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Why are people frustrated by high levels of immigration? As refugee crises proliferate, this has become a central political question. In order to justify anti-immigration policy or rationalize restrictionist sentiment, commentators and elected officials have repeatedly returned to one hypothesis: Immigration must be bad for American workers.

There’s just one problem: This hypothesis is wrong. Economists have studied this question repeatedly, in a variety of contexts and in every segment of the population, and they have found that the demand effect consistently outweighs the supply effect. Simply put, when immigrants come to a place looking for jobs, they also demand goods and services—thus creating jobs for native-born workers. Immigrants need legal services and taxi drivers; they need groceries and cars. The question has always been which effect is bigger. And the literature has resoundingly answered that the demand effect wins out.

This doesn’t explain away all immigration worries. But it should force politicians to seriously reckon with why xenophobia exists instead of resigning themselves to treating new immigrants as an economic burden, when, for example, they were actually the “sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022.”

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by my colleague Rogé Karma who recently dove into the economics literature, originally expecting to find some negative effects on wages, only to be repeatedly struck by the truth: Anti-immigration sentiment has no economic justification.

“I think there is a lot of this deep discomfort with non-materialist explanations,” Rogé argues. “I think one of the most revealing things here is that the demographic that is most opposed to immigration are older folks living in rural areas, many of whom are retired. And the people who tend to be most supportive of immigration are working-age people living in big cities where immigrants are more common. So if you thought, Okay, this is a product of the people who immigrants are directly competing with … you would think, Oh, this would show up where the immigrants are, and it doesn’t.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s Election Day, and in place of any exit-poll astrology, we’re going to talk about something that’s been a driving force in the campaign: immigration, specifically the research about the relationship between immigration and wages.

A common line bandied about in politics is that immigration reduces the wages of native-born Americans. It’s most commonly been pushed by restrictionists on the right, like J. D. Vance and Donald Trump.

J. D. Vance: And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country. And by the way, that will be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.

Donald Trump: Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African American and Latino workers.

Demsas: However, I’ve noticed a growing openness to the idea that immigration hurts American workers, not just from longtime restrictionists, but also from Democrats and liberals who are scarred by their loss in 2016 and fretting over the possibility of losing the 2024 election. But sometimes a lot of smoke is just a smoke bomb.

[Music]

This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and today I’ve asked my colleague Rogé Karma to come on the show. We’re going to talk about a recent deep dive he did into the economics literature on the relationship between immigration and wages.

The common thinking goes: If you increase the supply of labor, then you’ll reduce the price of that labor. If immigrants simply weren’t allowed in, then companies would be forced to pay American workers high wages. It seems so obvious, so why does study after study find this to be so wrong?

[Music]

Rogé, welcome to the show!

Rogé Karma: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Demsas: This is one of those episodes where I’m actually having trouble deciding which narrative is the conventional narrative.

Karma: (Laughs.) It’s because you’ve been steeped in the economic literature for far too long.

Demsas: Exactly. But there’s the conventional wisdom in academic circles that immigrants do not reduce native-born wages. But that’s not, I think, the average person’s perception of this, especially if they’re listening to politicians who, on both sides of the aisle, will be kind of making these arguments.

So I want to walk through the evidence together here because, Rogé, you recently wrote a piece, and you’ve spent a big chunk of time this year diving into the research space and really trying to figure out what’s going on. Like, Where is the evidence actually leading us? And I want to start with the Mariel Boatlift. Can you tell us what that is and then what economist David Card found when he looked into it?

Karma: Of course. And the first thing I will say is: I do think there is a little bit of a man-on-the-street, common-sense view that goes something a little bit like, Well, given that there is a fixed pool of jobs in a country, if you add a bunch of foreign-born workers, they’re going to take those jobs from natives. And if you just apply Econ 101, as the supply of a good goes up, like labor, then the price of that good, i.e. wages, falls. And so I think there is a little bit of an intuitive sense that more immigrants would mean lower wages and lower employment prospects. And I think this was actually the conventional view on both sides of the aisle for much of the 20th century, in much of the economics profession for much of the 20th century, until this study came along and shattered the consensus.

And so what happened was: In 1980, Fidel Castro lifted Cuba’s ban on emigration. And that caused about 125,000 Cubans to migrate from Mariel Bay in Cuba to Miami, Florida, and about half of them settled there, which represented a 7 to 8 percent increase in the Miami workforce, which is 25 times the amount that the workforce expands due to immigration in the U.S. every year. So this is a huge change, an incredibly large change.

And years later, what the economist David Card—who will go on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in empirical economics—what he realizes is that this created a perfect version of what economists call a “natural experiment,” that because of this big one-time influx of immigrants to Miami, you could compare the trajectory of native-born wages in Miami to a variety of other cities that prior to the boatlift had similar employment and demographic trends. These include Atlanta, Los Angeles, etcetera. And I think the view was, Look—if there’s any place you’re going to see the negative effect of immigration on wages, it’s going to be with this unprecedented, large, random shock.

And that’s why the finding that Card comes to is so surprising, because he finds that the boatlift had virtually no effect on the wages of native-born workers, including those without a college degree. If you look at a chart of the wages of workers in Miami compared to most of these other cities in the U.S. at the time, there’s almost no difference. You can’t even tell the boatlift happened. And I think what that points to—and the big, overarching explanation that I think the common-sense wisdom got wrong—is that immigrants aren’t just workers. Immigrants are also consumers. They buy lots of things, like healthcare and groceries and housing.

And so at the same time that they are competing with Americans for jobs, they’re also creating more demand for those jobs. They’re creating more employment opportunities. And when you increase the demand for labor, that pushes wages up, even if you increase the supply of labor that pushes wages down. And we can talk about some ways in which this was later challenged and complicated, but I think that’s the big missing piece of the common-sense take.

Demsas: Yeah. I think there’s a level to which you have to really draw out how this works in the real world, because people come, and they’re like, Okay. Now there’s more people who want to eat at McDonald’s. You have to hire more people on shift to service that demand. There are more people demanding taxi cabs. There are more people who now need immigration-lawyer services, so that means you need more legal assistants. That means you need more paralegals. That means you need more janitors cleaning the buildings because they’re expanding into new office space.

There’s a level to which this positive flow is not intuitive to people, because it’s so downstream of the initial event, which is: People are here looking for jobs. It’s the immediate, first thing they see happening.

Karma: Exactly. But it’s funny because when we think about this in a slightly different context, it’s very intuitive. For example, you don’t see Republican politicians going to high-school or college graduations and yelling at graduates or complaining that all of these graduates are about to undermine the wages or employment prospects of adults in the labor force.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Karma: And that’s because we understand, when it comes to native-born people, like, Wait—population growth doesn’t necessarily mean less for everyone. And so I think when you take this to a slightly different context, it’s like, Oh, wait. This actually does make a lot of sense.

Demsas: Well, I think there’s one thing that I really want to draw out here. Because if you’re an individual person who’s—let’s say you are a high-school graduate. You are working in the types of service-sector jobs that are usually competing with immigrants. Maybe on net what you’re saying makes sense for the entire labor market, but doesn’t it change when you look downstream at the people who are the most likely to be competing with new immigrants for jobs?

Karma: This is exactly the right question. When I mentioned the complications earlier, this is where they come in. There is an argument that has come up in response to the Card paper and its response to a lot of the natural experiments on this. And I should say, also, in addition to the Mariel Boatlift study, there were similar experiments in the subsequent years in Israel, in France, in Denmark that all came to very similar results.

But then there was a backlash set of critiques, which was just this: Okay. On average, wages might not be affected, but what about the least-skilled, the least-educated workers? And, particularly, what about those without a high-school degree who work in the professions that are most likely to be competing with these new immigrants, most of whom—if we’re talking about, at least, undocumented immigrants—are less skilled themselves?

And this was the critique made, and has been long made, by a Harvard economist, George Borjas. And in 2015, he went back to the Card study, and he looked specifically at this group of high-school dropouts. And he found—or, at least, at the time, it seemed like he found—that actually there was a sizable negative effect on this smaller group. And again, this was the explanation: Okay, maybe on average it works out, but the supply-and-demand effects of immigrants are asymmetric.

Immigrants who are unskilled, who come into a country—they compete only with a certain subset of the least-skilled workers, but they’re spending their money broadly. So they might get a job as a lettuce picker or construction worker, but they’re spending their money on a lot more than just housing and lettuce. And so on net, they end up hurting these less-skilled workers more.

Demsas: It’s an inequality story too. All of us get the benefits, especially those of us in high-skilled jobs that aren’t really experiencing this competition, but they’re not concentrated for the lowest income.

Karma: And this is the most, I feel, poignant critique because, yes, this makes higher-skilled workers better off, but it hurts the least of us. And what is really interesting, though, is that Borjas’s debunking of Card has since been debunked.

Demsas: Oh, my gosh. Recursive debunkings. (Laughs.)

Karma: I know. This is all the fun of an academic debate. It has all the titillating content we want.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Karma: So if you look at what Borjas did, what’s interesting is he didn’t just look at high-school dropouts. He also excluded from his sample women, nonprime-age workers, and, most confusingly, Hispanics, which is sort of absurd. And his justification was that these exclusions left only the workers that were most directly competing with the Marielitos. But it left a total sample of just 17 workers per year.

Demsas: I find this fact so insane. It’s one of those things where I don’t understand what the point of extremely rigorous journal processes for econ journals are if they’re allowing something like this to go by unnoticed, unflagged.

Karma: And I think the reason is because at that point, it’s really hard to tell the difference between an actual empirical finding and just statistical noise.

Demsas: I mean, it’s 17 people.

Karma: It’s 17 people. It’s this extremely specific and hard-to-justify group. And then, what’s interesting is there’s a couple follow-up studies, one of which finds that the effect that Borjas found was because of a change in the way that the census counted Black workers and Black individuals.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Karma: And if you just take the way that they were measuring it before, the entire effect goes away.

Demsas: Even with those 17, the sample size?

Karma: Even with those 17.

Demsas: Wow. Okay.

Karma: But I think the broader critique is, Wait. This is ridiculous. Let’s just actually do what the critique says, which is: Let’s just look at all workers who don’t have a high-school degree. And when you actually look at that, Card’s original findings hold up. Actually, workers that lack even a high-school degree didn’t have their wages negatively affected.

