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.

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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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Atlantic Intelligence: AI-powered search is killing the internet’s curiosity, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: A century-old novel offers a unique antidote to contempt and despair, Maya Chung writes.

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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.

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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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The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is often assumed to be impossible to solve, a matter of two national movements with irreconcilable aspirations for one tiny piece of land. It has felt like this for nearly a century, and perhaps never more so than during the past year of anger and grief.

But as a Palestinian who was born in Jerusalem’s Old City, who has lived through the occupation, who sat in an Israeli prison for five years, I see a way out. Even today, with the pain so fresh, I believe it’s possible for Palestinians to get our state, and for the two peoples to coexist. But to arrive there, both sides will need to radically change their thinking—and their leadership.

The future I imagine is in some ways rooted in a past I remember from my childhood in the early ’80s. In the busy streets of the Old City, you knew which community you belonged to, but everyone shared the space. As a boy, before I had any understanding of who was above whom, I knew only that everyone was bustling at the end of the week, with Jews going to synagogue, Christians heading to church, and Muslims following the sound of the muezzin to prayer. My family is Muslim, but I attended a Christian school. I never questioned how natural this layered reality was.

But then, in 1987, the First Intifada began. I was 14. All at once, I felt pulled into the conflict, drawn to what I heard on the streets and saw on television, which was a more straightforward story than what I’d known in Jerusalem—the struggle of my people, armed with stones, standing up to tanks. I wanted to throw stones as well, to feel a part of it. And so I did. And like many of my teenage friends, I was eventually arrested, and sentenced by a military judge to five years’ imprisonment.

This was the most painful moment of my life. My childhood was over. I wasn’t able to finish high school. But my experience in prison changed me in unexpected ways. It gave me a different kind of education. I was elected as a spokesperson to negotiate with the prison authorities, whether for better food or special permits for family visits. And my understanding of my enemy grew.

Out in the street, we wore keffiyehs over our faces, and they saw us only through the scope of a rifle. But now I got to know some Israelis. I could see their eyes, and they could see mine. I learned Hebrew. I learned their names. And I saw for the first time that these people, whom I had feared as my oppressors, had their own fears. They were scared of us, the Palestinians, of the violence we might cause them, of the violence we were causing them. It’s hard for my own people, oppressed as we feel by Israeli power, to appreciate this, but the fears of Israelis are real, not exaggerated or invented. The images of October 7 are seared into their minds. Especially since the massacre, they desire the sort of security that any of us would want, and they will never bargain away the safety of their families. They are not a suicidal people.

I also learned how to negotiate with Israelis. Maybe because of their own history of survival, they can be stubborn. You cannot expect to get anything through pressure tactics. Believe me, Palestinians have tried: The strategy for decades has been to use violence against Israeli civilians while beseeching the world to force Israel into making concessions. But this hasn’t worked. Trying to get the American president to use carrots and sticks with the Israelis is pointless. We need to deal with them directly. That’s the only way. And just as we have needs—dignity, rights, independence—they have needs as well, and we must find ways to reassure them of their security, to defeat their fears.

[Read: Israel and Hamas are kidding themselves]

I have often thought of the conflict as having DNA. The need for security is one strand, and the other is a desire for dignity. This did not require any special education for me to learn. It comes with the reality of being a Palestinian. We live in a state of constant humiliation: at each checkpoint, every time we need to cross a border, when settlers in the West Bank attack and kill our people and burn our fields with impunity. Half of our lives seem to be spent waiting in line as an Israeli soldier stands over us with a gun. We lack freedom. We are denied basic human dignity. And this existence, to feel forever trampled on, has been ours now for at least three generations.

This is the DNA, a desire for both safety and self-determination. By acknowledging and attending to these twin desires—rather than parsing right from wrong or replaying history—people of goodwill can solve the conflict. I am part of an initiative—organized by Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, and Nasser al‑Kidwa, the former Palestinian foreign-affairs minister—to do just that. We envision a cease-fire in Gaza and a return of the hostages held by Hamas since October 7, and we have worked out the details of a two-state solution, proposing a plan for drawing borders, determining the status of Jerusalem, and rebuilding Gaza.

The contours are not hard to imagine, but many obstacles stand in the way. I see four main ones, two within our own societies and two from the outside.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government aren’t interested in making any concessions to the Palestinians. They hardly see us, and are intent on ignoring our demands indefinitely. But I don’t think they represent the majority of Israelis, who dislike Netanyahu and want his rule to end. I believe that those who protest by the tens of thousands every week in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem know that the status quo is not acceptable for either people.

