The Senate on Thursday rejected legislation to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits, essentially guaranteeing that millions of Americans will see a steep rise in costs at the beginning of the year.Senators rejected a Democratic bill to extend the subsidies for three years and a Republican alternative that would have created new health savings accounts — an unceremonious end to a monthslong effort by Democrats to prevent the COVID-19-era subsidies from expiring on Jan. 1.Ahead of the votes, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York warned Republicans that if they did not vote to extend the tax credits, “there won’t be another chance to act,” before premiums rise for many people who buy insurance off the ACA marketplaces.”Let’s avert a disaster,” Schumer said. “The American people are watching.”Republicans have argued that Affordable Care Act plans are too expensive and need to be overhauled. The health savings accounts in the GOP bill would give money directly to consumers instead of to insurance companies, an idea that has been echoed by President Donald Trump. But Democrats immediately rejected the plan, saying that the accounts wouldn’t be enough to cover costs for most consumers.Some Republicans have pushed their colleagues to extend the credits, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who said they should vote for a short-term extension so they can find agreement on the issue next year. “It’s too complicated and too difficult to get done in the limited time that we have left,” Tillis said Wednesday.But despite the bipartisan desire to continue the credits, Republicans and Democrats have never engaged in meaningful or high-level negotiations on a solution, even after a small group of centrist Democrats struck a deal with Republicans last month to end the 43-day government shutdown in exchange for a vote on extending the ACA subsidies. Most Democratic lawmakers opposed the move as many Republicans made clear that they wanted the tax credits to expire.The deal raised hopes for bipartisan compromise on health care. But that quickly faded with a lack of any real bipartisan talks.The dueling Senate votes are the latest political messaging exercise in a Congress that has operated almost entirely on partisan terms, as Republicans pushed through a massive tax and spending cuts bill this summer using budget maneuvers that eliminated the need for Democratic votes. They also tweaked Senate rules to push past a Democratic blockade of all of Trump’s nominees. An intractable issueThe votes were also the latest failed salvo in the debate over the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature law that Democrats passed along party lines in 2010 to expand access to insurance coverage.Republicans have tried unsuccessfully since then to repeal or overhaul the law, arguing that health care is still too expensive. But they have struggled to find an alternative. In the meantime, Democrats have made the policy a central political issue in several elections, betting that the millions of people who buy health care on the government marketplaces want to keep their coverage.”When people’s monthly payments spike next year, they’ll know it was Republicans that made it happen,” Schumer said in November, while making clear that Democrats would not seek compromise.Even if they view it as a political win, the failed votes are a loss for Democrats who demanded an extension of the benefits as they forced a government shutdown for six weeks in October and November — and for the millions of people facing premium increases on Jan. 1.Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said the group tried to negotiate with Republicans after the shutdown ended. But, he said, the talks became unproductive when Republicans demanded language adding new limits for abortion coverage that were a “red line” for Democrats. He said Republicans were going to “own these increases.”A plethora of plans, but little agreementRepublicans have used the looming expiration of the subsidies to renew their longstanding criticisms of the ACA, also called Obamacare, and to try, once more, to agree on what should be done.Thune announced earlier this week that the GOP conference had decided to vote on the bill led by Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the chairman of the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee, and Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, even as several Republican senators proposed alternate ideas.In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has promised a vote next week. Republicans weighed different options in a conference meeting on Wednesday, with no apparent consensus.Republican moderates in the House who could have competitive reelection bids next year are pushing Johnson to find a way to extend the subsidies. But more conservative members want to see the law overhauled.Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., has pushed for a temporary extension, which he said could be an opening to take further steps on health care.If they fail to act and health care costs go up, the approval rating for Congress “will get even lower,” Kiley said.___Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON —
The Senate on Thursday rejected legislation to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits, essentially guaranteeing that millions of Americans will see a steep rise in costs at the beginning of the year.
Senators rejected a Democratic bill to extend the subsidies for three years and a Republican alternative that would have created new health savings accounts — an unceremonious end to a monthslong effort by Democrats to prevent the COVID-19-era subsidies from expiring on Jan. 1.
Ahead of the votes, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York warned Republicans that if they did not vote to extend the tax credits, “there won’t be another chance to act,” before premiums rise for many people who buy insurance off the ACA marketplaces.
“Let’s avert a disaster,” Schumer said. “The American people are watching.”
Republicans have argued that Affordable Care Act plans are too expensive and need to be overhauled. The health savings accounts in the GOP bill would give money directly to consumers instead of to insurance companies, an idea that has been echoed by President Donald Trump. But Democrats immediately rejected the plan, saying that the accounts wouldn’t be enough to cover costs for most consumers.
Some Republicans have pushed their colleagues to extend the credits, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who said they should vote for a short-term extension so they can find agreement on the issue next year. “It’s too complicated and too difficult to get done in the limited time that we have left,” Tillis said Wednesday.
But despite the bipartisan desire to continue the credits, Republicans and Democrats have never engaged in meaningful or high-level negotiations on a solution, even after a small group of centrist Democrats struck a deal with Republicans last month to end the 43-day government shutdown in exchange for a vote on extending the ACA subsidies. Most Democratic lawmakers opposed the move as many Republicans made clear that they wanted the tax credits to expire.
The deal raised hopes for bipartisan compromise on health care. But that quickly faded with a lack of any real bipartisan talks.
The dueling Senate votes are the latest political messaging exercise in a Congress that has operated almost entirely on partisan terms, as Republicans pushed through a massive tax and spending cuts bill this summer using budget maneuvers that eliminated the need for Democratic votes. They also tweaked Senate rules to push past a Democratic blockade of all of Trump’s nominees.
An intractable issue
The votes were also the latest failed salvo in the debate over the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature law that Democrats passed along party lines in 2010 to expand access to insurance coverage.
Republicans have tried unsuccessfully since then to repeal or overhaul the law, arguing that health care is still too expensive. But they have struggled to find an alternative. In the meantime, Democrats have made the policy a central political issue in several elections, betting that the millions of people who buy health care on the government marketplaces want to keep their coverage.
“When people’s monthly payments spike next year, they’ll know it was Republicans that made it happen,” Schumer said in November, while making clear that Democrats would not seek compromise.
Even if they view it as a political win, the failed votes are a loss for Democrats who demanded an extension of the benefits as they forced a government shutdown for six weeks in October and November — and for the millions of people facing premium increases on Jan. 1.
Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said the group tried to negotiate with Republicans after the shutdown ended. But, he said, the talks became unproductive when Republicans demanded language adding new limits for abortion coverage that were a “red line” for Democrats. He said Republicans were going to “own these increases.”
A plethora of plans, but little agreement
Republicans have used the looming expiration of the subsidies to renew their longstanding criticisms of the ACA, also called Obamacare, and to try, once more, to agree on what should be done.
Thune announced earlier this week that the GOP conference had decided to vote on the bill led by Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the chairman of the Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee, and Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, even as several Republican senators proposed alternate ideas.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has promised a vote next week. Republicans weighed different options in a conference meeting on Wednesday, with no apparent consensus.
Republican moderates in the House who could have competitive reelection bids next year are pushing Johnson to find a way to extend the subsidies. But more conservative members want to see the law overhauled.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., has pushed for a temporary extension, which he said could be an opening to take further steps on health care.
If they fail to act and health care costs go up, the approval rating for Congress “will get even lower,” Kiley said.
___
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.
In the days and weeks after the 2020 election, partisans across the country used lies and deceit to try to defraud the American people and steal the White House.
But it’s only old news if you believe that justice and integrity carry an expiration date, wrongdoing is fine with the passage of enough time and the foundational values of our country and its democracy — starting with fair and honest elections — matter only to the extent they help your political side prevail.
It bears repeating: “What we’re talking about here is an attempt to overturn the outcome of a presidential election,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, who heads the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy think tank at New York University. “If people can engage in that kind of conduct without consequence or accountability, then we have to worry about it happening again.”
Which is why punishment and deterrence are so important.
Last week, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously reinstated the criminal case against six Republicans who signed certificates falsely claiming Trump had won the state’s electoral votes. Those charged include Nevada’s GOP chairman, Michael McDonald, and the state’s representative on the Republican National Committee, Jim DeGraffenreid.
The ruling focused on a procedural matter: whether the charges should have been brought in Douglas County, where the fake certificates were signed in the state capital — Carson City — or in Clark County, where they were submitted at a courthouse in Las Vegas. A lower court ruled the charges should have been brought in Douglas County and dismissed the case. The high court reversed the decision, allowing the prosecution on forgery charges to proceed.
As well it should. Let a jury decide.
Of course, the Nevada Six and other phony electors are but small fry. The ringleader and attempted-larcenist-in-chief — Donald “Find Me 11,780 Votes” Trump — escaped liability by winning the 2024 election.
But it was further evidence of his abundant contempt for the rule of law. (Just hours after taking office, Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 defendants — including some who brutalized cops with pepper spray and wooden and metal poles — who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.)
Efforts around the country to prosecute even those low-level schemers, cheaters and 2020 election miscreants have produced mixed results.
In Michigan, a judge threw out the criminal case against 15 phony electors, ruling the government failed to present sufficient evidence that they intended to commit fraud.
In New Mexico and Pennsylvania, fake electors avoided prosecution because their certification came with a caveat. It said the documentation was submitted in the event they were recognized as legitimate electors. The issue was moot once Trump lost his fight to overturn the election, though some in Trump’s orbit hoped the phony certifications would help pressure Pence.
Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, looks askance at many of the cases that prosecutors have brought, suggesting the ballot box — rather than a courtroom — may be the better venue to litigate the matter.
“There’s a fine line between what’s distasteful conduct and what’s criminal conduct,” Muller said. “I don’t have easy answers about which kinds of things should or shouldn’t be prosecuted in a particular moment, except to say if it’s something novel” — like these 2020 cases — “having a pretty iron-clad legal theory is pretty essential if you’re going to be prosecuting people for engaging in this sort of political protest activity.”
Other cases grind on.
Three fake electors are scheduled for a preliminary hearing on forgery charges next month in Wisconsin. Fourteen defendants — including Giuliani and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — face charges in Georgia. In Arizona, the state attorney general must decide this week whether to move forward with a case against 11 people after a judge tossed out an indictment because of how the case was presented to grand jurors.
WASHINGTON — President Trump rocked American politics at the outset of his first campaign when he first labeled his rivals as enemies of the American people. But the rhetoric of his top confidantes has grown more extreme in recent days.
Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, declared over the weekend that “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country” is fueling an historic national schism, “shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general.”
“The only remedy,” Miller said, “is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
It was a maxim from an unelected presidential advisor who is already unleashing the federal government in unprecedented ways, overseeing the federalization of police forces and a sweeping deportation campaign challenging basic tenets of civil liberty.
Miller’s rhetoric comes amid a federal crackdown on Portland, Ore., where he says the president has unchecked authority to protect federal lives and property — and as another controversial Trump advisor harnesses an ongoing government shutdown as pretext for the mass firing of federal workers.
Russ Vought, the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, plays the grim reaper in an AI video shared by the president, featuring him roving Washington for bureaucrats to cut from the deep state during the shutdown.
His goal, Trump has said, is to specifically target Democrats.
As of Monday afternoon, it was unclear exactly how many federal workers or what federal agencies would be targeted.
“We don’t want to see people laid off, but unfortunately, if this shutdown continues layoffs are going to be an unfortunate consequence of that,” White House press secretary Karoline Levitt said during a news briefing.
‘A nation of Constitutional law’
Karin Immergut, a federal judge appointed by Trump, said this weekend that the administration’s justification for deploying California National Guard troops in Portland was “simply untethered to the facts.”
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” Immergut wrote, chiding the Trump administration for attempting to circumvent a prior order from her against a federal deployment to the city.
“This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition,” she added: “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”
The administration is expected to appeal the judge’s decision, Leavitt said, while calling the judge’s ruling “untethered in reality and in the law.”
“We’re very confident in the president’s legal authority to do this, and we are very confident we will win on the merits of the law,” Leavitt said.
If the courts were to side with the administration, Leavitt said local leaders — most of whom are Democrats — should not be concerned about the possibility of long-term plans to have their cities occupied by the military.
“Why should they be concerned about the federal government offering help to make their cities a safer place?” Leavitt said. “They should be concerned about the fact that people in their cities right now are being gunned down every single night and the president, all he is trying to do, is fix it.”
Moments later, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he does not believe it is necessary yet, he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act “if courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
“Sure, I’d do that,” Trump said. “We have to make sure that our cities are safe.”
The Insurrection Act gives the president sweeping emergency power to deploy military forces within the United States if the president deems it is needed to quell civil unrest. The last time this occurred was in 1992, when California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to send federal troops to help stop the Los Angeles riots that occurred after police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.
Subsequent posts from Miller on social media over the weekend escalated the stakes to existential heights, accusing Democrats of allying themselves with “domestic terrorists” seeking to overturn the will of the people reflected in Trump’s election win last year.
On Monday, in an interview with CNN, Miller suggested that the administration would continue working to sidestep Immergut’s orders.
“The administration will abide by the ruling insofar as it affects the covered parties,” he said, “but there are also many options the president has to deploy federal resources under the U.S. military to Portland.”
Other Republicans have used similar rhetoric since the slaying of Charlie Kirk, a conservative youth activist, in Utah last month.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) wrote that posts from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office have reached “the threshold of domestic terrorism,” after the Democratic governor referred to Miller on social media as a fascist. And Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said Monday that Democrats demanding an extension of healthcare benefits as a condition for reopening the government were equivalent to terrorists.
“I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Fine told Newsmax, “and what we’re learned in whether it’s dealing with Muslim terrorists or Democrats, you’ve gotta stand and you’ve gotta do the right thing.”
Investigating donor networks
Republicans’ keenness to label Democrats as terrorists comes two weeks after Trump signed an executive order declaring a left-wing antifascist movement, known as antifa, as a “domestic terrorist organization” — a designation that does not exist under U.S. law.
The order, which opened a new front in Trump’s battle against his political foes, also threatened to investigate and prosecute individuals who funded “any and all illegal operations — especially those involving terrorist actions — conducted by antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of antifa.”
Leavitt told reporters Monday the administration is “aggressively” looking into who is financially backing these operations.
Trump has floated the possibility of going after people such as George Soros, a billionaire who has supported many left-leaning causes around the world.
“If you look at Soros, he is at the top of everything,” Trump said during an Oval Office appearance last month.
The White House has not yet made public any details about a formal investigation into a donors, but Leavitt said the administration’s efforts are under way.
“We will continue to get to the bottom of who is funding these organizations and this organized anarchy against our country and our government,” Leavitt said. “We are committed to uncovering it.”
As the Senate meets Friday for another vote to reopen the federal government, Democrats are refusing to yield without a deal from President Donald Trump — likely extending the government shutdown into next week.Democrats say not even the threat of mass firings and canceled federal projects will force them to accept the GOP short-term funding proposal without major policy concessions on health care.A top White House official warned Thursday that the number of federal workers who could be fired because of the shutdown is “likely going to be in the thousands.” Trump hasn’t made public his exact targets yet, though he met with White House budget chief Russ Vought on Thursday to discuss the plan.The White House already has a list – put together by Vought’s Office of Management and Budget in coordination with federal agencies – of the agencies they are targeting with the firings, according to two White House officials. While details are still being sorted, according to the officials, announcements could come in the coming days on which are on the chopping block for not aligning with the president’s priorities.Speaking on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries skewered the president and his team for what he called their “retribution effort” against Democrats, but made clear his party would not relent. He added that neither he nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have received a call from Trump or GOP leaders for negotiations since the group met at the White House Monday.“Democrats are in this fight until we win this fight,” Jeffries said when asked if Democrats could accept a deal without an extension of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies that his party has been seeking. “This is the first week of the shutdown but we’ve had months of chaos and cruelty unleashed on the American people.”With the two parties still bitterly divided, the deadlocked Senate is expected to leave town for the weekend, which means neither chamber will vote again until at least Monday. With no ongoing talks between the two parties, many Senate Republicans plan to decamp to Sea Island, Georgia, this weekend for a major weekend fundraiser. The National Republican Senatorial Committee informed attendees in an email this week that the event was non-refundable and contracted years in advance — long before the current organization’s leadership, according to two people familiar with the matter.Democrats, too, have a scheduled fundraiser later this month. That event in Napa, California, is set to take place on Oct. 13. A spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said they did not have information about whether the event was still on, though one of the featured attendees, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, has already informed organizers that she won’t be attending if there is a shutdown, according to a person familiar with the planning.Inside the Capitol, lawmakers and their staff are bracing for a lapse that could last into mid-October, with fears rising that government workers will miss a paycheck next week.GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota described Friday’s vote as “crucial,” warning that “things go south real quick” if the government isn’t reopened before the weekend.Rounds is one of the few Republicans publicly anxious about the potential harms of an extended shutdown on the federal workforce, and has worked behind the scenes with some Democrats to find a way out of it. The end needs to come as quickly as possible, he warned, suggesting that Democrats could soon see the White House take an ax to programs that they heavily favor if the shutdown doesn’t end.“I think it’s gonna bite them harder than it does us,” Rounds told reporters Thursday. “There’s a whole lot of things out there that the Democrats care about that are not consistent with the president’s policies, and those are the first things at risk.”Senate Majority Leader John Thune remained firm Thursday when asked about how the shutdown would end. He said Democrats would have a fourth chance on Friday to vote to open the government: “If that fails, then they can have the weekend to think about it, we’ll come back, we’ll vote again on Monday.”“My Democrat colleagues are facing pressure from members of their far-left base, but they’re playing a losing game here,” he added.
WASHINGTON —
As the Senate meets Friday for another vote to reopen the federal government, Democrats are refusing to yield without a deal from President Donald Trump — likely extending the government shutdown into next week.
Democrats say not even the threat of mass firings and canceled federal projects will force them to accept the GOP short-term funding proposal without major policy concessions on health care.
A top White House official warned Thursday that the number of federal workers who could be fired because of the shutdown is “likely going to be in the thousands.” Trump hasn’t made public his exact targets yet, though he met with White House budget chief Russ Vought on Thursday to discuss the plan.
The White House already has a list – put together by Vought’s Office of Management and Budget in coordination with federal agencies – of the agencies they are targeting with the firings, according to two White House officials. While details are still being sorted, according to the officials, announcements could come in the coming days on which are on the chopping block for not aligning with the president’s priorities.
Speaking on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries skewered the president and his team for what he called their “retribution effort” against Democrats, but made clear his party would not relent. He added that neither he nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have received a call from Trump or GOP leaders for negotiations since the group met at the White House Monday.
“Democrats are in this fight until we win this fight,” Jeffries said when asked if Democrats could accept a deal without an extension of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies that his party has been seeking. “This is the first week of the shutdown but we’ve had months of chaos and cruelty unleashed on the American people.”
With the two parties still bitterly divided, the deadlocked Senate is expected to leave town for the weekend, which means neither chamber will vote again until at least Monday. With no ongoing talks between the two parties, many Senate Republicans plan to decamp to Sea Island, Georgia, this weekend for a major weekend fundraiser. The National Republican Senatorial Committee informed attendees in an email this week that the event was non-refundable and contracted years in advance — long before the current organization’s leadership, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Democrats, too, have a scheduled fundraiser later this month. That event in Napa, California, is set to take place on Oct. 13. A spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said they did not have information about whether the event was still on, though one of the featured attendees, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, has already informed organizers that she won’t be attending if there is a shutdown, according to a person familiar with the planning.
Inside the Capitol, lawmakers and their staff are bracing for a lapse that could last into mid-October, with fears rising that government workers will miss a paycheck next week.
GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota described Friday’s vote as “crucial,” warning that “things go south real quick” if the government isn’t reopened before the weekend.
Rounds is one of the few Republicans publicly anxious about the potential harms of an extended shutdown on the federal workforce, and has worked behind the scenes with some Democrats to find a way out of it. The end needs to come as quickly as possible, he warned, suggesting that Democrats could soon see the White House take an ax to programs that they heavily favor if the shutdown doesn’t end.
