For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.

Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years. I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically. He may be no less nutty than any of Trump’s more controversial nominees. And given the power he is likely to hold—command over 2 million American military personnel—he is almost certainly far more dangerous than any of them.

Hegseth began his involvement in conservative-movement politics as a Princeton undergraduate. He then joined the Army and quickly developed a profile, when not on active duty, as a budding Republican spokesperson. He testified against Elena Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court (on the grounds that, while dean of Harvard Law School, she had blocked military recruiters from campus in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and lobbied in favor of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. As the Republican Party’s foreign-policy orientation changed radically under Donald Trump, Hegseth’s positions changed with it. But his devotion to the party remained constant. After stints running the advocacy groups Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and a failed Senate campaign, he finally settled at Fox News, where he joined a chorus in support of Trump.

Along the way, Hegseth has written five books. The first, extolling Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy, revolves around ideas that Hegseth has since renounced after converting to Trumpism. Another is simply a collection of war stories. The other three, all published in the past four years—American Crusade (2020), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and The War on Warriors (2024)—lay out his worldview in florid, explicit, and often terrifying detail.

A foundational tenet of Hegseth’s philosophy, apparently carrying over from his Roosevelt-worshipping era, is a belief in the traditional masculine virtues and the potential for war to inculcate them. Hegseth maintains that boys require discipline and must aspire to strength, resilience, and bravery. His preferred archetype for these virtues appears to be Pete Hegseth, whose manful exploits either on the basketball court (he played for Princeton) or the battlefield are featured in all three books.

[David A. Graham: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Hegseth complains that society no longer gives veterans like him their proper measure of deference. “Being a veteran no longer demands respect of the coastal elites or reverence from large swaths of the public,” he writes—an observation that will sound strange to anybody who has ever attended a football game or listened to a speech by a politician from either party. “In previous generations, men had to find ways to salvage their honor if they didn’t get to fight in a war.” (The single strongest piece of evidence for Hegseth’s thesis—the popularity of lifelong coastal elitist, proud war-avoider, and POW-mocker Donald Trump—goes unmentioned).

Hegseth’s demand for greater respect grows out of his belief that he personally succeeded in the face of forbidding odds. “I had been an underdog my whole life,” he writes. “I persisted. I worked my ass off.” But the woke military, he complains, doesn’t reward that kind of individual merit and grit. Instead, it has grown so obsessed with diversity that it promotes unqualified minorities and allows women in combat, reducing its effectiveness and alienating hard-working, meritorious soldiers such as, well, him. He also frets that the inclusion of women in combat erodes traditional gender norms. “How do you treat women in a combat situation,” he asks, “without eroding the basic instinct of civilization and the treatment of women in the society at large?”

(The treatment of women by Hegseth specifically happens to be the subject of a recently disclosed police report detailing an alleged sexual assault of a woman at a 2017 political conference. Hegseth denies the allegation and says that the encounter, which took place while he was transitioning between his second and third wives, was consensual. He paid the alleged victim an undisclosed sum in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.)

One episode looms especially large in Hegseth’s mind as the embodiment of the wokification of the military and its abandonment of traditional merit. In 2021, Hegseth, an active National Guard member, wished to join the Washington, D.C., unit protecting incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The National Guard, however, excluded him from the detail because he was deemed a security risk on account of a bicep tattoo of the “Deus Vult” symbol—a reference to the Crusades that is popular with some far-right activists.

The logic of the snub was straightforward. Biden’s inauguration took place in the immediate aftermath of an insurrection attempt that had included many members of the armed forces, some operating within far-right networks. But to Hegseth—who protests that the Deus Vult tattoo is simply an expression of his Christian faith, not a white-nationalist symbol—the decision was an unforgivable personal affront.

He expresses indignation at the notion that he could even be suspected of harboring radical ideas. “I fought religious extremists for over twenty years in uniform,” he writes. “Then I was accused of being one.” This is not as paradoxical as Hegseth makes it sound. Many of the people most eager to fight against extremists of one religion are extremist adherents of another religion. An example of this would be the Crusades, an episode that Hegseth highlights in American Crusade as a model to emulate.

In any case, evidence of Hegseth’s extremism does not need to be deduced by interpreting his tattoos. The proof is lying in plain sight. In his three most recent books, Hegseth puts forward a wide range of familiarly misguided ideas: vaccines are “poisonous”; climate change is a hoax (they used to warn about global cooling, you know); George Floyd died of a drug overdose and was not murdered; the Holocaust was perpetrated by “German socialists.”

Where Hegseth’s thinking begins venturing into truly odd territory is his argument, developed in Battle for the American Mind, that the entire basic design of the public education system is the product of a century-long, totally successful communist plot. Hegseth is not just hyperventilating about the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, or other left-wing fads, as conservatives often do. Instead he argues that the entire design of the U.S. education system is a Marxist scheme with roots going back to the founding of the republic. The deist heresies of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he writes, laid the groundwork to implant communist thought into the school system. Then, “American Progressives in the late 1800s blended the idea of Marxist government with aspects from the Social Gospel and the belief in an American national destiny in order to make Marxism more palatable to Americans.”

The nefarious plan to turn America communist involves steps that appear anodyne to the untrained eye. “Yes, our modern social sciences—like ‘political science,’ previously known as ‘politics,’ and ‘social studies,’ previously known as individual disciplines like ‘history, economics, geography and philosophy’—are byproducts of Marxist philosophy,” he writes. “Let that sink in: the manner in which we study politics, history, and economics in American schools—public and private—today is the product of Marxists. That was always the plan, and it worked.” Hegseth will no longer sit back and allow communist indoctrination to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

The Marxist conspiracy has also, according to Hegseth, begun creeping into the U.S. military, the institution he is now poised to run. His most recent book calls for a straightforward political purge of military brass who had the gall to obey Democratic administrations: “Fire any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extraconstitutional and agenda-driven transformation of our military.” Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines. He is reportedly working on an executive order that will fast-track the removal of officers “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” and compiling a list of officers involved in the Afghanistan retreat, who will likewise be shoved out.

To what end? Trump has already signaled his interest in two revolutionary changes to the Defense Department’s orientation. One is to legalize war crimes, or at least cease enforcement of the rules of war. The president-elect has enthusiastically endorsed the use of illegal military methods and has pardoned American soldiers who committed atrocities against detainees and unarmed civilians, following a loud campaign by Hegseth on Fox News.

[Graeme Wood: War crimes are not difficult to discern]

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth makes plain that he considers the very idea of “rules of war” just more woke nonsense. “Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” He repeatedly disparages Army lawyers (“jagoffs”), even claiming that their pointless rules are “why America hasn’t won a war since World War II.” (Ideally, the secretary of defense would be familiar with historical episodes such as the Gulf War.)

