Back in Little League, I used to think I was a pretty good baseball player. I hit a bunch of home runs and thought I could play in the majors—until about seventh grade. That’s when I stepped to the plate against a pitcher from Warren Jr. High School who could throw a curveball.

His first pitch appeared to be coming straight for my head. I hit the dirt and then peeked up just in time to see the ball break perfectly over the plate. Humbling! The umpire called it a strike, a bunch of Warren players laughed at me, and I would eventually go on to become one of those writers who uses too many sports analogies.

Embarrassing as that was, the decisiveness of my defeat dealt a fast end to my delusional diamond dreams. I never learned to hit a curveball but did take a tidy lesson from the experience: When life offers clarity, take the gift.

Democrats should take the gift.

If nothing else, the party’s electoral battering last week should provide a clarity that Democrats clearly lacked before. They were shocked by the results. I knew a bunch who were indeed predicting a rout, but with Kamala Harris doing the routing. “This could be glorious,” a Democratic operative friend said to me last weekend after the now-ingloriously wrong Des Moines Register poll that showed Harris leading Trump by three points in deep-red Iowa was released. Trump wound up winning the state by 13 points.

At minimum, the prevailing sentiment was that the election would be very close. Pundit consensus seemed to place the race at the cliché junction of “razor-thin” and “wafer-thin” (personally I thought it would be “paper-thin,” but then, I was an outlier). The contest, many predicted, might take many days to call. Election lawyers swarmed battleground states. I don’t recall speaking with more than one or two Democrats in the final weeks who foresaw the ultimate beatdown the party suffered.

Then came the knee-buckling curveball that electorates have a knack for throwing.

“We at least have some precision here with this result,” Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan told me. “There’s really no ambiguity in what voters said, at least at the presidential level.” This can save time and focus the collective mind on the larger problems that confront Democrats.

No one is debating whether it would have helped if, say, Bad Bunny had endorsed Harris sooner. In other words, last week’s drubbing was not conducive to small-bore second-guessing; no use dwelling in the margins when the margins are, in fact, so conclusive.

This was not the case after the defeat that Democrats suffered at Trump’s hand eight years ago. That election was much closer. It lent itself to strategic quibbling (“if only Hillary Clinton had spent more time in Wisconsin”), numeric hypotheticals (“if only X number of votes in X number of states had swung the other way”), and systemic laments (damn Electoral College). All of this amounted to the political equivalent of In any other ballpark, that’s a home run.

And it distracted from—even muddled—whatever lessons that loss could have provided.

Partly as a result, Democrats engaged in no real reckoning after 2016. Essentially they became a party that defined itself in opposition to Trump, just as Republicans have been defined in submission to him. This probably made sense for Democrats in the short term. Trump’s presidency, his post-presidency, and the lame knockoffs that he inspired gave Democrats plenty of material to work with. They enjoyed good midterm results (2018, 2022) and picked Joe Biden as a winning stopgap candidate in 2020.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Biden never got the “stopgap” memo. The obstinate octogenarian insisted on running again until it was way too late for someone else to enter, putting Harris and her party in a terrible position.

Bewildered Democrats are casting blame, and Biden seems to be catching the most. But the recriminations will subside soon enough, and the faster Democrats can embrace the clarity of this moment, the better.

“This has more of a feel of wiping the slate clean,” Pete Giangreco, a Democratic campaign strategist, told me. “Sure, you can maybe argue whether Josh Shapiro as the running mate could have helped with Pennsylvania, but who cares? It wouldn’t have mattered. It makes it easier to focus on what matters.”

Dingell says that what matters most—and what the 2024 results expose—is that working-class voters, across racial lines, are put off by the Democratic Party. This should be apparent not just from the defeats of last Tuesday but also the successes. She mentioned two of her Democratic House colleagues who have been elected and reelected in treacherous swing districts: Jared Golden of Maine, who holds a slight edge (about 700 votes) in one of the few races in the country that has yet to be called, and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who appears to have narrowly retained her rural Washington State district, and who has criticized national Democratic leaders for their inattention to working-class voter concerns.

“I think we just need to go out and learn and listen for a while,” Dingell told me.

First, listen to the results: They were not close. Trump won all seven battleground states and the popular vote; made big gains with Black and Hispanic voters, as well as with young people; and even polled 52 percent of white women. Republicans took the Senate and kept the House.

As it turned out, Democrats were much closer to delusion than the reality that voters would impose. So, by all means, digest the postmortems, posit the theories, and engage in the various “conversations we need to have” that Democrats and pundits keep prescribing. Better yet, skip those.

“Here’s what we know: We don’t know anything,” Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show on Election Night. “We’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know shit.”

There is a simple humility in that, something to sit with back in the dugout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

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Evening Read

OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Night They Hadn’t Prepared For

By Elaine Godfrey

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

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

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

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Watching the Blue Wall crumble There is no constitutional mandate for fascism. The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa The tyranny of the election needle

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Photographs by OK McCausland

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

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

But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable. As the evening drew on, the clusters of giddy sorority sisters and VIP alumni stopped dancing, their focus trained on the projector screens, which were delivering a steady flow of at best mediocre and sometimes dire news for Democrats. No encouragement had yet come from those all-important blue-wall states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Somewhere between Georgia turning red and Senator Ted Cruz demolishing Colin Allred in Texas, attendees started trickling out the back.

It was starting to feel pretty obvious, even then, that Donald Trump would be declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election. And soon after 5:30 a.m. eastern this morning, he was, when the Associated Press called Wisconsin for him, giving him an Electoral College majority even with a number of states yet to declare. An across-the-board rightward shift, from Michigan to Manhattan, had gradually crushed the hopes of Democrats in an election that, for weeks, polling had indicated was virtually tied. But a Trump victory was a reality that nearly everyone at Harris’s watch party seemed to have prepared for only theoretically.

Before last night, Democrats felt buoyant on a closing shot of hopium. While Harris stayed on message, Trump had what seemed a disastrous final week: His closing argument was incoherent; his rally at Madison Square Garden was a parade of racism; he stumbled getting into a garbage truck and looked particularly orange in photos. Democratic insiders crowed that early-vote totals were favoring Harris, and that undecided voters in swing states were coming around. Then there was Ann Selzer’s well-respected poll in Iowa, which suggested that the state might go blue for the first time since Barack Obama’s presidency.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

On a breezy and unseasonably warm evening in Washington, D.C., thousands of people had gathered on the grassy campus at Harris’s alma mater to watch, they hoped, history being made. No one mentioned Trump when I asked them how they were feeling—only how excited they were to have voted for someone like Harris. Kerry-Ann Hamilton and Meka Simmons, both members of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, had come together to witness the country elect the first Black woman president. “She is so well qualified—” Hamilton started to say. “Overqualified!” Simmons interjected.

Leah Johnson, who works at Howard and grew up in Washington, told me that she would probably leave the event early to watch returns with her mother and 12-year-old daughter at home. “It’s an intergenerational celebratory affair,” she said. “I get to say, ‘Look, Mom, we already have Barack Obama; look what we’re doing now!’”

