This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump appears to experience the world through the glow of a television screen. He has long placed a premium on those who look the part in front of the camera. Paging Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Trump has picked Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS, as the agency is known, falls under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Last week, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as HHS secretary. As you may have guessed, Kennedy and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

In the pre-Trump era, it might have been a stretch to describe CMS administrator as an overtly political position. But Oz’s objective under Trump couldn’t be clearer. In a statement, Trump, using his reliably perplexing capitalization, telegraphed that Oz will bring a certain ethos to the job—a little MAGA, a little MAHA. Oz, Trump promised, will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” And, because he’s Trump, he mentioned Oz’s nine daytime Emmy Awards.

Some 150 million Americans currently rely on the agency’s insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. Oz has been a proponent of Medicare Advantage for All. Though that sounds like the Medicare for All initiative championed by progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the two programs are quite different. At its core, Medicare for All would set the U.S. on a path toward nationalizing health care. Trump would never go for that. But Medicare Advantage already exists within America’s patchwork private/public system, and Oz might push to strengthen it. He could also face budgetary pressure to weaken it. Oz’s own health-care views haven’t remained consistent. Though he once praised the mandatory universal models of Germany and Switzerland, as a Republican politician he threw his support behind privatized Medicare.

When asked about Oz’s nomination, Fetterman, his former opponent, told CNN: “As long as he’s willing to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m voting for the dude.” Some people were pissed. Victoria Perrone, who served as the director of operations on Fetterman’s Senate campaign, called out her old boss on social media: “Dr. Oz broke his pledge to ‘do no harm’ when he said red onions prevent ovarian cancer. My sis died of OC in 6/2022. This is a huge personal betrayal to me. We know he won’t protect the Medicaid that paid for her treatments,” Perrone posted on X. “I feel like I’ve been duped and 2 years of working on your campaign was a waste,” she added.

The above argument is illustrative of another reality Trump acknowledged in announcing his pick: “Make America Healthy Again” keeps growing. Oz, Trump declared, “will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He went a step further, promising that Oz will bring “a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.” Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill. Senator Claire McCaskill read three statements that Oz had made on his eponymous show:

“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”

“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”

“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

Oz’s defense that day was that his job was to be a “cheerleader” for the Dr. Oz audience. “I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them. I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family,” he testified.

He emerged from that hearing largely unscathed. Two years later, Oz would go on to read what he claimed were Trump’s medical records on that same show. He famously praised Trump’s testosterone levels and supposed all-around health. Four years after that, once Trump was president, Oz sent emails to White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushing them to rush patient trials for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID.

In the next Trump administration, those are the sorts of exchanges Oz could be having with Kennedy—or with Trump himself. How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

Related:

Trump is coming for Obamacare again. (From January) Why is Dr. Oz so bad at Twitter? (From 2022)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Another theory of the Trump movement What the men of the internet are trying to prove Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel

Today’s News

Republican members of the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of the investigation into the sexual-misconduct and drug-use allegations against former Representative Matt Gaetz. Jose Ibarra, who was found guilty of killing Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Trump tapped former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who previously led the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, to be the secretary of education.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Drought is an immigration issue, and Trump’s climate policies are designed to ignore that, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Archive Films / Getty; Internet Archive; Prelinger Associates / Getty.

Put Down the Vacuum

By Annie Lowrey

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.

I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The cancer gene more men should test for We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines. Apple lost the plot on texting. What going “wild on health” looks like

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty

Read. If you feel upset about the election, these seven books are a prescription for rage and despair, Ruth Madievsky writes.

Gather. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

After the last time Donald Trump won the presidency, in 2016, The New York Times confronted its readers with a vivid illustration of how out of touch most of them were with their fellow Americans. In a series of maps, the newspaper color-coded the United States by TV-viewing preferences, highlighting which parts of the country preferred Game of Thrones (cities) and which ones preferred American Dad! (rural areas). The starkest factoid: Trumpland’s favorite TV show was Duck Dynasty, a hunting-themed reality series that many liberals had never seen one second of.