Writing about his time guarding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay—where, as even the Bush administration eventually admitted, most detainees were innocent men swept up by American forces—Hegseth describes calls for due process as a stab-in-the-back against brave soldiers like himself. “The nation was dealing with legal issues (mostly led by weak-kneed, America-hating ACLU types) concerning enemy combatants, ‘international rights’ of illegal combatants, and the beginnings of extrajudicial drone attacks,” he writes. “Not to mention the debate about the ‘rights’ of assholes (I mean, ‘detainees’) at Gitmo.”

Trump’s second and even more disturbing interest in having a loyalist run the department is his enthusiasm for deploying troops to curtail and if necessary shoot domestic protesters. His first-term defense secretaries blanched at these demands. Hegseth displays every sign of sharing Trump’s impulses, but in a more theorized form.

The clearest throughline of all three books is the cross-application of Hegseth’s wartime mentality to his struggle against domestic opponents. American Crusade calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left,” with the goal of “utter annihilation,” without which “America cannot, and will not, survive.” Are the Crusades just a metaphor? Sort of, but not really: “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” (Emphasis—gulp—his).

Battle for the American Mind likewise imagines the struggle against the communist educational plot as a military problem: “We are pinned down, caught in an enemy near ambush. The enemy has the high ground, and is shooting from concealed and fortified positions.”

And The War on Warriors repeatedly urges Hegseth’s readers to treat the American left exactly like foreign combatants. Describing the military’s responsibility to the nation, he writes, “The expectation is that we will defend it against all enemies—both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)” The Marxist exception swallows the “not political opponents” rule, because pretty much all of his political opponents turn out to be Marxists. These include, but are not limited to, diversity advocates (“They are Marxists … You know what they are? They’re traitors”), newspapers (“the communist Star Tribune”), and, as noted, almost anybody involved in public education.

Lest there be any ambiguity, Hegseth incessantly equates the left to wartime enemies. “They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy—and then total control,” he writes at one point. At another, he argues, “We should be in panic mode. Almost desperate. Willing to do anything to defeat the ‘fundamental transformation’ of the American military and end the war on our warriors.”

Hegseth’s idea of illegitimate behavior by the domestic enemy is quite expansive. Consider this passage, recalling his time advocating for the Iraq War: “While I debated these things in good faith, the Left mobilized. Electing Obama, railroading the military, pushing women in combat—readiness be damned. The left has never fought fair.” The most remarkable phrase there is “electing Obama.” Hegseth’s notion of unfair tactics used by the left includes not only enacting administrative policies that he disagrees with, but the basic act of voting for Democrats. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political opposition likely endeared Hegseth to Trump, who shares the trait.

A Defense Secretary with a tenuous grip on reality, who can’t differentiate foreign enemies from domestic political opponents, and who seems to exist in a state of permanent hysteria is a problem that the United States has never had to survive. The main question I was looking to answer when I started reading Hegseth’s collected works was whether he would follow a Trump command to shoot peaceful protesters. After having read them, I don’t think he would even wait for the order.

Kamala Harris and the Democrats sold themselves as the party of change, freedom, and not being weird. But many American voters saw them instead as prigs, Stepford wives, morons, and condescending smarty-pants. The Democrats didn’t actually embody all of these shortcomings, separately or simultaneously—it’s difficult to be both smart and dumb, seductive and prudish. I’ve been thinking this past week about how the Democratic Party is seen, and it hit me: The Democratic Party resembles that most American of institutions: the HR department.

Like human resources, the Democrats are a party of norms, procedure, bureaucracy, DEI initiatives, rule following, language policing, and compliance. It is in this way that the Democratic Party feels not so much infuriating and threatening, but just kind of an annoying bummer. In the same way that an HR manager might respond when asked for clarity, Kamala Harris frequently speaks in the lexicon of lawerly avoidance.  

The Democrats banked on the idea that classic mommy-party traits—nurturing, fretting about life’s dangers—would appeal to voters worried about the chaos of Trumpism. Instead, their warnings came across as scolding, while Donald Trump’s wild antics were either embraced by his party as a selling point or dismissed as the harmless by-product of his showmanship. To his followers, Donald J. Trump, CEO, fits a heroic and masculine frame; to his detractors, he is a villain, yet he is always the protagonist.

The cultural space that the HR department occupies, however, carries with it no archetype at all. HR is mainly reactive, and often overly cautious, executing the company’s goals with an extraordinarily low tolerance for risk. At best, this function serves as a careful, mild check on excessive behavior, and at worst, as a fussy and fear-based obstacle that distorts a company’s culture and prevents people from achieving their mission. Trump famously hates to be told what to do; the HR department exists to do just that.

HR departments also have a reputation for being haters of fun. In 2016, the Democrats knew that Trump was seen as the more affable candidate. This wasn’t exactly difficult. Despite her many qualifications, Hillary Clinton had a reputation for being lawyerly, not playful. More recently, a Democratic operative told me that the party had learned its lesson from Clinton’s run, and consciously sought to brand Harris’s latest campaign as joyful. But it’s impossible to convince a skeptic that you’re the party of fun when you’re also the party accused of, and sometimes engaged in, taking beloved things away—gas stoves and cows come to mind—because “it’s good for humanity.”

Michael Scott, Steve Carrell’s character from The Office, once said to Toby Flenderson, the HR representative on the show, “Why are you the way that you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.” Michael Scott may be a buffoon, but Toby Flenderson is a killjoy, which is precisely how many voters see the Democrats. They’ve Flendersoned themselves. There is no heroism in HR, just the hemming-in of behavior. The Democrats should want the vote of Michael Scott, and not be satisfied with only the support of rule-following, overachieving Leslie Knope. (And, no, this isn’t about gender: There are plenty of non-Knope, fun-loving, rule-breaking women in the world.)

Democrats will tell you that they are the way they are because they’re trying to help Americans, because they know what’s best. But this was no more convincing to voters than a corporation’s insistence that the HR department exists to help employees. Absolutely no one believes that, of course. HR departments work for the people who hold the power, and they reinforce the company line, whatever that may be. To quote from a headline from the Society for Human Resources Management, “HR Doesn’t Exist to Help Employees.” And in the past few days, you’ve heard echoes of this admission from prominent Democrats, left and center-left alike. The party has turned its back on workers.  

​​Because they are not stupid, workers and voters pick up the whiff of the old okey doke when they are sold policies and procedures they are told are for their own good but are quite obviously most beneficial to those higher up on the org chart. Just as the savvy worker views an intervention from HR with suspicion, any voter who is paying attention will regard a party known for its past class betrayals with great skepticism.   