“I think it’s gonna bite them harder than it does us,” Rounds told reporters Thursday. “There’s a whole lot of things out there that the Democrats care about that are not consistent with the president’s policies, and those are the first things at risk.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune remained firm Thursday when asked about how the shutdown would end. He said Democrats would have a fourth chance on Friday to vote to open the government: “If that fails, then they can have the weekend to think about it, we’ll come back, we’ll vote again on Monday.”
“My Democrat colleagues are facing pressure from members of their far-left base, but they’re playing a losing game here,” he added.
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s decision to appoint an “emergency police commissioner” in Washington is just the latest attempt to change an increasingly uncomfortable subject for the White House. Last month President Trump told the American people he was never briefed on the files regarding Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2019 was charged with sex trafficking minors. We now know that Bondi told the president in May that his name appeared multiple times in those files, which traced Epstein’s operation back to the mid-1990s.
So — either you believe a city experiencing a 30-year low in crime is suddenly in need of an emergency police commissioner or you agree with Joe Rogan’s assessment: This administration is gaslighting the public regarding those files.
Now there will be pundits who will try to say Republicans are too focused on kitchen table issues to care about the Epstein controversy.
If only that were true.
According to the Consumer Price Index, goods cost more today than they did a month ago. And prices are higher than they were a year ago. It would be wonderful if Congress were in session to address kitchen table issues like grocery prices. However, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) ended the House session early to avoid a vote on the release of the Epstein files — a vote that could have displeased Trump. Those are the lengths some in the MAGA movement are willing to go to prevent the public from knowing the truth about Epstein’s clients. That is the backdrop for what is currently happening in the streets of Washington. It’s not inspired by a rise in crime, but by a fear of transparency.
It’s important to look at Bondi’s “emergency police commissioner” decision with clear, discerning eyes because the administration is purposefully conflating the issues of crime and homelessness in order to win back support from Trump’s base. While it is true that the district has made huge progress against crime, and the number of unhoused residents is far lower than a decade ago even though homeless populations nationwide have soared, the rise of conspicuous encampments around Washington is one of the reasons Virginia was almost able to lure away the city’s NBA and NHL teams. However, the nation’s capital was able to keep those sports franchises because of the leadership of Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Instead of taking over the city’s police force, perhaps Bondi should ask Bowser for some advice that could be replicated in other cities nationwide. Ask the mayor’s office what resources it might need to continue its progress on homelessness and crime. But again, this really isn’t about what benefits the people, is it? It’s really about what’s in the best interest of one person.
Now there will be pundits who will try to tell you Republicans are too focused on making this country “great” to worry about who is in the Epstein files. I ask you, when has trampling over democracy ever made us great? In Iran, we contributed to the overthrowing of Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1950s, and we continue to be at odds with the nation. In Chile in the early 1970s, we moved against Salvador Allende, and it took 20 years to normalize our relationship again.
Here at home, in 2010, the state of Michigan took over the predominantly Black city of Benton Harbor under the guise of a financial emergency. The City Council was prevented from governing as state officials tried to save the city from a crippling pension deficit and other financial shortages. There was temporary reprieve, but Benton Harbor is still on economic life support. That’s because the issue wasn’t the policies of the local government. It was the lasting effects of losing so much tax revenue to a neighboring suburb due to white flight. The explanation for Benton Harbor’s woes lies in the past, not the present.
The same is true in Washington. The relatively young suburbs of McLean and Great Falls, Va., are two of the richest in the country. When you have the same financial obligations of yesteryear but less tax revenue to operate with, there will be shortfalls. And those gaps manifest themselves in many ways — rundown homes, empty storefronts, a lack of school resources.
Those are legitimate plagues affecting every major city. What Bondi is doing in Washington isn’t a cure for what ails it. And when you consider why she’s doing what she’s doing, you are reminded why people are so sick of politics.
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The author argues that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appointment of an “emergency police commissioner” in Washington D.C. serves as a deliberate distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein files controversy, rather than addressing any legitimate public safety emergency.
The author contends that President Trump misled the American public by claiming he was never briefed on the Epstein files, when Bondi actually informed him in May that his name appeared multiple times in documents tracing Epstein’s operation back to the mid-1990s.
The author emphasizes that Washington D.C. is currently experiencing a 30-year low in crime rates, making the justification for an “emergency police commissioner” appear fabricated and politically motivated rather than based on actual public safety needs.
The author criticizes House Speaker Mike Johnson for ending the legislative session early specifically to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files, suggesting this demonstrates how far the MAGA movement will go to protect Trump from transparency.
The author argues that the administration is purposefully conflating crime and homelessness issues to win back support from Trump’s base, while ignoring the actual progress Washington D.C. has made under Mayor Muriel Bowser’s leadership in reducing both crime and homelessness.
The author draws historical parallels to failed U.S. interventions in Iran and Chile, as well as Michigan’s takeover of Benton Harbor, arguing that federal takeovers of local governance consistently fail and represent an assault on democratic principles rather than effective problem-solving.
Different views on the topic
Trump administration officials justify the federal intervention as part of a broader crime-reduction initiative, with National Guard forces working alongside law enforcement teams to carry out the president’s plan to reduce violent crime in the city[1].
The administration cited legal authority under Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, which grants the president the power to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control during a declared emergency, marking the first time a president has invoked this unprecedented authority[2].
Federal officials defended the directive as necessary for enforcing immigration laws, with the revised order specifically directing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to provide assistance with “locating, apprehending, and detaining aliens unlawfully present in the United States” regardless of local D.C. law and police policies[1].
The administration’s approach focused on nullifying the city’s sanctuary city policies and ensuring that all Metropolitan Police Department leadership obtain federal approval for policy decisions moving forward, framing this as essential for effective federal law enforcement[2].
Following legal challenges, the Justice Department demonstrated flexibility by scaling back the original directive after meeting with D.C. officials, ultimately leaving the local police chief in charge while maintaining federal oversight for immigration-related matters[1].
It’s January 21, 2025, the first full day of the second Trump administration. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, deputized by the president to patrol the border, have killed a migrant family. Video of the incident sparks outrage, sending local protesters swarming to ICE detention centers. Left-wing pro-immigrant groups begin arriving in border states to reinforce the protests, setting off clashes.
In response, the Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona mobilize National Guard units, ordering them to disperse the paramilitaries. But these groups, having been deputized by the president, are recognized under Articles I and II of the Constitution as legal militias. The commander of the New Mexico National Guard refuses orders from the governor, saying that migrants pose the true threat, not patriotic Americans defending their homes. The governor summarily relieves him of command. On his way out the door, the general pledges to “continue to follow the lawful commands of POTUS.”
Last month, at one site in Washington, D.C., and another in Palo Alto, California, the advocacy group Veterans for Responsible Leadership hosted Constitutional Thresholds, a war game “designed to address the potential extra-constitutional actions of a second Trump presidential term.” The events described above were part of their scenario, an extrapolation based on statements from key Trump advisers. The game’s participants, a mix of former government officials, retired military officers, political operatives, and leaders of veterans’ organizations, were divided into a red pro-Trump cell and an anti-Trump blue cell. “As veterans, we are people who can uniquely communicate to the American public how important the Constitution is, because we took an oath to defend it,” Amy McGrath, a former Marine Corps pilot and a Democratic candidate for Senate in Kentucky who was one of the event’s organizers, told participants before it began. “That oath doesn’t go away just because you took off this uniform.”
I would think about this injunction repeatedly over the course of the war game, which I attended in D.C. The organizers were sincere in their concerns about a second Trump administration, and earnest in their desire to prepare for the potential challenges. But I still wondered about certain of their assumptions—about the ways veterans on the left and the right assert moral authority in our society, the ways the organizers’ political opponents might behave, and the ends to which each side might go to preserve their vision of our democracy. Perhaps most of all, I wondered whether any of them had paused to consider how these war games might look to those who do not share their assumptions.
The war game started with some minor confusion. The red and blue cells were decamping to their respective conference rooms, but William Enyart, a former member of Congress and retired major general in the Illinois National Guard, didn’t know where to go. He was assigned to play the role of adjutant general of the New Mexico National Guard. Although his character worked for the Democratic governor, the scenario cast him as sympathetic to the Trump administration. He wasn’t sure whether to head for the red or the blue conference room. He would, as the game progressed, wind up shuttling between the two, dramatizing the divided loyalties that were a theme of the day.
With the players settled into their respective war rooms, the scenario began with a social-media post from the governor of Texas:
For too long, we Texans have paid the price as Democrat governors and a Democrat president failed to protect our borders. The American people voted out a weak president and replaced him with one who will enforce our laws, and who is now delivering justice on behalf of the people of Arizona and New Mexico. We stand with them and President Trump’s plan to end the open-border regime of the past.
Donald Trump, somewhat improbably played by the Never-Trump conservative Bill Kristol, posted his own brief statement of support on social media: “Help is on the way.” In addition to sending National Guard units, the president deputized members of two right-wing groups. Soon, the video of these groups killing the migrant family was introduced into the scenario.
The scenario reached an inflection point for the blue cell when Enyart, as commander of the New Mexico National Guard, refused to disperse the federally deputized militias. Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state playing the role of New Mexico’s governor, pulled Enyart into a separate conference room to confront him. “I took a dual oath, one to the State of New Mexico and one to the Constitution,” Enyart told Boockvar. “I am obligated to follow the Constitution first and foremost. It is my duty to disregard any unconstitutional orders that I’m given. With all due respect, governor, I will obey your directions so long as they’re within the parameters of the Constitution.”
He began debating Articles I and II, and their authorities for use of militias, with Boockvar and a man playing the role of her counsel. They also began to debate which was the larger threat, the crisis at the border or the militias who’d ostensibly arrived to secure it. Boockvar summarily relieved Enyart of his command, and her counsel told him not to communicate with any of his subordinate commanders or key leaders within the New Mexico National Guard if he “wanted to remain on the right side of history.”
Events in the red-cell war room, meanwhile, were moving briskly along. The White House seized on reports of tuberculosis to reinstate Title 42, the COVID-era provision that secured the border. In coordination with the speaker of the House, the president was planning a joint address to Congress that evening in which he’d update the American people on the situation. At that address, the president also planned to pardon those convicted after January 6. There was some internal White House debate as to whether Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, should be present at the Capitol for the mass pardoning. The consensus, however, was that he should instead be flown down to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to galvanize the militias.
The situation at the border was deteriorating rapidly. In the last hour of the war game, the governors of New Mexico and Arizona ordered law enforcement to detain militia members. The Texas governor and Tucker Carlson hosted a mass militia-deputization ceremony next to the border crossing in El Paso. One of the right-wing groups warned that it might escalate; a left-wing veterans group responded by asking the Defense Department to remind veterans and National Guard members of their duty. Then, in the final minutes of the game, a shootout in El Paso left 14 members of a right-wing paramilitary group dead. This seemed to be the final provocation, the crescendo for which the entire scenario had been constructed, delivering the excuse Trump needed to invoke the Insurrection Act. Kristol demurred.
“Trump can be canny when his future is on the line,” Kristol said later. “He’s got a sense that there’s things he could do that would go too far, that would lose him the support he really cares about. He’s a very effective demagogue.” Kristol believed that Trump might ultimately hang back in such a scenario, allowing the governors to carry the burden of securing their states. Given Trump’s history of shifting responsibility for his mistakes onto subordinates, Kristol’s assessment certainly didn’t seem far off.
After the game, the participants gathered to debrief. They were struck by the speed at which events had unfolded. Some believed that the courts would, in reality, have slowed things down, serving as a check on executive power, while others were equally certain a second Trump administration would blow past the judiciary. “In the second term, there will be no grown-ups in the room. No one in that room will even have a moment mentally where they say, ‘This is against the law, Mr. President. We can’t do it,’” said Rick Wilson, a political operative and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, who’d played the White House chief of staff. “They’ll say, ‘This is against the law, Mr. President. How do we do it?’”
Kristol wasn’t so sure. “There’s lots of ways to slow this down,” he said. “Trump can’t replace everyone on January 20.” He suggested that if Trump wins, the Biden administration can spend the months before his inauguration preparing for the challenge, and outside groups can ready legal challenges to the things he’s promising to do.
Participants lamented that the left was too often caught flat-footed by the right, and started exploring ideas about how best to prepare. Some floated the idea of forming “a parallel government” or “government in exile” or “shadow government” focused on countering Trump’s administrative actions. Will Attig, one of the few participants with a background in organized labor, noted that a third of airline pilots are veterans. What if those pilots organized a boycott and decided that they wouldn’t fly into red states? At times, the participants spoke of veterans as a cohesive group, one that the left could corral. Yet veterans are divided politically, just like the rest of Americans—and a majority of veterans supported Trump in the 2020 election. No one seemed to consider that political action designed to appeal to veterans on one end of the political spectrum would inevitably invite a response from veterans on the other side.
Veterans played a leading role in the day’s events. Most of the game’s key organizers were veterans. And although many participants were not, the veterans are the ones who argued most stridently that constitutional norms would do little to stymie Trump, and that veterans should help lead efforts to organize against a second Trump administration. Perhaps that’s because those who have experienced war—particularly the brutal insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan—need less convincing of civilization’s inherent fragility.
Veterans have played a vital role in our civic life. A disproportionate number of veterans held elected office after the Second World War, the last era in which our politics was functional. Their shared experience helped ward off the endemic hyper-partisanship we suffer today. If you’ve fought a war together, you’re less likely to fight a war among yourselves.
The idea that veterans should play a central role in resisting any constitutional overreach from Trump seemed to rely on the argument that the oath we swore to “support and defend the Constitution” extends to civilian life. But this neglects a far less frequently referenced, but equally essential, portion of the oath of office, which concludes with a commitment to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.” When you take off your uniform, the term of your oath ends. When veterans assume an active role in civic life, they do so as civilians, not as extrajudicial defenders of the Constitution.
The far-right has long urged veterans to remember their oaths. Does the left want to travel further down that same road? Imagine if the Heritage Foundation, or any other right-wing advocacy group, hosted a set of veteran-led war games based around countering the sort of extra-constitutional violations that some conservatives already allege that President Joe Biden is indulging: Biden has stolen the election through mail-in ballots; Biden has abandoned his obligation to seal the border. It’s not hard to anticipate the denunciations that would flood in from the left. In such exercises, the scenarios reveal as much about the participants and how they imagine their adversaries as they reveal about those adversaries themselves.
The war game I witnessed built to the question of whether the president would invoke the Insurrection Act. The organizers approached the federalization of the National Guard as an unconscionable act that would grant President Trump dangerous powers. A previous war game, organized by many of the same participants and turned into the documentary War Game, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, also featured the invocation of the Insurrection Act as the scenario’s climax. In the documentary, the scenario was built around a repeat of January 6, and centered on the question of whether the Democratic president would evoke the Insurrection Act to contain protesters at the Capitol, deploying the military to contain the protests with force. He did not.
And yet, many presidents have made a different choice. Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, and Reagan all invoked the Insurrection Act at least once during their administrations. Kennedy and Johnson each invoked it three times, Kennedy twice to federalize the Alabama National Guard when the governor refused to integrate schools. The Insurrection Act was last invoked 32 years ago, in 1992, by President George H. W. Bush during the Los Angeles riots. Whether you identify as a Democrat or a Republican, a president of your own party has invoked the act within living memory of many of your fellow citizens. The problem, it seems, is not invoking the act, but the fact that Trump might be the one who has the power to invoke it. Follow that logic. Trump would reclaim that power only if he wins the election. And if he wins the election, it will be because enough Americans choose to give him their vote.
This is where the logic of war games begins to break down in a democracy. Unless you believe a constitution that can deliver a Trump presidency is not worth upholding, you must accept a president’s legal use of his executive authority. Is it possible that war games in American politics are, at least in this moment, less about countering illegal actions and more about planning to undermine opposing administrations? If war games like the one I watched become a political norm, will that be healthy for our democracy?
During the debrief, Kristofer Goldsmith touched on the role of the courts. Goldsmith is an Iraq War veteran who now works for an organization called Task Force Butler, focused on countering right-wing extremist groups. “I know gameplay for this type of scenario can feel very fast,” he said. “I just want to emphasize that this is the way things can develop on the ground, and there will not be time for the courts to intervene. The distance between deputizing an extremist organization and 14 people getting killed on the ground is minutes, and there’s no way to actually do a filing or to get a response from a judge.”
I walked away from the war game wondering whether the participants were cognizant of how their actions might be perceived not only by those on the right, but also by those who don’t entirely share their views. If some on the left don’t believe that courts or systemic checks will be able to halt the extra-constitutional actions of a second Trump administration—or even its legal ones—does it follow that the opposition should abandon constitutional norms and establish “shadow governments” and resistance cells to check executive authority? Many of the war game’s participants seemed to think so.
If the divide between the left and the right in America has become so wide that neither can conceive of the other wielding power legitimately, then perhaps the war game I observed wasn’t a game at all.
As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back.
In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office. The second is to structure it as a comparison between his four years and Trump’s four years as president. The third is to offer it as a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House.
The referendum route already looks like a dead end for Biden. The comparison path remains difficult terrain for him, given that voters now express more satisfaction with Trump’s performance as president than they ever did while he was in office. The third option probably offers Biden the best chance to recover from his consistent deficit to Trump in polls.
Political scientists agree: Every presidential reelection campaign combines elements of a backward-looking referendum on the incumbent and a forward-looking choice between the incumbent and the challenger.
But on balance, the referendum element of presidential reelection campaigns has appeared to influence the outcome the most. Since modern polling began, the presidents whose approval ratings stood well above 50 percent in Gallup surveys through the election year (including Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) all won a second term comfortably. Conversely, the presidents whose approval ratings fell well below 50 percent in election-year Gallup polls all lost their reelection bids: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Trump.
That history isn’t encouraging for Biden. His approval rating in a wide array of national polls has been stuck at about 40 percent or less. What’s more, most voters are returning intensely negative verdicts on specific elements of Biden’s record. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last weekend, just 20 percent of Americans said Biden’s policies had helped them personally; more than twice as many said his policies had hurt them. In the lastest Fox News poll, about three-fifths of Americans said Biden had mostly failed at helping working-class Americans, handling the economy, and improving America’s image around the world, while about seven in 10 said he had failed at managing security at the border.
In the past, such withering judgments almost certainly would have ensured defeat for an incumbent president, and if Biden loses in November, analysts may conclude that he simply failed a referendum on his performance.
But Democrats, and even some Republicans, see more opportunity for Biden than previous presidents to surmount negative grades about his tenure.
One reason is that in an era when distrust of political leaders and institutions is so endemic, officeholders are winning reelection with approval ratings much lower than in earlier generations, pollsters in both parties told me. The other reason is that the intense passions provoked by Trump may make this year less of a referendum and more of a choice than is typical in reelection campaigns.
The choice, though, has unusual dimensions that complicate Biden’s situation, including an especially concrete element of comparison: Trump was president so recently that most voters still have strong impressions about his performance. For Biden, comparing his four years to Trump’s represents the second broad way to frame the election. But at this point, that doesn’t look like a winning hand for the incumbent either.
One of the scariest trends for Democrats is that retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance are rising, perhaps in reaction to voter discontent over Biden’s record. Nearly half of voters in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal national poll said they now approve of Trump’s performance as president—10 percentage points more than those who said the same about Biden’s current performance.
Trump has made clear that he wants voters to view the contest mostly as a comparison between his time in office and Biden’s. “We had everything going so beautifully,” Trump declared in his victory speech after the Super Tuesday primaries. “Joe Biden, if he would have just left everything alone, he could have gone to the beach. He would have had a tremendous success at the border and elsewhere.”
Facing these dismal reviews in polls of his job performance, and the tendency among many voters to view Trump’s record more favorably than his, Biden naturally will be tempted in tonight’s State of the Union to emphasize all that he has accomplished. And he has many positive trends that he can highlight.