Everyone I spoke with used similar words and phrases: lots of firsts and historics and references to the glass ceiling, which proved so stubbornly uncrackable in 2016. Attendees cheered in unison at the news that Harris had taken Colorado, and booed at Trump winning Mississippi. A group of women in tight dresses danced to “1, 2 Step” by Ciara and Missy Elliott. Howard’s president led alumni in the crowd in a call-and-response that made the whole evening feel a little like a football game—just fun, low stakes.

Several people I talked with refused to entertain the idea that Harris wouldn’t win. “I won’t even let myself think about that,” a woman named Sharonda, who declined to share her last name, told me. She sat with her sorority sisters in their matching pink-and-green sweatshirts. Soon, though, the crowd began to grow restless. “It was nice when they turned off the TV and played Kendrick,” said one attendee who worked at the White House and didn’t want to share her name. “Just being part of this is restoring my soul, even if the outcome isn’t what I want it to be,” Christine Slaughter, a political-science professor at Boston University, told me. She was cautious. She remembered, viscerally she said, the moment when Trump won in 2016; and the memory was easy to conjure again now. “I know that feeling,” she said. She was consoling herself: She’d been crushed before. She could handle it again.

Harris herself was expected to speak at about 11 p.m., but by midnight, she still hadn’t appeared. People bit their cheeks and scrolled on their phones. There was a burst of gleeful whoops when Angela Alsobrooks beat Larry Hogan in Maryland’s U.S. Senate election. But soon the trickle of exiting attendees became a steady flow. Potentially decisive results from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were not due soon, but Michigan didn’t look good. North Carolina was about to be called for Trump.

I texted some of my usual Democratic sources and received mostly radio silence in response. “How do you feel?” I asked one, who had been at the party earlier. “Left,” she answered. Mike Murphy, a Republican anti-Trump consultant, texted me back at about 12:30 a.m: “Shoot me.”

Donors and VIPs were streaming out the side entrance. The comedian Billy Eichner walked by, looking sad, as the Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache (Jump On It)” played over the loudspeakers. A man pulled me aside: “There will be no speech, I take it?” he said. It was more of a comment than a question.

(OK McCausland for The Atlantic)

“I’m depressed, disappointed,” said Mark Long, a software salesman from D.C., who wore a T-shirt with a picture of Harris as a child. He was especially upset about the shift toward Trump among Black men. “I’m sad. Not just for tonight, but for what this represents.” Elicia Spearman seemed angry as she marched out of the venue. “If it’s Trump, people will reap what they sow,” she said. “It’s karma.”

Just before 1 a.m., the Harris campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond came onstage to announce that the candidate would not be speaking that night. The former Louisiana representative offered muted encouragement to the crowd—an unofficial send-off. “Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in the promise of America,” he said, before adding, “Go, Kamala Harris!” The remaining members of the crowd cheered weakly. Some of the stadium lights went off.

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.  

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

When he was last in the White House, the president-elect ignored ethics and security guidelines, fired inspectors general and other watchdogs, leaked classified information, and used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, deploying U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard “troops” in American cities. Trump actively encouraged the January 6, 2021, insurrection at our Capitol. When he left the White House, he stole classified documents and hid them from the FBI.  

Because a critical mass of Americans aren’t bothered by that list of transgressions, any one of which would have tanked the career of another politician, Trump and his vice president–elect, J.D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies. This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its architects, all Trump fans, will now endeavor to make it become reality. Trump will surely try again to dismantle America’s civil service, replacing qualified scientists and regulators with partisan operatives. His allies will help him to build a Department of Justice that does not serve the Constitution, but instead focuses on harassing and punishing Trump’s enemies. Trump has spoken, in the past, of using the Federal Communications Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to punish media organizations and anyone else who crosses him, and now he will have the chance to try again.

[Read: The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa]

Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too. This is not just a theoretical threat. As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. As a result of this massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.

American foreign policy will also reflect this shift toward kleptocracy. In his first term, Trump abused the powers of his office, corrupting American foreign policy for his personal gain. He pressured the Ukrainian president to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent; altered policy toward Turkey, Qatar, and other nations in ways that suited his business interests; even used the Secret Service to funnel government money to his private properties. In a second term, he and the people around him will have every incentive to go much further. Expect them to use American foreign policy and military power to advance their personal and political goals.  

There are many things a re-elected President Trump cannot do. But there are some things he can do. One is to cut off aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has three months to drop all half-measures and rush supplies to Ukraine before Trump forces a Ukrainian surrender to Russia. If there’s anything in the American arsenal that Ukraine might successfully use—other than nuclear weapons—send it now, before it’s too late.

Another thing Trump can do is to impose further tariffs–and intensify a global trade war against not only China but also against former friends, partners, and allies. America First will be America Alone, no longer Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill,” but now just another great power animated by predatory nationalism.

Around the world, illiberal politicians who seek to subvert their own democracies will follow America’s lead. With no fear of American criticism or reaction, expect harassment of press and political opponents in countries such as Mexico and Turkey to grow. Expect the Russian-backed electoral cheating recently on display in Georgia and Moldova to spread. Expect violent rhetoric in every democracy: If the American president can get away with it, others will conclude that they can too. The autocratic world, meanwhile, will celebrate the victory of someone whose disdain for the rule of law echoes and matches their own. They can assume Trump and Vance will not promote human rights, will not care about international law, and will not reinforce our democratic alliances in Europe and Asia.

But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable, as people begin to understand that existential issues, such as climate change and gun violence, will not be tackled. A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate. The deep gaps within America will grow deeper. Politics will become even angrier. Trump won by creating division and hatred, and he will continue to do so throughout what is sure to be a stormy second term.

[David A. Graham: The institutions failed]

My generation was raised on the belief America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history when America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

Iowa Democrats had gotten their hopes up, and honestly, how could they not? On Saturday night, J. Ann Selzer—the most renowned pollster in Iowa, if not the entire country—released her final pre-election survey, finding that Kamala Harris was leading Donald Trump by three points in a state the former president had carried by eight in 2020.

The poll seemed to portend a big night for Harris not only in Iowa but across the Midwest, suggesting a surge of support from women that would virtually assure her election. It also found a pair of Democratic House candidates in Iowa leading Republican incumbents, pointing to a Democratic majority in the chamber.

On Monday night, as Democrats packed inside a gymnasium in Des Moines for a rally, Selzer’s survey was all anyone could talk about. “I know that was exciting,” Lanon Baccam, the Democrat running for the local congressional seat, told the crowd, which erupted in cheers at the mere mention of the poll, “but I don’t think anyone in this room is surprised.”

[Read: How to understand the election returns so far]

The following night, many of the same Democrats gathered for a watch party inside a hotel ballroom downtown, their hopes turning to nerves and finally to resignation as a far bleaker picture emerged. The Selzer poll was way off, and Trump was poised to win Iowa by his largest margin ever. Iowa Democrats haven’t had much to celebrate since Barack Obama’s victory in 2012, and last night wasn’t any different.

