“Ukrainians don’t care who will be president of the United States,” my boss, the editor in chief of one of the largest television stations in Ukraine, told me in 2012 as I headed overseas to cover the American election. I was at the Obama campaign’s headquarters, in Chicago, when the president gave his victory speech that year—but back then, Ukrainian television didn’t broadcast live at night, so my report didn’t air until the next morning, local time.

Covering the 2024 U.S. election for the Ukrainian media was an entirely different experience. People in Ukraine were following every turn. Multiple Ukrainian radio stations called me for reports from the rallies I’d attended in Saginaw, Michigan, and State College, Pennsylvania. Ukraine is at war, and the United States is its biggest provider of military aid; the future of that relationship was at stake. The contest’s eventual winner, Donald Trump, had promised to end the war in 24 hours—which Ukrainians understood to mean that he intended to sell our country out to Russia.

But for me, that was only one dimension of this election’s significance. I’ve covered five American presidential contests for the Ukrainian press, starting in 2008, and in that time, I feel that I have witnessed an American transformation that resonates uncomfortably with the Ukrainian past.

After Ukraine became independent, in 1991, our political parties were for decades run from the pockets of oligarchs. A handful of unimaginably wealthy men, each with holdings in media and industry, controlled factions of political representatives who competed almost exclusively with one another. Political campaigns lacked substance and consisted mainly of personal attacks. In the United States in 2008 and 2012, by contrast, the candidates had real constituencies and actual debates about health care and the economy. Many Ukrainians envied the strength of American institutions, media, and civic engagement.

[Read: ‘They didn’t understand anything, but just spoiled people’s lives’]

Sure, I was a bit stunned when, at a 2008 John McCain rally in Columbus, Ohio, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger warned voters that socialism was on the rise and would destroy America the way it had his native Austria. I had just been to Youngstown, Ohio, where I’d interviewed laid-off workers who lacked basic health care; Austria, meanwhile, was a country I knew well, and it had one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why would an elected official peddle such nonsense to this enormous crowd? Still, American democracy seemed, to an outsider, like the picture of health.

The roles had all but reversed when I came back in 2016. Ukrainians had risen up in 2014 against the corrupt, Russia-backed government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. Our transition wasn’t perfect, but we elected a government that was at last serious about reform. The Kremlin responded by occupying Crimea and assaulting eastern Ukraine, where it backed separatists in the Donbas region. A low-level war would continue in the Donbas straight up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022. Even so, we were building up our democracy. Something was happening to America that seemed to point in a different direction.

That year, Americans were more divided than I’d ever seen them. And it wasn’t easy to talk with Republicans. Some Trump supporters told me that a European reporter could never understand their views on guns. One shut the door in my face at a campaign headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, explaining that he didn’t trust the foreign media. I’d reported from the rallies of pro-Russian separatists in Crimea and the Donbas, who considered Kyiv-based journalists suspicious if not outright enemies, and I knew when to leave.  

That feeling wasn’t the only disconcertingly familiar one. The worldviews of many Americans I talked with that year diverged starkly from the visible facts of their lives. Democrats scoffed that nobody would vote for Trump—but the excitement at his rallies was plainly evident. A man at a Trump rally in Wilmington, Ohio, complained to me about unemployment. Neither he nor anybody in his family had lost a job—in fact, the mayor of Wilmington told me that the town had more than 300 job vacancies. A retired prosecutor told me that the only media outlet he trusted was WikiLeaks. I was reminded of Russia’s coordinated disinformation campaign against Ukrainians: Since the start of the war, we’d been flooded with fabricated news. We had struggled to make the international press understand that high-profile politicians were simply inventing stories. Now something similar seemed to be happening in the United States.

