At a rally in Las Vegas in September, the reggaeton star Nicky Jam came onstage in a Make America Great Again hat and endorsed Donald Trump. “We need you. We need you back, right? We need you to be the president,” he said. But after a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last month called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” the singer—whose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised partly on the island—had second thoughts.

“Never in my life did I think that a month later, a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country, and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump,” Nicky Jam said.

He had no right to be surprised. Trump himself had previously gone after Puerto Rico—he punished its leaders for criticizing him after Hurricane Maria, and sought to swap it for Greenland—but even if Nicky Jam had missed or forgotten that, he had to know who Trump was.

Nicky Jam was ahead of the curve. Since the election, Trump has moved swiftly to do things he’d said he’d do, and yet many people—especially his own supporters—seem stunned and dismayed. This is absurd. Surprise was perhaps merited in late 2016 and early 2017, when Trump was still an unknown quantity. But after four years as president, culminating in an attempt to erase an election he lost, Trump has demonstrated who he is. Somehow, the delusion of Trump à la carte—take the lib-owning, take the electoral wins, but pass on all of the unsavory stuff—persists.

In an article about how Trump’s transition is “shocking the Washington establishment,” Peter Baker of The New York Times writes: “Nine years after Mr. Trump began upsetting political norms, it may be easy to underestimate just how extraordinary all of this is.” He’s right that the aberrant nature of the picks may be overlooked, as I have warned, yet it is also true that the actual unpredictability of them is overestimated.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Trump isn’t bluffing]

On K Street, Politico reports, health-care-industry lobbyists can’t believe that Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. They were “expecting a more conventional pick,” even though Trump emphasized Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda late in the campaign, and even though Kennedy said that Trump had promised him control of HHS. To be sure, Kennedy is a shocking and disturbing pick, as Benjamin Mazer and my colleague Yasmin Tayag have recently written for The Atlantic, but his nomination should not come as a surprise—especially for people whose entire business proposition is being highly paid to advise clients on how Washington actually works. (The influence peddlers reportedly hope that senators will block Kennedy. The fact that they’re still waiting for someone else to solve their problems is further evidence of how little they’ve learned, years into the Trump era.)

Meanwhile, the New York Post, a key pillar of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media juggernaut, is similarly jittery about the Kennedy choice. Back when Kennedy was a thorn in President Joe Biden’s side, threatening to run against him in the Democratic primary, the Post’s editorial board was all too happy to elevate him. Now the board condemns his nomination and tells us that it came out of a meeting with him last year “thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.” The columnist Michael Godwin, who beamed on November 9 that Trump’s victory “offers the promise of progress on so many fronts that it already feels like Morning in America again,” was back a week later to complain that “it’s not a close call to say” that Kennedy and Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, are “unfit” for the roles.

The lobbyists and editorialists are in good company, or at least in some sort of company. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators say they are shocked by many of Trump’s Cabinet picks. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who notoriously professed surprise when Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, is “shocked” at the Gaetz nomination. Gaetz’s House Republican colleagues are “stunned and disgusted.”

Reactions to Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense are less vitriolic, if no less baffled. “Wow,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told NBC. “I’m just surprised, because the names that I’ve heard for secretary of defense have not included him.” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was even blunter. “Who?” he said. “I just don’t know anything about him.”

[David A. Graham: The Trump believability gap]

If this is true, the senators could perhaps do with some better staff work. Hegseth was a real possibility to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration; more to the point, he was a prominent figure on Fox News, which is a dominant force in the Republican Party, from whose ranks Trump has repeatedly drawn appointees.

Staffers at the affected agencies have also expressed shock and horror at the prospect of an Attorney General Gaetz, a Defense Secretary Hegseth, or a Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Ordinary Americans may also be taken aback. As I reported last month, Trump critics were concerned about a “believability gap,” in which voters opposed some of Trump’s big policy ideas, sometimes quite strongly, but just didn’t trust that he would really do those things. Although they perhaps deserve more grace than the Republican officials and power brokers who are astonished, they also had ample warning about who Trump is and how he’d govern.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. He’s appointing officials such as Stephen Miller and Tom Homan who are committed to that, and yesterday morning, Trump confirmed on Truth Social a report that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to conduct mass deportations. And yet, when the roundups start in January, many people are somehow going to be taken by surprise.

Democrats in mourning over Donald Trump’s victory can comfort themselves with the fact that, if the United States follows the pattern of other democracies that elect wannabe strongmen, their party should have a very good chance to win back the White House in 2028. The same cannot be said for the United States Senate.

With very few votes left to count in last week’s election, the Republican Party appears to have flipped four Senate seats—in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Montana—giving it a presumptive 53–47 majority. On the surface, that outcome may not seem dramatic, and in fact represents a fine performance for Democrats. The party had no realistic pickup opportunities this election cycle. Meanwhile, it had to defend three seats in red states and five seats in swing states. Democratic incumbents lost all the red-state races, but won four of the five purple-state contests: in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan—all states that voted for Trump.

The real problem for Democrats is that the 2024 map was only slightly harsher than usual. Going forward, every Senate election is going to be brutal. The institution is so skewed in favor of the current Republican coalition that Democrats need at least a few red-state seats to win consistent majorities. Now they have none.

The partisan divide of the 50 states is not an immutable fact of nature, but here’s how things look for the foreseeable future: 24 states are solidly red; 17 are solidly blue. Over the past three presidential cycles, only six states have swung back and forth: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Throw in New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Minnesota—where Trump or Kamala Harris won by about four points or less—and America has nine purple states in total, representing 18 Senate seats. To hold the chamber, Republicans need to win just two of those seats if they control the presidency, and three if they don’t. Democrats need to sweep almost all of them. They must pitch perfect game after perfect game to have a shot at even the narrowest majorities.

And even a perfect game will not be enough in the 2026 midterms. That year’s map features just two realistic pickup opportunities: Maine and North Carolina. Democrats, meanwhile, will need to defend seats in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Unless they pull off a major upset, they can at most cut the GOP majority to 51. In that best-case scenario, they will then need to flip either North Carolina or Wisconsin in 2028 without losing seats in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, or New Hampshire. Barring any unexpected deaths or retirements, Democrats can afford to lose only one swing-seat race over the next four years to have a shot at 50 senators.