“Iowa has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. Republicans are in the advantage right now,” Bill Brauch, the Democratic Party chair in Polk County, which includes Des Moines, told me. “We hoped that would change someday, but it isn’t today.”

Democrats had been optimistic about Iowa for the same reasons they were optimistic across the country. After foregoing most door-knocking due to the pandemic in 2020, they had built a robust turnout operation that dwarfed the GOP’s organizing efforts, which Democrats saw little evidence of as they canvassed neighborhoods. Enthusiasm, Brauch told me, was “through the roof.” And indeed, he said turnout was high in Des Moines. But more voters went Republican than Democrats expected, cutting into the margins that Democrats needed to offset the GOP’s strength in rural counties, where Republican turnout was also high.

The dynamic was the same across the country as returns came in: Despite strong turnout in many areas, Harris could not match Joe Biden’s 2020 performance in the counties that powered his victory over Trump. As of early Wednesday morning, the GOP had flipped at least two Senate seats, in West Virginia and Ohio, giving Republicans an all-but-certain majority, and they had a chance of ousting Democratic incumbents in several other battlegrounds that were too close to call. The House landscape was less certain, as Democrats still had a chance to flip enough GOP districts to recapture control.

They needed a net gain of four House seats for a majority, and although some of the party’s best pickup opportunities were in blue states such as New York and California, Democrats began seeing races in the Midwest trend in their direction in the closing weeks, opening up the possibility of more paths to the majority and larger gains nationally. But the Midwest surge did not materialize.

Democrats had poured late money into the two most competitive House races in Iowa, where they saw evidence that voters wanted to punish Republicans for enacting a state abortion ban—one of the strictest in the country—that took effect this summer following months of legal battles. In 2022, low Democratic turnout in places like Polk County helped Republicans flip a House seat, giving them all four in the state. The abortion ban, however, sparked hope among Democrats that Iowa would see the same blue shift that other states saw in 2022 after the Supreme Court overruled Roe—a belief that the Selzer poll reinforced.

Selzer has achieved a near-mythical status among political insiders. On Monday night, when I asked Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture and former two-term Iowa governor, whether he believed her latest findings, he replied with a detailed history of Selzer’s past predictive successes. In 2008, her polling correctly forecast that Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, and in both of the past two presidential elections, it came close to nailing Trump’s margin of victory when most other polls underestimated his support. “Anyone who doubts Ann Selzer when it comes to Iowa does so at their own risk,” Vilsack told me. “So do I believe it?” he added, referring to her Saturday poll. “Absolutely.”

On Tuesday night, the Democrats who showed up to rejoice instead realized that Selzer’s survey was just another poll—one of many that appeared to once again underestimate Trump’s support. As the night wore on, they held out hope that Baccam would defeat Representative Sam Nunn, a first-term Republican. (As of this writing, the Democrat in Iowa’s other competitive House race is narrowly trailing with nearly all precincts reporting.) But a podium set up for victory speeches stayed empty, and when, at around 11:20 p.m. local time the Associated Press called the race for Nunn, only a smattering of Democrats were there to see the news.

Brauch, the county Democratic chair, was at a loss to explain how his party fell so far short once more. “I don’t think any of us knows what the answer is,” he told me. “If we did, we’d be doing better tonight.”

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One thing tomorrow’s election will test is Americans’ appetite for chaos, particularly the kind that Donald Trump has been exhibiting in the last few months of his campaign. After weeks of running a disciplined campaign, Trump’s advisers lost control of their candidate, the Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta reported this week. Trump grew restless and bored and drifted off script in his campaign appearances. During a summer interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, for example, he mused aloud about Kamala Harris, “I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?” From the perspective of his advisers, Trump’s string of offensive public statements needlessly alienated potential voters. Members of Trump’s campaign staff told Alberta that they became disillusioned about their ability to rein in their candidate and left the campaign.

Will this unleashed version of Trump affect the election outcome? In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Alberta and another Atlantic staff writer, Mark Leibovich, about how candidate Trump transformed over the summer, how Kamala Harris’s campaign reacted, where each campaign stands now, and what it means for the election. Alberta and Leibovich also offer tips on how to manage your inner chaos while watching the election results.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. We are recording the Monday before Election Day. The candidates are furiously campaigning in the swing states. At some point, their planes were on the same tarmac in North Carolina.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump mused about shooting reporters; Kamala Harris said normal campaign things. And yet the race is still one of the closest in American history.

Anyway, in this episode, I want to get the inside view of both political campaigns in their last days. So I have with me today two seasoned political reporters, Mark Leibovich. Hi, Mark.

Mark Leibovich: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: And Tim Alberta. Hi, Tim.

Tim Alberta: Hi, Hanna. Hi, Mark.

Leibovich: Hi, Tim. Isn’t it good to be seasoned today?

Alberta: I’m feeling very seasoned.

Rosin: Yeah, that’s a cliché word. It doesn’t mean old. What’s a more flattering word than seasoned? Like, experienced? Or longtime? Longtime: that’s flattering, I think.

Leibovich: It’s definitely flattering.

Alberta: We don’t use veteran.

Rosin: No, veteran is old. How about active?

Leibovich: Yeah, we’re very active. Yeah. Can you tell by our voices?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Anyway, Mark, I understand you’re writing up a preelection guide to how to approach Tuesday night.

Leibovich: Basically, I’m trying to collect a helpful toolkit to how to approach Election Day from sort of a practical standpoint as far as what information you can ignore, but also a habit or even mindfulness standpoint about how to not drive yourself needlessly crazy, how not to be triggered by the kinds of things that Election Night coverage will probably overload you with.

And that includes Donald Trump probably declaring victory wildly prematurely or erroneously, which, I mean, will be news because he’s one of the candidates, but it also should surprise no one. And there are ways to kind of condition yourself, or try to, going into what tomorrow night will be like—which will be obviously very anxious for a lot of people.

Rosin: I see. So instead of “We know it’s going to be like that,” like, “We know that we don’t have enough information.”

We know that there probably isn’t going to be, sort of, instant early clarity. So you’re going into it eyes wide open, doing what? Like, what? Because maybe Tim needs this advice.

Leibovich: Well, I’m trying. Well, I think we all need this advice, Hanna. I mean, I think it’s an approach to how we consume information, how we get information.

I talked to a couple of Democratic consultants who said that one of the first things they do is turn off all their text notifications, because any kind of text notification is designed to trigger you on Election Night.

There is a lot of manipulation of your emotions before the actual only information that is necessary, which, the most valuable information is going to come in probably after 11 o’clock, or quite late. It could be days later. The idea is the news will find you. Turn off your phone if you can. Information is coming in haphazardly from a million different directions, out of order, in no particular sequence whatsoever, about something that has already happened—meaning the voting has already happened. So no control is there. This is basically just people throwing information out in no order, and it is not necessarily—

Rosin: It’s not cumulative and it’s not adding up to—

Leibovich: —Not cumulative.

Rosin: Exactly. Exactly.