This is the first obstacle: Netanyahu and his reactionary, racist allies. Israelis must find a way to vote him and the extremists out. Nothing will change until Israeli leaders see the benefit of creating a Palestinian state, and do not act with such indifference to our lives and needs. But the second obstacle I see is closer to home for me, and just as crucial: the corrupt and ineffective leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.

I first met Abbas as part of a Fatah youth delegation soon after the First Intifada ended. After being released from prison, in 1993, I became involved with the party, the largest faction in Palestinian politics at the time. My fellow delegates and I were in our 20s; Abbas was then in his 50s and Fatah’s second-in-command. “You are tomorrow’s leaders,” he told us. Today, Abbas is nearly 90, and we are in our 50s. Over the years, he has worked to ensure that the tomorrow he promised never arrived. He was elected president in 2005 to serve for four years. He has served for almost 20, without a single reelection. Over that period, he has compromised our democracy, our security, our economy, and our dignity.

Abbas lost the 2006 legislative elections to Hamas, and then lost Gaza to Hamas control the following year. But he could have taken the past two decades to build up the West Bank, creating transparent, accountable institutions that would represent a thriving alternative to Hamas. Because he didn’t, he allowed the extremists to fill the vacuum. As recently as 2021, Abbas canceled planned elections, this time after Fatah split into three factions. Younger, reformist Fatah leaders were ready to try to create that alternative, and might have offered a counterbalance to the extremism that led to October 7. But Abbas stood in their way.

Palestinians want change. Polls show that about 90 percent of the population wants Abbas to resign. But removing him isn’t just important for the West Bank and the possibility of negotiating with the Israelis. It’s also essential to Gaza’s “day after.” As brutal and oppressive as the Hamas regime has been, the people of Gaza don’t want to see Hamas replaced with Abbas.

Instead, Palestinian political leaders should form a unity government that includes nonpartisan national figures; Fatah reformists such as al‑Kidwa, the former security czar Mohammed Dahlan, and, with any luck, the imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti; and even members of nonextremist Islamist factions like the Ra’am party, in Israel’s Parliament. This broad coalition would be responsible for reconstructing Gaza and unifying it with the West Bank. It would need the support of Arab countries and the international community—and, of course, recognition by Israel.

All of this is impossible while Netanyahu and Abbas remain in power, which is why they are the biggest internal obstacles. But there are also two external ones.

The first is obvious: Iran is the mutual enemy of both Israelis and Palestinians who want peace, as well as of all the moderate forces in the Middle East. Iran has propped up Hamas and Hezbollah, whose ideologies and actions will lead to nothing but endless war. The best way to counter Iran is for Israel to build relationships with the Emiratis and the Saudis and a reformed Palestinian Authority. But to do that, Abbas and Netanyahu need to go.

The second external obstacle might seem surprising, but it’s no less important to acknowledge: the extreme sentiments in the West. I understand what has motivated the protests on American college campuses. I have grieved the death of every Gazan, and I am certainly not against peaceful demonstration. But I think that some of those who call themselves pro-Palestine and rally under the Palestinian flag are doing us real harm—and I would say the same about some of those who rally under the Israeli flag and call themselves pro-Israel.

These protests have merely hardened the positions of Hamas and Netanyahu. They apply the wrong kind of pressure: against compromise. Against seeing each other and finding ways to move closer. They alienate everyday Israelis and Palestinians. As far as I’m concerned, there is only one idea to rally behind; only one pro-Israel, pro-Palestine slogan: “Stop the war and free the hostages.” Nothing else is helpful, certainly not slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

[From the April 2024 issue: Franklin Foer on the end of America’s Jewish golden age]

I know how hard these obstacles will be to overcome; as a Palestinian, I am accustomed to endless heartbreak. It’s far easier to remain self-righteous, to believe that with enough yelling or missiles, things will change for the better. But they won’t, not until the two sides begin to look at each other honestly.

I have talked with many Israelis over the years, after I was elected international secretary for Fatah youth, and then as the head of Israeli relations for the party. I have become close friends with many of them, and not just with people on the left and in the center, but with those on the right as well. I’ve learned some lessons from all of this talking.

Primarily, I decided not to hate them. For a simple reason: We have killed them and they have killed us. Hate has never achieved anything for the Palestinians besides more misery. Additionally, I decided never to lecture Israelis on morality, on what to do and what not to do. I chose instead to focus on my side, on the example that I set.

That’s why I went to Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim attacked on October 7, for a condolence visit early this year. Standing in front of cameras, I condemned the acts of Hamas. I didn’t want history to document that no Palestinian spoke up against this atrocity. In Kfar Aza—a mile away from the city of Beit Hanoun, over the border in Gaza—I could see smoke, and I could hear bombs, and I knew what was happening there, but I had come only to denounce what Hamas had done in the name of Palestinians, in my name. One day, an Israeli will stand in front of us and denounce what has happened in Gaza. I don’t have to lecture them. All I can do is offer my example.

