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Among Donald Trump’s recent Cabinet nominations is a pick that has alarmed the scientific community: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services. With this choice, Trump has further elevated a conspiracy-minded vaccine skeptic with no medical background, whose views are often not rooted in science. I spoke with my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers health, about the damage RFK Jr.’s proposals could do to Americans’ trust in public health—whether he is confirmed or not.

The Elevation of Fringe Beliefs

Lora Kelley: As you’ve written, some of Robert F. Kennedy’s concerns—such as taking on ultra-processed foods and removing toxins from the environment—seem appealing to Americans across the political spectrum, yet his proposed solutions for these problems could pose a danger to Americans. Could you help me understand the gap between some of his seemingly commonsense proposals and the fringe ideologies behind them?

Yasmin Tayag: A lot of Kennedy’s health proposals actually make sense to me: investing in regenerative agriculture, and increasing access to preventive health care, and even removing toxins from the environment are things that sound good to pretty much anyone, regardless of their political party. Kennedy, of course, was until recently a Democrat, and a lot of his environmental and health concerns do reflect the things that the left has historically worried about.

The problem is that when you start looking at how he’s going to execute on these goals, you realize that his track record of proposing solutions is not based in science. We can all agree that it’s a good idea to take toxins out of the environment, but we might not all agree that fluoride is a toxin, as Kennedy seems to suggest. And so you have to ask: How is Kennedy going to make these decisions?

He’s a science skeptic, even though he claims to be a champion of science that lets people make their own decisions about their health. His view is that science as an institution has been so corrupted by corporate influence—he’s always railing against Big Pharma—that anything that comes out of the science institution that we’ve long relied on is bad.

Lora: Even if he doesn’t get confirmed, could Kennedy’s nomination still have an impact on Americans’ trust in public health?

Yasmin: Kennedy being so publicly considered for such a prominent health role has already given legitimacy to the fringe ideas that he’s entertained over the years. He’s said in the past that he believes 5G cellular technology controls our behavior, and he has implied that antidepressants are linked to mass shootings.

For a lot of the public, this might be their first time really having to think about health topics such as fluoridation. If this is not something you think about normally, and all of a sudden, here’s this guy all over the news, talking about his doubts about things that have long been accepted as scientific fact, I think it’s reasonable that people would also start feeling confused. The fact that he is in the public eye and getting a lot of airtime to discuss his skepticism is, at the very least, putting a spotlight on these fringe beliefs and, at worst, making them seem more legitimate than they are.

Lora: Given that bird flu may be a growing threat, how do you anticipate Kennedy might respond to a pandemic as the head of HHS?

Yasmin: It’s unlikely that we would see anything close to a streamlined public-health response, in part because Kennedy is so skeptical of vaccines. That could mean a hesitation to invest in the production of vaccines, or a lack of encouragement for Americans to use them. But I think the broader impact might be if he continues to legitimize the view that vaccines are something to be afraid of. People may refuse to take them.

During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, we had people who believed in science leading HHS, and the response was pretty mediocre: inconsistent communication, inadequate testing, little coordination between state and federal agencies. But at least the interventions made sense from a scientific perspective. With someone who does not believe in basic health principles, we may see an unpredictable response—or even no response.

Lora: What kind of power does this role actually come with?

Yasmin: If Kennedy becomes secretary of HHS, he’s going to have an enormous influence on American public health—he would oversee the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Administration for Children and Families, among others. And on top of overseeing all of those departments, he would also be the primary adviser to the president on health. So he would be the one telling Donald Trump what health priorities should be. That’s a really scary prospect, because a lot of Kennedy’s perspective on the world doesn’t seem to be rooted in any kind of scientific reality, at least not a mainstream one. He wouldn’t always be able to implement his ideas directly—removing fluoride from water, for example, can happen only at the state and local level—but his endorsement alone could go a long way.

His appointment, though he still needs to be confirmed, seems plausible to me. Kennedy’s audience is a big one—MAGA meets woo-woo, as our colleague Elaine Godfrey has called it—that could further expand support for Trump. But there are still a number of Republican senators he’ll have to win over. Some might take issue with his views on health. Others may feel threatened by his plans to remove corporate influence from the government—Big Pharma, for example, has long provided campaign money to both parties. Kennedy’s plans to overhaul food and pharmaceuticals would also require a ton of regulation, which is exactly what Republicans don’t want. The biggest pitfall for Kennedy would be if his goals run up against Trump’s economic priorities. He was an environmental lawyer, so he’s very anti-oil, whereas Trump is deeply pro-oil. In his past speeches, Trump has said that Kennedy can do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn’t “touch the oil.” I could see Trump or others in the party pushing back on him for that reason.

