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Among Donald Trump’s many campaign-trail promises was his threat to dismantle the Department of Education, which he has claimed without basis is filled with “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.” But the president-elect seems to want to have it both ways: In trying to hamstring the federal agency, Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda.

Trump proposed dismantling or dramatically cutting the DOE during his 2016 run, but he didn’t follow through while in office. This time, even if he does stick with it, he’s not likely to succeed: Because the department was elevated to a Cabinet-level agency by an act of Congress under President Jimmy Carter, shutting it down would likewise require an act of Congress. Passing such a law is a probable nonstarter even though Republicans will soon control the House and Senate. It would require a 60 percent vote in the Senate (at least as long as the filibuster is in place), and some Republicans would likely not support cutting the DOE, because it could be unpopular with their constituents. Red, rural, low-income areas are among the parts of the country whose school districts receive the most Title I supplemental funding from the agency. Although the DOE has found its place in the crosshairs of the culture wars, its daily function largely involves distributing funds to K–12 schools and administering federal loan programs for college students—not getting involved in the curriculum issues that inflame the political right.

Whether he follows through on his DOE threat or not, Trump has other channels through which to alter America’s schools. Trump’s statements on the campaign trail suggest that he’s likely to use his executive power to roll back the changes President Joe Biden made to Title IX, which related in part to protections for LGBTQ students and rules for how colleges respond to allegations of sexual violence on campus (these changes are currently blocked in some states). Trump’s platform also states that he “will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency, including the Department of Education, to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition, at any age,” and he has signaled that he may threaten to withhold federal funds from schools that don’t fall in line. Trump and his team may also push to direct public money to parents with students in private and religious K–12 schools through a system known as “school choice” vouchers, which has gained political momentum after sustained attacks on public schools from Republican politicians (vouchers were a priority of Trump’s last education secretary, Betsy DeVos, too).

Conservative politicians have long been outwardly skeptical of the federal government playing a major role in schools—yet many are also inclined to push through policy priorities on education when they are in positions of national power, Jon Valant, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told me. The Department of Education, in particular, has been an on-and-off boogeyman of Republicans. President Ronald Reagan talked about closing the agency as part of his effort to shrink the federal government (obviously, he did not succeed). But for all the talk about reducing the federal government’s power, eliminating the DOE would likely just mean moving things around—the Justice Department might handle civil-rights programs currently managed by the DOE; the Treasury Department might take over student-loan administration. It’s not clear that these changes “would actually shrink the federal role in education or the cost of administering those programs,” Valant told me.

Even as he claims that he will axe the department, Trump is moving forward with staffing it. He has put forth Linda McMahon, a major campaign donor with roots in the professional wrestling world, as his secretary of education. McMahon fits the description of some of Trump’s other recent Cabinet picks: a friend or loyalist who is unqualified for the role at hand. She has scant experience working in or with schools—she once claimed to have a degree in education because she had spent a semester student-teaching, The Washington Post and the Hartford Courant reported. But the choice of McMahon does not send as strong a signal as selecting a louder culture-war voice, such as Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, or the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo—all of whom policy experts speculated about as possible picks—might have.

In his first term as president, Trump spoke with bombast about his education plans but didn’t end up doing much. The national conversation on schools was in a different place then—before the culture wars further heated up and public trust in schools and other institutions declined. Trump and his allies have made schools a villain in many of the social issues he centered his campaign on. This time, he may have more incentive to take action, if he’s willing to do the work of transforming the system.

Related:

Donald Trump claims public schools offer sex-change surgeries. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

Today’s News

Former Representative Matt Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration for the attorney-general role in Trump’s second administration. Trump announced that former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is his new pick for the position. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif—whom Israel claims to have killed—over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Brazil’s federal police announced that former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people have been indicted for allegedly plotting a coup after he lost in the 2022 elections.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: The bean—small, humble, protein-dense—has the potential to remake American diets, Lora Kelley writes. But it also has an image problem.

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Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker

By Arthur C. Brooks

You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such paradoxical questions have been used for centuries to train young monks, who were instructed to meditate on and debate them. This was intended to be taxing work that could induce maddening frustration—but there was a method to it too. The novitiates were not meant to articulate tidy answers; they were supposed to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself—for this was the path to enlightenment.

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A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.

One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown.

Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, there is nowhere near the same level of support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—which is why Donald Trump kept bringing up the issue. His campaign also barraged swing-state voters and sports fans with ads reminding them that Kamala Harris had previously supported taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. The commercials were effective: The New York Times reported that Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, found that one ad “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The Harris campaign mostly avoided the subject.

Since the election, reports of dissent from this strategy have begun to trickle out. Bill Clinton reportedly raised the alarm about letting the attacks go unanswered, but was ignored. After Harris’s loss, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts went on the record with his concerns. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the Times. The recriminations go as far as the White House, where allies of Joe Biden told my colleague Franklin Foer that the current president would have countered Trump’s ads more aggressively, and “clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”

One problem: Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves. His officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors, and in January 2022, his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define the word woman, telling Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

On sports—an issue seized on by the Trump campaign—Biden’s White House has consistently prioritized gender identity over sex. Last year, the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, with the election looming, this part of the Title IX revision was put on hold.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions, and did not have the courage, or strategic sense, to reject them publicly. Nor did she defend them.  

The fundamental issue is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia. But it isn’t: When trans men or nonbinary people who were born female have competed in women’s sports against other biological females, no one has objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, caused controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Henig did so without any protests. (He was not taking testosterone and so did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that regular Americans can understand is difficult: On CNN Friday, when the conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton said that “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe that boys should play girls’ sports,” he was immediately shouted down by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was a “slur,” and he “was not going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also rebuked Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a way that is respectful.”