I know it’s controversial to say, but this is why I think Palestinians need to make the first move. There is more urgency for us than for the Israelis. They are suffering because of the conflict, but not as much as we are. They can wait another 75 years until it becomes necessary for them to share the land. We cannot wait another 75 hours. They have an air force; we don’t. They have tanks; we don’t. We have spent decade after decade not achieving any progress with them. As a practical person, I’ve concluded that we ought to try something else.

Palestinians need to put in place a strategy that prioritizes the security of Israelis—not for the Israelis’ sake, but for our own national interest. We need to make sure that the Palestinian Authority properly criminalizes violence committed by Palestinians—just as Israel must end settler violence in the West Bank and respect that the lives of Palestinians are as sacred as the lives of Israelis. Both sides in this conflict need to gain control over their violent tendencies. And then our message to the Israelis will be: more for more. If we make you feel safer, if we build institutions that clamp down on violence effectively, that build a successful economy for Palestinians, that create stability and transparency, we expect from you more dignity, freedom, and trust.

The two-state solution feels impossible at this moment, so we need to build it step-by-step, offering more for more. Then we’ll be ready for the tough decisions. This needs to start at the top, which is why I care so much about changing the leadership. People need to see how trust can form. If I were the prime minister of the future state of Palestine, I would want the Israeli prime minister to be my best friend. I would have him and his family over for dinner and let them get to know my wife and kids. Mutual trust between the top leaders will help facilitate trust among the people.

Even today, after tens of thousands have been killed in Gaza in the past year, I still maintain that the majority of mainstream Palestinians and mainstream Israelis want to find a way out of this.

I recently decided to pursue a master’s degree in conflict resolution at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. Every Monday, when I show up for class, I get a vivid illustration of what the future could be. When I was younger, Hebrew University seemed off-limits to Palestinians; even just walking by the campus gates felt disloyal. But these days, the student population is nearly 20 percent Arab, and there are many young women wearing hijabs.

When I look at these students, I see that many of them, Israeli and Palestinian alike, wear nearly identical pendants depicting the same territory—between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—which each side claims in its entirety for their own people. (And I bet both pendants were made in the same factory in China.) But then they go to the same classes and listen to the same professors, and sometimes a professor will assign two Israeli students and two Palestinian students to the same research group, and those students, each with their own necklace, will work together. At this moment, their differences become irrelevant; they are just trying to get their studies done. And I promise you: They do not want to throw each other into the sea.

They wear those pendants because they are confused, because their political leaders have poisoned their minds. These young people, who know how to work so well together, who know how to give and take, already know how to be neighbors. They just need leadership that will reinforce the possibility. This leadership doesn’t exist now, and that is the real enemy for both Israelis and Palestinians.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “How to Build a Palestinian State.”

Everything about the staging of Kamala Harris’s “closing argument” rally Wednesday night on the White House Ellipse seemed designed to frame the upcoming election as a referendum on democracy. Flanked by American flags and surrounded by banners that screamed FREEDOM, the Democratic nominee delivered her speech against the same backdrop that Donald Trump used on January 6 when he addressed the crowd that went on to storm the Capitol.

“So look,” Harris said about halfway through her speech. “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office …”

Scattered shouts of You will! You will! echoed from the audience near the stage. In my conversations with Harris supporters afterward, their confidence seemed authentic. To a person, everyone I talked with believed they were on the verge of victory—that Harris would defeat the “wannabe dictator” once and for all, pull America back from the brink, and save the world’s oldest democracy from descending into facism.

Then I would ask a question they found dispiriting: What if she doesn’t?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind for months. We are in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential races in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they are going to win—and that if they don’t, the consequences for America will be existential.

Trump and his allies have already clearly signaled what they will do if he loses: Claim victory anyway, declare the election rigged, and engage in another conspiracy to overturn the result, whether by litigation, extra-Constitutional arm-twisting, or even violence. The pressure campaign is unlikely to work; as Paul Rosenzweig noted in The Atlantic, none of the officials overseeing vote tabulation in battleground states is a partisan election denier. Still, this full-frontal assault on the validity of the election represents an ongoing threat.

If Harris loses, the response from her coalition would almost certainly be less dramatic and damaging; unlike Trump, she has committed to accepting the result. But as the election nears and panic over Trump’s authoritarian impulses reaches a fever pitch in certain quarters, I’ve begun to worry that prophecies of democratic breakdown following a Trump reelection could become self-fulfilling. What happens to America if Harris voters have fully internalized the idea that democracy is on the ballot, and then “democracy” loses?