Yet every Democratic strategist I spoke with in recent days agreed that Biden would be mistaken to spend too much time trying to burnish perceptions of his record. “The challenge for Biden is his inclination to want credit and claim credit and talk about the greatest economy in 50 years or whatever,” David Axelrod, who served as the top political adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, told me. “You have to resist that.”
The veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg reacts as if he hears nails on a chalkboard whenever Biden stresses positive trends in the economy. That emphasis, he argues, is “missing how angry voters are,” particularly over the cumulative increase in prices for essentials such as groceries and rent since Biden took office. Greenberg told me, “That defines the economy for people, and they are angry at the huge inequality, the big monopolies that are profiteering. They are also angry about what’s happening with crime, and they are angry now with the border.” To tout other accomplishments against that backdrop, Greenberg said, makes Biden look out of touch.
Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, says that although Biden may want to accentuate the positive, it is more important for him to acknowledge the frustration that so many Americans feel about their “lived experience with inflation and immigration.” “You can’t just race ahead with your policy prescriptions without people feeling that you actually get it and telling them that they are right to feel the way they do,” he told me.
Gaspard, Axelrod, and Greenberg each said they believed that Biden, rather than looking back, must shift the economic argument as much as possible toward what he and Trump would do if returned to power. That’s Biden’s third broad option for framing the race. “I don’t think you want to argue about whether you are better off in those [Trump] years or these years,” Axelrod told me. “You want to argue about who will help you be better off in the future, and what you have to do to make people better off in the future.”
That future-oriented frame, all three said, will allow Biden to highlight more effectively his legislative achievements not as proof of how much he has accomplished for Americans but as evidence that he’s committed in a second term to fighting for average families against powerful interests.
Biden has already been portraying himself in that populist mode, with his regulatory moves against “junk fees” and surprise medical bills, and the ongoing negotiations by Medicare with big pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for seniors. “President Biden took on drug companies to get a better deal for the American people, and he won,” Neera Tanden, the chief White House domestic policy adviser told reporters yesterday, in a preview of what will likely be a common refrain through the campaign.
Greenberg believes that the president needs to drastically amplify the volume on this argument: He says that Democratic base voters expressing discontent over Biden are eager to hear him take on “the top one percent, the big companies, the monopolies that have price gouged, [made] huge profits at your expense, didn’t raise your wages, didn’t cut prices.” Greenberg, like many other Democrats, also thinks Biden’s best chance to narrow Trump’s advantage on the economy is to portray him as most concerned about serving the same powerful interests that voters are angry about.
Yet the viewpoint of many, Black and Latino voters included, that they were better off under Trump could blunt the impact of those Democratic arguments. Many voters may not mind that Trump’s presidency delivered the greatest rewards to the affluent and corporations if they feel that they also benefited more from his tenure than they have under Biden. With inflation still weighing so heavily on voters living paycheck to paycheck, “they blame [Biden] for the problem in the first place, and they don’t think his solutions help the situation,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump, told me.
Democrats view the rising retrospective ratings for Trump’s presidency as a sign that many voters are forgetting what they didn’t like about it at the time, whether his belligerent tweets or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With those memories fading, fewer voters in polls are expressing alarm about the dangers a reelected Trump could pose to democracy and the rule of law as Democrats hoped or expected.
“This is one of the existential narratives of the campaign: How do we make people really fear his second term?” Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, told me. “People aren’t focused. They are still in the denial phase. They think, Oh, he’s just a showman.”
A survey of swing voters released earlier this week by Save My Country Action Fund, a group that Dach co-founded, quantified that challenge. The survey found that less than one-third of swing voters in key states had heard much about Trump’s most inflammatory recent statements, such as his declaration that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and his pledge to pardon some of the January 6 rioters. Extreme comments like those, Dach argues, provide Democrats with an opportunity to refresh voters’ concerns that a second Trump term will bring chaos, division, and even violence.
“He has created an extraordinary body of evidence that he will be more extreme and more dangerous in a second term than he was in the first, and he keeps refreshing the body of evidence every day,” Geoff Garin, who conducted the poll, told me.
Abortion may offer Biden similar opportunities. In the new CBS/YouGov poll, just one-third of voters said Trump deserved blame for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rescinding the nationwide right to abortion, even though he’s claimed credit for appointing the three justices who tipped the balance. If Biden and his allies can increase the share who blame Trump, they will likely make voters more concerned that a reelected Trump would seek to ban abortion nationwide. Climate could serve the same function for young people: A survey of battleground states released yesterday by the advocacy group Climate Power found that “when people are reminded about Trump’s [climate] record, they become more concerned about what he will do” if reelected, Christina Polizzi, the group’s deputy managing director for communications, told me.
Though a race focused more on the future than the past might improve Biden’s prospects, it wouldn’t offer him guarantees. Voters’ judgments about what the two men will do are influenced by their assessments of what they have done; significantly more voters in the CBS/YouGov poll, for instance, said that Trump’s policies going forward were more likely than Biden’s to improve both inflation and border security. And a forward-looking race also forces voters to consider which man they believe is physically more capable of handling the job for the next four years.
In the 2022 election, Democrats won an unprecedented number of voters with negative views of Biden’s performance and the economy because those voters considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. That dynamic may work for Biden again—but only to a point: There’s a limit to how many voters disappointed in an incumbent president will vote for him anyway because they consider the alternative unacceptable. If Biden, starting tonight, can’t generate at least some additional hope about what his own second term would bring, fear about a second Trump term may not be enough to save him.
What was the worst moment for the American economy in the past half century? You might think it was the last wheezing months of the 1970s, when oil prices more than doubled, inflation reached double digits, and the U.S. sank into its second recession of the decade. Or the 2008 financial collapse and Great Recession. Or perhaps it was when COVID hit and millions of people abruptly lost their job. All good guesses—and all wrong, if surveys of the American public are to be believed. According to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the most widely cited measure of consumer sentiment, that moment was actually June 2022.
Inflation hit 9 percent that month, and no one knew if it would go higher still. A recession seemed imminent. Objectively, it’s hard to claim that the economy was in worse shape that month than it had been at those other cataclysmic times. But substantial pessimism was nonetheless explicable.
Over the next 18 months, however, the economy improved rapidly, and in nearly every way: Inflation plummeted to near its pre-pandemic level, unemployment reached historic lows, GDP boomed, and wages rose. The turnaround, by most standard economic measures, was unprecedented. Yet the American people continued to give the economy the kind of approval ratings traditionally reserved for used-car salesmen. Last June, the White House launched a campaign to celebrate “Bidenomics”—the administration’s strong job-creation record and big investments in manufacturing and clean energy. The effort flopped so badly that, within months, Democrats were begging the president to abandon it altogether.
More recently, consumer sentiment has improved. After falling for months, it suddenly rebounded in December and January, posting its largest two-month gain in more than 30 years—even though the economy itself barely changed at all. Yet as of this writing, sentiment remains low by historical standards—nothing like the sunny outlook that prevailed before the pandemic.
What’s going on? The question involves the psychology of money—and of politics. Its answer will shape the outcome of the presidential election in November.
The toll of inflation on the American psyche is undoubtedly part of the story. That people hate high inflation is not a novel observation: The Federal Reserve has long been obsessed with preventing another ’70s-style inflationary spiral; its patron saint is Paul Volcker, the former Fed chair who famously broke that spiral by jacking up interest rates, which plunged the economy into a recession. But although experts and political leaders know that inflation matters, the way they understand the phenomenon is very different from how ordinary people experience it—and that alone may explain why sentiment stayed low for so long, and has only now begun to rise.
When economists talk about inflation, they are often referring to an index of prices meant to represent the goods and services a typical household buys in a year. Each item in the index is weighted by how much is spent on it annually. So, for instance, because the average household spends about a third of its income on housing, the price of housing (an amalgam of rents and home prices) determines a third of the inflation rate. But the goods that people spend the most money on tend to be quite different from those that they pay the most attention to. Consumers are reminded of the price of food every time they visit a supermarket or restaurant, and the price of gas is plastered in giant numbers on every street corner. Also, the purchase of these items can’t be postponed. Things like a new couch or flatscreen TV, in contrast, are purchased so rarely that many people don’t even remember how much they paid for one, let alone how much they cost today.
The irony is that consumers spend a lot more, on average, on expensive, big-ticket items than they do on groceries or takeout, which means the prices we pay the most attention to don’t contribute very much to overall inflation numbers. (Less than a tenth of the average consumer’s budget is spent at the supermarket.) Some measures of inflation—“core” and “supercore” inflation among them—exclude food and energy prices altogether. That is reasonable if you’re a Fed official focused on how to set interest rates, because energy and food prices are often extremely sensitive to temporary fluctuations (caused by, say, a drought that hurts grain harvests or an OPEC oil-supply cut). But in practice, these measures overlook the prices that matter most to consumers.
This dynamic alone goes a long way toward explaining the gap between “the economy” and Americans’ perception of it. Even as core inflation fell below 3 percent over the course of 2023, food prices increased by about 6 percent, twice as fast as they had grown over the previous 20 years. “I think that explains a huge part of the disconnect,” Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, told me. “You won’t convince any consumer that inflation is under control when food prices are rising that fast.”
Consumers say as much when you ask them. In a recent poll commissioned by The Atlantic, respondents were asked what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The price of groceries led the list, and 60 percent of respondents placed it among their top three—more, even, than the share that chose “inflation.” This isn’t exactly a new development. In 2002, Donovan told me, Italian consumers were convinced that prices were soaring by nearly 20 percent even though actual inflation was a stable 2 percent. It turned out that people were basing their estimates on the cost of a cup of espresso, which had abruptly risen as coffee makers rounded their prices up after the introduction of the euro.
What’s more, most people don’t care about the inflation rate so much as they care about prices themselves. If inflation runs at 10 percent for a year, and then suddenly shrinks to 2 percent, the damage of the past year has not been undone. Prices are still dramatically higher than they were. Overall, prices are nearly 20 percent higher now than they were before the pandemic (grocery prices are 25 percent higher). When asked in a survey last fall what improvement in the economy they would most like to see, 64 percent of respondents said “lower prices on goods, services, and gas.”
What about wages? Even adjusted for inflation, they have been rising since June 2022, and recently surpassed their pre-pandemic levels, meaning that the typical American’s paycheck goes further than it did prior to the inflation spike. But wages haven’t increased faster than food prices. And most people think about wage and price increases very differently. A raise tends to feel like something we’ve earned, Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan, told me. Then we go to the grocery store, and “it feels like those just rewards are being unfairly taken away.”
If inflation is in fact the main reason the American people have been so down on the economy—and its future—then the story is likely to have a happy ending, and soon. My great-grandmother loved to reminisce about the days when a can of Coke cost a nickel. She didn’t, however, believe that the country was on the verge of economic calamity because she now had to spend a dollar or more for the same beverage. Just as surely as people despise price increases, we also get used to them in the end. A recent analysis by Ryan Cummings and Neale Mahoney, two Stanford economists and former policy advisers in the Biden administration, found that it takes 18 to 24 months for lower inflation to fully show up in consumer sentiment. “People eventually adjust,” Mahoney told me. “They just don’t adjust at the rate that statistical agencies produce inflation data.”
Mahoney and Cummings posted their study on December 4, 2023—18 months after inflation peaked in June 2022. As if on cue, consumer sentiment began surging that month. (Perhaps helping matters, food inflation had finally fallen below 3 percent in November 2023.)
There is another story you can tell about consumer sentiment today, however, one that has less to do with what’s happening in grocery stores and more to do with the peculiarities of tribal identity.
It’s well established that partisans on both sides become more negative about the economy when the other party controls the presidency, but this phenomenon is not symmetrical: In a November analysis, Mahoney and Cummings found that when a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans’ economic outlook declines by more than twice as much as Democrats’ does when the situation is reversed. Consumer-sentiment data from the polling firm Civiqs and the Pew Research Center show that Republicans’ view of the economy has barely budged since hitting an all-time low in the summer of 2022.
Meanwhile, although sentiment among Democrats has recovered to nearly where it stood before inflation began to rise in 2021, it remains well below its level at the end of the Obama administration. It may never return to its previous heights. Over the past decade, the belief that the economy is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful has become central to progressive self-identity. Among Democrats ages 18 to 34, who tend to be more progressive than older Democrats, positive views of capitalism fell from 56 to 40 percent between 2010 and 2019, according to Gallup. Dim views of the broader economic system may be limiting how positively some Democrats feel about the economy, even when one of their own occupies the Oval Office. According to a CNN poll in late January, 63 percent of Democrats ages 45 and older believed that the economy was on the upswing—but only 35 percent of younger Democrats believed the same. To fully embrace the economy’s strength would be to sacrifice part of the modern progressive’s ideological sense of self.
The media may be contributing to economic gloom for people of every political stripe. According to Mahoney, one possible explanation for Republicans’ disproportionate economic negativity when a Democrat is in office is the fact that the news sources many Republicans consume—namely, right-wing media like Fox News—tend to be more brazenly partisan than the sources Democrats consume, which tend to be a balance of mainstream and partisan media. But mainstream media have also gotten more negative about the economy in recent years, regardless of who’s held the presidency. According to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution, from 1988 to 2016, the “sentiment” of economic-news coverage in mainstream newspapers tracked closely with measures such as inflation, employment, and the stock market. Then, during Donald Trump’s presidency, coverage became more negative than the economic fundamentals would have predicted. After Joe Biden took office, the gap widened. Journalists have long focused more on surfacing problems than on highlighting successes—bringing problems to light is an essential part of the job—but the more recent shift could be explained by the same economic pessimism afflicting many young liberals (many newspaper journalists, after all, are liberals themselves). In other words, the media’s negativity could be both a reflection and a source of today’s economic pessimism.
What happens to consumer sentiment in the coming months will depend on how much it is still being dragged down by frustration with higher prices, which will likely dissipate, as opposed to how much it is being limited by a combination of Republican partisanship and Democratic pessimism, which are less likely to change.
Will the place that it finally settles in come November matter to the election? How people say they are feeling about the economy in an election year—alongside more direct measures of economic health, such as GDP growth and disposable income—has in the past been a good predictor of whom voters choose as president; a healthy economy and good sentiment strongly favor the incumbent. Despite all the abnormalities of 2020—a pandemic, national protests, a uniquely polarizing president—economic models that factored in both economic fundamentals and sentiment predicted the result and margin of that year’s presidential election quite accurately (and much more so than polling), according to an analysis by the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck.
It is of course possible that consumer sentiment is becoming a more performative metric than it used to be—a statement about who you are rather than how you really feel—and perhaps less reliable as a result. Still, the story that voters have in their heads about the economy clearly matters. If that story were influenced solely by the prices at the pump and the grocery store or the number of well-paying jobs, then—absent another crisis—we could expect the mood to be buoyant this fall, significantly helping Biden’s prospects for reelection. But the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by everything from the news we read to the political messages we hear to the identities we adopt. And, for better or worse, those stories have yet to be fully written.
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Updated at 4:40 p.m. ET on January 16, 2024
Even before the caucus began, Matt Wells was working the room. The 43-year-old wore an autographed Ron DeSantis trucker hat as he strolled up and down the aisles of the Washington High School auditorium in rural southeast Iowa, greeting neighbors and passing out DeSantis flyers. When it was time for three-minute speeches, Wells spoke from the podium without notes, his voice quivering with emotion. DeSantis “always backs up his words with action,” he told the crowd. “He will be a president we can be proud of.”
Minutes later, Wells’s hopes were dashed. DeSantis lost to Donald Trump in Wells’s precinct by five votes. The former president went on to win the Iowa caucus by nearly30 points statewide, carrying 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties and beating his own 2016 margin of support by more than 25 points.
This wasn’t exactly a surprise. Trump had held a similar lead in opinion polls beforehand, and the only question was whether that margin would hold up if the snowdrifts and subzero temperatures kept caucus-goers frozen in their homes. Turnout was low, but by the end of the evening, that uncertainty was answered definitively: Trump is still the guy. But in second place, DeSantis led former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley by a mere two points, denying both a clear claim to the title of “Obvious Viable Trump Alternative.”
By clinging to second—despite polling in the days before the caucus forecasting that he could be pushed into third—DeSantis has lived to fight another day. Barely. “This is going to be a long battle ahead, but that is what this campaign is built for,” a campaign official told Fox News last night, trying to sound resolute if not exactly optimistic. “No shot,” an Iowa GOP strategist texted me at midnight.
DeSantis is being eclipsed in two directions, simultaneously. Trump continues to hoover up all the GOP votes, and Haley is consolidating the rest; even though she ranked third in Iowa, she looks poised to run a strong second to Trump in New Hampshire’s primary next week, with a shot at pulling off an upset. Which is probably why, according to the campaign, DeSantis will fly straight to South Carolina, where he will attempt to chip away at Trump’s double-digit lead and beat Haley in a state where she once served as governor. His path forward doesn’t make much sense—and, in any case, his efforts seem unlikely to make a difference.
“In my heart of hearts, I’d hoped …” Wells told me, trailing off as the statewide results were pouring in on TV. “It’s us. It’s the American people. We get the government we deserve.”
It’s been rare this election cycle to find a voter who really likes Ron DeSantis—not just his policies but theman himself. And Wells really does. He sees DeSantis as a Republican for the next generation: fiscally and socially conservative, a biblically “sound” family man who is devoted to keeping his campaign promises. Sometimes, I found myself thinking that Wells made a better case for DeSantis than DeSantis did for himself.
Wells, a small-business owner, has volunteered at more than 40 DeSantis events since March. He brought the governor and his wife to his church to meet his pastor. He recruited phone canvassers for DeSantis from all over the country. I first met Wells at the Iowa State Fair last summer, where he and the rest of the DeSantis posse were being pursued along the midway by a boisterous herd of men in Trump hats. They catcalled DeSantis, shouting, “Go home, Ron!” and “Smile, Ron!” Wells, who is short and stout, with a dark-brown goatee, tried to run interference. “You’re all a bunch of degenerates!” he yelled. The guys looked like they wanted to give him a swirly.
Since then, I’ve watched as Wells challenged Trump supporters online and in person. He seems to find some kind of perverse satisfaction in correcting media reports and taking on trolls. He confronted them in public, too, including one QAnon conspiracy theorist who’d accused Casey DeSantis of faking her breast-cancer diagnosis. Wells stopped attending meetings of the Washington County Republican Party in the fall, he said, because the chairman is a Trump devotee. (When I reached the county GOP chair by phone, he told me that Wells is “a toxic individual.”)
The primary has been this way since its start: ugly, mean, and probably a foretaste of the next nine months.
In the days before the big event, the candidates were made to suffer one final indignity of the Hawkeye State’s unglamorous process: arctic weather conditions. Driving sleet and snow made major highways temporarily impassable. Pines collapsed under the weight of the flakes, and oaks along the highway were dusted white like birches. The cold was even more extreme than the precipitation: Over the weekend, the temperature dipped well below zero in parts of the state, with a torturous –26 windchill. On Saturday, standing on a street in downtown Davenport, one of the Quad Cities along the Illinois border, I felt my cheeks burning.
Still, Iowans ventured out to watch Haley and DeSantis duke it out for second place. And so did the press corps. At times, in knotty-pine-walled restaurants and industrial-chic event centers across southeast Iowa, journalists were barely outnumbered by voters. The silliness was perhaps best captured in a moment at the end of one Haley rally in Cedar Rapids, when attendees scrambled from their seats to take a photo with her, and a horde of reporters followed in a mad dash for interviews. Somewhere in the melee, I tripped on a plastic cup, sending ice and brown alcohol shooting across the floor. Reporters rushed by, slipping on the cubes and thwacking me with their bags, as I knelt to clean it up. Over the loudspeakers, “Ants Marching” began playing at full blast.
More than other candidates’ rallies, Haley’s felt warm. Her voters are the kind of people who are eager to talk to reporters, people who sigh and say, “I’m just looking for a candidate who can bring us all together.” These Iowans supported the former UN ambassador because of her foreign-policy experience, they told me, but also because they found her refreshingly competent. She’s “somebody that’s really smart and really experienced and qualified,” Jane Fett, a financial manager from Long Grove, told me in Davenport. “It takes my breath away to bring that back to politics.” DeSantis is too conservative for them—not a unifier.