A few Democrats, such as Colin Allred, a Senate candidate in Texas, attempted to counter Republicans’ ads by forcefully supporting women’s right to compete in single-sex sports—and not only lost their races anyway, but were attacked from the left for doing so. In states such as Texas and Missouri, the political right is surveilling and threatening to prosecute parents whose children seek medical treatments for gender dysphoria, or restricting transgender adults’ access to Medicaid. In this climate, activists believe, the Democrats should not further jeopardize the rights of a vulnerable minority by legitimizing voters’ concerns. “Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LBGTQ-engagement director, wrote on X. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”

During the race, many journalists wrote about the ubiquity—and the grimness—of the Trump ads on trans issues, notably Semafor’s David Weigel. But at the time, I was surprised how dismissive many commentators were about their potential effect, given the enormous sums of money involved. My theory was that these ads tapped into a larger concern about Democrats: that they were elitists who ruled by fiat, declined to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics as bigots. Gender might not have been high on voters’ list of concerns, but immigration and the border were—and all the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those subjects, too.

Not wishing to engage in a losing issue, Harris eventually noted blandly that the Democrats were following the law on providing medical care to inmates, as Trump had done during his own time in office. On the integrity of women’s sports, she said nothing.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

How did we get here? At the end of Barack Obama’s second term, gay marriage was extended to all 50 states, an achievement for which LGBTQ groups had spent decades campaigning. In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County found that, in the words of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” Those advances meant that activist organizations, with large staffs and existing donor networks, had to go looking for the next big progressive cause. Since Trump came to power, they have stayed relevant and well funded by taking maximalist positions on gender—partly in reaction to divisive red-state laws, such as complete bans on gender medicine for minors. The ACLU, GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and other similar groups have done so safe in the knowledge that they answer to their (mostly wealthy, well-educated) donors, rather than a more diverse and skeptical electorate. “The fundamental lesson I hope Dem politicians take from this election is that they should not adopt positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter, who is a white, non-college 50-yr-old living in a small-city suburb,” the author (and Atlantic contributing writer) James Surowiecki argued last week on X.

Even now, though, many Democrats are reluctant to discuss the party’s positions on trans issues. The day after Moulton made his comments, his campaign manager resigned in protest, and the Massachusetts state-party chair weighed in to say that they “do not represent the broad view of our party.” But Moulton did not back down, saying in a statement that although he had been accused of failing “the unspoken Democratic Party purity test,” he was committed to defending the rights of all Americans. “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democrats, faced a similar backlash. He initially told reporters, “There’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” but he quickly walked back the comments. “I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today,” Hinojosa said. “In frustration over the GOP’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.” (On Friday, he resigned, citing the party’s “devastating” election results in the state.)

The tragedy of this subject is that compromise positions are available that would please most voters, and would stop a wider backlash against gender nonconformity that manifests as punitive laws in red states. America is a more open-minded country than its toughest critics believe—the latest research shows that about as many people believe that society has not gone far enough in accepting trans people as think that it has gone too far. Delaware has just elected the first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride. But most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.

There is no single explanation for Donald Trump’s unambiguous win. But if, as we were constantly told, this was in fact the most important election of our lives, in which the future of democracy really was at stake, Democrats never conducted themselves that way.

It was an egregious mistake—not just in retrospect but in real time—to allow Joe Biden to renege on his implicit promise to be a one-term president, and to indulge his vain refusal to clear the way for younger and more charismatic leaders to rise up and meet the magnitude of the political moment. Perhaps no candidate, not even one blessed with the talents of a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, could have overcome the handicap imposed on Kamala Harris when she emerged valiantly from the wreckage of the Weekend at Bernie’s campaign this summer, which her own administration had so brazenly tried to sneak past the voting public.

But other major mistakes were made over the past four years. The Biden presidency was understood to be a return to normalcy and competence after the terrible upheavals of the early months of COVID and the circus of the first Trump administration. That was the deal Americans thought had been accepted—that was Biden’s mandate. Instead, as president, even as he leaned into plenty of policies that served all Americans, Biden either could not or would not forcefully distance himself from the Democratic Party’s need for performative “wokeness”—the in-group messaging used by hyper-online and overeducated progressives that consistently alienates much of the rest of the nation.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

Here’s one narrow but meaningful example: On day one—January 20, 2021—the Biden administration released an “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” The order said that “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” Supporters argued that the order was simply pledging that the administration would enforce previously established legal protections for LGBTQ people, but critics saw it differently. As the author Abigail Shrier wrote on Twitter: “Biden unilaterally eviscerates women’s sports. Any educational institution that receives federal funding must admit biologically-male athletes to women’s teams, women’s scholarships, etc. A new glass ceiling was just placed over girls.”

In signaling their commitment to an extreme and debatable idea of trans rights, Democrats hemorrhaged other constituencies. Many Americans of all races care about girls’ sports and scholarships, and they believe that protecting women’s rights and flourishing doesn’t begin and end at safeguarding their access to an abortion.

Out of this larger context, Harris entered the final stretch of the campaign already compromised. Republicans seized on her previous comments in support of progressive proposals such as defunding the police (which she later renounced). But it was more than culture-war flash points. Fair or not, many Americans didn’t believe Harris deserved to be vice president in the first place. This is in large part the fault of her boss, who stated up front before selecting her that he would prefer a vice president “who was of color and/or a different gender.” It was a slightly less blunt version of what he said before appointing Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—that the job was only ever available to a Black woman. Harris’s very presence within the Biden administration therefore, to many onlookers, amounted to a kind of glaring evidence of precisely the kind of DEI hiring practices they intended to repudiate on Tuesday.