And in the subsequent years after this debate, there have been other natural-experiment studies that have found the same thing. One that I really think was done quite well was on Puerto Rican immigrants after Hurricane Maria who came to Orlando. It found the same effect. It actually found, to your point, that while wages for construction workers, specifically, actually did become depressed a little bit, that was offset by a boost in the wages for leisure and hospitality workers. And so, actually, one wrinkle to this story is that maybe some sectors might experience a little bit of this. But on net, it won’t affect the entire skill group. The entire skill group ends up pretty well off. And I think this, for me, was a very counterintuitive finding. And when I asked economists about it, the leading explanation is what was described to me as “specialization plus scale.”

On paper, it looks like—and the assumption has long been—immigrants without a high-school degree are perfect substitutes for native workers without a high-school degree. But it turns out that that’s actually not true. And I think the restaurant industry is a good example of this. Take fry cooks: A bunch of new immigrants come in, and they take jobs as fry cooks working in restaurants. That might depress the wages of local-born fry cooks. But what also happens is: Because the cost of labor has gone down for fry cooks, and because now there’s all this more demand for restaurant services, you get restaurants expanding. You get more restaurants opening up.

And what happens when restaurants open up? They don’t just have to hire more fry cooks. They hire more waiters and waitresses and bartenders and chefs. And it turns out that a lot of new immigrants can’t fill those roles, because they don’t have the English skills or the tacit cultural knowledge to do so. And so, actually, if you were a native-born worker and you just stayed a fry cook, you might have seen your wages depressed, but you’re actually far more likely to have gotten a job in one of these professions that is now more common, that actually pays more, because immigrants have entered.

Demsas: So you get promoted.

Karma: Exactly.

Demsas: I think the other group of people that people often point to as being harmed by this are actually recent immigrants, right? It may be the case that there’s not a substitution effect between native-born workers and foreign-born workers. But if you are the first person off the Mariel Boatlift, and then the thousandth person is coming off, you guys are probably competing.

I always find this a bit of a weird argument because people usually talking about this are immigration restrictionists. Are they taking the position of the most-recent immigrants who’ve come to this country?

Karma: Yeah. Don’t you care about all the other immigrants?

Demsas: Yeah. Yeah. What’s going on there?

Karma: That is a really good point. And I should say, just because these studies don’t find much of an effect on native-born wages of natives of all skill levels does not mean that immigration has no cost at all. And I think this is actually one of the most-important, most-consistent findings, is we do see a pretty sizable effect on the wages of other immigrants, in large part because they don’t have the substitution effect.

Another cost is inequality. A lot of these studies find that, even though a lot of lower-skilled native workers aren’t affected, immigration ends up boosting the wages of higher-skilled workers, in part because immigrants are also demanding the services of, let’s say, architects or computer programmers, etcetera. And so it’s not a huge change in inequality, but it does slightly exacerbate inequality.

And then I would say the third one is what I talked about earlier, which is if you look sector by sector. It’s very possible that a construction worker or a worker in a specific sector where a lot of immigrants come in might experience some wage losses. That is very possible. Even if the aggregate effect on an entire skill group is not negative, you can see concentrated losses.

Demsas: But this is just true of all effects, right? If the average effect is positive, 50 percent of people are below the average of all things.

I think the thing that I’m getting at here is—and one of the things I really liked about your approach to this—that you were very, very careful to try and be as fair as possible to both sides of this debate. And what I’m hearing is that there’s so much reaching you have to do to really find serious costs to immigration. Even when you do, it’s like, Slightly exacerbate inequality. Maybe there are certain industries where you have some impacts, but those people are also benefiting from the growth, and they’re also benefiting from substitution effect, etcetera.

And it’s not to just pooh-pooh all that, but I think it’s really interesting to talk about why there’s such an intense desire to find this effect. And I don’t know if you have a thought on why this narrative is so important to people, because there are other reasons that people could say they’re anti-immigration, but there’s a real desire to make it about wages. There’s a real desire to make it about economics.

Karma: Yeah. I will say: I want to definitely talk about these different reasons. And I’d be very interested in your theory, too, and I have my own. I will say, one good-faith reason for this concern, one that I think will be brought up a lot is, Well, what about when we look at history?

And so it is true, and lots of folks, including David Leonhardt, liberal columnist at The New York Times, has pointed out that during this mid-century, quote-unquote, golden-age period—1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—you saw really high wage growth for the working class. You saw a really big reduction of inequality, really fast rise in living standards, and also very low immigration. And then from the 1980s on, you see much higher levels of immigration, and you see wage stagnation for the median worker. You see an exacerbation of inequality. And so I think one thing is, If we look at history, maybe these experiments aren’t capturing everything. They’re only looking at one city at a time. And when we look at the broad sweep of American history, it really does look like this is happening.

And I think that is a critique that’s important to take seriously. But at the same time, one of the golden rules of social science is “Correlation does not equal causation,” right? There were a lot of things happening starting in the 1970s and ’80s that also affected workers, also affected inequality—everything from technological change to globalization to the weakening of labor unions and concentration of corporations. And I think a lot of those other things were going on, and I think two data points are really instructive here.

Demsas: Well, before you get into that, I actually think you’re being super generous to this argument, which I think is your MO here. I think it’s important to be intellectually generous at the front part. But I want to be very clear here: This is not looking at the broad sweep of American history. This is looking at the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s, and going, Huh. This extremely transformative time in American history, where there’s tons of growth happening because World War II is ending. Also, the World War II production, in general—lots of stuff happens, of course, following that, anti-growth stuff that we’ve talked about in this podcast in the past.

And I think it’s kind of weird and, I think, feeds into the question I was even asking you earlier about, like: There’s such an intense desire to make this true, and when you look back at the foreign-born share of the population in the United States over, actually, our long term, in 2023, 14.3 percent of Americans are foreign-born, and that’s in line—and lower—than large parts of the 19th century. So what you see in American history, when looking at the foreign-born share of the population, is: You see we’re at roughly 14.8 percent, even throughout the 1800s. You see a massive dip start to happen during the Great Depression—normal. People kind of stop emigrating when that happens. And then you don’t really see a catch-up happening until very recently.

And so there’s a level to here where I’m like, If Leonhardt and others want to make this critique, they need to then explain the entirety of the 1800s in American economic history. And I think there’s a desire not to really wade into that debate, because they’re just pointing at a simple correlation and going, I’m sure this explains it. I actually don’t find this even minimally persuasive.

Karma: I know. I think you’re totally right. And also, you don’t even have to go back to the 1800s. You can just go back, I don’t know, the past four years, where we’ve had a huge, massive surge of undocumented immigration. And at the same time, we’ve had wages at the very bottom of the income distribution rise at their fastest pace since the 1940s, a huge reduction in wage inequality.

And so even if you’re going to make the correlation argument, it’s like, Wait. The last couple of years sort of disproved this. And even over this time period that Leonhardt and others are talking about, what you have is: The places that receive the most immigrants are the places that have the least wage stagnation. It’s Texas. It’s Florida. It’s the Acela corridor. And so I think you’re right. I really wanted to put that out there because I think it is a very common argument, but it’s not one I find remotely persuasive.

Demsas: There’s one other thing that I think other folks point to a lot, and I’m going to ask you to explain it, because you’re explaining all these studies for me so nicely. But the National Academy of Sciences has a study called the “Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” I feel like this is a calling card for a lot of folks who are pro–immigration restriction. What does it say, and what’s important about that study?

Karma: This was a large report that looked at, or at least purported to look at, a bunch of different studies that claim to be a sort of meta-analysis of a lot of the immigration literature and tried to come to a conclusion on what it all says. And the big conclusion that they came to was, when we look on average, wages are not affected, especially when we look in the long term. But there was a disagreement within the panelists over, specifically, high-school dropouts. And there’s a chart that often is linked to or is often brought up by immigration restrictionists. It is table 5-2.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, you know exactly where it is.

Karma: It shows a lot of negative numbers. And the thing that I will often remind people is: That chart is basically talking about high-school dropouts. Okay, put that aside. There are a lot of studies on there that seem to show negative effects. One of them is the Borjas study that we talked about earlier. And George Borjas was actually one of the panelists on this report, which may indicate or may give you a hint of why it turned out the way it did. But when you actually go through and look at these studies, most of them are not the kind of high-quality, natural-experiment study we’re talking about. A lot of them just focus on Black men, Hispanic men—like, very particular subgroups.

And then, also, a whole bunch of these studies are in a category of, what they’re called, “skilled-cell studies.” And these studies are different, right? They’re not looking at a specific causal link created by a natural experiment. What they’re saying is, We’re going to just look at the entire group of unskilled workers in the United States. We’re going to look at immigration flows, and then we’re going to make a bunch of assumptions, and a bunch of assumptions about the substitutability of native-born and foreign-born workers, about how fast capital adjusts. And based on those assumptions, we’re going to make big claims.

And so there was this famous other Borjas paper in the early 2000s that made the claim that when you do one of these studies, it shows really intense negative effects. And so this report that is often used, and I know this is so wonky, is just—

Demsas: We love wonky here.

Karma: Yes. But I think it is just a case study, in that listing a bunch of studies with varying qualities, looking at varying different groups, is just not the most-accurate way to do things. And then, yeah, I could go on. There are lots of other problems with it, but I just think that that is one of the ones that frustrates me the most and frustrates a lot of the economists who I spoke to for this piece.

Demsas: I asked you a question earlier, and now I’m just going to give you the answer that I have to it, which is this question about why it’s so persistent, people desire it. One of my theories for this is that there’s a real desire to sane wash anti-immigrant sentiment.

When large parts of the population hold opinions, and particularly when they are different than the kinds of people who are in media or are in elite spaces—like, most people who work in media are living in cosmopolitan cities, have gone to college, have often maybe interacted with people who are from foreign-born countries repeatedly throughout their lives because they’re, like, living in New York or Chicago or L.A. or something like that. And as a result, like, they are not really in touch with some of the more common anti-immigration sentiments, and as a result, they feel kind of uncomfortable being like, Well, they’re all racist and xenophobes. They don’t want to sound like that. And so in order to look at this sentiment in the country and go, like, Well, I don’t want to call them a bunch of people who hate immigrants, I need to find some more material explanation for their opposition to it.

And I think it’s weird here, because I actually think it’s important to take very seriously what people are saying. Like, there are people who have serious cultural concerns with people coming into the country. And some of those things, I find not reasonable, and some of them I find—I don’t find really any of them reasonable, but I understand why someone would feel that way without having to be a bad person. Like, do I wish that people didn’t have those attitudes? Sure. But I think that they’re not lying when they tell you the things that are actually concerning them. And you write something really nicely on this, in your piece, and I'll let you say it, but can you just talk to us a little bit about what surveys of public opinion actually find in regards to people’s opposition to immigration?

