For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.

Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump’s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold—command over 2 million American military personnel—he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.

Hegseth began his involvement in conservative-movement politics as a Princeton undergraduate. He then joined the Army and quickly developed a profile, when not on active duty, as a budding Republican spokesperson. He testified against Elena Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court (on the grounds that, while dean of Harvard Law School, she had blocked military recruiters from campus in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and lobbied in favor of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. As the Republican Party’s foreign-policy orientation changed radically under Donald Trump, Hegseth’s positions changed with it. But his devotion to the party remained constant. After stints running the advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and a failed Senate campaign, he finally settled at Fox News, where he joined a chorus in support of Trump.

Along the way, Hegseth has written five books. The first, extolling Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy, revolves around ideas that Hegseth has since renounced after converting to Trumpism. Another is simply a collection of war stories. The other three, all published in the past four years—American Crusade (2020), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and The War on Warriors (2024)—lay out his worldview in florid, explicit, and often terrifying detail.

A foundational tenet of Hegseth’s philosophy, apparently carrying over from his Roosevelt-worshipping era, is a belief in the traditional masculine virtues and the potential for war to inculcate them. Hegseth maintains that boys require discipline and must aspire to strength, resilience, and bravery. His preferred archetype for these virtues appears to be Pete Hegseth, whose manful exploits either on the basketball court (he played for Princeton) or the battlefield are featured in all three books.

[David A. Graham: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Hegseth complains that society no longer gives veterans like him their proper measure of deference. “Being a veteran no longer demands respect of the coastal elites or reverence from large swaths of the public,” he writes—an observation that will sound strange to anybody who has ever attended a football game or listened to a speech by a politician from either party. “In previous generations, men had to find ways to salvage their honor if they didn’t get to fight in a war.” (The single strongest piece of evidence for Hegseth’s thesis—the popularity of lifelong coastal elitist, proud war-avoider, and POW-mocker Donald Trump—goes unmentioned).

Hegseth’s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. “I had been an underdog my whole life,” he writes. “I persisted. I worked my ass off.” But the woke military, he complains, doesn’t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. “How do you treat women in a combat situation,” he asks, “without eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?”

(The treatment of women by Hegseth specifically happens to be the subject of a recently disclosed police report detailing an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a 2017 political conference. Hegseth denies the allegation and says that the encounter, which took place while he was transitioning between his second and third wives, was consensual. He paid the alleged victim an undisclosed sum in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.)

One episode looms especially large in Hegseth’s mind as the embodiment of the wokification of the military and its abandonment of traditional merit. In 2021, Hegseth, an active National Guard member, wished to join the Washington, D.C., unit protecting incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The National Guard, however, excluded him from the detail because he was deemed a security risk on account of a bicep tattoo of the “Deus Vult” symbol—a reference to the Crusades that is popular with some far-right activists.

The logic of the snub was straightforward. Biden’s inauguration took place in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection attempt that had included many members of the armed forces, some operating within far-right networks. But to Hegseth—who protests that the Deus Vult tattoo is simply an expression of his Christian faith, not a white-nationalist symbol—the decision was an unforgivable personal affront.

He expresses indignation at the notion that he could even be suspected of harboring radical ideas. “I fought religious extremists for over twenty years in uniform,” he writes. “Then I was accused of being one.” This is not as paradoxical as Hegseth makes it sound. Many of the people most eager to fight against extremists of one religion are extremist adherents of another religion. An example of this would be the Crusades, an episode that Hegseth highlights in American Crusade as a model to emulate.

In any case, evidence of Hegseth’s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are “poisonous”; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by “German socialists.”

Where Hegseth’s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind, that the entire basic design of the public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot. Hegseth is not just hyperventilating about the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, or other left-wing fads, as conservatives often do. Instead he argues that the entire design of the U.S. education system is a Marxist scheme with roots going back to the founding of the republic. The deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system. Then, “American Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans.”

The nefarious plan to turn America communist involves steps that appear anodyne to the untrained eye. “Yes, our modern social sciences—like ‘political science,’ previously known as ‘politics,’ and ‘social studies,’ previously known as individual disciplines like ‘history, economics, geography and philosophy’—are byproducts of Marxist philosophy,” he writes. “Let that sink in: the manner in which we study politics, history, and economics in American schools—public and private—today is the product of Marxists. That was always the plan, and it worked.” Hegseth will no longer sit back and allow communist indoctrination to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: “Fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.” Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” and compiling a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.

To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department’s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.

[Graeme Wood: War crimes are not difficult to discern]

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)

Writing about his time guarding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay—where, as even the Bush administration eventually admitted, most detainees were innocent men swept up by American forces—Hegseth describes calls for due process as a stab-in-the-back against brave soldiers like himself. “The nation was dealing with legal issues (mostly led by weak-kneed, America-hating ACLU types) concerning enemy combatants, ‘international rights’ of illegal combatants, and the beginnings of extrajudicial drone attacks,” he writes. “Not to mention the debate about the ‘rights’ of assholes (I mean, ‘detainees’) at Gitmo.”

Trump’s second and even more disturbing interest in having a loyalist run the department is his enthusiasm for deploying troops to curtail and if necessary shoot domestic protesters. His first-term defense secretaries blanched at these demands. Hegseth displays every sign of sharing Trump’s impulses, but in a more theorized form.

The clearest throughline of all three books is the cross-application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis—gulp—his).

Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.”

And The War on Warriors repeatedly urges Hegseth’s readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, he writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule, because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists … You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat—readiness be damned. The left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.

