When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?

A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.

[Read: The cowardice of open letters]

Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher.  

I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.

I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.

I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.

But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.

Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.

That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.

When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?

Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.

For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.

[Read: When writers silence writers]

Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.

Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.

But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.

Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”

Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.

Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.

Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”

Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.

“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”

Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.

Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.

Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.

The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.

“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"

Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.

“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]

Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”

Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.

Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.

Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?

This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.

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In the decade since Donald Trump began to define American politics, critics have struggled to understand his massive appeal. They have perhaps sensed by now that Trump’s support comes from someplace underneath conscious and rational political analyses. Who else but Sigmund Freud to help explain? “The past few years,” the academic and critic Merve Emre wrote in an essay for The New Yorker this past June, “have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.” History has now given us another iteration: a Freud for the Trump movement.

Consensus on the causes of Trump’s sweeping electoral victory has formed around the idea that voters were responding to Democratic performance on material matters, namely inflation and immigration. But the Trump movement has never been, to my mind, strictly concerned with tangible issues; part of the allure is immaterial by nature, addressed to elemental human urges. Trump offered something special on that count from the beginning—a politics consisting not mainly of a positive vision but rather of a series of opportunities to own the libs. In this project, rational policy details aren’t a priority and are sometimes absent altogether; the point is domination of one’s enemies, a libidinal desire.

Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. “Disinhibition,” the New York Times writer Ezra Klein wrote recently, “is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength.” Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportune one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics.

[Read: Washington is shocked]

The temptation to psychologize one’s political opponents typically wins out after defeat, the political theorist and professor Corey Robin told me recently. (An easy claim to test: Among the surge of post-election takes is a subgenre of explanatory pieces evaluating the psyches of unexpected Trump voters—suggestions that Latinos are wedded to political strongmen, or that conservative wives cast their votes for right-wingers purely out of fear or submission.) In those periods, “Freud is mobilized to explain why the left failed—not because of institutions or specific forms of economic power or the Cold War, etc., but instead because of psychic structures that the left never really touched,” Robin said. Freud offers something more than simply assigning diagnoses to opponents: “an archaeology of the mind,” Robin told me, that aims to unearth emotions and desires that people aren’t necessarily aware of themselves.

That sort of excavation can be useful. Freud helps in forming an account of what people are drawn to in Trump—what pleasure, what gratification. Gary Greenberg, a writer and psychotherapist, argued in a 2018 Guardian essay that Trump is a figure who beckons America back to prior states of development—an indicator that the death drive is at work. Trump, Greenberg wrote, “urges us all to shake loose the surly bonds of civilized conduct: to make science irrelevant and rationality optional, to render truth obsolete, to set power free to roam the world, to lift all the core conditions written into the social contract—fealty to reason, skepticism about instincts, aspirations to justice.” Trump is, in other words, an atavist, inviting citizens to satisfy all of their hungry drives, all of their libidinous instincts: His America is a place for malign energies to express themselves in action. There’s a certain pleasure in that, perhaps, a kind of psychic relief—to lose oneself in a radical movement and to express feelings normally prohibited by society.

Today’s left-of-center would also be wise to consider what Freud might teach them about countering an appeal like Trump’s. In an essay published in Jacobin shortly before the election, the author and psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart argued that liberals have still failed to reckon with the psychological tendencies Freud identified that facilitate mass political movements like those of the president-elect. “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress,” Reinhart wrote. This doesn’t mean indulging those feelings—rather, it means offering a politics built to contain them. “To craft an effective liberal or left politics, we must stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable and own up to the persistent reality of destructive human tendencies that manifest not only around Trump but also in countless contexts throughout history,” Reinhart wrote.

[Read: What to read if you’re angry about the election]

Freudian psychoanalysis has, in the past several decades, faded from a feverish mid-century peak. In 1960, psychoanalysts occupied the majority of psychiatry positions in the United States, but the latter half of the century saw the advent of a vituperative discursive conflict over the validity of some of Freud’s key claims and the credibility of psychoanalysis as an effective, scientific method of clinical treatment. The debate raged across disciplines—by that time, Freud and the psychoanalytic model had been absorbed into numerous other fields, including literature, politics, and sociology. And though psychoanalytic treatment has been largely replaced by more familiar forms of psychiatric care, such as psychopharmacology (the treatment of mental illness with medication) and standardized therapy, Freud’s contributions remain useful.

Psychoanalyzing one’s enemies always comes with a certain degree of condescension, which is unfortunate, because the Freudian lens is an egalitarian approach so long as its advocates recognize that they, too, are ruled by motivations they cannot easily recognize or define. “Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936, “the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” I believe this insight bears wide application: I’m affected enough by vibes and instincts to believe that some part of my mind beneath my conscious thoughts plays an important role in my day-to-day life and decision making, and I suspect the same is true of others. It seems to me that avid Trump support must be anchored in such parts. In that case, whatever explains the Trump movement has in some sense always been with us and has visited us historically before; let’s pray that this time, the fever breaks quickly.