The Times feature was just one of many pieces of media meant to serve as a wake-up call to blue America, bemoaning how the nation had split into silos. Pundits agreed that restoring unity—and curbing Trump-era extremism—would require voters to get out of their comfort zones in order to understand, connect with, and persuade the other side.

Eight years later, with Trump taking the White House in part by bringing young people to the right, it may seem that those calls were simply never heeded: that liberal America instead drew itself further inward and is now facing the fallout. But that’s not quite right. Trump’s first term was marked by concerted cultural efforts that spread “resistance” ideology into conservative enclaves. Hollywood’s endorsement of the #MeToo movement rippled into everyday workplaces; calls for racial justice were turned into prime-time football spectacles; enormously popular children’s movies and blockbusters made the case for multiculturalism. These were attempts on the left to do what it knew how to do best—influence whatever remained of “the mainstream.” But the very shape of culture was changing, and it’s now quite clear that only one side knows what to do about that.

Arguably the key architect of this ongoing political era was Andrew Breitbart, the conservative pundit—and compatriot of Trumpism’s most cunning culture warrior, Steve Bannon—who founded a series of online publications in the 2000s and died in 2012. The so-called Breitbart Doctrine stated that “politics is downstream from culture”—that is, the ideas conveyed by popular entertainment shapes consumers’ worldviews. This proposition called for conservatives to build a shadow Hollywood that tells conservative stories and raises up conservative stars (Duck Dynasty’s un-P.C. patriarch, Phil Robertson, won an award named for Breitbart in 2015). In the long run, though, the doctrine’s biggest impact has been encouraging the right to get creative with online culture.

Social media’s role in the 2016 election—helping bundle a variety of grievances into one exciting, factually pliant narrative of elites oppressing regular Americans—has been highly publicized. What’s less talked about is that it triggered a strangely regressive counteroffensive. Democrats, of course, made memes and organized online during Trump’s first term, but they also channeled energy into reforming social media through content moderation and regulatory efforts. These efforts were prudent, and notionally bipartisan. But while Democrats seemed to yearn to bring back a less anarchic paradigm, Republicans railed against perceived liberal bias in tech—meaning they wanted, in effect, an even better mouthpiece. As media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan have long argued, new communication formats change the way a society thinks of—and speaks to—itself. By all rights, an effective political movement should prioritize harnessing such changes, not reversing them.

In the 2020s, as many Democratic voters and politicians stepped back a bit from partisan warfare, the gears of culture were being refitted yet again. The old social-media platforms had been somewhat defanged, but action was happening on emerging platforms like TikTok, livestreams, and podcasts. These hypnotizing microforms—which captured most of young America, but also cut inroads across demographics—made old cultural fault lines, such as A&E versus HBO, look quaint. Conservative ideas popped up in a flurry of new fads and scenes: the manosphere, the tradwives, anti-woke comedians playing to cryptocurrency conferences. Livestreamers saw an influx of money from right-leaning interests (and, in some cases, Russian ones). When it came time for Trump to mount his comeback campaign, he could plug into a booming world of sympathetic influencers with enormous followings.

[Read: Trump’s red-pill podcast tour]

By contrast, Joe Biden’s signature effort in regard to TikTok was his administration’s support for banning it. When Kamala Harris became the nominee, she did unleash a wave of coconut-themed memes that, more than anything, excited fans of the pop stars whose songs were in the background. Late in her brief campaign, she and her surrogates also made some forays into popular podcasts. But in any analysis, these were marginal efforts compared with the old-school influence methods her campaign relied on: ad campaigns, door-knocking, and rallies headlined by mainstream celebs.