Karma: Well, first of all, I think that analysis is really spot on. I think sane washing is a good descriptor. The one that I haven’t had is often a veneer of respectability. And I think there is a lot of this deep discomfort with nonmaterialist explanations, in part, also, because—especially, if you’re thinking about, let’s say, center-left folks—if you’re part of a political party that you think needs to respond to people’s views on immigration, it’s much easier to say, Well, look—we already believe in raising worker wages.

And so, all of a sudden, if immigration gets looped into the set of values that we already believe, we’re then comfortable to give in to people’s instincts here. Whereas if it feels like pandering to darker forces, I think that makes liberals, especially, less comfortable with doing it. And I think to your point, though, it’s like: If we don’t acknowledge those darker forces, it’s not always great. And I think what you’re getting at, too, is in this piece, consistently what you find in sort of surveys of public opinion is that it’s not primarily material explanations that explain things. It’s things—a lot of them are about cultural difference, about violations of social norms, about crime, about national identity.

And I think one of the most-revealing things here is that the demographic that is most opposed to immigration are older folks living in rural areas, many of whom are retired. And the people who tend to be most supportive of immigration are working-age people living in big cities where immigrants are more common. So if you thought, like, Okay, this is a product of the people who immigrants are directly competing with are the most anti-immigrant, you would think, Oh, this would show up where the immigrants are, and it doesn’t. And so I think that really speaks to it.

I think the other thing that really speaks to it is, like, have you just listened to the Republican Party? Like, Donald Trump and J. D. Vance will occasionally mention wages, especially when it’s Stephen Miller talking to The New York Times, when it’s J. D. Vance in a vice-presidential debate or talking to a New York Times interviewer. That’s when they will bring up this wages argument. When they are speaking to an audience that they know is very center or left, they will, like, bring up this wages argument. But if you listen to the guy at the top of the ticket, right, it is, These folks are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It is portraying immigrants as a sort of psychopathic horde of murderers. It’s spreading conspiracy theories about pet-eating immigrants. Like, it’s very hard to take seriously that this is actually the main concern when the leader of the party who is anti-immigration is, like, so openly pointing to a very different set of issues.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: why less immigration would mean a poorer quality of life in America.

[Break]

Demsas: I think one of the things that I also find reasonable for why people struggle is the Econ 101 explanation you give right at the beginning is intuitive. And it shows up in many different parts of our econ reporting, this question of thinking outside of partial equilibriums, right? If you were to just say, I’m looking at just the impact of immigrants on wages, holding equal all other effects on the population, on the economy, then you would see negative downward pressure on wages.

But economists don’t do that. Our lives aren’t lived in partial equilibriums. We live in general equilibrium. There are multiple different markets working together at all times. And you have to look at not just what’s happening with the effect on the labor markets, what’s happening in the effect on the housing market, the consumption of random household goods. And so I think that that’s really difficult to do in normal conversation. And what I think is really funny is that now—you kind of foreshadowed this—there’s a big push to blame immigrants for the housing market, and it’s like, Oh, the only time immigrants are consumers of anything is when they’re consuming housing. Otherwise they’re just competing with you for wages. They’re not buying anything else.

What I wanted to ask, though, is about this other argument that people also make, which is: Okay—maybe you’re right that in the world that we live in, given that immigration is always happening, companies can rely on there going to be some level of immigration. They’re used to a high level of immigration happening. You don’t see these negative effects on wages. But in a world where you were to just, like, really, really tamp down—really, really stop immigration from coming in—companies would have to reshape how they’re doing their hiring practices. The entire American economy would change if it wasn’t reliant on foreign labor.

And so this idea that there are these, quote, jobs Americans won’t do isn’t true. They would do them at a price. They would do them if the wages were better, if the working conditions were better, and that we should strive for these higher-quality jobs. And companies that can’t do that, well—they should just not do that anymore. They should just literally stop relying on foreign labor. And so I think that how you respond to that is really important because, you know, I do think a lot of people are starting to, like, fixate on that argument.

Karma: This has actually been one of the largest justifications for what Donald Trump has called the largest deportation effort in American history that he wants to enact when he’s in office. Any of his advisors are talking about this. They talk about: This is going to force employers to hire workers at higher wages, to give them better jobs, and that’s a big reason why we should do it. So I think it’s a really important one to address.

And what’s nice is we actually have some really good empirical studies on this. We don’t just have to guess as to what would happen and assume as to what would happen. My favorite of these studies, although there are a few, looked at the Secure Communities program, which was a DHS program that deported about 500,000 immigrants between 2008 and 2014, so during the Obama administration. And the way that this happened was: It happened sort of semi-randomly across communities, such that it created a sort of natural experiment where you could look at how it affected communities where it had happened and how it affected not-yet-affected communities.

And the findings were shocking even to me because I would think, Okay, maybe when you get rid of a lot of these workers, there’s just going to be more jobs available.

Demsas: It’s like a shock.

Karma: It’s such a big, immediate shock. But what the authors find is that for every 100 immigrant workers who are deported, there are actually nine fewer jobs for natives. And this isn’t just temporary jobs. This is, like, permanently, there are fewer jobs for natives in the community, unemployment goes up, and wages slightly fall. And I think this kind of finding is repeated across different examples through American history.

There’s another great study of the H2B program, which allocates low-skilled workers to companies, and also finds that when companies aren’t allocated those workers, they don’t hire a bunch of natives. They actually just produce less. And so what happens when immigrants are ripped away from these communities is the interconnected web of employment and workers whose jobs depended on each other all gets torn up, right? Businesses close. Businesses have to stop producing as much. There are just less child-care services. There are less meals served. There are less houses built—either for reasons of: Employers actually can’t have a viable business with higher labor costs, whether it’s because natives don’t always want to do these jobs, or whether it’s just because, for the reasons we talked about earlier, there’s just a lot of benefits from the specialization of labor that occur when immigrants are in a place.

One way I think about this is sort of the opposite of the story that we were talking about earlier. When we talked about immigrants coming in and creating the specialization plus scale, that just happens in reverse. Instead of businesses expanding, and therefore being able to hire more natives because they’re expanding, businesses are shrinking. They’re shutting down. They’re closing. And when that happens, native-born workers get caught in the crossfire. When there’s less demand for your services as a restaurant, and your costs are higher, and so you have to close down, you’re not just getting rid of your immigrant workers, you’re getting rid of all the native-born workers who are working there too. And so I think that’s what these studies are finding, is you just can’t neatly remove immigrants from communities without having huge backfiring effects on the native-born.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s even useful to play it out in the best-case scenario. I think the best-case scenario for the folks who are making this argument is that there’s this short-term harm, but then you just need to let the economy play out and develop new businesses to figure out new business models that work. And in the best-case scenario, you’re talking about a poorer country. You’re talking about a country where your output, your growth is literally less. And that sounds very abstract, but we’re talking about less stuff. You have less money. You can buy fewer things. You can buy a worse quality of life. Your housing is probably worse. Even the basic stuff where you’re talking about, Can you afford child care?—fewer people can do that.

A lot of things are worse when the output declines, when it’s harder for businesses to try new things, when there’s difficulty with dynamism in the economy, where you can’t start a bunch of different kinds of businesses quickly, see what works, and have that kind of churn. And so I think it’s even difficult to conceptualize: When people are making this argument, they’re saying, We should take on the costs of being a poorer country for the sake of national homogeneity of where you were born.

And so I think that that’s the trade-off we’re talking about here. It’s not that America would cease to exist, right? There are a lot of countries who follow the sort of principles we’re talking about here, where they are really strict on who gets to come in, and they’re just poorer than America. And I think that that’s the really clear trade-off that I think often restrictionists won’t make baldly.

Karma: First of all, even the best-case scenario you’re talking about is one that has actually no empirical evidence. It’s all theoretical. So that’s the first point. The second is that this gets back to, I think, your point about general versus partial equilibriums, too. Because when we’re even just looking at these wage or employment studies, they’re holding a lot constant. And everything they’re holding constant also changes in an actual scenario where you deport millions of immigrants.

So there is another great study from the economist Ben Jones and a few others looking at immigrants and entrepreneurship. And they looked at basically every single business that opened up between 2005 and 2010 and looked at basically the country of origin of the person who started that business. And they found that immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start new businesses than native-born individuals.

And when they actually did the math, they found that immigrants, by entrepreneurship alone, are creating far more jobs than they take. One response to that would be, Oh, okay. Well, maybe this is high-skilled immigrants. Maybe this is the Google-founder kind of effect. But actually, they found that there was no difference in the rate of entrepreneurship between individuals from OECD countries and from non-OECD countries. And if you just think about this for a second, think about the people who end up coming here, the amount of risk they have to take, the perseverance that it takes to, like, actually get to the U.S.—it wouldn’t be surprising that these people are, like, more intrepid and more entrepreneurial.

Demsas: Just huge selection effects. Like, if you can make it through the Darién Gap, what does that say about you?

Karma: Exactly. And so that’s one effect that is completely lost in a lot of these studies. One of my favorite studies of this is one that was done in Denmark, because in Denmark, what is interesting—unlike in the U.S., where you have to just look at a specific city—Denmark has data on individuals for the entire country. It’s a pretty small country. And so researchers can actually track what happens to every single individual worker when new immigrants come in. And that gives you a sort of accuracy that you don’t necessarily get with the natural-experiment studies in the U.S., at least at a countrywide basis. And what they found is that native-born—even less-skilled native-born—workers end up responding to immigration by entering higher-paying occupations, by moving to higher-opportunity cities, and by actually getting better education, such that they actually had higher wages as a result of it.

And so I could go on. You could talk about the amount of women who are able to be in the workforce because of immigrants providing child care. Like, you can list this out, and there are all these ways in which even these studies are missing the sort of beneficial effect that immigrants are having that you would be taking away if you just suddenly got rid of all these people, in addition to this atrocious humanitarian effects.

Demsas: I find that the Danes—like, I wanted some sort of poll on their privacy concerns. I’m just like, Do you guys not care? I mean, like, I think it’s great. I would be pro-this everywhere, but I’m just surprised that countries are able to do this. There would be a revolt in America.

Karma: Even if the data is anonymized, I’m like, The data the researchers got was anonymized, but the data the government has is not anonymized.

Demsas: We don’t even let the government share data like that. Like, the IRS can’t just send the Treasury Department, like, all the data they have on people’s tax returns.

Karma: But you know what? You know what? Great for the Danish for doing it, too, so we can learn more about immigration through them.

