Alex Jones looked different in the final hours of Infowars, as though he were ready for something new. Broadcasting from his Austin studio for the last time yesterday, Jones had shaved his head and ditched his standard shirt and blazer (no tie) in favor of a T-shirt with a massive red Infowars logo. For $49.99, you could buy the same shirt on his website. “Every purchase of this T-shirt goes directly to ensuring that no matter what obstacles arise, Alex Jones will continue to broadcast the truth,” the product description reads.

Jones had lost a yearslong legal battle with the parents of Sandy Hook victims, who were terrorized by Infowars fans after Jones falsely accused them of being “crisis actors.” Last year, he was ordered to pay more than $1 billion in damages to the Sandy Hook parents, forcing him to declare bankruptcy and sell his company. Yesterday morning, The Onion announced that it had bought Infowars at auction, and would turn the site into a satire platform. During his final broadcast, Jones said he was supposed to vacate the Infowars headquarters at some point that day. After 25 years, during which Jones turned a local talk-radio show into his own conspiratorial media empire, it was all ending.

Or was it? “The studios are humming and ready,” Jones said into the camera during the final stream, which happened on X rather than on the Infowars website. “They’re just three miles from here. We’re ready to go.” Jones has already established his next plan: He will, of course, continue streaming through a new website unaffiliated with the Infowars brand. And there’s good reason to suspect that it will work. After Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News, he continued to stay relevant and garner an audience on the show he hosts on X. Jones still has 3.2 million followers on X that he can direct to wherever he ends up going. (He was banned from Twitter in 2018 but reinstated by Elon Musk last year.)

His approach to conspiracism—world-encompassing theories in service of far-right ends—is now common, a fact that the show itself likes to take credit for. Modern conspiracism is all “downstream from Alex Jones,” another Infowars personality, Owen Shroyer, said in the show’s final stream. “What started at Infowars has metastasized.”

Losing Infowars is still consequential for Jones, even as he begins broadcasting from a new studio and website. Infowars’ precise influence is hard to track, but as of 2022, his show was broadcast on about 30 radio stations, and to millions who tune in online. Jones also still faces financial challenges. The Onion has taken over his supplement business, a significant source of his revenue. He will owe money to Sandy Hook families until he pays off his remaining debt.

Jones will weather this with the support of some powerful friends, however. Steve Bannon appeared on the final stream, and on Wednesday, Roger Stone broke the news live on Infowars that Tulsi Gabbard is Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence. Jones also has had a relationship with the president-elect that could be to his advantage in the future: He interviewed Trump in 2015, early in his presidential campaign. In 2016, he was a VIP guest at Trump’s GOP-nominee acceptance speech. And in 2021, J. D. Vance praised him as a “truth-teller.”

At one point while I watched the Infowars broadcast, the video cut away from Jones. This was it. Then, Shroyer and another Infowars personality, Harrison H. Smith, popped up to keep things going. Jones yelled something at them from off camera about lawyers coming in. Each successive moment of the stream felt like it could be the final one. Shroyer and Smith kept speaking in a series of dramatic aphorisms, as though they were putting the finishing touches on a monologue. Then they would pick right back up and do it again. “The system doesn’t want you to know this information” flowed into “This is not a victory for the bad guys. This is them being revealed and brought out in the open. This will only backfire.” After teasing that the stream was about to end, Shroyer interjected with: “It’s all happening right now. History is unfolding.” This had to be it. Nope. He continued: “We are the Jedi; we are destined to win in the end.”

Then Jones came back for more. “I will never surrender; I will never back down,” he said. Jones then began to muddle his way through something about how his sinking ship was tied to a new ship and that a whole armada was coming, but the armada was a stand-in for the American people. He couldn’t end his ending. The camera cut to a zoomed-out shot of him in his studio, alone at his desk, glumly looking down at some papers, with monitors showing the Infowars logo around him for the last time. The stream cut out.

And then it came back. Jones appeared in the studio, but in a different shirt, suggesting that the segment was prerecorded. Wistful, cinematic music played while Jones excitedly hawked one of his supplements—something called “Ultimate Hydraforce.” Jones joked that he was going to get in trouble for false advertising because, as it turned out, Ultimate Hydraforce wasn’t just hydrating; it was also a pre-workout supplement and has some other beneficial stuff as well. “I always seek to bring you the very best supplements; you can get the best results and come back and get them again,” Jones said. Infowars is ending. But Infowars will never really be over.

Why is a regular guy attracted to a billionaire candidate? It’s simple: Because the candidate can play to people’s fantasies. The man knows his television, loves girls, hates rules, knows how to make a deal, tells jokes, uses bad language, and is convivial to a fault. He is loud, vain, cheeky. He has a troubled relationship with his age and his hair. He has managed to survive embarrassment, marital misadventures, legal troubles, political about-faces. He’s entangled in conflicts of interest, but he couldn’t care less. His party? A monument to himself.

He thinks God is his publicist, and twists religion to suit his own ends. He may not be like us, but he makes sure there’s something about him that different people can relate to personally. He is, above all, a man of enormous intuition. He is aware of this gift and uses it ruthlessly. He knows how to read human beings, their desires and their weaknesses. He doesn’t tell you what to do; he forgives you, period.

So, how do you like Silvio Berlusconi?

Here in Italy, he loomed over our politics—and our lives—for 30 years. He created his own party in 1994 (Forza Italia, a sort of Make Italy Great Again), and a few months later, he became Italy’s prime minister for the first time. He didn’t last long, but he climbed back into government in 2001, and then again in 2008. Three years later, he resigned amid sex scandals and crumbling public finances, but he managed to remain a power broker until he died last year.

[Tom Nichols: Trump’s depravity will not cost him this election]

Silvio Berlusconi, like Donald Trump, was a right-wing leader capable of attracting the most disappointed and least informed voters, who historically had chosen the left. He chased them, understood them, pampered them, spoiled them with television and soccer. He introduced the insidious dictatorship of sympathy.

But Silvio Berlusconi is not Donald Trump.

Berlusconi respected alliances and was loyal to his international partners. He loved both Europe and America. He believed in free trade. And he accepted defeat. His appointments were at times bizarre but seldom outrageous. He tried hard to please everybody and to portray himself as a reliable, good-hearted man. Trump, as we know, doesn’t even try.

Berlusconi may have invented a format, but Trump adopted and twisted it. Trump’s victory on November 5 is clear and instructive, and it gives the whole world a signal as to where America is headed.

The scent of winners is irresistible for some people. The desire to cheer Trump’s victory clouds their view. They don’t see, or perhaps don’t take seriously, the danger signs. Reliability and coherence, until recently a must for a political leader, have taken a back seat. Showing oneself as virtuous risks being counterproductive: It could alienate voters, who would feel belittled.

American journalism—what is left of it, anyway—meticulously chronicled Trump’s deceitfulness. It made no difference, though. On the contrary, it seems to have helped him. Trump’s deputy, J. D. Vance, explained calmly in an interview that misleading people—maybe even lying to them—is sometimes necessary to overcome the hostility of the media.