Now that she has lost, one of the many what-ifs to argue over is this: What if Harris had tried to court the millions of subscribers to Joe Rogan’s bro-beloved podcast? Trump and J. D. Vance each did their own three-hour conversation with Rogan. The host wanted to talk with Harris, but he and the campaign couldn’t agree on the logistical details: Harris’s camp had wanted Rogan to travel to her from his Austin studio, and to chat for only an hour. These were reasonable requests when judged by the standards of a traditional politician at the height of campaign season, but they were also a sign of the Harris side’s inability or unwillingness to play by the rules of the new media. The refusal may have also been a strategic move to avoid the possibility of making a gaffe on mic—but given who ended up winning the election, this, too, seems like an antiquated concern.

After all, the hottest commodity of today’s online cultural ecosystem is open conflict. Chitchat on podcasts and livestreams is transfixing because it’s unruly, argumentative, and unafraid of causing offense. (Note how videos of dozens of voters engaged in free-for-all debates, produced by the media company Jubilee, took off this election cycle). Theoretically, it’s not hard to infiltrate the new conservative information environment: Rogan tried to talk to Harris, and the similarly influential podcaster Theo Von booked Bernie Sanders. But most Democratic surrogates seem stuck on a 20th-century performance style, defined by slick sound bites or soaring, cinematic monologues. They seem reluctant to do what these new formats require, which is fight.

One example came when Rogan recently interviewed John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania whose entire brand is allegedly being no-nonsense. Rogan presented him with the conspiracy theory that Democrats were importing undocumented immigrants to swing states, and planning to give them amnesty, in order to expand their voter pool. Fetterman could have debunked that idea in any number of ways, and forcefully. Instead he did what politicians have long been trained to do in contentious interviews: find a point of agreement—“you know, immigration is always going to be a tough issue in this nation”—and change the subject. Rogan, and probably many of his listeners, took this gauziness as evidence that the conspiracy theory was right. The day before Rogan endorsed Trump, the podcaster posted the clip of the exchange with the note “I think everyone should understand exactly what is happening.”

Harris wouldn’t have won just by going on a few more podcasts—but if more Democrats had spent more of the past four years in the mix, figuring out how to spar, complicating the right’s narratives about inflation and immigration, finding ways to redirect attention toward their own agenda, who knows? This new ecosystem is now so visible—and so obviously connected to the rightward shift among young people that helped reelect Trump—that to label it alternative seems ridiculous. Still, the temptation to ignore it, for people who are less than enchanted with Trumpism, will only grow under the new administration. Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

Photographs by Jonno Rattman

Updated at 8:50 a.m. ET on November 3, 2024

An hour’s drive from downtown Pittsburgh is one of the most beautiful places in America—Fallingwater, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s late masterpiece. The house is a mass of right angles, in ochre and Cherokee red, perched above the Bear Run waterfall that provides the house its name.

Fallingwater was commissioned in 1934 by a couple, Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann, whose family had made its fortune from a brick-and-mortar business—a department store in Pittsburgh founded in 1871, when the city was flush with steel and glass money. Edgar became a generous patron of the arts in Pittsburgh and helped raise money for a local arena. Before he bought the Fallingwater site outright, the land had been leased to the store’s employee association, which allowed workers to spend their summers there.

Unlike today’s rich, many of whom make their money from ones and zeros, the Kaufmann family’s money came from a place and its people—the matrons of Pittsburgh who needed new pantyhose, the girls who met under the store’s ornate clock, the parents who took their children to see Santa. In the age before private jets, the Kaufmanns spent their leisure time near that place too. Fallingwater was built to be their summer retreat.