The average HR professional is likely to be college-educated, younger than the median worker, and wealthier than the average American. She (and usually it’s a she: 73.5 percent of HR professionals are women) is more likely to be Black or Hispanic, which is also true of Democrats. And HR workers are more likely to be Democrats themselves. According to Federal Election Commission filings, political donors listing their profession as human resources made 6,598 donations to Kamala Harris in this election cycle, and only 821 to the Trump campaign.

By means of disclosure, I’ll admit that I have liked every HR person I’ve dealt with in my personal life. They are likable people. They perform a mandated service, which the nonreptilian part of my brain accepts. Occasionally, HR really does serve as a useful resource, helping employees navigate FLSA, ACA, Title VII, FMLA, ADA, and OSHA (all except OSHA being Democratic initiatives). HR is an arm of the corporation, and the depletions of life-force I have suffered in HR dealings cannot be blamed on these representatives personally. I say this as someone who left a job at National Public Radio because I just couldn’t handle filling out my Kronos automated time sheets. I never resented the actual practitioners of HR for being made to implement their mind-numbing training videos, or distributing their jargon-laden rule books, or being the gendarme of liability avoidance. But I don’t want to live under that regime if I don’t have to.

For what it’s worth, I wanted Harris to win, and I wanted her to win because I viewed my choice as one between compliance and chaos. But I can relate on some level to those who rejected her. Campaigns are always run aspirationally, but elections are referendums. For so many Americans, the stultifying small-bore, rules-bound persnicketiness of the Democratic Party became a huge turnoff. People don’t want to feel that they are being told what they can or cannot say. They’re sick of a culture of walking on eggshells. The proof is right there in the election results—and what’s a presidential election, really, if not a quadrennial performance review of an entire nation?

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victorious reelection bid, Democrats are searching for an explanation of Kamala Harris’s loss in order to begin rebuilding for the future. So it goes every election cycle—a loss, a scramble for causality, and competing narratives begin to set.

Just one week out from Election Day, there are multiple dissenting and overlapping arguments being made to try to make sense of the results. In 2016, many Democrats believed that Trump’s attack on trade policies was core to his victory. As a result, the Biden-Harris administration pursued Trump-like policies on trade, none of which seem to have made a significant difference in increasing the union vote share, reducing Trump’s likelihood of victory, or stemming the flow of working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.

Now, again, various parts of the Democratic coalition are seeking to define the party’s loss. But what do we actually know about why the Democrats were defeated? There are still theories forming, but on today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the former Republican strategist and current host of The Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller about the postelection narratives jockeying for power.

“But for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes, that still is a unique experiment in the world. That “America is an idea” type of thing. The idea is pretty dim at this point,” Miller argued.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss, the losing party begins participating in a well-worn democratic tradition: slinging takes about what happened.

This is democracy! When the voters send a dissatisfied response, the messy work of recalibration requires parsing the signal from the noise.

Were voters mad because of a global inflationary environment that no Democrat could dig their way out of? Did they want to see specific breaks between Harris and Biden on policy? Were they frustrated by a candidate they saw as too left on cultural issues?

There are data points in favor of many different theses. Here’s where I’d put my stake in the ground, with the caveat that we still don’t have a complete analysis on subgroup dynamics, or even a final vote count on all the races:

First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum.

Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process.

Figuring out how much of this is in the campaign’s control—would it really have mattered that much if she’d gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?—or figuring out what this means for America’s two political parties will take months, if not years. As you’ve heard on this podcast, I’m still arguing about what 2016 really meant on trade and immigration.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. As a disclaimer, I worked for the Harris primary campaign in 2019 before becoming a journalist, and my guest today, Tim Miller, is a political strategist who was Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director on his presidential campaign. He’s been an anti-Trump conservative since then and is the host of The Bulwark Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk through some of these inchoate narratives and debate which ones we think are likely to hold water.

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

Demsas: Well, we’re recording this six days after Election Day. And—as you have seen on Twitter, and I’m sure in your various interviews—the takes are already coming in very, very hot. And this is a show where we often look at narratives that have already baked, and kind of look at the research and data behind how these narratives formed and what truth is there and what sorts of things have gotten ahead of themselves.

But we’re in an interesting moment right now where we’re seeing very important narrative formation happen in real time. In the aftermath of an election, everyone’s scrambling to define what happened in order to maybe wrest control of the future of the party from an ideological perspective or just a pure power perspective. And so we’re seeing a bunch of people arguing about why Trump won and why Harris lost in a time where there’s a bunch of unknowns. So we’re going to go through a few of these different narratives that are coming up.

But Tim, right off the bat, I wanted to ask you: What’s your perception of why Trump won and Harris lost?

Miller: I’m going to preempt my answer by saying that I think that uncertainty is important in this moment, and that false certainty can lead to some very mistaken and disastrous results. I say this from experience, having worked on the Republican autopsy in 2013, when the conventional wisdom congealed very quickly that Republicans, in order to win again, needed to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to appeal more to Hispanics and women. And not only was that wrong, but the person that became the nominee and then the president used that autopsy for toilet paper and went exactly the opposite direction.

It also always didn’t also work out in Trump’s favor. In 2022, the conventional wisdom was that Trumpism was badly hurt and that Ron DeSantis was ascendant. Right? So anyway, in the week after the election, bad takes abound.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: That said, my answer is, I’m open to a variety of different things that the Democrats might have to do, among them being maybe nothing and watch Trump self-implode. Might be as simple as that. That said, the one thing that I think is certain that the Democrats need to reflect on when it comes to this question of why Trump won and why Harris lost—it’s that the Democratic message is not landing outside of a particular demographic of middle- to upper-income, college-educated, not particularly religious, urban- and suburban-dwelling white Americans, in addition to Black women, right? Those are the demos that the Democrats are doing well with, that Kamala Harris grew her share with from last time, at least in the case of college-educated women. And I think that the Democrats are doing a very poor job of communicating to people in all of those other demographics.

On what they need to do, I’m very open to various possibilities about whether it’s about affect or vibe or policy or whatever. But I’m certain that there is—fair or unfair, there’s a perception that the Democrats don’t care about these other demographics, particularly working-class demographics, particularly working-class men. And that they did not offer them something that was more appealing than the nostalgia and promises of gold bullion that they got from Donald Trump. And so we can hash through all the different theories about why that was. But I think the fact that what happened—you can’t argue with.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s very descriptively true. But I guess what I would want to know from you is do you feel like there are specific things that Democrats have done that tipped the scales against them? I think that what you’re outlining here is very sound. There’s a difference between why Harris may have lost and what the Democrats need to do going forward to be a more electorally relevant party at the presidential level. And so from your perspective, though, is there something about the Democratic argument around the economy or other issues that you think was particularly relevant this time around?