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.

British news outlet The Guardian also said it would stop posting on Elon Musk's X, calling it a 'toxic media platform'.

It has accused X of promoting "disturbing content", and says Mr Musk is using it to "shape political discourse."

Why has this election season featured so many stories about animal cruelty? The 2024 campaign has contained many remarkable moments—the Democrats’ sudden switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris; the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the emergence of Elon Musk as the MAGA minister for propaganda; the grimly racist “America First” rally at Madison Square Garden. But the bizarre run of stories about animal abuse has been one of the least discussed.

In late October, the National Rifle Association was supposed to hold a “Defend the 2nd” event with a keynote address by Trump, but it was canceled at the last minute, because of what the NRA described as “campaign scheduling changes.” Here’s another possible reason: Earlier last month, the NRA’s new chief executive, Doug Hamlin, was outed as an accessory to cat murder.

In 1980, according to contemporary news accounts unearthed by The Guardian, Hamlin and four buddies at the University of Michigan pleaded no contest to animal cruelty following the death of their fraternity’s cat, BK. The cat’s paws had been cut off before it was set on fire and strung up, allegedly for not using the litter box. “I took responsibility for this regrettable incident as chapter president although I wasn’t directly involved,” Hamlin wrote in a statement to media outlets after the Guardian report appeared.

In April, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s Republican governor, scuttled her chances of becoming Trump’s running mate when her memoir revealed that two decades ago, she shot her wirehaired pointer, Cricket, in a gravel pit after the puppy had attacked some chickens and then bit her. (“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, adding that she later killed an unruly goat in the same spot.) More recently, during his only debate with Harris, Trump painted immigrants as murderers of American cats and dogs, repeating unsubstantiated internet rumors that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating “the pets of the people that live there.”

[Read: The link between animal abuse and murder]

American political figures have long showcased their pets to humanize themselves—remember Barack Obama’s Portuguese water dogs, Bo and Sunny, and Socks, Bill Clinton’s cat? But the relationship between animals and humans keeps growing in salience as our lifestyles change. Domestic animals have moved from being seen as ratcatchers, guards, and hunting companions to pampered lap dogs that get dressed up as pumpkins on Halloween. Half of American pet owners say that their animals are as much part of the family as any human, and many of us mainline cute videos of cats and dogs for hours every week. These shifting attitudes have made accusations of animal abuse a potent attack on political adversaries—and social media allows such claims to be amplified even when they are embellished or made up entirely.

At the same time, we make arbitrary distinctions between species on emotional grounds, treating some as friends, some as food, and some as sporting targets. Three-quarters of Americans support hunting and fishing, and the Democratic nominee for vice president, Tim Walz, was so keen to burnish his rural credentials that he took part in a pheasant shoot on the campaign trail. Similarly, only 3 percent of Americans are vegetarian, and 1 percent are vegan, but killing a pet—a member of the family—violates a deep taboo.

Noem, who seemed to view Cricket purely as a working dog, was clearly caught off guard by the reaction to her memoir. “The governor that killed the family pet was the one thing that united the extreme right and the extreme left,” Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor who studies human attitudes toward animals, told me. “There was this moral outrage. She was just oblivious.”

Herzog, the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, has been interested in how people think about animal cruelty since he researched illegal cockfighting rings for his doctorate several decades ago. He told me that the people who ran the fights, who made money by inflicting great pain on the roosters involved, “loved dogs and had families. But they had this one little quirk.” Politicians can trip over these categories—our deep-down feeling that some animals can be killed or hurt, and others cannot—without realizing it until it’s too late.

I had called Herzog to ask what he made of someone like the NRA’s Hamlin—a prominent man who was once involved in the torture of an animal. Should a history of animal cruelty or neglect—or just plain weirdness—be disqualifying for a politician, a corporate leader, or an activist? In his media statement, Hamlin maintained after the fraternity story came out that he had not done anything similar again. “Since that time I served my country, raised a family, volunteered in my community, started a business, worked with Gold Star families, and raised millions of dollars for charity,” he declared. “I’ve endeavored to live my life in a manner beyond reproach.” Could that be true—could someone be involved in such a sadistic act without it being evidence of wider moral depravity?

“What strikes me about animal cruelty is that most people that are cruel to animals are not sadists or sociopaths; they’re everyday people,” Herzog told me. A review of the literature showed that a third of violent offenders had a history of animal abuse—but so did a third of the members of the control group, he said. Then Herzog blew my mind. “To me, the greatest paradox of all is Nazi animal protection.”