A Defense Secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

When the 1997 comedy Austin Powers needed a song to send up the swinging ’60s in its joyfully absurd opening sequence, the movie could have opted for obvious touchstones, such as British-invasion rock or sitar-drenched psychedelia. Instead, it used an offbeat bit of samba-jazz by Quincy Jones. This was an inspired choice. Jones’s 1962 song “Soul Bossa Nova” was certainly an artifact of its decade, reflecting a then-emerging international craze for Brazilian rhythms. But the track was more than just a time capsule; its hooting percussion and saucy flutes exploded from the speakers in a way that still sounds original, even alien, decades later.

Jones, the legendary polymath who died at age 91 on Sunday, spent a lifetime making music like this—music that defined its era by transcending it. He’s best associated with the gleaming, lush sound of jazz and pop in the ’70s and ’80s, as most famously heard on Michael Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. But his impact was bigger than any one sound or epoch, as Jones used his talent and expertise to design a future we’re still catching up to.

Jones was born into wretched conditions in Depression-era Chicago: His mother was sent to a mental hospital when he was 7, leaving him to be temporarily raised by a grandmother who was so poor that she cooked rats to eat. When Jones was 11, after his family moved to Washington State, he and his brother broke into a building looking for food and came across a piano; playing around with the instrument lit a fire in the young Jones. He’d spend his teenage years hanging out with Ray Charles and playing trumpet with the Count Basie Orchestra; at age 20, he started touring the world as a member of Lionel Hampton’s big band. After producing Dinah Washington’s 1955 album, For Those in Love, he went to Paris to study under the famed classical-music teacher Nadia Boulanger, who’d also tutored Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

These early brushes with genius—and global travels that exposed him to far-flung musical traditions—gave him the skills he’d draw on for the rest of his life. Boulanger, Jones would often later say, drilled into him an appreciation for the endless possibilities contained within the confines of music theory. Mastery, she told him, lay in understanding how previous greats had creatively used the same 12 notes available to everyone else. Jones took this idea to heart. His work was marked by a blend of compositional rigor and freedom; knowing what had come before allowed him to arrange familiar sounds in ways that were, in one way or another, fresh.

Take, for example, Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s My Party,” which Jones produced. The song is a key text of mid-century girl-group pop—Phil Spector tried to take the song for the Crystals—but what made it soar were the Jonesian touches: harmonic decisions that feel ever so off, Latin syncopation pulsing throughout. You can hear similarly eclectic, colorful elements in another American standard that Jones arranged: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie’s 1964 version of “Fly Me to the Moon” (which Buzz Aldrin listened to before stepping onto the lunar surface in 1969).  

Though schooled by classical academics and jazz insiders, Jones seemed to have a pop soul: He used precise technique not to impress aficionados but to convey emotion in an accessible, bold way. “The Streetbeater,” the theme song for Sanford & Sons, used prickly, interlaced percussion to conjure sizzling excitement; a tempo change in “Killer Joe,” from Jones’s 1969 album, Walking in Space, opened up an oasis of cooling flute. The 1985 African-famine-relief anthem “We Are the World” was a particularly gracious use of talent. Not just any producer could have brought 46 vocalists—including such distinctive voices as Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner—into one coherent, catchy whole.

Jones’s signature collaborator was Michael Jackson. It was a kinship that made sense: The two men shared a knack for rhythm, a sense of history, and perfectionism. “He had a perspective on details that was unmatched,” Jones said of Jackson in a 2018 GQ interview. “His idols are Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, all of that. And he paid attention, and that’s what you’re supposed to do.” For all of Jackson’s scandals and eccentricities, the music he made with Jones has never been overshadowed. The songs are just too intricately lovely, delighting hips and hearts and heads all at once, to be denied.

[Read: AI can’t make music]

As Jones settled into living-icon status, he tried to pass his wisdom to new generations. In 1992, he founded the hip-hop magazine Vibe; in 2017, he launched Qwest TV, a streaming service for videos of jazz performances. He kept working with young talents, such as Amy Winehouse in 2010 and the avant-pop composer Jacob Collier much more recently. Even so, later in life, Jones liked to gripe about the state of pop music. In his view, modern artists weren’t educated or broad-minded enough to break new ground. “Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain,” he told New York magazine in 2018. “Music is emotion and science.” He added, “Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?”

Yet clearly, he still has disciples today—though perhaps some of them are misunderstanding his lessons, trying nostalgically to imitate his work rather than studying his techniques to create something different. I feel, for example, conflicted about the Weeknd, a pastiche-y pop star who’s obsessed with recapturing the magic of Jones and Jackson’s hot streak. Jones himself appeared on an interlude on the Weeknd’s 2022 release, Dawn FM. He relayed a story about childhood trauma rippling throughout his adult life, and concluded by saying, “Looking back is a bitch, isn’t it?” The point, he seemed to say, was to use the past to keep moving forward.

In the fall of 2022, pro-democracy protesters in cities across mainland China developed a clever tactic for speaking out against government forces that wished to silence them. They began holding up blank sheets of paper, as well as tacking up blank paper in public spaces, to register their disapproval of restrictive lockdown rules as well as their disapprobation of the government’s repressive censorship laws.

Observers from all over the world noted with admiration the courage and creativity of the protesters, who’d found a bold way to speak out while saying nothing at all. Chinese authorities cracked down on the dissenters, censoring online reporting about them and arresting or otherwise threatening those who have tried to remind people of the movement since then.

In America, a country consecrated to freedom, the dystopian scenes out of China seemed distant. Americans understand on a bone-deep level that, to paraphrase James Madison, absolute sovereignty belongs to the people, not the government. Americans are free to say what we believe, and free to share our ideas with our fellow citizens. We are free to criticize the government, which is accountable to the people, not the other way around. The First Amendment does not grant us these freedoms—they are an inviolable right. The First Amendment does, however, dictate that the government dare not interfere with these freedoms, that officials have no right to cut down the American people’s speech, including the people’s right to free press.

