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Tag: existential threat

  • A Warning

    A Warning

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    Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?”

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    I did not understand how so many ostensibly patriotic voters could subsequently embrace Trump, but mainly I couldn’t understand his soul sickness: How does a person come to such a rotten, depraved thought?

    That day in the White House, I mentioned to Kushner one of Trump’s more recent calumnies and told him that, in my view, his father-in-law’s incivility was damaging the country. Strangely, Kushner seemed to agree with me: “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

    I was confused at first. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment.

    Perverse, of course. But revelatory as well, and more than a little prophetic. Because Trump, in the intervening years, has gone lower, and lower, and lower. If there is a bottom—no sure thing—he’s getting closer. Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet “fascist.”

    “For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” In a separate speech, Trump, Nichols wrote, “melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.”

    Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency. As David A. Graham, one of our magazine’s chroniclers of the Trump era, wrote recently, “The former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.”

    David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged

    There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.

    And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.

    The Atlantic, as our loyal readers know, is deliberately not a partisan magazine. “Of no party or clique” is our original 1857 motto, and it is true today. Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.

    This editor’s note appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Warning.”

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    Jeffrey Goldberg

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  • Kevin McCarthy Got What He Wanted

    Kevin McCarthy Got What He Wanted

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    “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.”

    Ronald Brownstein: The only sin that Republicans can’t forgive

    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.

    From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?

    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.

    Mark Leibovich: The most pathetic men in America

    “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.

    Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved

    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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    Mark Leibovich

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  • A Politician Who Loved Being Courted

    A Politician Who Loved Being Courted

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    Every so often, someone asks me who my favorite politicians to write about over the years have been. I always place Bill Richardson, the longtime congressman and former governor of New Mexico, near the top of my list. I once mentioned this to Richardson himself.

    “How high on the list?” he immediately wanted to know. “Top 10? Top three? I get competitive, you know.”

    Richardson died in his sleep on Friday, at age 75. I will miss covering this man, the two-term Democratic governor, seven-term congressman, United Nations ambassador, energy secretary, crisis diplomat, occasional mischief magnet, and freelance hostage negotiator who even holds the Guinness World Record for the politician who’s shaken the most hands—13,392—in an eight-hour period.

    “Make sure you mention that Guinness World Record thing,” Richardson urged me the first time I wrote about him, in 2003. “The handshake record is important to me.”

    Why? I asked. “Because it shows that I love politics,” he replied. “And I do love politics. I love to campaign. I love parades. I don’t believe I’m pretentious. I’m very earthy.”

    But why was the fact that he loved politics important?

    “Because I’m sick of all these politicians these days who are always trying to convince you that they are not really politicians,” Richardson went on. I had noticed this phenomenon as well, and it holds up: that the slickest and most unctuous people you encounter in politics are often the ones who spend the most energy trying to convince you they hate politics and are in fact “not professional politicians.”

    “I don’t mind being called a ‘professional politician,’” Richardson added. “It’s better than being an amateur, right?”

    From the September 2023 issue: How America got mean

    Richardson was an original. Born to a Mexican mother and an American businessman, he spent much of his childhood in Mexico City and identified strongly as Latino. He served as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the 1980s and was the only Latino governor in America during his two terms in Santa Fe. Richardson spoke often about how his dual ethnic and cultural identities placed him in advantageous and sometimes awkward positions—“between worlds” (which he’d use as the title of his 2005 memoir).

    His identities also placed Richardson in big demand as probably the most prominent Latino elected official in the country at the time. He absolutely loved being in big demand, and was milking his coveted status as much as possible when I first encountered him. That September, all of the 2004 Democratic candidates for president—John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards, etc.—were straining to pay respects to Richardson after a debate in Albuquerque.

    I was working for the Washington Post Style section at the time, and I found Richardson’s full-frontal “love of the game” quite winning. He was over-the-top and unabashed about the enjoyment he derived from the parade of candidates coming before him. “It’s fun to get your ring kissed,” Richardson told me that night, though he might not have said ring.

    We were walking into a post-debate reception for another candidate, Senator Joe Lieberman. Like most of the Democratic VIPs in Albuquerque that night, Lieberman was an old friend of Richardson’s; they’d worked together on the 1992 Democratic Party platform committee.

    “I wore this to curry favor with you,” Lieberman told Richardson, pointing to a New Mexico pin on his jacket. “You also saw that I spoke a little Spanish in [the debate].”

    “I thought that was Yiddish,” Richardson said. Lieberman then got everyone’s attention and offered a toast to El Jefe.