I’m sorry?

“The Nazis passed the world’s most progressive animal-rights legislation,” he continued, unfazed. The German regime banned hunting with dogs, the production of foie gras, and docking dogs’ tails without anesthetic. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, “wrote that he would put in a prison camp anyone who was cruel to an animal.” When the Nazis decreed that Jews could no longer own pets, the regime ensured that the animals were slaughtered humanely. It sent their owners to concentration camps.

[Read: A single male cat’s reign of terror]

The Nazis dehumanized their enemies and humanized their animals, but Herzog thinks that the reverse is more common: Many people who are good to other humans are often cruel to animals. And even those who claim to love animals are nonetheless capable of causing them pain. Circus trainers who whip their charges might dote on their pets. People who deliberately breed dogs with painfully flat faces to win competitions insist that they adore their teeny asthmatic fur babies. “These sorts of paradoxes are so common,” Herzog said.

The lines separating cruelty from the acceptable handling of animals have a way of shifting. I’m old enough to remember the 2012 election cycle, when Mitt Romney was reviled for having driven his station wagon with a kennel strapped to the top containing the family dog, Seamus. Midway through the 12-hour drive from Boston to Ontario, the dog suffered from diarrhea, obscuring the rear windshield. Like Noem, Romney was also blindsided by the scandal: Animal activists described his actions as cruelty, and a Facebook group called Dogs Against Romney attracted 38,000 fans. By the standards of a dozen years ago, Seamusgate was a big story, but it’s mild in comparison with this year’s headlines. When Romney was asked about Noem’s memoir earlier this year, he said the two incidents were not comparable: “I didn’t eat my dog. I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.”

One of the most reliable sources of strange animal stories this cycle has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmentalist with a lifelong interest in keeping, training, and eating animals who has frequently transgressed the accepted Western boundaries of interaction with the natural world. In July, Vanity Fair published a photograph that it said Kennedy, then an independent candidate for president, had sent to a friend. In it, he and an unidentified woman are holding a barbecued animal carcass up to their open mouths. The suggestion was that the animal was a dog. “The picture’s intent seems to have been comedic—Kennedy and his companion are pantomiming—but for the recipient it was disturbing evidence of Kennedy’s poor judgment and thoughtlessness,” the magazine reported. (In response, Kennedy said that the animal was a goat.)

A month later, Kennedy admitted that he had once found a dead bear cub on the side of a road in upstate New York and put it in his trunk. He said he had intended to skin it and “put the meat in my refrigerator.” However, that never happened, because, in NPR’s glorious phrasing, Kennedy claimed to have been “waylaid by a busy day of falconry” and a steak dinner, and instead decided to deposit the carcass in Central Park. (He even posed the dead bear so that it appeared to have been run over by a cyclist.) “I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” he later told the comedian Roseanne Barr in a video that he released on X. He was 60 when the incident occurred. What made the idea of picking up a dead bear sound so strange to many commentators, when the falconry would have caused, at most, a raised eyebrow—and the steak dinner no comment at all?

Kennedy’s animal antics still weren’t finished. In September, he released a bizarre video in which he fondled an iguana and recounted how in some countries, people slit open the lizards’ stomachs to eat the eggs inside. Then another old anecdote surfaced: His daughter Kick recalled a trip home from the beach with parts of a dead whale strapped to the roof of the car. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick told Town & Country. She added that this was “just normal day-to-day stuff” for her father. Not everyone was so quick to minimize Kennedy’s conduct. “These are behaviors you read about in news articles not about a candidate but about a suspect,” my colleague Caitlin Flanagan observed.

[Pagan Kennedy: New York’s grand dame of dog poisoning]

I’m as guilty as anyone of making illogical distinctions—though I would like to stress that I have never murdered a cat or dismembered a dead whale. Having recently driven across Pennsylvania, where I counted three dead deer by the side of the road on a single trip, I support the right to hunt—population control is essential. Yet the infamous photograph of Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump posing with a dead leopard on a safari trip more than a decade ago disturbs me far more than the unproven assertion that one immigrant, somewhere, has eaten a dog or cat for sustenance. You can tell from the Trump sons’ expressions that they are extremely proud of having killed a rare and beautiful creature purely for their own entertainment. The image is grotesque. It reminds me of Atticus Finch’s instruction that it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, because “mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.”

As it happens, hunters, many of them animal lovers in their everyday life, have a complicated code of ethics about what counts as a fair chase. Hence the backlash over the former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s support for shooting Alaskan wolves from an aircraft. Most of us are okay with killing animals—or having them killed on our behalf—as long as the process does not involve unnecessary cruelty or excessive enjoyment.