Voters’ response was definitive. According to a New York Times analysis, “Of the counties with nearly complete results, more than 90 percent shifted in favor of former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election.” That is to say, Trump improved with every single racial group across the country except one. He performed slightly better with Black voters overall (13 percent voted for him this time, according to exit polls, compared with 12 percent in 2020), and significantly better with everyone else—particularly Latinos, 46 percent of whom gave him their vote. He received an outright majority of ballots from voters marking the “other” box—a first for Republicans—and his party reclaimed the Senate and looks poised to hold on to the House. All told, the only racial group among whom Trump lost any support at all turned out to be white people, whose support for him dropped by a percentage point.

Were Trump not such a singularly polarizing, unlikeable, and authoritarian figure, one of the most salient and—when glimpsed from a certain angle—even optimistic takeaways from this election would be the improbable multiracial and working-class coalition he managed to assemble. This is what Democrats (as well as independents and conservatives who oppose Trump) must reckon with if they are ever going to counter the all-inclusive nihilism and recklessness of the new MAGA majority. Much attention has been paid to the gender gap in voting, and it’s true that more men voted for Trump than women. But the fact that so many citizens of all geographies and skin tones wanted to see Democrats pay a price, not just for policy differences but also for the party’s yearslong indulgence of so many deeply unpopular academic and activist perspectives, must be taken seriously.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

“The losses among Latinos is nothing short of catastrophic for the party,” Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx told The New York Times. Torres, an Afro Latino Democrat, won a third term on Tuesday. He criticized the Democrats for being beholden to “a college-educated far left that is in danger of causing us to fall out of touch with working-class voters.”

Yet I fear that far too many elite Democrats will direct their ire and scrutiny outward, and dismiss the returns as the result of sexism and racism alone. In an Election Night monologue on MSNBC, the anchor Joy Reid expressed this mentality perfectly. Anyone who knows America, she said, “cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Her panel of white colleagues nodded solemnly. “This really was an historic, flawlessly run campaign,” Reid continued. “Queen Latifah never endorses anyone—she came out and endorsed! She had every prominent celebrity voice. She had the Swifties; she had the Beyhive. You could not have run a better campaign.”

Over on X, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” wrote that we “must not delude ourselves”: “Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans—including white women—have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy.”

Moments after North Carolina was called for Trump, Reid diagnosed what went wrong for Harris: White women, she said, didn’t come through; it was “the second opportunity that white women in this country have to change the way that they interact with the patriarchy,” and they had failed the test again. On X, commentators immediately jumped on the blame-white-women bandwagon, as if it was an evergreen obituary they all had on file, ready to post within a moment’s notice.

Reflexive responses like these exemplify the binary framing of culture and politics in the United States—white/nonwhite, racist/anti-racist—that ascended with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and peaked after the racial reckoning of 2020. For many on the left, it has proved a powerful and compelling means of contextualizing enduring legacies of inequality and discrimination that are rooted in past oppressions. And it has notched real successes, especially by forcing the country to confront bias in the criminal-justice system and policing. But it has also become a casualty of its own discursive dominance—an intellectual and rhetorical straitjacket that prohibits even incisive thinkers from dealing with the ever-evolving complexity of contemporary American society. As a result, it has taught far too many highly compensated pundits, administrators, scholars, and activists that they never have to look inward.

[Ronald Brownstein: An uncertain future beat an unacceptable present]

But the framing didn’t work for many other people. “I’m thankful that victimhood didn’t win as a strategy,” one of my oldest and closest friends, a Black man who doesn’t have a college degree, messaged me after Trump’s victory. (It is worth noting that his twin brother, a veteran, turned MAGA during the racial reckoning.) If we are to listen to what enormous numbers of our compatriots—including unprecedented numbers of newly minted nonwhite GOP voters—are trying to tell us, the straitjacket proved decisive in their shift rightward.

All of us who reject the vision of America that Trumpism is offering are going to have to do something grander than merely counter a vulgar celebrity demagogue who commands a potent populist movement. It is too late for that anyway. We are going to have to reimagine the inner workings of the multiethnic society we already inhabit. The stale politics of identity that tries to reduce even the glaringly inconvenient fact of Trump’s multiracial alliance to “white women” stands in the way of overcoming the real democratic crisis.

Harris herself knows this. When Trump attempted to goad her, mockingly pondering whether she was even Black at all, she shrewdly avoided appealing to superficial categories. In this crucial way, her campaign may be viewed as an unequivocal success, one that we can learn from.

Former President Donald Trump won a sweeping victory in the Electoral College, four years after executing multiple schemes to overthrow an election he lost and seize power by force, and months after being convicted of state crimes in New York. He ran a race of slander and lies against immigrants and his political opponents, vowing to seize dictatorial powers in a campaign of vengeance.  

But he won. When all the votes are counted, he may not have won the popular vote, but he will have won a decisive victory in the Electoral College nonetheless. Behind him are Republican Party apparatchiks who see the devotion of Trump’s followers as a vehicle for their most extreme ideological schemes, including national bans on abortion, a mass deportation that could wreck the economy and subject Americans of any immigration status to invasive state scrutiny and force, and an immense distribution of income upward. The Democrats’ reward for steering the economy out of the post-pandemic economic crisis will be watching their opponent claim credit for the prosperity that their work created—an economy unencumbered by inflation and the high interest rates once needed to tame it. If Trump seems popular now, he will likely be much more popular in a year.