To be comfortable in these freedoms, to assume that we would never need to resort to holding up blank sheets of paper to criticize the powerful, is a luxury that Americans cannot presently afford.

The United States is on the eve of an election that could see the return to power of Donald Trump, an autocrat who vociferously and repeatedly threatens the basic freedoms of the American people—with a particular preoccupation with curbing freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Worse still, he has persuaded his followers to cheer on the demise of their own freedoms. When Trump tells people that journalists are “the enemy of the American people,” or “evil,” when he says that Americans who describe the criminal charges he faces should be investigated for treason, he is not merely denigrating a professional class; he is directly attacking the rights of all Americans. He is attacking those who happen to work as journalists, but he is likewise attacking their neighbors—every American who has the right to free speech and free press themselves.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo in October. “We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” he said, using the term he often directs at American citizens who work in journalism, as well as his political foes generally. He went on: “And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary by the military.”

Donald Trump does not seem to believe in free speech or the freedom of the press at all. He believes that when his fellow citizens say things he doesn’t like, he should have the power to shut them up. And he has repeatedly suggested investigating and imprisoning Americans, as well as turning the U.S. military on the American people in order to do so. No wonder Trump is so starry-eyed over China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, whom Trump often praises in effusive terms. No wonder Trump has similarly embraced the dictator and former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who bragged about leading his country to the extrajudicial killing of thousands of Filipino citizens, including those working as journalists. (“Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination if you’re a son of a bitch,” Duterte once said.) And no wonder Trump openly admires the autocrats Vladimir Putin (“genius”) and Viktor Orbán (“a great man”), both of whom he describes as being “at the top of their game, whether you like it or not.”

In Trump’s recent interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump complained about the Americans who have noticed his pattern of adulation for the brutal leaders of antidemocratic regimes, whose citizens do not have the right to free speech. “They hate when I say—you know, when the press—when I call President Xi, they said, ‘He called President Xi brilliant.’ Well, he’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” He went on: “Actually, we have evil people in our country.”

Trump is making it abundantly clear that dictators aren’t the problem—rather, Americans exercising their right to free speech and free press are the problem, and they are a problem that should be solved by dictatorial rule.

One person who seems to share Trump’s confusion over basic American freedoms is Elon Musk, who strangely claims to be a free-speech absolutist, all while remaking Twitter into a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign. Musk, like Trump, is fixated on tearing down American citizens and their right to free press. Musk likes to post spirited calls to action on his social platform such as “We are the mainstream media now,” seeming to believe that he is the one who grants Americans their right to expression. (Never mind that a social platform that is truly absolutist in letting anyone say whatever they want would probably look more like 4Chan than anything else—that is, it would neither delete its users’ comments nor deploy algorithms to amplify its owners’ political views.)

Musk has long aspired to be taken seriously by the news industry, and his aggrievement seems to stem, in part, from the fact that he is not. Before his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, he floated the idea of starting various news sites—including one in which users would upvote or downvote stories as part of a “credibility-ranking site for people to rate journalists and news organizations,” not realizing or perhaps not caring that truth, and therefore credibility, is not something that can be established or eliminated through the clicking of buttons on the internet at scale. (Such a system would, however, be very useful for efforts at political warfare.)

Today, Musk claims that Twitter is “the top source of news on Earth!” when in reality it is among the closest analogues that America has ever seen to a state-run media outlet. And although several operators of huge social platforms have floated the idea of accreditation or licensing for journalists the way lawyers take the bar and doctors take board exams, there is no special class of licensed journalists, and that is by design. Every American citizen has the right to free press. You do not need to work full-time as a journalist, or pass a test, or join a professional association to exercise this right.

One of the knock-on effects of living in a country whose citizens have the right to say and publish whatever they want is that people sometimes say abhorrent things. (And also: People can consume the information they wish. But for that to happen, your fellow citizens have to be free to offer it to you in the first place, whether what you’re seeking is Newsmax, Joe Rogan, or The New York Times.) In practice, the rights of free speech and free press are interwoven this way. And any American who consumes media, or publishes their own research, reporting, or opinions on any platform—whether on a flyer stuck to a telephone poll, in an Instagram post, or in a local newspaper—is benefiting from the protection of these rights, and would suffer greatly if they were curtailed.

Social media is miraculous in its flattening ability—people can self-publish their ideas with very little friction and no financial cost; they have the potential to reach a massive audience in an instant. These qualities are positive on their face, and sometimes mean that people mistake Twitter for an engine of free speech, when in fact it is a private company run by an illiberal man who is throwing everything he has behind an anti-free-speech politician who wants to attack his fellow Americans with their own military.

Trump’s and Musk’s most ardent supporters are fond of posting a meme that goes like this: “You don’t hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don’t.” Musk, of course, has every right to run his social platform how he chooses. If he wants to make it a forum for railing against the American right to free speech and free press, while believing he can convince people that doing so demonstrates his commitment to free speech, that’s his prerogative. If he wants to stoke hatred and partisanship, and advocate for interruptions to the peaceful transfer of power in the United States, he can.

But Musk cannot grant the American people their right to free speech any more than Trump can. The American right to free speech and free press is God-given. And the Constitution is intended to protect Americans from government tyrants who would attempt to quash our freedom in just the way that Trump is threatening to do, with Musk’s full-throated endorsement.