A few registered Democrats went to Haley rallies, too, which made sense, given that her supporters are more likely to prefer Joe Biden over Trump. These are people who are exhausted by Trump’s antics but yearn for more youthful political leaders; they planned to reregister as Republicans on the day of the caucus in order to vote. Haley “unites, and she also brings hope,” Jerry Stewart, a former Biden supporter wearing a black Hawkeye sweatshirt, told me. “This is going to sound far-fetched, but she brings hope like Obama did.”
Some voters still seemed undecided just days before caucus night. Outside the Olympic Theater in Cedar Rapids on Friday, I listened as two men discussed the merits of Haley versus DeSantis as the GOP nominee. “I’m twisting his arm for Nikki,” Lyle Hanson said. His friend, Scott Garbe, nodded, before unleashing a darting series of thoughts that only an Iowan, overwhelmed at the national significance of the task before him, could have:
“She’s electable, and I don’t think DeSantis is. He’s not going to get a crossover vote, an anti-Trump vote. When Haley goes against Biden, or when Haley goes against—I’m not saying this right. She’ll get the anti-Biden vote. When Trump goes against Biden, Biden’s going to get a lot of anti-Trump vote. There isn’t going to be an anti-Haley vote. So that’s why she’s going to win.”
That was not supposed to be the calculation that Iowa voters were making. The DeSantis campaign began last May with promise. Here was a governor who had finally put some respect next to Florida’s name, his allies said. He’d cut taxes and promoted school choice. He’d proved his leadership ability with Hurricane Ian—in a smart pair of go-go boots. He was Trump minus the chaos and the nutty tweets, right-wing pundits said. Remember the fuss? The conservative parents’-rights group, Moms for Liberty, was so excited about DeSantis that its founders gave him a ceremonial sword.
DeSantis adopted a maximal ground campaign in Iowa: He spent millions and set up a get-out-the-caucus team rivaling, experts say, that of Senator Ted Cruz, 2016’s surprise caucus winner. DeSantis also earned the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds and the evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. To prove the wisdom of this all-in strategy, DeSantis needed to soar to victory in Iowa, and he told reporters he would. “I think it’s going to help propel us to the nomination,” he said on Meet the Press. Instead, the campaign is plummeting to Earth like a plug door off a Boeing Max 9.
What brought him down? As many have noted, the governor lacks personal warmth and much capacity for small talk. He is seemingly unable to stand naturally; his hands are always slightly raised, as though he’s wearing too many layers, like Randy in A Christmas Story. DeSantis has an unsettling habit of licking his lips when he speaks, and his smile never quite reaches his eyes, which seem full of terror.
“You can almost hear the thoughts in the back of his head: “How am I losing? Why am I not connecting?” the Iowa GOP strategist told me. The heel lifts haven’t helped. At an event in Davenport two days before the caucus, DeSantis passed me on his way to the bathroom, waddling stiffly in a pair of shiny black boots.
A few DeSantis supporters told me they actually liked his lack of charisma. “He’s not running for Miss America,” Ross Paustian, a farmer from Walcott, Iowa, told me in Davenport. Wells put it even more simply: “He’s not fake.” Yet even the governor’s fans were not predicting victory, days before the caucus. “Trump is going to win,” Gloria King, a DeSantis supporter and retiree from Davenport, told me on Saturday. Her enthusiasm was entirely for Casey: “She was like, so cool! The coolest. She should be running!”
Perhaps the crumbling of the DeSantis campaign could be blamed, at least in part, on Trump and his allies, who, very early on, had carpet-bombed the Florida governor with abuse and mockery. The former president made up nicknames like “Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron” (an insult less easy to parse but goofily evocative). He recruited Florida lawmakers to endorse him and taunt their governor.
Even in Iowa, Trump and his allies were relentless. Two days before the caucuses, a comedian handed DeSantis a “participation” trophy at a campaign rally. “He’s special, he’s unique, and he’s our little snowflake,” the provocateur announced, before security guards dragged him away.
Last night, Wells stood up once more for his candidate. A few days ago, he’d told me that he not only expected DeSantis to beat Trump, but that DeSantis had to beat him. “The one thing that I have really learned this cycle is that it’s going to be a contest of work versus a cult of personality,” he said. The only way to break the narrative, he said, was to win the caucus.
Instead, I watched in real time as Wells came to the realization that so many others already have: His party and its members are not who Wells wishes they were.
After the caucus was over, Wells drove two hours on dark roads to Des Moines to say farewell to his friends on the DeSantis campaign. He called me from the road, sounding more dejected than he had when he’d left. For 30 minutes, he sighed and paused and quoted the Bible (“Our people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge”). Wells wouldn’t vote for Trump or Biden in the fall, he said. But he might move to Florida.
This article originally stated that a Trump fan awarded Ron DeSantis a “participation” trophy at a rally. In fact, it was a comedian who did so.
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Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignment—a convergence of issues and demographics and personalities that will deliver a lock on power to one side or the other. In my lifetime, at least five “permanent” majorities have come and gone. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevance—until, four years later, Richard Nixon’s narrow win augured an “emerging Republican majority” (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt. In 1976, Jimmy Carter heralded a winning interracial politics called “the Carter coalition,” which proved even shorter-lived than his presidency. With Ronald Reagan, the conservative ascendancy really did seem perpetual. After the Republican victory in the 2002 midterm elections, George W. Bush’s operative Karl Rove floated the idea of a majority lasting a generation or two.
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But around the same time, the writers John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted a decades-long advantage for the party of educated professionals, single women, younger voters, and the coming minority majority. The embodiment of their thesis soon appeared in Barack Obama—only to be followed by Donald Trump and the revenge of the white working class, a large plurality that has refused to fade away.
Recent American history has been hard on would-be realigners. The two parties are playing one of the longest deuce games since the founding. Even with the structural distortion of the Senate and the Electoral College favoring Republicans, the American people remain closely divided. The Democratic presidential candidate has won seven of the last eight popular votes, while the national vote for the House of Representatives keeps swinging back and forth between the parties. Stymied by a sense of stalemate, both now indulge in a form of magical thinking.
Neither side believes in the legitimacy of the other; each assumes that the voters agree and will soon sweep it into power. So the result of every election comes as a shock to the loser, who settles on explanations that have nothing to do with the popular will: foreign interference, fraudulent ballots, viral disinformation, a widespread conspiracy to cheat. The Republican Party tries to hold on to power by antidemocratic means: the Electoral College, the filibuster, grotesquely gerrymandered legislatures, even violence. The Democratic Party pursues a majority by demography, targeting an array of identity groups and assuming that their positions on issues will be predictably monolithic. The latter is a mistake; the former is a threat to democracy. Both are ways to escape the long, hard grind of organized persuasion that is politics.
Two other jarring features define our age of deadlock. One is a radical shift in the two parties’ center of gravity. The signature of elections today is the class divide called education polarization: In 2020, Joe Biden won by claiming a majority of college-educated white voters, the backbone of the old Republican Party. Trump, with a lock on the white working class, lost despite making gains among nonwhite, non-college-educated voters, yesterday’s most reliable Democrats. Meanwhile, on the political stage, cultural and social issues have eclipsed economic issues—even as every facet of American life, whether income or mortality rates, grows less equal and more divided by class.
These two trends are obviously related, and they have a history. From the late 1970s until very recently, the brains and dollars behind both parties supported versions of neoliberal economics: one hard-edged and friendly to old-line corporate interests such as the oil industry, the other gentler and oriented toward the financial and technology sectors. This consensus left the battleground open to cultural warfare. The educated professionals who dominate the country’s progressive party have long cared less about unions, wages, and monopoly power than about race, gender, and the environment. In the summer of 2020, millions of young people did not come out of isolation to protest the plight of meatpackers laboring in COVID-ridden processing plants. They were outraged by a police killing, and they called for a “racial reckoning”—a revolution in consciousness that ended up having little effect on the lives of the poor and oppressed.
For their part, Republicans have spoken the traditionalist language of the working class ever since Nixon’s “silent majority”; Trump dropped the mantra of low taxes and deregulation that used to excite the party when it was more upscale, and directed his message to a base that votes on issues such as crime, immigration, and what it means to be an American. More recently, Republican candidates have turned to anti-“woke” rhetoric. In losing its voice as the champion of workers, the Democratic Party lost many of the workers themselves, and during the past half century, the two parties have nearly switched electorates.
This remapping helps explain the outpouring of new books that pay political attention to those overlooked Americans of all races who lack a college degree, many employed in jobs that pay by the hour—factory workers, home health aides, delivery drivers, preschool teachers, hairdressers, restaurant servers, farm laborers, cashiers. During the pandemic, they were called “essential workers.” Now they’ve been discovered to hold the key to power, giving rise to yet another round of partisan dreaming of realignment, this time hinging on the working class. But these Americans won’t benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs.
The economic decline and political migration of the American working class receive the most compelling treatment in Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, by the New York Times writer David Leonhardt. He describes the rise and fall, from the New Deal to the present, of what he calls “democratic capitalism”—not a neutral phrase, but a positive term for a mixed economy that benefits the many, not just the few. By now, the story of growing inequality and declining mobility is familiar from the work of Thomas Piketty, Gary Gerstle, Raj Chetty, and other scholars. Leonhardt has a gift for synthesizing complex trends and data in straightforward language and persuasive arguments whose rationality doesn’t fully mute an undertone of indignation. He appreciates the power of stories and weaves obscure but telling events and people into his larger narrative: a 1934 strike in the Minneapolis coal yards that showed the political potential of worker solidarity; the mid-century businessman Paul Hoffman, who argued to members of his own class that they would benefit from a prosperous working class; the pioneering computer programmer and Navy officer Grace Hopper, who saw the economic benefits of military spending on technological research.
An economy that gives most people the chance for a decent life doesn’t arise by accident or through impersonal forces. It has to be created, and Leonhardt identifies three agents: political action, such as union organizing, that gives power to the have-nots; a civic ethos that restrains the greed of the haves; and public spending on people, infrastructure, and ideas—“a form of short-term sacrifice, an optimistic bet on what the future can bring.”
All three—power, culture, and investment—combined in the postwar decades to transform the American working class into the largest and richest middle class in history. Black Americans, even while enduring official discrimination and racist violence, closed the gap in pay and life expectancy with white Americans—progress, Leonhardt writes, that “reflected class-based changes more than explicitly race-based changes.” In other words, the right of workers to form unions, an increased and expanded federal minimum wage, and a steeply progressive tax code that funded good schools all reduced racial inequality by reducing economic inequality. But after the 1960s, the economy’s growth slowed, and the balance of power among the classes grew lopsided. American life became stratified. Wealth flowed upward to the few, unions withered, and public goods such as schools starved. In their rush to cash in, elites knocked over taboos that had once restrained the worst extremes of greed. Metropoles prospered and industrial regions decayed. Despite the end of Jim Crow and the growth of a Black professional class, the gap between Black and white Americans began to widen again as the country’s top 10 percent pulled away from the rest.
This economic analysis comes with a political argument that will not be welcomed by many progressives. Leonhardt places blame for the decline of the American dream where it belongs: on free-market intellectuals, right-wing politicians, corporate money. But he also points to the shortsighted complacency of union leaders, and, even more, the changing values and interests of well-educated, comfortable Democrats. Beginning in the early ’70s, they dropped concern about bread-and-butter issues for more compelling causes: the environment, peace, consumer protection, abortion, identity-group rights. The labor movement lost interest in social justice, and progressive politicians lost interest in the working class. Neither George Meany nor George McGovern sang from the New Deal songbook. After the ’60s, “the country no longer had a mass movement centered on lifting most Americans’ living standards.”
Why did the white working class abandon the party that had been its champion? “In the standard progressive telling,” Leonhardt writes, “the explanation for this political shift is race.” Race had a lot to do with it, and Leonhardt affirms that Democrats’ embrace of the Black freedom movement in the ’60s, followed by white backlash (exploited by Republicans with their “southern strategy”) and persistent racism, is a major cause. But the progressive telling falls short on three counts. It’s morally self-flattering and self-exonerating; it’s politically self-defeating (accusing voters of racism, even if deserved, is not the way to convince them of anything); and it fails to explain too many recent political trends. For example, nearly all-white West Virginia remained mostly Democratic decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only turned indelibly red in 2000. According to one estimate, almost a quarter of the working-class white voters who gave Trump the presidency in 2016 had voted for a Black president only a few years earlier. The stark polarization of the current college-educated and non-college-educated white electorate shows the key role of class. And what are we to make of an openly bigoted president running for a second term and increasing his share of the Black and Latino vote?
Leonhardt’s subtler account is rooted in the working class’s growing cultural and economic alienation from a Democratic Party ever more dominated by elites and activists, and out of touch on the issues that hurt less affluent Americans most, especially crime, trade, and immigration. The financial crisis of 2008 was a pivotal event, leaving large numbers of Americans with the sense that the country’s upper classes were playing a dirty game at the expense of the rest.
That fall, I reported on the presidential campaign in a dying coal town in Appalachian Ohio. To my surprise, its white residents were giving Obama a close hearing, and he ended up doing better in the region than John Kerry had. But at a local party gathering, an older white man told me that neither party had done anything to reverse the decline of his town, and that he would no longer vote Democratic, for one reason: illegal immigration. I listened politely and discounted his grievance—I didn’t see any undocumented immigrants in Glouster, Ohio. Why did he care so much?
Leonhardt provides an answer. In a comprehensive analysis, he shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy. Again, racial resentment partly explains hostility to large-scale immigration, but Leonhardt shows that rapid demographic change can erode the social bonds that make collective efforts for greater equality possible: “Low immigration numbers in the mid-1900s improved the lives of recent immigrants by fostering a stronger safety net for everybody.” As Democrats were reminded in 2022’s midterms, immigration is less popular among working-class Americans of all races than among college graduates. The mayor of my very progressive city, a son of the Black working class, recently sounded like that working-class white ex-Democrat in Ohio when he warned that the arrival of more than 100,000 migrants “will destroy New York.”
These positions reflect class differences in approaches to morality. Drawing on social-science research, Leonhardt distinguishes between “universal” values such as fairness and compassion, which matter more among educated professionals, and “communal” values such as order, tradition, and loyalty, which count more lower down the class ladder. It shouldn’t be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but don’t necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identity—the belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.
Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Brooks Kraft / Corbis / Getty; Leif Skoogfors / Getty; Cynthia Johnson / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.
This worldview provided a sense of meaning to a generation that came of age after 2008, amid upheaval and disillusionment. Because the new progressivism flourished among younger, educated Americans who lived online, its cultural reach was disproportionate, making rapid inroads in universities, schools, media, the arts, philanthropy. But its believers badly overplayed their hand, giving Republicans easy wins and driving away ordinary Democrats. Americans remain a wildly diverse, individualistic, aspirational people, with rising rates of mixed marriage, residential integration, and immigration from all over the world. Any rigid politics of identity—whether the left’s obsession with “marginalized communities,” or its sinister opposite in the reactionary paranoia of “white replacement theory”—is bound to shatter against the realities of American life.
Identity politics has been a feverish interlude following the demise of the neoliberal consensus that prevailed from Reagan to Obama. What will take its place? Leonhardt hopes for a Democratic Party that learns how not to alienate the nearly two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. He believes that education can be a force for upward mobility, but that the current version of meritocracy—built-in advantage at the top, underfunding below—has created a highly educated aristocracy. He advises a renewed emphasis on economic populism, a hard line on equal rights for all but reasonable compromise on other controversial social issues, and a general attitude of respect. His hero is the martyred Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 presidential campaign was the last to unite working-class Americans of all colors.
A version of the same argument, with less historical depth and feeling but more charts and polemics, can be found in John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Judis and Teixeira have been explaining their earlier book’s thesis for two decades even as the majority of its title kept failing to emerge. Now they diagnose their error: “What began happening in the last decade is a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters. That’s something that we really didn’t anticipate.” Like Leonhardt, they call on Democrats to embrace New Deal–style “economic liberalism” (but not Green New Deal–style socialism) and to reject “today’s post-sixties version of social liberalism, which is tantamount to cultural radicalism.” In a series of scathing chapters, Judis and Teixeira show how far left the Democrats’ “shadow party” of activists, donors, and journalists has moved in the past 20 years on immigration, race, gender, and climate.
The authors want a return to the party’s cultural centrism of the ’90s. Instead of decriminalizing the border, which most 2020 Democratic presidential candidates advocated, they call for tighter border security, enforcement of laws that prohibit hiring undocumented immigrants, and a way for those already here to become citizens. They show that middle-ground policies like these and others—the pursuit of racial equality that focuses on expanding opportunity for individuals, not equity of group outcomes; support for equal rights for trans Americans without insisting on a gender ideology that denies biological sex—remain majority views, including among nonwhite Americans. Judis and Teixeira are less persuasive on climate change: Although their gradualism might be politically helpful to Democrats, the country and the planet will be at the mercy of extreme weather that’s indifferent to such messaging.
Joshua Green’s fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics argues that a Democratic renewal is already under way. Like Leonhardt, Judis, and Teixeira, Green traces the Democrats’ estrangement from working Americans back to the ’70s; he begins his story with a moment in 1978, when Jimmy Carter abandoned unions for Wall Street. The narrative reaches a climax in 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed home values and retirement savings while taxpayer dollars rescued the banks that had triggered it, convincing large numbers of Americans that the system was rigged by financiers and politicians. Because of policy choices by the Obama administration—Democrats’ last spasm of neoliberalism—much of the blame fell on the former party of the common people.
Yet out of the wreckage rose a new group of Democratic stars who sounded like their New Deal predecessors, many of whom were every bit as radical. Taking aim at corporate elites, Green’s protagonists want to increase economic equality through worker power and state intervention. Though Sanders and Warren failed as presidential candidates, Green argues that their populism transformed the party, including the formerly moderate Joe Biden, who has pushed a remarkably ambitious legislative agenda with working-class interests at its center.
Green is a first-rate journalist, but his book suffers from a blind spot: It ignores the role of culture in the party’s struggles with the working class. His analysis omits half the story until the 2016 election, when, he acknowledges, Trump “reshuffled Democratic priorities. As he moved cultural issues to the center of national political conflict, race, gender, and immigration eclipsed populist economics as the focus of the liberal insurgency.” In the face of Trump’s bigotry, Democrats felt compelled to adopt the “maximalist” positions of activists, assuming that these would align the party with “the groups on the receiving end of Trump’s ugliest barbs,” such as Latino immigrants. Instead, the party’s working-class losses began to extend beyond white voters. Green’s answer is to double down on economic populism: “Rather than fear the Republicans’ culture wars—or respond to them by racializing policies that benefit everyone—Democrats should take the opportunity to reestablish the party as serving the interests of working people of every race and ethnicity.”
None of these books offers a shortcut to a new Democratic majority. The erosion of working-class support is too old and too severe to be easily reversed. In fact, it’s the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, who imagines a coming realignment—for Republicans. Ruffini can’t resist making the case that, in addition to transforming the party, this coalition could become the next permanent majority. To do so, he breezes through some of the same history, and reaches a similar conclusion: Democrats have fallen into a “cosmopolitan trap,” losing their hold on a key constituency in the process.
Ruffini’s most original contribution is to apply close statistical analysis to the past few election cycles as he builds his case for a Republican multiracial coalition. He supplies strong evidence of the moderate social views of most Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. On that basis, Ruffini doesn’t think Democrats can win back their lost supporters just by changing the subject to class. “Democrats may calculate that, simply by focusing on economic issues, they can keep cultural issues from eating into their base,” but they’re wrong, he writes. “When voters’ economic views and social views are in conflict, one’s social stances more often drive voting behavior … Cultural divides are what voters vote on even if politicians don’t talk about them.” Ruffini offers no data to support this conclusion, but it underpins his counsel for a politician like Biden. Never mind his legislative accomplishments that benefit the working class; what he really needs, Ruffini advises in political-operative mode, is a “hard pivot against the cultural left”—he seems to have in mind a Sister Souljah moment—to neutralize Republican attacks.