Trump will claim a popular mandate for everything he does. He did that when he eked out a narrow Electoral College victory in 2016, and he will do it now. But there is no constitutional mandate for authoritarianism. No matter what the Roberts Supreme Court says, the president is not a king, and he is not entitled to ignore the law in order to do whatever he pleases.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

The Trump administration’s record of union busting, repealing workplace regulations, and cutting the welfare state to enrich the already wealthy will have few obstacles. The coterie of extremists that surrounds Trump has a radical conception of what America should be that includes suppressing the speech and expression of their political opponents; a racial hierarchy entitled to legal protection and enforcement; a society in which women’s bodies are treated as state property and LGBTQ people have few rights that others need respect. They will have a willing partner in an already extreme-right Supreme Court, which will be emboldened to enable this agenda of discrimination, deportation, and domination, using a fictionalized historical jurisprudence to justify it.

The Biden administration sought to bring down the temperature of the Trump era by offering aid to families, revitalizing American manufacturing, and easing inflation without increasing unemployment. That politics brought them few rewards, and the Democrats are unlikely to pursue such an agenda again, if they ever return to power. Trump has expressed admiration for nationalist strongmen such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who holds power in a country that still has elections but where there is little chance of the opposition succeeding, because both the state and social levers of power are under the purview of one man. The Trump entourage will return with more detailed plans for authoritarian governance; perhaps the only guardrail they now face is that they prize loyalty over genuine expertise. But fewer people will be willing to stand up to Trump than last time.

I believe that, as in previous eras when the authoritarian strain in American politics was ascendant, the time will come when Americans will have to face the question of why democracy was so meaningless to them that they chose a man who tried to overthrow their government to lead it. They’ll have to decide why someone who slandered blameless immigrants as pet-eating savages and vowed to deport them for the crime of working hard and contributing to their community, something conservatives claim they want from newcomers, should lead a nation where all are supposed to be created equal. They’ll have to determine why a country conceived in liberty would hand power to the person most responsible for subjecting women to state control over their bodies, to the point of treating them as mere reproductive vessels not worth saving until they are bleeding out in an emergency room.

Millions of Americans are already asking themselves these questions this morning. All of the potential answers are disquieting. Choosing Trump in 2016, prior to everything he did as president, was frightening enough. Choosing him in full knowledge of how he would govern is worse. But there is no sunset on the right and duty of self-determination; there are no final victories in a democracy. Americans must continue to ensure that they live in one.

Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that won him a return trip to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was on flagrant display in the past couple of weeks of the campaign. But Trump consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical. For example, Trump promised to both whip inflation and also institute enormous tariffs, a combination nearly all economists agree is impossible. The mass deportation that Trump has promised would also likely drive up prices, rather than soothing the economy. But in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump promised a way out.

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump said in remarks early this morning. “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”

You can contrast that with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps unfixable, flaw.

[Read: The night they hadn’t prepared for]

Harris won praise for her positive campaign message, especially in the immediate weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she became the nominee. Biden had spent months warning darkly about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking—explicitly. “We’re not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative answer, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become strikingly conservative, but it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take seriously the economic pain of inflation. In its first two years, the Biden administration was single-mindedly focused on revving and restructuring the economy after COVID, and treated inflation more as a transitory annoyance than a long-term danger. But also, it seems to have concluded that it lacked a good answer to inflation. The administration argued with frustration that inflation was a worldwide trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that inflation in the U.S. had dropped faster than in peer countries, and that the American economy was running better than any other. All of this was true and also politically unhelpful. You can’t argue people into feeling better with statistics.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats are now America’s conservative party]

In theory, the mid-summer switch from Harris to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris struggled to create distance from Biden. When she was offered chances to do so, she demurred. In early October, the hosts of The View asked her what she’d have done differently from the president, and she replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Republicans were delighted and made that a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it’s not clear that Harris would have been able to pull off a more radical switch. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbent parties in recent elections. Her coalition meant she couldn’t run an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign, even if she had been so inclined. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters closed off moving very far to the left on economics, though past campaigns do not offer clear evidence that would have been a winner either. Besides, Democrats had a good empirical case that what they had done to steward the economy was very successful. They just had no political case.

In a bitter turn for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes. If he truly attempts to, or succeeds at, speedily deporting millions of people or instituting 60 percent tariffs, he will drive inflation higher and wreck the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may temper that. Having clearly promised to fix the problem and vanquished his enemies, he’ll now be able to declare a swift victory.

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.

At a rally just outside Atlanta in late October, thousands of Donald Trump supporters lined up in the punishing southern sun to see their hero; some had driven hours from out of state. Vendors hawked T-shirts with slogans such as Say no to the ho, and Roses are red, Hunter smokes crack, Joe Biden has dementia and Kamala isn’t Black, sometimes chanting the phrases out loud to amused onlookers.

Hundreds of people still standing in the winding queue shuffled off into a disappointed crowd when told that the venue was now full. Many hung around outside, browsing the vendors’ wares or grabbing a bite at one of the nearby food trucks. They were there to see Trump, but also to enjoy the sense of belonging that comes from being surrounded by the like-minded. They were there to see and be seen, dressed in MAGA hats, MAGA shirts, MAGA tights. Service dogs decked out in stars and stripes, men in silk shirts printed with an image of a bloodied Trump raising his fist. As “Y.M.C.A.” blared from inside the venue, Trump supporters stopped their conversations to sing along and shape their arms with the chorus.