Trump’s threats are already effectively silencing Americans. Consider, for example, Jeff Bezos’s profound cowardice in banning The Washington Post from publishing its endorsement of Trump’s rival. (Ditto Patrick Soon-Shiong over at the Los Angeles Times.) Bezos, like Musk, is free to run his business how he chooses. But that shouldn’t shield him from criticism over his actions. In explaining his decision, Bezos blamed the American citizens who work as journalists for being hated, denigrated, and threatened by Trump. “Our profession is now the least trusted of all,” he wrote in an essay explaining himself, with no apparent trace of irony given the breach of trust that his actions represented. “Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

Something that is apparently working: Trump’s Musk-assisted campaign to tell Americans they should rail against their own right to free press and free speech. The illiberal techno-authoritarian crowd cheered Bezos on for his kowtowing, and for his chastising of the journalism industry, and Trump began using the newspaper’s non-endorsement as a campaign talking point. (It may seem odd that Trump would boast about a newspaper’s decision not to endorse his rival, given his hatred of the press, but he dismisses newspapers as “fake news” only when they criticize him.)

This is how tyranny works: Amplify praise for the dear leader, silence dissent, crack down on individual freedoms, repeat. A free society’s fall into authoritarianism does not start with citizens being forced to protest using blank sheets of paper. But it can get to that point with dizzying speed. This is the warning that people in once-free nations always repeat: You’re free until you are not. And destroying a people’s right to speak and publish freely is always one of the first moves in the autocrat’s playbook.

Centuries ago, the American colonists forging a new way of life on this continent found themselves subject to laws and restrictions on free speech that dated back to medieval England. You could not criticize the government without facing violent punishment. Public whippings were routine. One Maryland man, who called his local legislature a “turdy shitten assembly” in 1666, was sentenced to be tied to an apple tree and lashed 30 times, according to Stephen D. Solomon’s account in Revolutionary Dissent: How the Founding Generation Created the Freedom of Speech. A Virginia man who criticized the government had his arms broken and was beaten by a group of men who flogged him with their rifles. Courts sentenced others to have their ears cut off, as in the case of a Massachusetts man who denounced the Church and the government in 1631. Americans were lashed and beaten and bloodied for their right to speak freely. Eventually many of them fought and died to protect themselves, and they did so to create a free society that would protect future American citizens from such barbarism and tyrannical government overreach.

Trump would like to convince the American people that his hatred is laser-focused. He would like Americans to believe that his threats of retribution are reserved only for his political foes, for the former advisers he now deems disloyal, for the tens of thousands of American citizens who work as journalists. What Americans need to understand is that anyone who would threaten to quash the most fundamental rights of some of their fellow citizens is threatening to impinge the rights of all Americans. The United States is still a nation consecrated to freedom. And the American people should not hand it over to anyone who would dare try to convince you otherwise.

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At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.

“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”

Trump never did deploy the nickname against Biden in public. Yet the restiveness he felt during that stretch of the race foretold a dramatic shift in the tone and tenor of his campaign. Within weeks, Trump would survive an assassination attempt, Biden would abandon his candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris would replace him atop the Democratic ticket, and polls would show an election that once appeared finished suddenly reverting to coin-flip status. All the while, Trump became more agitated with what he saw as the trust-the-plan, run-out-the-clock strategy of his campaign—and more convinced that this cautious approach was going to cost him a second term.

[Read: This is exactly what the Trump team feared]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

Chris LaCivita, who co-manages Trump’s campaign with Susie Wiles, at an event in Phoenix (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Trump decided it was time to take matters into his own hands.

For the first 10 days following Biden’s departure from the race, Trump had listened dutifully as his campaign co-managers—a pair of longtime GOP consultants named Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita—explained that the fundamentals of their strategy remained solid. Nothing dramatic needed to change with Harris taking over the ticket, they told Trump, because she was inheriting the vulnerabilities they had exploited so successfully against Biden. They argued that whatever burst of money and enthusiasm had accompanied her entry into the race would prove short-lived—and warned him against overreacting. Staying the course, they told Trump, was the surest recipe for electoral success.

[Read: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

He went along with their plan—for a while. But every hour his campaign spent attacking Harris as if she were a credible opponent—rather than bludgeoning her as the airheaded, unqualified, empty pantsuit Trump was sure she was—gnawed at the former president. Finally, he ran out of patience. On July 31, during an onstage interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump publicly unloaded the sort of race-baiting barbs that his aides had, up until that point, succeeded in containing to his private diatribes.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump told the journalists onstage, eliciting gasps from the audience. “I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

In the days after his NABJ appearance—as staffers scrambled to satisfy their boss’s appetite for pugilism without indulging his racist and misogynistic impulses—Trump began to lose confidence in his team. He had long dismissed the warnings from certain friends, such as his former acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, that Wiles and LaCivita weren’t up to the job. But now he had reason to wonder. With Harris climbing rapidly in the polls and his own favorability numbers slipping, Trump was pondering, for the first time, a shake-up of his team. (Cheung said Trump never considered a change to his campaign leadership.)

In early August, Trump started courting two of his longtime allies and former campaign managers from 2016, Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, discussing what it might look like if they rejoined his political operation in a formal capacity. Trump told Lewandowski—who promptly agreed to come aboard—that he missed the “fun,” freewheeling nature of that first run for the White House. He told Conway, meanwhile, that he worried he was being overly “managed” by his current team.

Trump’s conversations with Conway troubled Wiles and LaCivita. They knew that she and Trump were talking more and more frequently; they also knew she loved to take credit for electing him in 2016, and wouldn’t be eager to share accolades with her successors. Conway’s back-channeled criticisms of the 2024 campaign had been subtle but pointed; in an effort to placate her, LaCivita increased her monthly retainer at the Republican National Committee from $20,000 a month to $30,000. But in private conversations, Conway continued to point out the campaign’s shortcomings—especially, in her view, the mistaken selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. When Wiles and LaCivita met Trump at a fundraiser in the Hamptons the evening of August 2—having been tipped off that their boss just spent the day talking strategy with Conway at his Bedminster club in New Jersey—the campaign’s top advisers fretted that their days running the show might be numbered. (As The New York Times was reporting on Conway’s visit to Bedminster, Trump called reporter Maggie Haberman and angrily denied that changes were afoot, saying he was “thrilled” with Wiles and LaCivita.)