Demsas: So true. But so the thing that’s interesting is: We’ve made a bunch of arguments here about why this is actually really positive for the economy. But regardless of that, there’s been a backlash, and we’re seeing that right now. I mean, this is airing on Election Day, and so we’re, I’m sure, in the future, just pacing nervously to see what’s going on.

Karma: (Laughs.) Apologies to anyone who was listening to this looking for a soothing distraction.

Demsas: But this has been probably the most-important issue of this election. Maybe inflation is another one. But the two most-important issues. I did an episode earlier this year with John Burn-Murdoch where we talked about the sense that Americans are very xenophobic and this narrative that they hate immigration—they hate immigrants—and that’s, like, just a fact of the world, and that all immigration has basically been this plot by elites to shove it down our throats. And, of course, we explored how a lot of that narrative is really overblown and underestimates just how strong pro-immigrant sentiment is in America, particularly relative to other countries.

And I still stand by that analysis, but there has been a shift in public opinion, even in the past year. You’ve seen polls come out that have really indicated that there’s been a backlash effect to the high levels of immigration that are kind of returning us to the 1800s averages.

And so first, can you just talk us through that backlash? What are the numbers there? What are we seeing?

Karma: Totally. The thing that first drew my attention to this was, as you were saying: The way this has impacted the election is that you’ve just seen such a hard right turn in the rhetoric from candidates on both sides. And I remember listening to Trump in 2024, making 2016 Trump sound like JFK in just how crazy he was. And then looking at the Democratic side, where the message went from, in 2020, Joe Biden promising to restore moral dignity to our asylum system, and then in 2024 Kamala Harris saying that, Actually, no. She is the one that will fortify the border, not Trump.

Demsas: Do not come.

Karma: Do not come. And underlying this is quite possibly the most dramatic shift in public opinion that I’ve ever seen. So going back to the 1960s, Gallup asks Americans every year this question: Do you think immigration should be increased, kept the same, or decreased? In 2020, only 28 percent of Americans said that immigration should be decreased. Actually, more Americans said it should be increased. By 2024, just four years later, the percentage of those who wanted it decreased had nearly doubled to 55 percent, the first time that there had been a majority of Americans who wanted immigration decreased since the early 2000s.

And just to put this shift in context, I think when Americans think about big public-opinion shifts, they think of gay marriage. And they think of the increasing support for gay marriage. Support for gay marriage, according to Gallup, increased about 20 points over the course of around a decade, maybe eight or nine years. This shift we’re talking about was nearly 30 points in four years. It makes gay marriage look gradual and small by comparison. And this immigration shift is most concentrated among Republicans, but it’s also Democrats. It’s also independents. And it’s especially been sharp in the past year.

Demsas: This is one of those things where I think it’s really important for people who, like myself, are in favor of high levels of immigration, first of all, to accept that, at some level, if you get that, you will have some negative effects, but I think also to really narrow in onto people’s specific concerns.

So I did an article earlier this year. It’s called “Something’s Fishy About the ‘Migrant Crisis.’” And basically, I was just like, Okay, there are high levels of immigration in a lot of places in this country. But not every place in this country is experiencing backlash, right? Like, you’re hearing these stories in New York and Chicago about people sleeping on the floors of police stations in Chicago. In New York, I had, like, an affordable-housing lawyer tell me—she was a very liberal person telling me that she was kind of concerned because there were migrants in the street in midtown Manhattan who were just, like, lying on the ground.

And there’s a lot to which I’m like, You know, if these people who are talking to me are some of the most-liberal people on immigration are expressing kind of like, Well, we can’t handle this. Like, we obviously can’t handle this, it indicates a very specific problem, right? Like, people—these New Yorkers, Chicagoans—they’re not afraid of immigrants or foreign-born people. There’s huge levels of foreign-born share in New York and Chicago. And the number of people that were entering we’re talking about, you know, that were coming in and demanding services from local government were a very small fraction of this.

So I was trying to understand what was going on there, and I really came down to the specific concerns people have. People don’t want to see local tax dollars being spent on newcomers to their city, if they feel like they need things that the city’s not actually taking care of. They don’t want to see their schools being used as shelters instead of being used in order to service, you know, their kids. And there’s just kind of general sense that, like, Now there are people sleeping on the streets. There’s nowhere for them to be housed. Like, It’s actually reducing my quality of life a bit. Clearly, there’s a sense of it being overwhelmed.

But then when I looked in places like Miami and Los Angeles, and in Texas and in Houston—Miami and Houston, in particular—I was like, There are way more immigrants who have come through a Houston, in Texas, than have come through a Chicago. So why are we seeing such backlash?

And I came to like two reasons. One is that many of the immigrants were not able to get work permits. The other thing that’s really important here is the Greg Abbott busing program. Because, most people, they come into the country, and, you know, what happens? They have networks that they’re following. Like, either they have populations of people that they’re able to get help from, or there are even people who are kind of recruiting them as they’re kind of coming over, like, Oh, we need work. We need people to come do this. And so there’s a level to which, like, there’s a natural flow to where they end up.

Greg Abbott has, I think, maybe the most-effective political stunt in American history—I genuinely think, like, reshaped the entire conversation on immigration by doing this. And then he says, Okay, I’m gonna bus people—effectively breaking these kind of natural shifts—to Democratic cities. And when people kind of show up randomly, there’s, like, of course, this massive transaction cost that’s enacted. And, you know, Texas is a border state, and I think, at some level, I kind of understand. They’re like, Oh, everyone should have to experience what it’s like to have all this kind of flow of people coming in. But Texas has boomed as a result of this too.

So anyway, I think the real thing that’s important here is that people who are in favor of immigration have to address these specific concerns. You have to make sure that there is, like, actually a clear, orderly process by which people are being resettled. If there’s not, I mean, that’s going to lead to backlash, even from people who are in favor of immigration. And the most frustrating part of my reporting is learning the Biden administration had basically abdicated their responsibility to try and help with the resettlement process of people across the country, because they were afraid of being blamed. And to me, I’m like, Well, you were still blamed. So I’m not sure it worked out for you.

Karma: Everything you’re describing here, I think, falls under the banner of what has been called either, colloquially, “chaos theory” or, more academically, the “locus of control theory” of immigration, which is that populations tend to be able to handle high amounts of immigration if they think the process is orderly and fair, and they become much more likely to oppose immigration when they see the process is chaotic and unfair and disorderly.

You know, you have a great example in that piece of the U.K., post-Brexit, having very high levels of immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment decreasing. Something you see in the U.S. is that even as you have these massive shifts in the amount of immigrants people want let in, when you ask questions like, Do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society? or, Do you support a path to citizenship for nondocumented immigrants? and even, Should it be easier to immigrate to the U.S.? people’s views actually haven’t changed nearly as much. And they remain more pro-immigrant than they were in 2016, which speaks to the fact that what people are upset about here—they’re not suddenly xenophobic. They don’t suddenly hate immigrants. A lot of what’s happening is that they’re responding to the chaos of the process.

I think my favorite part of that piece that you wrote was this point that you made about how there’s a way of looking at Greg Abbott’s busing program as working, in the sense of, like, Look—didn’t this prove his point? He said that liberal cities should have to handle this, and he proved that they couldn’t. But the process by which he did it was engineered to achieve that outcome, right? You point out in that piece that there are 3 million foreign-born people in New York City, in a city of 8 million, and they’ve been bused a couple tens of thousands. And it has led Eric Adams to say, like, New York is falling apart. That does not mean that New York can’t handle that amount of immigrants. The specific process by which this happened was engineered to achieve an outcome of chaos. And that’s what people are responding to.

Demsas: Well, let’s leave it on an optimistic note. Always our last question: What is something that you originally thought was good on paper but didn’t pan out in real life?

Karma: So this is quite a pivot from what we were talking about earlier. Last year I got engaged to my girlfriend.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, yes! Congratulations!

Karma: That was not the thing that was—

Demsas: Oh god.

Karma: That would be bad. But the way I did it was: It was our five-year anniversary, in Rome, very romantic. I knew I wanted to propose in front of the Pantheon, which was my partner’s favorite building in Rome.

Demsas: She’s an architect.

Karma: She’s an architect, yes. But I didn’t want to do it when there were a bunch of crowds around, so I was like, How can I figure out a way to get us there, like, early in the morning? And so I decided, in a decision that looked very good on paper, to book a Vatican tour for, like, 9 a.m. And so I was like, Oh, I’ll propose, and then we’ll go on this tour of the Vatican, and it’ll be, like, really cool. And it’ll be, like—we’ll see the Sistine Chapel. Sounded great. Looked good on paper.

It turns out that immediately after you have one of the most emotionally riveting experiences of your life—

Demsas: (Laughs.) You don’t want to go on a tour!

Karma: The last thing you want to do is go on a three-hour tour of the Vatican where you have to wait until the last 15 minutes to see the Sistine Chapel. We’re just, like, so badly just wanting to get out of there and be with each other, and we were just in such a great mood, only to have, like, the biggest buzzkill in the world be the Vatican.

Demsas: This is so funny, Rogé. I didn’t know the story. Wait. I can’t believe—so you went on the tour?

Karma: We went on the tour. I wish so badly I would have said, Let’s just forget the tour. But we were in such good spirits after. We’re like, This is going to be so great. Like, actually, looking back, I’m like, Was that even good on paper? I don’t think so.

Demsas: I was actually with you. I was like, Okay, yeah. Then you had a fun tour.

Karma: Like, a nice walking tour, architecture tour—probably great. When you’re, like, confined to the Vatican and just looking at, like, our guide—she was great, but she was just explaining every little thing, and we’re just like, We don’t want to be in public with a million people. We just want to be with each other. This is very strange.

Demsas: I think this is my favorite “good on paper” yet. This is unreal. (Laughs.)

Karma: I put a lot of thought into this, and I was like, This one was bad. This is not my best. It’s a funny story now.

Demsas: Yeah.

Karma: You know, I look back on it—I’ve looked back on it very fondly. So yeah, that’s my “good on paper” story.

Demsas: Thank you so much, Rogé. Thanks for coming on the show.

Karma: It’s been a pleasure being here. Thanks so much for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

The very last shot of Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, is identical to its first: a close-up of the tortured, weary face of Benji Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin with a frenetic intensity familiar from his work on Succession. That his sad eyes remain static despite all he has seen is significant, because this is, ostensibly, a Holocaust film, and everyone is supposed to be changed by the end of a Holocaust film.