In the end, arbitrary categories can license or restrict our capacity for cruelty and allow us to entertain two contradictory thoughts at once. We love animals and we kill animals. We create boundaries around an us and a them, and treat transgressors of each limit very differently. In a similar way, some of Donald Trump’s crowds applaud his racist rumors about migrants—when they might not dream of being rude to their neighbor who was born abroad. “What we see in animals,” Herzog told me, “is a microcosm of the big issue of how humans make moral decisions.” In other words, illogically and inconsistently. The same individual is capable of great humanity—and great cruelty or indifference.

When the presidential-election results begin rolling in on Tuesday night, a sizable audience of pro-Trump Christians will not turn to Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, or Right Side Broadcasting. Instead, they will stream their news directly from God, on a show called FlashPoint, where an affable host named Gene Bailey sits behind a desk with a large red phone.

“This is God saying ‘This is my program!’” Bailey says in a promotional video for the show, which airs three times a week and, at peak moments, draws hundreds of thousands of viewers on YouTube alone.

“We have a responsibility to report what we hear from heaven,” a prophet from Omaha named Hank Kunneman has said on the show.

One of the many signs that FlashPoint is a departure from the usual televangelism is that the o in its logo looks like the view through a rifle scope. Another is that the audience is referred to as the “FlashPoint Army.” A third is that the red phone is a hotline to Donald Trump. A fourth is that, sometimes, heaven sends not just news of the End Times, but earthly instructions. This was the case during the run-up to January 6, when FlashPoint was getting millions of views, and the prophets told the FlashPoint Army to claim the U.S. Capitol for God’s kingdom.

In an episode last month, there were no such instructions, not yet. Just breaking news that a hurricane was heading for Florida, and the question of how that fit into demonic plans to thwart victory for Trump. “What do you think, supernatural impact here?” Bailey said to Kunneman.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

“There are a lot of conspiracy theories about whether man can manipulate weather,” the prophet said at a moment when such disinformation was leading to death threats against FEMA workers. “I do know this: Evil spirits work with man. And there are some very evil men who cooperate with evil spirits. And God did say in the prophecies that these storms would be sent to interrupt the flow of our election process.”

It was a relatively typical night for FlashPoint, which I can say because I have watched hours and hours of episodes going back to its launch in September 2020. That was when the show first entered the sprawling media ecosystem that has risen alongside a growing movement of apostles and prophets known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose theology includes the idea that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. The movement has become the vanguard of America’s Christian right, and its media wing is not the realm of prosperity-gospel preachers or Sunday services on basic cable. It is part of another propaganda universe—an unruly world of YouTube prophets broadcasting from basements about a dream God gave them about World War III, or a TikTok prophecy about what the war in Gaza means for the End Times, or a viral video about what the Almighty told a pink-haired prophet named Kat Kerr, who claims to have spoken with Trump 20 minutes before the first attempt to assassinate him. Such prophecies can rack up millions of views on social media.

Within that world, FlashPoint has emerged as the premier outlet for the most trusted prophets with the largest followings, and a venue for politicians eager to reach that audience. By now, Bailey has interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Trump himself. Most important, the show has become a kind of command center for the people Trump refers to as “my Christians.” In a sense, FlashPoint is where God’s memo goes out, which makes it all the more noteworthy that, in recent weeks, the prophecies have become more apocalyptic.

From the beginning, the show has framed politics as a great “spiritual war.” It launched on the Victory Channel, a streaming platform and satellite-television network that is part of the well-funded empire of Kenneth Copeland, an old-guard televangelist in the multifaceted world of charismatic Christianity. Copeland himself never exactly belonged to the apostle-and-prophet crowd. But he was part of the broader mobilization of charismatic Christians behind Trump, and provided the most prominent prophets with the platform they needed to build a movement they likened to a new Great Awakening. Among these was Lance Wallnau, the chief marketer of the idea that God anointed Trump. Wallnau quickly became a FlashPoint regular.

The Victory Channel had virtually no presence on YouTube before FlashPoint debuted, according to Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies who has documented the involvement of NAR figures in the January 6 insurrection. As FlashPoint began amplifying election-fraud conspiracy theories, viewer data show, the Victory Channel’s overall YouTube views grew from 152,000 in October 2020 to 32.4 million in January 2021. On the evening of January 6, 2021, FlashPoint covered the insurrection that its guests had helped foment, broadcasting live from Copeland’s Texas church, blessing what has become a lasting narrative of the day for millions of Americans.