In truth, the real threat was Lewandowski.

A tough-talking operative who had famously accosted a female reporter in 2016 and later allegedly made unwanted sexual advances toward a Republican donor’s wife, Lewandowski had promised Trump a return to the “killer” vibes of 2016. But the details of his new role were left open to interpretation. Lewandowski believed—and told anyone who would listen—that he would outrank the existing campaign leadership. Trump himself, meanwhile, assured Wiles and LaCivita that Lewandowski would be a utility man, serving as a key surrogate while helping organize election-security efforts and field operations in swing states.

The honeymoon period was nonexistent. Before Lewandowski worked a single day on behalf of the campaign, he complained to friends that Wiles and LaCivita had leaked the news of his hiring in an unflattering light that downplayed his role—and timed it to coincide with when he was traveling and off the grid, unable to speak for himself.

Determined to assert himself, Lewandowski arrived at Palm Beach headquarters in mid-August with designs on running the place. Wiles accompanies Trump nearly everywhere on the trail, and LaCivita, when not joining them, often works from his home in Virginia, leaving Lewandowski with a free hand in Florida. He began taking aside junior staffers and department heads alike, one at a time, informing them that he spoke for Trump himself. He made it known that he would be in charge of all spending, and that he needed people to tell him what wasn’t working so he could fix it. Meanwhile, he began calling the campaign’s key operatives in the battleground states, probing for weaknesses in Trump’s ground game and assuring them that a strategy shift was in the works.

Even as colleagues grew tired of hearing Lewandowski describe himself as the former president’s personal proxy, they realized he wasn’t wrong. His arrival coincided with a marked shift in Trump’s mood and behavior. Gone, suddenly, was the candidate of 2024, who despite all the inevitable outbursts was at least receptive to direction and aware of consequences; in his place, as the summer progressed, was the alter ego of 2016, the candidate who did and said whatever he wanted and ignored anyone who sought to rein him in.

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the former president shared a social-media post suggesting that Harris had performed oral sex in exchange for career advancement. He denigrated the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for military personnel, as less impressive than the civilian Medal of Freedom. He accused Harris of leading a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president of the United States.” He called into Fox News’s coverage of the convention and rambled so incoherently that the anchors cut his line 10 minutes into the interview. (Trump promptly dialed Newsmax to continue talking.) At a rally in North Carolina, after polling the audience about whether he should “get personal” with his attacks on Harris—the crowd responding rowdily to encourage his invective—Trump mused about firing his campaign advisers.

Around that time, Trump was asked by reporters about the tone of his candidacy. “I think I’m doing a very calm campaign,” he replied. “I have to do it my way.”

Kellyanne Conway at the Republic National Convention in July (Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic)

As Trump was settling on Vance as his vice-presidential pick, one of the arguments he found most persuasive centered on an injection of youthful verve: The freshman senator, then just 39 years old, could complement a running mate four decades his elder with a style and media savvy that broadened the campaign’s appeal. With that promise, however, came a certain peril. Vance maintained an entourage of Very Online influencers who had little experience winning campaigns but lots of owned libs in their social-media mentions. Now some of those right-wing agitators would be joining an operation that was already struggling to keep its principal on message.

Vance’s first two months on the ticket were largely uneventful. His awkward, halting appearances fueled a sense of buyer’s remorse among some Trump confidants, but he made no mistakes of any real consequence. (The talk of “childless cat ladies” preceded his appointment to the GOP ticket, as did his remarks that he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”) And then came September 9. It was one day before Trump would meet Harris in Philadelphia for their first and only debate, and Vance, according to people familiar with the situation, was feeling punchy. Over the past several days, the young senator had marinated in right-wing agitprop stemming from Springfield, Ohio, where it was rumored that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets. When Vance’s allies on the campaign learned that he’d already spoken out about related issues in Springfield—how the influx of thousands of Haitian migrants who came legally to fill jobs had stressed the city—they urged him to seize on this conspiracist catnip and turn it into a crusade for the Trump campaign.

One staffer in particular—a young activist named Alex Bruesewitz—helped convince Vance and his team that this was an opportunity to put his stamp on the campaign. Vance agreed. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” the senator posted on X, catching the Trump campaign’s leaders entirely off guard. Figuring there was no use in half measures, Bruesewitz led Vance’s minions in blasting the social-media post around their networks and urging officials on other GOP campaigns, as well as at the Republican National Committee, to join Vance’s assault on the migrant community of Springfield. (Bruesewitz did not respond to a request for comment about this story.)

Most Republicans refused to go along. But Trump himself found the shtick irresistible. Even as he was sequestered in debate prep, word reached him that Vance had amplified the sensational claims about Springfield. The former president’s advisers were bewildered by Vance’s post. Though they went out of their way to avoid any talk of Springfield for the duration of the debate prep, there was an ominous feeling that Trump wouldn’t be able to help himself.

Yet somehow, by the time Trump charged ahead onstage the following night—“They’re eating the dogs; the people that came in, they’re eating the cats”—his campaign was facing a more serious crisis.