Popular art about the Holocaust has long been a series of lesson plans, a conduit for catharsis. Most directors, by peering into a gas chamber or the maw of an oven, mean to remind us, as the actor-director Roberto Benigni once obscenely put it, that Life Is Beautiful. This pattern was set only a few years after the Holocaust itself, from the moment “Anne Frank” stood on a Broadway stage in 1955 and redeemed her audience by telling them, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.” Even Schindler’s List, that paradigm of Holocaust movies, is about the moral journey of a non-Jewish savior, Oskar Schindler, who ends the film weeping because “I didn’t do enough!”

This tidy didacticism is perhaps in the nature of narrative and its need for a clean arc—and it’s a good reason the deaths of millions should never have become fodder for blockbusters to begin with. But in A Real Pain, Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film, manages to tell a story about the Holocaust that doesn’t ask all those dead millions to become its supporting cast. In this film, trauma trickles down through the generations, but not in the obvious or pat ways that descendants of survivors have captured it before.

The story plays out straightforwardly as a travelogue that begins and ends in an airport. A pair of cousins, David (played by Eisenberg) and Benji, are on a Jewish-heritage tour of Poland. Their beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who died recently, set money aside in her will for them to visit her birth country. The cousins are only three weeks apart in age, but their differences could not be more pronounced.

Eisenberg has long perfected a kind of “Woody Allen without the baggage” screen persona, and here again he is that neurotic, twitchy Jewish guy. David is settled into middle age, working at a company that creates ad banners for the internet (a job both detestable and banal), with a wife and young child he adores. But the effort he’s making to tamp down his own sadness and pain makes him look pinched and constipated.

His cousin, Benji, tamps nothing down; he is a charmer with a scruffy beard, loose limbs, and an easy though slightly demonic smile. He’s the kind of person who will suddenly hug you for no reason, who speaks too loudly and overshares, who burps unapologetically among strangers. He ships some marijuana to their first hotel stop in Poland. When he and David join a small heritage-tour group upon arriving in Warsaw, everyone immediately falls for him, even as he instigates one awkward situation after another. “You light up a room and then you shit on everything inside of it,” David tells him—an accurate description. Or as one of the tour-group members, a middle-aged divorcée played by a smoky-voiced Jennifer Grey, says about Benji, “He’s funny and charming, under all the mishegas.”

[Read: How Son of Saul captures the reality of the Holocaust]

The wonder of this film is its smallness—not to mention its admirable shortness (a swift hour and a half)—despite the large historical and emotional backdrop against which it plays out. These characters want their presence in Poland to mean something, to transform them in some way, but it won’t—it is just a place and, as depicted here, an often drab one. All the trip does is foreground the complexity of David and Benji’s relationship as they shuttle through walking tours and nondescript hotels: Benji’s resentment of and reliance on David’s stability; David’s bafflement and envy over Benji’s allure; and the mental illness that keeps Benji, always on the verge of tears or screaming, stuck in his own mind and his mother’s basement.

If this pilgrimage is meant to offer a comeuppance for these two overgrown Millennial boys, to relativize their own pain as small, this reckoning never arrives.

At the end of the tour, they visit the death camp Majdanek. The camera fixes on their faces as they take in the barracks, the blue-stained walls of the gas chamber, the crematoria. And the score, which is heavy on Chopin, goes silent. As they drive away, Benji is weeping. But there is no mistaking this as a reaction to the camp or thoughts of his grandmother; Majdanek only gave him a little shove. When the cousins leave the tour to find the house where their grandmother grew up, they are headed for an anticlimax. “It’s so unremarkable,” Benji says. To make the moment more solemn, David suggests borrowing from the Jewish ritual of laying a stone on top of a grave, and places one near the threshold. But then a Polish neighbor yells at them that this is a tripping hazard, and they scurry off, pocketing their stones. David will eventually rest his on his stoop in New York City, the home that does have meaning to him.

There is an extremely prosaic quality to their encounters with these places of long-ago Jewish life and death; even as they try to squeeze significance out of the experience, Eisenberg makes us aware of their self-awareness. (“We’re on a fucking Holocaust tour,” Benji scolds David at one point. “If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don’t know what to tell you, man.”) In calling attention to the cliché, Eisenberg is undermining a mini-genre of sorts: books and films about such heritage tours. Earlier this year, Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham starred in the movie Treasure, playing a father and daughter visiting Poland in 1991. Dunham’s character, visibly depressed and recently divorced, is fixated on her father’s experience as a survivor of Auschwitz, so much so that she secretly tattoos his number from the camp on her leg. He is determinedly cut off from his own experience, and thus from her. But during a visit to Auschwitz together, his memories rush in—aided, in a common Holocaust-film trope, by a flashback, this one aural (barking dogs and screeching trains)—and his emotional opening-up begins.

The urtext of such journey stories is probably Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. In the 2005 film adaptation of the novel, a similar transformation occurs at the site of a Jewish massacre: sepia-toned flashbacks of shots fired and piles of bodies. And the eyes of Elijah Wood, playing Foer in the film with a determined blankness, fill with tears behind his coke-bottle glasses.

Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, once diagnosed this as holo-kitsch, and it now seems to have passed on to a third generation. These grandchildren want to touch the trauma and have some of its meaning rub off. But Eisenberg resists this. He chooses to set the climactic scene of A Real Pain not in a gas chamber but in a Jewish-themed restaurant in Lublin, with a piano player’s treacly rendition of “Hava Nagila” tinkling in the background. The tour group is sitting around a table having dinner and reminiscing about their forebears’ resilience, not their suffering.

Once again, Benji makes a scene. And after he storms off, managing to concern and confuse everyone, David breaks down. He knows he’s “oversharing,” but he can’t help it. His cousin’s troubling behavior is much worse than we’ve already seen, and culminated in a crisis after their grandmother died. She alone was capable of breaking through to Benji by putting his anguish in perspective; she even slapped him once, as if to shock him awake.

Driving Benji’s oversensitivity and instability is a desperate, self-involved desire to feel. But this doesn’t make him an inheritor of trauma. It just exposes his distance from it—the trip’s only real revelation being his own fragility. David, processing aloud at the dinner, himself close to tears, can’t believe the dissonance, all the vulnerability in his generation despite their family’s history: “How did this guy come from the survivors of this place?”

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At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat.

“People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen,” Trump remarked to friends at a fundraiser this summer, according to someone who heard the conversation. He smirked at the compliment. “What’s discipline got to do with winning?”

Trump never did deploy the nickname against Biden in public. Yet the restiveness he felt during that stretch of the race foretold a dramatic shift in the tone and tenor of his campaign. Within weeks, Trump would survive an assassination attempt, Biden would abandon his candidacy, Vice President Kamala Harris would replace him atop the Democratic ticket, and polls would show an election that once appeared finished suddenly reverting to coin-flip status. All the while, Trump became more agitated with what he saw as the trust-the-plan, run-out-the-clock strategy of his campaign—and more convinced that this cautious approach was going to cost him a second term.

[Read: This is exactly what the Trump team feared]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

Chris LaCivita, who co-manages Trump’s campaign with Susie Wiles, at an event in Phoenix (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Trump decided it was time to take matters into his own hands.

For the first 10 days following Biden’s departure from the race, Trump had listened dutifully as his campaign co-managers—a pair of longtime GOP consultants named Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita—explained that the fundamentals of their strategy remained solid. Nothing dramatic needed to change with Harris taking over the ticket, they told Trump, because she was inheriting the vulnerabilities they had exploited so successfully against Biden. They argued that whatever burst of money and enthusiasm had accompanied her entry into the race would prove short-lived—and warned him against overreacting. Staying the course, they told Trump, was the surest recipe for electoral success.

[Read: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

He went along with their plan—for a while. But every hour his campaign spent attacking Harris as if she were a credible opponent—rather than bludgeoning her as the airheaded, unqualified, empty pantsuit Trump was sure she was—gnawed at the former president. Finally, he ran out of patience. On July 31, during an onstage interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump publicly unloaded the sort of race-baiting barbs that his aides had, up until that point, succeeded in containing to his private diatribes.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump told the journalists onstage, eliciting gasps from the audience. “I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

In the days after his NABJ appearance—as staffers scrambled to satisfy their boss’s appetite for pugilism without indulging his racist and misogynistic impulses—Trump began to lose confidence in his team. He had long dismissed the warnings from certain friends, such as his former acting director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, that Wiles and LaCivita weren’t up to the job. But now he had reason to wonder. With Harris climbing rapidly in the polls and his own favorability numbers slipping, Trump was pondering, for the first time, a shake-up of his team. (Cheung said Trump never considered a change to his campaign leadership.)

In early August, Trump started courting two of his longtime allies and former campaign managers from 2016, Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski, discussing what it might look like if they rejoined his political operation in a formal capacity. Trump told Lewandowski—who promptly agreed to come aboard—that he missed the “fun,” freewheeling nature of that first run for the White House. He told Conway, meanwhile, that he worried he was being overly “managed” by his current team.

Trump’s conversations with Conway troubled Wiles and LaCivita. They knew that she and Trump were talking more and more frequently; they also knew she loved to take credit for electing him in 2016, and wouldn’t be eager to share accolades with her successors. Conway’s back-channeled criticisms of the 2024 campaign had been subtle but pointed; in an effort to placate her, LaCivita increased her monthly retainer at the Republican National Committee from $20,000 a month to $30,000. But in private conversations, Conway continued to point out the campaign’s shortcomings—especially, in her view, the mistaken selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate. When Wiles and LaCivita met Trump at a fundraiser in the Hamptons the evening of August 2—having been tipped off that their boss just spent the day talking strategy with Conway at his Bedminster club in New Jersey—the campaign’s top advisers fretted that their days running the show might be numbered. (As The New York Times was reporting on Conway’s visit to Bedminster, Trump called reporter Maggie Haberman and angrily denied that changes were afoot, saying he was “thrilled” with Wiles and LaCivita.)

In truth, the real threat was Lewandowski.

A tough-talking operative who had famously accosted a female reporter in 2016 and later allegedly made unwanted sexual advances toward a Republican donor’s wife, Lewandowski had promised Trump a return to the “killer” vibes of 2016. But the details of his new role were left open to interpretation. Lewandowski believed—and told anyone who would listen—that he would outrank the existing campaign leadership. Trump himself, meanwhile, assured Wiles and LaCivita that Lewandowski would be a utility man, serving as a key surrogate while helping organize election-security efforts and field operations in swing states.

The honeymoon period was nonexistent. Before Lewandowski worked a single day on behalf of the campaign, he complained to friends that Wiles and LaCivita had leaked the news of his hiring in an unflattering light that downplayed his role—and timed it to coincide with when he was traveling and off the grid, unable to speak for himself.