[Rogé Karma: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

Anything short of that means that, even if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, that president will be immediately hamstrung. Even a narrow GOP majority will make it impossible for, say, President Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer to pass liberal legislation. They would instead, from the moment they’re sworn in, have to contend with congressional investigations, government shutdowns, and debt-ceiling hostage negotiations.

Their troubles would hardly end there. A GOP Senate majority would slow-walk or even block a Democratic president’s Cabinet nominations and personnel appointments. An administration without administrators would be unable to issue new regulations and rules. Whatever policies the administration did manage to make would then be tied up by an ever more hostile judiciary. Without control of the Senate, Democratic presidents will struggle to get nominees confirmed at even the district and circuit levels. They can forget about the Supreme Court.

Democrats have been aware of their Senate problem for years. That’s why, during the first Trump term, many liberals urged the party to prioritize scrapping the filibuster and making Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states as soon as it had the opportunity. But the opportunity never truly arrived, because the Democrats’ brief trifecta under Joe Biden depended on moderate senators, such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to entertain any such hardball tactics. Addressing the Democrats’ Senate problem legislatively would appear to require a more substantial Democratic Senate majority, which is precisely the issue.

And so, if they are to expand their options in the Senate, Democrats will have to find some way to broaden their appeal in the states where voters seem to have irrevocably abandoned them. That is not a new idea, and it is not an idea that anyone has yet figured out how to implement. But it is the only option. If Democrats don’t figure out how to compete in more states, Trump and his allies won’t need to dismantle the free press, imprison their enemies, or overturn election results to ensure perpetual GOP dominance. The basic math of the Senate will do that for them.

Voters gave America’s rudest man permission to return to the White House; what else have they given permission to? Michael Che has one idea. “So y’all gonna let a man with 34 felonies lead the free world and be the president of the United States?” he asked during last night’s “Weekend Update.” “That’s it. I’m listening to R. Kelly again.”

The joke captured a feeling that’s been circulating in America ever since last Tuesday’s election: silver-lining nihilism, a relief that we can stop trying to be good. Kamala Harris lost probably because of the economy, but the Republican campaign did effectively leverage widespread exhaustion with identity politics, inclusive speech, and perhaps even civility itself. Some of Trump’s supporters have celebrated by crowing vileness such as “Your body, my choice.” Some of Harris’s fans have openly denigrated the minorities who voted for Trump.

Eesh. But if this is, as my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams posted on X, the “post-woke era,” then perhaps at least comedy—the entertainment form that’s grouched the most about progressive piety—will be funnier now. Maybe someone will channel the spirit of Joan Rivers in her prime, turning nastiness into a high art. But judging from last night’s SNL, we will not be so lucky.

The episode’s host, the comedian Bill Burr, seemed well positioned to interpret Trump’s win. With his Boston accent and stubbled beard, he has long drawn upon his white-working-class bona fides to critique both sides of the partisan divide. When he hosted SNL shortly before the 2020 presidential election, he mocked wokeness in a somewhat sneaky way: By accusing white women and gay people of hijacking the posture of oppression from people of color, he in effect co-opted the logic of intersectionality to call out its own excesses. Whether you were offended or amused by his monologue, it at least had a point.

Last night, however, Burr just seemed ornery. He opened with a promise to avoid talking about the election, and then said he’d just gotten over the flu. When you’re sick, he observed, you lie awake “just going through this Rolodex of people that coughed on you. Sniffled near ya. Walked by an Asian or something.” Smattered chuckles. “You try to fight it. You’re like, ‘They say on the internet that’s where all the disease comes from.’” Almost no laughs.

Eventually he got to the election. “All right, ladies you’re oh-and-two against this guy,” he said, referring to Harris’s and Hillary Clinton’s losses to Trump. “Ladies, enough with the pantsuit, okay? It’s not working. Stop trying to have respect for yourselves. You don’t win the office, like, on policy, you know? You gotta whore it up a little.” He added, “I know a lot of ugly women—feminists, I mean—don’t want to hear this message.”

Maybe in those oh-so-woke times a week ago, I’d feel compelled to spell out how repeating stereotypes about Asian people and reducing women to their looks effectively makes life harder for Asian people and women. Other pundits would have then defended Burr on the grounds that he’s mocking his own racism and America’s sexism. Let’s skip all that and agree that Burr’s attempt to push the line of acceptability led him to bomb in a way that was horrible to watch. He created the same sucking feeling that Tony Hinchcliffe did when he made an arena of MAGAs groan at the idea that Puerto Rico is floating garbage. There’s no wit, no passion, no aha to this kind of comedy. It’s just guys flailing about for a reaction.

To be fair, Burr might have just been tired. This election cycle “took forever,” even though most voters made up their mind long ago, he complained. Their choices were two “polar opposite” candidates: “It’s like, ‘Let’s see. What does the orange bigot have to say? How about the real-estate agent that speaks through her nose?’”  (“Orange bigot”—is this The View in 2015?)

The rest of the episode was a bit better than the monologue. Burr’s presence pushed the writers to focus on sketches about masculinity, an apt subject given the role that male voters played in the election. A segment in which young guys tried to get their dads to open up about their feelings by talking about sports and cars was oddly touching. A bit featuring a self-pitying bro at group therapy was amusingly deranged. In the edgiest sketch, Burr played a fire fighter with a fetish involving children’s cartoons, leading SNL to air an image of the dad from Bluey in a ball gag. Was this post-woke Hollywood vulgarity or what comedy’s always been—the search for surprise?

The truth that SNL and the culture at large must now wrestle with is this: Trump may be back in office after four years away, but the world only turns forward. Wokeness has not been some fad; it hasn’t even been a movement that can be defeated. It’s been, as the term itself implies, an awakening—reshaping how people think about the relationship between the words they use and the society they live in. The case it made was so persuasive that it altered the English language likely forever. It also spread shame and overreached in a way that created backlash—but that backlash will cause cultural changes that build off what we just lived through, not reverse it entirely. The way to fully get back to a pre-woke time would be through actual Orwellian fascism.  

SNL isn’t counting that possibility out. Last night opened with the cast members speaking to the camera, telling Trump that they’d supported him all along, that they shouldn’t be on an enemies list, and that they’ll help him hunt down any colleagues who voted for Harris. Their tone was light but the satire was dark, highlighting the way that leaders—in politics, media, and business—who were once critical of Trump have taken to flattering him out of fear of retribution. The sketch anticipated a future that would make recent speech wars look quaint. But for now, as for long before, we can say what we want to say, not only what we think we should say.