Several days earlier, Trump had fielded a phone call from one of his superfans: Laura Loomer. A right-wing agitator best known for racist and conspiracist bombast—she has celebrated the deaths of migrants and called school shootings fake events put on by crisis actors—Loomer had remained one of Trump’s most loyal and vocal supporters even in the darkest moments of his post–January 6 exile at Mar-a-Lago. That loyalty gave her a direct line to the former president. After she had joined the candidate aboard his plane during crucial trips to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the year, campaign officials discussed ways to sideline Loomer without causing a scene. They neutralized a volatile situation at the convention this summer, for example, by providing Loomer with a front-row seat for Trump’s acceptance speech—putting her in close physical proximity to her idol while keeping her far from the VIP area that cameras would be shooting live.

But now, in the first week of September, Loomer was getting antsy. She called Trump and demanded to know why the campaign had been keeping her at bay; why she hadn’t been allowed back on the plane as the Republican nominee toured the country. Trump told Loomer not to worry: He would personally see to it that she was invited aboard the plane for his next trip. Later that day, when Trump relayed this request to Wiles—who, since the beginning of the campaign, had controlled the flight manifest—she registered disbelief. “Sir, our next trip is to Philadelphia for the debate,” Wiles told Trump, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Trump shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just stick her in the back of the plane.”

Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man “no” one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.

When Trump’s jet touched down in Philadelphia on September 10, and photographers captured Loomer disembarking, some of the former president’s allies were apoplectic. Republican elected officials began texting campaign aides demanding to know why she was traveling with Trump. But outside of Wiles and LaCivita, Trump’s own staffers hadn’t known she was on the manifest. They were as bewildered—and furious—as everyone else. (Why Trump’s employees find Loomer uniquely noxious, when their boss consorts with known racists and trafficks in cruel conspiracy theories himself, is a separate question.)

As the night unfolded, with Loomer watching the debate backstage and then joining other GOP surrogates in the spin room, campaign leaders weighed their next move. Yanking her from the plane risked turning the story into something bigger and messier: a jilted Loomer lashing out against corrupt RINO deep-state simps in the aftermath of Trump’s miserable debate performance. Wiles decided that Trump’s special guest would remain on the manifest for the duration of the itinerary. The only problem? They were headed straight from Philadelphia to New York City for a memorial ceremony the next morning, honoring victims of 9/11—which Loomer, naturally, had described as an inside job.

After the cameras showed Loomer standing near Trump at Ground Zero, the former president’s own phone lit up. For the rest of the day, friends and associates and donors dialed his number with a manic urgency. Some read him old tweets that Loomer had sent; others demanded that whoever let this woman aboard the plane be fired. Senator Lindsey Graham asked Trump if he was trying to lose the election. To all of this Trump pleaded ignorance. He began complaining to aides that nobody had ever explained to him, specifically, why Loomer was so toxic. They responded by pulling up Loomer’s most incendiary posts and showing them to the boss. Trump winced at some and seemed unaffected by others. But he agreed, by the end of the trip, that Loomer needed to go. What sealed Loomer’s fate, according to two people who were part of these conversations, wasn’t just her racist diatribes but also her appearance: Trump, who is generally appalled by plastic surgery, was disgusted to learn about the apparent extent of Loomer’s facial alterations. (When asked for comment, Cheung told me, “Laura was a hard worker in the primaries and President Trump appreciates a fighter.”)

Trump regarded the Loomer episode as a one-off nuisance. His advisers, however, feared that something more fundamental had gone amiss. The past month had seen the campaign spiral into a free-for-all. Lewandowski was going rogue. Morale was plummeting among the rank-and-file staff. And Trump himself seemed intent on sabotaging a message—curbing immigration, fighting inflation, projecting strength on the world stage—that had been engineered to win him the election. Privately, Wiles confided to friends that she and LaCivita felt they’d lost control of the campaign.

When she and LaCivita sat down with Trump in the middle of September, Wiles urged her boss to realize just how badly things were going. These recent mistakes could not be repeated; this current path was unsustainable. “We need to step back and think hard about what we’re doing,” Wiles told him, according to several people familiar with the conversation. “Because this can’t go on.”

Trump doesn’t take well to admonishment. Yet the only other time he’d heard Wiles address him like this was in late 2022, shortly after he’d announced his candidacy, when he’d dined with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump seemed to recognize now, as he had then, that he was engaging in self-sabotage. He told Wiles that he agreed: It was time to tighten things up.

Trump thought the conversation was over. But there was one more thing on Wiles’s mind.

Corey Lewandowski at the Republican National Convention (Jim Bourg / Redux)

Days before departing for that doomed East Coast swing through Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan, Lewandowski had told Trump that they needed to talk. There was information, he said, that the candidate deserved to know.

When they met at Mar-a-Lago, Lewandowski laid it all out. He’d spent several weeks digging into the finances of the campaign, he told Trump, and things weren’t adding up. Far too much money was being spent on programs insignificant to his electoral success, and there had been no apparent oversight of contracts and arrangements that created a windfall for certain campaign employees. Lewandowski told Trump that he’d taken the liberty of bringing in a private consultant—personally escorting this outsider into the campaign’s offices—to study the books. This person’s conclusion, Lewandowski said, was: “Your people are either completely incompetent, or they’re stealing from you.”

Trump seemed conflicted. Nothing angered him more than the idea of being taken advantage of. Then again, if there was one person in politics he’d come to rely upon—one person who, he believed, would never steal from him—it was Wiles. Ultimately, Trump instructed Lewandowski to take his concerns to her.

When Lewandowski did so, on a plane ride that same week, things quickly went sideways. He made no accusations about specific individuals, but shared his belief that certain tactical decisions had been made with big paydays in mind. Wiles told him that she took offense at such conjecture—and that she didn’t need to justify anything to him. Still, Wiles spent the next hour walking Lewandowski through the choices made about vendors, contracts, and costs. When he continued to suggest that things weren’t on the level, Wiles ended the conversation, preferring to focus on preparing Trump for the upcoming debate.