Related:

RFK Jr. collects his reward. The sanewashing of RFK Jr.

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Today’s News

Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly urged the House Ethics Committee to not publicly release its probe into former Representative Matt Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had a call about the future of the Ukraine war. It was their first conversation since late 2022. Trump selected North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to be the Interior Department secretary last night; if confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would oversee the country’s public lands.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Diego Mallo. Source: Mark Peterson / Redux.

The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump

By Elaina Plott Calabro

Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.

A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.

When Patel was installed as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense just after the 2020 election, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised him not to break the law in order to keep President Donald Trump in power. “Life looks really shitty from behind bars,” Milley reportedly told Patel. (Patel denies this.)

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A month after his election in 2016, Donald Trump chose Andrew Puzder, a longtime fast-food-company CEO, to be his secretary of labor. Most of Trump’s Cabinet picks moved smoothly through the confirmation process, but Puzder’s nomination languished amid allegations of wage theft, sexual harassment, and spousal abuse, as well as his acknowledgment that he had hired an undocumented immigrant as a nanny and not paid her taxes. By February 2017, he gave up and withdrew his nomination.

Being a president’s most troubled or scandal-ridden nominee is dangerous—like being the weakest or sickest member of the herd when predators start to circle. Republican senators probably calculated that if they rejected Puzder, Trump would send a pick with less baggage and higher qualifications, which is exactly what he did: Alex Acosta, the eventual selection, had a long government résumé and easily won confirmation.

Something very different is happening with Trump’s Cabinet picks this time. Less than two weeks have passed since the election, but the president-elect has already put forward a batch of nominees so aberrant by historical standards that any one of them would have been a gigantic story in the past. (Hello, Attorney General–designate Matt Gaetz.) Each one barely holds the media’s attention for an hour or two before the next nomination eclipses them. (Whoops, I didn’t see you there, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

If Senate Republicans reject one of these unqualified nominees, how can they justify saying yes to any? And yet, how could they reject the whole slate of nominees by a president from their own party, who is so popular among their own voters? Perversely, the sheer quantity of individually troubling nominees might actually make it harder for the Senate to block any of them.

[Elaine Godfrey: Either way, Matt Gaetz wins]

The list of wild picks also includes Tulsi Gabbard, the walking embodiment of horseshoe theory and Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence; Pete Hegseth, a square-jawed Fox News host tapped by Trump to lead the Pentagon; and Kristi Noem, a governor with no national-security experience, selected to head the Department of Homeland Security. By the time anyone gets around to noting that Trump is appointing his personal lawyers (who defended him in his several criminal trials) to top legal posts in the government, who will have the energy to be shocked?

We don’t know yet if the Senate will confirm any or all of these nominees, but weariness is apparent in the voices of Republican senators, who face a choice between approving Trump’s nominees and allowing Trump to use a dubious constitutional work-around to appoint them without requiring a Senate vote. Many have gasped or raised pained questions about Gaetz, and some have even predicted that his nomination will fail, but none has publicly pledged to vote against him.

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is a medical doctor who has shown a willingness to buck Trump and even voted to convict him during Trump’s second impeachment; he’s the incoming chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Yet Cassidy responded to the preposterous HHS nomination by posting on X that Kennedy “has championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure. I look forward to learning more about his other policy positions and how they will support a conservative, pro-American agenda.”

This isn’t how things used to work. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated former Senator John Tower to be secretary of defense. Few could question Tower’s credentials. A World War II veteran, he’d served nearly 20 years on the Armed Services Committee; he later investigated the Iran-Contra affair. But allegations of womanizing and alcohol abuse led the Senate to reject his nomination, even though the body tends to give former and current members an easy ride. Hegseth, by comparison, is a veteran but has no government experience, has a history of infidelity and was in 2017 accused of sexual assault, and has expressed various extreme views, including lobbying Trump to pardon American soldiers accused of murdering prisoners and unarmed civilians. (Trump granted the pardons.)