Bailey brought on a pastor who cast himself as a reporter, who said that he had “confirmed that the FBI had a busload of antifa people come in and infiltrate the rally.” The host tossed to a prophet named Mario Murillo, who said, “I know that there is a spirit in the land that wants to take away our Christian rights and our freedoms and that today we demonstrated to them we are not going to let this happen—and anyone who thinks this ends tonight is totally mistaken.” Wallnau Zoomed in from Trump International Hotel in Washington. He described the march to the Capitol as a “giant Disney parade,” and said the violence had been carried out not by “our people” but by antifa and Black Lives Matter, calling them “the devil’s people.” Bailey turned to Kunneman: “What’s God showing you?” Kunneman videoed in from Omaha, calling the violence “a smokescreen from the Devil.” “Remember,” he continued. “Big God, little devil. Big God, little corrupt Democrat rat. Big God, little Republican pathetic person that cannot stand for their democracy.” People clapped.

“Here are your orders from heaven: Be strong, fear not … Your God will come with a vengeance,” Kunneman said, declaring FlashPoint to be “part of the new spirit of truth in media that’s going to rise in the land.”

In the four years since then, the hour-long show has offered regular sustenance for Americans who believe that a great spiritual battle against demonic forces is under way, one that could culminate any moment. Production values improved. The red phone was added. Each show opens with urgent, triumphant music and a red, white, and blue montage of apocalyptic images—dire headlines, hands praying, a tattered American flag flying, and the slogans “We are believing patriots!” and “It’s time to stand up!”

Bailey and the prophets have often hit the road for live broadcasts, part of a circuit of pro-Trump events meant to keep followers energized. In Georgia last year, they led a crowd of thousands in a pledge called the “Watchman Decree,” in which the audience promised allegiance “first and foremost to the kingdom of God,” declared the Church to be “God’s governing body on the earth,” and committed to be “God’s ambassadors” with “legal power from heaven.”

Most of the time, Bailey has been behind the desk, with the prophets Zooming in from offices and basements as they did on a Tuesday last January, kicking off the election season with news from the Iowa caucuses, where Trump was winning. “It’s election season!” Bailey said, showing a clip of the freezing weather in Iowa, and another meant to suggest that Democrats were trying to tell people to stay home. “Hank,” he said. “What do you see as we get into this?”

Kunneman said the freeze meant that God was “freezing the efforts” of Democrats to “manipulate things to alter our election integrity and our freedom.” He said Trump was winning Iowa because voters “recognize the voice God has raised up that is going to bring a deliverance to this country.”

“I want to go to Dutch,” Bailey said, turning to a popular South Carolina prophet named Dutch Sheets, who claims that God speaks through dreams, including one Sheets talked about on January 1, 2021—a few days after he visited the White House—in which he described charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol. As he usually does, Sheets joined from a studio lit with blue lights. His blue eyes glowed.

“I feel like God is exposing evil and opening the eyes of a nation,” he said in a soothing voice, and then he described a cryptic dream God had given him that could be taken as prediction or instruction or some sort of coded plan.

“Watchmen are supposed to be watching for the enemy,” he began. “In this particular dream, 50 people found themselves in a military strategy room. They had been summoned there, one from each state. And Gene in the dream was one of them. I was one of them. We were all gathered. Then a general and an admiral came into the room, and said, ‘We have asked you to come because we need your help.’ There was a map of all 50 states on all the walls. And the dams and waterways were highlighted.” Sheets said that this was God’s “advance warning” of a terrorist attack on the nation’s water supply, a sign of how far the enemy was willing to go, and told people to pray for the safety of supply lines.

“Amen,” Bailey said, turning to Wallnau. “Tie it all together for us.”

Wallnau said the show was God’s way of bringing the disparate prophets together ahead of the election. He said the movement was “apostolically maturing” and would not make the same mistakes it had made on the day of the Capitol riot. “When I was up at January 6, I was upset when it happened, because I could see that Trump did not have the voices that he needed to be there speaking in proximity to him,” he said. “That will not happen this time.”

He did not clarify what he meant by “this time,” and Bailey did not ask. “Amen to that,” the anchorman said.

That is how FlashPoint has been going all year long, each episode rolling current events into an ever-escalating End Times narrative building toward the election. After a helicopter crash killed the president of Iran in May, the usual panel of prophets convened. “What does this mean?” Bailey asked.

Kunneman shuffled through some papers and pulled out a prophecy about Iran that he’d delivered five years earlier, in which he stated that “God is literally going to tear their leadership from them and there would be a regime change.”

“The Lord said 2024 would be his justice,” Kunneman said.

When Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a scheme to silence a porn star before the 2016 election, Bailey Zoomed in from his beach vacation. “Rick?” he said to Rick Green, a regular on the show who runs something called the Patriot Academy in Texas, and who began trashing the judicial system.

“Joseph Stalin would be so proud of Joe Biden right now,” Green said. “He’s looking up from hell right now saying, ‘Great job, Joe. You’re doing this even better than I did with my show trials during Communism.”