Determined to assert himself, Lewandowski arrived at Palm Beach headquarters in mid-August with designs on running the place. Wiles accompanies Trump nearly everywhere on the trail, and LaCivita, when not joining them, often works from his home in Virginia, leaving Lewandowski with a free hand in Florida. He began taking aside junior staffers and department heads alike, one at a time, informing them that he spoke for Trump himself. He made it known that he would be in charge of all spending, and that he needed people to tell him what wasn’t working so he could fix it. Meanwhile, he began calling the campaign’s key operatives in the battleground states, probing for weaknesses in Trump’s ground game and assuring them that a strategy shift was in the works.

Even as colleagues grew tired of hearing Lewandowski describe himself as the former president’s personal proxy, they realized he wasn’t wrong. His arrival coincided with a marked shift in Trump’s mood and behavior. Gone, suddenly, was the candidate of 2024, who despite all the inevitable outbursts was at least receptive to direction and aware of consequences; in his place, as the summer progressed, was the alter ego of 2016, the candidate who did and said whatever he wanted and ignored anyone who sought to rein him in.

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the former president shared a social-media post suggesting that Harris had performed oral sex in exchange for career advancement. He denigrated the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for military personnel, as less impressive than the civilian Medal of Freedom. He accused Harris of leading a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president of the United States.” He called into Fox News’s coverage of the convention and rambled so incoherently that the anchors cut his line 10 minutes into the interview. (Trump promptly dialed Newsmax to continue talking.) At a rally in North Carolina, after polling the audience about whether he should “get personal” with his attacks on Harris—the crowd responding rowdily to encourage his invective—Trump mused about firing his campaign advisers.

Around that time, Trump was asked by reporters about the tone of his candidacy. “I think I’m doing a very calm campaign,” he replied. “I have to do it my way.”

Kellyanne Conway at the Republic National Convention in July (Joseph Rushmore for The Atlantic)

As Trump was settling on Vance as his vice-presidential pick, one of the arguments he found most persuasive centered on an injection of youthful verve: The freshman senator, then just 39 years old, could complement a running mate four decades his elder with a style and media savvy that broadened the campaign’s appeal. With that promise, however, came a certain peril. Vance maintained an entourage of Very Online influencers who had little experience winning campaigns but lots of owned libs in their social-media mentions. Now some of those right-wing agitators would be joining an operation that was already struggling to keep its principal on message.

Vance’s first two months on the ticket were largely uneventful. His awkward, halting appearances fueled a sense of buyer’s remorse among some Trump confidants, but he made no mistakes of any real consequence. (The talk of “childless cat ladies” preceded his appointment to the GOP ticket, as did his remarks that he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”) And then came September 9. It was one day before Trump would meet Harris in Philadelphia for their first and only debate, and Vance, according to people familiar with the situation, was feeling punchy. Over the past several days, the young senator had marinated in right-wing agitprop stemming from Springfield, Ohio, where it was rumored that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets. When Vance’s allies on the campaign learned that he’d already spoken out about related issues in Springfield—how the influx of thousands of Haitian migrants who came legally to fill jobs had stressed the city—they urged him to seize on this conspiracist catnip and turn it into a crusade for the Trump campaign.

One staffer in particular—a young activist named Alex Bruesewitz—helped convince Vance and his team that this was an opportunity to put his stamp on the campaign. Vance agreed. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” the senator posted on X, catching the Trump campaign’s leaders entirely off guard. Figuring there was no use in half measures, Bruesewitz led Vance’s minions in blasting the social-media post around their networks and urging officials on other GOP campaigns, as well as at the Republican National Committee, to join Vance’s assault on the migrant community of Springfield. (Bruesewitz did not respond to a request for comment about this story.)

Most Republicans refused to go along. But Trump himself found the shtick irresistible. Even as he was sequestered in debate prep, word reached him that Vance had amplified the sensational claims about Springfield. The former president’s advisers were bewildered by Vance’s post. Though they went out of their way to avoid any talk of Springfield for the duration of the debate prep, there was an ominous feeling that Trump wouldn’t be able to help himself.

Yet somehow, by the time Trump charged ahead onstage the following night—“They’re eating the dogs; the people that came in, they’re eating the cats”—his campaign was facing a more serious crisis.

Several days earlier, Trump had fielded a phone call from one of his superfans: Laura Loomer. A right-wing agitator best known for racist and conspiracist bombast—she has celebrated the deaths of migrants and called school shootings fake events put on by crisis actors—Loomer had remained one of Trump’s most loyal and vocal supporters even in the darkest moments of his post–January 6 exile at Mar-a-Lago. That loyalty gave her a direct line to the former president. After she had joined the candidate aboard his plane during crucial trips to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the year, campaign officials discussed ways to sideline Loomer without causing a scene. They neutralized a volatile situation at the convention this summer, for example, by providing Loomer with a front-row seat for Trump’s acceptance speech—putting her in close physical proximity to her idol while keeping her far from the VIP area that cameras would be shooting live.

But now, in the first week of September, Loomer was getting antsy. She called Trump and demanded to know why the campaign had been keeping her at bay; why she hadn’t been allowed back on the plane as the Republican nominee toured the country. Trump told Loomer not to worry: He would personally see to it that she was invited aboard the plane for his next trip. Later that day, when Trump relayed this request to Wiles—who, since the beginning of the campaign, had controlled the flight manifest—she registered disbelief. “Sir, our next trip is to Philadelphia for the debate,” Wiles told Trump, according to two people familiar with the conversation. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

Trump shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just stick her in the back of the plane.”

Wiles knew that nothing good could come of this. Still, after one more round of gentle pushback, she acquiesced. (Even people like Wiles, who have a track record of talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas, learn that you cannot retain a seat at the table if you tell the man “no” one time too many.) Wiles decided that allowing Loomer on the trip was not a hill to die on. Perhaps, she would later remark to friends, it should have been.

When Trump’s jet touched down in Philadelphia on September 10, and photographers captured Loomer disembarking, some of the former president’s allies were apoplectic. Republican elected officials began texting campaign aides demanding to know why she was traveling with Trump. But outside of Wiles and LaCivita, Trump’s own staffers hadn’t known she was on the manifest. They were as bewildered—and furious—as everyone else. (Why Trump’s employees find Loomer uniquely noxious, when their boss consorts with known racists and trafficks in cruel conspiracy theories himself, is a separate question.)

As the night unfolded, with Loomer watching the debate backstage and then joining other GOP surrogates in the spin room, campaign leaders weighed their next move. Yanking her from the plane risked turning the story into something bigger and messier: a jilted Loomer lashing out against corrupt RINO deep-state simps in the aftermath of Trump’s miserable debate performance. Wiles decided that Trump’s special guest would remain on the manifest for the duration of the itinerary. The only problem? They were headed straight from Philadelphia to New York City for a memorial ceremony the next morning, honoring victims of 9/11—which Loomer, naturally, had described as an inside job.

After the cameras showed Loomer standing near Trump at Ground Zero, the former president’s own phone lit up. For the rest of the day, friends and associates and donors dialed his number with a manic urgency. Some read him old tweets that Loomer had sent; others demanded that whoever let this woman aboard the plane be fired. Senator Lindsey Graham asked Trump if he was trying to lose the election. To all of this Trump pleaded ignorance. He began complaining to aides that nobody had ever explained to him, specifically, why Loomer was so toxic. They responded by pulling up Loomer’s most incendiary posts and showing them to the boss. Trump winced at some and seemed unaffected by others. But he agreed, by the end of the trip, that Loomer needed to go. What sealed Loomer’s fate, according to two people who were part of these conversations, wasn’t just her racist diatribes but also her appearance: Trump, who is generally appalled by plastic surgery, was disgusted to learn about the apparent extent of Loomer’s facial alterations. (When asked for comment, Cheung told me, “Laura was a hard worker in the primaries and President Trump appreciates a fighter.”)

Trump regarded the Loomer episode as a one-off nuisance. His advisers, however, feared that something more fundamental had gone amiss. The past month had seen the campaign spiral into a free-for-all. Lewandowski was going rogue. Morale was plummeting among the rank-and-file staff. And Trump himself seemed intent on sabotaging a message—curbing immigration, fighting inflation, projecting strength on the world stage—that had been engineered to win him the election. Privately, Wiles confided to friends that she and LaCivita felt they’d lost control of the campaign.

When she and LaCivita sat down with Trump in the middle of September, Wiles urged her boss to realize just how badly things were going. These recent mistakes could not be repeated; this current path was unsustainable. “We need to step back and think hard about what we’re doing,” Wiles told him, according to several people familiar with the conversation. “Because this can’t go on.”

Trump doesn’t take well to admonishment. Yet the only other time he’d heard Wiles address him like this was in late 2022, shortly after he’d announced his candidacy, when he’d dined with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump seemed to recognize now, as he had then, that he was engaging in self-sabotage. He told Wiles that he agreed: It was time to tighten things up.

Trump thought the conversation was over. But there was one more thing on Wiles’s mind.

Corey Lewandowski at the Republican National Convention (Jim Bourg / Redux)

Days before departing for that doomed East Coast swing through Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan, Lewandowski had told Trump that they needed to talk. There was information, he said, that the candidate deserved to know.

When they met at Mar-a-Lago, Lewandowski laid it all out. He’d spent several weeks digging into the finances of the campaign, he told Trump, and things weren’t adding up. Far too much money was being spent on programs insignificant to his electoral success, and there had been no apparent oversight of contracts and arrangements that created a windfall for certain campaign employees. Lewandowski told Trump that he’d taken the liberty of bringing in a private consultant—personally escorting this outsider into the campaign’s offices—to study the books. This person’s conclusion, Lewandowski said, was: “Your people are either completely incompetent, or they’re stealing from you.”

Trump seemed conflicted. Nothing angered him more than the idea of being taken advantage of. Then again, if there was one person in politics he’d come to rely upon—one person who, he believed, would never steal from him—it was Wiles. Ultimately, Trump instructed Lewandowski to take his concerns to her.

When Lewandowski did so, on a plane ride that same week, things quickly went sideways. He made no accusations about specific individuals, but shared his belief that certain tactical decisions had been made with big paydays in mind. Wiles told him that she took offense at such conjecture—and that she didn’t need to justify anything to him. Still, Wiles spent the next hour walking Lewandowski through the choices made about vendors, contracts, and costs. When he continued to suggest that things weren’t on the level, Wiles ended the conversation, preferring to focus on preparing Trump for the upcoming debate.

