the Democratic Party to take Trump down. He implied that funding for Ukraine isn’t going to the military but is instead lining the pockets of the Washington elite: “Have you been to McLean recently?”

The man he unabashedly endorsed, meanwhile, again spoke of “the enemy within,” and attacked the enemy of the people (the media). Trump once again demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He claimed that members of the January 6 “unselect committee” had burned, destroyed, and deleted all the evidence it had collected because, in the end, they found out that Nancy Pelosi was at fault (this bit was especially hard to follow). He called for enlisting the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney into combat: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Trump blew some of his usual autocratic dog whistles, saying, for instance, that anyone who burns an American flag should be sentenced to a year in prison. He suggested that loyalists and extremists will fill his next administration, should it exist. He implied that he’d bring in Elon Musk to find ways to slash the federal budget, and let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist, examine public-health matters. “He can do anything he wants,” Trump said of Kennedy.

But perhaps the most meaningful moment of the night was when Trump said matter-of-factly that he won’t run for president again. He instead hinted that his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, will be a top 2028 contender. Win or lose, this was it, his last dystopian rodeo. Trump spoke almost wistfully about suddenly approaching the end of his never-ending rally tour. He sounded like a kid moving to a new neighborhood and a new middle school. He told his friends he’d miss them. “We’ll meet, but it’ll be different,” he said. He was in no rush to leave the stage.

The big question going into Tuesday’s election is whether the MAGA movement will fizzle out should Trump lose. Although Trump himself seems more exhausted than usual these days, his supporters are as fired up as ever. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants— a reference to Trump’s now-infamous response to the July attempt on his life—broke out among the crowd as people waited to pass through Secret Service checkpoints. I passed a man in a brown wig, a pink blazer, and a green top that read Kamala Toe, the words gesturing toward his crotch. I saw a woman wearing gold Trump-branded sneakers, and many people with Musk’s Dark MAGA hat. The latter seemed particularly notable: In addition to getting behind Vance, Trump might be inclined to pass the torch to another nonpolitician—namely, someone like Musk.

For now, though, Trump is returning to his conspiratorial election denialism. Four years ago, he tried to undermine the results in Arizona, Georgia, and other states. Last night, he singled out Pennsylvania. (A day earlier, his campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state, alleging voter suppression.) “It’s hard to believe I’m winning, it seems by a lot, if they don’t cheat too much,” he said, alleging malfeasance in York and Lancaster counties. Whether he succeeds or fails, the detritus that Trump has left behind will likely linger. “Look around, Mr. President, because there’s a lot of garbage here!” Charlie Kirk said earlier in the night. “Go to the polls on Tuesday and make sure that we all ride that big garbage truck to Washington, D.C.,” Kennedy, who was one of the warm-up speakers, implored.

Trump, though, opined with uncharacteristic nostalgia: “When I was a young guy, I loved—I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history and all of the things that can happen.” He sounded fleetingly earnest. He has undoubtedly cemented his place in history. Or, as Carlson put it earlier in the night: “Almost 10 years later, he has completely transformed the country and the world.”

Related:

Trump suggests training guns on Liz Cheney’s face. A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks

Today’s News

The White House altered its transcript of President Joe Biden’s call with Latino activists, during which official stenographers recorded that Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” according to the Associated Press. The White House denied that Biden had been referring to Trump voters. During a meeting in Moscow, North Korea’s foreign minister pledged to support Russia until it wins the war against Ukraine. The price of Donald Trump’s social-media stock fell another 14 percent today, amounting to a loss of more than 40 percent over three days.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Although AI regulation is the rare issue that Trump and Harris actually agree on, partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: These books are must-reads for Americans before Election Day, Boris Kachka writes.

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This Might Be a Turning Point for Child-Free Voters

By Faith Hill

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

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