The first time Trump ran for president as a Republican, when I spoke with his followers I encountered a superficial denial of Trump’s prejudice that suggested a quiet approval of it. They would deny that Trump made bigoted remarks or proposed discriminatory policies while also defending those remarks and policies as necessary. What I found this time around were people who were far more deeply embedded in an unreality carefully molded by the Trump campaign and right-wing media to foment a sense of crisis—and a belief that they were being exploited by a shadowy conspiracy that Trump alone could vanquish. Whereas many supporters I spoke with at rallies in 2016 rationalized or dismissed Trump’s yarns as exaggerations or bombast, in 2024 they would repeat them solemnly and earnestly, as gospel.

The conspiracy theories, particularly surrounding immigration, are significant because they justify extreme measures—Trump’s promises to stripcritical news outlets of their broadcast licenses, prosecute political rivals, and purge the federal government of “the enemy within.” Yet some supporters I spoke with also seemed either unaware or disbelieving of the plans that Trump and his allies have for a second administration. There is a disconnect between what Trump and his allies intend to do in power and what many of the people who would vote him in believe he would do.

This disconnect was apparent earlier in the 2024 campaign, when Democrats began attacking Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation “blueprint” for a second Trump administration. The agenda contemplates not only a political purge of the federal government, and a president who can order the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies, but drastic limits on abortion; drastic cuts to education, the social safety net, and efforts to fight climate change; and using federal powers to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Although Project 2025 was not affiliated with the campaign, it was largely a Trumpworld project, conceived by former Trump aides. Trump surmised that his own followers would not support what was in Project 2025 and distanced himself from it, posting late one night in July that he knew “nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.” (CNN reported that at least 140 people who worked for Trump were involved in the project, including six of his former Cabinet members.) Its architects were left to quietly reassure their fellow travelers that he was saying this for political reasons. “He’s running against the brand,” Russell Vought, a Project 2025 contributor and potential future Trump chief of staff, told an undercover reporter. “He’s very supportive of what we do.”

I noticed a particular disconnect on immigration; people I spoke with emphasized their support for legal immigration and, unlike Trump, did not single out particular ethnicities or nationalities for scorn. They said they would welcome anyone as long as they came legally. It’s possible that this was merely something they were telling themselves they believed so as not to interrogate their own motives further. They were ultimately also in thrall to Trump’s narrative about how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were conspiring to repopulate the country with undocumented immigrants living on the dole at their expense. That fiction was not just a source of rage but a predicate for whatever radical action might be needed to rectify it.

One Trump voter I met among the cheerful crowd of supporters milling around outside a packed rally outside Atlanta, who identified himself only as Steve and said he worked in telecommunications, managed to touch on virtually every immigration conspiracy theory put forth by the Trump campaign in about 30 seconds. Yet even Steve told me the issue was people coming in illegally, not that they were coming in at all. “You’re not coming in legally; you’re not pledging to the country; you’re not saying you’re going to support that country,” Steve said.

[Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point]

Another Trump supporter named Rebecca Cruz told me, “We need immigration in this country, but we need safe, safe immigration.” Referring to the Biden administration, she explained that “they take them from other countries, bringing them. They’re going into certain countries, and they fly them in here … because they want to destroy America. They hate what America stands for.”

A few days earlier, at another Trump rally, in Greenville, North Carolina, the crowd cheered when Trump demanded that news outlets be taken off the air for criticizing him or for giving positive coverage to Harris. They laughed when Trump played a bizarre video mocking trans people in the military. They cheered for the death penalty. They booed when Senator Ted Budd warned that Harris would let “the illegals who are here … use your taxpayer dollars for transgender surgeries.” Trump insisted that “Kamala Harris has imported an army of illegal-alien gang members and migrant criminals from prisons and jails, from insane asylums and mental institutions all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo, not just South America.” Trump repeated “the Congo” three times, in case the audience didn’t understand that the immigrants he was attacking were Black. He would occasionally pay lip service to legal immigration, or vow to defend Americans of “any color and creed,” but this was only after invoking a litany of stereotypes designed to justify state violence against whichever marginalized group he had just finished demonizing.

When I spoke with people one-on-one, they reflected back to me Trump’s rhetoric, occasionally with a somewhat more human touch. A retired English teacher who did not want to give her name emphasized that “I believe in immigration, but do it legally. Don’t make your first act of coming to America be coming illegally … We’re taking away from servicing children who don’t even get to eat because you’re giving housing to the people coming in.” Another retiree in North Carolina, named Theresa Paul, gave me a hard look and said she was supporting Trump because “when you take illegals over our citizens, that’s treason … We’re being worked to death, taxed to death, and for what? So we can put up people that’s coming in illegally, and putting them up way superior to us.” I asked her why she thought the Biden administration would want to do that. She grasped my arm lightly and said, “To replace us, right?”

I began to realize that these Trump fans—diehards though they may be—represent a distinct space in the MAGA landscape. They enjoy his cruelty, seeing it as righteous vengeance for the constellation of wrongs they have been told they are the victims of, but they aren’t the architects of these conspiracy theories, and neither do they stand to profit from them. Their conspiracism serves to distract them from Trump’s actual policy agenda and his authoritarian ambitions.

There are, I’ve come to see, three circles of MAGA that make up the Trump coalition. The innermost circle comprises the most loyal Trump allies, who wish to combine a traditional conservative agenda of gutting the welfare state and redistributing income upward while executing by force a radical social reengineering of America to resemble right-wing nostalgia of the 1950s. Trump’s advisers and other conservative-movement figures understand Trump’s populism as a smoke screen designed to conceal their agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy, banning abortion, eviscerating the social safety net, and slashing funding for education, health care, and other support for low-income people. All of this is consistent with how Trump governed when he was in the White House, although many people seem to have forgotten what he was actually like. This faction wants a government that works to preserve traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, or at least one that does not seek to interfere with what it sees as the natural order of things.