    Richardson let me ride around with him in the back of his SUV while he tried to hit post-debate receptions for all of the candidates. I noted that he’d instructed the state police driver to keep going faster and faster on Interstate 40—the vehicle hit 110 miles an hour at one point. When I mentioned the triple-digit speed in my story, it caused a bit of a controversy in New Mexico. Ralph Nader made a stink. (“If he will do this with a reporter in the car,” Nader said, according to the Associated Press, “what will they do when there’s no reporter in the car?”)

    The next time I saw Richardson, a few months later, he shook his head at me and tried to deny that the vehicle was going 110.  I held my ground.

    “Oh, whatever. Fuck it,” Richardson said. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”

    Richardson ran for president in 2008, but he quit after finishing fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire. I had since moved on to The New York Times and used to run into him on the campaign circuit. A few weeks after he dropped out, I went down to Santa Fe to interview him about the lengths that the two remaining Democratic candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—were going to in an attempt to win his endorsement. Another Bill Richardson primary! What could be more fun?

    “Oh, the full-court press is on like you wouldn’t believe,” he told me. The “political anthropology” of this was quite interesting too, he added. “Barack is very precise,” like a “surgical bomb,” Richardson said. “The Clintons are more like a carpet bomb.” He relished my interest in the pursuit of him.

    “I want to make it clear that I’m not annoyed by any of this,” Richardson said of the repeated overtures he was getting from the candidates and their various emissaries. I quoted him saying this in the Times, but not what I said in response to him in the moment: “No shit, governor.”

    I’ll admit that the notion of a pol who loves the game seems quite at odds with the tenor of politics today. People now routinely toss out phrases like our democracy is at stake and existential threat to America, and it’s not necessarily overheated. Fun? Not so much.

    But thinking about Richardson makes me nostalgic for campaigns and election nights that did not feel so much like political Russian roulette. Presidency or prison? Suspend the Constitution or preserve it? Let’s face it: Death threats, mug shots, insurrections, and white supremacists are supreme buzzkills.

    From the October 2023 issue: The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump

    Richardson made it clear to me that he’d loved running for president—it was one of the best times of his life, he said—and he missed the experience of it almost as soon as he got out. But what he really wanted was, you know, the job. “I would have been a good president,” he said in Santa Fe in 2008. “I still believe that. Please put that in there, okay?”

    If nothing else, the Clinton-Obama courtship was a nice cushion for Richardson as he tried to ease back into life in the relative quiet of his governor’s office. It also, he said, might get him a gig in the next administration. Richardson was 60 at the time and said he envisioned “a few more chapters” for himself in public life. Richardson told me he would have loved to be someone’s running mate or secretary of state.

    “I’m not pining for it, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ve had a great life,” he told me. “I’m at peace with myself.”

    He wound up endorsing Obama, who, after he was elected, nominated Richardson to be his secretary of commerce—only to have Richardson withdraw over allegations of improper business dealings as governor (no charges were filed).

    Richardson devoted the last stage of his career to his work as a troubleshooting diplomat and crisis negotiator. He would speak to thugs or warlords, drop into the most treacherous sectors of the globe—North Korea, Myanmar—if he thought it might help secure the release of a hostage.  Among the many tributes to Richardson this past weekend from the highest levels (Joe Biden, Obama, the Clintons), I was struck most by the ones from some of the people who knew directly the ordeals he worked to end: the basketball star Brittney Griner and the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, who called Richardson “a giant—the first giant—in American hostage diplomacy.”

    The last time I saw Richardson was a few years ago, in the pre-pandemic Donald Trump years—maybe 2018 or 2019. We had breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel, near the White House. I remember asking him what he called himself those days, what he considered his current job title to be.

    Richardson shrugged. “‘Humanitarian,’ maybe?” he said. But he worried that it sounded pretentious.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Living in Phoenix Makes Perfect Sense

    Living in Phoenix Makes Perfect Sense

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    In Phoenix, a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit now somehow counts as a respite. On Monday, America’s hottest major city ended its ominous streak of 31 straight days in which temperatures crested past 110. The toll of this heat—a monthly average of 102.7 degrees in July—has been brutal. One woman was admitted to a hospital’s burn unit after she fell on the pavement outside her home, and towering saguaros have dropped arms and collapsed. Over the past month, hospitals filling up with burn and heat-stroke victims have reached capacities not seen since the height of the pandemic.

    “Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” You might ask that question to the many hundreds of thousands of new residents who have made the Arizona metropolis America’s fastest-growing city. Last year, Maricopa County, where Phoenix sits, gained more residents than any other county in the United States—just as it did in 2021, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

    At its core, the question makes a mystery of something that isn’t a mystery at all. For many people, living in Phoenix makes perfect sense. Pleasant temperatures most of the year, relatively inexpensive housing, and a steady increase in economic opportunities have drawn people for 80 years, turning the city from a small desert outpost of 65,000 into a sprawling metro area of more than 5 million. Along the way, a series of innovations has made the heat seem like a temporary inconvenience rather than an existential threat for many residents. Perhaps not even a heat wave like this one will change anything.