Leibovich: So anyway, that’s one reason you can skip that part.

Rosin: Interesting. Tim, do you think you could do that?

Alberta: I fear that in the attempt to not drive myself crazy, I would drive myself crazy. In other words, you would find your brain stacking up with all of the things that other people know that you don’t, because in that moment you have decided to sequester yourself or at least to sort of rigidly compartmentalize your emotions and your brain waves and your political intake.

And therefore the exit polling showing the number of non-college whites in Maricopa County breaking away from Trump is lost on you in that pivotal moment, when that could be the little parcel of information that is necessary for you to believe that you have finally figured out this electoral equation and that you have a bead on it in this moment.

It’s a game of inches, and the inches are everywhere around us, Hanna. So how could I give up any of those inches when we are so close to the end of the game? I want the zen that Mark is offering, but I just don’t find it realistic.

Rosin: Hmm. You know how sometimes you start with the moment of meditation? We’ll consider that our moment of meditation, and now we’re gonna go into the stressful part of this conversation. So, Tim, you’ve been covering the Republican side closely, and you recently spent a lot of time talking to Trump’s advisers.

How would you describe the state of the campaign in the weeks before the election?

Alberta: I would describe it as something slightly removed from the serenity that Mark has described for us.

Rosin: Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Alberta: Yeah, look, Hanna, I think the context here is really important: that this Trump campaign, unlike the previous two, was for the majority of its time in operation, really pretty disciplined, pretty smart.

The people running the campaign had done a pretty good job of keeping Trump out of his own way and talking him out of bad ideas and sort of curbing some of his most self-destructive impulses. And what we’ve seen in the last couple of months is basically Trump going full Trump, and an inability among those senior advisers to really do anything to stop it.

This has been kind of the proverbial slow-motion car wreck. And, you know, it’s not just Trump himself, although of course he is the inspiration for the chaos. He is the generator of all of the turmoil that you see.

He is at the center of this chaos, but the chaos ripples out away from him. And so when you ask yourself the question of how could it be that at the most important public event of the campaign, with 20,000-plus jammed into Madison Square Garden in prime time, the whole world watching, and you pay a million dollars to put on this event, and the guy who kicks it off is a vulgar, shock jock, insult-roast comedian who was dropped by his own talent agency for using racial slurs onstage—how could this person possibly be booked into that position to open for Trump in that environment? It’s exactly the sort of thing that the people around him had been really successful in avoiding for most of the campaign. But ultimately, in the key home stretch here, in the sort of the witching hours of this campaign, it’s all fallen apart.

Rosin: Mark, same for the Democrats. How would you describe where they are?

Leibovich: I would say I’ve talked to a fair number of Democrats on the campaign in the last few days.

It feels like something approaching the general area of the ballpark of confidence.

Rosin: Interesting! Anomalous for Democrats.

Leibovich: Well, they are so incredibly quick to embrace bad news and to go right from bad news to deep levels of doomsaying. I’ve not seen that in the last few days.

I mean, look, I think their numbers internally seem a little better. I think a lot of the external polls have been encouraging. And I think you can’t underestimate how much of a train wreck Trump’s last 10 days have been, in a way that, if he loses, I think people will very much point to.

Rosin: So, Mark, I remember we sat here in the spring and discussed how absolutely stagnant this race would be. Like, we were just sleepwalking into a repeat.

Leibovich: But it was a great podcast. Everyone should listen to it again. (Laughs.)

Rosin: But it was very, you know—we didn’t have much to say. And then for everybody, the reset button got pressed in July.

Tim, the full Trump who we’ve seen on the campaign trail for the last few months started, actually, according to your account, before Harris entered the race. So what happened?

Alberta: I think that maybe the proper visual here, Hanna, is like the wild animal that has chased down its prey and has mauled it mostly to death and is now just sort of pawing at it, toying with it, unsure of really what to do because, well, what’s left to do?

Donald Trump really found himself, according to all the reporting I did, sort of over it. Sort of bored with running against Joe Biden. Because here is, in his view, this sort of hapless old man who can’t even string together sentences, much less really defend himself or go on offense in a meaningful way against Trump. And so I think that he’s looking at Joe Biden thinking, Gosh this is sort of a bore, and around this time, of course, in late June, early July, Trump’s polling is better than it’s ever been in any of his three campaigns for the presidency.

The battleground polling is showing him consistently pulling ahead five, six, seven points across all of these states. The national polling is up. His favorability is up. Democrats are preparing for a bloodbath not just to lose the presidency but to lose the House and the Senate, and it’s, you know, The sky is falling. And everyone around Trump is sort of giddy and gleeful. They’re looking around like, Nothing can stop us.

And around this time is when you started to see Trump talking a little bit differently, behaving a little bit differently, according to people close to him—almost looking for some disorder and some mayhem to inject into the campaign. He starts talking to people on the outside. And when Kamala Harris gets in the race, he was angry, on the one hand, because he thought he had it sort of sewn up against Biden, and he liked running against Biden in the sense that Biden really, you know, couldn’t punch back.

But I think also he’s sort of excited in the sense that with Harris, he’s got this live target. He’s able to channel some of the base instincts that brought him to power in the first place. You know, Trump, I think, viewed the Harris switcheroo as a new lease on life in the sense that he was going to be able to go whole hog again.

But the people around him were saying, No, no, no, no. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do. And frankly, the reason you’re in this position is because you’ve listened to us and because you haven’t been going rogue and running the kind of, you know, totally undisciplined #YOLO 2016 campaign that you would like to run and that you would run if you were left to your own devices. And around that time is when Trump started to lose confidence in those people who were giving him that advice, and he brought in other people to help with the campaign, and from there things really started to spiral.

Rosin: So, Mark, how are Democrats responding as Trump is reasserting this peak-Trump version of himself?

Leibovich: I think in a kind of measured way. I mean, I think, look, the peak Trump pretty much speaks for itself. It’s not like you need people to amplify. I mean, to some degree you do, because outlets that a lot of Republicans watch—like, say, Fox—are going to be insulated from a lot of this, because just Fox doesn’t show it.

I mean, that’s just not their point of emphasis, But I think they’ve been very deft—they’ve made a lot of ads around the kind of changing abortion messaging. I mean, even Melania Trump saying that she believes in a woman’s right to choose, things like that, to some degree, they’re trying to highlight it, but to another degree—this is a big political-operative cliché, but they are running their race.

And I think the Democrats, beginning when Biden stepped aside, I think Harris has performed much better than a lot of people thought she would, and I think her campaign has made a lot of good decisions, and she herself has made a lot of good decisions.

Rosin: It does, from the outside, seem exactly the opposite of the chaos inside the Trump campaign that Tim described, because if you think back to when Biden dropped out, there was some worry that the transition might not be smooth.