This innermost circle includes legislative allies such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act; policy aides such as Vought, who has spoken of mass deportation as a means to “end multiculturalism”; and elite backers such as Elon Musk, who hopes to use his influence to inflict hardship on Americans by dramatically cutting the welfare state so that he can reduce his own tax burden. It is no coincidence that Musk has transformed the social network formerly known as Twitter into a haven for racist pseudoscience that he himself consciously amplifies.

This faction also includes those far-right figures who are not official members of Trumpworld but who see the reality-show star as a champion of a resurgent white-nationalist identity. These people understand what Trumpism’s goals are, and most of them also understand that, absent the particular devotion Trump inspires, their plans would not be politically viable.

There is a second, slightly larger circle around this first one, comprising devoted Trump fans. These fans are the primary target for a sanitized version of the “Great Replacement” theory, which holds that American elites have conspired to dispossess them of what they have in order to give it to unauthorized immigrants who do not belong. They are not ideologically hostile to the welfare state—indeed, many of them value it—but they believe it is being wasted on those who have no claim to it. People in this circle are acting rationally in response to conspiracy theories they have chosen to believe, and are bewildered by those who refuse to acknowledge what they are certain is true. This bewilderment serves only to further cement their feeling that they are the victims of an elite plot to take from them that which they deserve. This is the group you might refer to as true believers.

In a different political and informational environment, many of these true believers would be unlikely to support the Project 2025 agenda—or at least not much of it—but here they are so isolated from mainstream news sources that they believe Trump’s claims that he has no ties to it, and that he has their best interests in mind because “he cannot be bought” by the same elites they believe are responsible for their hardships.

Then there is the outer circle: Americans with conservative beliefs who may be uneasy about Trump but whose identification with conservative principles and the Republican Party mean they wish to persuade themselves to vote for the Republican candidate. They may be ardently anti-abortion, or small-business owners, or deeply religious. They do not believe everything Trump says; in fact, their approach to the man is dismissiveness. These are voters who fall into what my colleague David Graham calls the “believability gap.” They don’t like Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric but also don’t think he will follow through with it. This is the “What’s the downside for humoring him?” faction.

This group of Trump voters treat his authoritarianism as mere bombast or as exaggerations from the media, seeing this election as an ordinary one in which a party with a bad economic record should be replaced by a party with a better one, not an election in which a man who tried to destroy American democracy is running for a chance to finish the job.

Denial is the mortar that holds the three MAGA circles together. The innermost circle denies the radicalism of its agenda to the middle ring of fervent Trump supporters, presenting any criticism as the lies of the same liberal elites responsible for dispossessing real Americans of what is owed them. The outer circle treats Trump’s authoritarianism and racism as regrettable and perhaps too colorful, but equivalent or similar to other common character defects possessed by all politicians. To acknowledge the liberal critique of Trump as correct would amount to a painful step away from a settled political identity that these outer-circle members are not willing to take—they would have to join the Never Trumpers in exile.

As different as some of the people I spoke with at these Trump rallies could be, when they went into the crowd, they experienced the ecstasy of the cruelties they would perhaps not allow themselves to indulge in alone. The rationalizations and explanations and denial melted away. They understood that they were there to mock and condemn those they hate and fear, and to listen to all of Trump’s vows to punish them.

A person, alone in conversation, can be rational. People, in a crowd, become something else.

Conspiracism is not an inherently right-wing indulgence. After September 11, many in liberal circles fell for nonsense alleging that the Bush administration was secretly behind the attacks. After George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, some liberals indulged absurd theories about voting machines in Ohio switching votes and thus delivering the state to Bush. More recently, conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt on Trump being staged spread in certain liberal circles online.

Political leaders, intellectuals, and public figures can play a crucial role in containing such conspiracism. Democratic leaders shamed 9/11 truthers out of the party. John Kerry conceded the election rather than champion baseless allegations about voter fraud. Unlike Trump, who gleefully promoted conspiracy theories around the violent assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, no prominent Democrats embraced any of the conspiracy theories that emerged about the attempt on Trump’s life. But when elites cultivate and indulge conspiracism—when they exploit it—they can create the conditions for authoritarianism and political violence.

“In social movements … conspiracy theories that may be absurd and specious on their face nevertheless contain valid information about the motivations, grievances, insecurities, and even panics among their promoters, so they cannot be simply dismissed,” the historian Linda Gordon wrote in The Second Coming of the KKK. “Among Klan leaders, conspiracy theories also did a great deal of organizing work: they provided identifiable and unifying targets, supplying a bonding function that explanations based on historical analyses do not deliver.” Political and national identities of any ideology can be forged by the sense that some part of your identity is under assault. When that assault does not truly exist, conspiracism can provide it.

Trumpist conspiracy theories perform a similar function. In his stump speeches, the former president calls the United States an “occupied country” that will be “liberated” from criminal migrants when he retakes power. He tells his audience that crime by undocumented immigrants is not simply a social problem that might be solved with more restrictive immigration policy but a deliberate plan by those in office. “Kamala is importing millions of illegals across our borders and giving them taxpayer benefits at your expense,” Trump declared in Greenville.

Humiliation is an essential part of the Trumpist style. Trump appeals to his audiences’ pride by telling them they have been hoodwinked by their adversaries, but that he has the power to avenge this injustice. Invoking that sense of humiliation is part of how he primes his audiences to be manipulated, knowing that their sense of shame will make them both angry and eager to reassert that pride. It is one of the most obvious con-man tricks in history—you got scammed, you paid too much, but if you give me your money, I’ll get you a better deal—and it has worked on tens of millions of Americans for a decade.