Donald Trump called Latino migrants rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. After one of his final rallies, at which a comedian described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage,” many people, myself included, thought Latinos would decisively turn against him. We were wrong. Exit polls show that 46 percent of Latinos voted for him, and among Latino men, he won 55 percent of the votes—a huge increase from 36 percent in 2020.

Many Americans are baffled. How could Latinos—many of whose family members could be targeted by the mass deportations that the Trump team is promising—make this choice? But seeing the results—and hearing from Latino Trump voters—it made perfect sense to me. This was, simply, a vote for capitalism.

American values are especially powerful in groups with large immigrant populations; those values are what draw people here. Though many of America’s earliest immigrants came here seeking relief from famine and poverty, our freedoms—to worship freely, to speak freely—are what we became famous for. The promise was mythologized on the Statue of Liberty: our welcome to the tired, poor, huddled masses, who yearned not to grow filthy rich, but to be free. In the 20th century, immigrants fled religious persecution and political oppression to find in America freedoms that they, and their descendants, cherished and took seriously. I was raised by my grandfather, a Puerto Rican veteran of World War II. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I was taught that our political freedoms and our moral obligation to democracy mattered more.

At the same time, from the very beginning, the land of the free has also been about the freedom to make and spend money. America put God on our money, but for many Americans, money is God. This nation put profit over morality through centuries of slavery. Individual expediency in the name of capitalism is as American as the right to bear arms. Around the world, no idea has been marketed more effectively than the American dream. America: where even corporations can be people! And when we talk about someone living “the American dream,” we aren’t referring to their trips to the voting booth or the way they utilize their freedom of assembly. We are praising people who have achieved financial success and accumulated material things.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

We deify and elevate these people in the media, in social settings, and online, and we rarely question the ethical price that may have been paid to get them there. Just look at Trump, the “self-made man” whose father’s real-estate fortune launched his career. Until Trump became a political villain, he was an American success story. He was regularly on Oprah and sung about in hip-hop songs, and he had that cameo in Home Alone 2. And the truth is, for many Americans—Latinos included—he still is that man. He is living the dream; he has buildings with his name on them.

Latinos broke for Trump for many complicated reasons, including sexism, religious conservatism, racism (or a desire to assimilate into whiteness). But the simplest answer is often the best: To many, Trump represents prosperity. And the ability to financially prosper is what America is all about. People believe this, because America told them so.

In polls, Latinos consistently put economic issues at the top of their list of concerns. After the election, the media was full of voters reaffirming this. As one Pennsylvania voter of Puerto Rican descent told NBC News, he wasn’t bothered by Trump’s comments about the island: “For me, it’s work. It’s the economy. It’s groceries.”

Why, one might ask, was this narrative so much more persuasive to Latinos than to Black Americans? Perhaps because the American dream wasn’t created with Black people in mind. The civil-rights movement was painstakingly built by exploiting America’s political rights to assembly and free speech. When Black Americans in the North couldn’t buy homes because of redlining, many could still—despite obstacles—vote. Perhaps Black voters understood better than many Latino voters an essential truth: Access to the American dream is elusive, but America’s freedoms are indispensable.

One of the great takeaways of this election is that the narrative of America as the land of the free has ceased to be many voters’ top priority. This election was a battle for the soul of the nation—but the fight wasn’t between American ideals and un-American ones. It was between our best and worst selves.

Waking up to the election results on Wednesday, many Americans who opposed Donald Trump may have felt inclined to resent their neighbors. How could more than 70 million of them vote for a convicted felon who had hobnobbed with a fascist, showed little respect for the country’s institutions or alliances, and couldn’t even promise not to rule as a dictator? Some foreign observers on social media seemed to react similarly, seeing in Trump the worst traits of American caricatures: egomania, narcissism, chauvinism, carelessness.

But these prejudices were unfair on November 4, and they are still unfair on November 8. Yes, Trump is a true native son of this country, and some of its worst tendencies have allowed him to flourish. And yes, those who care about the future of the United States have every right to be worried about the trends he has unleashed or exploited—authoritarianism, misogyny, conspiracism.

And yet: This country has always been a big, beautiful land of contradictions. As an Iranian Canadian socialist who moved here from Europe in 2017, I hear my share of anti-American chatter from left-leaning Middle Easterners, Canadians, and Europeans. Many seize on simple stories about America as a land of hyper-capitalism, violence, racism, and imperialism—and such stories are not in short supply. The United States remains the world’s only developed country not to have public health care. It is by far the world’s biggest military power. And expressions of racial animus can be loud, deadly, and persistent.

[Jennifer Senior: Focus on the things that matter]

But to reduce America to these clichés is to miss much that is extraordinary. This same country of megalomaniac capitalism is home to public libraries and research universities that are the envy of many European social democracies—institutions tended by millions of Americans deeply committed to their survival. Those who imagine America as a country of racists perhaps haven’t actually visited its small towns, where mosques, Hindu temples, and gurdwaras prosper next to churches and synagogues. In this supposedly immigrant-hating country, Trump banned entry to the residents of seven Muslim countries in 2017—only for thousands of Americans to show up at airports in protest. Thousands more Americans staff immigrant-rights groups. For a narcissistic country, the United States has a lot of excellent public museums that acknowledge historical injustice and encourage self-reflection.

This country got its start as a naively daring social experiment already riven with contradictions. A group of European slave owners on ethnically cleansed land pledged to establish a nation whose self-evident truth was the equality of all. And yet, what they founded was a breathtakingly dynamic republic whose tree of creativity has never ceased leafing. The hopes vested in the United States have been sometimes vindicated, sometimes dashed. Chattel slavery endured here long after it was eradicated in Britain. But in 1860, Americans did elect a president who brought about its abolition at the end of a bloody civil war. The postwar promise of Reconstruction gave way to Dixiecrat rule and Jim Crow, but the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s was to become the most inspiring example of civil disobedience of its era, encapsulated in the call of Martin Luther King Jr. for the United States to “live up to the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

American actions abroad have also been contested and contradictory. In the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Washington played the role of imperial power. The same Washington helped establish the League of Nations in an effort to end all war—before the U.S. Senate refused to join it, undermining its efficacy. The United States first vowed to stay out of World War II, then joined the Allies to help defeat fascism on the beaches of Normandy and the plains of Manchuria. After the war, the United States helped establish democracies in Japan and West Germany—during the same era in which it took part in organizing an antidemocratic coup in Iran.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

The essence of America has always been the battle over its essence. No one election has ever determined its complete or permanent nature, and that is as true now as it was in 1860 and 1876. If today’s America is the America of Donald Trump, it is also the America of those who would stand up to him.