Once the debate was behind them—and with many on the inside fearing that the campaign was falling apart—Wiles sensed that Lewandowski was about to make a move. He had repeatedly gone back to Trump, asking for control over hiring and firing as well as veto power over all spending decisions, which would effectively put him in charge of the campaign. Now he was going all in, telling Trump that Wiles and LaCivita had invested tens of millions of dollars in direct-mail outreach aimed at mobilizing supporters during the early-voting period—money that just so happened to line the pockets of certain campaign staffers, including LaCivita, and that could have been spent instead on television advertising. Lewandowski understood that the only tactical component of campaigning that Trump cared about was TV ads. He was telling Trump not just that he was being stolen from, but that the money in question would have made him ubiquitous on TV.

On September 12, when Wiles told Trump, “This can’t go on,” she added that she wasn’t just talking about Loomer and Springfield. Lewandowski had parachuted into a well-run campaign and rolled grenades into every department, Wiles told Trump, sowing distrust and spreading rumors and making it impossible for her to do her job. “If there’s something you’re skeptical of, something you want answers to, let’s talk about it,” Wiles told her boss. “But if you don’t have confidence in me and Chris, just say so.”

It was an ultimatum. And if Trump struggled with the decision before him—fire Wiles and LaCivita, or keep them and banish Lewandowski—he didn’t let on. Then and there he gave Wiles a vote of confidence. The next day, on the campaign plane, Trump convened Wiles, LaCivita, and Lewandowski around a table in the front cabin, in a meeting first reported on by Puck. He spoke directly to Lewandowski. “We can’t afford to lose these guys,” Trump said, motioning toward Wiles and LaCivita. “They’re in charge.”

Lewandowski knew the fight was lost. “Sir, I’m the only fucking person on this plane who isn’t getting paid to be here right now,” he grumbled, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting. “I’m happy to go back to fucking New Hampshire.”

“No, I want you on TV for me every day,” Trump said. He paused. “And go win me New Hampshire, while you’re at it.”

Lewandowski slapped the table. “You’re not going to win New Hampshire,” he said. “But okay.”

When passengers reboarded the plane for the next leg of their trip, Lewandowski was not on it. Being evicted from the plane is a signature insult in Trump’s political sphere. Lewandowski told friends that he’d planned all along to fly commercial to his next destination; the former president told his traveling aides that Lewandowski’s absence was meant to send the message that dissent would no longer be tolerated. Trump had lost a lot of ground to Harris over the previous month, and victory was possible only if everyone on the campaign fell back in line.

Things appeared to stabilize from there. As September gave way to October, and Harris launched a major media offensive aimed at connecting with voters who still felt no familiarity with her, Trump’s campaign was delighted to cede the spotlight. Wiles and LaCivita believed that every moment Harris spent in front of live cameras translated to more Republican votes. Instead of trying to book Trump onto major networks, where his comments might produce negative news cycles, his team arranged a tour of podcasts, most of them aimed at young men. The effort was led by Bruesewitz, the impulsive young Vance sycophant who maintained an impressive network of right-wing influencers. The strategy appeared to work: For the first three weeks of October, Trump’s internal polling showed Harris’s momentum stalled—measured in both net favorability and vote share—while Trump’s numbers inched upward.

By the middle of October, Trump was being hounded with requests from Republican candidates for joint appearances—requests that had been conspicuously few and far between just a month earlier. Even vulnerable incumbents, such as Representative Ken Calvert of California, tried to grab hold of Trump’s coattails, campaigning with him in his decidedly purple district. Surveying the narrative shift, Trump’s allies marveled at how simple it had all been. Keeping voters’ attention on Harris—while, to the extent they could, keeping Trump out of his own way—had produced the most significant movement in his direction since her entry into the race.

Not that Trump wasn’t doing his best to muck things up. The 40 minutes he spent onstage in Pennsylvania swaying silently to music prompted aides to exchange frenzied messages wondering whether the audio could be cut to get him off the stage. (Ultimately, they decided, letting him dance was less dangerous than letting him rant.) A week later, back in the all-important commonwealth for another event, he left aides slack-jawed by marveling at the ample genitalia of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer.  

Even as the political class settled on Trump as the betting favorite, his allies couldn’t shake a pair of very bad feelings. The first was about ground game: With much of their party’s resources being diverted to legal efforts, the GOP’s field operation was struggling to keep pace with the Democrats. The patchwork strategy left Republicans heavily dependent on outside help. But good help is hard to find. Elon Musk’s canvassing program was fast becoming a punch line in Republican circles. Several GOP consulting firms saw young staffers take short leaves to knock doors for Musk, lured by the enormous commissions he offered. His new system proved easy to game, allowing workers to inflate the number of contacts they reported, and to pocket the rewards. (Musk’s political entity, America PAC, did not respond to a request for comment.)

The more urgent concern, however, was the acrimony that had fractured the Republican nominee’s political operation. Lewandowski had, within a month of his defenestration at 30,000 feet, worked his way back into Trump’s inner circle—and even, at times, onto the plane itself. Wiles had, around the time of their showdown with Lewandowski, told LaCivita that she could no longer deal with the headache of handling the manifest. She charged him with the thankless duty for the remainder of the campaign, making for awkward encounters whenever Trump announced that he wanted Lewandowski to accompany him somewhere.

Even when Lewandowski wasn’t around, his presence was felt. In one instance, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—with whom Lewandowski was reported to have carried on a romantic relationship (they have both denied this)—boarded the Trump plane after an event and joined the former president for a strategy briefing with his aides. As the candidate received a series of positive updates from the ground—early-voting metrics, state-based internal polling—Noem interrupted to say that the campaign was lagging behind the Democrats in terms of voter-registration numbers. Trump’s aides were stunned: Not only was she contradicting their own data, but those present were convinced that Lewandowski had put her up to it in order to make Wiles and LaCivita look bad. (Noem, through a spokesperson, denied this and took offense at the notion that “she needs a man to put her up to anything.”)

As the race moved toward its conclusion—and as the constellation of helpers and hangers-on surrounding Trump began positioning themselves to take credit or deflect blame—more than a few people close to the candidate were shopping dirt on their internal rivals. A sense of foreboding settled in over the campaign. There was so much bad blood, several aides told me, that something was bound to spill out into the open.

Sure enough, on October 15, the Daily Beast published an explosive story alleging that LaCivita had skimmed huge amounts off the top of TV ads, direct mail, and other expenditures, netting him some $22 million from his work on behalf of the campaign and a pair of related super PACs. Multiple campaign sources told me that the nature of these arrangements was exaggerated, and that although LaCivita had made plenty of money—and perhaps more than some people were comfortable with—it was nowhere near that amount. (“Not only is the $22 million number manufactured out of thin air,” LaCivita told me in a statement, “but it’s defamatory.”) His objections hardly mattered: Trump was livid. Even when Wiles tried to calm him down, arguing that Lewandowski had planted the story to eliminate LaCivita, the former president kept fuming, saying the story made him look like a fool and demanding to know why the campaign hadn’t stopped it from being published.

With everyone in the campaign watching to see how their boss would respond to the article, Trump made it known that LaCivita was not welcome on the plane for a planned trip to Georgia that evening. Trump was still beside himself a day later, ranting about the article and telling friends that he’d fire LaCivita—and possibly his entire team—if it weren’t for the PR hit that would cause just weeks out from Election Day. (Cheung denied that Trump was upset by the Daily Beast report, saying, “Everyone recognized it came from disgruntled individuals.”)

LaCivita was abruptly summoned to Trump Tower on the morning of Friday, October 18. There, he found himself climbing into the lead car of the former president’s motorcade, a limousine in which Trump often rides alone to recharge between events. On this occasion, there was another passenger, the businessman Howard Lutnick, who had recently been named a co-chair of Trump’s White House transition team. The three of them made small talk all the way to LaGuardia Airport, as LaCivita waited for the hammer to drop. It felt, LaCivita would later tell several friends, like an episode of The Apprentice: beckoned by the boss, shoved into the limo with a spectator on hand, only to ride in suspense for what seemed like an eternity, believing that at any moment Trump would turn and say, “You’re fired.”

Instead, when they arrived at LaGuardia and boarded the campaign plane, Trump signaled for LaCivita to join him in the cramped, four-seat office at the front of the cabin. As they settled across from each other, Trump reached for a small stack of paper: a printout of the Daily Beast story. LaCivita, in turn, produced a much thicker stack of paper. These were the exhibits for the defense: Federal Election Commission reports, bank-account statements, pay stubs, vendor agreements, and more. For the next half hour, according to several sources with knowledge of the exchange, the two men had it out—profanities flying but voices kept intentionally low—as LaCivita insisted to Trump that he wasn’t ripping the candidate off. Trump, the sources said, seemed to vacillate between believing his employee and seething over the dollar figure, wondering how something so specific could be wrong. Finally, after a couple of concluding f-bombs, Trump seemed satisfied. “Okay, I get it, I get it,” he told LaCivita, holding up his hands as if requesting that the defense rest. He added: “You should sue those bastards.”

The air was more or less cleared: Trump has not raised the issue of LaCivita’s pay since, aides told me, save for several episodes of the candidate teasingly—but conspicuously—calling LaCivita “my $22 million man!” Nevertheless, the alliance remains fragile. Less than a week after the détente, CNN unearthed LaCivita’s Twitter activity from January 6, 2021, including his having liked a tweet that called for Trump to be removed via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita was dead to him—that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.

That was just fine by LaCivita; he had always viewed himself as a hired gun, and his reservations about working for Trump weren’t exactly a secret. Still, the word that Trump had iced one of his two key lieutenants sent a shiver through the rest of the staff. Many had noticed new faces poking around, asking questions about finances and compliance. With Trump’s suspicions piqued, every staffer, as well as every decision, would be under the microscope through Election Day.

Entering the final weekend of October, I noticed something in conversations with numerous Trump staffers: resignation. They had long since become accustomed to working in the high-intensity, zero-margin-for-error environment created by Wiles and LaCivita. But this home stretch of the campaign hadn’t just been hard and stressful; it had been disillusioning. Several campaign officials had told me, throughout the spring and summer, how excited they were about working in the next Trump White House. Now those same people were telling me—as paperwork was being distributed internally to begin the process of placing personnel on the transition team and in the prospective administration—that they’d had a change of heart. The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.

Donald Trump at a rally in Phoenix in June (Roger Kisby / Redux for The Atlantic)

Standing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden on the evening of Sunday, October 27, an irate group of Trump staffers, family members, and loyalists was looking for someone to blame.

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous. Elected officials—Democrats, and, before long, Republicans too—blasted the comedian’s remarks. Headlines from the world’s leading news organizations described the event as every bit the hate-fest Republicans had promised it wouldn’t be. Trump aides were blitzed with text messages from lawmakers and donors and lobbyists wanting to know who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign.