As of this fall, Ukraine is two and a half years into an all-out war with Russia, and America is eight years into a style of politics that my American colleagues describe as substanceless. I listened for mentions of Ukraine at the rallies I attended, and heard none. The closest the candidates came was when Trump, in Pennsylvania, promised that his administration wouldn’t get involved in the affairs of “countries you’ve never heard of,” and Kamala Harris reminded a crowd in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that Trump had a strange fascination with Russia. Nonetheless, the Trump supporters I spoke with assured me that their candidate would bring an end to all wars, including the one in Ukraine. I heard this from Bill Bazzi, the mayor of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. And I heard it from rally-goers, including an elderly woman at a J. D. Vance event in Saginaw, who told me that she’d persuaded skeptical family members to overlook Trump’s personality and focus on his leadership qualities and ability to bring peace to the world.

Harris didn’t speak much about foreign policy at the event I attended in Ann Arbor, but she did warn her audience about the risk of fascism. That word surprised me. Since the full-scale invasion of our country, Ukrainians have frequently used it to describe the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin. The international media have been reluctant to pick up the term, perhaps because it is so heavily freighted with historical meaning. But now it has become part of the American political vernacular.

This American campaign season was rife with reminders of a politics that were once routine in Ukraine, and that we are now happy to be mostly rid of. We know very well, from our experience, what happens when billionaires own media platforms: They can withdraw endorsements written by their editorial boards and back political candidates in order to curry favor. In Warren, Michigan, I talked with a man who claimed that he’d earned $80,000 in one month for collecting signatures for Elon Musk’s petition to support the Constitution. In another echo, the Trump camp threatened that it would challenge the election results if they didn’t name him the winner: Ukraine has some experience with elections followed by months of litigation.

Some of the Americans I met on the campaign trail wanted to know if I found the situation in their country disturbing. Sure. But everything is relative. Americans are fortunate not to live through what we do in Ukraine. There were times in the past week when I’d be reporting in the Midwest and, because of the time difference, the air-raid-alert app on my phone would go off in the middle of the day, announcing another nighttime attack on my home city of Kyiv. In between interviews, I’d scroll through photos of the buildings hit, hoping not to see my family’s home.   

Trump has won the contest for the U.S. presidency. If he withholds military aid, Ukraine may suffer huge losses on the battlefield and enormous civilian casualties. But one way or another, Kyiv is going to have to work with his administration. My time reporting on the campaign has convinced me that this election was not an aberration so much as a reality to be accepted. For the foreseeable future, the United States will turn inward, becoming a country more and more focused on itself. Outsiders will simply have to take this into account.

[Listen: Autocracy in America]

As for the threat of encroaching authoritarianism, I remain an optimist. Take it from a member of the generation of Ukrainians who successfully defended democracy: To capture a state requires not just a strong leader but an apathetic society. Democracy survives when citizens actively defend their rights on every level.

I saw a lot of that in Nevada and Arizona, where I spent the last two days of the campaign following canvassers. I went door-to-door with members of the Culinary Union of Las Vegas—a guest-room attendant, a cocktail server, and a porter—and listened as they urged residents to pay attention to the Nevada Senate race. In Phoenix, I followed a group of volunteers from California who’d spent weeks trying to talk with people they disagreed with. They told me they had knocked on 500,000 doors in Arizona. Friends in New York and Washington told me that they or their relatives had done campaign work outside their cities—writing letters, phone-banking. Even those critical of both candidates and the system itself cared deeply about the country; some who were alienated from the national races focused their energies on local ones. I have never seen anything like this in Europe, where elections are all about going to the polls once every few years.

One thing we have learned in Ukraine, confronted with foreign invasion and war, is that life goes on. The same will be true for America after November 5. I’m reminded of the time a foreign journalist asked a Ukrainian general how Ukraine would survive the winter. He confidently replied that after the winter, there would be spring.

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

The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of ​​AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Related:

Why Democrats are losing the culture war The right’s new kingmaker

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What the left keeps getting wrong Conor Friedersdorf: The case for treating Trump like a normal president “You are the media now.” Why Netanyahu fired his defense minister

Today’s News

A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: AI-powered search is killing the internet’s curiosity, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: A century-old novel offers a unique antidote to contempt and despair, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose. The limits of Democratic optimism The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition The “Stop the Steal” movement isn’t letting up. Quinta Jurecic: “Bye-bye, Jack Smith.” Don’t give up on America.