I’m no better than you. I’m bad. So vote for me! This seems to be the magic new formula of American democracy. Venting and showing off flaws has become a way to reassure those voters—and there are many of them—who hate criticism. He who misbehaves is popular; those who dare to preach become unbearable. People love the Joker, not Batman—the Joker is more fun.

You don’t need to be a historian to know this; just a few history lessons are enough. The people, whether in the Athens of Plato and Demosthenes or in republican Rome, asked for leaders they could admire. This pretense lasted for centuries, in very different places and contexts. The people demanded honesty and sobriety from their leaders. They rarely got it, but at least they asked for it.  

Not even dictators escaped the rule. Italy’s own Benito Mussolini did not flaunt his excesses; he pretended to be sober and virtuous, and Italians pretended to believe it. Only autocrats and tyrants continue the farce today. A few weeks ago, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un got very angry when flyers rained down on Pyongyang showing his and his family’s luxuries to a very poor nation. Trump would have used them as election posters.

Aristocracy means “government by the best.” Today, we are in a kakistocracy, government by the worst. And tens of millions of American voters are proud of it, or at least happy to appear so. The copyright of this questionable political style belongs at least in part to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Trump himself: Both, in 2016, won by proudly displaying their whims and weaknesses.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: The minister of chaos]

In his book Narrare l’Italia, the psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja wrote: “The growth of children is not guided by the rules that parents impart, but by the examples they offer. Leaders—fathers and mothers of the people—will be able to preach what they consider necessary national virtues, but they will spread them only if they are the first to practice them.” The author must admit that this has changed. Successful leaders have stopped “preaching the necessary virtues of the nation,” instead preferring to applaud its faults and consolidate their own power. It’s more rewarding.

The words Lead by example! are the soundtrack of distant childhood, for some of us. And what was asked of a firstborn or a class leader was expected of elected leaders. If they betrayed trust—and it often happened, everywhere—they lost their job and their reputation. Today, being labeled a good example or an expert is not only anachronistic; it is risky: Who do these guys think they are? How dare they show us a path, suggest a behavior? We know how to do our own research and make mistakes on our own, thank you.

Berlusconi’s shortcomings helped fuel his success, but he wasn’t proud of them. Trump wears his flaws like medals, and is appointing people to his coming administration who have the same attitude. Berlusconi would never have allowed the equivalent of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. near Italy’s department of health. An Italian Matt Gaetz would have been considered for a reality show on one of Berlusconi’s TV channels, at most.

If this is the path that democracy chose, let’s prepare for the worst. It will become impossible to get rid of a leader elected in this way and for these reasons. What do you want from me? they will reply after having disappointed and failed. I told you who I was, and you voted for me with enthusiasm. Now shut up and be good.

When Donald Trump seemed poised to win the presidential election in 2016, Trevor Noah, then the host of The Daily Show, began the program’s live night-of special on a somber note. “It feels like the end of the world,” he said to a silent audience. “I’m not going to lie. I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place for jokes tonight, because this is the first time throughout this entire race where I’m officially shitting my pants.”

On Tuesday night, Noah’s predecessor, Jon Stewart, returned to anchor the same live presidential election-night special for the first time since 2012, and Stewart’s mood was noticeably lighter than Noah’s. Stewart didn’t make any apocalyptic declarations; instead, he seemed desperate to make his studio audience laugh—“We are obviously digging through the results to find some that you like!”—without reminding them too much of the election’s likely outcome, which had begun to clarify when the hour began. Stewart may have built his reputation as an acerbic comedic truth-teller, but on Tuesday night, he seemed subdued, more interested in soothing his viewers than in delivering biting assessments of the returns.

The overall approach felt oddly inert, perhaps a sign of how confusing the world of political comedy has become. That’s in part because comedians came to play a substantial role in Trump’s third presidential campaign. Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, went on a tour of podcasts hosted by comics who appeal to young male voters, including Tim Dillon, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan. Trump’s team also invited the comic (and another podcaster) Tony Hinchcliffe to take the stage at a rally last month at Madison Square Garden, where he made disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans that received the kind of backlash many pundits called this year’s “October surprise.”

Forget attaining celebrity endorsements from pop stars and Hollywood’s A-list talent, in other words. Both Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, seemed to recognize the need for unconventional forms of outreach, but the Trump campaign in particular eschewed traditional journalists in favor of provocative comics and hosts who would provide friendly platforms for the former president. “A survey of many hours of conversations between these comedians and Trump mostly reveals slavish affection,” observed The New York Times of Trump’s podcast appearances, “and even a certain kinship … Trump and his hosts share a disdain of news media, a reflexive paranoia about so-called cancel culture, a delight in transgression and a love of cruel insult jokes.”

[Read: Why democrats are losing the culture war]

That shift toward comedians as sources of ideological validation has left established satirists such as Stewart in an odd position. Though Stewart has enjoyed plenty of success this election year—his return as the Monday-night anchor for The Daily Show helped reverse the viewership decline that happened during Noah’s stewardship, and his contract was recently extended through 2025—he continues to face an uphill battle in maintaining his impact.

As the face of a long-running television program, Stewart is constrained by ratings concerns and runtime logistics, but he’s also committed to performing a routine that’s barely changed over the years: an opening monologue, followed by correspondent-led segments, a guest interview, and a “moment of zen.” The new cohort of podcasters may also care about audience engagement, but they’re nimbler with their content—and they’re becoming more influential as a result. Stewart’s chosen platform for his comic punditry isn’t the dominant approach for political comedy anymore. (Several of The Daily Show’s offshoots, such as Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show, and Jordan Klepper’s The Opposition, failed to last, and on Tuesday, The Daily Show was the only late-night show to air a live special.)

Yet Stewart has seemed reluctant to adjust his strategy—or to criticize the actions of some of his peers. Note how he responded to Hinchcliffe’s set at the Trump rally: On an episode of The Daily Show, he praised Hinchcliffe as “very funny” and defended him against the negative news coverage of his set. In some ways, Stewart did what he’s often done: take aim at the larger institution of the media rather than a fellow comic. But by sidestepping the opportunity to scrutinize the growth of the comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline, he avoided examining his own role as a purveyor of political humor.

Other comedians have been more willing to consider their field’s shifting responsibility. In a Substack post, the ex–Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac chided his former boss for his reaction to Hinchcliffe. “For Jon, it seems like comedians should be free to say whatever they want, wherever they want,” Cenac wrote. “And he seems more willing to defend the idea that the circumstances surrounding their jokes are irrelevant as long as people laugh.” Those “circumstances”—taking stages at rallies rather than clubs, offering their podcasts as prominent campaign stops—have also caught the attention of Marc Maron, one of the most prominent podcast-hosting comedians. Maron posted a statement to his website a week before the election criticizing contemporaries he believed had become mouthpieces for misinformation and casual bigotry. “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote. “Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant … When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism.”

[Read: What happened to Jon Stewart?]