“Talk to the people,” Bailey said, turning to Kunneman.

“God said there are two he’s put his hand on: Netanyahu, and Donald Trump,” Kunneman said, explaining that Netanyahu was reelected prime minister despite corruption charges, and that Trump would also triumph. “Same scenario.”

When Trump survived the assassination attempt in July, the panel invoked prophecies and Bible stories about ears. Wallnau spoke of God being “in control of every fraction of what’s happening with this man.” He said angels had turned Trump’s head. As he always did, he spoke of Trump as a King Cyrus, the ancient Persian ruler whom God uses in the Bible to liberate the Babylonians and return Jewish people to their homeland.

“As history teaches, in the final battle, King Cyrus had a wound to his head,” Bailey said as the program ended. “There you go.” The episode got more than 300,000 views on YouTube, which was not unusual.

On a Tuesday in August, FlashPoint promoted a new prophet from Colorado Springs, a fit-looking, bald-headed young man who calls himself “Joseph Z,” who said God had told him that the anti-Christ is working through the “deep state” to assassinate Trump, and scapegoat Iran. “The spirit of the Lord forewarns, to forearm, to prepare us for these moments,” said Joseph Z, who publishes a newsletter for his followers, one of which recently began, “There is a war coming against the will of the antichrist.”

One day in September, the subject was the upcoming debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. “The thing we are dealing with, I believe, is witchcraft at a very high level,” Wallnau said. “You’re dealing with a whole lot of mind control.”

“I think we are going to see the colliding of two kingdoms,” Kunneman said. “The kingdom of God. And the kingdom of the enemy.”

“I am decreeing that the angels of the Lord are on that stage,” Sheets said.

For days, the show had been posting a short promo video of the red phone ringing, signaling that the anointed himself was coming, and now Bailey played the videotaped interview.

“We want to bring religion back into our country, and let it get stronger, bigger, better,” Trump told Bailey just before the debate, pledging to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofits such as churches from endorsing political candidates. “You will be in great shape,” Trump added. Bailey then prayed over the former president, who bowed his head but kept his eyes open.

“It was a great moment,” Bailey said on the show.

“I could feel the spirit of the Lord on his words, on you,” Kunneman said.

“He saw the genuineness of your faith,” Wallnau said, and Bailey cried.

On a Wednesday in October: “We keep turning on the lights and showing where the cockroaches are running,” Wallnau said, referring to the mainstream press, and the work that FlashPoint was doing to unearth satanic plots against Trump.

In recent weeks, the show has shifted into mobilization mode, promoting pro-Trump events such as A Million Women, a recent march on the National Mall organized by some of the NAR movement’s most prominent apostles and prophets. A conservative estimate is that tens of thousands of people showed up. Many in the crowd wore camouflage FlashPoint Army T-shirts and hats. The event was rich with symbolism invoking violent moments in the history of Christianity. Organizers described the march as “an Esther call,” invoking the biblical story of Esther, the Jewish queen of the Persian king, who persuades her husband to save her people from persecution, after which the king grants them permission to kill their enemies.

“What they are wanting is to give the nation back to God,” Bailey said of the crowd gathered in the sunshine on the Mall, where people were praying, crying, laying prostrate, blowing shofars, and waving the Appeal to Heaven flag, white with a green pine tree, that has become a symbol of the movement to advance God’s kingdom.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The Christian radicals are coming]

FlashPoint aired many of these scenes during its recap of the event. But the episode did not show the culmination of the march, when apostles and prophets surrounded a cement altar on a stage in view of the U.S. Capitol. The altar was meant to symbolize demonic strongholds in America, and as music swelled, Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jewish pastor, prayed to cast out these demons. Then he began smashing the altar with a sledgehammer. Others, men and women both, took turns smashing until the altar was in pieces. Later, a California apostle named Ché Ahn, one of the most powerful figures in the movement, declared that Trump would win the election and that Harris was a “type of Jezebel,” an evil biblical figure who was thrown from a tower to her death and eaten by dogs. Ahn decreed that Harris would be “cast out”—a moment that Matthew Taylor, the religion scholar, interpreted as a veiled way of blessing violence against her. (Ahn did not respond to a request for comment but told The Guardian after the event that his message was “all spiritual.”)

“It was a great thing,” Bailey said, describing the march.

During that show and others in recent weeks, Bailey reminded viewers to subscribe to FlashPoint on Rumble, a social-media platform favored by Trump supporters, in case YouTube removes the show. He and the prophets have continued likening the election to epic Biblical battles. They’ve spoken about God’s lawyers preparing to fight demonic “shenanigans” in Pennsylvania. They’ve spoken of “taking territory back.” Kunneman has started calling Harris “cackling Hamas.”