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

Lately, though, Pennsylvania has been on the receiving end of a different display of wealth and power. Elon Musk has made Donald Trump’s return to the White House his personal cause. He has so far donated at least $119 million to his campaign group, America PAC, and has devoted considerable energy to campaigning in the state where he went to college. The South African–born Tesla magnate, who usually lives in Texas, set up what The New York Times described as a “war room” in Pittsburgh. He has held town-hall meetings in several counties across the state. He announced at a Trump event in Harrisburg that he would write $1 million checks to swing-state voters, in what the Philadelphia district attorney has described as an “illegal lottery scheme.” And Musk is presenting himself, to some skepticism, as a fan of both of the state’s NFL teams, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Pennsylvania, which supported Democrats in six consecutive presidential elections before narrowly voting for Trump in 2016 and then returning to the Democrats in 2020, is widely expected to be the tipping-point state in the Electoral College next week. “Pennsylvania is caught in the middle of a realignment of the American electorate,” the polling analyst Josh Smithley, who runs the Pennsylvania Powered Substack, told me. The wealthier suburbs have been moving left as the rural areas “have been rocketing to the right, propelled by diminishing white working-class support for the Democratic Party.” The commonwealth is one of only six states in the country where more than 70 percent of current residents are homegrown. It is three-quarters white, and a third of its residents have a bachelor’s degree—lower than in neighboring Northeast Corridor states.  

At the moment, Musk is merely the wealthiest and most frenetic of the many political operatives showering Pennsylvanians with attention. If you found yourself caught in unexpected traffic there in October, it’s quite possible that a motorcade or rally roadblock was responsible. Every television ad break is stuffed with apocalyptic messaging from the two campaigns. Leaflets are slid under doors in quantities that would make environmentalists apoplectic.

Along with the economy, Republican messaging here has focused on the border wall and crimes committed by immigrants. But Pennsylvania is also the home of one of the Democrats’ most intriguing—and most promising—pushbacks to this narrative. Folksy populists including Senator John Fetterman and vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz are peddling their own version of “beware of outsiders.” In their telling, however, the interlopers are predatory plutocrats—such as Musk—and carpetbagging candidates from out of state. During the Eagles game on October 27, a Democratic ad used a clip of Trump saying that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.” A narrator intoned, “They don’t like us. We don’t care. Because here’s the thing that people like Donald Trump don’t understand: We’re Philly. F***ing Philly.” Perhaps with a male audience in mind, the underlying visuals were ice-hockey players having a punch-up and Sylvester Stallone smacking someone in Rocky.

Both campaigns, then, are posing versions of the same question: Who are the real outsiders? Who are “they”?

Reading, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic) Reading, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

In the past several months, Trump has held more than a dozen rallies and roundtables in Pennsylvania—including the one in Butler where he was nearly assassinated, and a second at the same spot, where Musk joyfully gamboled behind him before formally delivering his endorsement.

The mid-October event I attended in Reading, a small city where two-thirds of the population is Latino or Hispanic, was more low-key. But waiting to get into Santander Arena, I realized something: This was the Eras Tour for Baby Boomers. The merch. The anticipation. The rituals. The playlist of uplifting bangers. The length.

In towns and cities that feel forgotten, these rallies create a sense of community and togetherness. Taylor Swift concerts have friendship bracelets; this crowd had red Make America Great Again hats. (The “dark MAGA” version popularized by Musk was not yet en vogue.) For the Eras Tour, a concertgoer might make their own copy of Swift’s green Folklore dress, or her T-shirt that says NOT A LOT GOING ON AT THE MOMENT. The slogans at the Reading event were infinitely varied, but most were at least mildly aggressive. IF YOU DON’T LIKE TRUMP, YOU WON’T LIKE ME read one woman’s T-shirt. The men were just as fired up. For months, I have been arguing to friends that the widespread, illicit use of muscle-building steroids—which can cause rage, paranoia, and mood swings—might explain some of the political currents among American men. I usually can’t prove it, but here a large man wore a sleeveless vest that read MAKE ANABOLICS GREAT AGAIN.

Behind me in line were a mother and her two daughters—very Swiftie-coded, except they wanted to talk about “how the economy went to shit when Biden got in,” as the elder daughter put it. The mother raised the specter of Trump’s family-separation policy—which The Atlantic has extensively chronicled—only to dismiss it as a myth. She liked Trump, she told me, because he was a businessman: “People say he went bankrupt, but I think that’s smart. Finding a loophole.” Not so smart for the people he owed money to, I observed. The conversation died.