Leibovich: Oh, 100 percent. I mean, Tim and I, remember, we were at the Republican convention together, and that was such a moment, because Trump was really kind of at his peak then, which is kind of ironic to say, because the assassination attempt had taken place two days before the convention started. But his popularity, I mean—there was a sense of confidence at that convention which was just off the charts to a degree to which you could almost sense the boredom creeping into Trump when he’s giving this acceptance speech, and I guess it was Thursday night, and then about halfway through, he just kind of went off the rails, and he just sort of—it became just a very unhinged acceptance speech, went from kind of a gripping one where he’s describing the assassination attempt to something completely different, which kind of became a metaphor for how the rest of the campaign would unfurl for him.

And of course, three days later, Biden got out and then the world changed again.

Rosin: All right, up next, I ask Tim and Mark whether the chaotic final months of the Trump campaign could end up costing him the election. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: So from a campaign manager’s perspective, the chaos is disturbing, but what we actually care about is whether it has any impact on voting day. Tim, so what are the ways the drama you describe could affect the election? Like, say, turnout or whatever it is that we’re worried about?

Alberta: Well, look, if these episodes were contained to just Trump being a little bit goofy or going off message and sort of ranting and raving about the latest person who said something very nasty about him on cable news, I don’t think it would have much real-world effect. But I think that some of what we’re unpacking here over these past 10, 11, 12 weeks, Hanna, is something that actually gets to a fundamental weakness, which is a failure of the Trump team to expand its coalition.

Or at the very least what we’re seeing is the way in which the potential of expanding the Trump coalition has been undermined by Trump’s own actions or by the people close to him. So, for example, we know based on six months of really solid, consistent data that Trump is likely to perform better with Latino voters as a whole and particularly with Latino men under 40 than any Republican nominee in modern history.

And yet, when the dominant headline coming out of your rally at Madison Square Garden the week before the election is that one of your speakers calls the island of Puerto Rico floating trash in the ocean, this is self-sabotage.

Another core component of this Trump campaign, from the beginning, has been How do we keep our margins tight in the suburbs outside of Detroit and Milwaukee and Philly and Vegas and elsewhere? How do we keep our margins tight with these college-educated, suburban women? We’re not going to win them, right? But how do we manage to keep it close? How do we lose them by just seven or eight points instead of by 16, 17, 18, 20 points?

And when you look at, for example, the selection of J. D. Vance and, you know, his old, greatest-hits reel around childless cat ladies, and he thinks abortion should be illegal nationwide, right?

And there’s just something that sort of went fundamentally awry over the summer. I think Mark is right. Both of us were remarking at the convention about how it was effectively an early Election Night victory party. I mean, they weren’t even—Republicans in Milwaukee weren’t even talking about the campaign as if it were going to be competitive. It was already over. The fat lady was singing onstage in prime time in Milwaukee. And yet, I remember corresponding with several smart Republicans—Trump supporters—while I was there, and they were a little bit nervous about the Vance selection. And then on Thursday night, to Mark’s point, Trump gives this sort of weird, meandering speech that seems to squander a lot of the goodwill that he had coming into that event because of the assassination attempt. And it felt like between those two things—the Vance selection and then the speech—and then, you know, 24 hours after leaving Milwaukee, Biden gets out, Harris takes over the ticket, and suddenly, those dominoes started to fall.

And what we saw was all of the best-laid plans of the Trump operation go awry. And it wasn’t just surface-level things where we say, Oh, that was sort of silly he said that. Or Oh, this was an unforced error, but it’ll be a quick news cycle and blow over. Some of what we’ve seen, I think, will have a real impact at the ballot box.

Rosin: So what you’re describing is a campaign strategy that is fairly traditional that they were following fairly successfully, which is: try and win over, you know, some middle-of-the-road voters, or at least not massively alienate those people.

But, Trump has been running a very different kind of campaign—like going to Madison Square Garden—and fewer on-the-ground resources. And that seems like a pattern across swing states, which for me raises the question whether what these managers are calling chaos, like, that is the strategy.

The strategy was always just: get a lot of attention.

Alberta: I think it depends on the type of attention you’re talking about. So when Trump goes to the southern border and has, you know, hundreds of cameras following him around there and talks about the lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants committing crimes—you know, that is attention, and it can even be attention that is rooted in some hyperbole, some demagoguing, some bombast. And yet it is productive attention politically for the Trump people, right? They look at this sort of cost-benefit analysis and they recognize that, sure, we might antagonize some people with this rhetoric. We might alienate some people with our focus on these issues, but we think that the reward is far greater than the risk.

So there is, I think, plenty of good attention that the Trump people do want. I think what they’ve tried to avoid is a lot of the sideshow that is appealing to some of the very online, right-wing, MAGA troll base but does nothing to add to the coalition that I was describing a minute ago. And ultimately at the end of the day, politics is a math equation. It’s multiplication and addition.

Leibovich: Right, and I think, to Tim’s point, immigration was an incredibly effective issue for Trump. When you tip that into people eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and just how that took over the narrative of the Trump campaign—I mean, one, they look like fools; two, it insults the intelligence of so many people, and it turns a very serious and effective issue for the Trump campaign, immigration, into a joke and into just something really, really problematic and gross.

Rosin: So the art of running a Trump campaign, then, is to siphon and manage and titrate the chaos exactly right. Like, you want the right kind of chaos, the right kind of attention, but if you lose control of it, it just comes back to bite you. Is that basically what’s happened?

Alberta: Yeah, and it’s always gonna be a high-wire act, right? These people aren’t stupid. They knew what they were getting themselves into. In fact, Chris LaCivita—who is one of the two people managing the Trump presidential campaign here in 2024—within a few weeks of his decision to join the operation back in the fall of 2022, you have Trump saying that he wants to terminate parts of the Constitution. You have Trump saying and doing these sort of crazy, self-destructive things. And LaCivita is sort of looking around saying, What have I gotten myself into?

And of course people who are friends with him are saying, Come on, dude, you knew exactly what you were signing up for. You know exactly what you were getting yourself into. So I think whatever degree of self-delusion may exist at the outset, when some of these folks ally themselves with Donald Trump, you know, it dissolves pretty quickly and they become clear-eyed about who they’re working for and what the challenges are.

And to your point, Hanna, yes, there’s inevitably going to be some chaos, some attention-seeking behavior, some stuff that is vulgar and inappropriate and racist and misogynistic and whatever else. Their job is to try to turn things that are kind of potentially toxic into productivity. They’re trying to mine coals out of manure here, and again, I can’t stress this enough: For most of the campaign, they were actually doing a pretty good job of it. But at a certain point I think it just becomes too much to manage.

Rosin: Mark, do you get the sense that the Harris campaign’s—you described it as, like, a little dose of confidence. Is that because of everything that Tim has described?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, I think Trump has given them so much to work with. And not just like, Oh, look, he said this and sort of putting that out there. I mean, early indications about the revulsion that women are having—women voters are having for Trump—even more so than usual. And the degree to which they seem to be voting and maybe even lying to their husbands about—to kind of use a new ad that the Harris campaign is using which is basically saying, you know, a lot of Republican women are secretly going into the ballot, and behind their husband’s back, they’re voting for Kamala Harris. So again, Trump made their job easier, but I think they have taken what has been given to them. And I do feel hopeful. Yeah. Again, from talking to a bunch of them, and levels of very, very cautious optimism—which I would say, you know, it would probably be an absolute verboten thing for anyone anywhere near the Harris campaign to show anything more than just a tiny bit of confidence. Because that’s going to harken back to the overconfidence of 2016 or the overconfidence of 2020, you know—Biden was supposed to win by a lot more than he did.

