Four years ago, the long-running Fox News juggernaut suddenly looked precarious. The 2020 elections proved a major threat, as viewers abandoned the network and huge lawsuits threatened its coffers. Today, Donald Trump is headed back to the White House, and he’s bringing a brigade of former Fox talent with him—a symbolic expression of the Murdoch-owned channel’s astonishing comeback.

Leading the list are Pete Hegseth, a frequent Fox presence who is nominated for secretary of defense, and Sean Duffy, a former Fox Business host (and U.S. representative) tapped to lead the Department of Transportation. They’re joined by former Fox contributors Tom Homan (border czar), Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence), and Janette Nesheiwat (surgeon general); former host Mike Huckabee (ambassador to Israel); guest host Pam Bondi (attorney general); and frequent guests Michael Waltz (national security adviser) and Marty Makary (commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration). Larry Kudlow passed this time on an administration job to stay at Fox Business.

[David A. Graham: Tucker’s successor will be worse]

In some ways, this staffing strategy looks a lot like that of the first Trump administration. During that presidency, the network was closely intertwined with the White House; the Fox host Sean Hannity was sometimes called Trump’s “shadow chief of staff,” and Hannity’s colleague Tucker Carlson became the leading exponent of Trumpist ideology in the media.

But the mostly synergistic relationship faltered in November 2020. Fox was the first network to forecast that Joe Biden had won Arizona, which infuriated both the Trump camp and conservative viewers. As the Republican Party became engulfed by bogus accusations of electoral fraud, Fox found itself in an uncomfortable in-between position. The network sometimes hosted Trump-world figures who repeated false claims, but privately, hosts ridiculed them. Meanwhile, hard-line viewers became angry with Fox’s refusal to go all in on the Big Lie and started defecting to more extreme right-wing upstarts such as Newsmax and One America News Network; Trump lambasted his former Fox allies. Internally, the network was rattled, and leaders debated next steps. Rupert Murdoch had never loved Trump, and some of his children wondered whether the business would be better served by moving to the center.

Worse was to come. Fox may not have embraced voting-fraud claims as fully as other outlets, but it did air guests’ statements that machines made by Dominion, a company that makes ballot-counting-equipment, had rigged the presidential election. Dominion sued for defamation, and a legal expert told CNN that the prospect of huge payouts represented “an existential threat” to the Fox Corporation. Fox finally settled the case on the eve of a trial, in April 2023, paying $787 million, though not before damaging internal communications had emerged as part of the litigation. A week later, Carlson—the network’s most popular figure—was fired.

[Read: What does Tucker Carlson believe?]

So Fox’s return to dominance today is somewhat surprising. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. The network has led cable-news ratings for more than two decades, and weathered the loss of several prominent hosts before Carlson; as I wrote when he exited, anchors tend to need Fox more than Fox needs them.

Although Trump has sometimes tried to claim credit for Fox’s success, what really seems to have happened is that Trump and Fox rediscovered a symbiotic relationship that allowed both to rebound. A spokesperson for the network pointed out to me that Fox has covered inflation, border security, and President Biden’s apparent decline extensively, getting to those topics faster or in more depth than CNN and MSNBC did. These three issues were also among the most important in the latest presidential election. What seemed like adverse headlines for Trump, including the criminal charges against him, led to high ratings for MSNBC, but Fox still came out on top.

After years of mostly avoiding Fox, Democrats also began to appear on the channel to try to get their message out. Kamala Harris granted one of her rare national-media interviews to Fox’s Bret Baier. Her vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, went on Fox News Sunday two weeks running in October. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an early adopter of Fox guest spots, introduced himself at the Democratic National Convention in August by joking, “Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself saying: I’m Pete Buttigieg, and you might recognize me from Fox News.”

The aftermath of the election has many on the left feeling dejected and tuning out the news. MSNBC’s numbers tanked in the week after the election, and the network’s morning-show team of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski has endured backlash over their meeting for a reset with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. MSNBC’s parent company is also spinning it off from NBC.