Though Ruffini doesn’t spend much time on economic policy, it’s worth noting that a few high-profile Republicans have recently discovered that monopolistic corporations can be oppressors, that capitalism tears communities apart. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as other politicians, limit this insight to their partisan enemies in Silicon Valley, but a few conservative writers, such as Sohrab Ahmari, the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It, are open to ideas of social democracy. This internal party battle between the old libertarians and the new egalitarians doesn’t seem to interest Ruffini; oddly, given his populist ambitions, he remains unmoved by the anti-corporate critique. Nor does he have much to say about the Republican Party’s descent with Trump into authoritarian nihilism.
Ruffini’s formative years as a professional Republican came during the George W. Bush presidency, and his thinking hasn’t kept up with the America of fentanyl and Matt Gaetz. The populist future of Ruffini’s desires is a wholesome mixture of culturally conservative, “pro-capitalist” families and low taxes. His “commonsense majority” would combine white people who didn’t graduate from college and nonwhite people of all classes, because “the education divide makes a much bigger difference in the attitudes of whites than it does among nonwhites.” It sounds like a twist on the Judis-Teixeira emerging majority of two decades ago. Demography as destiny seduces realigners on both sides.
Ruffini recognizes that Republicans are a long way from attracting enough nonwhite voters to achieve his majority. But, he argues, if the party battles job discrimination based on a college degree, makes voting Republican socially acceptable among Black Americans, and apologizes for the southern strategy, his goal could be realized by 2036. By then, the Democratic Party would presumably be a pious rump of overeducated white people demanding open borders and anti-racist math.
These writers are all trying to solve a puzzle: One party supports unions, the child tax credit, and some form of universal health care, while the other party does everything in its power to defeat them. One president passed major legislation to renew manufacturing and rebuild infrastructure, while his predecessor cut taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet polls since 2016 have shown Republicans closing the gap with Democrats on which party is perceived to care more about poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and “people like me.” During these years, the energy on the left has been fueled by an identity politics that resisted Trump and became the orthodoxy of educated progressives, with its own daunting lexicon. Many Democrats fell silent, out of fear or shame or confusion.
Now, encouraged perhaps by the excesses and failures of a professional-class social-justice movement, and by the relative success of Biden’s pro-worker agenda, they seem to be finding their voice. Judis and Teixeira cite polling data from Wisconsin and Massachusetts as evidence that Americans are less divided on cultural issues than activists on both sides, who benefit by stoking division, would like: “If you look at the country’s voters, and put aside the culture wars, what you find are genuine differences between the parties’ voters over economic issues.” The real disagreements have to do with taxation, regulation, health care, and the larger problem of inequality. Democrats’ way forward seems obvious: emphasize differences on economics by turning left; mute differences on culture by tacking to the middle. If the party can free itself from the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the cultural radicalism of campus and social media, it might start to win in red states.
I want Leonhardt, Judis, Teixeira, and Green to be right. Having long held the same views, I’m an ideal audience for these books and other new ones making related arguments, such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke, and Fredrik deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Yet the solutions that some of them propose for the Democrats’ working-class problem leave me with a worrying skepticism. In an age of shredded social bonds and deep distrust of institutions, especially the federal government, we can’t go back to New Deal economics. If Ruffini is right, the culture wars aren’t easily put aside. “Guns and religion,” in Obama’s unfortunate phrase, are genuinely held values, not just proxies for economic grievance; conservative politicians manipulate them, but they aren’t inauthentic. Race and gender are more important categories than class for millions of Americans, especially younger ones. Illegal immigration legitimately vexes citizens living precarious lives. Social issues aren’t manufactured by power-hungry politicians to divide the masses. They matter—that’s why they’re so polarizing.
The working class is immense, varied, and not all that amenable to being led. It’s more atomized, more independent-minded, more conspiracy-minded and cynical than it was a couple of generations ago. Although unions are gaining popularity and energy, only a tenth of workers belong to one. Abandoned to an unfair economy while the rich freely break the rules, bombarded with images of fame and wealth, awash in drugs, working-class Americans are less likely to identify with underdogs like Rocky and Norma Rae or the defeated heroes of Springsteen songs than to admire celebrities who pursue power for its own sake—none more so than Trump.
The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain? The working class isn’t a puzzle whose solution comes with a prize—it isn’t a means to the end of realignment and long-term power. It is a constituency comprising half the country, whose thriving is necessary for the good of the whole.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “What Does the Working Class Really Want?”
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Within days of Trump’s election, his key immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, was already gathering a group of loyal bureaucrats to start drafting executive orders. Civil servants who were veterans of the George W. Bush administration found the proposals to be so outlandishly impractical, if not also harmful to American interests and perhaps even illegal, that they assumed the ideas could never come to fruition. They were wrong. Over the next four years, lone children were loaded onto planes and sent back to the countries they had fled without so much as a notification to their families. Others were wrenched from their parents’ arms as a way of sending a message to other families abroad about what awaited them if they, too, tried to enter the United States.
If given another chance to realize his goals, Miller has essentially boasted in recent interviews that he would move even faster and more forcefully. And Trump, who’s been campaigning on the promise to finish the job he started on immigration policy, would fairly assume if he is reelected that harsh restrictions in that arena are precisely what the American people want. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he declared during a speech in Iowa in September, referring to 1954’s offensively titled Operation Wetback, under which hundreds of thousands of people with Mexican ancestry were deported, including some who were American citizens.
Trump and other key fixtures of his time in office have refused to rule out trying to reinstate family separations. They have been explicit about their plans to send ICE agents back into the streets to make arrests (with help from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the National Guard), and finish their work on the wall. They say that they will reimpose the pandemic-related expulsion policy known as Title 42, which all but shut off access to asylum, and that they will expand the use of military-style camps to house people who are caught in the enforcement dragnet. They have laid out plans and legal rationales for major policy changes that they didn’t get around to the first time, such as ending birthright citizenship, a long-held goal of Trump’s. They’ve floated ideas such as screening would-be immigrants for Marxist views before granting them entry, and using the Alien and Sedition Acts in service of deportations. Trump and his advisers have also made clear that they intend to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow them to deploy the U.S. military to the border, and to use an extensive naval blockade between the United States and Latin America to fight the drug trade. That most drug smuggling occurs at legal ports of entry doesn’t matter to Trump and his team: They seem to have reasonably concluded that immigration restrictions don’t have to be effective to be celebrated by their base.
The breakneck pace of work during Miller’s White House tour was periodically hampered by worried bureaucrats attempting end runs around him, or by his most powerful detractors, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, whispering reservations into the president’s ear. But Trump’s daughter and son-in-law have left politics altogether, and Miller used Trump’s term to perfect strategies for disempowering anyone else who dared to challenge him. As for job applicants to work in a second Trump administration, Miller told Axios that being in lockstep with him on immigration issues would be “non-negotiable.” Others need not apply.
Those who choose to join Trump in this mission to slash immigration would do so knowing that they would face few consequences, if any, for how they go about it: Almost all of the administration officials who pushed aggressively for the most controversial policies of Trump’s term continue to enjoy successful careers.
The speed of Trump’s work on immigration can obscure its impact in real time. This is why Lucas Guttentag, a law professor at Stanford and Yale and a senior counselor on immigration issues in the Obama and Biden administrations, created a database with his students to log and track the more than 1,000 immigration-policy changes made during Trump’s years in office. Most remain in place. This is worth dwelling on. Trump’s time in office already represents a resurgence of old, disproven ideas about the inherent threat—physical, cultural, and economic—posed by immigrants. And if Trump does return to office, this moment may qualify less as a blip than an era: a period like previous ones when such misconceptions prevailed, and laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act and eugenics-based national-origins quotas ruled the day.
Returning Trump to the presidency would reopen wounds that have barely healed in the communities he has said he would target immediately. Recently, I stood outside a church in the Northeast that caters mostly to undocumented farmworkers, with a Catholic sister who oversees the parish’s programming. As we stood in the autumn light, I remarked on the picturesque scene around her place of worship and work. She replied by pointing in one direction, then another, then another, at the places where she said ICE agents used to hide out on Sunday mornings during the Trump administration, waiting to capture her congregants as they left Mass to go about their weekly errands at the laundromat and the grocery store.
Beyond the emotional impact of Trump’s return, the economy could also face a pummeling if the number of immigrant workers, legal and otherwise, were to drop. In a November 2022 speech, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, detailed the harm from COVID-related dips in immigration, which left the country short an estimated 1 million workers.
America’s rightward shift on immigration is part of a global story in which Western countries are, in general, turning against immigrants. But the world tends to look to the United States as a guide for what sorts of checks on immigration are socially permissible. A new Trump administration would provide a pretty clear answer: just about any.
An anything-goes approach to immigration enforcement may indeed be what the country is left with if Trump succeeds in the next general election. “The first 100 days of the Trump administration will be pure bliss,” Stephen Miller told Axios, “followed by another four years of the most hard-hitting action conceivable.”
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Specter of Family Separation.”
“I made history, didn’t I?” Kevin McCarthy was saying Tuesday night, a few hours after he in fact did, by becoming the first speaker of the House to ever be ousted from the job. History comes at you fast—and then it hurtles on. By yesterday morning, the race to replace him was fully in motion, even as the wooden Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy sign still hung outside his old office.
Washington loves a death watch, which is what McCarthy’s speakership provided from its first wee hours. He always had a strong short-timer aura about him. The gavel looked like a toy hammer in McCarthy’s hands, the way he held it up to show all of his friends when he was elected. He essentially gave his tormentors the weapon of his own demise: the ability of a single member of his conference to execute a “motion to vacate” at any time. Tuesday, as it turned out, is when the hammer fell: day 269 of Kevin held hostage.
McCarthy tried to put on a brave face during Tuesday’s roll call. But he mostly looked dazed as the bad votes came in, sitting cross-legged and staring at the ground through the back-and-forth of floor speeches, some in support, some in derision.
“This Republican majority has exceeded all expectations,” asserted Elise Stefanik of New York, cueing up an easy rejoinder from McCarthy’s chief scourge, Matt Gaetz of Florida: “If this House of Representatives has exceeded all expectations, then we definitely need higher expectations!”
Garret Graves of Louisiana hailed McCarthy as “the greatest speaker in modern history,” which brought an immediate hail of laughter from the minority side. Otherwise, Democrats were content to say little and follow the James Carville credo of “When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.”
Mike Garcia of California urged his fellow Republicans to be “the no-drama option for America,” which did not seem to be going well. Andy Biggs of Arizona concluded, “This body is entrenched in a suboptimal path.”
By 5 p.m., that path had led to a 216–210 vote against McCarthy—and the shortest tenure of a House speaker since Michael C. Kerr of Indiana died of tuberculosis, in 1876.
How should history remember McCarthy’s speakership? Besides briefly? McCarthy was never much of an ideological warrior, a firebrand, or a big-ideas or verdict-of-history guy. He tended to scoff at suggestions of higher powers or lofty purposes.
Insomuch as McCarthy had any animating principle at all, it was always fully consistent with the prevailing local religion: self-perpetuation. Doing whatever was necessary to hang on for another day. Making whatever alliances he needed to. Could McCarthy be transactional at times? Well, yes, and welcome to Washington.
The tricky part is, if you’re constantly trying to placate an unruly coalition, it’s hard to know who your allies are, or when new enemies might reveal themselves. That became more apparent with every “yea” vote to oust McCarthy—Ken Buck of Colorado, Nancy Mace of South Carolina. At various points, McCarthy had considered those Republicans to be “friends.” And “you can never have too many friends,” McCarthy was always telling people. In the end, he could have used more.
“Kevin is a friend,” Marjorie Taylor Greene was saying outside the Capitol before Tuesday’s vote. She turned out to be steadfast. Reporters surrounded Greene like she was an old sage. “Matt is my friend,” Greene also said, referring to Gaetz. George Santos walked by behind the MTG press scrum, and three of the Greene reporters trailed after him. Lauren Boebert—whom Greene had once called a “little bitch” on the House floor (not a friend!)—followed Santos. Boebert wound up supporting McCarthy, sort of. “No, for now,” she said when her name came up in the voice vote.
McCarthy always tried to convey the impression that he was having fun in his job, and was aggressively unbothered by critics who dismissed him as a lightweight backslapper, in contrast to his predecessors, Paul Ryan the “policy” guy and John Boehner the “institutionalist.” Back in April 2021, I was sitting with McCarthy, then the House minority leader, at an ice-cream parlor in his hometown of Bakersfield, California. He used to come in here—a place called Dewar’s—for Monday-night milkshakes after his high-school football practices. He kept saying hello to people he recognized and posing for photos with old friends who stopped by our table. At one point that night, McCarthy turned to me and indicated that being someone people wanted to meet was one of the main rewards of his job.
He was always something of a political fanboy at heart, hitting Super Bowls and Hollywood awards parties. He liked meeting celebrities. He showed me pictures on his phone of himself with Kobe Bryant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump. We had just eaten dinner at an Italian restaurant, Frugatti’s, which featured a signature dish named in his honor—Kevin’s Chicken Parmesan Pizza. (He had ordered a pasta bolognese.)
“I know the day I leave this job, the day I am not the leader anymore, people are not going to laugh at my jokes,” McCarthy told me then. “They’re not going to be excited to see me, and I know that.” This was something to savor, for as long as it lasted. And that basically became the game: take as many pictures and gather as many keepsakes as he could to prove the trip was real.
“Keep dancing” became a favorite McCarthy mantra during his abbreviated time with the speaker’s gavel—as in, keep dancing out of the way of whatever “existential threat” to his authority came along next. McCarthy would contort himself in whatever direction was called for: promise this to get through the debt-ceiling fight, finesse that to keep the government open, zig with the zealots, zag with the moderates. Renege on deals, if need be; throw some bones; do an impeachment; order more pizza.
“Tonight, I want to talk directly to the American people,” McCarthy said on the morning of January 7. After being debased through 15 rounds of votes, he could finally deliver his “victory” speech as the newly (barely) elected speaker of the House. As a practical matter, it was after 1:15 a.m., and the American people were asleep. Everything about McCarthy’s big moment felt like an overgrown kid playacting. There he was with a souvenir hammer, after near-fisticuffs broke out between two of the crankier kids at the sleepover.
McCarthy would grab whatever sliver of a bully pulpit he could manage. “I never thought we’d get up here,” he said as he began his late-night acceptance speech. Immediately, everyone wondered how long he could possibly stay. And how it would end. This seemed to include McCarthy himself. “It just reminds me of what my father always told me,” he said. “It’s not how you start. It’s how you finish.”
McCarthy had moved into the speaker’s chambers a few days earlier, before it was officially his to move into. Why wait? He took a picture with his freshly engraved nameplate on the door. He invited his lieutenants over to check out his new office. Not bad for a kid from Bakersfield! He ordered more pizza. And Five Guys. Dancing requires fuel.
But throughout his tenure, McCarthy carried himself with a kind of desperate edge, which his critics sensed and held against him. “We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything, besides just staying or becoming speaker,” Bob Good of Virginia said in a floor speech on Tuesday.
This was late in the afternoon, when everyone still expected McCarthy to keep fighting. His supporters viewed his defeat as temporary. Gaetz stepped out onto the Capitol steps and was quickly engulfed by a scrum of boom mics, light poles, and onrushing reporters. Back inside, McCarthy grabbed the last word on the crazy spectacle.
“Judge me by my enemies,” the now–former speaker said, maybe trying to sound defiant.
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The missiles that comprise the land component of America’s nuclear triad are scattered across thousands of square miles of prairie and farmland, mainly in North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. About 150 of the roughly 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles currently on alert are dispersed in a wide circle around Minot Air Force Base, in the upper reaches of North Dakota. From Minot, it would take an ICBM about 25 minutes to reach Moscow.
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These nuclear weapons are under the control of the 91st Missile Wing of the Air Force Global Strike Command, and it was to the 91st—the “Rough Riders”—that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, paid a visit in March 2021. I accompanied him on the trip. A little more than two months had passed since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and America’s nuclear arsenal was on Milley’s mind.
In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.
Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.
But his views emerged in a number of books published after Trump left office, written by authors who had spoken with Milley, and many other civilian and military officials, on background. In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”
These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, considered Trump to be a “fucking moron.” John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff in 2017 and 2018, has said that Trump is the “most flawed person” he’s ever met. James Mattis, who is also a retired Marine general and served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, has told friends and colleagues that the 45th president was “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.” It is widely known that Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, believed that the president didn’t understand his own duties, much less the oath that officers swear to the Constitution, or military ethics, or the history of America.
Twenty men have served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs since the position was created after World War II. Until Milley, none had been forced to confront the possibility that a president would try to foment or provoke a coup in order to illegally remain in office. A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.
Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic
The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” McMaster said to me.
For the actions he took in the last months of the Trump presidency, Milley, whose four-year term as chairman, and 43-year career as an Army officer, will conclude at the end of September, has been condemned by elements of the far right. Kash Patel, whom Trump installed in a senior Pentagon role in the final days of his administration, refers to Milley as “the Kraken of the swamp.” Trump himself has accused Milley of treason. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump White House official, has said that Milley deserves to be placed in “shackles and leg irons.” If a second Trump administration were to attempt this, however, the Trumpist faction would be opposed by the large group of ex-Trump-administration officials who believe that the former president continues to pose a unique threat to American democracy, and who believe that Milley is a hero for what he did to protect the country and the Constitution.
“Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” Kelly told me. “Mark had a very, very difficult reality to deal with in his first two years as chairman, and he served honorably and well. The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” Kelly, along with other former administration officials, has argued that Trump has a contemptuous view of the military, and that this contempt made it extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty.
Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told me that no Joint Chiefs chairman has ever been tested in the manner Milley was. “General Milley has done an extraordinary job under the most extraordinary of circumstances,” Gates said. “I’ve worked for eight presidents, and not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon in their angriest moments would have considered doing or saying some of the things that were said between the election and January 6.”
Gates believes that Milley, who served as his military assistant when Gates was Bush’s secretary of defense, was uniquely qualified to defend the Constitution from Trump during those final days. “General Milley expected to be fired every single day between Election Day and January 6,” he said. A less confident and assertive chairman might not have held the line against Trump’s antidemocratic plots.
When I mentioned Gates’s assessment to Milley, he demurred. “I think that any of my peers would have done the same thing. Why do I say that? First of all, I know them. Second, we all think the same way about the Constitution.”
Some of those who served in Trump’s administration say that he appointed Milley chairman because he was drawn to Milley’s warrior reputation, tanklike build, and four-star eyebrows. Senator Angus King of Maine, a political independent who is a supporter of Milley’s, told me, “Trump picked him as chief because he looks like what Trump thinks a general should look like.” But Trump misjudged him, King said. “He thought he would be loyal to him and not to the Constitution.” Trump had been led to believe that Milley would be more malleable than other generals. This misunderstanding threatened to become indelibly ingrained in Washington when Milley made what many people consider to be his most serious mistake as chairman. During the George Floyd protests in early June 2020, Milley, wearing combat fatigues, followed Trump out of the White House to Lafayette Square, which had just been cleared of demonstrators by force. Milley realized too late that Trump, who continued across the street to pose for a now-infamous photo while standing in front of a vandalized church, was manipulating him into a visual endorsement of his martial approach to the demonstrations. Though Milley left the entourage before it reached the church, the damage was significant. “We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Milley said to his security chief. “I’m fucking done with this shit.” Esper would later say that he and Milley had been duped.
For Milley, Lafayette Square was an agonizing episode; he described it later as a “road-to-Damascus moment.” The week afterward, in a commencement address to the National Defense University, he apologized to the armed forces and the country. “I should not have been there,” he said. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” His apology earned him the permanent enmity of Trump, who told him that apologies are a sign of weakness.