Culture Break

Matt Wilson / Paramount

Analyze. The comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline has muddled the genre of political comedy, Shirley Li writes.

Read. In Miss Kim Knows, Cho Nam-Joo captures both the universality of sexism and the specificity of women’s experiences, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

One week ago, in the middle of early voting, an arsonist attached incendiary devices to two ballot-drop boxes, one in Oregon and another in Washington State. Hundreds of ballots were scorched or burned beyond recognition. Affected voters will have to be identified, contacted, and asked to resubmit their ballot. Police are still searching for the culprit, who they fear may strike again.

Set aside the high-minded talk of saving democracy; this was a literal attack on voting—and officials are preparing for even more. Election experts and local leaders anticipate that this week, and probably some weeks after, will bring a torrent of election disinformation, online threats, and in-person tensions that could boil over into violence.

In response, officials across the country have transformed their tabulation centers into fortresses, with rolls of razor wire atop their fences and ballistic film reinforcing their windows. Election staffers are running drills with law-enforcement officers, studying nonviolent de-escalation tactics, and learning protocols for encountering packages containing mysterious white powder.

The more pressing concern, however, is what happens after Tuesday, in that period, fraught with impatience, between when election workers are counting votes and the results are confirmed. During this interval—which may be only hours, but may run to days in some places—there will be little actual news and many attempts to create some: At the very moment when a watchful press will be desperate for new developments, conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump’s allies will be intent on sowing chaos and doubt.

“It’s going to be a time of high drama,” Darrell West, a senior fellow specializing in governance at the Brookings Institution, told me. There are always small, human-caused errors in polling, but in many decades of American elections, only a handful of cases of voter fraud have ever been found. Any glitch is “likely to be seriously elevated this time, and people will take isolated examples and turn them into system-wide problems that could fuel outrage,” West said. But instead of another concentrated day of “Stop the Steal” violence, as January 6 was in Washington, D.C., West and other experts say that we’re likely to see a more dispersed, harder-to-track election-denial movement. “The violence, if it takes place, will be during the vote-counting process,” he said.

[Listen: Is journalism ready for a second Trump administration?]

America has had four years to prepare—legally and logistically—for this election week. Election workers have received new training in case things get rowdy in polling places. Many states have passed laws to clarify the role of poll observers, who can provide valuable transparency but who were deployed by election conspiracists to disrupt the 2020 election—and might be again.

Authorities have also shored up their facilities. In Phoenix, the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, which was ground zero for protests and so many baseless allegations of fraud in 2020, is now surrounded by concrete barriers, armed officers, and a 24/7 video feed for public observation. The county has also developed “robust cybersecurity measures,” J. P. Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, told me, and it has employed on-call experts called “tiger teams” to troubleshoot any tech and security issues.

At the federal level, the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force has already brought 20 charges against people accused of threatening election officials. Each of the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country has designated a district elections officer to handle any Election Day complaints. Still, officials in many states—Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, to name just a few—have purchased panic buttons for their poll workers; some have Narcan on hand in case they find fentanyl in ballot envelopes. “Election officials are risk managers by nature” and have always been well aware of Election Day threats, Kim Wyman, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Washington secretary of state, told me. “What’s new since 2020 is the more personal nature” of those threats.

Although police officers will not be stationed at every polling site in America this year, the presence of law enforcement, including plainclothes officers, will be higher than normal, even if their presence will be intentionally inconspicuous, Chris Harvey, who works with the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a coalition of election and law-enforcement officials, told me. “Police at polling places should be like fire extinguishers,” he said: available but not obtrusive.