In 2016, Trump’s surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, and record-breaking donations to the ACLU, and waves of grassroots organizing. Subscriptions surged at newspapers committed to holding the new administration to account; books about combating tyranny became best sellers. The energy wasn’t contained to the liberal “resistance” movement. Conservative expats launched their own political groups and publications. As my colleague Franklin Foer recently wrote, the warnings of impending autocracy in America at the time “helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump.”

That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden’s victory represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached president simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again.

But of course the story didn’t end there. And the fact that, four years later, Trump is within a coin flip of returning to the Oval Office has created some dissonance in liberal America. Trump has, in his third campaign, been more explicit than ever about his illiberal designs. He has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists, and revoking broadcast licenses for TV networks whose news coverage he doesn’t like.

Democrats have sought to warn voters about the threat that these actions would pose to democracy—sometimes dialing up the rhetoric in an effort to wake Americans to the peril. But the messaging seems to have had an unfortunate dual effect, deeply stressing out voters already inclined to believe it while largely failing to resonate with the undecided and politically disengaged. Last week, The New York Times reported on a memo circulated by the leading pro-Harris super PAC warning Democrats that persuadable voters weren’t being moved by messages that focused on the former president’s authoritarianism. “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” the email read. Compared with 2020, fewer Americans are telling pollsters that they are highly motivated to vote, or that this is the most important election of their lifetime.

Within a certain segment of Harris’s base, though, the struggle against autocracy remains very much top of mind. And if you spend too much time online monitoring the discourse, as I do, you might come away with the impression that, for many, Election Day will be the decisive moment in the battle for American democracy. Some liberals are even making plans to leave the country if Trump wins. Biden’s son Hunter recently told Politico he was worried that Trump’s reelection would mean “losing our democracy to a fascist minority” and warned that a second Trump term “is potentially the end of America as we’ve known it.”

I’ve heard similar sentiments from my most anxious Harris-voting friends and family members. And I’ve wondered whether another Trump victory would spur in them the same spirit of post-2016 activism or send them spiraling into fatalism and disengagement.

On Wednesday night, Harris was careful in her speech not to wallow too much in the doom and gloom of an imperiled democracy. But she did take aim at her opponent’s illiberalism. She said that Trump was “out for unchecked power” and warned that if elected, he would enter the Oval Office with an “enemies list.” She alluded to the country’s birth in revolt against a “petty tyrant,” and described Americans who have fought over centuries to defend and promote democracy around the world. “They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” Harris declared to cheers.

In my conversations after the speech, many supporters, teary-eyed and high on adrenaline as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” still blared from the speakers, were understandably loath to talk about what they’ll do next week if their candidate loses. But they politely indulged me.

Alyssa VanLeeuwen, a mom from Maryland who brought her eighth-grade daughter to the rally, emitted a guttural agghh when I posed the question to her. “Democracy is absolutely on the line,” she told me. A Trump victory, she said, would mean a bleak and uncertain future for her daughter. “I’m scared. I’m terrified if that happens.”

When I asked her if she thought that fear would translate to disillusionment or activism, she paused to give it thought. “I think,” she said, “everybody’s going to go to battle again to try to fight for their neighbors.”

I spoke with another Harris supporter who asked me not to use her name (“My family could be targeted”). She, too, called the prospect of Trump’s reelection “terrifying.” She said that Trump would herald “the return of McCarthyism” as he used federal power to root out and punish his political enemies, and went on to lay out in vivid detail the various worst-case scenarios of a second Trump term. But when I asked her whether she thought American democracy itself might be destroyed, she said no. “We have 300 million people in this country,” she told me, “and I don’t think we would allow that.”

This attitude was shared by almost everyone I spoke with that night on the Ellipse. Some of them told me about friends, glued to cable news and doomscrolling on their phones, who might tend toward fatalism if Trump wins again. But the people I met—the kind who travel long distances and wait outside in the cold for hours to attend political rallies—were not thinking of Election Day as a singular make-or-break moment. They seemed to know that, no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week, and the week after that. Its preservation depends, in part, on not pegging its fate to the outcome of any one election.

Before leaving the Ellipse, I met Salome Agbaroji, a 19-year-old Harvard student who had traveled from Cambridge to see Harris speak. As a poet, she spends a lot of time thinking about the language that shapes our politics, and she told me she resents what she considers hyperbolic rhetoric in the media about the end of democracy. A professor had recently taught her the root of the Greek word for democracy—demos, meaning “people,” and kratia, meaning “rule.” The power of the people doesn’t disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader.

“I don’t think democracy lives in an institution,” Agbaroji told me. “Democracy lives in the people.” As long as people hold on to “that spirit, it will be hard to kill.”