On June 1, 2020, Milley and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper (center) accompanied Donald Trump partway to St. John’s Church after the clearing of Lafayette Square. Milley’s apology for appearing to lend military support to a political photo op earned him Trump’s enmity. (Patrick Semansky / AP)
Joseph Dunford, the Marine general who preceded Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had also faced onerous and unusual challenges. But during the first two years of the Trump presidency, Dunford had been supported by officials such as Kelly, Mattis, Tillerson, and McMaster. These men attempted, with intermittent success, to keep the president’s most dangerous impulses in check. (According to the Associated Press, Kelly and Mattis made a pact with each other that one of them would remain in the country at all times, so the president would never be left unmonitored.) By the time Milley assumed the chairman’s role, all of those officials were gone—driven out or fired.
At the top of the list of worries for these officials was the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. Early in Trump’s term, when Milley was serving as chief of staff of the Army, Trump entered a cycle of rhetorical warfare with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. At certain points, Trump raised the possibility of attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons, according to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s book, Donald Trump v. The United States. Kelly, Dunford, and others tried to convince Trump that his rhetoric—publicly mocking Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” for instance—could trigger nuclear war. “If you keep pushing this clown, he could do something with nuclear weapons,” Kelly told him, explaining that Kim, though a dictator, could be pressured by his own military elites to attack American interests in response to Trump’s provocations. When that argument failed to work, Kelly spelled out for the president that a nuclear exchange could cost the lives of millions of Koreans and Japanese, as well as those of Americans throughout the Pacific. Guam, Kelly told him, falls within range of North Korean missiles. “Guam isn’t America,” Trump responded.
Though the specter of a recklessly instigated nuclear confrontation abated when Joe Biden came to office, the threat was still on Milley’s mind, which is why he set out to visit Minot that day in March.
In addition to housing the 91st Missile Wing, Minot is home to the Air Force’s 5th Bomb Wing, and I watched Milley spend the morning inspecting a fleet of B‑52 bombers. Milley enjoys meeting the rank and file, and he quizzed air crews—who appeared a little unnerved at being interrogated with such exuberance by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—about their roles, needs, and responsibilities. We then flew by helicopter to a distant launch-control facility, to visit the missile officers in charge of the Minuteman IIIs. The underground bunker is staffed continuously by two launch officers, who are responsible for a flight of 10 missiles, each secured in hardened underground silos. The two officers seated at the facility’s console described to Milley their launch procedures.
The individual silos, connected to the launch-control facility by buried cable, are surrounded by chain-link fences. They are placed at some distance from one another, an arrangement that would force Russia or China to expend a large number of their own missiles to preemptively destroy America’s. The silos are also protected by electronic surveillance, and by helicopter and ground patrols. The Hueys carrying us to one of the silos landed well outside the fence, in a farmer’s field. Accompanying Milley was Admiral Charles Richard, who was then the commander of Strategic Command, or Stratcom. Stratcom is in charge of America’s nuclear force; the commander is the person who would receive orders from the president to launch nuclear weapons—by air, sea, or land—at an adversary.
It was windy and cold at the silo. Air Force officers showed us the 110-ton blast door, and then we walked to an open hatch. Richard mounted a rickety metal ladder leading down into the silo and disappeared from view. Then Milley began his descent. “Just don’t touch anything,” an Air Force noncommissioned officer said. “Sir.”
Then it was my turn. “No smoking down there,” the NCO said, helpfully. The ladder dropped 60 feet into a twilight haze, ending at a catwalk that ringed the missile itself. The Minuteman III weighs about 80,000 pounds and is about 60 feet tall. The catwalk surrounded the top of the missile, eye level with its conical warhead. Milley and I stood next to each other, staring silently at the bomb. The warhead of the typical Minuteman III has at least 20 times the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. We were close enough to touch it, and I, at least, was tempted.
Milley broke the silence. “You ever see one of these before?”
“No,” I answered.
“Me neither,” Milley said.
I couldn’t mask my surprise.
“I’m an infantryman,” he said, smiling. “We don’t have these in the infantry.”
He continued, “I’m testifying in front of Congress on nuclear posture, and I think it’s important to see these things for myself.”
Richard joined us. “This is an indispensable component of the nuclear triad,” he said, beginning a standard Strategic Command pitch. “Our goal is to communicate to potential adversaries: ‘Not today.’ ” (When I later visited Richard at Offutt Air Force Base, the headquarters of Stratcom, near Omaha, Nebraska, I saw that his office features a large sign with this same slogan, hanging above portraits of the leaders of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.)
I used this moment in the silo to discuss with Milley the stability of America’s nuclear arsenal under Trump. The former president’s ignorance of nuclear doctrine had been apparent well before his exchanges with Kim Jong Un. In a 2015 Republican-primary debate, Trump was asked, “Of the three legs of the triad … do you have a priority?” Trump’s answer: “I think—I think, for me, nuclear is just—the power, the devastation is very important to me.” After this, Senator Marco Rubio, a foreign-policy expert who was one of Trump’s Republican-primary opponents, called Trump an “erratic individual” who could not be trusted with the country’s nuclear codes. (Rubio subsequently embraced Trump, praising him for bringing “a lot of people and energy into the Republican Party.”)
I described to Milley a specific worry I’d had, illustrated most vividly by one of the more irrational public statements Trump made as president. On January 2, 2018, Trump tweeted: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
This tweet did not initiate a fatal escalatory cycle, but with it Trump created conditions that easily could have, as he did at several other moments during his presidency. Standing beside the missile in the silo, I expressed my concern about this to Milley.
“Wasn’t going to happen,” he responded.
“You’re not in the chain of command,” I noted. The chairman is an adviser to the president, not a field commander.
“True,” he answered. “The chain of command runs from the president to the secretary of defense to that guy,” he said, pointing to Richard, who had moved to the other side of the catwalk. “We’ve got excellent professionals throughout the system.” He then said, “Nancy Pelosi was worried about this. I told her she didn’t have to worry, that we have systems in place.” By this, he meant that the system is built to resist the efforts of rogue actors.
Shortly after the assault on the Capitol on January 6, Pelosi, who was then the speaker of the House, called Milley to ask if the nation’s nuclear weapons were secure. “He’s crazy,” she said of Trump. “You know he’s crazy. He’s been crazy for a long time. So don’t say you don’t know what his state of mind is.” According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, who recounted this conversation in their book, Peril, Milley replied, “Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.” He then said, according to the authors, “I want you to know this in your heart of hearts, I can guarantee you 110 percent that the military, use of military power, whether it’s nuclear or a strike in a foreign country of any kind, we’re not going to do anything illegal or crazy.”
General Milley outside his residence on Generals’ Row at Fort Myer, alongside Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia (Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic)
Shortly after the call from Pelosi, Milley gathered the Pentagon’s top nuclear officers—one joined by telephone from Stratcom headquarters—for an emergency meeting. The flag officers in attendance included Admiral Richard; the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General John Hyten, who was Richard’s predecessor at Stratcom; and the leaders of the National Military Command Center, the highly secure Pentagon facility from which emergency-action messages—the actual instructions to launch nuclear weapons—would emanate. The center is staffed continuously, and each eight-hour shift conducts drills on nuclear procedures. In the meeting in his office, Milley told the assembled generals and admirals that, out of an abundance of caution, he wanted to go over the procedures and processes for deploying nuclear weapons. Hyten summarized the standard procedures—including ensuring the participation of the Joint Chiefs in any conversation with the president about imminent war. At the conclusion of Hyten’s presentation, according to meeting participants, Milley said, “If anything weird or crazy happens, just make sure we all know.” Milley then went to each officer in turn and asked if he understood the procedures. They all affirmed that they did. Milley told other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “All we’ve got to do is see to it that the plane lands on January 20,” when the constitutional transfer of power to the new president would be completed.
I found Milley’s confidence only somewhat reassuring. The American president is a nuclear monarch, invested with unilateral authority to release weapons that could destroy the planet many times over.
I mentioned to Milley a conversation I’d had with James Mattis when he was the secretary of defense. I had told Mattis, only half-joking, that I was happy he was a physically fit Marine. If it ever came to it, I said, he could forcibly wrest the nuclear football—the briefcase containing, among other things, the authentication codes needed to order a nuclear strike—from the president. Mattis, a wry man, smiled and said that I was failing to take into account the mission of the Secret Service.
When I mentioned to Milley my view that Trump was mentally and morally unequipped to make decisions concerning war and peace, he would say only, “The president alone decides to launch nuclear weapons, but he doesn’t launch them alone.” He then repeated the sentence.
He has also said in private settings, more colloquially, “The president can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide to push a button. One reason for this is that there’s no button to push.”
During conversations with Milley and others about the nuclear challenge, a story from the 1970s came frequently to my mind. The story concerns an Air Force officer named Harold Hering, who was dismissed from service for asking a question about a crucial flaw in America’s nuclear command-and-control system—a flaw that had no technical solution. Hering was a Vietnam veteran who, in 1973, was training to become a Minuteman crew member. One day in class, he asked, “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The Air Force concluded that launch officers did not need to know the answer to this question, and they discharged him. Hering appealed his discharge, and responded to the Air Force’s assertion as follows: “I have to say I feel I do have a need to know, because I am a human being.”
The U.S. military possesses procedures and manuals for every possible challenge. Except Hering’s.
After we climbed out of the missile silo, I asked Milley how much time the president and the secretary of defense would have to make a decision about using nuclear weapons, in the event of a reported enemy attack. Milley would not answer in specifics, but he acknowledged—as does everyone in the business of thinking about nuclear weapons—that the timeline could be acutely brief. For instance, it is generally believed that if surveillance systems detected an imminent launch from Russia, the president could have as few as five or six minutes to make a decision. “At the highest levels, folks are trained to work through decisions at a rapid clip,” Milley said. “These decisions would be very difficult to make. Sometimes the information would be very limited. But we face a lot of hard decisions on a regular basis.”
The story of Milley’s promotion to the chairmanship captures much about the disorder in Donald Trump’s mind, and in his White House.
By 2018, Trump was growing tired of General Dunford, a widely respected Marine officer. After one White House briefing by Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” Trump did not consider Dunford to be sufficiently “loyal,” and he was seeking a general who would pledge his personal fealty. Such generals don’t tend to exist in the American system—Michael Flynn, Trump’s QAnon-addled first national security adviser, is an exception—but Trump was adamant.
The president had also grown tired of James Mattis, the defense secretary. He had hired Mattis in part because he’d been told his nickname was “Mad Dog.” It wasn’t—that had been a media confection—and Mattis proved far more cerebral, and far more independent-minded, than Trump could handle. So when Mattis recommended David Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff, to become the next chairman, Trump rejected the choice. (In ordinary presidencies, the defense secretary chooses the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the president, by custom, accedes to the choice.)
At that point, Milley was Mattis’s choice to serve in a dual-hatted role, as NATO supreme allied commander in Europe and the head of U.S. European Command. Mattis has said he believed Milley’s bullish personality made him the perfect person to push America’s European allies to spend more on their collective defense, and to focus on the looming threat from Russia.
But a group of ex–Army officers then close to Trump had been lobbying for an Army general for the chairmanship, and Milley, the Army chief of staff, was the obvious candidate. Despite a reputation for being prolix and obstreperous in a military culture that, at its highest reaches, values discretion and rhetorical restraint, Milley was popular with many Army leaders, in part because of the reputation he’d developed in Iraq and Afghanistan as an especially effective war fighter. A son of working-class Boston, Milley is a former hockey player who speaks bluntly, sometimes brutally. “I’m Popeye the fucking sailorman,” he has told friends. “I yam what I yam.” This group of former Army officers, including Esper, who was then serving as the secretary of the Army, and David Urban, a West Point graduate who was key to Trump’s Pennsylvania election effort, believed that Trump would take to Milley, who had both an undergraduate degree from Princeton and the personality of a hockey enforcer. “Knowing Trump, I knew that he was looking for a complete carnivore, and Milley fit that bill,” Urban told me. “He checked so many boxes for Trump.”
In late 2018, Milley was called to meet the president. Before the meeting, he visited Kelly in his West Wing office, where he was told that Trump might ask him to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But, if given a choice, Kelly said, he should avoid the role. “If he asks you to go to Europe, you should go. It’s crazy here,” Kelly said. At the time of this meeting, Kelly was engaged in a series of disputes with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner (he referred to them acidly as the “Royal Couple”), and he was having little success imposing order over an administration in chaos. Each day, ex–administration officials told me, aides such as Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro—along with Trump himself—would float absurd, antidemocratic ideas. Dunford had become an expert at making himself scarce in the White House, seeking to avoid these aides and others.
Kelly escorted Milley to the Oval Office. Milley saluted Trump and sat across from the president, who was seated at the Resolute Desk.
“You’re here because I’m interviewing you for the job of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Trump said. “What do you think of that?”
Milley responded: “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” At which point, Trump turned to Kelly and said, “What’s that other job Mattis wants him to do? Something in Europe?”
Kelly answered, “That’s SACEUR, the supreme allied commander in Europe.”
Trump asked, “What does that guy do?”
“That’s the person who commands U.S. forces in Europe,” Kelly said.
“Which is the better job?” Trump asked.
Kelly answered that the chairmanship is the better job. Trump offered Milley the role. The business of the meeting done, the conversation then veered in many different directions. But at one point Trump returned to the job offer, saying to Milley, “Mattis says you’re soft on transgenders. Are you soft on transgenders?”
Milley responded, “I’m not soft on transgender or hard on transgender. I’m about standards in the U.S. military, about who is qualified to serve in the U.S. military. I don’t care who you sleep with or what you are.”
The offer stood.
It would be nearly a year before Dunford retired and Milley assumed the role. At his welcome ceremony at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall, across the Potomac River from the capital, Milley gained an early, and disturbing, insight into Trump’s attitude toward soldiers. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America.” Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. To Milley, and to four-star generals across the Army, Avila and his wife, Claudia, represented the heroism, sacrifice, and dignity of wounded soldiers.
It had rained that day, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair threatened to topple over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. (Recently, Milley invited Avila to sing at his retirement ceremony.)
These sorts of moments, which would grow in intensity and velocity, were disturbing to Milley. As a veteran of multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had buried 242 soldiers who’d served under his command. Milley’s family venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.
Milley was raised in a blue-collar section of Winchester, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, where nearly everyone of a certain age—including his mother—was a World War II veteran. Mary Murphy served in the women’s branch of the Naval Reserve; the man who became her husband, Alexander Milley, was a Navy corpsman who was part of the assault landings in the central Pacific at Kwajalein, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. Alexander was just out of high school when he enlisted. “My dad brought his hockey skates to the Pacific,” Milley told me. “He was pretty naive.”
Though he was born after it ended, World War II made a powerful impression on Mark Milley, in part because it had imprinted itself so permanently on his father. When I traveled to Japan with Milley this summer, he told me a story about the stress his father had experienced during his service. Milley was undergoing a bit of stress himself on this trip. He was impeccably diplomatic with his Japanese counterparts, but I got the impression that he still finds visiting the country to be slightly surreal. At one point he was given a major award in the name of the emperor. “If my father could only see this,” he said to me, and then recounted the story.
It took place at Fort Drum, in upstate New York, when Milley was taking command of the 10th Mountain Division, in 2011. His father and his father’s younger brother Tom, a Korean War veteran, came to attend his change-of-command ceremony. “My father always hated officers,” Milley recalled. “Every day from the time I was a second lieutenant to colonel, he was like, ‘When are you getting out?’ Then, all of sudden, it was ‘My son, the general.’ ”
He continued, “We have the whole thing—troops on the field, regalia, cannons, bugle—and then we have a reception back at the house. I’ve got the Japanese flag up on the wall, right over the fireplace. It’s a flag my father took from Saipan. So that night, he’s sitting there in his T-shirt and boxers; he’s having probably more than one drink, just staring at the Japanese flag. One or two in the morning, we hear this primeval-type screaming. He’s screaming at his brother, ‘Tom, you got to get up!’ And I’ll say it the way he said it: ‘Tom, the Japs are here, the Japs are here! We gotta get the kids outta here!’ So my wife elbows me and says, ‘Your father,’ and I say, ‘Yes, I figured that out,’ and I go out and my dad, he’s not in good shape by then—in his 80s, Parkinson’s, not super mobile—and yet he’s running down the hallway. I grab him by both arms. His eyes are bugging out and I say, ‘Dad, it’s okay, you’re with the 10th Mountain Division on the Canadian border.’ And his brother Tom comes out and says, ‘Goddamnit, just go to fucking bed, for Chrissakes. You won your war; we just tied ours.’ And I feel like I’m in some B movie. Anyway, he calmed down, but you see, this is what happens. One hundred percent of people who see significant combat have some form of PTSD. For years he wouldn’t go to the VA, and I finally said, ‘You hit the beach at Iwo Jima and Saipan. The VA is there for you; you might as well use it.’ And they diagnosed him, finally.”
Milley with the flag his father took from Saipan during World War II. Seeing it on Milley’s wall once plunged his father, who had PTSD, into a combat flashback. (Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic)
Milley never doubted that he would follow his parents into military service, though he had no plans to make the Army a career. At Princeton, which recruited him to play hockey, he was a political-science major, writing his senior thesis on Irish revolutionary guerrilla movements. He joined ROTC, and he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June 1980. He began his Army career as maintenance officer in a motor pool of the 82nd Airborne; this did not excite him, so he maneuvered his way onto a path that took him to the Green Berets.
His first overseas mission was to parachute into Somalia in 1984 with a five-man Special Forces A-Team to train a Somali army detachment that was fighting Soviet-backed Ethiopia. “It was basically dysentery and worms,” he recalled. “We were out there in the middle of nowhere. It was all small-unit tactics, individual skills. We were boiling water we got from cow ponds, and breakfast was an ostrich egg and flatbread.” His abiding interest in insurgencies led him to consider a career in the CIA, but he was dissuaded by a recruiter who told him working in the agency would make having any kind of family life hard. In 1985, he was sent to Fort Ord, where he “got really excited about the Army.” This was during the Reagan-era defense buildup, when the Army—now all-volunteer—was emerging from what Milley describes as its “post-Vietnam malaise.” This was a time of war-fighting innovation, which Milley would champion as he rose in rank. He would go on to take part in the invasion of Panama, and he helped coordinate the occupation of northern Haiti during the U.S. intervention there in 1994.
Clockwise from top left: Milley played high-school hockey at Belmont Hill School, in Massachusetts, in the mid-’70s. Milley getting his ROTC commission at Princeton in 1980. Milley with his mother and father, both World War II veterans, at his ROTC commissioning ceremony in 1980. Milley (left) deployed in Somalia with the Green Berets of the 5th Special Forces Group in the 1980s. (Courtesy of the Milley family)
After September 11, 2001, Milley deployed repeatedly as a brigade commander to Iraq and Afghanistan. Ross Davidson, a retired colonel who served as Milley’s operations officer in Baghdad when he commanded a brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, recalled Milley’s mantra: “Move to the sound of the guns.” Davidson went on to say, with admiration, “I’ve been blown up, like, nine times with the guy.”
Davidson witnessed what is often mentioned as Milley’s most notable act of personal bravery, when he ran across a booby-trapped bridge at night to stop a pair of U.S. tanks from crossing. “We had no communication with the tanks, and the boss just ran across the bridge without thinking of his own safety to keep those tanks from blowing themselves up,” he told me. “It was something to see.”
Davidson and others who fought for Milley remember him as ceaselessly aggressive. “We’re rolling down a street and we knew we were going to get hit—the street just went deserted—and bam, smack, a round explodes to our right,” Davidson said. “Everything goes black, the windshield splinters in front of us, one of our gunners took a chunk of shrapnel. We bailed out and Milley says, ‘Oh, you want a fight? Let’s fight.’ We started hunting down bad guys. Milley sends one Humvee back with the wounded, and then we’re kicking doors down.” At another point, Davidson said, “he wanted to start a fight in this particular area north of the city, farm fields mixed with little hamlets. And so we moved to the middle of this field, just circled the wagons and waited to draw fire. He was brought up in a school of thought that says a commander who conducts command-and-control from a fixed command post is isolated in many regards. He was in the battle space almost every day.”