Or consider Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, whom President Barack Obama nominated to lead HHS in 2009. Daschle was forced to withdraw his nomination over $140,000 in unpaid back taxes. That was a serious lapse, yet it feels quaint compared to Kennedy’s or Gaetz’s dubious résumé.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gaetz announcement is already destroying the government]

A clear sign of how much things have changed may come from Puzder, whom Trump is reportedly considering nominating as labor secretary again. If Senate Republicans are willing to approve the same guy they rejected eight years ago, the advice-and-consent guardrails will be well and truly gone.

The circuslike bombardment of freakishly unqualified personnel picks calls to mind Steve Bannon’s notorious insight that the press can handle only so much information, real or fake, without being overloaded. Uncovering, verifying, debunking, and explaining information takes time and resources. “The real opposition is the media,” Bannon told the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Something similar might apply to U.S. senators who might otherwise be tempted to show some independence.

Ascribing too much strategic intent to Trump is always a risk. The president-elect works from impulse and intuition. Trump selected Gaetz on a whim during a two-hour flight, according to The New York Times; Politico has reported that Susie Wiles, Trump’s campaign manager and incoming chief of staff, was on the plane but was unaware of the Gaetz pick. Even if Trump is not consciously following Bannon’s directive, however, the effect is the same. Intentionally or otherwise, the shit level is high and rising.

Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.

Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On the face of it, the trio seem to possess little in common except having scant qualification on paper for the jobs he wants them to fill. (Gabbard and Gaetz are also widely disliked by members of the respective parties in which they served in the U.S. House.)

Consider where all three were nine years ago. Hegseth was an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran serving in the Army Reserve, backing Marco Rubio for president from his relatively new perch as a Fox News commentator. Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii and the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee; she’d resign the next year to back Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president. Gaetz was a little-known representative in the Florida state House, with plans to run for his dad’s state Senate seat in 2016. Even today, none of them share an ideology: Hegseth is a culture warrior, Gaetz a libertine with an unusual mix of political views, and Gabbard an ostensible dove with her own strange commitments.

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

What brings them together is not just fidelity to Trump, but a shared sense of having been persecuted by the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. It’s what they share with Trump as well as one another, and it’s their main credential to serve under him.

After the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Hegseth defended the rioters on Fox News. “These are not conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies—that’s a bunch of nonsense that people want to tell us,” he said. “These are people that understand first principles; they love freedom, and they love free markets.” Two weeks later, the National Guard said it had removed 12 members from duty on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration because of worries about extremist groups.

By his own account, Hegseth was one of the dozen. He said a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross had gotten him flagged. He soon left the military, then wrote a book attacking the military as a bastion of “wokeness” and decay. “The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” he wrote. He’s remained a loud critic of Pentagon brass, including suggesting that General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in his role only because he is Black.

[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s Cabinet]

Gabbard seems like an odd choice for DNI, a role created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Though a veteran and former representative, she has no clear interest in intelligence and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee. She does, however, have a grudge against the intelligence community. She says that this summer, she was placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, resulting in frequent extra screening at airports. Gabbard says she believes this is because of criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris. Confirming any of this is impossible, because the watch lists really are a civil-liberties nightmare: They are not public, the reasons anyone gets on them are opaque, and the process for challenging them is enigmatic.

Gaetz is somehow an even more improbable pick to be the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer than Gabbard is for DNI. He has extensive experience with law enforcement, but generally he’s been the suspect. In 2008, he was pulled over for speeding and suspected of driving drunk, but he refused a Breathalyzer test and charges were dropped. Court papers have alleged that Gaetz attended drug- and sex-fueled parties involving underage girls, which Gaetz denies. He’s currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a variety of alleged offenses. (My colleague Elaine Godfrey reported that Gaetz has shown videos of naked women to colleagues; Gaetz was a leading opponent of a revenge-porn law in the Florida legislature.) 

More to the point, Gaetz was also the subject of a lengthy Justice Department probe into possible sex-trafficking. A top Trump aide told the House January 6 committee that Gaetz had sought a pardon from Trump at the close of his first presidency. After years of investigation, the DOJ informed Gaetz’s lawyers in 2023 that he would not be charged. The experience left Gaetz furious at the Justice Department.