Don’t give up on this beautiful country. Its best traditions are now in danger, and no special genius of constitutional design will automatically keep them intact. In the hands of a president who may wish to model himself on Vladimir Putin, democratic institutions will be tested like never before. Americans will have to fight to safeguard them at every level of government. Daunting as this task may be, I have faith that Americans will rise to it. Trump may be the Founders’ nightmare, but their dreams can still outlive him.

In the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump did the following things: falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating their neighbors’ pets; invited a comedian onstage at a rally to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”; said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the reporters who cover his rallies; fantasized about former Representative Liz Cheney having guns “trained on her face”; called America a “garbage can for the world”; and pretended to fellate a microphone in public. Then, on Tuesday night, he decisively won the presidential election, sweeping every battleground state in the country.

That Trump routinely gets away with saying things that would have ended any other politician’s career is hardly a novel observation. People have been making this point since he launched his first campaign nine years ago. Theories abound to explain the phenomenon, and we’ll get to those in a moment. But, first, do me a favor and reread that paragraph above. Clock your reflexive reaction. Do you find yourself indifferently skimming, or notice that your attention has begun to drift? Do you roll your eyes at what looks like yet another scoldy catalog of Trump’s alleged misdeeds, or mentally quibble with my characterizations? (He was obviously joking about Cheney.) Perhaps you’re thinking that you missed one of these moments—or maybe you’re not quite sure. Hasn’t he said something about shooting reporters before? Who can remember—all of this stuff blends together.

What you’re experiencing is the product of Trump’s clearest political accomplishment, and perhaps his most enduring legacy: In his near decade as America’s main character, he has thoroughly desensitized voters to behavior that, in another era, they would have deemed disqualifying in a president. The national bar for outrage keeps rising; the ability to be shocked has dwindled.

Trump is not the first modern president to contribute to this national numbing effect. Richard Nixon’s abuses of power shattered the idyllic image many Americans had of the presidency, seeding a skepticism that would eventually blossom into generational cynicism. And Bill Clinton’s affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky—complete with the airing of every graphic detail by opponents, and the rush to excuse his indiscretions by allies—helped normalize the idea that presidents don’t need to be moral exemplars.

But when it comes to lowering our collective expectations of presidential behavior, Trump is a singular figure. The lines he has enterprisingly crossed—legal, ethical, constitutional, moral—are too numerous to list. (Plus, chances are, you’d get bored and abandon this article if I tried.) But it seems worth noting here just a few of Trump’s firsts. He is the first president to try to stay in power after losing an election. He is the first president to be impeached twice (for attempting to trade military aid for political favors from the Ukrainian president, and for sending a violent mob to storm the Capitol). He is the first to be convicted of a felony (for crimes connected with hush-money payments to an adult-film star with whom he had an affair), and the first to be found liable for sexual abuse (for assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room). He demonstrates no contrition for these acts. In fact, he’s always denied all wrongdoing—even as he’s boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his base.

Trump’s apologists might argue that his success is a symptom, not the cause, of the country’s coarsened character. Alternatively, something about his public persona, forged in the New York tabloids and on reality TV, may make people uniquely tolerant of his sins. After all, the same voters in North Carolina who delivered him the state’s 16 Electoral College votes this week also rejected a Trump-aligned candidate for governor who’d been discovered making vile anti-Semitic and racist comments on a porn site. Trump has also no doubt been aided by Republican politicians who cravenly defend everything he does, blundering Democrats who have struggled to provide a compelling alternative, and a press corps still constrained by its “bias toward coherence.”

In any case, the fact remains that Trump’s brazenness damages the political culture. Every time he crosses a new line, he makes it that much easier for the next guy to do so. Nearly a decade into the Trump era, too many Americans have internalized the idea that expecting our political leaders to be good people is quaint and foolish. But this savvier-than-thou attitude only empowers Trump and his mimics to act with impunity.

Is it possible to resensitize an electorate to scandal and cruelty? I don’t know. Maybe we start by trying to remember how we felt when all of this was still new.

In recent weeks, Gen Z voters have been sharing videos of themselves on TikTok listening—for what they say is the first time—to Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape. I found watching these videos, and reading some of the young people’s interviews in The Washington Post, at once heartbreaking and hopeful. Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old in Georgia who had never actually heard the once and future president say “grab them by the pussy,” told the paper she “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.” Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio, was similarly shocked when she heard it for the first time. “I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

A less cynical age may dawn again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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

Today’s News

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

Evening Read

Justin Sullivan / Getty

The Right’s New Kingmaker

By Ali Breland

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

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

Read the full article.

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

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

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One thing tomorrow’s election will test is Americans’ appetite for chaos, particularly the kind that Donald Trump has been exhibiting in the last few months of his campaign. After weeks of running a disciplined campaign, Trump’s advisers lost control of their candidate, the Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta reported this week. Trump grew restless and bored and drifted off script in his campaign appearances. During a summer interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, for example, he mused aloud about Kamala Harris, “I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?” From the perspective of his advisers, Trump’s string of offensive public statements needlessly alienated potential voters. Members of Trump’s campaign staff told Alberta that they became disillusioned about their ability to rein in their candidate and left the campaign.

Will this unleashed version of Trump affect the election outcome? In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Alberta and another Atlantic staff writer, Mark Leibovich, about how candidate Trump transformed over the summer, how Kamala Harris’s campaign reacted, where each campaign stands now, and what it means for the election. Alberta and Leibovich also offer tips on how to manage your inner chaos while watching the election results.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. We are recording the Monday before Election Day. The candidates are furiously campaigning in the swing states. At some point, their planes were on the same tarmac in North Carolina.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump mused about shooting reporters; Kamala Harris said normal campaign things. And yet the race is still one of the closest in American history.