Once, when the commanding general of the 10th Mountain Division, Lloyd Austin—now the secretary of defense—was visiting Baghdad, Milley took him on a tour of the city. Milley, Austin, and Davidson were in a Humvee when it was hit.
“Mark has the gift of gab. I don’t remember what he was talking about, but he was talking when there was an explosion. Our second vehicle got hit. Austin’s window shattered, but we didn’t stop; we punched through,” Davidson said. “Wedged into Austin’s door was this four-inch chunk of shrapnel. If it had breached the door seam, it would have taken Austin’s head clean off. It was a ‘Holy shit, we almost got the commanding general killed’ type of situation. That wouldn’t have gone well.”
(When I mentioned this incident recently to Austin, he said, “I thought that was Mark trying to kill his boss.” That’s an elaborate way to kill the boss, I said. “You’ve got to make it look credible,” Austin answered, smiling.)
Dunford, Milley’s predecessor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the four-star commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2013 when Milley, by then a three-star general, came to serve as the international joint commander of all ground forces in the country. He describes Milley as ambitious and creative. “He was very forward-leaning, and he set the bar very high for himself and others,” Dunford told me. “He puts a lot of pressure on himself to perform. There’s just a level of ambition and aggressiveness there. It would be hard for me to imagine that someone could have accomplished as much as he did in the role. Hockey was the right sport for him.”
Clockwise from top left: In the late ’90s, Milley (seated on truck) served in the 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea, the forward line against a North Korean invasion. Returning home to Fort Ord, California, after the invasion of Panama, January 1990. Milley speaks to members of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, which he commanded, in Iraq in 2005. In 1994, Milley helped coordinate the U.S. occupation of northern Haiti. (Courtesy of the Milley family)
Soon after becomingchairman,Milley found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other. In November 2019, Trump decided to intervene in three different cases that had been working their way through the military justice system. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an Islamic State prisoner. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. (Gallagher’s nickname was “Blade.”) In an extraordinary move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him in rank. Trump also pardoned a junior Army officer, Clint Lorance, convicted of second-degree murder for ordering soldiers to shoot three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. In the third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he suspected was a bomb maker for the Taliban and then covering up the killing. At a rally in Florida that month, Trump boasted, “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state.”
The president’s intervention included a decision that Gallagher should be allowed to keep his Trident insignia, which is worn by all SEALs in good standing. The pin features an anchor and an eagle holding a flintlock pistol while sitting atop a horizontal trident. It is one of the most coveted insignia in the entire U.S. military.
This particular intervention was onerous for the Navy, because by tradition only a commanding officer or a group of SEALs on a Trident Review Board are meant to decide if one of their own is unworthy of being a SEAL. Late one night, on Air Force One, Milley tried to convince Trump that his intrusion was damaging Navy morale. They were flying from Washington to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to attend a “dignified transfer,” the repatriation ceremony for fallen service members.
“Mr. President,” Milley said, “you have to understand that the SEALs are a tribe within a larger tribe, the Navy. And it’s up to them to figure out what to do with Gallagher. You don’t want to intervene. This is up to the tribe. They have their own rules that they follow.”
Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.
“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.
“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.
Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump answered that he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”
At which point a frustrated Milley summoned one of his aides, a combat-veteran SEAL officer, to the president’s Air Force One office. Milley took hold of the Trident pin on the SEAL’s chest and asked him to describe its importance. The aide explained to Trump that, by tradition, only SEALs can decide, based on assessments of competence and character, whether one of their own should lose his pin. But the president’s mind was not changed. Gallagher kept his pin.
When I asked Milley about these incidents, he explained his larger views about behavior in combat. “You have accidents that occur, and innocent people get killed in warfare,” he said. “Then you have the intentional breaking of the rules of war that occurs in part because of the psychological and moral degradation that occurs to all human beings who participate in combat. It takes an awful lot of moral and physical discipline to prevent you or your unit from going down that path of degradation.
“I’ll use Gallagher as an example. He’s a tough guy, a tough, hard Navy SEAL. Saw a lot of combat. There’s a little bit of a ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ feeling in all of this. What happened to Gallagher can happen to many human beings.” Milley told me about a book given to him by a friend, Aviv Kochavi, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. The book, by an American academic named Christopher Browning, is called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
“It’s a great book,” Milley said. “It’s about these average police officers from Hamburg who get drafted, become a police battalion that follows the Wehrmacht into Poland, and wind up slaughtering Jews and committing genocide. They just devolve into barbaric acts. It’s about moral degradation.”
During Milley’s time in the Trump administration, the disagreements and misunderstandings between the Pentagon and the White House all seemed to follow the same pattern: The president—who was incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the aspirations and rules that guide the military—would continually try to politicize an apolitical institution. This conflict reached its nadir with the Lafayette Square incident in June 2020. The day when Milley appeared in uniform by the president’s side, heading into the square, has been studied endlessly. What is clear is that Milley (and Mark Esper) walked into an ambush, and Milley extracted himself as soon as he could, which was too late.
The image of a general in combat fatigues walking with a president who has a well-known affection for the Insurrection Act—the 1807 law that allows presidents to deploy the military to put down domestic riots and rebellions—caused consternation and anger across the senior-officer ranks, and among retired military leaders.
“I just about ended my friendship with Mark over Lafayette Square,” General Peter Chiarelli, the now-retired former vice chief of staff of the Army, told me. Chiarelli was once Milley’s superior, and he considered him to be among his closest friends. “I watched him in uniform, watched the whole thing play out, and I was pissed. I wrote an editorial about the proper role of the military that was very critical of Mark, and I was about to send it, and my wife said, ‘You really want to do that—end a treasured friendship—like this?’ She said I should send it to him instead, and of course she was right.” When they spoke, Milley made no excuses, but said it had not been his intention to look as if he was doing Trump’s bidding. Milley explained the events of the day to Chiarelli: He was at FBI headquarters, and had been planning to visit National Guardsmen stationed near the White House when he was summoned to the Oval Office. Once he arrived, Trump signaled to everyone present that they were heading outside. Ivanka Trump found a Bible and they were on their way.
“As a commissioned officer, I have a duty to ensure that the military stays out of politics,” Milley told me. “This was a political act, a political event. I didn’t realize it at the moment. I probably should have, but I didn’t, until the event was well on its way. I peeled off before the church, but we’re already a minute or two into this thing, and it was clear to me that it was a political event, and I was in uniform. I absolutely, positively shouldn’t have been there. The political people, the president and others, can do whatever they want. But I can’t. I’m a soldier, and fundamental to this republic is for the military to stay out of politics.”
Trump, inflamed by the sight of protesters so close to the White House, had been behaving especially erratically. “You are losers!” the president screamed at Cabinet members and other top officials at one point. “You are all fucking losers!”
According to Esper, Trump desperately wanted a violent response to the protesters, asking, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” When I raised this with Milley, he explained, somewhat obliquely, how he would manage the president’s eruptions.
“It was a rhetorical question,” Milley explained. “ ‘Can’t you just shoot them in the legs?’ ”
“He never actually ordered you to shoot anyone in the legs?” I asked.
“Right. This could be interpreted many, many different ways,” he said.
Milley and others around Trump used different methods to handle the unstable president. “You can judge my success or failure on this, but I always tried to use persuasion with the president, not undermine or go around him or slow-roll,” Milley told me. “I would present my argument to him. The president makes decisions, and if the president ordered us to do X, Y, or Z and it was legal, we would do it. If it’s not legal, it’s my job to say it’s illegal, and here’s why it’s illegal. I would emphasize cost and risk of the various courses of action. My job, then and now, is to let the president know what the course of action could be, let them know what the cost is, what the risks and benefits are. And then make a recommendation. That’s what I’ve done under both presidents.”
He went on to say, “President Trump never ordered me to tell the military to do something illegal. He never did that. I think that’s an important point.”
We were discussing the Lafayette Square incident while at Quarters Six, the chairman’s home on Generals’ Row at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac from the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Capitol. Next door to Quarters Six was the home of the Air Force chief of staff, General Charles Q. Brown Jr., who is slated to become the next chairman. Generals’ Row was built on land seized by the Union from Robert E. Lee’s plantation. It is a good place to hold a discussion about the relationship between a democracy and its standing army.
I tried to ask Milley why Lafayette Square had caught him off guard, given all that he had seen and learned already. Only a few weeks earlier, Trump had declared to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a meeting about China, that the “great U.S. military isn’t as capable as you think.” After the meeting, Milley spoke with the chiefs, who were angry and flustered by the president’s behavior. (Esper writes in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, that one member of the Joint Chiefs began studying the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which can be used to remove an unfit president.)
“Weren’t you aware that Trump—”
“I wasn’t aware that this was going to be a political event.”
I tacked. “Were you aware that this was”—I paused, searching for an artful term—“an unusual administration?”
“I’ll reserve comment on that,” Milley responded. “I think there were certainly plenty of warnings and indicators that others might say in hindsight were there. But for me, I’m a soldier, and my task is to follow lawful orders and maintain good order and discipline in the force.”
“You didn’t have situational awareness?”
“At that moment, I didn’t realize that there was a highly charged piece of political stagecraft going on, if you will. And when I did, I peeled off.” (That evening, Lieutenant General McMaster texted Milley the well-known meme of Homer Simpson disappearing into a hedge.)
The lesson, Milley said, was that he had to pay more attention. “I had to double down on ensuring that I personally—and that the uniformed military—that we all stayed clear of any political acts or anything that could be implied as being involved in politics.”
The week after Lafayette Square, Milley made his apology in the National Defense University speech—a speech that helped repair his relationship with the officer corps but destroyed his relationship with Trump.
“There are different gradients of what is bad. The really bad days are when people get killed in combat,” Milley told me. “But those 90 seconds were clearly a low point from a personal and professional standpoint for me, over the course of 43, 44 years of service. They were searing. It was a bad moment for me because it struck at the heart of the credibility of the institution.”
The chasm dividing Milley and Trump on matters of personal honor became obvious after Lafayette Square. In a statement, referring to Milley’s apology, Trump said of the chairman, “I saw at that moment he had no courage or skill.”
Milley viewed it differently. “Apologies are demonstrations of strength,” Milley told me. “There’s a whole concept of redemption in Western philosophy. It’s part and parcel of our philosophy, the Western religious tradition—the idea that human beings are fallible, that we sin and that we make mistakes and that when you do so you own the mistake, you admit it, and then you learn from that mistake and take corrective action and move on.”
For his part, General Chiarelli concluded that his friend had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quoting Peter Feaver, an academic expert on civil-military relations, Chiarelli said, “You have to judge Mark like you judge Olympic divers—by the difficulty of the dive.”
That summer, Milley visited Chiarelli in Washington State and, over breakfast, described what he thought was coming next. “It was unbelievable. This is August 2, and he laid out in specific detail what his concerns were between August and Inauguration Day. He identified one of his biggest concerns as January 6,” the day the Senate was to meet to certify the election. “It was almost like a crystal ball.”
Chiarelli said that Milley told him it was possible, based on his observations of the president and his advisers, that they would not accept an Election Day loss. Specifically, Milley worried that Trump would trigger a war—an “October surprise”—to create chaotic conditions in the lead-up to the election. Chiarelli mentioned the continuous skirmishes inside the White House between those who were seeking to attack Iran, ostensibly over its nuclear program, and those, like Milley, who could not justify a large-scale preemptive strike.
In the crucial period after his road-to-Damascus conversion, Milley set several goals for himself: keep the U.S. out of reckless, unnecessary wars overseas; maintain the military’s integrity, and his own; and prevent the administration from using the military against the American people. He told uniformed and civilian officials that the military would play no part in any attempt by Trump to illegally remain in office.
The desire on the part of Trump and his loyalists to utilize the Insurrection Act was unabating. Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser whom Milley is said to have called “Rasputin,” was vociferous on this point. Less than a week after George Floyd was murdered, Miller told Trump in an Oval Office meeting, “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter—they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.”
According to Woodward and Costa in Peril, Milley responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.” Then he turned to Trump. “Mr. President, they are not burning it down.”
I asked Milley to describe the evolution of his post–Lafayette Square outlook. “You know this term teachable moment?” he asked. “Every month thereafter I just did something publicly to continually remind the force about our responsibilities … What I’m trying to do the entire summer, all the way up to today, is keep the military out of actual politics.”
He continued, “We stay out of domestic politics, period, full stop, not authorized, not permitted, illegal, immoral, unethical—we don’t do it.” I asked if he ever worried about pockets of insurrectionists within the military.
“We’re a very large organization—2.1 million people, active duty and reserves. Some of the people in the organization get outside the bounds of the law. We have that on occasion. We’re a highly disciplined force dedicated to the protection of the Constitution and the American people … Are there one or two out there who have other thoughts in their mind? Maybe. But the system of discipline works.”
So you had no anxiety at all?
“Of anything large-scale? Not at all. Not then, not now.”
In the weeks before the election, Milley was a dervish of activity. He spent much of his time talking with American allies and adversaries, all worried about the stability of the United States. In what would become his most discussed move, first reported by Woodward and Costa, he called Chinese General Li Zuocheng, his People’s Liberation Army counterpart, on October 30, after receiving intelligence that China believed Trump was going to order an attack. “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said, according to Peril. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise … If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history.”
Milley later told the Senate Armed Services Committee that this call, and a second one two days after the January 6 insurrection, represented an attempt to “deconflict military actions, manage crisis, and prevent war between great powers that are armed with the world’s most deadliest weapons.”
The October call was endorsed by Secretary of Defense Esper, who was just days away from being fired by Trump. Esper’s successor, Christopher Miller, had been informed of the January call. Listening in on the calls were at least 10 U.S. officials, including representatives of the State Department and the CIA. This did not prevent Trump partisans, and Trump himself, from calling Milley “treasonous” for making the calls. (When news of the calls emerged, Miller condemned Milley for them—even though he later conceded that he’d been aware of the second one.)
Milley also spoke with lawmakers and media figures in the days leading up to the election, promising that the military would play no role in its outcome. In a call on the Saturday before Election Day, Milley told news anchors including George Stephanopoulos, Lester Holt, and Norah O’Donnell that the military’s role was to protect democracy, not undermine it. “The context was ‘We know how fraught things are, and we have a sense of what might happen, and we’re not going to let Trump do it,’ ” Stephanopoulos told me. “He was saying that the military was there to serve the country, and it was clear by implication that the military was not going to be part of a coup.” It seemed, Stephanopoulos said, that Milley was “desperately trying not to politicize the military.”
When the election arrived, Milley’s fear—that the president would not accept the outcome—came to pass. A few days later, when Acting Secretary Miller arrived at the Pentagon accompanied by a coterie of fellow Trump loyalists, including Kash Patel, senior officers in the building were unnerved. Patel has stated his conviction that the Pentagon is riddled with “deep state” operatives.
A few days after Esper’s firing, Milley gave a Veterans Day speech, in the presence of Miller, to remind the armed forces—and those who would manipulate them—of their oath to the Constitution. The speech was delivered at the opening of the National Army Museum at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia.
“The motto of the United States Army for over 200 years, since 14 June 1775 … has been ‘This we will defend,’ ” Milley said. “And the ‘this’ refers to the Constitution and to protect the liberty of the American people. You see, we are unique among armies. We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, a tyrant or dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe, or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution … We will never turn our back on our duty to protect and defend the idea that is America, the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
He closed with words from Thomas Paine: “These are times that try men’s souls. And the summer soldier and the sunshine Patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country. But he who stands by it deserves the love of man and woman. For tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”
When Miller followed Milley, his remarks betrayed a certain level of obliviousness; Milley’s speech had sounded like a warning shot directed squarely at hard-core Trumpists like him. “Chairman, thanks for setting the bar very high for the new guy to come in and make a few words,” Miller said. “I think all I would say to your statements is ‘Amen.’ Well done.”
I asked Milley later if he’d had Miller in mind when he gave that speech.
“Not at all,” he said. “My audience was those in uniform. At this point, we are six days or so after the election. It was already contested, already controversial—and I wanted to remind the uniformed military that our oath is to the Constitution and that we have no role to play in politics.”
He would remain a dervish until Inauguration Day: reassuring allies and cautioning adversaries; arguing against escalation with Iran; reminding the Joint Chiefs and the National Military Command Center to be aware of unusual requests or demands; and keeping an eye on the activities of the men dispatched by Trump to lead the Pentagon after Esper was fired, men who Milley and others suspected were interested in using the military to advance Trump’s efforts to remain president.
Shortly after Esper was fired, Milley told both Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, another Trump loyalist sent to the Pentagon, that he would make sure they would see the world “from behind bars” if they did anything illegal to prevent Joe Biden from taking the oath of office on January 20. (Both men have denied being warned in this manner.)
I asked Milley recently about his encounters with Trump’s men. As is his on-the-record custom, he minimized the drama of those days.
I said, “You literally warned political appointees that they would be punished if they engaged in treasonous activities.”
He responded: “I didn’t do that. Someone saying I did that?”
“You warned Kash Patel and others that they were fucking around and shouldn’t have been.”
“I didn’t warn anybody that I would hold them accountable for anything.”
“You warned them that they would be held accountable for breaking the law or violating their oaths.”
Suddenly, acquiescence.
“Yeah, sure, in conversation,” he said. “It’s my job to give advice, so I was advising people that we must follow the law. I give advice all the time.”
Today Milley says, about Trump and his closest advisers, “I’m not going to say whether I thought there was a civilian coup or not. I’m going to leave that to the American people to determine, and a court of law, and you’re seeing that play out every day. All I’m saying is that my duty as the senior officer of the United States military is to keep out of politics.”
What is certain is that, when January 20 finally arrived, Milley exhaled. According to I Alone Can Fix It, by the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, when Michelle Obama asked Milley at the inauguration how he was doing, he replied: “No one has a bigger smile today than I do.”
The arrival of a new president did not mean an end to challenges for Milley, or the Pentagon. Attempts to enlist the military in America’s zero-sum culture war only intensified. Elements of the hard right, for instance, would exploit manifestations of performative leftism—a drag show on an Air Force base, for instance—to argue that the military under Biden was hopelessly weak and “woke.” (Never mind that this was the same military that Trump, while president, had declared the strongest in history.) And in an unprecedented act of interference in the normal functioning of the military, Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has placed holds on the promotions of hundreds of senior officers to protest the Defense Department’s abortion policies. The officers affected by the Tuberville holds do not make such policies.
An even more substantial blow to morale and force cohesion came late in the summer of 2021, when American forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan against the advice of Milley and most other senior military leaders. The withdrawal—originally proposed by Trump, but ordered by Biden—was criticized by many veterans and active-duty soldiers, and the damage was exacerbated by the callous manner in which Biden treated America’s Afghan allies.
This summer, Milley and I visited the War Memorial of Korea, in Seoul, where Milley laid a wreath in front of a wall containing the names of hundreds of Massachusetts men killed in that war. I asked him about the end of America’s war in Afghanistan.
“I’ve got three tours in Afghanistan,” he said. “I lost a lot of soldiers in Afghanistan, and for any of us who served there and saw a considerable amount of combat in Afghanistan, that war did not end the way any of us wanted it to end.”
Do you consider it a loss?
“I think it was a strategic failure,” he answered, refusing to repeat the word I used. “When the enemy you’ve been fighting for 20 years captures the capital and unseats the government you’re supporting, that cannot be called anything else.”
He continued, “We sunk a tremendous amount of resources, a tremendous amount of money and, most importantly, lives into helping the Afghan people and giving them hope for a better future. For 20 years we did that. And our primary goal for going there was to prevent al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization from striking the United States ever again. That was the strategic promise President Bush made to the American people. And we have not, to date, been attacked from Afghanistan, so all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that served in Afghanistan should hold their heads high and should be proud of their contributions to American national security. But at the end of the day, the Taliban took the capital.”
Milley had recommended to Biden that the U.S. maintain a residual force of soldiers to buttress the American-allied government in Kabul. Biden, Milley said, listened to the military’s advice, weighed it, and then chose another path. “It was a lawful order, and we carried out a lawful order,” Milley said.
But, I asked him, did you think Afghanistan was winnable?