At a recent live show in North Carolina, he told Bailey that the nation was in “an Exodus 32 moment,” when thugs were “trying to steal the leadership and take over the nation, just like today, and God called them out, and he opened up the ground and swallowed those evildoers, and I believe we are going to see that.”

Kunneman said that God is saying, “What will my people decide? Are you going to choose life, or are you going to choose death? You gonna choose good, or you gonna choose evil?”

Bailey said that he was having visions of a decisive moment on a battlefield. The question now was whether the FlashPoint Army that the show had been cultivating for the past four years was ready to follow orders from heaven. “We see an opening,” Bailey said, adding that he believed “this is the time that we’re going to have to go harder, faster, and take back what the devil stole.”

The show ended, and the conversation continued offline.

Kamala Harris is hard to avoid in North Carolina these days. Turn on your TV and there she is (except when Donald Trump is on instead). On the radio: Kamala. Switch to Spotify if you want, but you’ll get Kamala ads there too. It’s enough to make you want to get out of the house and drive somewhere, but that’s only going to take you past a parade of Kamala billboards. You might even find yourself passing a Harris-Walz field office.

This makes sense. North Carolina is a key swing state in the election. Harris can win without it, but Trump probably cannot. In 2020, it gave Trump his narrowest victory, with a margin of fewer than 75,000 votes. Harris; Trump; their respective running mates, Tim Walz and J. D. Vance; and a host of surrogates have made many visits to the state and plan to keep coming right up until Election Day. Both campaigns are blanketing the airwaves.

But the similarities end there. The Trump campaign is running a lean operation in North Carolina, with far less physical presence: fewer field offices, fewer paid staffers, less footprint in general. I’ve driven on interstates across half the state in the past couple of weeks, and dead deer have outnumbered Trump billboards by roughly a 2-to-1 ratio. Simply put, the Trump campaign seems to barely exist here.

[George Packer: The three factors that will decide the election]

What’s happening in North Carolina is a microcosm of the way the Harris and Trump campaigns are approaching the race nationally, as well as the results they’re producing. Harris is running a huge, centralized, multifaceted campaign with lots of staff. Trump is running a much leaner campaign, appearing to rely more on high-profile visits than organizational infrastructure, and farming out some get-out-the-vote operations, a central function of any political campaign, to independent groups. And in North Carolina, as in the nation overall, the result is a deadlock in the polls.

The gap between these two approaches stems from different resources, different campaigning philosophies, and different candidates. The Harris campaign has raised a staggering amount of money, allowing it to build a large operation around the country. The Trump campaign, by contrast, is scuffling for money; as of August, The New York Times recently reported, it had 11 paid staffers, compared with 200 four years ago and 600 for Harris this cycle. The Trump campaign appears to be betting that the candidate’s personal charisma and the popularity of his particular brand of grievance politics make up for it.

Trump’s campaign may well be making the right bet. “Trump’s turnout operation is his message,” Mac McCorkle, a public-policy professor at Duke University and retired Democratic strategist, told me. (I am an adjunct journalism instructor at Duke.) “Democrats confuse get-out-the-vote strength a little too much with We have 100 field offices. That’s good for Democrats, but that sometimes we fail to reflect that with a really strong, penetrating message, you don’t need as many field offices.”

Some of the difference is merely strategic. For example, although Harris and allied super PACs and other groups have posted billboards across the state trumpeting her support for entitlements and lower middle-class taxes, Trump and his supporters have evidently decided that billboards in North Carolina aren’t worth it. The Trump campaign has spent a much higher proportion of its budget on sending mailers to voters than Harris’s has.

Some other portion of the difference is more philosophical. At the risk of oversimplification, Democrats rely on a top-down organization, which involves lots of field offices and a great deal of national direction. Republicans tend to prefer a hub-and-spoke model, in which campaigns recruit captains who are then responsible for finding volunteers to work under them. Both of these models have succeeded in the past. In recent years, North Carolina Republicans have been more effective at turning out their voters than Democrats have. To see why getting every voter to the polls can matter, consider the 2020 race for chief justice of the state supreme court, in which Republican Paul Newby beat the incumbent Democrat, Cheri Beasley, by just 401 votes.

Harris has 29 field offices across the state, including in suburban counties that are traditionally strongly Republican but where Democrats see a chance to pick up votes. She has more than 300 staffers on the ground, and the campaign says that 40,000 people in North Carolina, most of them first-time volunteers, have signed up to help out since Harris began running, in July. That has drawn notice across the aisle. “What we’re seeing in North Carolina that we haven’t seen for a time, though, is a really well organized ground game by the Democrats,” Senator Thom Tillis told Semafor in September.