[Read: The malignant cruelty of Donald Trump]

These conspiracy theories create communities that are hostile to dissenters, and they legitimize radical, even violent actions. This is how thousands of Trump supporters ended up ransacking the Capital on January 6, 2021, hoping to overturn an election on the basis of a conspiracy theory about voting machines, spread by elite figures who knew it to be false. The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News and the congressional inquiry into January 6 revealed that although much of the right-wing leadership class understand they have created a monster they cannot control, they lack the courage to confront it. Trump and his closest aides, by contrast, are well aware of the hold they have on their audience and see it as useful for their own purposes.

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.” Trumpism is neither Nazism nor Stalinism, but Arendt’s observation about people living in a universe of complete unreality still applies.

All of us navigate the world on the basis of information sources we trust, and millions of people trust Donald Trump. Understanding his longevity is perhaps impossible absent an information environment in which people come to passionately believe things that are not true. This is not a false-consciousness argument. If banning abortion matters more to you than raising the minimum wage, and you make your choice with that in mind, that is your right as a voter. But that decision should be based on values, not on a universe of unreality.

The former president and his surrogates have woven a totalizing conspiracy theory in which virtually every problem facing the nation can be laid at the feet of immigration. Violent crime is rising because of immigrants (it isn’t). Democrats are chartering planes from other countries to bring in illegal immigrants (they aren’t), whom they are paying to come (it’s not happening) and who are smuggling in fentanyl (it’s overwhelmingly citizens who are doing the smuggling, actually), in the hopes that these illegal immigrants will vote for them (they can’t vote, and they wouldn’t necessarily vote for Democrats if they could). Immigrants are the main reason for the housing crisis (they aren’t—it’s a lack of supply); they’re getting FEMA money meant for citizens affected by the hurricanes in the South (wrong); and none of this would have happened if Biden and Harris hadn’t opened the border (the Biden administration is on pace to match Trump’s border deportations) to undocumented immigrants who don’t pay taxes (false). There really was a rise in illegal border crossings after the pandemic, but the response of the Democratic Party was to move closer to Trump’s positions on immigration.

Nor will mass deportation, framed as a means to fight crime, resolve any of these issues. Mass deportation will not raise wages. It will not make housing less expensive. It will not create jobs. It will not make the welfare state more generous to those who need its assistance. And indeed, during Trump’s term as president, his administration shirked prosecuting undocumented criminals in favor of destroying families and removing as many people as possible, regardless of what roots they might have established. Trump aides are planning an attack on the kind of legal immigration that supporters at his rallies repeatedly told me they wanted—an attack that, if prior experience holds, will take precedence over enforcing the law against criminals.

But for some today, just as in the past, the presence of immigrants threatens a “dominance” that, as Gordon wrote of the 1920s, “many white native-born Protestants considered a form of social property.” It is an odd but insufficient sign of progress that such status anxiety is no longer confined to white, Protestant, or native-born people—the irony is that America is such a powerful machine of assimilation that the ascendant reactionary coalition includes millions of people descended from those once deemed unassimilable aliens by their predecessors movements. Unfortunately, lies and conspiracy theories directed at those we see as unlike us are far more likely to be believed.

Like Trump’s lies about voter fraud in 2020, the conspiracy theories about immigration are important not because there is truth to them but because they forge a political identity that is not amenable to fact-checking or correction. It does not matter if the “voter fraud” in 2020 did not happen; believing that it did expresses the symbolic view that the opposing coalition should not be considered truly American. To point out that very little of what Trump and his allies say about immigration is factual cannot dispel the worldview that causes one to embrace it: that the America you know has been stolen by people who have no claim to it.

The workings of American immigration policy are complicated, though, and any sufficiently complicated process can appear to someone who doesn’t understand it as a conspiracy—if you don’t understand the weather, for example, you might think the U.S. government has a hurricane gun it can aim with pinpoint accuracy at Republican-majority districts. If you don’t understand something—and if understanding it might leave your conception of your own identity teetering, Jenga-like—it is much easier to believe what the people you love and trust are telling you, even if that thing is untrue.

Perhaps most important, the breadth of the conspiracy and the power of the conspirators place any solutions beyond the reach of ordinary politics. At the rally prior to the storming of the Capitol, Trump warned the audience that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then he retreated to the safety of the White House and watched the mob attack Congress, hoping that by some miracle his supporters would succeed in keeping him in power by force. In such dire circumstances, only a messianic figure will rescue the virtuous from the corrupt. The logic of grand conspiracy thus elevates the strongman.

In the conspiracist mind, Trump is not simply the only logical solution but the only hope, the only man not compromised by the grand cabal that opposes him and its puppet politicians. Trump’s followers are convinced that Trump’s wealth means he cannot be bought. Few politicians have ever been more clearly for sale.  

Doubtlessly, many liberals would deny a distinction between the devotion of Trump supporters who flock to his rallies and the ideological vanguard that aims to use him as a vehicle to remake the country. While I was out reporting this story, The Atlantic published an account of how, according to Trump’s former chief of staff General John Kelly, Trump spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler and his generals. Typically, when I go out to rallies, I do not argue with voters or offer my own views, because I am there to find out what they believe and why. But because of my affiliation with The Atlantic, several people I spoke with asked me to explain my views—occasionally referring to the story as “fake news” or “Democrats calling Trump Hitler,” having heard the story wrongly characterized this way.

In one exchange, I mentioned that as a man married to a woman born to a West African immigrant father, I did not appreciate Trump’s remarks about Black immigrants, and recounted the story of Trump complaining about not wanting immigrants from “shithole countries.” The Trump supporter had not heard of the 2018 incident and refused to believe that it had occurred as I relayed it.