[David A. Graham: The terminally online are in charge now]

What each of these appointments would offer, if the nominees are confirmed, is a chance to get their revenge on the people they feel have done them wrong. Whether they can get confirmed will be a good test of just how acquiescent the GOP Senate, under incoming Majority Leader John Thune, will be to Trump’s agenda.

Hegseth would be the least traditionally qualified nominee to lead the Defense Department in memory; it’s a sprawling bureaucracy, and he has no experience with it except as a low-ranking officer. But Hegseth is personally well liked and already collecting support from powerful Republicans. Gabbard’s past record of criticizing Republicans may raise some eyebrows, though she has become a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. Gaetz will be the biggest test, in part because many Republicans personally despise him, and because the probes into him make him radioactive. (Perhaps these nominees are why Trump has so avidly demanded recess-appointment power.)

If Trump can get Hegseth, Gabbard, and Gaetz confirmed, he’ll be on the way to the retribution he promised. And if any of them falls, he’s still made his intentions crystal clear.

Americans don’t typically have a reason to think about the fluoride in their water, but this is not a typical week. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former independent presidential candidate whom Donald Trump is eyeing as his health czar, has vowed to remove the mineral from drinking water if he is appointed to the next administration. Kennedy has said that the chemical lowers children’s IQ, even though studies overwhelmingly show that it is safe. Trump apparently agrees, and in his victory speech on Wednesday, he told Kennedy to “go have a good time” working on public health.

The prospect of giving Kennedy any semblance of power over the nation’s health is alarming, and not only because of his preoccupation with fluoride. (And to be fair, many scientists have made serious and nuanced inquiries about fluoride.) Kennedy, an environmental lawyer with no background in health, is best known for his skepticism, if not outright antagonism, toward vaccines. He also has a long track record of championing other pseudoscientific and conspiratorial views, such as the baseless belief that antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings.

When I looked up his full “Make America Healthy Again” platform, I expected to see wacky conspiracies. Instead, its goals could have been pulled from any liberal public-health campaign. MAHA’s key ambitions include addressing the root causes of chronic disease, improving the food supply through regenerative agriculture, preserving natural habitats, eliminating corporate influence from government health agencies, and removing toxins from the environment. The campaign acknowledges the need for systemic interventions such as increasing access to nutritious food and prioritizing preventative health care, initiatives touted by Democrats such as Michelle Obama.

MAHA represents a mix of concerns from across the political spectrum. “The issues he’s bringing up when it comes to health and food are more recognizably left,” Rachel Meade, a political scientist at Boston University who has studied Kennedy’s politics, told me. Blaming our health problems on corporations is also a move from the left’s playbook, Meade said. Indeed, Bernie Sanders has spent the past year railing against Ozempic’s manufacturer for making the drug so expensive. Assessed only by its goals and not its remedies, MAHA makes a lot of sense. That’s also what makes it dangerous.

Everyone can agree that “removing toxins from the environment,” one of MAHA’s stated goals, is a good idea. But not everyone agrees on what a toxin is. Fluoride is one, from Kennedy’s perspective. MAHA rightly points out that America’s “poor diet” must be addressed. But what counts as a good diet? To Kennedy, it might include raw milk, which poses serious health risks. Addressing “inadequate healthcare” is crucial, of course—but to Kennedy, that could entail treating COVID with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, alternative remedies that have been proven not to work.

RFK Jr.’s goals aren’t the only part of his platform that may appeal to more than conspiracy-addled Trump supporters. His overarching diagnosis of the nation’s health problems is that Americans are being misled by bad science and the institutions that support it. “Once Americans are getting good science and allowed to make their own choices, they’re going to get a lot healthier,” he said in an interview with NBC on Wednesday. This notion—that people should do their own research and take their health into their own hands—resonates widely. The belief that scientific institutions aren’t working spans the political spectrum, bringing together subcultures including anti-vaxxers, seed-oil truthers, carnivore-diet enthusiasts, and wellness influencers.

Kennedy himself is politically slippery. He was a Democrat until 2023, when he campaigned for president as an independent before dropping out and endorsing Trump. His anti-vaccine beliefs are historically associated with crunchy liberals, and his environmental views align with the left. But he fits in easily among Republicans, too. Many on the right adopted anti-vaccine views during COVID. More pertinently, his anti-establishment attitude toward health fits neatly in Trump’s us-versus-them narrative. Kennedy, like Trump, thinks of himself as a populist; he frames public-health issues in terms of corrupt institutions duping everyday people, regardless of their party. The bipartisan alliance formed around opposition to mainstream public health has created a strange new faction that counts Kennedy among its figureheads. One way to think of it, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey has written, is “woo-woo meets MAGA.”