Maron’s comments double as a demand that his fellow performers recognize the stakes of participating in this political moment. But the comedy world’s response to those stakes has run the gamut. Perhaps some of the podcasters he’s calling out want to wield actual power to sway voters—and therefore, like the powerful leaders they’re catering to, build a dedicated fan base of their own. Other comics, like the team behind Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” may see their role as entertainers meant mostly to gesture at the issues driving headlines. After this latest election cycle, the one thing that seems clear is that political comedy—the point of practicing it, the changing flavor of its influence—is growing ever muddier.

For Tuesday night’s live show, meanwhile, Stewart opted to provide mostly distraction. His punch lines were as soft as his analysis of election results, struggling to dispel the undercurrent of unease. That’s not entirely Stewart’s fault: His audience seemed tense from the start, and the show faced some unexpected developments, including announced guest Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania canceling at the last minute, forcing Stewart to improvise and fill the extra time. Only at the end of the hour did Stewart fully embrace his own distress at the election returns, putting his head in his hands as he delivered a closing statement. “Look,” he began, before groaning and stumbling over his words. “What we know is that we really don’t know anything … I just want to point out, just as a matter of perspective, that the lessons that our pundits take away from these results, that they will pronounce with certainty, will be wrong. And we have to remember that.”

The plainspoken commentary was a refreshing moment that cut through the preceding aimlessness—but it also revealed a truth about the comedic genre’s stalwarts, like Stewart. Americans look to voices such as his in anxious moments; it’s why SNL has booked the typically no-holds-barred stand-up Bill Burr to host its postelection show this weekend. Yet Stewart has never claimed to be anything more than a performer, even when he was deemed the “most trusted man in America” during his initial run hosting The Daily Show. As he pointed out, none of us knows anything—perhaps, least of all, the comics who are tasked much too often with making sense of the nation’s chaos.

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How do you transform something so big, so existential, into something people can grasp? Last night, Oprah Winfrey gave it a shot as the penultimate speaker at Kamala Harris’s grand-finale rally in Philadelphia: “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

Every presidential election is the biggest ever, but this one lacks an adequate superlative. Throughout 2024, both parties have leaned on the imagery and messaging of our Founding Fathers. The Donald Trump acolyte and former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy frequently says that we’re living in a “1776 moment.” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s democratic governor, last night invoked Benjamin Franklin’s warning about our still-young country: “a republic, if you can keep it.” It’s an oft-repeated line, but that “if” lingered in a way I’d never felt before.

Shapiro was peering out at the tens of thousands of people standing shoulder to shoulder along Benjamin Franklin Parkway at the chilly election-eve gathering. Many attendees had been there for hours, and more than a few had grown visibly restless. Each emotion, both on the stage and in the crowd, was turned up to 11—fear, hope, promise, peril. At the lectern, Shapiro’s inflection mirrored that of former President Barack Obama. So much of Harris’s campaign send-off had the feel of Obama’s 2008 celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. Will.i.am came ready with a song (a sequel to his Obama ’08 anthem, “Yes We Can”) titled—what else?—“Yes She Can.”

Around 11:30 p.m., Harris finally appeared at the base of the Rocky Steps to make her final pitch. Beyond the symbolic proximity to the Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall, this particular setting was a visual metaphor for, as Harris put it, those who “start as the underdog and climb to victory.” (Sadly, no one in the A/V booth thought to blast the Rocky horns as she walked up.) The truth is, it’s a bit of a stretch to call Harris the underdog. She is, after all, the quasi-incumbent, and polls suggest that the race is tied. Still, you sort of knew what she was getting at with the Rocky thing.

For the past nine years, the whole political world, and much of American life, has revolved around Donald Trump. He is an inescapable force, a fiery orange sun that promises to keep you safe, happy, and warm but, in the end, will burn you. Harris is running on preserving freedom and democracy, but she’s really just running against Trump. In surveys and interviews, many Americans say that they, too, are voting against Trump rather than for Harris. The election is about the future of America, but in a real sense, it’s about fear of one person.

Harris had already been in Scranton, Allentown, and Pittsburgh yesterday. But now her campaign had reached its finish line, in Philadelphia, and though I heard cautious optimism, none of the Harris campaign staffers I spoke with last night dared offer any sort of prediction. The closest I got was that some believe they’ll have enough internal data to know which states are actually in their column by late tonight, and that they expect the race might be called tomorrow morning or afternoon.

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, wrapped up in an expectedly apocalyptic and campy manner. The truth is, some of his chaos worked—he never lost our attention. Consider the weeklong national conversation about the word garbage. A comedian’s stupid joke deeming Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” might end up being a determining factor in a Trump defeat, but President Joe Biden’s comment likening Trump supporters to garbage also proved a pivotal moment for the MAGA movement. In response to Biden, Trump appeared in a bright-orange safety vest as a way of owning the insult—a billionaire showing solidarity with the working class. In a similar late-campaign moment, Trump donned an apron and served fries at a (closed) McDonald’s. It wasn’t the work wear so much as the contrast that told the story: In both instances, Trump kept his shirt and tie on. These theatrical juxtapositions, however inane, have a way of sticking in your brain.

But not everyone gets the reality-TV component of his act. Many of his supporters take his every utterance as gospel. At Trump’s final rallies, some showed up in their own safety vests or plastic trash bags. Trump’s movement had quite literally entered its garbage phase. In his closing argument last night, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, called Harris “trash.” And Trump, days after miming oral sex onstage, kept the grossness going, mouthing that House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is a “bitch.”

Trump’s campaign was much longer than Harris’s, and for that reason, I spoke with far more Republicans than Democrats at campaign events this year. Across different cities and states, it was clear that people stood for hours at Trump rallies because they still obsess over Trump the man, and because Trumpism has become something like a religion. Trump makes a significant portion of the country feel good, either by stoking their resentments or simply making them believe he hears their concerns. In the end, though, he’s also the one feeding their fears.

It can be easy to write off American politics as a stadium-size spectacle that’s grown only cringier and uglier over the past decade. But last night, in my conversations with Philadelphians who’d braved the chill to see Harris, it became clear that the show was just the show, and that they had other priorities. Sure, they’d get to see Ricky Martin perform “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and hear Lady Gaga sing “God Bless America,” but all of that was extra. A trio of 20-year-old Temple University students—two of whom wore Brat-green Kamala beanies, one of whom wore a camo Harris Walz trucker hat—told me about their hometowns. One had come from nearby Bucks County, which he’d watched grow Trumpy over his teen years. Another was from the Jersey Shore and said she believed that people would egg her house if she put a Harris sign in the front yard. Another, who was from Texas, summed up the risks posed by Trump more succinctly than almost anyone I’ve spoken with over the past two years of covering the campaign: “He’ll let people get away with promoting hate and violence in our country, and I think that is my biggest fear.”

This election has been an elaborate traveling circus, with performers playing into all manner of dreams and nightmares. Trump has long relied on the allure of the show, and the preponderance of celebrity cameos at Harris’s recent rallies proves that she, too, understands the importance of star power. But now that all of the swing states have been barnstormed, and the billions of dollars have been spent, what’s left? The pageantry has entered its final hours. Tomorrow (or the next day … or the next day), a new iteration of American life begins. We won’t be watching it; we’ll be living it.