“I think it would have been a sustainable level of effort over time,” he answered. “Take where we’re at right now. We are still in Korea today, 70 years after the armistice was signed. When North Korea came across the border in the summer of 1950, the South Korean military was essentially a constabulary, and we had a limited number of advisers here. And then we reinforced very rapidly from our occupation forces in Japan, and then we fought the Korean War. So we ended up preventing North Korea from conquering South Korea, and that effort led to one of the most flourishing countries in the world.”
He went on to say, however, that he understood why leaders of both political parties, and a majority of Americans, wanted U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan. “These operations aren’t sustainable without the will of the people,” he said. “Would I and every soldier who served there wish that there was a better outcome? Absolutely, yes, and to that extent, that’s a regret.
“The end in Afghanistan didn’t happen because of a couple of decisions in the last days,” he said. “It was cumulative decisions over 20 years. The American people, as expressed in various polls, and two presidents of two different parties and the majority of members of Congress wanted us to withdraw—and we did.”
If the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a low, then a continuing high point for the Defense Department is its enormous effort to keep the Ukrainian army in the fight against Russia. Milley and Lloyd Austin, his former commander and Biden’s secretary of defense, have created a useful partnership, particularly regarding Ukraine.
The two men could not be more unalike: Milley cannot stop talking, and Austin is loath to speak more than the minimum number of words necessary to get through the day. But they seem to trust each other, and they sought, after Austin’s appointment, to bring stability back to the Pentagon. When I met Austin in his office in mid-September, he alluded to this common desire, and to the turbulence of the recent past. “We needed to make sure we had the relationship right and the swim lanes right—who is responsible for what,” he said. “The trust was there, so it was easy to work together to reestablish what we both knew should be the rules of the road.”
The massive effort to equip, train, and provide intelligence to Ukrainian forces—all while preventing the outbreak of direct warfare between the U.S. and Russia—must be considered (provisionally, of course) a consequential achievement of the Austin-Milley team. “We’ve provided Ukraine with its best chance of success in protecting its sovereign territory,” Austin told me. “We’ve pulled NATO together in a way that’s not been done, ever. This requires a lot of work by the Department of Defense. If you look at what he and I do every month—we’re talking with ministers of defense and chiefs of defense every month—it’s extraordinary.”
Milley has been less hawkish than some Biden-administration officials on the war with Russia. But he agrees that Ukraine is now the main battlefield between authoritarianism and the democratic order.
Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic
“World War II ended with the establishment of the rules-based international order. People often ridicule it—they call it ‘globalism’ and so on—but in fact, in my view, World War II was fought in order to establish a better peace,” Milley told me. “We the Americans are the primary authors of the basic rules of the road—and these rules are under stress, and they’re fraying at the edges. That’s why Ukraine is so important. President Putin has made a mockery of those rules. He’s making a mockery of everything. He has assaulted the very first principle of the United Nations, which is that you can’t tolerate wars of aggression and you can’t allow large countries to attack small countries by military means. He is making a direct frontal assault on the rules that were written in 1945.”
The magnitude of this assault requires a commensurate response, but with a vigilant eye toward the worst possible outcome, nuclear war. “It is incumbent upon all of us in positions of leadership to do the very best to maintain a sense of global stability,” Milley told me. “If we don’t, we’re going to pay the butcher’s bill. It will be horrific, worse than World War I, worse than World War II.”
The close relationship between Milley and Austin may help explain one of Milley’s missteps as chairman: his congressional testimony on the subject of critical race theory and “white rage.” In June 2021, both Milley and Austin were testifying before the House Armed Services Committee when Michael Waltz, a Republican representative from Florida (and, like Milley, a former Green Beret), asked Austin about a lecture given at West Point called “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage.” Austin said that the lecture sounded to him like “something that should not occur.” A short while later, Milley provided his own, more expansive views. “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” he said. And then it seemed as if the anger he felt about the assault on the Capitol spilled out of its container. “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?” he asked. “What is wrong with having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”
These comments caused a new round of criticism of Milley in some senior military circles, including from generals who agreed with him but believed that this sort of commentary was the purview of the political echelon.
Colonel Ross Davidson, Milley’s former operations officer, who was watching the hearing, told me he thinks Milley’s contempt for the January 6 insurrectionists was not the only thing that motivated his testimony. Seeing Austin, the first Black secretary of defense and his friend, under sustained criticism led Milley, as Davidson describes it, to “move to the sound of the guns.”
“That’s in his nature,” Davidson said. “ ‘Hey, man, my battle buddy Lloyd is being attacked.’ ”
Today, Austin defends Milley’s statements: “In one instance, in one academic institution, a professor was exposing his students to this,” he said, referring to critical race theory. “If you are familiar with all of our curriculum and what we do in our various schools and how we train leaders, it’s kind of upsetting and insulting” to suggest that the military has gone “woke.”
When I asked Milley recently about this episode, his answer was, predictably, lengthier, more caustic, and substantially more fervent.
“There’s a lot of discourse around whether it’s a tough Army or a woke Army,” he said, referring to commentary on right-wing news channels. “Here’s my answer: First of all, it’s all bullshit. Second, these accusations are coming from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re doing it for political purposes. Our military wasn’t woke 24 months ago, and now it’s woke?”
He continued, “You want woke? I’ll give you woke. Here’s what your military’s doing: There are 5,000 sorties a day, including combat patrols protecting the U.S.A. and our interests around the world. At least 60 to 100 Navy warships are patrolling the seven seas, keeping the world free for ocean transport. We have 250,000 troops overseas, in 140 countries, defending the rules-based international order. We’ve got kids training constantly. This military is trained, well equipped, well led, and focused on readiness. Our readiness statuses are at the highest levels they’ve been in 20 years. So this idea of a woke military is total, utter, made-up bullshit. They are taking two or three incidents, single anecdotes, a drag show that is against DOD policy. I don’t think these shows should be on bases, and neither does the secretary of defense or the chain of command.”
This table-pounder of a speech prompted an obvious question: What will Milley say publicly once he’s retired? Donald Trump is the presumptive favorite to win the Republican nomination for president, and Trump represents to Milley—as numerous books, and my understanding of the man, strongly suggest—an existential threat to American democracy.
“I won’t speak up in politics. I won’t. You can hold me to it,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on elected officials. I’ll comment on policies, which is my purview. I have a certain degree of expertise and experience that I think enable me to make rational contributions to conversations about complex topics about war and peace. To make personal comments on certain political leaders, I don’t think that’s my place.”
Never?
“There are exceptions that can be made under certain circumstances,” he said. “But they’re pretty rare.”
It is hard to imagine Milley restraining himself if Trump attacks him directly—and it is as close to a sure thing as you can have in American politics that Trump will. At one point during his presidency, Trump proposed calling back to active duty two retired flag officers who had been critical of him, Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, so that they could be court-martialed. Mark Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, says he and Milley had to talk Trump out of such a plan.
During one conversation at Quarters Six, Milley said, “If there’s something we’ve learned from history, it’s that aggression left unanswered leads to more aggression.” He was talking about Vladimir Putin, but I got the sense that he was talking about someone else as well.
If Trump is reelected president, there will be no Espers or Milleys in his administration. Nor will there be any officials of the stature and independence of John Kelly, H. R. McMaster, or James Mattis. Trump and his allies have already threatened officials they see as disloyal with imprisonment, and there is little reason to imagine that he would not attempt to carry out his threats.
Milley has told friends that he expects that if Trump returns to the White House, the newly elected president will come after him. “He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list,” he has said. But he’s also told friends that he does not believe the country will reelect Trump.
When I asked him about this, he wouldn’t answer directly, but when I asked him to describe his level of optimism about the country’s future, he said: “I have a lot of confidence in the general officer corps, and I have confidence in the American people. The United States of America is an extraordinarily resilient country, agile and flexible, and the inherent goodness of the American people is there. I’ve always believed that, and I will go to my grave believing that.”
I pressed him: After all you’ve been through, you believe that?
“There are bumps in the road, to be sure, and you get through the bumps, but I don’t want to overstate this. What did I do? All I did was try to preserve the integrity of the military and to keep the military out of domestic politics. That’s all I did.”
These assertions will be debated for a long time. But it is fair to say that Milley came close to red lines that are meant to keep uniformed officers from participating in politics. It is also fair to say that no president has ever challenged the idea of competent civilian control in the manner of Donald Trump, and that no president has ever threatened the constitutional underpinnings of the American project in the manner Trump has. The apportionment of responsibility in the American system—presidents give orders; the military carries them out—works best when the president is sane. The preservation of a proper civil-military relationship is hugely important to democracy—but so too is universal acceptance of the principle that political officials leave office when they lose legitimate elections.
As Milley cedes the chairmanship, he also cedes Quarters Six. I visited him there on a number of occasions, and almost every time he walked me out onto the porch, he would look out theatrically on the city before us—on the Capitol that was sacked but not burned—and say, “Rome hasn’t fallen!”
One time, though, he said, “Rome hasn’t fallen—yet.”
This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “The Patriot.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence.
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The upcoming trials of Trump—in Manhattan; Atlanta; South Florida; and Washington, D.C.—will not be the first time he encounters this dynamic. His claims of 2020 election fraud floundered before judges, resulting in a series of almost unmitigated losses. In one ruling that censured and fined a team of Trump-aligned lawyers who had pursued spurious fraud allegations, a federal judge in Michigan made the point bluntly. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” she wrote, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.”
But only now is Trump himself appearing as a criminal defendant, stripped of the authority and protections of the presidency, before judges with the power to impose a prison sentence. The very first paragraph of the Georgia indictment marks this shift in power. Contrary to everything that Trump has tried so desperately to prove, the indictment asserts that “Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020”—and then actively sought to subvert it.
Although Trump loves to file lawsuits against those who have supposedly wronged him, the courtroom has never been his home turf. Records from depositions over the years show him to be sullen and impatient while under oath, like a middle schooler stuck in detention. Timothy L. O’Brien, a journalist whom Trump unsuccessfully sued for libel in 2006, recalled in Bloomberg that his lawyers forced Trump to acknowledge that he had lied over the years about a range of topics. Trump has seemed similarly ill at ease during his arraignments. When the magistrate judge presiding over his arraignment in the January 6 case asked whether he understood that the conditions of his release required that he commit no more crimes, he assented almost in a whisper.
All of this has been a cause for celebration among Trump’s opponents—because the charges against him are warranted and arguably overdue, but also for a different reason. The next year of American politics will be a twin drama unlike anything the nation has seen before, played out in the courtroom and on the campaign trail, often at the same time. Among Democrats, the potential interplay of these storylines has produced a profound hope: Judicial power, they anticipate, may scuttle Trump’s chances of retaking the presidency, and finally solve the political problem of Donald Trump once and for all.
It has become conventional wisdom that nothing can hurt Trump’s standing in the polls. But his legal jeopardy could, in fact, have political consequences. At least some proportion of Republicans and independents are already paying attention to Trump’s courtroom travails, and reassessing their prior beliefs. A recent report by the political-science collaborative Bright Line Watch found that, following the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents indictment in June, the number of voters in each group who believed that Trump had committed a crime in his handling of classified information jumped by 10 percentage points or more (to 25 and 46 percent, respectively).
And despite Trump’s effort to frame January 6 as an expression of mass discontent by the American people, the insurrection has never been popular: Extremist candidates who ran on a platform of election denial in the 2022 midterms performed remarkably poorly in swing states. Ongoing criminal proceedings that remind Americans again and again of Trump’s culpability for the insurrection—among his other alleged crimes—seem unlikely to boost his popularity with persuadable voters. If he appears diminished or uncertain in court, even the enthusiasm of the MAGA faithful might conceivably wane.
Above all of this looms the possibility of a conviction before Election Day, which has no doubt inspired many Democratic fantasies. If Trump is found guilty of any of the crimes of which he now stands accused, a recent poll shows, almost half of Republicans say they would not cast their vote for him.
But that outcome is only one possibility, and it does not appear to be the most likely.
Americans who oppose Trump—and, more to the point, who wish he would disappear as a political force—have repeatedly sought saviors in legal institutions. The early Trump years saw the lionization of Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a white knight and (bewilderingly) a sex symbol. Later, public affection turned toward the unassuming civil servants who testified against Trump during his first impeachment, projecting an old-school devotion to the truth that contrasted with Trump’s gleeful cynicism. Today, Mueller’s successors—particularly Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the Georgia prosecution—are the subjects of their own adoring memes and merchandise. One coffee mug available for purchase features Smith’s face and the text Somebody’s Gonna Get Jacked Up!
Perhaps this time will be different. With Trump out of office, Smith hasn’t been limited, as Mueller was, by the Justice Department’s internal guidance prohibiting the indictment of a sitting chief executive. Willis, a state prosecutor, operates outside the federal government’s constraints. And neither Bill Barr nor Republican senators can stand between Trump and a jury.
The indictments against Trump have unfolded in ascending order of moral and political importance. In April, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced charges for Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money scheme that began in advance of the 2016 election. In June came Smith’s indictment of Trump in Florida, over the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Two months later, the special counsel unveiled charges against Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Willis’s indictment in Georgia quickly followed, employing the state’s racketeering statute to allege a widespread scheme to subvert the vote in favor of Trump. (He has pleaded not guilty in the first three cases and, as of this writing, was awaiting arraignment in Georgia. The Trump campaign released a statement calling the latest indictment “bogus.”)
But each case has its own set of complexities. The New York one is weighed down by a puzzling backstory—of charges considered, not pursued, and finally taken up after all—that leaves Bragg’s office open to accusations of a politically motivated prosecution. The indictment in Florida seems relatively open-and-shut as a factual matter, but difficult to prosecute because it involves classified documents not meant to be widely shared, along with a jury pool that is relatively sympathetic to Trump and a judge who has already contorted the law in Trump’s favor. In the January 6 case, based in Washington, D.C., the sheer singularity of the insurrection means that the legal theories marshaled by the special counsel’s office are untested. The sweeping scope of the Georgia indictment—which involves 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts—may lead to practical headaches and delays as the case proceeds.
Trump’s army of lawyers will be ready to kick up dust and frustrate each prosecution. As of July, a political-action committee affiliated with Trump had spent about $40 million on legal fees to defend him and his allies. The strategy is clear: delay. Trump has promised to file a motion to move the January 6 proceedings out of Washington, worked regularly to stretch out ordinary deadlines in that case, and tried (unsuccessfully) to move the New York case from state to federal court. The longer Trump can draw out the proceedings, the more likely he is to make it through the Republican primaries and the general election without being dragged down by a conviction. At that point, a victorious Trump could simply wait until his inauguration, then demand that the Justice Department scrap the federal cases against him. Even if a conviction happens before Americans go to the polls, Trump is almost certain to appeal, hoping to strand any verdict in purgatory as voters decide whom to support.
Currently, the court schedule is set to coincide with the 2024 Republican primaries. The Manhattan trial, for now, is scheduled to begin in March. In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Aileen Cannon has set a May trial date—though the proceedings will likely be pushed back. In the January 6 case, Smith has asked for a lightning-fast trial date just after New Year’s; in Georgia, Willis has requested a trial date in early March. But still, what little time is left before next November is rapidly slipping away. In all likelihood, voters will have to decide how to cast their ballot before the trials conclude.
The pileup of four trials in multiple jurisdictions would be chaotic even if the defendant were not a skillful demagogue running for president. There’s no formal process through which judges and prosecutors can coordinate parallel trials, and that confusion could lead to scheduling mishaps and dueling prosecutorial strategies that risk undercutting one another. For instance, if a witness is granted immunity to testify against Trump in one case, then charged by a different prosecutor in another, their testimony in the first case might be used against them in the second, and so they might be reluctant to talk.
In each of the jurisdictions, defendants are generally required to sit in court during trial, though judges might make exceptions. This entirely ordinary restriction will, to some, look politically motivated if Trump is not allowed to skip out for campaign rallies, though conversely, Trump’s absence might not sit well with jurors who themselves may wish to be elsewhere. All in all, it may be hard to shake the appearance of a traveling legal circus.
Attacking the people responsible for holding him to account is one of Trump’s specialties. Throughout the course of their respective investigations, Trump has smeared Bragg (who is Black) as an “animal,” Willis (who is also Black) as “racist,” and Smith as “deranged.” Just days after the January 6 case was assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump was already complaining on his social-media site, Truth Social, that “THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL” with Chutkan presiding (in the January 6 cases she has handled, she has evinced little sympathy for the rioters). Anything that goes wrong for Trump during the proceedings seems destined to be the subject of a late-night Truth Social post or a wrathful digression from the rally stage.
However damning the cases against Trump, they will matter to voters only if they hear accurate accounts of them from a trusted news source. Following each of Trump’s indictments to date, Fox News has run segment after segment on his persecution. A New York Times /Siena College poll released in July, after the first two indictments, found that zero percent of Trump’s loyal MAGA base—about 37 percent of Republicans—believes he committed serious federal crimes.
And beyond the MAGA core? A recent CBS News poll showed that 59 percent of Americans and 83 percent of self-described non-MAGA Republicans believe the investigations and indictments against Trump are, at least in part, attempts to stop him politically. Trump and his surrogates will take every opportunity to stoke that belief, and the effect of those efforts must be balanced against the hits Trump will take from being on trial. Recent poll numbers show Trump running very close to President Joe Biden even after multiple indictments—a fairly astonishing achievement for someone who is credibly accused of attempting a coup against the government that he’s now campaigning to lead.
The law can do a great deal. But the justice system is only one institution of many, and it can’t be fully separated from the broader ecosystem of cultural and political pathologies that brought the country to this situation in the first place.
After Robert Mueller chose not to press for an indictment of Trump on obstruction charges, because of Justice Department guidance on presidential immunity, the liberal and center-right commentariat soured on the special counsel, declaring him to have failed. If some Americans now expect Fani Willis or Jack Smith to disappear the problem of Donald Trump—and the authoritarian movement he leads—they will very likely be disappointed once again. Which wouldn’t matter so much if serial disappointment in legal institutions—he just keeps getting away with it—didn’t encourage despair, cynicism, and nihilism. These are exactly the sentiments that autocrats hope to engender. They would be particularly dangerous attitudes during a second Trump term, when public outrage will be needed to galvanize civil servants to resist abuses of power—and they must be resisted.
Trump’s trials are perhaps best seen as one part of a much larger legal landscape. The Justice Department’s prosecutions of rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 seem to have held extremist groups back from attempting other riots or acts of mass intimidation, even though Trump has called for protests as his indictments have rained down. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently announced criminal charges alleging that more than a dozen Republicans acted as “fake electors” in an effort to steal the 2020 election for Trump—and as a result, would-be accomplices in Trump’s further plots may be less inclined to risk their own freedom to help the candidate out. Likewise, some of those lawyers who worked to overturn the 2020 vote have now been indicted in Georgia and face potential disbarment—which could cause other attorneys to hold back from future schemes.
This is a vision of accountability as deterrence, achieved piece by piece. Even if Trump wins a second term, these efforts will complicate his drive for absolute authority. And no matter the political fallout, the criminal prosecutions of Trump are themselves inherently valuable. When Trump’s opponents declare that “no one is above the law,” they’re asserting a bedrock principle of American society, and the very act of doing so helps keep that principle alive.
None of this settles what may happen on Election Day, of course, or in the days that follow. But nor would a conviction. If a majority of voters in a handful of swing states decide they want to elect a president convicted of serious state and federal crimes, the courts can’t prevent them from doing so.
Such a result would lead to perhaps the most exaggerated disjunction yet between American law and politics: the matter of what to do with a felonious chief executive. If federal charges are the problem, Trump seems certain to try to grant himself a pardon—a move that would raise constitutional questions left unsettled since Watergate. In the case of state-level conviction, though, President Trump would have no such power. Could it be that he might end up serving his second term from a Georgia prison?
The question isn’t absurd, and yet there’s no obvious answer to how that would work in practice. The best way of dealing with such a problem is as maddeningly, impossibly straightforward as it always has been: Don’t elect this man in the first place.
This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Trump on Trial.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