    My first morning in Phoenix, more than 20 years ago, the sun broke the horizon two miles up a trail in South Mountain Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the United States. I had arrived the previous night from Michigan, leaving behind the late-March dreariness that passes for spring in the Midwest for several months of research that would become my book, Power Lines. As the sun turned the mountain golden and I stripped down to short sleeves for the first time in months, I realized the Valley of the Sun’s charms.

    Outside the summer months, the quality of life in Phoenix is really quite high—a fact that city boosters have promoted stretching back to before World War II. They traded the desiccated “Salt River Valley” for the welcoming “Valley of the Sun.” Efforts to downplay the dangers of Phoenix’s climate go back even further. In 1895, when Phoenix was home to a few thousand people, a local newspaper reported that it had been proved “by figures and facts” that the heat is “all a joke,” because the “sensible temperature” that people experienced was far less severe than what the thermometers recorded. “But it’s a dry heat” has a long history, one in which generations of prospective newcomers have been taught to perceive Phoenix’s climate as more beneficial than oppressive.

    Most people surely move to Phoenix not because of the weather, but because of the housing. The Valley of the Sun’s ongoing commitment to new housing development continues to keep housing prices well below those of neighboring California, drawing many emigrants priced out of the Golden State. Subdivisions have popped up in irrigated farm fields seemingly overnight. In 1955, as the home builder John F. Long was constructing Maryvale, then on Phoenix’s western edge, he quickly turned a cantaloupe farm into seven model homes. Five years later, more than 22,000 people lived in the neighborhood; now more than 200,000 do. Even today, the speed of construction can create confusion, as residents puzzle over the location of Heartland Ranch or Copper Falls or other new subdivisions that include most of the 250,000 homes built since 2010.

    Even in the summer, you might not always notice just how harsh of a terrain Phoenix can be. Developers engage in a struggle to secure water rights, tapping groundwater aquifers, drawing water from the Colorado River brought to the city by aqueduct, and purchasing water from local farmers. Air-conditioning is the lifeblood of Phoenix, as much a part of the city as the subway system is in New York. In 1961, Herbert Leggett, a Phoenix banker, spoke of his normal summer day to The Saturday Evening Post: “I awake in my air-conditioned home in the morning … I dress and get into my air-conditioned automobile and drive to the air-conditioned garage in the basement of this building. I work in an air-conditioned office, eat in an air-conditioned restaurant, and perhaps go to an air-conditioned theater.”

    In the kind of air-conditioned bubbles Leggett described, it is actually possible for people like me, who work indoors, to forget the heat and oppression of Phoenix’s summer—that is, until we have to scurry across a parking lot or cross concrete plazas between buildings. Starting in late April, when high temperatures regularly hit over 90, many residents fire up their AC, using it until October, when highs once again drop into the 80s. At the height of summer, Phoenix becomes virtually an indoor city during the day. Remote car starters become valuable amenities for taking the edge off the heat. Runners wake before dawn to exercise, and dogs are banned from hiking trails in city parks on triple-digit days. With air-conditioning, the benefits of Phoenix outweigh the drawbacks for many residents.

    But this lifestyle comes with a cost. Electricity consumption has soared in Phoenix, almost doubling in the average home from 1970 to today. At the height of its operation, Four Corners Power Plant, only one of five such coal-fired power plants built north of Phoenix to help power the region’s growth, emitted 16 million tons of carbon annually, equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 3.4 million cars. Even today, with most coal-fired generation retired, Phoenix relies heavily on carbon-emitting natural gas for its electricity. Both the past and present of Phoenix’s energy worsens the very heat its residents are trying to escape.

    Air-conditioning protects most people, but especially as the heat intensifies, those without it are left incredibly vulnerable. Elderly women living alone, many of whom struggle to maintain and pay for air-conditioning, are particularly susceptible, accounting for the majority of indoor heat-related deaths. Unhoused people, whose population in Phoenix has increased by 70 percent in the past six years, suffer tremendously and make up much of the death toll. One unhoused man recently compared sitting in his wheelchair to “sitting down on hot coals.”

    This heat wave will end, but there will be another. Still, the horror stories of life in 115 degrees is hardly guaranteed to blunt Phoenix’s explosive growth. There are currently building permits for 80,000 new homes in the Phoenix metro area that have not yet commenced construction—homes that will require more water, more AC, and more energy.