Once the debate was behind them—and with many on the inside fearing that the campaign was falling apart—Wiles sensed that Lewandowski was about to make a move. He had repeatedly gone back to Trump, asking for control over hiring and firing as well as veto power over all spending decisions, which would effectively put him in charge of the campaign. Now he was going all in, telling Trump that Wiles and LaCivita had invested tens of millions of dollars in direct-mail outreach aimed at mobilizing supporters during the early-voting period—money that just so happened to line the pockets of certain campaign staffers, including LaCivita, and that could have been spent instead on television advertising. Lewandowski understood that the only tactical component of campaigning that Trump cared about was TV ads. He was telling Trump not just that he was being stolen from, but that the money in question would have made him ubiquitous on TV.

On September 12, when Wiles told Trump, “This can’t go on,” she added that she wasn’t just talking about Loomer and Springfield. Lewandowski had parachuted into a well-run campaign and rolled grenades into every department, Wiles told Trump, sowing distrust and spreading rumors and making it impossible for her to do her job. “If there’s something you’re skeptical of, something you want answers to, let’s talk about it,” Wiles told her boss. “But if you don’t have confidence in me and Chris, just say so.”

It was an ultimatum. And if Trump struggled with the decision before him—fire Wiles and LaCivita, or keep them and banish Lewandowski—he didn’t let on. Then and there he gave Wiles a vote of confidence. The next day, on the campaign plane, Trump convened Wiles, LaCivita, and Lewandowski around a table in the front cabin, in a meeting first reported on by Puck. He spoke directly to Lewandowski. “We can’t afford to lose these guys,” Trump said, motioning toward Wiles and LaCivita. “They’re in charge.”

Lewandowski knew the fight was lost. “Sir, I’m the only fucking person on this plane who isn’t getting paid to be here right now,” he grumbled, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting. “I’m happy to go back to fucking New Hampshire.”

“No, I want you on TV for me every day,” Trump said. He paused. “And go win me New Hampshire, while you’re at it.”

Lewandowski slapped the table. “You’re not going to win New Hampshire,” he said. “But okay.”

When passengers reboarded the plane for the next leg of their trip, Lewandowski was not on it. Being evicted from the plane is a signature insult in Trump’s political sphere. Lewandowski told friends that he’d planned all along to fly commercial to his next destination; the former president told his traveling aides that Lewandowski’s absence was meant to send the message that dissent would no longer be tolerated. Trump had lost a lot of ground to Harris over the previous month, and victory was possible only if everyone on the campaign fell back in line.

Things appeared to stabilize from there. As September gave way to October, and Harris launched a major media offensive aimed at connecting with voters who still felt no familiarity with her, Trump’s campaign was delighted to cede the spotlight. Wiles and LaCivita believed that every moment Harris spent in front of live cameras translated to more Republican votes. Instead of trying to book Trump onto major networks, where his comments might produce negative news cycles, his team arranged a tour of podcasts, most of them aimed at young men. The effort was led by Bruesewitz, the impulsive young Vance sycophant who maintained an impressive network of right-wing influencers. The strategy appeared to work: For the first three weeks of October, Trump’s internal polling showed Harris’s momentum stalled—measured in both net favorability and vote share—while Trump’s numbers inched upward.

By the middle of October, Trump was being hounded with requests from Republican candidates for joint appearances—requests that had been conspicuously few and far between just a month earlier. Even vulnerable incumbents, such as Representative Ken Calvert of California, tried to grab hold of Trump’s coattails, campaigning with him in his decidedly purple district. Surveying the narrative shift, Trump’s allies marveled at how simple it had all been. Keeping voters’ attention on Harris—while, to the extent they could, keeping Trump out of his own way—had produced the most significant movement in his direction since her entry into the race.

Not that Trump wasn’t doing his best to muck things up. The 40 minutes he spent onstage in Pennsylvania swaying silently to music prompted aides to exchange frenzied messages wondering whether the audio could be cut to get him off the stage. (Ultimately, they decided, letting him dance was less dangerous than letting him rant.) A week later, back in the all-important commonwealth for another event, he left aides slack-jawed by marveling at the ample genitalia of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer.  

Even as the political class settled on Trump as the betting favorite, his allies couldn’t shake a pair of very bad feelings. The first was about ground game: With much of their party’s resources being diverted to legal efforts, the GOP’s field operation was struggling to keep pace with the Democrats. The patchwork strategy left Republicans heavily dependent on outside help. But good help is hard to find. Elon Musk’s canvassing program was fast becoming a punch line in Republican circles. Several GOP consulting firms saw young staffers take short leaves to knock doors for Musk, lured by the enormous commissions he offered. His new system proved easy to game, allowing workers to inflate the number of contacts they reported, and to pocket the rewards. (Musk’s political entity, America PAC, did not respond to a request for comment.)

The more urgent concern, however, was the acrimony that had fractured the Republican nominee’s political operation. Lewandowski had, within a month of his defenestration at 30,000 feet, worked his way back into Trump’s inner circle—and even, at times, onto the plane itself. Wiles had, around the time of their showdown with Lewandowski, told LaCivita that she could no longer deal with the headache of handling the manifest. She charged him with the thankless duty for the remainder of the campaign, making for awkward encounters whenever Trump announced that he wanted Lewandowski to accompany him somewhere.