[Adam Serwer: Why Fox News lied to its viewers]

The impact of nontraditional news sources, including X and podcasts, on the election has brought a new round of predictions about the demise of traditional media. But Fox’s rebound suggests a different conclusion: Perhaps the answer isn’t that people are really demanding different kinds of news; it’s that they just want conservative news. The nearly uniform shift rightward of the electorate in 2024 suggests that Fox was well positioned to both reflect and amplify voters’ mood.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to gripe about Fox decisions, likely judging that his broadsides can help shape Fox’s coverage to his liking. Shortly before the election, he demanded that the network stop airing paid ads that criticized him, whined when Baier interviewed Harris, and blasted Fox this summer after Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the House who sits on the corporation’s board, criticized him. “Nobody can ever trust Fox News, and I am one of them,” he posted, semi-grammatically. Trump’s selection of so many Fox alumni for his administration is in part a reflection of his instinct that politics is really a form of entertainment, and one of the key qualifications he seeks in any aide is looking the part. But the appointments and nominations over the past two weeks also show that, much like the viewers who left Fox after the 2020 election but have since returned, Trump may not love everything Fox does, but he can’t bring himself to leave it for good.

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The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of ​​AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Related:

Why Democrats are losing the culture war The right’s new kingmaker

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What the left keeps getting wrong Conor Friedersdorf: The case for treating Trump like a normal president “You are the media now.” Why Netanyahu fired his defense minister

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A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

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Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose. The limits of Democratic optimism The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition The “Stop the Steal” movement isn’t letting up. Quinta Jurecic: “Bye-bye, Jack Smith.” Don’t give up on America.

Culture Break

Matt Wilson / Paramount

Analyze. The comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline has muddled the genre of political comedy, Shirley Li writes.

Read. In Miss Kim Knows, Cho Nam-Joo captures both the universality of sexism and the specificity of women’s experiences, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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If this wasn’t the Podcast Election, it was certainly a podcast-y election. Millions of people watched the results come in on a handful of livestreams hosted by popular podcasters, including one hosted by Tucker Carlson from Mar-a-Lago, on which Donald Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appeared as guests.

Trump also enjoyed a late-breaking endorsement from Joe Rogan, host of the world’s most popular podcast. For the past several months, much was made about the Trump campaign’s podcast strategy, reportedly masterminded by Trump’s son Barron, which included interviews with the tech-world whisperers Lex Fridman and the All-In Podcast. Trump took advantage of every opportunity to be interviewed at length and in casual conversation for huge audiences of young men; Harris did not, and immediately after her loss, this stood out to many people as a big problem. As New York Times editor Willy Staley put it in a wry (or grim) post on X, there is now palpable “soul-searching among Democrats about the podcast situation.”

I spent Election Night watching a livestream hosted by The Free Press, the media company founded by the former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. The guest list was a strange assemblage of iconoclasts and establishment castoffs, and it was obvious from the comments that many viewers were just there to watch It Girls Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, hosts of the cultish podcast Red Scare, smirk and sip teensy glasses of champagne while barely saying anything. (One of Nekrasova’s longer sentences of the night was “He’s winning like crazy, right?”)

[Read: Bad news]

A little after 8 p.m., the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang called in from a parking lot in Philadelphia. “I gotta say, the vibe’s kind of Trumpy,” he told Weiss. He had voted for Kamala Harris, he told her, though he hadn’t been excited about it. He offered his critique of the campaign run by Harris and Tim Walz, which he felt was overly risk-averse and uncharismatic. Specifically, he called out the missed opportunity to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience, as both Trump and J. D. Vance had done. (Harris purportedly could have appeared on the show if she followed the host’s terms; in late October, Rogan wrote on X that, contrary to the campaign’s desires, he would not accept a one-hour time limit on the interview and that he wanted to record in his studio in Austin.) “It pisses me off,” Yang said.

“That was a gimme,” he went on. “The Rogan interview would have been almost entirely upside. It’s low-propensity male voters, people that are not inclined to vote for you, so you have nothing to lose.” On Carlson’s Election Night livestream, Elon Musk made a similar argument, alluding to the parasocial, possibly persuasive power of podcasts: “To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”

As I watched, I felt annoyed. Rogan’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and anti-trans shtick—among many other bizarre statements, such as his claim that intelligence agencies provoked January 6—should make him radioactive for any politician, let alone a Democrat in 2024. And anyway, “more podcasts” sounds like a pretty desperate response to such a monumental loss. But these are stupid times.