Related:

Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy. Podcast: Does America want chaos?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

This election is a test. Three tips for following election results without losing your mind X is a white-supremacist site, Charlie Warzel writes. The micro-campaign to target privately liberal wives

Today’s News

A federal judge ruled against state and national Republicans who tried to invalidate roughly 2,000 absentee ballots returned by hand over the weekend and yesterday in some of Georgia’s Democratic-leaning counties. The FBI said that many of the bomb threats made to polling locations in several states “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” Officials in Georgia and Michigan reported that their states received bomb threats linked to Russia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over their differences on how the war in Gaza should be conducted. Gallant, who was seen as a more moderate voice in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, will be replaced by Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz.

Evening Read

Justin Sullivan / Getty

The Right’s New Kingmaker

By Ali Breland

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove Me Wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates …

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the core of the conservative movement.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Anthony Gerace. Sources: Hulton Archive; Joe Vella / Alamy.

Read. The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, “probably saved my life,” George Packer writes. And the book’s vision remains startlingly relevant today.

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X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government]

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield become a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG. Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people. Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.) Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.) Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.) Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are what make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove me wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates. He invited anyone who disagreed with him to come up one by one and take their shot, in a carnivalesque “step right up” style.

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the heart of the conservative movement. Few Republicans have as much purchase with all factions of the party. In Montana, Kirk delivered a simple message. “Now, all of you—I’m sure you’re feeling this: Things are unaffordable,” he said. “They’re out of reach. It is harder than ever to be able to have the American dream … and that is because of Kamala Harris.” Days before the Missoula event, however, Kirk had said that Haitian migrants “will become your masters” should Donald Trump lose the election, that “this election is literally about” whether Americans will be “allowed to fight back against invading armed hordes,” and that “swarms of people want to take our stuff, take women, and loot the entire nation.”

I arrived in Montana thinking that Kirk’s code-switching was part of a cynical move to expand his reach. He hosts one of the most popular news podcasts in the country, and his YouTube channel is a clout machine. But I came away realizing that Kirk is less of an influencer than an operator. While he spoke, volunteers moved around the crowd asking people if they were registered to vote. Later in the day, Kirk appeared at an event with Tim Sheehy, the GOP candidate trying to defeat Senator Jon Tester. Kirk bragged that Turning Point had registered 100 new voters that day. (A spokesperson for Turning Point USA did not respond to multiple requests for comment or an interview with Kirk.)

Kirk’s apparatus has gone from a conservative youth-outreach organization to an all-encompassing right-wing empire—one that has cultivated relationships with influential conservative faith groups, built out a powerful media arm, and hosted rallies for Trump and other top Republicans. It has allowed Kirk to wedge himself into a powerful role: He is the gatekeeper of a bridge between mainstream conservatism and its extreme fringes. Instead of merely serving as a roleplayer on the right, Kirk now leverages his influence to bend conservatism closer to his own vision. Kirk has power, and he knows it.

For a while, Kirk embraced a vanilla brand of conservatism. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to fortify a small but stable conservative youth movement with a focus on free markets and limited government. The group wanted to reach young people where they were, which included college campuses but also the internet. Early Turning Point memes read as though the organization had hired a Popsicle-stick-joke writer to make bland, conservative-minded witticisms. Kirk’s Twitter account featured mundane perspectives, such as “Taxes are theft” and “USA is the best country ever.”

Even as Trump began to take over the Republican Party, Kirk relentlessly extolled free-market capitalism and repeatedly praised markets as a near-panacea to America’s problems. Though personally Christian, he said that politics should be approached from a “secular worldview.” In 2018, he said that he understood that most people “don’t want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama” wants them to. He would probably have never described himself as an LGBTQ ally, but he was also not known to go out of his way to bash trans people or speak out against the gay “lifestyle.”

This approach did not please everyone on the right. In 2019, the young white nationalist Nick Fuentes encouraged his followers, called Groypers, to show up at Turning Point events and troll Kirk for not being far enough to the right. “You have multiple times advocated on behalf of accepting homosexuality,” a man in a suit with a rosary around his hand said at one event to Kirk, who was sitting onstage next to a gay Turning Point USA contributor. “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” Another person used the Q&A time to tell Kirk that “we don’t want centrists in the conservative movement.”

Something began to change around the end of Trump’s first term. Kirk hasn’t just followed the rest of his party to the right. He is now far more conservative than much of the mainstream GOP. Christianity in particular has become a dominant feature of Kirk’s rhetoric and Turning Point USA. Kirk’s position on religion has veered from “We do have a separation of Church and state, and we should support that” (his words to the conservative commentator Dave Rubin in 2018) to “There is no separation of Church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction” (his words on his own podcast in 2022).

In 2021, he established Turning Point Faith, a division of his organization that he has used to make significant inroads with hard-right evangelical churches and their leaders, many of whom have lent their pulpits to Kirk. He has laughed off accusations that he embraces Christian nationalism. Liberals fret about a “disturbing movement of ‘Christian nationalism,’” he said in 2022. “Do you know what that’s code for? That’s code for: You’re starting to care, and they’re getting scared.” But there aren’t a lot of other ways to describe his goal of eroding the barriers between Church and state, and Turning Point Faith’s mission of returning America to “foundational Christian values.”

Kirk has also embraced rhetoric that was previously the territory of white nationalists, making explicit reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, the conspiracy that immigration is a plot to dilute the cultural and political power of white people. Since 2022, he has posted that “Whiteness is great,” and that there is an undeniable “War on White People in The West.” On his podcast, he has accused an ambiguous “they” of “trying to replace us demographically” and “make the country less white” by using an “anti-white agenda” of immigration to enact “the Great Replacement.” Because of “them,” he’s said, “the dumping ground of the planet is the United States southern border.” Some other Republicans now dabble in Great Replacement rhetoric, but Kirk has avoided being outflanked on the right: He’s attacking Martin Luther King Jr. as “awful” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “a huge mistake.”

Some of Kirk’s rightward shift is potentially driven by him astutely putting his fingers to the wind of what’s bubbling among the base. In Montana, the crowd was most energetic when Kirk delved into points about how immigrants and trans people are making America worse. When I went out of the crowd to stand under a tree nearby, I heard a mother talking to her small daughter. “You don’t want to go over there. There’s liberals,” she said, gesturing at the fringes of the crowd, where people were observing Kirk with dour expressions. She then parroted stuff I usually see only in the most unsavory corners of the far-right internet: “They want to kidnap you and brainwash you and probably molest you.”

Late last month, Trump came out onstage with pyrotechnics blasting in front of him and dozens of Turning Point logos behind him. Kirk and his group were hosting a rally in Duluth, Georgia, for the former president. “He’s a fantastic person, the job he does with Turning Point,” Trump said of Kirk during the rally. “I just want to congratulate and thank him. He’s working so hard.”

Kirk had spoken to the crowd of roughly 10,000 just before Trump took the stage. He used the platform to explicitly suffuse the event with a nod to Christian conservatism. “We are here in a state that is a very Christian state,” Kirk said. “A state that loves God and loves Jesus.” He led the crowd in a “Christ is King” chant.