MAHA appeals to this group—and could perhaps expand it. “Anti-establishment populism that has aspects of both left and right is a prominent narrative in alternative media spaces,” Meade said. Kennedy’s skepticism about health resonates among followers of influencers such as Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, who frequently entertain health-related conspiracies; Kennedy himself has been on their podcasts. Like Kennedy, many of them are disaffected former Democrats whose politics can be hard to pin down: Although Rogan endorsed Trump, he has called himself a “bleeding-heart liberal.”

It’s still possible that Kennedy might not get a prominent job in the Trump administration. His wariness of corporations doesn’t jibe with Trump’s embrace of them, and Trump has already made clear that environmental concerns won’t be a priority: “Bobby, stay away from the liquid gold,” he said in his victory speech, referring to oil. Kennedy’s history of bizarre behavior—including dumping a bear corpse in Central Park—may give some in Trump’s inner circle pause.

Even if Kennedy never joins the Trump administration, his ideas will continue to have broad appeal. America has seen what happens when people lose trust in public-health institutions. Pandemics drag on because people are afraid to get vaccinated. Measles outbreaks return to schools. People drink bleach. And maybe soon, Americans will no longer be drinking fluoridated water.

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Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat. Almost everywhere, Donald Trump expanded his coalition, and this time, unlike in 2016, he didn’t have to thread the needle of the Electoral College to win: He can claim the legitimacy of winning the popular vote.

Trump’s opponents are now muttering about the choice of Tim Walz, the influence of the Russians, the role of the right-wing media, and whether President Joe Biden should not have stepped aside in favor of Harris. Even the old saw about “economic anxiety” is making a comeback.

These explanations all have some merit, but mostly, they miss the point. Yes, some voters still stubbornly believe that presidents magically control the price of basic goods. Others have genuine concerns about immigration and gave in to Trump’s booming call of fascism and nativism. And some of them were just never going to vote for a woman, much less a Black woman.

But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.

Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries.

And so it came to pass: Last night, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires grinned and applauded for Trump. They were part of an alliance with the very people another Trump term would hurt—the young, minorities, and working families among them.

Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power.

Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania. Biden, too old and tired to mount a proper campaign, likely would have lost worse than Harris; more to the point, there was nothing even a more invigorated Biden or a less, you know, female alternative could have offered. Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts.

No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic “I will fix it” solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs. (I knew Harris was in trouble when I was in Pennsylvania last week for an event and a fairly well-off business owner, who was an ardent Trump supporter, told me that Michelle Obama had conspired with the Canadians to change the state’s vote tally in 2020. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part of the conversation.)

As Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, put it in a social-media post last night: The election went the way it did “because America wanted Trump. That’s it. People reaching to construct [policy] alibis for the public because they don’t want to grapple with this are whistling past the graveyard.” Last worries that we might now be in a transition to authoritarianism of the kind Russia went through in the 1990s, but I visited Russia often in those days, and much of the Russian democratic implosion was driven by genuinely brutal economic conditions and the rapid collapse of basic public services. Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

The bright spot in all this is that Trump and his coterie must now govern. The last time around, Trump was surrounded by a small group of moderately competent people, and these adults basically put baby bumpers and pool noodles on all the sharp edges of government. This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create.

Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air.

Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

Related:

What Trump understood, and Harris did not Democracy is not over.

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George T. Conway III: What we’re in for Voters wanted lower prices at any cost. Blame Biden, Tyler Austin Harper argues. Trump won. Now what?

Today’s News

The Republicans have won back control of the Senate. Votes are still being counted in multiple House races that could determine which party controls the House. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a concession speech at Howard University, emphasizing that there will be a peaceful transfer of power. In an interview on Fox News, a Trump spokesperson said that Trump plans to launch “the largest mass-deportation operation of illegal immigrants” on his first day in office.

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Work in Progress: “Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020,” Derek Thompson writes. “In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.”

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Evening Read

OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Night They Hadn’t Prepared For

By Elaine Godfrey

The vibe shifted sometime around 10:30 p.m. Eastern.