According to exit polls, Harris did do poorly with young men. Yang was clearly correct that she had nothing to lose. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote on Thursday, Harris may have avoided Rogan’s three-plus-hour, formless interview format for fear of messing up, “but given who ended up winning the election, this … seems like an antiquated concern.” Was this the difference? Definitely not. But it was a difference. Next time, I would guess, Rogan and his ilk will not be snubbed; the oddball internet is mainstream enough to seriously court.

Obviously, political campaigns always prioritize making their candidates appear accessible, relatable, authentic, and so on. For a useful historical parallel, I looked to 1976—another election in which a key issue was inflation, a key concern was turning out disaffected young voters and restoring faith in American institutions, and a key problem with the Democratic presidential campaign was that many people said they had no idea what it was about.

Jimmy Carter, after seeing what an interview in Playboy had done for California Governor Jerry Brown’s polling numbers during the primaries, agreed to sit for his own. The interviewer, Robert Scheer, wrote in the introduction: “For me, the purpose of the questioning was not to get people to vote for or against the man but to push Carter on some of the vagueness he’s wrapped himself in.” But in September 1976, when the magazine published the 12,000-word Q&A, it was regarded almost immediately as a disaster. Carter infuriated Christians and gave satirists plenty to lampoon with his description of feeling “lust” and “adultery” in his heart at times. (Many also read parts of the interview as obliquely referring to his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, as a liar.)

Scheer later said that the idea was to use the length and intimacy of the interview to answer the questions of young voters who “wondered if he was this Southern square.” He also thought that the interview had done exactly what the campaign wanted it to, even if it had made them nervous in the process.

Voter turnout in 1976 was abysmal, as expected in the aftermath of Watergate. But, although the interview was regarded by the national media as a major gaffe, apparently many voters didn’t think about it that way. Some were asked about it in polling conducted the same week it was published—of 1,168 respondents, 289 said they hadn’t heard about the interview, while 790 said they had but it hadn’t changed their minds. Carter did lose some small number of voters, at least in the moment—28 respondents said that the interview had caused them to change their vote from Carter to Gerald Ford, while only four said it had caused them to change their vote from Ford to Carter.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

In the end, Carter won with a narrow margin in the popular vote and outperformed Ford with voters ages 22 to 44, while falling short with voters 45 or older as well as with those 18 to 21. Voters recorded their feelings about the Playboy interview again in exit polls. They were asked whether there was anything they disliked about Carter and given eight choices of response, “I didn’t like his Playboy interview" among them. Again, the respondents said that they cared little about it. (They cared more that he was too pro-union.)

If you read all the critiques of the Harris campaign being written right now, you could come to the conclusion that she was both too online and not online enough. She misunderstood her youth support by looking too much at the wrong parts of TikTok; she went on Call Her Daddy, a massively popular podcast that began as part of the Barstool Sports extended universe but was, I guess, the wrong part. She won the endorsement of the two most popular musicians in the world, whose fans wield a ton of online “power,” however you define it. The default political and cultural stance on the Girl Internet is liberal to leftist and was pro-Harris, so maybe she spent too much time there and not enough in unfriendly corners.

There’s a more compelling case this time around that online misogyny had something to do with the results than there was after Trump’s first victory, in 2016, when reporters were so quick to explain how young men were radicalized in spaces like 4chan—a website that was always fairly niche, even if it did influence broader internet culture in certain ways. Today, discontented men are among the most popular influencers on major platforms.

The next Democratic candidate will surely sit for Rogan wherever he asks them to sit. They won’t have a choice. They’ll have to take the risk and act like they have nothing to lose—right now, that’s certainly the truth.

The last weeks of Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president were a festival of crudeness. In light of this, Tucker Carlson’s warm-up act at a Georgia rally late last month was, if notably creepy, still typical of the sunken depths of rhetoric. Carlson offered an extended metaphor in which Trump was an angry “dad” with a household of misbehaving children (a 2-year-old who has smeared “the contents of his diapers on the wall,” “a hormone-addled” 15-year-old girl who has decided to “slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger”). The children in this metaphor, if it wasn’t clear, are the citizens of this country.

“Dad comes home, and he’s pissed,” Carlson said to wild cheers. “He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know.” Then came the grossest part: Carlson’s fantasy of Trump spanking “a bad little girl” as punishment.