Despite Kirk’s embrace of the far right, he has continued to gain standing in the establishment wings of the right. He sat down with J. D. Vance at a Turning Point event in September, and again on Halloween. Kirk has had public conversations with high-profile conservatives such as Vivek Ramaswamy and Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt. Kirk has spent much of this year campaigning for Republican politicians. He has gone to Nebraska, where he tried to get the legislature to change how the state awards Electoral College votes, and to Ohio, where Republicans are trying to win a Senate seat.

Unlike other, sycophantic portions of right-wing media, Kirk isn’t simply a hanger-on to the conservative elite. When he can, he will try to bend elected officials toward his political vision. On multiple occasions, Kirk has publicly gone after Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Last January, several months after Johnson was elected as House speaker, Kirk posted a podcast episode titled “You Deserve Better Than What the GOP Is Giving You.” Johnson, he said on the show, was “a disappointment.” A few minutes later, he added: “Speaker Johnson is trying to gaslight you. Dare I say, he’s just lying.”

In March, Johnson went on Kirk’s show to kiss the ring. Kirk approached the conversation cordially and in good faith, but he also didn’t shy away from directly criticizing the speaker. Kirk pressed Johnson on why he hadn’t shut down the government last year and dismissed the speaker’s explanation that it would have been politically damaging: “We have been hearing that excuse for 11 years.”

Kirk’s ability to dress down one of the party’s most important members is a testament to how much power he has accrued. People like Johnson sign up for this because older politicians see Millennials such as Kirk as whispers to the rest of their generation, sometimes just because they’re younger, Jiore Craig, a senior fellow at ISD Global who has researched Kirk and Turning Point USA, explained to me: “There is this nervousness that he offers something about the internet and young people that politicians don’t know.” The belief that he can turn out young people makes politicians go to Kirk even as he tries to big-dog them, Craig said. It’s not just his appeal to youth either; alienating Kirk may mean losing an avenue to faith leaders and the broader audience he has amassed. Whether Republicans like it or not (and some don’t), they have to deal with him. This is how he has the freedom to walk around noxious far-right politics and then step back into the polite mainstream with impunity.

Even at 31, clad in saggy suit pants, Kirk has the affect of an eager college conservative. He lacks Tucker Carlson’s resolute confidence and corresponding bored disdain. He lacks the poise and charisma of far-right influencers such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. But to think of Kirk as only a media figure is to miss the point.

Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, who is writing a book about Kirk and Turning Point USA, argues that Kirk’s relationships and organizations have become so robust and far-reaching that besides Trump, Kirk is the most important person in the conservative movement. “No matter who wins in November, he will be the kingmaker,” Boedy told me.

Kirk doesn’t have an outright edge in many of the fields he trades in: Carlson and others have more popular podcasts, there are more prominent figures within the conservative faith movement, and there are better-funded conservative groups. Still, almost no one else has the relative prominence and relationships he does across so many areas. “It’s like Rush Limbaugh with six other tentacles,” Boedy said.

Kirke is all but ensured to sit in an important position on the right for years to come. He is in charge of much more than helping the right win youth voters. He has a relatively prominent political-media empire that he can use to push his ideas forward—one that works in tandem with the rest of his apparatus. His years of relationship-building with faith groups cannot be replicated by would-be challengers overnight. At least for now, Kirk has convinced Republicans that his political project is divinely ordained.

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Maybe it was always building to this: thousands of people singing and dancing to “Macho Man,” some sporting neon safety vests, others in actual trash bags, a symbolic expression of solidarity with their authoritarian hero whose final week on the campaign trail has revolved around the word garbage.

Where will the MAGA movement go from here? Trump had an answer last night, at least for the short term. He wasn’t telegraphing an Election Day victory—he was preparing, once again, to label his opponents “cheaters” and to challenge a potential defeat.

The evening’s host, Tucker Carlson, said that for most of his life as a journalist, he’d imagined that one would have to be “bereft of a soul” to stand onstage and support a politician. “And here I am with a full-throated, utterly sincere endorsement of Donald Trump.”

On with the show.

As I wandered around Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, last night, this iteration of Trumpism felt slightly different, if not wholly novel. Nine years ago, Trump held one of his first MAGA rallies not far from this venue. “Donald Trump Defiantly Rallies a New ‘Silent Majority’ in a Visit to Arizona” read a New York Times headline from July 11, 2015. Charlie Kirk, one of last night’s warm-up speakers, put it thusly: “This state helped launch the movement that has swept the globe.” All of the elements Trump needed to stoke the fire back then were still here last night: the Mexican border debate, inflamed racial tensions, metastasizing political extremism. Trump’s movement has grown, and his red MAGA hat has become a cultural touchstone. As the Arizona sun set, though, his nearly decade-long campaign of fear and despotism also had a surprising air of denouement.

Trump told Carlson he doesn’t like to look back. But last night, as he rambled (and rambled), he was sporadically reflective about all that had led to this point in his life. Trump sat in a leather chair with just a handheld mic—no teleprompter, no notes. He mostly ignored Carlson’s questions and instead tossed out ideas at random—what he calls “the weave.” In reality, it’s less lucid than he believes; more of a zigzag across years of personal triumphs and troubles. Remember “Russia, Russia, Russia”? Remember the “China virus”? Remember the time he courageously pardoned Scooter Libby? Remember how good he used to be at firing people on The Apprentice? Remember the crowd at that one Alabama rally? All of this, in his mind, amounted to something akin to a closing argument.

The event was a hurricane-relief benefit billed as Tucker Carlson Live With Special Guest Donald J. Trump. But Carlson barely spoke. Instead, he sat back in his own chair, occasionally picking at his fingers, looking somewhat mystified that this was where he’d ended up in his career, hosting Inside the Authoritarian’s Studio. He had taken the stage to the sounds of Kid Rock, but he looked as preppy as ever in a navy blazer, a gingham shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He insisted, twice, that he had bent the knee to Donald Trump without shame. Trump, he marveled, had shown him what a sham D.C. was. He lamented how those inside the Beltway treated Trump “like he was a dangerous freak, like he’d just escaped from the state mental institution.”

Carlson has grown more radical since Fox News fired him. Last night, he claimed, for instance, that the CIA and the FBI have been working with the Democratic Party to take Trump down. He implied that funding for Ukraine isn’t going to the military but is instead lining the pockets of the Washington elite: “Have you been to McLean recently?”

The man he unabashedly endorsed, meanwhile, again spoke of “the enemy within,” and attacked the enemy of the people (the media). Trump once again demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He claimed that members of the January 6 “unselect committee” had burned, destroyed, and deleted all the evidence it had collected because, in the end, they found out that Nancy Pelosi was at fault (this bit was especially hard to follow). He called for enlisting the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney into combat: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Trump blew some of his usual autocratic dog whistles, saying, for instance, that anyone who burns an American flag should be sentenced to a year in prison. He suggested that loyalists and extremists will fill his next administration, should it exist. He implied that he’d bring in Elon Musk to find ways to slash the federal budget, and let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist, examine public-health matters. “He can do anything he wants,” Trump said of Kennedy.