In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It didn’t take long to get to the answer: Alex Bruesewitz.

Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves.

Now, with their grand celebration quickly morphing into a public-relations nightmare, Trump’s allies stewed. Two decisions needed to be made, and quickly: whether to inform the man of the hour about this disaster before he took the stage, and whether to issue a statement rebuking Hinchcliffe and his remarks. Some staffers feared throwing Trump off his game at such a crucial moment, and others argued that showing any weakness would just make things worse. But LaCivita dictated a short statement to the communications team that was blasted out to reporters across the arena, distancing the campaign from Hinchcliffe, while Wiles pulled the former president aside and explained the situation. (Trump, aides told me, was merely annoyed at the time; only after watching television coverage the next morning would he rage about how Wiles, LaCivita, and Caporale had “fucked this up.”)

Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.

The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”

It happened fast. Almost as soon as Hurricane Milton bore down on South Florida last month, high winds began shredding the roof of Tropicana Field, home for 26 years to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. Gigantic segments of Teflon-coated fiberglass flapped in the wind, then sheared off entirely. In the end, it took only a few hours for the Trop to lose most of its roof—a roof that was built to withstand high winds; a roof that was necessary because it exists in a place where people can no longer sit outside in the summer; a roof that was supposed to be the solution.

The problem, of course, is the weather. Of America’s four major professional sports, baseball is uniquely vulnerable to climate change in that it is typically played outside, often during the day, for a long, unrelenting season: six games a week per team, from March to October, which incidentally is when the Northern Hemisphere gets steamy and unpredictable, more so every year. In 1869, when the first professional baseball club was formed, the average July temperature in New York City’s Central Park was 72.8 degrees. In 2023, it was 79. By 2100, it could be as much as 13.5 degrees hotter, according to recent projections, hot enough to make sitting in the sunshine for a few hours unpleasant at best and hazardous at worst. In June, four Kansas City Royals fans were hospitalized for heat illness during an afternoon home game. On a muggy day four seasons ago, Los Angeles Angels starting pitcher Dylan Bundy began sweating so much, you could see it on TV. He then took a dainty puke behind the mound and exited the game with heat exhaustion.

Games have been moved because of wildfire smoke on the West Coast and delayed because of catastrophic flooding in New York. What we used to call generational storms now come nearly every year. Two weeks before the Trop’s roof came off, a different storm ripped through Atlanta, postponing a highly consequential Mets-Braves matchup and extending the season by a day.  

Climate change is already affecting some basic material realities of the sport. Some ball clubs have added misting fans and massive ice-water containers for temporary relief, making the experience of going to the game feel a little less like relaxing and a little more like surviving. A 2021 study found that umpires are more prone to mistaken calls in extreme heat, and one from last year found that decreased air density—the result of hotter temperatures—is changing the fundamental physics of how balls fly through the air.

Baseball just saw its latest season come and go, with the L.A. Dodgers—who play in a city that already experiences extreme storms, deadly heat, and drought—taking the World Series in five games. As we look forward to the next season, and the one after that, the biggest question isn’t whether Shohei Ohtani’s new elbow can make him the greatest player in history (possibly), or whether sports betting has ruined baseball (quite possibly), or whether the Mets will go the distance in 2025 (definitely)—it’s whether the sport will be able to adapt in time to save itself. “It’s becoming difficult for me, as somebody who enjoys the sport, and as somebody who researches climate change,” Jessica Murfree, an assistant professor of sport administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. “I don’t know that there’s a way to have it all.”

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In a scene from the movie Interstellar, the film’s protagonist, a pilot named Joseph Cooper, takes his children and father-in-law to a baseball game in the blight-ravaged, storm-battered year 2067. A few dozen people are sitting in the stands of a dinky diamond that looks like it could belong to a high-school team, eating popcorn; Cooper’s father-in-law is grousing about how, in his day, “we had real ballplayers—who are these bums?” And then one such bum turns around to reveal his jersey, and there’s the joke, if you want to call it that: These are the New York Yankees.

Timothy Kellison shows this clip to the students he teaches at Florida State University’s Department of Sport Management. “That’s the future of sport in the long run,” he told me: The most powerful franchise in the history of baseball could become a traveling oddity. “From a Yankees fan’s perspective, from a baseball fan’s perspective, that’s a very troubling future.”

Murfree was even more direct: “I do think sport might be one of the first things to go when we really move past these alarming tipping points about climate.”

Baseball has long been defined, and enriched, by its openness to the world. It gets “better air in our lungs” and allows us to “leave our close rooms,” as Walt Whitman wrote in 1846, during the sport’s earliest days. It is the only major sport in which the point is for the ball to leave the field of play; once in a while—on a lucky night, in an open park—a home run lands in the parking lot or a nearby body of water. Wind, temperature, and precipitation are such a part of the game that the website FanGraphs includes weather in its suite of advanced statistics. The season begins in spring and ends in autumn, in a cycle that binds the sport to all living things: renewal and decay, renewal and decay. “Playing baseball in the fall has a certain smell,” Alva Noë, a Mets fan and philosophy professor at UC Berkeley, told me. “Playing baseball in the spring, in the hot summer, has a certain feel.” In his book The Summer Game, the famed baseball chronicler Roger Angell wrote of the “flight of pigeons flashing out of the barn-shadow of the upper stands”; of “the heat of the sun-warmed iron coming through your shirtsleeve under your elbow”; of “the moon rising out of the scoreboard like a spongy, day-old orange balloon.”

Angell was writing in 1964, in the context of the closure of the Polo Grounds, the “bony, misshapen old playground” that was home to both the Mets and the Yankees at various times. He mourned the future of the sport, when “our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable.” The next year, baseball’s first indoor stadium, the Houston Astrodome, opened, the argument being that a roof was the only viable way to play baseball in the subtropical Texas climate.

Sixty years later, Houston is much hotter, and eight teams (including the Rays, who are still figuring out where to play next season) have roofs; this includes two of the three newest parks in baseball (in Miami and the Dallas metro area). The next new one (in Las Vegas, which is one of the fastest-warming cities in the country) will have one, too. Most of these roofs are retractable, but in practice, many tend to stay closed during summer’s high heat and heavy rains. During any given week of the season, several games are played on plastic grass in a breezeless hangar, under not sky but steel. In the future, “the aesthetics of the game, the feel of the game, will be so different, if you’re sitting in … a sort of neutral, sanitized, protected” space, Noë said. “There won’t be birds, there won’t be clouds, there won’t be glare from the sun, there won’t be wind, there won’t be rain, there won’t be pollution, there won’t be the sound of overflying airplanes. You’ll be playing baseball in a shopping mall.”

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This vision is, to be clear, the best answer we have so far to baseball’s climate problem. If anything, it’s actually too ambitious, too far off. Renovating existing parks to add roofs is impractical and expensive; building new ones costs even more: “We’re not talking about one business and relocating it to a different building higher up on the land,” Kellison said. “These are billion-dollar stadiums. They’re intended to be permanent.” Baseball is also highly invested in its own iconography; in cities such as Boston and Chicago, places with famous, century-old, open parks, domes will be a tough sell.

And, obviously, they’re not a perfect solution to extreme weather. In Phoenix, a city that had 113 straight 100-degree-or-more days this summer, the air-conditioning system at Chase Field has been straining; players have left games due to cramps, blaming the heat. Even if teams find the money and the will to build new parks, and even if those parks do the thing they’re supposed to do, they might not do it fast or well enough to make baseball comfortable or safe enough to keep its fans—fans whom baseball is already anxious to retain, as other entertainment becomes more popular.

Kellison is actually pretty optimistic about some adaptation being possible, precisely because baseball, like all sports, is so dependent on its fans. People pay lots of money to be in baseball stadiums—about $3.3 billion in 2023, according to one analysis. Owners and the league have a major incentive to keep them coming. “These are very wealthy and successful business leaders who aren’t just going to let a product like this go away with such a financial stake in it,” he said. Aileen McManamon, a sports-management consultant and a board member of the trade association Green Sports Alliance, told me that Major League Baseball does recognize that examining its relationship to the environment “is fundamental to [its] continued existence.”

But MLB isn’t a monolith—it’s a multibillion-dollar organization composed of 30 teams with 30 ownership groups, in 27 cities across two countries. (The league did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Kellison doesn’t believe that MLB is thinking as ambitiously or formally as it should be about climate change’s effect on the sport, and neither does Murfree. “There really is no excuse to say this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, a freak accident,” Murfree said. “The league and its organizations do have a responsibility to be forward-thinking and protect their people and their organizations from something that scientists have been waving their hands in the air about for a long time.”

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Experts have all kinds of proposals, both radical and subtle, to go along with domes: Brad Wilkins, the director of the University of Oregon’s Performance Research Laboratory, suggested making changes to the uniforms, which are polyester, highly insulative, and “not very good at dissipating heat.” (The league did change the uniforms slightly this year, in part to incorporate more “breathable” fabric, but many players found the quality lacking.) McManamon talked with me about being more strategic regarding where and how we build new stadiums, looking for sites with natural ventilation and better shade, and using novel materials. She also suggested shortening the season, to make it a little gentler on fans and players. Murfree, meanwhile, has argued for shifting the timing of the season, and for opportunistically moving games based on weather, making baseball less tied to place.

Not all of these ideas are immediately feasible, and none will be popular. All sports like to mythologize themselves, but baseball—this young country’s oldest game—might have one of the most powerful and pernicious mythmaking apparatuses of all. It’s the stuff of poetry, of 18-hour documentaries, of love stories. Baseball people are intensely nostalgic. They love to find ways to be cranky about changes much less consequential than these. But Murfree’s a fan, and a pragmatist. “If we dig our heels into the status quo, we will lose out on the things that we enjoy,” she said. “If baseball is to remain America’s favorite pastime, we have no choice but to be flexible.”

Fans, players, and Major League Baseball think of the sport as something static, but in fact it is changing all the time. The earliest baseball games were played by amateurs, on irregularly sized fields, with inconsistent rules and balls that were made of melted shoes wrapped in yarn and pitched underhand. Since then, we have seen, among other things, the introduction of racial integration, night games, free agency, the designated hitter, instant replay, sabermetrics, and the pitch clock, each new development greeted with skepticism and outrage and then, eventually, acceptance. Now we face the most radical changes of all. Eventually, baseball—the sport of sunbaked afternoons, a sport made beautiful and strange by its exposure to the elements—may be unrecognizable. This will be the best-case scenario, because the alternative is that baseball doesn’t exist.  

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