Inside the arena, I got to chatting with 34-year-old Joshua Nash, from Lititz, in Lancaster County. He was sitting alone at the back of the arena wearing a giant foam hat that he had bought on Etsy for $20 and then put in the dryer to expand. He was both a very nice guy and (to me) an impenetrable bundle of contradictions. He would be voting for Trump, he said, despite describing himself as a pro-choice libertarian who was “more left-leaning on a lot of issues.” He worked for Tesla maintaining solar panels, “but I’m not big on the whole climate thing.” He had given up on the mainstream media because of its bias and had turned to X—before Community Notes, the social-media platform’s crowdsourced fact-checking program, repelled him too. “I just want the facts,” he told me.

The campy, carnivalesque atmosphere of Trump rallies—halfway between megachurch and WrestleMania—is hard to reconcile with the darkness of the sentiments expressed within them. How could anything be alarming, many of the former president’s supporters clearly think, about such a great day out? After all, like the Eras Tour, Trump’s rally circuit has created its own lore. At the front, you might see the “Front Row Joes,” who arrive hours early to bag the best spots in the arena, or Blake Marnell, also known as “Mr. Wall,” who wears an outfit printed with bricks meant to resemble Trump’s promised border barrier. Another regular is “Uncle Sam,” who comes decked out in candy-striped trousers and a stars-and-stripes bow tie. He leads the crowd in boos and cheers.

Trump feeds off his fans’ devotion, making them part of the show. In Reading, he praised the Front Row Joes while claiming that his events were so popular, they struggled to secure front-row seats, and then moved on to “the great Uncle Sam. I got to shake his hand. I have no idea who the hell he is. I got to shake his hand two weeks ago. He has the strongest handshake. I’m saying, ‘Man, that guy’s strong.’ Thank you, Uncle Sam. You’re great. Kamala flew to a fundraiser in San Francisco, a city she absolutely destroyed.”

Did you catch that curveball there? It wasn’t any less jarring in real time. Listening to Trump’s style of speaking—which he calls the “weave”—re-creates the experience of falling asleep during a TV program and missing a crucial plot point before jerking awake and wondering why the protagonist is now in Venice. Every time I zoned out for a few seconds, I was jolted back with phrases like “We defeated ISIS in four weeks” (huh?) and “We never have an empty seat” (fact-check: I was sitting near several hundred of them), or the assertion that Howard Stern is no longer popular, so “I dropped him like a dog.” You have to follow the thread closely. Or you just allow the waves of verbiage to wash over you as you listen for trigger words like the border and too big to rig.

Along U.S. Route 30 (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

At his rally in Reading, Trump made several cracks about the “fake news” media, which had turned out in droves to record him from an elevated riser in the middle of the arena. “They are corrupt and they are the enemy of the people,” he said. “We give them the information and then they write the opposite, and it’s really disgusting.” A wave of booing. A man in the crowd shouted, “You suck!”

A few days later, at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in the windswept western city of Erie, Senator Fetterman emerged in a sweatshirt, shorts, and a yellow wool Steelers hat with a bobble that made him look like an oversize Smurf. During his short speech, Fetterman twice mentioned the media’s presence, and people actually cheered. (About a third of Democrats trust newspapers, compared with just 7 percent of Republicans, according to Gallup.) “The national media is here,” Fetterman told the audience. “Want to know why? Because you pick the president!”

Fetterman’s speech attacked a series of Republican politicians whom he depicted as outsiders—disconnected elites. He roasted the vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance for allegedly not wanting to go to Sheetz, the convenience-store chain whose headquarters are in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He mocked his former Senate rival, the Trump-endorsed television personality Mehmet Oz, whose campaign never recovered from the revelation that he ate crudités and lived in New Jersey. He urged the crowd to vote against the Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick, who was born in Pennsylvania but spent his hedge-fund millions on a house in the tristate area. “You’re going to send that weirdo back to Connecticut,” Fetterman told the crowd.