But perhaps the most meaningful moment of the night was when Trump said matter-of-factly that he won’t run for president again. He instead hinted that his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, will be a top 2028 contender. Win or lose, this was it, his last dystopian rodeo. Trump spoke almost wistfully about suddenly approaching the end of his never-ending rally tour. He sounded like a kid moving to a new neighborhood and a new middle school. He told his friends he’d miss them. “We’ll meet, but it’ll be different,” he said. He was in no rush to leave the stage.

The big question going into Tuesday’s election is whether the MAGA movement will fizzle out should Trump lose. Although Trump himself seems more exhausted than usual these days, his supporters are as fired up as ever. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants— a reference to Trump’s now-infamous response to the July attempt on his life—broke out among the crowd as people waited to pass through Secret Service checkpoints. I passed a man in a brown wig, a pink blazer, and a green top that read Kamala Toe, the words gesturing toward his crotch. I saw a woman wearing gold Trump-branded sneakers, and many people with Musk’s Dark MAGA hat. The latter seemed particularly notable: In addition to getting behind Vance, Trump might be inclined to pass the torch to another nonpolitician—namely, someone like Musk.

For now, though, Trump is returning to his conspiratorial election denialism. Four years ago, he tried to undermine the results in Arizona, Georgia, and other states. Last night, he singled out Pennsylvania. (A day earlier, his campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state, alleging voter suppression.) “It’s hard to believe I’m winning, it seems by a lot, if they don’t cheat too much,” he said, alleging malfeasance in York and Lancaster counties. Whether he succeeds or fails, the detritus that Trump has left behind will likely linger. “Look around, Mr. President, because there’s a lot of garbage here!” Charlie Kirk said earlier in the night. “Go to the polls on Tuesday and make sure that we all ride that big garbage truck to Washington, D.C.,” Kennedy, who was one of the warm-up speakers, implored.

Trump, though, opined with uncharacteristic nostalgia: “When I was a young guy, I loved—I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history and all of the things that can happen.” He sounded fleetingly earnest. He has undoubtedly cemented his place in history. Or, as Carlson put it earlier in the night: “Almost 10 years later, he has completely transformed the country and the world.”

Related:

Trump suggests training guns on Liz Cheney’s face. A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks

Today’s News

The White House altered its transcript of President Joe Biden’s call with Latino activists, during which official stenographers recorded that Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” according to the Associated Press. The White House denied that Biden had been referring to Trump voters. During a meeting in Moscow, North Korea’s foreign minister pledged to support Russia until it wins the war against Ukraine. The price of Donald Trump’s social-media stock fell another 14 percent today, amounting to a loss of more than 40 percent over three days.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Although AI regulation is the rare issue that Trump and Harris actually agree on, partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: These books are must-reads for Americans before Election Day, Boris Kachka writes.

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MAGA is tripping. Five of the election’s biggest unanswered questions The Georgia chemical disaster is a warning. The five best books to read before an election

Evening Read

Illustration by Katie Martin

This Might Be a Turning Point for Child-Free Voters

By Faith Hill

When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.”

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu

Watch. Rivals (streaming on Hulu) is the silliest, sexiest show of the year, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Listen. We Live Here Now, a podcast by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin, who found out that their new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump’s presidency was mitigated by his ignorance, idleness, and vanity. Trump did not know how the office worked. He did not invest any effort to learn. He wasted much of his time watching daytime television.

Defeat in 2020—and Trump’s plot to overturn that defeat—gave him a purpose: vengeance on those who bested him.

A second Trump presidency will have a much clearer agenda than the first. No more James Mattis to restrain him, no more John Kelly to chide him, no more Rex Tillerson to call him a “fucking moron.” He will have only sycophants.

Trump has told the world his second-term plans.

He has vowed to round up and deport millions of foreign nationals. Because the removals will be slow—permissions have to be negotiated with the receiving governments, transportation booked, people forced aboard—Trump has spoken of building a national network of camps to hold the rounded-up immigrants. Deportation is a power of the presidency: Trump can indeed do all of this if he is determined to.

Trump has pledged huge increases in U.S. tariffs, not only on China but on friends and treaty partners, such as Mexico. Congress has historically delegated the president’s broad authority over trade. A restored President Trump will have the power to impose tariffs, and will also have the power to exempt industries and firms that bid for his favor.

Trump intends to shut down legal proceedings, state and federal, against himself. A friendly Supreme Court appears to grant him wide leeway to do so. He has promised to pardon people serving sentences for the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. The president has the power to do that also. He has spoken of prosecuting people who donate to Democratic candidates and of retribution against media companies that criticize him. Although it’s uncertain how far the courts would let him succeed, Trump is seeking a stooge attorney general who will at least try to bring such prosecutions.

Trump ordered his allies in Congress to oppose further military aid to Ukraine and got his way for six deadly months. Trump chose as his running mate one of the GOP’s harshest critics of the Ukrainian cause. Trump boasts that he will end the fighting within weeks. That is code for forcing Ukraine to submit to Russia.

One of Trump’s former national security advisers, John Bolton, predicts that Trump would withdraw from NATO in a second term. Trump does not have to withdraw formally, however. NATO ultimately depends on the U.S. president’s commitment to upholding the treaty’s mutual-defense clause and assisting threatened NATO members. As president, all Trump has to do to kill NATO is repeat what he once said as a candidate: that unless they pay up, he won’t protect this or that ally from attack. No further action required; the deed is done.

Some Trump apologists put a gloss on his pro–Vladimir Putin instincts by arguing that abandoning Ukraine will somehow strengthen the U.S. against China. Really? China will be impressed by a United States that walked away from Ukraine’s successful war of self-defense against Russian aggression because the American president is infatuated with the Russian dictator?

Whatever theory Trump allies may confect, Trump himself made it clear in a July interview that Taiwan cannot count on him any more than Ukraine can. Trump conceives of the U.S. alliance system as a protection racket, not as an association of democracies. In his preelection interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump made the Mafia comparison explicit. He said of Taiwan and other allies: “They want us to protect, and they want protection. They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know? The mob makes you pay money, right?” A vote for Trump isn’t a vote for some Pacific-first strategy, however misconceived or addled. It’s a vote for international gangsterism. Trump feels most at home with dictators (including Xi Jinping, China’s president for life) and with client states, such as Saudi Arabia, that pay emoluments to him and to his family via their businesses.

Yet a second-term Trump will not travel a smooth path to autocracy at home and isolation from abroad. If Trump does return to the presidency, it will almost certainly occur after a third consecutive loss of the popular vote: by 3 million in 2016, 7 million in 2020, and who knows how many millions in 2024.

Since the end of the Cold War, a Republican candidate for president has won more votes than his Democratic counterpart exactly once, in 2004. Even so, the GOP has enjoyed three presidencies, and soon perhaps a fourth. Minority rule begins to look like not merely a feature of Republican administration, but actually a precondition for it. Trump Republicans may now insist, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” But most Americans assumed that we were a democracy—and believe that, to the extent we’re not, we should be.