Anyway, in this episode, I want to get the inside view of both political campaigns in their last days. So I have with me today two seasoned political reporters, Mark Leibovich. Hi, Mark.

Mark Leibovich: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: And Tim Alberta. Hi, Tim.

Tim Alberta: Hi, Hanna. Hi, Mark.

Leibovich: Hi, Tim. Isn’t it good to be seasoned today?

Alberta: I’m feeling very seasoned.

Rosin: Yeah, that’s a cliché word. It doesn’t mean old. What’s a more flattering word than seasoned? Like, experienced? Or longtime? Longtime: that’s flattering, I think.

Leibovich: It’s definitely flattering.

Alberta: We don’t use veteran.

Rosin: No, veteran is old. How about active?

Leibovich: Yeah, we’re very active. Yeah. Can you tell by our voices?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Anyway, Mark, I understand you’re writing up a preelection guide to how to approach Tuesday night.

Leibovich: Basically, I’m trying to collect a helpful toolkit to how to approach Election Day from sort of a practical standpoint as far as what information you can ignore, but also a habit or even mindfulness standpoint about how to not drive yourself needlessly crazy, how not to be triggered by the kinds of things that Election Night coverage will probably overload you with.

And that includes Donald Trump probably declaring victory wildly prematurely or erroneously, which, I mean, will be news because he’s one of the candidates, but it also should surprise no one. And there are ways to kind of condition yourself, or try to, going into what tomorrow night will be like—which will be obviously very anxious for a lot of people.

Rosin: I see. So instead of “We know it’s going to be like that,” like, “We know that we don’t have enough information.”

We know that there probably isn’t going to be, sort of, instant early clarity. So you’re going into it eyes wide open, doing what? Like, what? Because maybe Tim needs this advice.

Leibovich: Well, I’m trying. Well, I think we all need this advice, Hanna. I mean, I think it’s an approach to how we consume information, how we get information.

I talked to a couple of Democratic consultants who said that one of the first things they do is turn off all their text notifications, because any kind of text notification is designed to trigger you on Election Night.

There is a lot of manipulation of your emotions before the actual only information that is necessary, which, the most valuable information is going to come in probably after 11 o’clock, or quite late. It could be days later. The idea is the news will find you. Turn off your phone if you can. Information is coming in haphazardly from a million different directions, out of order, in no particular sequence whatsoever, about something that has already happened—meaning the voting has already happened. So no control is there. This is basically just people throwing information out in no order, and it is not necessarily—

Rosin: It’s not cumulative and it’s not adding up to—

Leibovich: —Not cumulative.

Rosin: Exactly. Exactly.

Leibovich: So anyway, that’s one reason you can skip that part.

Rosin: Interesting. Tim, do you think you could do that?

Alberta: I fear that in the attempt to not drive myself crazy, I would drive myself crazy. In other words, you would find your brain stacking up with all of the things that other people know that you don’t, because in that moment you have decided to sequester yourself or at least to sort of rigidly compartmentalize your emotions and your brain waves and your political intake.

And therefore the exit polling showing the number of non-college whites in Maricopa County breaking away from Trump is lost on you in that pivotal moment, when that could be the little parcel of information that is necessary for you to believe that you have finally figured out this electoral equation and that you have a bead on it in this moment.

It’s a game of inches, and the inches are everywhere around us, Hanna. So how could I give up any of those inches when we are so close to the end of the game? I want the zen that Mark is offering, but I just don’t find it realistic.

Rosin: Hmm. You know how sometimes you start with the moment of meditation? We’ll consider that our moment of meditation, and now we’re gonna go into the stressful part of this conversation. So, Tim, you’ve been covering the Republican side closely, and you recently spent a lot of time talking to Trump’s advisers.

How would you describe the state of the campaign in the weeks before the election?

Alberta: I would describe it as something slightly removed from the serenity that Mark has described for us.

Rosin: Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Alberta: Yeah, look, Hanna, I think the context here is really important: that this Trump campaign, unlike the previous two, was for the majority of its time in operation, really pretty disciplined, pretty smart.

The people running the campaign had done a pretty good job of keeping Trump out of his own way and talking him out of bad ideas and sort of curbing some of his most self-destructive impulses. And what we’ve seen in the last couple of months is basically Trump going full Trump, and an inability among those senior advisers to really do anything to stop it.

This has been kind of the proverbial slow-motion car wreck. And, you know, it’s not just Trump himself, although of course he is the inspiration for the chaos. He is the generator of all of the turmoil that you see.

He is at the center of this chaos, but the chaos ripples out away from him. And so when you ask yourself the question of how could it be that at the most important public event of the campaign, with 20,000-plus jammed into Madison Square Garden in prime time, the whole world watching, and you pay a million dollars to put on this event, and the guy who kicks it off is a vulgar, shock jock, insult-roast comedian who was dropped by his own talent agency for using racial slurs onstage—how could this person possibly be booked into that position to open for Trump in that environment? It’s exactly the sort of thing that the people around him had been really successful in avoiding for most of the campaign. But ultimately, in the key home stretch here, in the sort of the witching hours of this campaign, it’s all fallen apart.

Rosin: Mark, same for the Democrats. How would you describe where they are?

Leibovich: I would say I’ve talked to a fair number of Democrats on the campaign in the last few days.

It feels like something approaching the general area of the ballpark of confidence.

Rosin: Interesting! Anomalous for Democrats.

Leibovich: Well, they are so incredibly quick to embrace bad news and to go right from bad news to deep levels of doomsaying. I’ve not seen that in the last few days.

I mean, look, I think their numbers internally seem a little better. I think a lot of the external polls have been encouraging. And I think you can’t underestimate how much of a train wreck Trump’s last 10 days have been, in a way that, if he loses, I think people will very much point to.

Rosin: So, Mark, I remember we sat here in the spring and discussed how absolutely stagnant this race would be. Like, we were just sleepwalking into a repeat.

Leibovich: But it was a great podcast. Everyone should listen to it again. (Laughs.)

Rosin: But it was very, you know—we didn’t have much to say. And then for everybody, the reset button got pressed in July.

Tim, the full Trump who we’ve seen on the campaign trail for the last few months started, actually, according to your account, before Harris entered the race. So what happened?