And I think what freaks everyone out is the idea that Trump, in the two times he’s been on a general-election ballot, has massively overperformed his polls. And now there’s a sense that perhaps that’s been accounted for in these polls and they’re undercounting African American voters, women voters, and so forth.

So anyway, I think all of that is kind of baked into this, but look, I don’t want to suggest that anything other than massive anxiety is the default for everyone around this campaign. And I assume both campaigns.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s leave the listeners with thoughts about Election Night. There’s the zen option, and hopefully many of our listeners will take advantage of the zen option.

Take a long, 12-hour walk. Be home by 11 p.m. and then turn on the television. Short of that, the map is really wide and open. I mean, seven open states. It’s a lot. So for those who are not spiritually built for the zen option, how—literally—will you guys be watching? Like, give a listener a guide of what to watch out for on the night.

Leibovich: Well, yes, there are seven battleground states. But I think there’s a lot you can learn if you can get information from other states. You know, there’s a poll that everyone has been talking about—a lot of insiders have been talking about over the last few days—from Iowa. Iowa, no one considered a swing state. Safely red, certainly has been in the last few elections, certainly for Trump. Ann Selzer, a deeply respected pollster, came up with this Des Moines Register poll on Saturday night, having Harris ahead by three.

Now, putting aside whether Iowa’s now a battleground state—I mean, if it’s even in the ballpark of accurate, I mean, as a euphoric result for people on Team Harris. I mean, look, if there are some early numbers from, say, South Carolina, Florida, that, you know, maybe show Trump’s margins a little lower than you would expect, possibly that’s something that you can learn from.

So again, it’s not just the seven battlegrounds, which will probably take a while to count, especially in some of the states with laws that make it harder to count early votes. But, yeah, I mean, like, the whole country does vote. It’s like, margins do matter, and I think we can learn from a lot of people.

And look, even, like, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky—I mean there are these early states that you know exactly who is going to win, but you can learn from.

Rosin: Because if the margins are smaller than they are expected to be, then that’s a bit of data that’s interesting. Tim, what about you?

Alberta: So there’s a known known, and a known unknown. The known known is that Democrats are continuing to see erosion in their coalition, specific to African American men, Latino men, and to some degree young voters.

And I think specifically if we’re looking at Detroit, at Milwaukee, at Philly, at Atlanta, at Maricopa County—there are places where we should be paying attention to this, right? I think the known unknown here is: Does Donald Trump get beaten up among suburban women, or does he get demolished among suburban women?

And I think that the answer to that question is probably determinative to who is sworn into office on January 20.

So I’m really paying very close attention to the collar counties outside of Philadelphia, to the WOW counties outside of Milwaukee. You have to look at Vegas and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Some of these places—I don’t want to be reductive, but I really do feel like, ultimately, that’s where the election is going to be won or lost.

Rosin: Both of you are saying: Look for signs. It’s not just big, broad swing states, but there are meaningful signs in smaller election results that you’ll be looking for.

Alberta: That’s right. It’s, again, it’s just a numbers game. And it so happens that the most dense, vote-rich areas of persuadable voters are just consistently found in these once re,d then purple, now pretty blue suburbs. And so whether you’re watching the presidential race or even if you’re looking for a potential upset in a Senate race, like in Texas, where Ted Cruz on paper looks like he’s going to win and maybe even win comfortably. But pay attention to Harris County, Texas, which, on Election Night in 2012, Obama and Romney fought Harris County to basically a draw. I think it was a matter of a few hundred votes that separated them. Fast-forward, you know, a decade. Democrats are carrying Harris County, which is the Houston suburbs—they’re carrying it by a quarter-million votes, 300,000 votes reliably, and that number’s only going up.

So those are the parts of the country where I think if you’re paying close attention, you’ll start to get a pretty good idea.

Rosin: Okay. I think we have options for the meditators and options for those who cannot bring themselves to meditate. Thank you both for joining me on this day before the election.

Leibovich: Thank you, Hanna. Thank you, Tim.

Alberta: Mark, I’ll call you tomorrow. We can meditate together.

Leibovich: I look forward to it. Yep, we’ll join figurative hands.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back later this week to cover the election, though possibly earlier than our usual Thursday release, depending on the results.

Thanks for listening.

Photographs by Wesaam Al-Badry

It’s the evening rush hour on the Friday before Election Day in Omaha, and about two dozen die-hard Democrats are making a racket. They’re standing on a bridge overpass, cheering, whooping, blowing whistles, holding up little American flags, and waving white signs emblazoned with a blue circle. Even in this Republican area on the outskirts of Nebraska’s biggest city, the cars passing by are honking in approval.

The signs say nothing—it’s just that big blue dot in the middle—but their message is no mystery here. “I don’t think there’s anybody in this city who doesn’t know what the blue dot represents,” Tim Conn, a 70-year-old retiree who has spray-painted a few thousand of the signs in his backyard, told me. More than 13,000 blue dots have popped up on Omaha lawns in the past three months, an expression of political pride in what has become a Democratic stronghold on the eastern edge of a deep-red state.

The blue dots embody a surge of enthusiasm for both Kamala Harris and Omaha’s outsize significance to the national election. Nebraska allocates some of its electoral votes by congressional district, and if Harris defeats Donald Trump in the Rust Belt’s “Blue Wall” states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—while losing the battlegrounds to the south, Omaha and its suburbs would likely deliver her the 270th vote that she needs to win the presidency. The district is so important that Trump and his allies repeatedly pressured Republicans in Nebraska’s legislature to change the rules in his favor. (The legislators rebuffed him a final time in September, and Trump has made little effort since to win Omaha the old-fashioned way—by earning more votes.)

Omaha could also determine control of Congress. Democrats view the GOP-held House district as one of their best opportunities to flip a seat and help recapture the majority. And in at least one postelection scenario, an upset victory by the independent Dan Osborn over Senator Deb Fischer—polls show the race is close—would give him the power to choose which party controls the Senate.

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

All this has made a region that’s hundreds of miles from the nearest swing state a potential tipping point for the balance of federal power. “Nebraska is literally in the middle of everything,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair, told me. “They try to say that we’re a flyover state, but ha-ha, joke’s on them.”

Nebraska began splitting up its electoral votes more than three decades ago, but only twice since then has Omaha’s vote in the Second Congressional District gone to a Democrat; Barack Obama won it by a single point in 2008, and Joe Biden beat Trump by six points in 2020.

This year, however, Harris is poised to carry the district by more than either of them. The area is filled with the white, college-educated voters who have largely recoiled from Trump since 2016, and a New York Times/Siena poll last week found the vice president leading by 12 points. Neither Harris nor Trump, nor their running mates, are campaigning in Omaha in the closing days of the election—a sign that both candidates see the district going to Harris.