For several hours beforehand, the scene at the Howard University Yard had been jubilant: all glitter and sequins and billowing American flags. The earrings were big, and the risers were full. Men in fraternity jackets and women in pink tweed suits grooved to a bass-forward playlist of hip-hop and classic rock. The Howard gospel choir, in brilliant-blue robes, performed a gorgeous rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” and people sang along in a way that made you feel as if the university’s alumna of the hour, Kamala Harris, had already won.

But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable.

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Americans are headed to the polls today, to cast their ballots in a crucial election. People are anxious, hopeful, and scared about the stakes of the election and its aftermath. But this is not the only such electoral test that American democracy has faced. An earlier contest has much to say to the present.

The presidential election of 1800 was a crisis of the first order, featuring extreme polarization, wild accusations, and name-calling—the Federalist John Adams was labeled “hermaphroditical” by Republicans, and Federalists, in turn, warned that Thomas Jefferson would destroy Christianity. People in two states began stockpiling arms to take the government for Jefferson if necessary, seeing him as the intended winner. Federalist members of Congress considered overturning the election; thousands of people surrounded the Capitol to learn the outcome; and an extended, agonizing tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr took 36 votes to resolve in the House of Representatives.

We’re not looking at a replay of the 1800 election; history doesn’t repeat itself. But two key components of that electoral firestorm are speaking loudly to the present: the threat of violence, and the proposed solution to the electoral turmoil after the contest’s close.

The unfortunate truth is that democratic governance is often violent. When the promises and reach of democracy expand, it almost always brings an antidemocratic blowback, sometimes including threats and violence. Black men gaining the right to vote during the Civil War was met with bluntly hostile threats, intimidation, and voter suppression during Reconstruction. The advancing demands for the civil rights of Black Americans in the 1960s led to vicious beatings and murders. In both eras, white Americans who felt entitled to power—and who felt threatened by the expanding rights and opportunities granted to racial minorities through democratic means—resorted to violence.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real election risk comes later]

At the end of the 18th century, the Federalists were the party of extreme entitlement. They favored a strong central government with the power to enforce its precepts and were none too comfortable with a democratic politics of resistance, protest, and pushback. They wanted Americans to vote for their preferred candidates, then step aside and let their betters govern.

When Jefferson and Burr—both Democratic Republicans—received an equal number of electoral votes, the Federalists were horrified. They faced the nightmare choice between Jefferson, a notoriously anti Federalist Republican, or Burr, an unpredictable and opportunistic politico with unknown loyalties. They largely preferred Burr, who seemed far more likely to compromise with the Federalists.

Tied elections are thrown to the House of Representatives to decide, with each state getting one vote. Given this chance to steal the election, Federalists inside and outside Congress began plotting—perhaps they could prevent the election of either candidate and elect a president pro tem until they devised a better solution.

Federalist talk of intervention didn’t go unnoticed. Governors in Pennsylvania and Virginia began to stockpile arms in case the government needed to be taken for Jefferson. This was no subversive effort; Jefferson himself knew of their efforts, telling James Madison and James Monroe that the threat of resistance “by arms” was giving the Federalists pause. “We thought it best to declare openly & firmly, one & all, that the day such an act [of usurpation] passed the middle states would arm.”

Ultimately, there was no violence. But the threat was very real—a product of the fact that Federalists felt so entitled to political power that they were unwilling to lose by democratic means. And losing is a key component of democracy. Elections are contests with winners and losers. Democracy relies on these free and fair contests to assign power according to the preferences of the American people. People who feel entitled to power are hostile to these contests. They won’t accept unknown outcomes. They want inevitability, invulnerability, and immunity, so they strike out at structures of democracy. They scorn electoral proceedings, manipulate the political process, and threaten their opponents. Sometimes, the end result is violence. In the election of 2024, this is the posture adopted by former President Donald Trump and his supporters. As in 1800, a steadfast sense of entitlement to power is threatening our democratic process.

The election of 1800 was just the fourth presidential contest in American history, and only the election of 1796, the first without George Washington as a candidate, had been contested. After the crisis of 1800, some people sought better options. Unsettled by the uproar of 1800, at least one Federalist favored ending popular presidential elections altogether. Thinking back to the election a few years later, the Connecticut Federalist James Hillhouse proposed amending the constitutional mode of electing presidents. The president should be chosen from among acting senators, he suggested. A box could be filled with balls—most of them white, one of them colored— and each senator who was qualified for the presidency would proceed in alphabetical order and pull a ball from the box. The senator who drew the colored ball would be president. Chief Justice John Marshall, who agreed that presidential contests were dangerous, declared the plan as good as any other.