If a president who comes to office without a majority democratic mandate starts doing the radical things Trump wants to do—building detention camps, pardoning January 6 culprits, abandoning Ukraine—he’s going to find himself on the receiving end of some powerful opposition. A president hoisted into office by a glitch of the Electoral College cannot silence criticism by invoking his popular mandate. A president who has been convicted of felonies and who fires prosecutors in order to save himself from being convicted of even more is not well positioned to demand law and order.

Trump may forget, but his opponents will not, that he was the man who wrecked the country’s centuries-long record of a peaceful transition of power. That particular clock reset itself to zero in 2021. The American tradition is now shorter than those of Moldova and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both of which have a record of peaceful transition of power stretching all the way back to 2019.

A second Trump administration will be even more of a snake pit of craziness, incompetence, and intrigue than the first was. Elon Musk will imagine himself to be the real power in the land: After all, he bought the presidency, didn’t he? Vice President J. D. Vance will scheme to shoulder aside an elderly Trump, whom he never respected. It’s amazing what a vice president can get done if he arrives at the office at six in the morning and the president doesn’t show up until nearly noon. The lower levels of the administration will see a nonstop guerrilla war between the opportunists who signed up with Trump for their own advantage and the genuine crackpots.

From the viewpoint of millions of Americans, a second Trump presidency would be the result of a foreign cabal’s exploitation of defects in the constitutional structure to impose un-American authoritarianism on an unwilling majority. It enrages pro-Trump America that anti-Trump America regards Trump and Vance as disloyal tools of Russian subversion—but we do, we have the evidence, and we have the numbers.

If Trump is elected again, world trade will contract under the squeeze of U.S. protectionism. Prices will jump for ordinary Americans. Farmers and other exporters will lose markets. Businesses will lose competitiveness as Trump tariffs raise the price of every input in the supply chain, including such basic commodities as steel and such advanced products as semiconductor chips.

As Americans quarrel over Trump’s extreme actions, the most prominent predators—Russia, China, and Iran—will prowl, seeking advantage for themselves in the U.S. turmoil. Ominously, Trump’s weakness may make great-power conflict more likely.

Putin, Xi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un may imagine that because they can manipulate and outwit Trump, they can discount the United States entirely. China especially may misinterpret Trump’s dislike of allies as an invitation to grab Taiwan—only to trigger a U.S. reaction that may surprise China and Trump alike. Until such a desperate moment, however, former allies will look elsewhere for protection. As a French cabinet minister said, only days ago: “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of the voters of Wisconsin every four years.”

Under a returned President Trump, the American century will come to a close, in the way darkly foreseen by a great 20th-century novel of Washington power, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, from 1959:

In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others … rise and rise and rise—and then … the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it.

[McKay Coppins: This is not the end of America]

Trump’s ascent has driven many to wonder how U.S. politics became so polarized, so extreme. That question, so often repeated, is also profoundly misplaced. We all regularly encounter fellow Americans who hold views different from our own. Almost all of those encounters unfold with calm and civility.

The speech and behavior modeled by Trump are emulated by only his most fervent admirers, and even then only in safe spaces, such as on social media and at his rallies. The most pro-Trump employer in America would instantly fire any employee who talked about women, racial minorities, international partners, or people who lived in big cities the way that Trump does. An employee who told lies, shifted blame, exulted in violence, misappropriated other people’s property, blathered nonsense, or just wandered around vacantly as Trump does would be referred to mental-health professionals or reported to law enforcement.

Trump’s conduct is in fact so disturbing and offensive even to his supporters that they typically cope either by denying attested facts or by inventing fictional good deeds and falsely attributing them to him: secret acts of charity, empathy, or courtesy that never happened.

Trump’s political superpower has not been his ability to activate a small fan base. If that’s all he were able to do, he’d be no more a threat to American institutions than any of the other fanatics and oddballs who lurk on the edges of mainstream politics. Trump’s superpower has been his ability to leverage his sway over a cult following to capture control of one of the two great parties in U.S. politics. If all we had to worry about were the people who idolize Trump, we would not have much to worry about. Unfortunately, we also must worry about the people who see him as he is but choose to work through him anyway, in pursuit of their own goals.

For that reason, Trump’s rise has imposed a special responsibility upon those of us with backgrounds in conservative and Republican politics. He arose because he was enabled not just by people we knew but by people we also knew to despise him.

For that reason too, his rise has generated a fierce and determined internal refusal of a kind not seen before in presidential politics. “Never Trump” is both a label for the reaction of some of the most prominent Republicans, such as Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney, and a movement that has helped tip into the Democratic column congressional seats once held by George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, and many other former party stalwarts. These did not use to be “swing seats” by any definition: Bush’s seat had been Republican-held for more than half a century until it went Democratic in 2018. Through the 2024 primaries, about one-fifth of Republicans voted against Trump to the very end, even after all of his opponents ended their campaigns.

Pro-Trump Republicans dismiss this internal refusal as unimportant. They also rage against the refusers as party traitors. I have felt that fury because I number among the refusers.

About two weeks ago, I received an email from a reader who demanded, not very politely, that I cease describing myself as a conservative if I did not support Trump’s return to the presidency:

I know a lot of you NeverTrumpers want to pretend otherwise, but the Trump presidency was a very conservative presidency, and a lot of policy objectives of the Conservative Movement were achieved in his presidency … There is never a conservative case for voting for a Democrat over a Republican due to the simple fact that in any given election (whether its federal or state or local), the Republican candidate is to the right of the Democratic candidate.

One lesson of the Trump years, however, is about how old concepts of “right” and “left” have fallen out of date in the Trump era. What was conservatism once? A politics of gratitude for America’s great constitutional traditions, a politics of free markets and free trade, a politics of American global leadership. This was the politics that excited me, as a very young man, to knock on doors for the Reagan-Bush ticket in the election of 1980.

Ronald Reagan liked to describe the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” As Trump closed his 2024 campaign, he derided the country as “the garbage can for the world.” In his first inaugural address, Reagan challenged the country “to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds.” He concluded: “And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.” Trump instead condemns the United States as a “stupid country that’s run by stupid people.”

In 1987, Reagan traveled to Berlin, then still divided by the Iron Curtain, to urge the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Three years later, Trump gave an interview to Playboy in which he condemned Gorbachev for not crushing dissent more harshly and praised the Chinese Communist Party for the murderous violence of Tiananmen Square:

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength … Russia is out of control, and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.

Reagan saluted a common American identity bigger than party. In 1982, he honored the centenary of the birth of his great opposite number among 20th-century presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Like the Founding Fathers before him, F.D.R. was an American giant, a leader who shaped, inspired, and led our people through perilous times. He meant many different things to many different people. He could reach out to men and women of diverse races and backgrounds and inspire them with new hope and new confidence in war and peace.

Forty-two years later, Donald Trump describes his Democratic adversaries, including the most recent Democratic speaker of the House, as enemies “from within.” Trump also mused about using the National Guard and the U.S. military against “the enemy within.” He has repeatedly spoken of using state power to retaliate against politicians and journalists. As president, he pressed his attorney general to prosecute his critics and perceived adversaries. Privately, he often spoke and speaks of arresting and executing opponents, including General Mark Milley, the most senior member of the military who incurred his displeasure. He has endorsed proposals to haul former Republican Representative Liz Cheney before a military tribunal to be punished for voting for his impeachment.