Alberta: I think that maybe the proper visual here, Hanna, is like the wild animal that has chased down its prey and has mauled it mostly to death and is now just sort of pawing at it, toying with it, unsure of really what to do because, well, what’s left to do?

Donald Trump really found himself, according to all the reporting I did, sort of over it. Sort of bored with running against Joe Biden. Because here is, in his view, this sort of hapless old man who can’t even string together sentences, much less really defend himself or go on offense in a meaningful way against Trump. And so I think that he’s looking at Joe Biden thinking, Gosh this is sort of a bore, and around this time, of course, in late June, early July, Trump’s polling is better than it’s ever been in any of his three campaigns for the presidency.

The battleground polling is showing him consistently pulling ahead five, six, seven points across all of these states. The national polling is up. His favorability is up. Democrats are preparing for a bloodbath not just to lose the presidency but to lose the House and the Senate, and it’s, you know, The sky is falling. And everyone around Trump is sort of giddy and gleeful. They’re looking around like, Nothing can stop us.

And around this time is when you started to see Trump talking a little bit differently, behaving a little bit differently, according to people close to him—almost looking for some disorder and some mayhem to inject into the campaign. He starts talking to people on the outside. And when Kamala Harris gets in the race, he was angry, on the one hand, because he thought he had it sort of sewn up against Biden, and he liked running against Biden in the sense that Biden really, you know, couldn’t punch back.

But I think also he’s sort of excited in the sense that with Harris, he’s got this live target. He’s able to channel some of the base instincts that brought him to power in the first place. You know, Trump, I think, viewed the Harris switcheroo as a new lease on life in the sense that he was going to be able to go whole hog again.

But the people around him were saying, No, no, no, no. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do. And frankly, the reason you’re in this position is because you’ve listened to us and because you haven’t been going rogue and running the kind of, you know, totally undisciplined #YOLO 2016 campaign that you would like to run and that you would run if you were left to your own devices. And around that time is when Trump started to lose confidence in those people who were giving him that advice, and he brought in other people to help with the campaign, and from there things really started to spiral.

Rosin: So, Mark, how are Democrats responding as Trump is reasserting this peak-Trump version of himself?

Leibovich: I think in a kind of measured way. I mean, I think, look, the peak Trump pretty much speaks for itself. It’s not like you need people to amplify. I mean, to some degree you do, because outlets that a lot of Republicans watch—like, say, Fox—are going to be insulated from a lot of this, because just Fox doesn’t show it.

I mean, that’s just not their point of emphasis, But I think they’ve been very deft—they’ve made a lot of ads around the kind of changing abortion messaging. I mean, even Melania Trump saying that she believes in a woman’s right to choose, things like that, to some degree, they’re trying to highlight it, but to another degree—this is a big political-operative cliché, but they are running their race.

And I think the Democrats, beginning when Biden stepped aside, I think Harris has performed much better than a lot of people thought she would, and I think her campaign has made a lot of good decisions, and she herself has made a lot of good decisions.

Rosin: It does, from the outside, seem exactly the opposite of the chaos inside the Trump campaign that Tim described, because if you think back to when Biden dropped out, there was some worry that the transition might not be smooth.

Leibovich: Oh, 100 percent. I mean, Tim and I, remember, we were at the Republican convention together, and that was such a moment, because Trump was really kind of at his peak then, which is kind of ironic to say, because the assassination attempt had taken place two days before the convention started. But his popularity, I mean—there was a sense of confidence at that convention which was just off the charts to a degree to which you could almost sense the boredom creeping into Trump when he’s giving this acceptance speech, and I guess it was Thursday night, and then about halfway through, he just kind of went off the rails, and he just sort of—it became just a very unhinged acceptance speech, went from kind of a gripping one where he’s describing the assassination attempt to something completely different, which kind of became a metaphor for how the rest of the campaign would unfurl for him.

And of course, three days later, Biden got out and then the world changed again.

Rosin: All right, up next, I ask Tim and Mark whether the chaotic final months of the Trump campaign could end up costing him the election. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: So from a campaign manager’s perspective, the chaos is disturbing, but what we actually care about is whether it has any impact on voting day. Tim, so what are the ways the drama you describe could affect the election? Like, say, turnout or whatever it is that we’re worried about?

Alberta: Well, look, if these episodes were contained to just Trump being a little bit goofy or going off message and sort of ranting and raving about the latest person who said something very nasty about him on cable news, I don’t think it would have much real-world effect. But I think that some of what we’re unpacking here over these past 10, 11, 12 weeks, Hanna, is something that actually gets to a fundamental weakness, which is a failure of the Trump team to expand its coalition.

Or at the very least what we’re seeing is the way in which the potential of expanding the Trump coalition has been undermined by Trump’s own actions or by the people close to him. So, for example, we know based on six months of really solid, consistent data that Trump is likely to perform better with Latino voters as a whole and particularly with Latino men under 40 than any Republican nominee in modern history.

And yet, when the dominant headline coming out of your rally at Madison Square Garden the week before the election is that one of your speakers calls the island of Puerto Rico floating trash in the ocean, this is self-sabotage.

Another core component of this Trump campaign, from the beginning, has been How do we keep our margins tight in the suburbs outside of Detroit and Milwaukee and Philly and Vegas and elsewhere? How do we keep our margins tight with these college-educated, suburban women? We’re not going to win them, right? But how do we manage to keep it close? How do we lose them by just seven or eight points instead of by 16, 17, 18, 20 points?

And when you look at, for example, the selection of J. D. Vance and, you know, his old, greatest-hits reel around childless cat ladies, and he thinks abortion should be illegal nationwide, right?

And there’s just something that sort of went fundamentally awry over the summer. I think Mark is right. Both of us were remarking at the convention about how it was effectively an early Election Night victory party. I mean, they weren’t even—Republicans in Milwaukee weren’t even talking about the campaign as if it were going to be competitive. It was already over. The fat lady was singing onstage in prime time in Milwaukee. And yet, I remember corresponding with several smart Republicans—Trump supporters—while I was there, and they were a little bit nervous about the Vance selection. And then on Thursday night, to Mark’s point, Trump gives this sort of weird, meandering speech that seems to squander a lot of the goodwill that he had coming into that event because of the assassination attempt. And it felt like between those two things—the Vance selection and then the speech—and then, you know, 24 hours after leaving Milwaukee, Biden gets out, Harris takes over the ticket, and suddenly, those dominoes started to fall.