Still, the Harris campaign and allied groups have spent more than $4 million in the area, which has also imperiled Omaha’s Republican representative, Don Bacon. Trump has spent only around $130,000. “That’s the biggest undertow for us,” Bacon told me on Saturday before a GOP get-out-the-vote rally in a more conservative part of the district. Public polls have shown Bacon’s opponent, the Democratic state senator and former middle-school science teacher Tony Vargas, ahead by a few points. Last week, the Cook Political Report, a leading congressional prognosticator, shifted its rating of the race as a “toss-up” to one that Vargas is slightly favored to win.

Public polls show Tony Vargas, right, narrowly leading his opponent, Republican Representative Don Bacon.  (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

A retired Air Force general serving his fourth term in Congress, Bacon outran Trump in 2020, winning reelection by 4.5 points. He defeated Vargas by a slimmer margin two years ago, and Vargas is running again—this time with more money and more backing from prominent members of his party.

Bacon has positioned himself as a moderate—he’s a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus—and frequently criticized the conservative hard-liners who ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But Bacon has been reluctant to cross Trump, and he lost some supporters by backing the former president’s late push to award all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the statewide winner, which would have effectively stripped power from many of his own constituents. “They’re so mad about that,” Vargas told me on Saturday, noting that Bacon received an endorsement from Trump soon after he signed a letter supporting the change. “Now we know what Don Bacon actually is. He’ll sell out Nebraskans if it means holding on to his seat of power.” At an Osborn event the next day, I met a former Republican and Bacon voter, Paul Anderson, who told me that he wrote in a friend’s name on his ballot rather than support Bacon again. “He’s afraid of Donald J. Trump,” Anderson said.

Vargas’s previous campaign and his plentiful TV ads have made him a recognizable face in the district. When one elderly woman answered her door on Saturday and saw him standing on her stoop, her eyes widened as if he were Ed McMahon about to hand her a giant check. She assured Vargas that both she and her daughter would vote for him. “I’ll remember, don’t worry,” she said. As we walked away, Vargas showed me the canvassing app on his phone: The woman was a registered Republican.

For Nebraska Democrats, the most pleasant Election Night surprise would involve a race in which they haven’t even fielded a candidate. Osborn, a Navy veteran and local union leader, rejected the party’s endorsement and elected to campaign instead as an independent, and he’s stunned Republicans and Democrats alike by running nearly even with Fischer, a two-term incumbent who won both her previous races by more than 15 points.

Osborn has caught on with a cross-partisan, populist campaign that mixes support for abortion rights, labor unions, and campaign-finance reform with a hawkish, Trump-like stance on border security. Republicans in the state have accused him of being a Democrat in disguise, but he’s appealed to voters in Nebraska’s conservative rural west by backing so-called Right to Repair laws—popular with farmers. He has also hammered Fischer’s opposition to rail-safety measures and her vote that delayed the provision of benefits to military veterans injured by toxic burn pits. In one commercial, Osborn, a longtime mechanic, takes a blowtorch to a TV showing one of Fischer’s attack ads.

Mostly, though, he seems to be winning support by criticizing both parties, and his success is validating his decision to spurn the Democrats. “This wouldn’t be close if he were running as the Democratic candidate,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist who has written about the “two-party doom loop,” a term Osborn has used during the campaign. Osborn has vowed to stay independent and said that he would refuse to align with the GOP or the Democratic Party as a senator (unlike the four independents currently serving in the Senate, who all caucus with the Democrats).

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Osborn’s pledge has its doubters, including fans such as Drutman. If either party has a clear majority, Osborn might be able to stay independent. But if both Osborn and Harris win, and Republicans wind up with exactly 50 Senate seats, his refusal to caucus with either party would hand the GOP a majority—and with it the ability to block Harris’s agenda and potentially her nominees to the Supreme Court. “There’s going to be so much pressure on him,” Drutman told me, “and he’s going to have to build a pretty strong infrastructure around him to manage that.”

Osborn has insisted that he wouldn’t budge. “I want to challenge the system, because the system needs to be challenged,” he told me. Osborn acknowledged that leaders in both parties “are gonna come knocking on my door, and then that’s going to allow me to use leverage to make deals for Nebraska.” Yet he gave other indications that he’d want to empower Democrats. He told me, for instance, that he supported filibuster reform and would back the Democrats’ push to remove the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to pass a law restoring abortion rights—a move the party might be able to make only if he helped them assemble a majority.

Republicans are confident that, come Wednesday morning, the question of Osborn’s party alliance will be moot. The national GOP has sent money and reinforcements to rescue Fischer’s bid—Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was stumping for her on Saturday—and her campaign has released polls showing her ahead of Osborn by several points. Independent candidates have threatened Republican incumbents a few times in recent years, only to fall short when GOP voters rallied around their party’s candidate in elections’ final weeks; in Kansas in 2014, the independent Greg Orman was polling close to Senator Pat Roberts for much of the campaign, but he lost by more than 10 points.

Left: Veterans protest at Republican Senator Deb Fischer’s rally on Saturday. Center: Senator Tom Cotton stumps for Fischer. Right: Dan Osborn, Fischer’s challenger, has run nearly even with her in polling. (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

Fischer has kept a low profile as a senator, and Republicans privately say she initially did not take Osborn seriously enough as a challenger. She’s embraced Trump in the apparent hope that his coattails will carry her to victory. When I asked Fischer why the race was so close, she pointed at me and the other national reporters who had come to one of her final rallies. “I explain his success to you folks in large part,” she said, “because I think you wanted to see a race here and you believed a lot of his polls that he put out early. We are going to win this race, and we are going to have a strong, strong showing.”

For his part, Osborn is courting Trump voters aggressively, recognizing that he cannot win with Democrats and independents alone. He has refused to say whether he’s voting for Trump or Harris. “As soon as I say who I’m voting for, I become that,” he told me. But Osborn’s closing ads leave the distinct impression that he’s backing Trump. “I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border,” he says in one. “If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.”

Osborn’s rightward turn has made it awkward for Democrats like Kleeb, the state party chair, who is clearly rooting for him even if she can’t say so publicly. “Yeah, it’s complicated!” she said when I asked about Osborn, letting out a big laugh. Kleeb told me she’s frustrated that Osborn has backed Trump on border policy and even more so that he assails both Republicans and Democrats as corrupt. “It’s unfair to criticize us as the same,” she said. Still, Kleeb continued, it’s obvious that on most issues, Osborn is preferable to Fischer, a down-the-line Republican: “We’ve told all of our Democratic voters—you need to weigh the issues that you deeply care about and who is closest to you. That’s who we suggest you vote for.”

To most Democrats in Omaha, the choice is easy. When I visited Jason Brown and Ruth Huebner-Brown, I found an Osborn sign on a front lawn festooned with campaign placards. None were bigger, however, than the one Jason created: the blue dot.