[Read: Five of the election’s biggest unanswered questions]

The signs and T-shirt slogans at the Erie rally tended to be less stern than twee. I saw a smattering of CHILDLESS CAT LADY and a lot of Brat green. During the warm-up, Team Harris entertained the crowd with a pair of DJs playing Boomer and Gen X hits: Welcome to America, where your night out can include both a sing-along to Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and a warning about the possible end of democracy. When Harris finally arrived onstage, to the sound of Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” her speech was tight, coherent … and clichéd. At one point, she asked the crowd: “Why are we not going back? Because we will move forward.” But you can’t say that Harris isn’t working for this: After the speech, she stuck around to fulfill a dozen selfie requests. At one point, I saw her literally kiss a baby.

The Democrats have placed a great deal of hope in the idea that Harris comes off as normal, compared with an opponent who rants and meanders, warning about enemies one minute and swaying along to “Ave Maria” the next (and the next, and the next …). This contrast captures what most people in the United Kingdom—where a majority of Conservative voters back Harris, never mind people on the left—don’t understand about America. How is this a close election, my fellow Britons wonder, when one candidate is incoherent and vain, the generals who know him best believe he’s a fascist, and his former vice president won’t endorse him? That message has not penetrated the MAGA media bubble, though: Time and again, I met Trump voters who thought that reelecting the former president would make America more respected abroad.

In Western Europe, many see America’s presidential election this year not as a battle between left and right, liberal and conservative, high and low taxes, but something more like a soccer game between a mid-ranking team and a herd of stampeding buffalo. Sure, the buffalo might win—but not by playing soccer.

Scenes along U.S. Route 30 (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

The next day, I got up early and set my rental car’s navigation system for a destination that registered, ominously, as a green void on the screen. This was a farm outside Volant (population 126), where Tim Walz would be talking to the rare Democrats among a fiercely Trump-supporting demographic: Pennsylvania farmers.

The work ethic of farmers makes Goldman Sachs trainees look like quiet quitters, and the agricultural trade selects for no-nonsense pragmatists who are relentlessly cheerful even when they’ve been awake half the night with their arm up a cow. Accordingly, many people I met at the Volant rally didn’t define themselves as Democrats. They were just people who had identified a problem (Trump-related chaos) and a solution (voting for Harris). “I don’t think we’re radical at all,” Krissi Harp, from Neshannock Township, told me, sitting with her husband, Dan, and daughter, Aminah. “We’re just down the middle with everything … All of us voted straight blue this year, just because we have to get rid of this Trumpism to get back to normalcy.”

Danielle Bias, a 41-year-old from Ellwood City, told me she was the daughter and granddaughter of Republicans, and she had volunteered for Trump in 2016. “This will be the first time I cross the line, but this is the first time in history I feel we need to cross the line to protect our Constitution and to protect our democracy,” she said. Her husband— “a staunch Republican, a staunch gun owner”—had followed her, as well as her daughter. But not her 20-year-old son. “He believes a lot of the misinformation that is out there, unfortunately,” Bias said, such as the idea that the government controls the weather.

The Democratic plan to take Pennsylvania rests partly on nibbling away at the red vote in rural counties. The farm’s owner, Rick Telesz, is a former Trump supporter who flipped to Biden in 2020 and has since run for office as a Democrat. Telesz’s switch was brave in the middle of western Pennsylvania, Walz said in his speech, and as a result, Telesz would “probably get less than a five-finger wave” from his neighbors.

Walz is the breakout star of 2024, one of those politicians in whom you can sense the schtick—folksy midwestern dad who’s handy with a spark plug—but nevertheless get its appeal. He walked out to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” in which the singer expresses the hope that he will live and die in the place where he was born. Walz had dressed for the occasion in a beige baseball cap and red checked shirt, and he gave his speech surrounded by hay bales and gourds. “Dairy, pork, and turkeys—those are the three food groups in Minnesota,” he told the crowd, to indulgent laughter, in between outlining the Democrats’ plans to end “ambulance deserts,” protect rural pharmacies, and fund senior care through Medicare.