What America did on Tuesday was elect that dad—vengeful, disappointed, erratic, and in the minds of his followers, benevolent.

A majority of voters preferred Trump, and likely for a variety of reasons; it may have been “the inflation, stupid” after all. But psychological forces also lie behind Trump’s appeal. Largely unexamined among these is the aura of paternalism exuded by the president-elect. Carlson, in his reptilian way, was getting at this idea in its most vulgar iteration. Trump wanted to be seen as a father figure for a nation he insisted needed discipline and defending. This felt like a role reversal from his 2016 persona: the class clown sitting in the back, lobbing spitballs at the establishment. If during his first administration he was a child dependent on “adults in the room” to make sure he didn’t fiddle with the nuclear code, this year he gave off the more assured air of an imposing patriarch in an overcoat; he’s been in the White House already and doesn’t need any help. This infused the slogan from his 2016 Republican National Convention, “I alone can fix it,” with new resonance eight years later.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

When Trump started using this line again, I immediately understood its efficacy. I have a fairly egalitarian marriage, yet a common refrain in my house, whenever something breaks, is “Aba will fix it” (my kids call me “Aba,” Hebrew for “dad”). My wife even laughs at how quickly our determination to avoid traditional gender roles breaks down if there is a dead bird in the backyard that needs to be disposed of or an IKEA shelf that has to be built. The notion of a dad who can—or at least will try to—“fix it” is deeply embedded in our cultural psyche, and not just among Americans who consider themselves conservative. Even for people who didn’t grow up with a father—maybe especially for those who didn’t—the longing for a mythical male protector can run deep. Just think of J. D. Vance, the vice-president-elect, who has written that the “revolving door of father figures” his mother would bring into his life was the worst part of his childhood. He longed for stability and firmness, and he has allied himself with a right-wing movement that aims to restore a “father knows best” nation of single-earner households tended to by stay-at-home moms.

Consciously or not, Trump exploited this desire, and he did so at a moment of deep economic and social flux in the country. He painted an exaggerated (and often fictional) portrait of a nation of vulnerable children menaced by murderous immigrants, one that requires a paterfamilias to provide a defense—and to guard their reproductive rights (he is, of course, the self-styled “father of IVF”). At a Wisconsin rally late last month, Trump described a conversation with his advisers in which he told them he wanted to use this sort of paternalistic language on the stump. They disagreed, according to his story, and told him it would be “very inappropriate” for him to say, for example, “I want to protect the women of our country.” To this, he responded: “Well, I’m going to do it—whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”

Authoritarian leaders thrive on this kind of familial imagery. One of the most memorable photos of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is from 1936: He smiles as an apple-cheeked little girl named Engelsina Markizova sits on his lap and throws her arms around his neck. (The year after the photo was taken, Markizova later said, her actual father was disappeared one night; he was executed in 1938 as part of Stalin’s purge.) During Benito Mussolini’s 1925 “Battle for Grain” propaganda campaign to boost Italy’s wheat production, the leader himself went out, sickle in hand, to thresh, as cameras captured the image of a man vigorously pretending to provide for his family. And, of course, “father” is a title borne by generations of dictators, including Muammar Qaddafi, who often went by “Father of the Nation,” and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (who gave himself a surname meaning “father of the Turks”).

Joseph Stalin, in 1936, in a fatherly photo op with Engelsina Markizova, whose real father would be executed under his regime two years later.
(Russian State Film and Photo Archive / Alamy)

Trump might be too undisciplined (or unfamiliar with history) to follow this script exactly—though even some of his flights of fancy might be generously described as dad humor of a sort—but his projection of paternalism does fit a recognizable mold. In the 1960s, the clinical psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three distinct parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. A good example of the “permissive” dad might be Tim Walz, a hugger and an emoter who is always up for a chat. As for Trump, all you needed to do was spend a few minutes at one of his rallies to see that he comes off as a classic “authoritarian” father: withholding, demanding, not open to negotiation over, say, curfew time.

[Adam Serwer: There is no constitutional mandate for fascism.]

The upside of the authoritarian style of parenting, according to Baumrind, is that it results in well-behaved, orderly children, and this is the society that Trump is promising: one without the flung diapers and slammed doors. But there is a clear downside to having a father like this.