I’ve attended several recent Harris campaign events across the state this fall. There’s a formula to these things: They’re powered by young women with blue jeans, ponytails, and white HARRIS WALZ T-shirts, and typically feature some national Democratic figure. Last week, I watched the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, campaign for a promotion to first gentleman. His first stop of the day was at a house in southern Raleigh, where the owners had turned their garage into a de facto canvassing base plastered with signs. A table displayed swag—including psychedelic orange stickers reading Donald Trump is weird—that could be earned with two hours of volunteering.

“We want you to get out there and knock on doors and canvass, because we need you to do that so we can win North Carolina, so my wife … can be the next president,” Emhoff said. “You know what’s at stake right now. I don’t have to tell you, but you have to go out there and make the case and just get people to see what is so obvious, what is so clear, to cut through this Trumpian fog.”

The goal of this huge apparatus is to have sustained exposure to voters, in order to both persuade undecided ones and get Harris supporters who are irregular voters to actually cast ballots. “I think having a presence with that infrastructure of our staff and our offices and of our contact and other campaign events that we have—it makes a difference over time,” Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground-state director, told me. “It opens doors, opens minds, to hearing persuasive messages.”

That is the theory, at least. Data so far suggest that Democratic turnout is lagging. North Carolina reports data based on race and partisan registration, not results, so it’s not a perfect proxy for votes, but turnout among Black voters, a key Democratic constituency in the state, is down somewhat. The Harris campaign’s task is to close that gap before or on Election Day.

What about on the Republican side? It’s harder to say. Everything about Trump’s campaign is more distributed: His voters are less concentrated in densely populated areas, and the GOP’s relational organizing style lends itself less to visibility. Even so, I’ve been struck by how invisible the Trump campaign is in North Carolina. Several Democrats told me they were also puzzled about what field operations Republicans were running. But they take little comfort in that, fearing a replay of 2016, when Hillary Clinton greatly outspent Trump and lost the general election.

Nationally, Republicans have expressed concerns about whether the Trump ground game is ready for the election. His campaign has handed much of the turnout operation over to outside groups, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and, more recently, Elon Musk’s America PAC. Ron DeSantis tried something similar in the GOP primary and failed spectacularly, but the temptation to use outside groups with fewer fundraising limits is strong. Reuters reports that Musk’s group has struggled to meet its targets, and The Guardian has revealed that paid canvassers might be falsifying voter contacts.

To get a better grasp of the Trump campaign’s operation in North Carolina, I reached out to spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee but received no answer. I also got no answer from Turning Point USA. I emailed a North Carolina–specific address for Musk’s America PAC and received only an automated email inviting me to apply for a paid-canvasser position. Matt Mercer, a spokesperson for the North Carolina GOP, also did not reply to me, but he told The Assembly, “There’s only one ground game this year that’s already been tested—and that’s the Trump campaign in the primary.”

Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, told me he thought the discrepancy I was witnessing was a result of more efficient targeting. He noted that he and several other longtime GOP voters he knows were seeing their mailboxes filled with attacks on a Republican candidate for the state supreme court—a sign of wasteful spending.

“I’m not gonna go into too much detail on this, because this is where I think Democrats have missed the mark, and I don’t want to help try to start educating them on how to quit missing the mark,” he said. “Other Republican voting efforts are more data driven and more strategic in who they talk to and how they talk to them. Democrats have not seemed to have dialed in on that.”

What Trump is doing is holding a lot of rallies in the state. These events are not cheap, but they are cheaper than running a large ground game, and they are powerful motivators for Trump voters. At a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, this month, I spoke with Dawn Metts, who lives some 45 minutes away, in Kinston. A friend got tickets to the rally and then invited her. “I said, ‘Heck yeah, we’re there, baby!’” she told me. She’d camped out overnight to make sure she got a good spot in the arena. Metts was feeling optimistic about Trump’s chances.

“As long as he wins, I feel good about it,” she said. “I think he’s gonna win.”

[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

Turnout, like football, is a game of inches. Both campaigns’ plans for North Carolina were disrupted in late September, when Hurricane Helene ravaged the western part of the state. Devastation from the storm upended preparations by election officials and partisan operatives, but, more important, meant that people who might otherwise have been focused on politics were focused on finding food, water, and a safe place to sleep.

The area affected by the storm is predominantly Republican; a quarter of Trump’s 2020 vote in North Carolina came from counties declared federal disaster areas. But Helene also hit Buncombe County, home to the liberal enclave of Asheville, hard, and Democrats there expressed concerns about their ability to turn out votes, according to the political outlet NOTUS.

Focusing on the minutiae of field offices or storm effects can be a distraction. Turnout can swing only a few votes here and a few votes there. Yet the 2024 election appears to be close enough that any of these factors could decide who wins North Carolina and, with it, the White House.