Walz also wanted to talk about place. He grew up in Minnesota, where each fall brought the opening of pheasant season, a ritual that bonded him, his father, and his late brother. “I can still remember it like it was yesterday,” he said. “Coffee brewing … The dogs are in the field. You’re on the land that’s been in your family for a long time, and you’re getting to participate in something that we all love so much—being with family, being on that land and hunting.”

Then Walz turned Trump’s most inflammatory argument around. Yes, the governor conceded, outsiders were coming into struggling communities and causing trouble. “Those outsiders have names,” he said. “They’re Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.” Why were groceries so expensive when farmers were still getting only $4.10 a bushel for corn and $10 for soybeans? Middlemen, Walz said—and venture capitalists like Vance. “I am proud of where I grew up,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade that for anything. And Senator Vance, he became a media darling. He wrote a book about the place he grew up, but the premise was trashing that place where he grew up rather than lifting it up. The guy’s a venture capitalist cosplaying like he’s a cowboy or something.”

A roadside stand off U.S. Route 30 sells Trump gear. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

On a sunny day at the Kitchen Kettle Village in Lancaster County, shoppers browsed among quilts, homemade relishes, and $25 T-shirts reading I ♥ INTERCOURSE in honor of a charming community nearby, whose sign presumably gets stolen quite often. Everyone I spoke with there was voting for Trump, and most cited the economy—specifically, inflation, which is immediately visible to voters as higher costs in stores. Among them was Ryan Santana, who was wearing a hat proclaiming him to be Ultra MAGA. He told me that money was tight—he was supporting his wife to be a stay-at-home mom to their young daughter on his salary as a plumbing technician—which he attributed to Biden’s policies. He also mentioned that he had moved from New York to Scranton to be surrounded by people who found his opinions unremarkable. “The left can do what they want,” he said. “Out in the country, we do what we want.”

Throughout my journey around Pennsylvania, I asked voters from both parties what they thought motivated the other side. Kathy Howley, 75, from Newcastle, told me at the Walz rally that her MAGA neighbors seemed to be regurgitating things they had heard on the news or online. “I try to present facts,” Howley said. “Why aren’t people listening to facts?” Many Trump voters, meanwhile, saw Democrats as spendthrifts, pouring money into their pet causes and special-interest groups, unwilling to tackle the border crisis in case they are called racist—or, more conspiratorially, because they think that migrants are future Democrats.

While out driving, I twice saw signs that read I’M VOTING FOR THE FELON. This was a mystery to me: Conservatives who in 2020 might have argued that “blue lives matter” and decried the slogan “Defund the police” as dangerous anarchy were now backing the candidate with a criminal record—and one who had fomented a riot after losing the last election. For those who planned to vote for Trump, however, January 6 was an overblown story—a protest that had gotten out of hand. “If he didn’t respect democracy, why would he run for office?” asked Johanna Williams, who served me coffee at a roadside café. When I pressed her, she conceded that Trump was no angel, but she believed he could change: “He does have a felony charge, but I still think that there is a little bit of good that he could do.” For the 20-year-old from rural Sandy Lake, stopping abortion was the biggest election issue. Even if a woman became pregnant from sexual assault, Williams believed, she should carry the pregnancy to term and give the baby to a couple who couldn’t have children.

I also met Williams’s mirror image. Rachel Prichard, a 31-year-old from Altoona, was one of those who snagged a selfie with Harris at the rally in Erie, which she proudly showed me on her phone as the arena emptied. She was voting Democratic for one reason: “women’s rights.” She had voted for Trump in 2016 “for a change,” and because she thought “he gave a voice to people who felt they didn’t have one.” Instead of helping, though, Trump had “taught them to yell the loudest.” Rachel had come to the arena with her mother, Susan, who had an even more intriguing voting history: She was a registered Republican who worried about high welfare spending and had voted for Trump twice, but she switched allegiance after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The Prichards are part of a larger female drift toward the Democrats in this election cycle, prompted by the repeal of Roe. Many such women are unshowy and private, the type who turn out for door-knocking but would be reluctant to get up on a podium—the opposite of the male MAGA foghorns who now blight my timeline on X. If Harris outperforms the polls in Pennsylvania, and across the country, it will be in no small part because of these women.