According to the National Institutes of Health, children of authoritarian parents can have “higher levels of aggression” and exhibit “shyness, social ineptitude, and difficulty making their own decisions.” They may have low self-esteem and difficulty controlling their anger. I’m not seeing a recipe here for good citizens—just loyal subjects.  

Is this who we might become? Trump’s paternalism, his projection of power and control, may have held appeal for his voters. It allowed them to project onto him all the things people project onto dads: that they are brave and indestructible and always there to kill an insect for us. Trump might have won his supporters’ love by fashioning himself as America’s father. But a democracy doesn’t need scared and obedient children. It needs grown-ups—vigilant, conscientious ones. And the president exists to serve them, not the other way around.

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates. He invited anyone who disagreed with him to come up one by one and take their shot, in a carnivalesque “step right up” style.

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the heart of the conservative movement. Few Republicans have as much purchase with all factions of the party. In Montana, Kirk delivered a simple message. “Now, all of you—I’m sure you’re feeling this: Things are unaffordable,” he said. “They’re out of reach. It is harder than ever to be able to have the American dream … and that is because of Kamala Harris.” Days before the Missoula event, however, Kirk had said that Haitian migrants “will become your masters” should Donald Trump lose the election, that “this election is literally about” whether Americans will be “allowed to fight back against invading armed hordes,” and that “swarms of people want to take our stuff, take women, and loot the entire nation.”

I arrived in Montana thinking that Kirk’s code-switching was part of a cynical move to expand his reach. He hosts one of the most popular news podcasts in the country, and his YouTube channel is a clout machine. But I came away realizing that Kirk is less of an influencer than an operator. While he spoke, volunteers moved around the crowd asking people if they were registered to vote. Later in the day, Kirk appeared at an event with Tim Sheehy, the GOP candidate trying to defeat Senator Jon Tester. Kirk bragged that Turning Point had registered 100 new voters that day. (A spokesperson for Turning Point USA did not respond to multiple requests for comment or an interview with Kirk.)

Kirk’s apparatus has gone from a conservative youth-outreach organization to an all-encompassing right-wing empire—one that has cultivated relationships with influential conservative faith groups, built out a powerful media arm, and hosted rallies for Trump and other top Republicans. It has allowed Kirk to wedge himself into a powerful role: He is the gatekeeper of a bridge between mainstream conservatism and its extreme fringes. Instead of merely serving as a roleplayer on the right, Kirk now leverages his influence to bend conservatism closer to his own vision. Kirk has power, and he knows it.

For a while, Kirk embraced a vanilla brand of conservatism. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to fortify a small but stable conservative youth movement with a focus on free markets and limited government. The group wanted to reach young people where they were, which included college campuses but also the internet. Early Turning Point memes read as though the organization had hired a Popsicle-stick-joke writer to make bland, conservative-minded witticisms. Kirk’s Twitter account featured mundane perspectives, such as “Taxes are theft” and “USA is the best country ever.”

Even as Trump began to take over the Republican Party, Kirk relentlessly extolled free-market capitalism and repeatedly praised markets as a near-panacea to America’s problems. Though personally Christian, he said that politics should be approached from a “secular worldview.” In 2018, he said that he understood that most people “don’t want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama” wants them to. He would probably have never described himself as an LGBTQ ally, but he was also not known to go out of his way to bash trans people or speak out against the gay “lifestyle.”

This approach did not please everyone on the right. In 2019, the young white nationalist Nick Fuentes encouraged his followers, called Groypers, to show up at Turning Point events and troll Kirk for not being far enough to the right. “You have multiple times advocated on behalf of accepting homosexuality,” a man in a suit with a rosary around his hand said at one event to Kirk, who was sitting onstage next to a gay Turning Point USA contributor. “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” Another person used the Q&A time to tell Kirk that “we don’t want centrists in the conservative movement.”

Something began to change around the end of Trump’s first term. Kirk hasn’t just followed the rest of his party to the right. He is now far more conservative than much of the mainstream GOP. Christianity in particular has become a dominant feature of Kirk’s rhetoric and Turning Point USA. Kirk’s position on religion has veered from “We do have a separation of Church and state, and we should support that” (his words to the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018) to “There is no separation of Church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction” (his words on his own podcast in 2022).