Harvey and his colleagues have spent the past year holding “tabletop exercises” in states across the country. At these trainings, election officials and police collaborate to work through alarming scenarios, including bomb threats to a voting precinct, active-shooter reports, and what, exactly, should happen if a group of armed men turns up outside a polling place in a state with open-carry laws. We “let each side sort of express their concerns: what the election officials would like the cops to do, what the cops tell the election officials they have the ability to do,” Harvey said. “If nothing else, they at least get familiar with each other.”

When Harvey first started this project, most of the law-enforcement attendees seemed bored, he told me—but in the past six months, “interest has increased dramatically.” Officers are realizing that this election season could be more volatile than any in recent memory. “People have had four years of marinating in conspiracy theories,” Harvey said. So when they go to vote, “they’ll be primed for any type of confrontation—or something they see as suspicious or evidence of fraud.” Before 2020, police officers could generally assume that most of the hard work was done when the polls closed. Now, Harvey said, they’re aware that when polls close on Election Day, that “might just be the beginning.”

That brings us to what experts believe is a more realistic hypothetical than violence on Election Day itself: a breakdown of public order resulting from days of confusion and impatience. Think hordes of people rioting outside polling centers across America, and stalking or physically attacking election officials. Imagine 2020, experts say, only worse.

Trump’s supporters do not seem at all prepared to accept a loss. And any claim of a stolen election this year could prompt them to take matters into their own hands. In 2020, cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Phoenix, and Atlanta witnessed swarms of angry people, riled up by false claims of voter fraud. These are places where, to this day, election officials receive a high volume of threats.

Delays will make things worse. Most states allow election workers to begin processing early ballots before Election Day, which helps speed up the counting process. Unfortunately, two states that still do not allow this are Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both electoral battlegrounds that could determine the outcome. Results are expected to take a while in the key states of Georgia and North Carolina, too. Counting, auditing, recounting—“all that stuff will draw a crowd and have an intimidating effect on the poll workers,” Harvey said.

Take Pennsylvania, a state seen as a must-win for both Kamala Harris and Trump. “We could end up in a situation where early tabulation shows Trump ahead, and Wednesday through Friday [that lead] starts to slip away,” West said. “That’s a bad formula for people who don’t trust the system.” Trump has again primed his supporters to pay special attention to Philadelphia. If it looks like Harris is edging ahead, West said, the city “will be the epicenter of a lot of the anger.”

Philly leaders are aware of this. Since 2020, they’ve moved the entire central election operation away from downtown to the northeastern part of the city. Certified poll watchers are still allowed inside, and there will be designated demonstration areas outside. But the new facility is also defended by a fence, barbed wire, and security checkpoints. “We are prepared, with our partners in law enforcement throughout the city, for anything that could come our way,” Lisa Deeley, a city commissioner, told me. Other states say that they, too, are ready for any contingency. In emailed statements, officials in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada confirmed to me that they had enhanced safety measures to protect the count. “We just have to be on the watch for outside agitators,” Darryl Woods, the chair of the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners, told me. “Foolishness will not be tolerated.”

No one seems too worried about D.C. this year. The Department of Homeland Security has designated January 6, 2025, as a National Special Security Event, and D.C. police have given press conferences assuring citizens of law-enforcement preparedness for any election-related disorder before or on that date. Some experts told me that the days with greater potential for risk this time are December 11, the deadline by which states must certify their election results, and December 17, when electors meet in their states to vote for president. If the election is close, both days could see protests and violence in the states where the margin is tightest, West said.

One welcome bit of reassurance is the fact that experts don’t anticipate the kind of paramilitary mobilization America saw in 2020, when unrest over the police killing of George Floyd and the COVID-19 lockdowns had people marching in the streets and extremist groups deploying around the country. Prominent members of militia-type organizations, such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, that achieved national prominence in 2020 are thankfully in jail, and many groups have refocused their efforts at a local level, Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Georgetown, told me.

Still, McCord is watching the parts of the country where these militias have regrouped, which, in some cases, happen to coincide with parts of the country where experienced election officials have been replaced with election deniers, including parts of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and Arizona. If there are moves, after the election, to implement independent state legislature theory and replace slates of electors, McCord said, “you can imagine extremists glomming onto that.”