Leaves blowing on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic) Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

Fallingwater might be a relic of an era when the social contract seemed stronger, but another Pennsylvania landmark reminded me that Americans have endured polarization more bitter than today’s.

In Gettysburg, the statues of Union General George Gordon Meade and Confederate General Robert E. Lee stare at each other across the battlefield for eternity— although the solemnity is somewhat disrupted by a nearby statue of Union General Alexander Hays that appears to be lifting a sword toward a KFC across the road. A stone boundary at what’s known as High Water Mark—the farthest point reached by Confederate soldiers in the 1863 battle—has become a modest symbol of reconciliation. In 1938, the last few living veterans ceremonially shook hands across the wall.

I was visiting Gettysburg to understand how the country came apart, and how its politicians and ordinary citizens tried to mend it again. The Civil War pitted American against American in a conflict that left about 2.5 percent of the population dead. During three days of fighting at Gettysburg alone, more than 50,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. The Civil War still resonates today, sometimes in peculiar ways. In Reading, Trump had asked the crowd if it wanted Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, restored to its former name of Fort Bragg, after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. His listeners roared their approval—never mind that Pennsylvania fought for the Union.

The address that Abraham Lincoln gave when he dedicated the Union cemetery there is now remembered as one of the most poignant (and succinct) in American history. By some accounts, though, it flopped at the time. “He thought it was a failure,” William B. Styple, a Civil War historian who was signing books in the visitor center’s gift shop, told me. “There was no crowd reaction.” Only when Lincoln began to read accounts of the address in newspapers was he reassured that anyone would notice his plea “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

When I reached the cemetery where Lincoln spoke, a ranger named Jerry Warren pointed me to the grass that marks historians’ best guess for the precise spot. When I told him that I was there to write about the presidential election, he paused. “In the middle of a civil war,” he said, “Lincoln never mentioned us and them.”

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

Now, I can’t quite believe that—the discrete categories of enemies and allies are sharply defined during wartime, as the blue and gray military caps in the gift shop made clear. But I see why Pennsylvanians might reject the suggestion that the gap between red and blue is unbridgeable. What I heard from many interviewees across the political spectrum was a more amorphous sense that something has gone amiss in the places they hold dear, and that nobody is stepping in to help. Perhaps a fairer way to see things is that many communities in Pennsylvania feel overlooked and underappreciated three years out of every four—and the role of a political party should be to identify the source of that malaise.

When I came back to Pittsburgh from Fallingwater, I got to talking with Bill Schwartz, a 55-year-old lifelong city resident who works the front desk at the Mansions on Fifth Hotel—another legacy of the city’s industrial golden age, built for the lawyer Willis McCook in 1905. Within a minute, he began to tell me about the diners and dime stores of his youth, now gone or replaced with vape shops and empty lots. (The Kaufmann family’s once-celebrated department store rebranded after Macy’s bought the chain in 2005. Its flagship location later closed.)

Schwartz, who is Black, lowered his voice as he recounted the racial slurs and insults that were shouted at him in the 1980s. But he fondly remembered the Gus Miller newsstand, dinners at Fat Angelo’s downtown, and nights at Essie’s Original Hot Dog Shop in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, home of a gnarly stalagmite of carbs known as “O Fries.” “It was a great hangout spot,” he said—his version of the bar in Cheers. But after the pandemic, he wandered down there and discovered a load of guys in construction gear. They had already gutted the place down to its wooden beams.

Did anyone try to save the Original Hot Dog Shop? Schwartz sighed. “That would require rich people to care about where they came from.”