Most people didn’t go that far, but Federalists and Republicans alike understood that the threat posed by fiercely contested partisan elections could be dire. Although the presidency had been peacefully transferred from one party to another, the road to that transfer had been rocky. Stockpiling arms? Threats of armed resistance? Seizing the presidency? The entire nation rocked by political passions, seemingly torn in two?

One Republican asked Jefferson in March 1801: What would have happened if there had been the “non election of a president”? Jefferson’s response is noteworthy. In that case, he wrote, “the federal government would have been in the situation of a clock or watch run down … A convention, invited by the republican members of Congress … would have been on the ground in 8 weeks, would have repaired the constitution where it was defective, and wound it up again.”

The political process would save the nation. A convention. Perhaps amending the Constitution. The solution to the crisis, Jefferson argued, lay in tried-and-true constitutional processes of government. As he put it, they were a “peaceable & legitimate resource, to which we are in the habit of implicit obedience.”

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

And indeed, that is the purpose of the Constitution, a road map of political processes. As Americans, we agree to abide by its standards or use constitutional and legal political means to change them. When people attack the Constitution—threaten it, ignore it, violate it—they are striking a blow to the constitutional pact that holds us together as a nation. We don’t often think about this pact, or even realize that it’s there—until it’s challenged.

Which brings us to the present. Today’s election presents a stark choice. Americans can either respect the basic constitutional structures of our government, or trample them with denial and lies. The Constitution is far from perfect. It needs amending. But it is our procedural starting point for change.

By voting, you are signaling your belief in this process. You are declaring that you believe in the opportunities presented by democracy, even if they sometimes must be fought for. Democracy isn’t an end point; it’s a process. This election is our opportunity to pledge our allegiance to that process—to the constitutional pact that anchors our nation. The choice is ours.

This might be nostalgia talking, but I miss the old Election Nights, the kind we used to have before the stakes became so gruesomely high. No one was warning of “existential consequences” or calling trauma counselors into the office.

The end of a campaign was once something to celebrate, a shining marker of our participatory traditions—a jubilee of civic duty, a peaceful transfer of power. Now the once-routine exercise of certifying electoral votes has been officially designated a “National Special Security Event.”

Ideally, this ordeal won’t last too long, and we will have something in the ballpark of clarity soon enough. Ideally, no one will get hurt or killed this time. I wish I could reassure you that our democracy will survive, no matter what.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real election risk comes later]

Alas, I can say only this: Elections matter. And this one really matters. I’m guessing that you’re with me on this, and that you’re not one of those “undecideds” from the cable focus groups “still waiting to hear more specifics” from Kamala Harris or whatever. But if you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you’ll be watching tomorrow with a rooting interest. And you will not be calm.

Why not at least try? Perhaps attempt something that approximates “grief minimization,” a term I came across recently that has been bubbling back up into my brain a lot. Grief minimization is a choice—or at least a worthy goal, especially this week.

I’ve spent the past several days gathering wisdom. I’ve gone back and revisited some of the solace I found useful after the earthquake of 2016. “This is not the apocalypse,” then-President Barack Obama said in a postelection interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker. “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” Certainly, Donald Trump’s presidency was bad, maybe worse than feared. But I took Obama’s point to be that prolonged grieving would be counterproductive, a kind of self-inflicted paralysis.

Likewise, preemptive anguish achieves nothing good. My friend Amanda Ripley wrote in The Washington Post last week about a study in which women waiting to learn the results of breast biopsies were found to have similar levels of stress hormones in their saliva as women who had already learned that they had cancer. “In experiments, people who believe they have a 50–50 chance of getting a painful electric shock become significantly more agitated than people who think they have a 100 percent chance,” Ripley wrote. “Anticipating possible pain feels worse than anticipating certain pain.”

In other words, don’t wallow in the potential for, or inevitability of, a worst-case scenario. Instead, seek out distractions. Maybe edibles too.

Shop for enlightenment beforehand, which you can apply during the white-knuckle hours. To that end, I spent a few days last week reaching out to some of my favorite campaign gurus. I wasn’t seeking intel about the election itself. Rather, my goal was to assemble a last-minute tool kit of coping mechanisms and best mental-health practices.   