And what we saw was all of the best-laid plans of the Trump operation go awry. And it wasn’t just surface-level things where we say, Oh, that was sort of silly he said that. Or Oh, this was an unforced error, but it’ll be a quick news cycle and blow over. Some of what we’ve seen, I think, will have a real impact at the ballot box.

Rosin: So what you’re describing is a campaign strategy that is fairly traditional that they were following fairly successfully, which is: try and win over, you know, some middle-of-the-road voters, or at least not massively alienate those people.

But, Trump has been running a very different kind of campaign—like going to Madison Square Garden—and fewer on-the-ground resources. And that seems like a pattern across swing states, which for me raises the question whether what these managers are calling chaos, like, that is the strategy.

The strategy was always just: get a lot of attention.

Alberta: I think it depends on the type of attention you’re talking about. So when Trump goes to the southern border and has, you know, hundreds of cameras following him around there and talks about the lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants committing crimes—you know, that is attention, and it can even be attention that is rooted in some hyperbole, some demagoguing, some bombast. And yet it is productive attention politically for the Trump people, right? They look at this sort of cost-benefit analysis and they recognize that, sure, we might antagonize some people with this rhetoric. We might alienate some people with our focus on these issues, but we think that the reward is far greater than the risk.

So there is, I think, plenty of good attention that the Trump people do want. I think what they’ve tried to avoid is a lot of the sideshow that is appealing to some of the very online, right-wing, MAGA troll base but does nothing to add to the coalition that I was describing a minute ago. And ultimately at the end of the day, politics is a math equation. It’s multiplication and addition.

Leibovich: Right, and I think, to Tim’s point, immigration was an incredibly effective issue for Trump. When you tip that into people eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and just how that took over the narrative of the Trump campaign—I mean, one, they look like fools; two, it insults the intelligence of so many people, and it turns a very serious and effective issue for the Trump campaign, immigration, into a joke and into just something really, really problematic and gross.

Rosin: So the art of running a Trump campaign, then, is to siphon and manage and titrate the chaos exactly right. Like, you want the right kind of chaos, the right kind of attention, but if you lose control of it, it just comes back to bite you. Is that basically what’s happened?

Alberta: Yeah, and it’s always gonna be a high-wire act, right? These people aren’t stupid. They knew what they were getting themselves into. In fact, Chris LaCivita—who is one of the two people managing the Trump presidential campaign here in 2024—within a few weeks of his decision to join the operation back in the fall of 2022, you have Trump saying that he wants to terminate parts of the Constitution. You have Trump saying and doing these sort of crazy, self-destructive things. And LaCivita is sort of looking around saying, What have I gotten myself into?

And of course people who are friends with him are saying, Come on, dude, you knew exactly what you were signing up for. You know exactly what you were getting yourself into. So I think whatever degree of self-delusion may exist at the outset, when some of these folks ally themselves with Donald Trump, you know, it dissolves pretty quickly and they become clear-eyed about who they’re working for and what the challenges are.

And to your point, Hanna, yes, there’s inevitably going to be some chaos, some attention-seeking behavior, some stuff that is vulgar and inappropriate and racist and misogynistic and whatever else. Their job is to try to turn things that are kind of potentially toxic into productivity. They’re trying to mine coals out of manure here, and again, I can’t stress this enough: For most of the campaign, they were actually doing a pretty good job of it. But at a certain point I think it just becomes too much to manage.

Rosin: Mark, do you get the sense that the Harris campaign’s—you described it as, like, a little dose of confidence. Is that because of everything that Tim has described?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, I think Trump has given them so much to work with. And not just like, Oh, look, he said this and sort of putting that out there. I mean, early indications about the revulsion that women are having—women voters are having for Trump—even more so than usual. And the degree to which they seem to be voting and maybe even lying to their husbands about—to kind of use a new ad that the Harris campaign is using which is basically saying, you know, a lot of Republican women are secretly going into the ballot, and behind their husband’s back, they’re voting for Kamala Harris. So again, Trump made their job easier, but I think they have taken what has been given to them. And I do feel hopeful. Yeah. Again, from talking to a bunch of them, and levels of very, very cautious optimism—which I would say, you know, it would probably be an absolute verboten thing for anyone anywhere near the Harris campaign to show anything more than just a tiny bit of confidence. Because that’s going to harken back to the overconfidence of 2016 or the overconfidence of 2020, you know—Biden was supposed to win by a lot more than he did.

And I think what freaks everyone out is the idea that Trump, in the two times he’s been on a general-election ballot, has massively overperformed his polls. And now there’s a sense that perhaps that’s been accounted for in these polls and they’re undercounting African American voters, women voters, and so forth.

So anyway, I think all of that is kind of baked into this, but look, I don’t want to suggest that anything other than massive anxiety is the default for everyone around this campaign. And I assume both campaigns.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s leave the listeners with thoughts about Election Night. There’s the zen option, and hopefully many of our listeners will take advantage of the zen option.

Take a long, 12-hour walk. Be home by 11 p.m. and then turn on the television. Short of that, the map is really wide and open. I mean, seven open states. It’s a lot. So for those who are not spiritually built for the zen option, how—literally—will you guys be watching? Like, give a listener a guide of what to watch out for on the night.

Leibovich: Well, yes, there are seven battleground states. But I think there’s a lot you can learn if you can get information from other states. You know, there’s a poll that everyone has been talking about—a lot of insiders have been talking about over the last few days—from Iowa. Iowa, no one considered a swing state. Safely red, certainly has been in the last few elections, certainly for Trump. Ann Selzer, a deeply respected pollster, came up with this Des Moines Register poll on Saturday night, having Harris ahead by three.

Now, putting aside whether Iowa’s now a battleground state—I mean, if it’s even in the ballpark of accurate, I mean, as a euphoric result for people on Team Harris. I mean, look, if there are some early numbers from, say, South Carolina, Florida, that, you know, maybe show Trump’s margins a little lower than you would expect, possibly that’s something that you can learn from.

So again, it’s not just the seven battlegrounds, which will probably take a while to count, especially in some of the states with laws that make it harder to count early votes. But, yeah, I mean, like, the whole country does vote. It’s like, margins do matter, and I think we can learn from a lot of people.