Miller: I think that, for starters, people were unhappy with the economy. And I don’t think that the Democrats presented a message to them about how they plan to change that for the better. But, again, I’m also not even really ready to concede that, with the exception of inflation being annoying and that broadly hurting people, the Democrats were hurt based on their economic argument. It might simply be cultural. It might be the way that they spoke, and having people feel like they weren’t being heard.

I think the Democrats in particular—I always want to immediately go to, What is the policy prescription that would have appealed? And I’m like, It’s possible that there wasn’t one.

Demsas: Yeah. An important backdrop that I think you’re alluding to here, as well, is that the inflationary environment was really, really bad for incumbents across the world, right? You’re kind of going into an election where the fundamentals are sort of rigged against incumbents because the inflationary episode was just really, really hard for people. I think one narrative that I’m seeing come up a lot is about campaign strategy. And this seems like something that’s going to be hashed out significantly. But I guess the question I have here is whether you think Harris could have won with a campaign run differently, even given the shortened timeline.

Miller: I’m giving another “I don’t know” answer to that question: I don’t know. I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others.

And so then that’s the other thing that people come to, which is like, Oh, she should have done Rogan and all this. And I agree. I think she should have done more of those interviews, but they also weren’t really her strong suit. And I think that this was something that might’ve borne out had there been a longer primary, and maybe somebody else would have emerged. But that said, I don’t think so. I think Kamala Harris was going to emerge from a primary, no matter when Joe Biden dropped out.

And so I’m not saying, Oh, this was inevitable. Just give up. Life is pain. [Laughs.] That’s not really what I’m saying. Any specific thing that people are like, Oh, if this tactic had been different, that would have helped—I don’t really buy that. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, her having the ability to separate herself from the administration would have been helpful, and I think that was very challenging to do given the situation Joe Biden left her in and the time period that was left. And I think that it’s very likely that she might have separated herself from the administration more and still lost, and we would have been here on this podcast with people saying, Why did she distance? [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Why did she break up the Democratic coalition?

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think that, on the tactics, I’m sort of with you here. I was looking at some of the data analyses that are coming out now, and it looks like, at this point, given the data we have, while the national average from 2020 to 2024 shifts roughly six points, in battlegrounds, that number is going to end up closer to three points. And that speaks to campaign effects. That speaks to the fact that in battleground states where, again, the majority of the money is going, people are putting ads in battleground states, the campaign is putting rallies there, she’s visiting, they’re really working the press in those places to get her story and message out in a way that you’re not really going to do in a safe, Dem county in Illinois or something.

And so as a result, what they see is that the campaign effects were good on a tactical level. Their ads were persuasive. There’s evidence from Dan Rosenhack at The Economist that it looks like the campaign effects were more effective than Trump’s on things like—indicating things like ads and rallies were better for Harris.

I think on this kind of broader meta question that you kind of raised, right, about Harris as the nominee, I don’t think this is inevitable. I mean, I wrote an article on July 9th arguing that she was unlikely to be a good nominee and the party shouldn’t coronate her, and Nancy Pelosi to The New York Times—I don’t know if you saw this quote, after Harris’s loss—she says that she had expected that if the president were to step aside that there would be an open primary. And that maybe Kamala would have been stronger going forward if she’d gone through a primary and that the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, which made it impossible to have a primary at the time. But it sounds like you’re saying that you think that, regardless, this would not have really changed the game that much.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think that had Joe Biden followed the—you can argue whether it was a promise or whether it was an indication that he was going to be a one-term [president] and pass the torch. And had there been a two-year process, maybe Kamala Harris does not emerge. But, look, there are three things that I think of when I hear this counterfactual about what would have happened had it been a more open process. The first thing is, the Democrat—one of the things that the Democrats have a lot of baggage around is identity politics. I think it would have been very challenging for a Black woman to be passed over.

Demsas: But the Democratic primary voters did this in 2019, right? There was this argument being made, but they said, no, we care most about electability and they chose Joe Biden.

Miller: Right, that’s true. But Joe Biden had been the vice president in that case. Kamala Harris was the vice president. You already saw this on social media. I saw this on social media, and I was basically for Kamala but also, at the same time, was like, maybe I think it’d be healthy to have an open process. And I guess if you could wave a magic wand, I probably would want Shapiro, Whitmer. Because hopefully that would win two of the three states you need to win the presidency. And that just seems like a safer bet to me. That was my position: It was like pro-Kamala and/but. And I had hundreds of people calling me a racist over that.

So, I think that it would have caused a lot of turmoil within the party.

Now, again, in a longer, two-year process, is that a lot of heat that then just dies out after a while, and you settle on something that’s a little bit more electable and everybody gets behind it except for a few people who have hurt feelings? Maybe.

No. 2, an open process opens up Gaza [as a] wound and rips that apart even wider, and I think creates potentially even greater turmoil than she already was dealing with on that issue. And that’s cost her, frankly. And then No. 3 is then if the theory of the case is a more electable person with someone that could get more distance from the Biden-Harris administration, that assumes that the Democratic voters were looking for somebody to do that.

And that is really where the tension is here, Jerusalem, because if you look at the data, a majority of the Biden-Harris Democrats were basically happy with the administration, right? There were surely big parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters, particularly working-class Black and Hispanic voters, the types of people that they lost ground with, that were unhappy with the Biden administration. But I think that there was a plurality within the party that was not going to be for somebody—look at the response to Dean Phillips, not exactly the most talented candidate, but total rejection and mockery for somebody who ran trying to get distance from the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think it would have been very challenging to run as a candidate and get distance. So to me, it’s like if we lived in an imaginary world where identity politics wasn’t an issue, Gaza wasn’t an issue, and there was no backlash to distancing yourself from Biden, then certainly the Democrats could have come up with a stronger option.

We don’t live in an imaginary world. And I think that within the world that we live in, within all those constraints, I think it’s very challenging to see a situation where you end up with somebody stronger than Harris.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, all those points I think are very well taken. And I think I’m seeing a lot of people make that argument of both Harris’s inevitability as the vice president, and also this sort of sense of It would have been a worse candidate. I do think that kind of my general belief is sort of, when you think you’re behind, you run a high-variance play. If you’re gonna lose anyway, you just kind of throw everything you can at the kitchen sink.