Even when Lewandowski wasn’t around, his presence was felt. In one instance, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—with whom Lewandowski was reported to have carried on a romantic relationship (they have both denied this)—boarded the Trump plane after an event and joined the former president for a strategy briefing with his aides. As the candidate received a series of positive updates from the ground—early-voting metrics, state-based internal polling—Noem interrupted to say that the campaign was lagging behind the Democrats in terms of voter-registration numbers. Trump’s aides were stunned: Not only was she contradicting their own data, but those present were convinced that Lewandowski had put her up to it in order to make Wiles and LaCivita look bad. (Noem, through a spokesperson, denied this and took offense at the notion that “she needs a man to put her up to anything.”)

As the race moved toward its conclusion—and as the constellation of helpers and hangers-on surrounding Trump began positioning themselves to take credit or deflect blame—more than a few people close to the candidate were shopping dirt on their internal rivals. A sense of foreboding settled in over the campaign. There was so much bad blood, several aides told me, that something was bound to spill out into the open.

Sure enough, on October 15, the Daily Beast published an explosive story alleging that LaCivita had skimmed huge amounts off the top of TV ads, direct mail, and other expenditures, netting him some $22 million from his work on behalf of the campaign and a pair of related super PACs. Multiple campaign sources told me that the nature of these arrangements was exaggerated, and that although LaCivita had made plenty of money—and perhaps more than some people were comfortable with—it was nowhere near that amount. (“Not only is the $22 million number manufactured out of thin air,” LaCivita told me in a statement, “but it’s defamatory.”) His objections hardly mattered: Trump was livid. Even when Wiles tried to calm him down, arguing that Lewandowski had planted the story to eliminate LaCivita, the former president kept fuming, saying the story made him look like a fool and demanding to know why the campaign hadn’t stopped it from being published.

With everyone in the campaign watching to see how their boss would respond to the article, Trump made it known that LaCivita was not welcome on the plane for a planned trip to Georgia that evening. Trump was still beside himself a day later, ranting about the article and telling friends that he’d fire LaCivita—and possibly his entire team—if it weren’t for the PR hit that would cause just weeks out from Election Day. (Cheung denied that Trump was upset by the Daily Beast report, saying, “Everyone recognized it came from disgruntled individuals.”)

LaCivita was abruptly summoned to Trump Tower on the morning of Friday, October 18. There, he found himself climbing into the lead car of the former president’s motorcade, a limousine in which Trump often rides alone to recharge between events. On this occasion, there was another passenger, the businessman Howard Lutnick, who had recently been named a co-chair of Trump’s White House transition team. The three of them made small talk all the way to LaGuardia Airport, as LaCivita waited for the hammer to drop. It felt, LaCivita would later tell several friends, like an episode of The Apprentice: beckoned by the boss, shoved into the limo with a spectator on hand, only to ride in suspense for what seemed like an eternity, believing that at any moment Trump would turn and say, “You’re fired.”

Instead, when they arrived at LaGuardia and boarded the campaign plane, Trump signaled for LaCivita to join him in the cramped, four-seat office at the front of the cabin. As they settled across from each other, Trump reached for a small stack of paper: a printout of the Daily Beast story. LaCivita, in turn, produced a much thicker stack of paper. These were the exhibits for the defense: Federal Election Commission reports, bank-account statements, pay stubs, vendor agreements, and more. For the next half hour, according to several sources with knowledge of the exchange, the two men had it out—profanities flying but voices kept intentionally low—as LaCivita insisted to Trump that he wasn’t ripping the candidate off. Trump, the sources said, seemed to vacillate between believing his employee and seething over the dollar figure, wondering how something so specific could be wrong. Finally, after a couple of concluding f-bombs, Trump seemed satisfied. “Okay, I get it, I get it,” he told LaCivita, holding up his hands as if requesting that the defense rest. He added: “You should sue those bastards.”

The air was more or less cleared: Trump has not raised the issue of LaCivita’s pay since, aides told me, save for several episodes of the candidate teasingly—but conspicuously—calling LaCivita “my $22 million man!” Nevertheless, the alliance remains fragile. Less than a week after the détente, CNN unearthed LaCivita’s Twitter activity from January 6, 2021, including his having liked a tweet that called for Trump to be removed via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita was dead to him—that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.

That was just fine by LaCivita; he had always viewed himself as a hired gun, and his reservations about working for Trump weren’t exactly a secret. Still, the word that Trump had iced one of his two key lieutenants sent a shiver through the rest of the staff. Many had noticed new faces poking around, asking questions about finances and compliance. With Trump’s suspicions piqued, every staffer, as well as every decision, would be under the microscope through Election Day.

Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.

Donald Trump at a rally in Phoenix in June (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Standing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden on the evening of Sunday, October 27, an irate group of Trump staffers, family members, and loyalists was looking for someone to blame.

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous. Elected officials—Democrats, and, before long, Republicans too—blasted the comedian’s remarks. Headlines from the world’s leading news organizations described the event as every bit the hate-fest Republicans had promised it wouldn’t be. Trump aides were blitzed with text messages from lawmakers and donors and lobbyists wanting to know who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign.

In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It didn’t take long to get to the answer: Alex Bruesewitz.

Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves.

Now, with their grand celebration quickly morphing into a public-relations nightmare, Trump’s allies stewed. Two decisions needed to be made, and quickly: whether to inform the man of the hour about this disaster before he took the stage, and whether to issue a statement rebuking Hinchcliffe and his remarks. Some staffers feared throwing Trump off his game at such a crucial moment, and others argued that showing any weakness would just make things worse. But LaCivita dictated a short statement to the communications team that was blasted out to reporters across the arena, distancing the campaign from Hinchcliffe, while Wiles pulled the former president aside and explained the situation. (Trump, aides told me, was merely annoyed at the time; only after watching television coverage the next morning would he rage about how Wiles, LaCivita, and Caporale had “fucked this up.”)

Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.

The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”

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.”