As much as possible, we should try to make ourselves sensible consumers of the treacherous and triggering torrent of information we will soon be drowning in. Note the metaphor here, as it segues into the important piece of guidance: Be careful where you swim. Avoid needless waves and currents. This includes the majority of information you get on TV before a critical mass of returns are processed, not to mention most of the inane opinions and guesswork and “partial data” you’re getting from the various walls of broadcast noise (disguised as maps) before 9 or 10 o’clock.  

“It’s extremely important to consume news on your own terms,” CNN’s Paul Begala, the longtime Democratic consultant, told me. As Election Day approaches, Begala tries to turn off every news notification on his phone that could increase his level of tension. “You cannot let anyone weaponize your amygdala against you,” Begala said, referring to the brain area that helps regulate emotions such as fear. Text bulletins, algorithms, and (God knows) social media are engineered to prey on our amygdala. But resist. You do not need this information right now, let alone predictions or useless speculation. It’s just empty-calorie pregaming. Trust me, you will learn who won and who lost. The news will find you.  

In the meantime, be humble and surrender to the unknown. Again, no one knows who is going to win. I’m pretty sure it will be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris (you’re welcome). Yet people still have a primal need for certainty, even when it’s obvious that none is possible. They are convinced that some special class of TV decoders exists that is in possession of secret knowledge otherwise off-limits to the uninitiated. They want to believe that these alleged super pundits are hoarding the “big secret” for themselves and their various co-conspirators.

“Some woman at LaGuardia came up to me and said, ‘Who’s going to win?’” James Carville, who will be yapping on Election Night with Brian Williams on Amazon Prime, told me. “And the guy who’s with her said, ‘Oh, he knows who’s going to win. He’s just not telling you.’”

Carville gets this a lot. “People think people like us have all the answers,” he said. Here’s a not-so-big secret: They do not.

I used to watch a lot of live sports on TV. I did this in large part because I wanted to see what happened in real time. Now, thanks to any number of screens that didn’t exist 30 years ago, I can be confident of learning exactly what happened and seeing what it looked and felt like as many times as I want. I partake of far more 10-minute YouTube synopses of NFL games than I do of full three-hour slogs (with the endless penalty flags, referee huddles, commercials, injury time-outs, official reviews, etc.). This saves me a whole lot of time and spares me a whole lot of the roller coaster.

I’m always hesitant to make sports analogies, especially with events of such terrifying magnitude as this election. Excluding those who have money on a game, sports will have very little real-life impact on most of the people who are choosing to invest emotionally in them.

Regardless, sporting events are much better-suited to television than election coverage is. When you watch a live game, the result is unfolding chronologically in front of you. That’s not possible for an event as huge and diffuse as Election Night, where partial data, secondhand projections, and “unconfirmed reports” are flying in haphazardly from all around the country. Chris Hayes had a good riff about this on MSNBC: “When you think about Election Night,” he said, “it’s like hearing the results of a full basketball game, basket by basket, but being read totally out of order, after the game already ended.”

You should really consider skipping most of this. Take a walk. Leave your phone at home. Steer clear of any news, stimuli, or people that could raise your blood pressure. This almost certainly includes Trump, who will probably declare a massively premature (and maybe erroneous) victory, no matter what the early returns say. Yes, this will be deeply irresponsible, but it should surprise no one. And any energy you devote to reacting will only sap your reserves for later, when you will need them.

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

I’ve seen landslide projections for both sides, and cogent arguments for why pollsters might be undercounting the support of both candidates. But a very close race remains the most likely scenario. Pace yourself and be realistic. Breathe, meditate, pray, seek simple pleasures, and be kind. It’s okay to be scared about whatever might unfold. Appropriate, even.

Rest assured, you will have a sizable community of fellow basket cases to commiserate with. Take comfort in them. Reach out and say you love them.

“This is easily the highest-stakes election of my life where I have not been personally involved,” Mac Stipanovich, a longtime GOP operative and lobbyist in Florida, told me. Stipanovich, a Never Trump Republican, says he is as nervous about tomorrow “as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Stipanovich wouldn’t speculate on an election result. But I got the gist: Anxiety is a natural side effect of this exercise, and maybe even a privilege of a democracy—if we can keep it.