And look, even, like, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky—I mean there are these early states that you know exactly who is going to win, but you can learn from.

Rosin: Because if the margins are smaller than they are expected to be, then that’s a bit of data that’s interesting. Tim, what about you?

Alberta: So there’s a known known, and a known unknown. The known known is that Democrats are continuing to see erosion in their coalition, specific to African American men, Latino men, and to some degree young voters.

And I think specifically if we’re looking at Detroit, at Milwaukee, at Philly, at Atlanta, at Maricopa County—there are places where we should be paying attention to this, right? I think the known unknown here is: Does Donald Trump get beaten up among suburban women, or does he get demolished among suburban women?

And I think that the answer to that question is probably determinative to who is sworn into office on January 20.

So I’m really paying very close attention to the collar counties outside of Philadelphia, to the WOW counties outside of Milwaukee. You have to look at Vegas and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Some of these places—I don’t want to be reductive, but I really do feel like, ultimately, that’s where the election is going to be won or lost.

Rosin: Both of you are saying: Look for signs. It’s not just big, broad swing states, but there are meaningful signs in smaller election results that you’ll be looking for.

Alberta: That’s right. It’s, again, it’s just a numbers game. And it so happens that the most dense, vote-rich areas of persuadable voters are just consistently found in these once re,d then purple, now pretty blue suburbs. And so whether you’re watching the presidential race or even if you’re looking for a potential upset in a Senate race, like in Texas, where Ted Cruz on paper looks like he’s going to win and maybe even win comfortably. But pay attention to Harris County, Texas, which, on Election Night in 2012, Obama and Romney fought Harris County to basically a draw. I think it was a matter of a few hundred votes that separated them. Fast-forward, you know, a decade. Democrats are carrying Harris County, which is the Houston suburbs—they’re carrying it by a quarter-million votes, 300,000 votes reliably, and that number’s only going up.

So those are the parts of the country where I think if you’re paying close attention, you’ll start to get a pretty good idea.

Rosin: Okay. I think we have options for the meditators and options for those who cannot bring themselves to meditate. Thank you both for joining me on this day before the election.

Leibovich: Thank you, Hanna. Thank you, Tim.

Alberta: Mark, I’ll call you tomorrow. We can meditate together.

Leibovich: I look forward to it. Yep, we’ll join figurative hands.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back later this week to cover the election, though possibly earlier than our usual Thursday release, depending on the results.

Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The malignant cruelty of Donald Trump]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Gullible Mr. Trump]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.

Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” And by “fake news,” he meant the members of the press covering his rally.

[Read: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

The crowd whooped and clapped. Many of Trump’s rallies feature a moment’s hate for the journalists in attendance, whom he blames for, among other things, distorting his message, not praising him enough, reflexively favoring Kamala Harris, fact-checking his statements, noticing empty seats, and reporting that people leave his events early.

But journalists are only some of the many “enemies from within” whom Trump has name-checked at his rallies and on his favored social network, Truth Social. He has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” if Facebook’s moderation policies penalize right-wingers. He has suggested using the National Guard or the military against “radical-left lunatics” who disrupt the election. He believes people who criticize the Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” A recent post on Truth Social stated that if he wins on Tuesday, Trump would hunt down “lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who had engaged in what he called “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.” Just last week, he fantasized in public about his Republican critic Liz Cheney facing gunfire, and he previously promoted a post calling for her to face a “televised military tribunal” for treason. In all, NPR found more than 100 examples of Trump threatening to prosecute or persecute his opponents. One of his recent targets was this magazine.

Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)

Following today’s speech in Lititz, Team Trump is trying to spin his comments as nothing more than tender concern for the welfare of reporters. “President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, wrote in a statement. (Let’s have a moment to enjoy the self-abasement required to write that brilliantly.) He continued:

The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!

The word Orwellian is overused, but come on, Steven Cheung. You expect people to believe this crock? That jaunty final exclamation mark gives the entire statement a whiff of sarcasm, and rightly so. Trump plainly meant that, if he were targeted from a nearby rooftop, he would at least draw some small consolation if a blameless camera operator from a local TV station were taken out first.

The rest of Trump’s speech was the usual minestrone of cheap insults, petty grievances, and bizarre digressions. He repeated a claim that he’d previously made on The Joe Rogan Experience—where he said he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”—that offshore wind farms are killing whales. He suggested that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after losing the 2020 election. At times, he appeared to be boring himself, regretting that he had to deliver a stump speech that the audience had probably heard “900 times.”

He took aim at his most-hated Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “not a smart girl”; Harris was “lazy as hell”; and Adam Schiff had an “enlarged watermelon head.” He complained about “Barack Hussein Obama” and said that because Obama’s wife had criticized him, “I think we’re gonna start having a little fun with Michelle.” Notably, given his other remarks about the media, he also threatened CBS’s broadcast license because, he contended, the network had deceptively edited one of Harris’s answers in her interview with 60 Minutes. (The network denies the allegation.) For those who dismiss Trump’s threats as merely overblown rhetoric, it should be noted that he has also launched a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in a part of Texas where the sole federal judge is a Republican.

[Read: Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign]

Trump’s current mood might be attributable to his stalled momentum in recent polls and a slump in his odds of victory in betting markets. Accordingly, in Lititz, he added a new name to his list of adversaries: J. Ann Selzer, the widely respected Iowa pollster who has a track record of producing surprising results that are borne out on Election Day. Last night, her poll for The Des Moines Register found that Harris was leading by three points in Iowa, a state that Trump won in 2020 by eight. Last year, when Selzer’s poll correctly showed Trump ahead in the state’s Republican primary campaign, he called her a “very powerful” pollster who had delivered a “big beautiful poll.” In Lititz, however, he described Selzer as “one of my enemies” and lumped her together with the media: “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”

The campaign is coming to an unruly close. Trump’s surrogates are going rogue: Elon Musk has said that his drive for government efficiency would cause “temporary hardship”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged this weekend to remove fluoride from drinking water; and House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Republicans would “probably” repeal the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes U.S. semiconductor production. None of these is a winning message for the Republicans. (Johnson later said he wouldn’t try to kill the bill.)

But the bigger issue is the candidate himself. The more professional elements of the campaign appear to be losing their grip on Trump, who is tired and bored and restless for revenge. Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can say authoritatively that this has been Trump’s darkest campaign yet.