In 2021, he established Turning Point Faith, a division of his organization that he has used to make significant inroads with hard-right evangelical churches and their leaders, many of whom have lent their pulpits to Kirk. He has laughed off accusations that he embraces Christian nationalism. Liberals fret about a “disturbing movement of ‘Christian nationalism,’” he said in 2022. “Do you know what that’s code for? That’s code for: You’re starting to care, and they’re getting scared.” But there aren’t a lot of other ways to describe his goal of eroding the barriers between Church and state, and Turning Point Faith’s mission of returning America to “foundational Christian values.”

Kirk has also embraced rhetoric that was previously the territory of white nationalists, making explicit reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, the conspiracy that immigration is a plot to dilute the cultural and political power of white people. Since 2022, he has posted that “Whiteness is great,” and that there is an undeniable “War on White People in The West.” On his podcast, he has accused an ambiguous “they” of “trying to replace us demographically” and “make the country less white” by using an “anti-white agenda” of immigration to enact “the Great Replacement.” Because of “them,” he’s said, “the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.” Some other Republicans now dabble in Great Replacement rhetoric, but Kirk has avoided being outflanked on the right: He’s attacking Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake.”

Some of Kirk’s rightward shift is potentially driven by him astutely putting his fingers to the wind of what’s bubbling among the base. In Montana, the crowd was most energetic when Kirk delved into points about how immigrants and trans people are making America worse. When I went out of the crowd to stand under a tree nearby, I heard a mother talking to her small daughter. “You don’t want to go over there. There’s liberals,” she said, gesturing at the fringes of the crowd, where people were observing Kirk with dour expressions. She then parroted stuff I usually see only in the most unsavory corners of the far-right internet: “They want to kidnap you and brainwash you and probably molest you.”

Late last month, Trump came out onstage with pyrotechnics blasting in front of him and dozens of Turning Point logos behind him. Kirk and his group were hosting a rally in Duluth, Georgia, for the former president. “He’s a fantastic person, the job he does with Turning Point,” Trump said of Kirk during the rally. “I just want to congratulate and thank him. He’s working so hard.”

Kirk had spoken to the crowd of roughly 10,000 just before Trump took the stage. He used the platform to explicitly suffuse the event with a nod to Christian conservatism. “We are here in a state that is a very Christian state,” Kirk said. “A state that loves God and loves Jesus.” He led the crowd in a “Christ is King” chant.

Despite Kirk’s embrace of the far right, he has continued to gain standing in the establishment wings of the right. He sat down with J. D. Vance at a Turning Point event in September, and again on Halloween. Kirk has had public conversations with high-profile conservatives such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. Kirk has spent much of this year campaigning for Republican politicians. He has gone to Nebraska, where he tried to get the legislature to change how the state awards Electoral College votes, and to Ohio, where Republicans are trying to win a Senate seat.

Unlike other, sycophantic portions of right-wing media, Kirk isn’t simply a hanger-on to the conservative elite. When he can, he will try to bend elected officials toward his political vision. On multiple occasions, Kirk has publicly gone after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Last January, several months after Johnson was elected as House speaker, Kirk posted a podcast episode titled “You Deserve Better Than What the GOP Is Giving You.” Johnson, he said on the show, was “a disappointment.” A few minutes later, he added: “Speaker Johnson is trying to gaslight you. Dare I say, he’s just lying.”

In March, Johnson went on Kirk’s show to kiss the ring. Kirk approached the conversation cordially and in good faith, but he also didn’t shy away from directly criticizing the speaker. Kirk pressed Johnson on why he hadn’t shut down the government last year and dismissed the speaker’s explanation that it would have been politically damaging: “We have been hearing that excuse for 11 years.”

Kirk’s ability to dress down one of the party’s most important members is a testament to how much power he has accrued. People like Johnson sign up for this because older politicians see Millennials such as Kirk as whispers to the rest of their generation, sometimes just because they’re younger, Jiore Craig, a senior fellow at ISD Global who has researched Kirk and Turning Point USA, explained to me: “There is this nervousness that he offers something about the internet and young people that politicians don’t know.” The belief that he can turn out young people makes politicians go to Kirk even as he tries to big-dog them, Craig said. It’s not just his appeal to youth either; alienating Kirk may mean losing an avenue to faith leaders and the broader audience he has amassed. Whether Republicans like it or not (and some don’t), they have to deal with him. This is how he has the freedom to walk around noxious far-right politics and then step back into the polite mainstream with impunity.