Even if Trump is only partly successful in crushing dissent, the authoritarian direction in which he wishes to lead the country is unmistakable. Since 2021, Trump has bent the Republican Party to his will even more radically now than he did as president. Republicans have made their peace with Trump’s actions on January 6. They wrote tariffs into their 2024 party platform. They let Trump plunder party funds for his own legal defense, and then, because they were broke, turned over their get-out-the-vote operation to Elon Musk’s personal super PAC. The Republican Party has lost its immunity to Trump’s authoritarianism.

Trump himself has only become more vengeful and bloodthirsty. He told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 about his response to two impeachments: “I became worse.” This personal instinct will guide the entire administration, and that is the meaning of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which functions as Trump’s first-year operating plan (in part because Project 2025 is the only plan Trump’s got).

If you are inclined to vote for Trump out of some attachment to a Reaganite idea of conservative Republicanism, think again. Your party, the party that stood for freedom against the Berlin Wall, has three times nominated a man who praised the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Forty years is a long time in politics. The four decades from 1924 to 1964 saw the Democratic Party evolve from one that nominated a segregationist and refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan to the party that wrote and implemented the Civil Rights Act. Over a similar interval, the Republican Party has rotated from being one of freedom and enterprise to one of authoritarianism and repression. Yet many inside the Republican world and outside—including my email correspondent—insist on pretending that nothing has changed.

A few weeks ago, a researcher released a report that tallied political contributions by almost 100,000 executives and corporate directors at almost 10,000 firms from 2001 to 2022. The tally showed a pronounced trend away from Republican candidates and conservative causes. When reported in the media, the headlines pronounced that “CEOs Are Moving Left.” Are they? Or are they instead recognizing that the party of Trump and Vance has become virtually the opposite of the party of Reagan and Bush?

Consider this example: In his 1991 State of the Union address, Bush discerned an “opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order, where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance.” Campaigning this year, Vance appeared at the Turning Point USA convention alongside the far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who announced: “We’re bringing down the new world order!”

Trump is opposed by almost every member of his first-term national-security team, and by his own former vice president; he has the support of the anti-vax crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the propagandist for Russian imperialism Tulsi Gabbard. Something revolutionary has happened inside the Republican Party: If you placed your faith and loyalty in Reagan and Bush’s party of freedom, you need to accept that the party of Trump and Vance has rejected your ideals, discarded your heroes, defiled your most cherished political memories. This GOP is something new and different and ugly, and you owe it nothing.

[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

“I believe in America.” Those words open a great American movie, The Godfather. Although, in the film, those words pulse with heavy irony—they are spoken by an undertaker to a gangster as they together plot an act of revenge against a bigoted failure of American justice—they also pulse with power. We can recognize that there is so much to doubt about America, yet we believe in it all the same.

In 1860, Americans voted on whether to remain one country or to split over slavery. In 1964, Americans voted on whether to defend equal rights before the law. So also will the election of 2024 turn on one ultimate question: whether to protect our constitutional democracy or submit to a presidency that wants to reorder the United States in such a way that it will become one of the world’s reactionary authoritarian regimes.

Some rationalizers for Trump want to deceive you that you face an unhappy choice between two equally difficult extremes. That is untrue. One choice, the Trump choice, deviates from the path of constitutional democracy toward a murky and sinister future. The other choice allows the United States to continue its cautious progress along the lines marked by the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment toward the aspiration of a “more perfect union.”

If elected, Kamala Harris will be the first woman president: a dramatic breakthrough in U.S. history. Yet, in so many ways, her presidency will be constrained. She’ll almost certainly face a Republican-controlled Senate from the start; very possibly, a Republican House, too. Even if the Democrats somehow win a majority in a single chamber of Congress in 2024, they’ll almost certainly lose it in 2026. Besides a hostile Congress, she would also face adverse courts and a media environment in which a handful of ultra-wealthy owners can impose ever-stricter limits on what may be said and who will hear it.

Yet within these inevitable limitations, Harris offers one big idea: the equal right of the female half of the American people to freedom and individuality.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, American women have become the targets of a campaign of surveillance, policing, and control. In many places, they have lost the right to protect themselves from the consequences of sexual violence. A study in an American Medical Association journal estimates that some 65,000 rape-caused pregnancies a year are occurring in the 14 states where abortion is now banned. State governments have inserted themselves into the medical care of women who miscarry their pregnancies, restricting the treatment their doctors can offer—sometimes with permanent loss of fertility or worse as a result of the government’s order.

Some conservative states are weighing restrictions on the right of pregnant women to travel across state lines to seek abortions in more liberal jurisdictions. In a 2022 interview, Vance declared himself sympathetic to such authoritarian measures:

I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation—let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity—that’s kind of creepy … And it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?

In his 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, Senator Barry Goldwater answered those who asked what he, as president, would do about this or that particular constituent interest. His words echo to this day: “I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

America’s main interest remains liberty. The election of 2024 will sway federal policy on a huge range of issues: climate change; economic growth; border security; stability on the European continent, in the Middle East, in the Indo-Pacific. Supreme above all of these issues, however, is preserving the right of the American people to govern themselves according to their constitutional rules.

Trump is not an abstract thinker. When he thinks about the presidency, he thinks about enriching himself, flattering his ego, and punishing his enemies. Yet, as he pursues his impulsive purposes, he is also advancing a bigger cause in which he has many more intelligent partners, and one that will outlast his political career. That cause is to rearrange the U.S. government so that a minority can indefinitely rule over the American majority.

As hemmed in as her presidency may be, Harris will also have a great cause to advance. Her cause will be what Lincoln’s was, and Roosevelt’s, and Reagan’s, too: to protect the right of the American majority to govern itself in defiance of domestic plutocrats and foreign autocrats. Every domestic-policy challenge—climate change, economic growth, budget deficits, border security—will follow from this prior question: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people—or government of some people, by some people, for some people?”

Voting has begun. This great ritual of American democracy reaches its climax on November 5. The right vote to cast in 2024 is both progressive and conservative: conservative because it conserves the great things Americans have already done together and progressive because it keeps alive the possibility of doing still greater things in the future. The near-term policy outlook matters far less than stopping a small cabal of sinister and suspect power-seekers from blocking forever the right of the American majority to do any great things at all.

In the immediate shock of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I posted these words:

We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

Over the succeeding four years of Trump’s term, I lived almost every day in a state of dread. Perhaps you did, too. Yet the American people proved equal to the work required of them. The guardrails shook, and in some places they cracked, yet when the ultimate test came, in January 2021, brave Americans of both great parties joined to beat back Trump’s violent attempted seizure of power.

Now here we are again. You are needed once more. Perhaps you feel wearier than you did seven years ago. Perhaps you feel more afraid today than you did then. Yet you must still find the strength to answer your country’s call. You can do it. We can do it. We believe in America.