And on this kind of inevitability point, right, I think there is this burgeoning sense that Democrats were just repudiated across the board here. You kind of brought this up, this idea that Democrats do not have a good answer on economic issues or on the issues that Americans care about.

But I don’t know, how do you reconcile that with the clear ticket-splitting you see going on here? [Nebraska’s Dan] Osborne ran seven points ahead of the Harris ticket. [Montana Senator Jon] Tester ran seven points ahead of the ticket. Amy Klobuchar ran six points ahead. That’s just in the Senate. And in the House, we see over-performances from everyone from AOC to Jared Golden in Maine, who’s a much more moderate member of the Democratic coalition. Doesn’t that indicate at some level that candidate quality was important here and that there were other candidates that were much more electable?

Miller: For starters, running the presidential race is so far different from running a Senate or House race that it’s almost not even the same sport.

It’s literally like T-ball versus the major leagues. What people expect from their—I mean, nobody’s like, Oh man, does Amy Klobuchar have to go on Joe Rogan? Nobody watches Amy Klobuchar’s debates. Obviously it’s a little different in Montana, where you’re running a competitive race. But again, just the interest in Senate races is different. I think that the Democrats have a coalition that is perfectly durable and able to win nonpresidential elections. I think that this trade in the voters that has happened where the Democrats are picking up more high-trust, more middle- to high-income, more college-educated voters, and the Republicans are picking up more low-trust, more middle- to low-income, and less educated voters. As a trade, that accrues to Democrats benefits in off-year elections and midterms and special elections, just because it’s the type of person that shows up for those types of things, and it accrues to the Republicans benefit in presidential elections. So that’s not good when the Republicans are nominating Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ presidential nominee is an existential threat to the fabric of our republic. And so that’s a problem.

And so I agree that you can’t look at the data and say, oh, the Democratic brand is irreparably harmed. Like, no, the Democrats won. And a lot of these Senate races are going to end up very narrow minorities, in the House and the Senate, that they will probably be able to win back in the midterms, depending on what happens.

But I think that there are two things, which is, No. 1, the Democrats are not well suited to running presidential elections right now, in this media environment, and then No. 2 is that the Democrats have abandoned huge parts of the country where they are not viable. And that’s particularly problematic, given the Senate and Electoral College and the way that’s set up.

So okay, back to No. 1. Democrats are really good at running campaigns that are set pieces. They have professionals that are running these campaigns: the ads, the conventions, the speeches, the going to the editorial-board meetings, the 2004-type campaigns. And that’s how Senate and House campaigns are basically still run in most of the country, and even governor’s races, right? People just don’t care about those races at that deep of a level. But the presidential race is—the media environment around it is so different. I mean, people are consuming information about the presidential race on their TikTok, listening to sports talk, listening to their random podcasts that aren’t about sports at all that are cultural, on women’s blogs, at a school function, people are talking about it casually, you know what I mean?

I’m a parent, and obviously this is a little bit of selection bias since I’m in politics and people know that, but people don’t come up to me and ask me what I think about the House race in my district. Nobody’s mentioned Troy Carter to me at any events,, at any school functions or any of my kids’ sporting events.

Demsas: He’s got to get his name out there. [Laughs.]

Miller: And so the information environment is just a total category difference. And Trump and even J. D. Vance in certain ways were able to take advantage of that by running campaigns that are a little bit more unwieldy, that are better for viral clips, that are also better for sitting down for two hours and broing out with the Theo Von and talking about how you can’t even do coke in this country anymore because the fentanyl is in it, right?

She wasn’t doing any of that. And doing one of those interviews isn’t really the answer, right? It’s like, can you communicate in a way that feels authentic? It might be fake authenticity, but in a way that feels authentic to people in their Instagram Stories, in their TikTok, in their podcasts, whatever.

And Democrats are not producing a lot of candidates who I feel are good at that.

Demsas: But I think there’s also this broad concern that the media ecosystem itself is not producing convincing, progressive-sounding or left-leaning media personalities. There’s a 2017 AER study that I remember being very, very shocking to people when it first came out, right after Trump’s election in 2016. And there are a couple economists, they look at the effect of Fox News, and they find that watching Fox News for an additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share by 0.3 percentage points. But watching MSNBC has essentially no effect, and they see that Fox News is actually able to shift viewers’ attitudes rightward. And they look at 2004 and 2008 and find that Republican presidential candidates’ share of the two-party vote would have been more than three points lower in 2004, and six points lower in 2008 without Fox News.

And so that’s something where I’m just like—there is something to the fact that the media ecosystem does not have that sort of targeted apparatus. But my usual belief about these sorts of things is that we’re discounting the fact that so much of the media is so liberal that Fox News can have this large effect because it I think stands out among a pack of more liberal institutions, but I am kind of surprised at MSNBC.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, as a person on MSNBC, did that study go on before I was a political contributor? I think it did. So we might need to update the study and have them focus on my hits and see if that changes anything.

I guess I want to noodle on that for a little bit. That does surprise me a little bit as well, but I would say this: I think that I’m less concerned. I think there’s a category of person out there, and maybe this is right, that is focused on Republicans have better propaganda outlets than the Democrats do.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And maybe that’s true. I don’t know. So to me, then the question is, okay, what can be done? What is realistic in this media environment? And it goes back to this question of, can the Democrats speak more through using existing outlets or finding a candidate who has a compelling story in their own right, or compelling communication skills to figure out how to speak to people that don’t watch mainstream news?

And that’s just really what it comes down to. The Democrats are very good at talking to people that are high-information, high-engagement, high-education, middle-to-high-income, and offering persuasive arguments. I think that they’re not good at talking to anybody else. And Obama was good at that, and Clinton was good at that. And we’re in a totally different media environment now than we were back then. But I think that there’s still things that can be learned from that.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, why the abortion-ballot-measure strategy didn’t pan out for the Harris campaign.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to pull us out of this media conversation here, because I think that there’s also this, let’s say things go a little bit differently—and again, the margins here are not very big—and Harris has won.

I think one of the big things we’d be hearing right now is that she won because of abortion, right? And looking at Election Night, you see a lot of wins for abortion. There are 10 states that have referendums on abortion policies, and seven of them win: New York, Maryland, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri. And in Florida, where it loses, the threshold is 60 percent and it earns 57 percent, so it lost, but there’s clearly a majority in favor.

And, going in, I mean, especially after the midterms, there was a real feeling, kind of the big narrative that came out of those midterms was that abortion is the place where Democrats can clearly distinguish and can clearly win over Republican candidates, even in deeply Republican states, and especially in deeply purple states.