Even at 31, clad in saggy suit pants, Kirk has the affect of an eager college conservative. He lacks Tucker Carlson’s resolute confidence and corresponding bored disdain. He lacks the poise and charisma of far-right influencers such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. But to think of Kirk as only a media figure is to miss the point.

Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, who is writing a book about Kirk and Turning Point USA, argues that Kirk’s relationships and organizations have become so robust and far-reaching that besides Trump, Kirk is the most important person in the conservative movement. “No matter who wins in November, he will be the kingmaker,” Boedy told me.

Kirk doesn’t have an outright edge in many of the fields he trades in: Carlson and others have more popular podcasts, there are more prominent figures within the conservative faith movement, and there are better-funded conservative groups. Still, almost no one else has the relative prominence and relationships he does across so many areas. “It’s like Rush Limbaugh with six other tentacles,” Boedy said.

Kirke is all but ensured to sit in an important position on the right for years to come. He is in charge of much more than helping the right win youth voters. He has a relatively prominent political-media empire that he can use to push his ideas forward—one that works in tandem with the rest of his apparatus. His years of relationship-building with faith groups cannot be replicated by would-be challengers overnight. At least for now, Kirk has convinced Republicans that his political project is divinely ordained.

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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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MAGA is tripping. Five of the election’s biggest unanswered questions The Georgia chemical disaster is a warning. The five best books to read before an election

Evening Read

Illustration by Katie Martin

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.”

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu

Watch. Rivals (streaming on Hulu) is the silliest, sexiest show of the year, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Listen. We Live Here Now, a podcast by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin, who found out that their new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Less than a week before Election Day, Donald Trump last night called for one of his prominent political adversaries to go before a firing squad. In an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Trump called Liz Cheney, the Republican former representative from Wyoming, “a very dumb individual” and “a radical war hawk.”

“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, Ooh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said. “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.”

Like Trump’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, these comments are a good summation of what he would bring to the White House if reelected. His campaign is premised around violence, disregard for the rule of law, and retribution for anyone who might disagree with him.

[David A. Graham: This is Trump’s message]

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney responded on X. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Trump’s campaign said that Trump “was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.” Trump isn’t wrong that Cheney has often advocated foreign military interventions. She can and should be criticized for many of her views. But Trump isn’t calling for a debate. He vividly imagined Cheney with “guns trained on her face.” Normalizing discussion of political opponents getting shot is a step in a dangerous direction.

These remarks cannot be written off as joking around, the excuse that Trump has typically used when he’s crossed lines. (He seems less concerned about disapprobation these days.) Trump didn’t laugh when he said it. Neither did Carlson or the audience. Besides, Trump has repeatedly called for the armed forces to be used against his political critics. He’s proposed deploying the military against the “enemies from within,” a group that includes “radical left lunatics” generally, but also former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam Schiff, both California Democrats. He’s amplified calls on Truth Social for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal (for what crimes, one can only guess). He has said that retired General Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

Yet some voters may go to the polls without a firm grasp of his rhetorical record. Trump makes so many outrageous remarks that keeping track of them all is difficult, and some parts of the press persist in toning down even his most dangerous comments. The headline in The New York Times on Trump’s Cheney remarks as of this writing was “Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery,” which is not strictly false but misses the point.

In these comments, Trump flagrantly displayed his hypocrisy. Although the former president has remade himself as a putative dove, he once backed some of the same conflicts that Cheney did, including the war in Iraq. And although he claims he wants to avoid foreign adventurism, he spent his first term in office being talked out of attacking Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, among others. He and his allies are now proposing that the U.S. military launch attacks on cartels inside Mexico.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]

Trump is also proposing new uses of the military domestically, not only against his enemies but to conduct a mass deportation. He has encouraged brutal policing and vigilante attacks by citizens. Trump may hate war, but he loves violence.

Perhaps voters shouldn’t give this man command of so many people armed with rifles.