In two other conversations, when asked about my views, I explained that, as a Texan, if I choose to have another child, I have to worry that if something goes wrong, doctors may refuse to treat my wife because of the state’s abortion ban. Doctors in Texas are afraid to provide lifesaving medical care to mothers with pregnancy complications because the Republican-controlled state government has passed laws that punish abortion providers with steep fines, loss of their medical license, and jail time. The Texas courts have repeatedly refused to clarify or expand the exceptions to the ban—these exceptions are simply meant to ensure sufficient political support for those bans. Because of this, Texas parents have to roll the dice with a pregnancy, knowing that their existing children may end up without a mother.

Not only did the people I spoke with react in disbelief that an abortion ban would be so strict; they did not believe that a doctor would refuse to treat a woman until she was at death’s door. Last week, ProPublica reported that a Texas mother, Josseli Barnica, died after doctors thought it would be a “crime” to treat her while she was having a miscarriage. ProPublica also reported that in 2023, a pregnant teenager from Vidor, Nevaeh Crain, died after three emergency rooms refused to treat her. Texas has fought the Biden administration’s attempt to set federal rules allowing emergency abortions. Last month, the Supreme Court let a ruling siding with Texas remain in place.

[Read: Gullible Mr. Trump]

There is a distance between the views of many of the most ardent Trump fans and the policy goals of the people they would put in power. The innermost MAGA circle understands this, even if many of the people whose votes they rely on don’t. This is why the role played by Fox News and other conservative media outlets is so crucial—not only in maintaining a sense of conspiracism and emotional siege but in ensuring that stories about women like Barnica and Crain never reach the eyes and ears of their audience.

This is an observation, not an excuse. In a democracy, citizens are responsible for knowing the consequences of their votes. They are responsible for not being enthralled by a jumped-up con man who tells them flattering lies. They are responsible for knowing the difference between fact and fiction. And yet few of us would find it easy to extract ourselves from a social universe in which belief in those fictions is a requirement for good standing.

Trump rallies are where the mask usually comes off. At the rallies, the different circles of MAGA lose their distinctiveness; in the anonymity and unity of the crowd, they can indulge the feelings of anger and hatred without the oversensitive, judgmental liberals of the outside world making them feel ashamed. Here, they can be themselves.

This is why the insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe thought he was in the right place to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in late October. “These are the kind of jokes that normal people tell,” the conservative media figure Matt Walsh declared. Hinchcliffe was hardly an outlier. Other speakers that night called Harris a prostitute, “the anti-Christ,” “the devil.” The disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Harris as “the first Samoan Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

The big mistake made by Hinchcliffe was that, in wrestling parlance, he broke kayfabe. The Trump campaign has fine-tuned its line-stepping over the years, invoking racist stereotypes with just the thinnest veneer of deniability, the better to cast liberal criticism as hypersensitive hysteria. In 2016, Trump campaigned on banning Muslims writ large, not just jihadist terrorists. In 2020, he publicly vowed to meet the nationwide Black-rights protests with violence. In 2024, Trumpism remains a politics of bullying marginalized groups and framing those unwilling to do so as possessing a lack of virtue. Do you want to coddle murderous illegal aliens? Do you want men in women’s sports? Why are you okay with gangs taking over our cities?

Trump’s agenda of using state power to maintain traditional American hierarchies of race, religion, and gender has not changed. But for much of his 2024 run, the sweeping generalizations of previous outings resembled more traditional dog whistling with superficially plausible connections to actual policy concerns. The shift can be imperceptible to people who have paid close attention to politics—Trump’s personality and ideology have not really changed—but to those who have not, his racial animus and misogyny are less obvious. About two-thirds of Hispanic voters in one recent poll said that Trump’s attacks on immigration were not directed at them.

The rightward shift of some Hispanic and Black voters seems to have persuaded the Trump campaign to tone down the explicit racial stereotyping of his previous campaigns, though not the promises to use state power to crush his political enemies. But when you put a guy in front of a Trump campaign sign to warm up the crowd with hacky jokes about Black people liking watermelon, it gets harder to suspend disbelief.

Amid the comedian’s insult to Puerto Rico and the barrage of racist stereotypes—not only about Black people and Puerto Ricans, but about Jews being cheap and Palestinians being terrorists—the word routine takes on another meaning: dull, tedious, boring. Yet the line about Puerto Rico broke through, and a growing list of Puerto Rican celebrities are now endorsing Harris, and perhaps moving crucial Hispanic votes in key swing states to her column.

The crisis caused by Hinchcliffe’s routine and remarks by other speakers that night is that they troubled voters in that outer MAGA circle by briefly revealing what Trump’s entourage actually believes—that when Stephen Miller says “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he is referring to a very limited number of people. The event pierced the veil of denial for those who are otherwise inclined to dismiss such criticisms as the tedious whining of an oversensitive age.

The Puerto Rican Reggaeton singer Nicky Jam renounced his support for Trump after the rally, saying, “Never in my life did I think that a month [after I appeared at a rally to support Trump] a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump, and I sidestep any political situation.” Those people who renounced their support for Trump after realizing that the contempt he has expressed for others also applies to people like them must understand: He was always talking about people like you, even when you didn’t want to believe it.

At Trump rallies, the denial and the dismissal cease, and the nature of Trumpism is revealed. This is why, despite the fact that the Puerto Rico “joke” bombed at a comedy club the night before, Hinchcliffe thought everyone at the rally would love it. His set was not a divergence from Trumpism. It was … Well, it was routine.