And I’m trying to think through this. What explains in your mind the sort of difference between how many voters were saying, Yes, I do have more liberal views on abortion; I’m willing to express those in these ballot measures; but no, I’m not going to then reward Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for it?

Miller: Well, a couple of things. No. 1, this tension has always existed as old as time, and it’s particularly existed as old as time in places like Florida. I did one of these, you know, time is a flat circle—

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I forget which election it was at this point, but it was like, how did the minimum-wage-increase ballot initiative in Florida pass at the same time that Ron DeSantis won by 18 points or whatever, whichever election that was.

And it’s like, voters are complicated. Voters have complex views. And so you see this as kind of just a common thing in voter habits. In this case, I think that there are a couple of complicating factors in addition. No. 1 was, Donald Trump muddied the waters on his views.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And I think that Donald Trump’s whole brand and vibe—I know we’re getting outside of the data space that you like to be in, Jerusalem, but there’s a certain group of people that are like, Yeah, that guy’s not gonna ban abortion. You know what I mean? And there’s just some percentage of voters out there that that’s just it. He doesn’t come off like Ted Cruz on abortion. He comes off as different, because they assume that he paid for an abortion or whatever, that he doesn’t care about it, and that he’s not gonna—this isn’t gonna be what he’s focused on. There are going to be people that are pro-choice that prioritize their economic views or their nativist views, right?

So that is going to be some of it. I think less so in Florida, but more in Arizona. To me, I think that there is actually a strategic backfiring of having these ballot initiatives on the ballot almost gave some people an out to do both, right? People that did not like Kamala Harris or that were more center-right and said, Oh, okay, great, I can protect abortion in Arizona and also vote for Donald Trump. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think my read of it is more that when you think about the specific argument being made about abortion, it was largely, he’s to blame for all these horrible things that are happening to women in states that have made abortion inaccessible. And by he, I mean Trump is to blame for that. And also, you know, he appointed these Supreme Court nominees who overturned Roe v. Wade. But as a prescription for the future, I feel like there was not a real clear argument made to voters of how Kamala Harris is going to actually protect abortion.

But again, it all comes back to the overarching question, did voters view this as an abortion election? And it seems clear that they viewed it as an inflation election. That was the core thing that they were focused on. And I think that one thing that I’ve heard a lot is what this means for understanding America, right?

So after 2016, people were just, I think, in shock, and were saying, I can’t believe this is the country I live in. And again here I’m hearing the sort of question of, you know, this is a black mark on the conscience of America, that people would vote for someone who threatened to overturn the results of the 2020 election, who talks with such liberal disdain for women and immigrants.

Something someone said to me in 2016 was really interesting: If your entire perception of America would have shifted if a few hundred thousand people voted differently, maybe don’t completely change everything you believe about everyone. And to me, I think that this framing about Trump’s reelection means something really dark about all the people that voted for him doesn’t really sit well with me because it seems like people are voting based on cost of living. At the same time, too, I think they’re taking their signal from Democrats who, if they’d taken their own warnings about the threat of fascism or the threat to our institutions, I think would have behaved very differently over the past couple of years in trying to win.

Miller: Yeah. It doesn’t change my view of the American people, really, that there are good people and bad people everywhere, that we all have good and bad inside of us. I’ll say that what it does impact for me—and maybe this is wrong and maybe I’m raw and it’s six days out—but for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes but still is a unique experiment in the world. You know, the “America is an idea” type of thing.

The idea is pretty dim at this point. And, to me, that is the change, having him win again, that I’m having trouble getting over. Mentally, it’s not that it makes me look poorly at my neighbors, but that we just might be at the end of the experiment and the sense that America is something different than Hungary or Switzerland or whatever, any country—you name the country.

It was the old fight with Republicans and Democrats during the Obama years, which is, Obama doesn’t think of America as any different than Belgium. Obama believes in Belgian exceptionalism. And that to me is kind of where I am. I think that we’re about to move into an era where America’s flaws, in addition to all of our existing flaws like gun violence and our history of racism, et cetera—the American system’s flaws look a lot more like what flaws look like in other countries.

There’s going to be oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption. There’s no special sense that the huddled masses around the world are welcome here any more than they might be welcome anywhere else. They frankly are probably going to be welcome here less than they’re welcome in certain other places.

And so to me, that is what I see differently. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Demsas: Yeah. I think in contrast to this large view about the American idea of maybe being different than we believed beforehand is this, I think, really popular take that’s picking up steam, which is about just Democrats need to moderate on cultural issues, whether it’s about immigration, or it’s the issue of trans women and girls in sports. They’re just too left of the median voter, and you don’t actually need to do a bunch else other than accept that people are where they are on those places and not go so far away from it.

The data point that’s kind of in favor of this, particularly on the trans-girls-in-sports one, is Kamala Harris’s leading super PAC, Future Forward, finds that the most effective, or one of the most effective, Trump ads is one of the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ads. They find that it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after people watched it.

How relevant do you think that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on cultural issues is to Harris’s loss? And I mean, there’s some people who I think are really making the claim that you could just really focus on this and you don’t need to make these kind of larger arguments about strategy or how we’re speaking to America on economic policy.

Miller: I don’t think that this was alone to account for Harris’s loss or even maybe the biggest thing to account for her loss. I think that she didn’t really respond to that ad in particular quite well, and that maybe that was a strategic mistake. I think her campaign—and she didn’t run like an overly “woke,” culturally left campaign. Ao the question is, did the Democratic brand on those issues drag her down? I think possibly.

To me, look, could Kamala Harris have squeaked out a victory this time while holding the same positions on trans issues had inflation been 20 percent better? Maybe. Probably. It was a clear victory for Trump, but it wasn’t, you know, Reagan ’84.

A couple of things changed, and had that one, the cultural stuff stayed static, could she have still won? Clearly. I mean, Biden won in 2020, when all of those issues were more high-salience, I think, than they were this time. Biden, not a Black woman—so maybe there’s something to that as well, that he was able to be a little bit more resilient against attacks on those issues.

So maybe that’s worth thinking about. I would say this, though. If the Democrats want to have 60 senators again ever, then yeah, they got to moderate on cultural issues. You know what I mean? There are two ways to look at this: Can Democrats still win elections by maintaining their views on everything? Yes. Are the Democrats giving away huge swaths of the country by not really even engaging with their concerns about the leftward shift of the party on a wide array of issues? Yeah, they are. I get the land-doesn’t-vote thing, I get it, but look at the map.

Demsas: [Laughs.] We’ve all seen the map.

Miller: The map is still the map, you know what I mean?