The Browns have been Harris enthusiasts since 2019, when she was their first choice in the crowded field of Democratic primary contenders then campaigning over the Iowa state line a few miles away. Inspired by the Democratic National Convention’s exhortation to “do something,” Jason began tinkering in their garage. He cut off the top of a bucket, used it to outline a circle, and spray-painted over a sign for a local lawn service. He showed it to Ruth and asked if he should add any writing, like Vote or Kamala. “No,” she replied. “It makes you stop and think for a second. Just leave it plain.”

Attendees pray at a Fischer rally (left), and the Browns make blue-dot signs (right). (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

They put the sign up in their yard in August, and soon after, neighbors started asking where they had gotten it and whether they could get one too. Before long, the Browns were ordering blank white signs from Amazon, first by the tens, and then by the hundreds. Jason made the first couple thousand by hand in their backyard, and then they enlisted the help of another neighbor, Conn, who had better equipment. After they had distributed 5,000 blue dots, the Browns finally gave up and started having them mass-produced by a political-sign company.

Jason and Ruth were telling me the story as we sat at their dining-room table, where they resembled the kind of superfans you might see satirized in a Christopher Guest movie. Both wore blue-dot T-shirts over blue jeans and blue long-sleeved shirts. Jason, 53, had a Kamala hat and blue shoes—he also has blue-shaded sunglasses—while Ruth, 58, wore blue-dot–shaped earrings. As we were speaking, the doorbell rang: A pair of young men were there to pick up more signs. (They give them out for free, though most people make donations that cover their costs.) The Browns have taken a leave of absence from their consulting business through the election; earlier this fall, they postponed a long-planned cruise.

At first, they told me, they saw the signs as part of an education campaign, because they found that many Omaha voters did not appreciate the city’s importance in the presidential election. Although the Second District has had its own electoral vote since the 1990s, the reapportionment following the 2020 census has made it more important for Harris than it was for past Democratic candidates—a result of shrinking blue states losing electoral votes to growing red ones. (In 2020, Biden wouldn’t have needed the district’s vote to reach 270, so long as he carried the Blue Wall states; he ultimately won 306 electoral votes.)

[Ronald Brownstein: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

As the blue dots took off, the Browns said they came to represent a sense of local pride, as well as inspiration to Democrats who feel isolated and powerless in red states. Ruth has tried to keep the vibe positive—she calls the signs “happy blue dots”—but she told me that the anxiety Democrats feel about the election has also played a part in the movement’s popularity. “I think there’s more enthusiasm because people are more scared this time,” she said.

I mentioned that I had spoken with one Democrat who worried that if Omaha delivered the election to Harris, Trump would make another attempt to lean on Republicans in the legislature to hand him all of Nebraska’s votes before the Electoral College meets in December. The Second District’s vote was saved in September by a GOP holdout, Mike McDonnell, who resisted pressure from other Republicans. Would he hold firm if he was all that stood in the way of Trump’s election?

Jason told me he’s sure that Republicans would come for the blue dot again, and he’s prepared for one more fight. If Omaha is responsible for electing Harris, “we’ll be running up and down that street, waving flags, tears of joy,” he said, “followed by, Oh, shit.”

Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.

Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” And by “fake news,” he meant the members of the press covering his rally.

[Read: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

The crowd whooped and clapped. Many of Trump’s rallies feature a moment’s hate for the journalists in attendance, whom he blames for, among other things, distorting his message, not praising him enough, reflexively favoring Kamala Harris, fact-checking his statements, noticing empty seats, and reporting that people leave his events early.

But journalists are only some of the many “enemies from within” whom Trump has name-checked at his rallies and on his favored social network, Truth Social. He has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” if Facebook’s moderation policies penalize right-wingers. He has suggested using the National Guard or the military against “radical-left lunatics” who disrupt the election. He believes people who criticize the Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” A recent post on Truth Social stated that if he wins on Tuesday, Trump would hunt down “lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who had engaged in what he called “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.” Just last week, he fantasized in public about his Republican critic Liz Cheney facing gunfire, and he previously promoted a post calling for her to face a “televised military tribunal” for treason. In all, NPR found more than 100 examples of Trump threatening to prosecute or persecute his opponents. One of his recent targets was this magazine.

Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)

Following today’s speech in Lititz, Team Trump is trying to spin his comments as nothing more than tender concern for the welfare of reporters. “President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, wrote in a statement. (Let’s have a moment to enjoy the self-abasement required to write that brilliantly.) He continued:

The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!

The word Orwellian is overused, but come on, Steven Cheung. You expect people to believe this crock? That jaunty final exclamation mark gives the entire statement a whiff of sarcasm, and rightly so. Trump plainly meant that, if he were targeted from a nearby rooftop, he would at least draw some small consolation if a blameless camera operator from a local TV station were taken out first.

The rest of Trump’s speech was the usual minestrone of cheap insults, petty grievances, and bizarre digressions. He repeated a claim that he’d previously made on The Joe Rogan Experience—where he said he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”—that offshore wind farms are killing whales. He suggested that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after losing the 2020 election. At times, he appeared to be boring himself, regretting that he had to deliver a stump speech that the audience had probably heard “900 times.”

He took aim at his most-hated Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “not a smart girl”; Harris was “lazy as hell”; and Adam Schiff had an “enlarged watermelon head.” He complained about “Barack Hussein Obama” and said that because Obama’s wife had criticized him, “I think we’re gonna start having a little fun with Michelle.” Notably, given his other remarks about the media, he also threatened CBS’s broadcast license because, he contended, the network had deceptively edited one of Harris’s answers in her interview with 60 Minutes. (The network denies the allegation.) For those who dismiss Trump’s threats as merely overblown rhetoric, it should be noted that he has also launched a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in a part of Texas where the sole federal judge is a Republican.

[Read: Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign]

Trump’s current mood might be attributable to his stalled momentum in recent polls and a slump in his odds of victory in betting markets. Accordingly, in Lititz, he added a new name to his list of adversaries: J. Ann Selzer, the widely respected Iowa pollster who has a track record of producing surprising results that are borne out on Election Day. Last night, her poll for The Des Moines Register found that Harris was leading by three points in Iowa, a state that Trump won in 2020 by eight. Last year, when Selzer’s poll correctly showed Trump ahead in the state’s Republican primary campaign, he called her a “very powerful” pollster who had delivered a “big beautiful poll.” In Lititz, however, he described Selzer as “one of my enemies” and lumped her together with the media: “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”

The campaign is coming to an unruly close. Trump’s surrogates are going rogue: Elon Musk has said that his drive for government efficiency would cause “temporary hardship”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged this weekend to remove fluoride from drinking water; and House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Republicans would “probably” repeal the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes U.S. semiconductor production. None of these is a winning message for the Republicans. (Johnson later said he wouldn’t try to kill the bill.)

But the bigger issue is the candidate himself. The more professional elements of the campaign appear to be losing their grip on Trump, who is tired and bored and restless for revenge. Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can say authoritatively that this has been Trump’s darkest campaign yet.

What new data from Iowa could mean for the race... and Harris on the iconic SNL

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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?”