[Read: A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks]

Whatever intimidation and violence may occur in the coming weeks, election workers and volunteers will almost certainly feel it most. Many of them have been receiving threats for years, and continue forwarding them, by muscle memory, to local authorities. Paradoxically, the election officials most likely to come under hostile pressure from MAGA activists are themselves Republicans.

Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder in Maricopa County, faced immense pressure and vile threats in 2020. But so did Leslie Hoffman, a Republican in deep-red Yavapai County. So did Anne Dover, the election director in Trump-voting Cherokee County, Georgia. And so did Tina Barton, a Republican clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, who was accused of cheating to help Joe Biden, and received a voicemail promising that “10,000 patriots” would find and kill her. No evidence of fraud was uncovered in any of these counties. (The threatening “patriot” was identified, charged, and later sentenced to 14 months in jail.)

This year, despite everything, some of those same officials remain remarkably hopeful. “While I have anxiety and concern about what we could see over the next few days and weeks, and maybe even into a few months,” Barton, who now works for the nonpartisan Elections Group, told me, “I have to think that the good in humanity and the good in America will ultimately win.”

To support The Atlantic’s journalism, please consider subscribing today.

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.”

[Read: Climate collapse could happen fast]

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.”

[Read: Why are baseball players always eating?]

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.”

[Read: A touch revolution could transform pitching]

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.  

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Strange things can happen in the desert. On Wednesday morning in San Tan Valley, Arizona, I watched Kari Lake, the Republican Senate candidate, come within a few feet of violating a fundamental election law.

Lake’s campaign bus had just rolled up to an early-voting site roughly an hour southeast of Phoenix. Along the path leading to the precinct’s entrance was a yellow sign that read 75 FOOT LIMIT. The post warned that electioneering beyond that threshold would constitute a Class 2 misdemeanor. Lake, as is her proclivity, waltzed right up to the line with a knowing smile.

I stood nearby, watching Lake glad-hand and pose for selfies with voters, who seemed surprised to see her. I heard her ask a man if he’d voted for Donald Trump. Amid the campaigning, she found time to attack the media. When I told her I was reporting for The Atlantic, she replied, “Oh, is that that really, really, really biased outlet?” (Three reallys.) Lake appeared to be performing for the cameras, but at that stop, there were none, save for those of her own campaign. It was just me and three other journalists with notebooks. No matter: This was, after all, Kari Lake. Bombast is her brand.

Lake may be the most MAGA-fied downballot candidate in the country. (The phrase MAKE ARIZONA GRAND AGAIN is splayed across the side of her bus next to a giant image of her head.) A former local-TV news anchor, Lake first gained national attention by promoting Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories about Arizona’s 2020 election results. When she ran for Arizona governor in 2022, she refused to accept her defeat. Most candidates make their name on a particular issue; election denialism, more than anything, has come to define Lake.

Once seen as Trump’s potential 2024 running mate, Lake is now battling the Democrat Ruben Gallego for the Arizona Senate seat soon to be vacated by Kyrsten Sinema. The RealClearPolitics polling average suggests that she could be on the verge of another loss. Trump, meanwhile, appears poised to retake the state at the top of the ticket. Although no outcome is guaranteed, on Tuesday, in a border state plagued by division and extremism, both a Democrat and a Republican might emerge victorious.

Such a result would come as a shock to many. It might particularly rankle conspiracists and those who have spent years casting doubt on the validity of America’s electoral systems. People, in other words, such as Kari Lake.

[Read: In Kari Lake, Trumpism has found its leading lady]

That morning, she took questions from the three other reporters, but looked at me and said, “I’m not talking to your outlet.” So I instead approached one of her surrogates, Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and later as the acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, too, had antagonized The Atlantic alongside Lake just minutes before. (Just as Trump did in a recent rally, Grenell claimed without evidence that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had “made up a lot of stuff.”) But now, in a quieter setting off to the side of the scene, he was willing to speak with me.