And Trump gained in all of those little red counties out there where it’s just land, all right? But he gained. There are a handful of people out there, and he got more of them, in every county. And the Democrats’, I think, choice to just say, Well, we’re just giving up on that and we’re just going to focus on the more dynamic parts of the growing parts of the country and, eventually, demographics are destiny and blah, blah, blah, that looks like a pretty bad bet today.

I’m not out here being like, yeah, you got to throw trans people or migrants under the bus for them to win. But certainly the cultural leftward shift has created a ceiling on Democratic support that I think has a negative effect for the party, but also for progress on a lot of those issues.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s obviously very up in the air here, how people are gonna take this mantle of how you should moderate, and I think that there’s bad and good ways that people can take this. And I think that there’s a level to which people—you don’t have to be throwing trans people under the bus. Maybe we need to figure out ways, whether it’s how Democrats responded to this with gay rights, where they talked about federalism a lot and made sure the country moved toward the issue before making it a national issue.

But I think the most important and damning thing that Democrats are clearly responsible for in the choices they have made is about the poor governance in blue cities and states. This is one of my hobbyhorses, but you see massive shifts, as you mentioned, in high-cost-of-living places that are heavily democratic, in New York and in California and in a lot of the Northeast. And I think it’s hard to see that as anything other than just a repudiation of Democratic governance and particularly the cost of living and the cost of housing in these places.

And so, to me, when you talked about the Democratic brand, I mean, when you’re in a cost-of-living election, yes, there are marginal effects on these cultural issues we’re talking about here. Yes, there are things that campaigns can do better. Yes, there are candidate effects. But if people are asking themselves, What does it look like, how does it feel to my pocketbook to live in a Democratically run state versus a Republican one? I feel like they’re being told a very clear story.

Miller: I think that that’s true. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot over the past week. I live in Louisiana, so there is the kind of emotional guttural response I have to this, which is, do you think Louisiana is being governed that well? Because I don’t.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, on cost, though, right? It’s cheaper, obviously, to have a house in Louisiana.

Miller: It’s cheaper to have a house in Louisiana because of the economic destruction of the state over the past couple of decades and the fact that everybody that grows up in parts of the state that’s not this corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge leave home. And a lot of people in these places leave home, too, looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s sad for the state.

That is my initial response, which is emotional, which is like, okay, sure. But why does Kamala Harris have to carry the baggage for the place I used to live—Oakland—but Donald Trump doesn’t have to carry the baggage for the hollowing out of big parts of Louisiana? That said, it’s true that it hurt the Democrats, right? And it’s also true that the Democrats have been badly managing these big cities. And if you just look at the numbers, suburban Democrats—and this could be a counterargument. Now, I’m going to really give you a galaxy brain, Jerusalem, to your original data point earlier that the three-point effect in the battleground states versus national speaks to a campaign effect? Maybe.

Maybe it also speaks to the fact that a lot of these battleground states are made up of places that have mixed governance and big suburbs where the Democrats are doing better. Democrats are doing better in suburban America because they know they’re not feeling the acute pain of governing issues that have plagued a lot of the big cities. And surely there are a couple of big cities in those seven swing states, but none of the ones you think of when you think of major disruptions, and that maybe that explains it and that the Republican gains were in a lot more of those places like that, Illinois, New Jersey, California. Anyway, just something to noodle on.

But I think that it is objectively true that Democrats are doing better in places that have not been plagued by some of these bad governing decisions on crime and on housing that we’ve seen for in Democratic cities, and the Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in blue states should fix that.

And it’s the No. 1 thing—the last thing I’ll say on this is—the No. 1 thing that comes to mind when I already hear stupid parlor-game stuff about 2028 and it’s like Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker. And to me, the No. 1 thing Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker need to do if they want to run in 2027 is make Illinois and California run better in the meantime. Otherwise, nothing against either of those two guys, but I think that they’re going to carry this baggage that you’re talking about.

Demsas: Well, I could go on about housing in blue states forever. And there’s an article popping, I think today, listeners, as you’re hearing about this, about why I think this was a big issue for the election.

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

Miller: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Miller: Oh, okay. Hold on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I misread the question. I thought it was an idea that was only good on paper that then ended up being not good on paper.

Demsas: Idea could be good.

Miller: No, no, no. I’ll come up with one where I’m wrong. I’m happy to bet where I’m wrong. I was just saying the ideas are endless on those.

Demsas: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you held, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miller: An idea that I thought that was good on paper that ended up not being good on paper. Well, I guess I have to give the obvious answer to that question, sadly. I don’t get to rant about daylight savings time as I hoped to—an idea that was certainly good on paper in the 1800s or whenever they came up with it that’s no longer good. Falling back, that is. Permanent daylight saving time: good idea.

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

Miller: Yeah. The idea that I thought that was good on paper that is relevant to this podcast—because I literally put it on paper and wrote it—was the aforementioned 2013 GOP autopsy.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Miller: Well, how great! Compassionate conservatism. Republicans can diversify their party by getting softer on cultural issues and reaching out to the suburbs and reaching out to Hispanic voters and Black voters, criminal-justice reform, and that through criminal-justice reform and immigration reform and softening on gays, that Republicans can have a new, diverse electorate, and we can all move into a happy, bipartisan future.

That was a great idea on paper that backfired spectacularly, and now the Republicans have their most diverse electorate that they’ve had ever, I think, voting for Donald Trump after rejecting all of those suggestions that I put on paper. So there you go.

Demsas: As one vote of confidence for younger Tim, there are very many ways that history could have gone. I think that people often forget how contingent things are and how unique of a figure Trump is. And right now we’ve talked through a bunch of different ways that people are reading this moment, but there are a lot of ways that people can go, depending on what candidates do and say and how they catch fire and their charisma and what ends up being relevant in two years and in four years. So a little bit of sympathy for younger Tim.

Miller: I appreciate that. And that is true. Who the hell knows, right?

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Had Donald Trump not run that time and he decided he wanted to do some other scam instead, then maybe Marco Rubio is the nominee and those things do come to pass.

Demsas: [Laughs.] Yeah. If Obama doesn’t make fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we’re not even sitting here on this podcast.

Miller: Great job, Jon Lovett, or whoever wrote that joke.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tim. Thanks for coming on the show.

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

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

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

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

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

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

Read the full article.

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

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Matt Wilson / Paramount

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Trump’s red-pill podcast tour]

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

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

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

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

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

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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?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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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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.

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Maybe it was always building to this: thousands of people singing and dancing to “Macho Man,” some sporting neon safety vests, others in actual trash bags, a symbolic expression of solidarity with their authoritarian hero whose final week on the campaign trail has revolved around the word garbage.