I informed Grenell that I had planned to ask Lake a straightforward question: Would she commit to accepting next week’s election results? He scoffed at the premise.

“It’s a dumb question to be like, ‘Do you accept the results of an election?’” Grenell told me. He said that “of course” she would accept the outcome if it were a free and fair election. “Let me ask you this question,” he said. “Do you think there’s no fraud in the election? Zero fraud?”

Lake saw me speaking with Grenell, and as she was heading back to her bus, she and I made eye contact. The crowd was smaller now, and Lake was chatting in a slightly dialed-down register. Professional wrestlers have a term to describe the performative antagonization of an opponent: kayfabe. Based on what I had seen of Lake prior to that moment, though, I didn’t think she ever snapped out of her combative persona when dealing with the media. As we briefly spoke one-on-one, Lake wasn’t exactly friendly, but she was at least willing to let me finish a sentence. I asked her if she’d accept the election results.

“A legally run election? Yes, absolutely,” she said. “One hundred percent.”

But how do you define that?

Suddenly her switch flipped. With a bright smile and sarcasm in her voice, Lake said, “I will accept the results of the election, absolutely!” Then she swiftly got back on the bus.

[George Packer: What will become of American civilization?]

Later that afternoon, I drove to a strip mall in Maryvale, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in metro Phoenix, to meet Gallego, Lake’s challenger. Between a barber shop and a check-cashing place, Arizona Democrats had set up a bustling field office. Inside the room, papel picado banners hung from the drop ceiling, the walls were plastered with posters—Latinos Con Harriz Walz, Democratas Protegen El Aborto—and, on the far side of the room, someone had handwritten a slew of motivational quotes (“If you have an opportunity to make things better and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.” — Roberto Clemente). When I turned around, I spotted Gallego chatting with that day’s volunteers. He was dressed casually in a short-sleeve button-down and jeans, and he wasn’t surrounded by a large entourage, as Lake had been. He and I found a quiet corner, and I asked him the same question I had asked Lake: Would he commit to accepting the election results? He didn’t hesitate.

“I trust the Arizona election system. I trust the Republicans and Democrats that have been running the state, and I will trust the results of the election, win or lose,” Gallego said.

Right now, the 44-year-old is in a rare position: He knows he stands a chance of winning over Lake-wary Republicans. He’s a Democrat, but, as a former Marine who has spoken out on culture-war issues, such as against the use of Latinx, he may appeal to some centrists and independents as well. Above all, he’s positioned to woo some of the most sought-after persuadable voters in the region: Latinos. He sometimes tells a story about how he grew up sleeping on the floor and didn’t have a bed until he got to college. On the stump, he often delivers remarks in both Spanish and English.

What Gallego is not doing is running a straight Democratic-party-line campaign. When I asked him how he felt about Joe Biden’s comments that Trump supporters are “garbage,” he didn’t rush to unequivocally defend the president. “No matter what, we shouldn’t be castigating people for how they vote,” he said. I also asked him if he anticipated civil unrest next week, given the chaos that had unfolded in Arizona in previous elections. “I really have faith in the voters of Arizona—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—that they’re going to go vote, and they’re going to keep it civil,” Gallego said. “I hope that the politicians would actually keep it civil and not try to bring election denialism into it, like Kari Lake has. That’s where the danger has happened.”

Gallego had stopped by that office to rev up volunteers for a canvassing operation. Joining him was Senator Mark Kelly and his wife, former Representative Gabby Giffords. That afternoon, I asked Kelly what sort of challenges he and his fellow Arizona Democrats were anticipating after Election Day, and whether he believed that Lake (and Trump, for that matter) would accept the election’s outcome. “They should,” Kelly said cautiously. “I mean, I don’t expect their behavior to be much different than it was in the 2020 and 2022 election, though. I mean, I have no reason to expect that. But you know, you can always dream that maybe they’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “Kari Lake certainly should have learned her lesson.”