Where will the MAGA movement go from here? Trump had an answer last night, at least for the short term. He wasn’t telegraphing an Election Day victory—he was preparing, once again, to label his opponents “cheaters” and to challenge a potential defeat.

The evening’s host, Tucker Carlson, said that for most of his life as a journalist, he’d imagined that one would have to be “bereft of a soul” to stand onstage and support a politician. “And here I am with a full-throated, utterly sincere endorsement of Donald Trump.”

On with the show.

As I wandered around Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, last night, this iteration of Trumpism felt slightly different, if not wholly novel. Nine years ago, Trump held one of his first MAGA rallies not far from this venue. “Donald Trump Defiantly Rallies a New ‘Silent Majority’ in a Visit to Arizona” read a New York Times headline from July 11, 2015. Charlie Kirk, one of last night’s warm-up speakers, put it thusly: “This state helped launch the movement that has swept the globe.” All of the elements Trump needed to stoke the fire back then were still here last night: the Mexican border debate, inflamed racial tensions, metastasizing political extremism. Trump’s movement has grown, and his red MAGA hat has become a cultural touchstone. As the Arizona sun set, though, his nearly decade-long campaign of fear and despotism also had a surprising air of denouement.

Trump told Carlson he doesn’t like to look back. But last night, as he rambled (and rambled), he was sporadically reflective about all that had led to this point in his life. Trump sat in a leather chair with just a handheld mic—no teleprompter, no notes. He mostly ignored Carlson’s questions and instead tossed out ideas at random—what he calls “the weave.” In reality, it’s less lucid than he believes; more of a zigzag across years of personal triumphs and troubles. Remember “Russia, Russia, Russia”? Remember the “China virus”? Remember the time he courageously pardoned Scooter Libby? Remember how good he used to be at firing people on The Apprentice? Remember the crowd at that one Alabama rally? All of this, in his mind, amounted to something akin to a closing argument.

The event was a hurricane-relief benefit billed as Tucker Carlson Live With Special Guest Donald J. Trump. But Carlson barely spoke. Instead, he sat back in his own chair, occasionally picking at his fingers, looking somewhat mystified that this was where he’d ended up in his career, hosting Inside the Authoritarian’s Studio. He had taken the stage to the sounds of Kid Rock, but he looked as preppy as ever in a navy blazer, a gingham shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He insisted, twice, that he had bent the knee to Donald Trump without shame. Trump, he marveled, had shown him what a sham D.C. was. He lamented how those inside the Beltway treated Trump “like he was a dangerous freak, like he’d just escaped from the state mental institution.”

Carlson has grown more radical since Fox News fired him. Last night, he claimed, for instance, that the CIA and the FBI have been working with the Democratic Party to take Trump down. He implied that funding for Ukraine isn’t going to the military but is instead lining the pockets of the Washington elite: “Have you been to McLean recently?”

The man he unabashedly endorsed, meanwhile, again spoke of “the enemy within,” and attacked the enemy of the people (the media). Trump once again demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He claimed that members of the January 6 “unselect committee” had burned, destroyed, and deleted all the evidence it had collected because, in the end, they found out that Nancy Pelosi was at fault (this bit was especially hard to follow). He called for enlisting the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney into combat: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Trump blew some of his usual autocratic dog whistles, saying, for instance, that anyone who burns an American flag should be sentenced to a year in prison. He suggested that loyalists and extremists will fill his next administration, should it exist. He implied that he’d bring in Elon Musk to find ways to slash the federal budget, and let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist, examine public-health matters. “He can do anything he wants,” Trump said of Kennedy.

But perhaps the most meaningful moment of the night was when Trump said matter-of-factly that he won’t run for president again. He instead hinted that his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, will be a top 2028 contender. Win or lose, this was it, his last dystopian rodeo. Trump spoke almost wistfully about suddenly approaching the end of his never-ending rally tour. He sounded like a kid moving to a new neighborhood and a new middle school. He told his friends he’d miss them. “We’ll meet, but it’ll be different,” he said. He was in no rush to leave the stage.

The big question going into Tuesday’s election is whether the MAGA movement will fizzle out should Trump lose. Although Trump himself seems more exhausted than usual these days, his supporters are as fired up as ever. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants— a reference to Trump’s now-infamous response to the July attempt on his life—broke out among the crowd as people waited to pass through Secret Service checkpoints. I passed a man in a brown wig, a pink blazer, and a green top that read Kamala Toe, the words gesturing toward his crotch. I saw a woman wearing gold Trump-branded sneakers, and many people with Musk’s Dark MAGA hat. The latter seemed particularly notable: In addition to getting behind Vance, Trump might be inclined to pass the torch to another nonpolitician—namely, someone like Musk.

For now, though, Trump is returning to his conspiratorial election denialism. Four years ago, he tried to undermine the results in Arizona, Georgia, and other states. Last night, he singled out Pennsylvania. (A day earlier, his campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state, alleging voter suppression.) “It’s hard to believe I’m winning, it seems by a lot, if they don’t cheat too much,” he said, alleging malfeasance in York and Lancaster counties. Whether he succeeds or fails, the detritus that Trump has left behind will likely linger. “Look around, Mr. President, because there’s a lot of garbage here!” Charlie Kirk said earlier in the night. “Go to the polls on Tuesday and make sure that we all ride that big garbage truck to Washington, D.C.,” Kennedy, who was one of the warm-up speakers, implored.

Trump, though, opined with uncharacteristic nostalgia: “When I was a young guy, I loved—I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history and all of the things that can happen.” He sounded fleetingly earnest. He has undoubtedly cemented his place in history. Or, as Carlson put it earlier in the night: “Almost 10 years later, he has completely transformed the country and the world.”

Related:

Trump suggests training guns on Liz Cheney’s face. A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks

Today’s News

The White House altered its transcript of President Joe Biden’s call with Latino activists, during which official stenographers recorded that Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” according to the Associated Press. The White House denied that Biden had been referring to Trump voters. During a meeting in Moscow, North Korea’s foreign minister pledged to support Russia until it wins the war against Ukraine. The price of Donald Trump’s social-media stock fell another 14 percent today, amounting to a loss of more than 40 percent over three days.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Although AI regulation is the rare issue that Trump and Harris actually agree on, partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: These books are must-reads for Americans before Election Day, Boris Kachka writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Katie Martin

This Might Be a Turning Point for Child-Free Voters

By Faith Hill

When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.”

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu

Watch. Rivals (streaming on Hulu) is the silliest, sexiest show of the year, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Listen. We Live Here Now, a podcast by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin, who found out that their new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But how do you define that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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