    But in a sense, nothing about Phoenix is unusual at all. The movement from air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space that Leggett described—and the massive energy use that makes it all run—is now typical in a country where nearly 90 percent of homes use air-conditioning. Clothing companies such as Land’s End advertise summer sweaters that “will come to your rescue while you’re working hard for those eight hours in your office, which might feel like an icebox at times.” And heat has claimed lives in “temperate” cities such as Omaha, Seattle, and Boston. Indeed, one 2020 study concluded that the Northeast had the highest rate of excess deaths attributable to heat.

    “Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” serves as nothing more than a defensive mechanism. It makes peculiar the choices that huge numbers of Americans have made, often under economic duress—choices to move to the warm climates of the Sun Belt, to move where housing is affordable, to ignore where energy comes from and the inequalities it creates, and, above all, to downplay the threats of climate change. In that way, Phoenix isn’t the exception. It’s the norm.

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    Andrew Needham

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  • How Jason Aldean Explains Donald Trump (And Vice Versa)

    How Jason Aldean Explains Donald Trump (And Vice Versa)

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    The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.

    Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.

    In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”

    Read: Trump’s rhetoric of white nostalgia

    Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.

    “Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”

    Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)

    Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.

    Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.

    In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.

    The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.

    In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

    The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.

    By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he’s denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”

    Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.

    A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.

    Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”

    That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”

    Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation

    As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.

    Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Political Campaigns May Never Be the Same

    Political Campaigns May Never Be the Same

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    Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder. Voice-impersonation technology and deep-fake videos are scaring campaign strategists, who fear that their deployment in the days before the 2024 election could decide the winner. Even some AI developers are worried about what they’ve unleashed: Last week the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT practically begged Congress to regulate his industry. (Whether that was genuine civic-mindedness or self-serving performance remains to be seen.)

    Amid the growing panic, however, a new generation of tech entrepreneurs is selling a more optimistic future for the merger of AI and politics. In their telling, the awesome automating power of AI has the potential to achieve in a few years what decades of attempted campaign-finance reform have failed to do—dramatically reduce the cost of running for election in the United States. With AI’s ability to handle a campaign’s most mundane and time-consuming tasks—think churning out press releases or identifying and targeting supporters—candidates would have less need to hire high-priced consultants. The result could be a more open and accessible democracy, in which small, bare-bones campaigns can compete with well-funded juggernauts.

    Martin Kurucz, the founder of a Democratic fundraising company that is betting big on AI, calls the technology “a great equalizer.” “You will see a lot more representation,” he told me, “because people who didn’t have access to running for elected office now will have that. That in and of itself is huge.”

    Annie Lowrey: AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.

    Kurucz told me that his firm, Sterling Data Company, has used AI to help more than 1,000 Democratic campaigns and committees, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and now-Senator John Fetterman, identify potential donors. The speed with which AI can sort through donor files meant that Sterling was able to cut its prices last year by nearly half, Kurucz said, allowing even small campaigns to afford its services. “I don’t think there have ever been this many down-ballot candidates with some level of digital fundraising operation,” Kurucz said. “These candidates now have access to a proper campaign infrastructure.”

    Campaigns big and small have begun using generative-AI software such as ChatGPT and DALL-E to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches. A handful of consultants told me they were mostly just experimenting with AI, but Kurucz said that its influence is more pervasive. “Almost half of the first drafts of fundraising emails are being produced by ChatGPT,” he claimed. “Not many [campaigns] will publicly admit it.”

    The adoption of AI may not be such welcome news, however, for voters who are already sick of being bombarded with ads, canned emails, and fundraising requests during election season. Advertising will become even more hyper-targeted, Tom Newhouse, a GOP strategist, told me, because campaigns can use AI to sort through voter data, run performance tests, and then create dozens of highly specific ads with far fewer staff. The shift, he said, could narrow the gap between small campaigns and their richer rivals.

    But several political consultants I spoke with were skeptical that the technology would democratize campaigning anytime soon. For one, AI won’t aid only the scrappy, underfunded campaigns. Deeper-pocketed organizations could use it to expand their capacity exponentially, whether to test and quick produce hundreds of highly specific ads or pinpoint their canvassing efforts in ways that widen their advantage.

    Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits first-time progressive candidates, told me that the office seekers she works with aren’t focused on AI. Hyperlocal races are still won by the candidates who knock on the most doors; robots haven’t taken up that task, and even if they could, who would want them to? “The most important thing for a candidate is the relationship with a voter,” Litman said. “AI can’t replicate that. At least not yet.”

    Although campaigns have started using AI, its impact—even to people in politics—is not always apparent. Fetterman’s Pennsylvania campaign worked with Kurucz’s AI-first firm, but two former advisers to Fetterman scoffed at the suggestion that the technology contributed meaningfully to his victory. “I don’t remember anyone using AI for anything on that campaign,” Kenneth Pennington, a digital consultant and one of the Fetterman campaign’s earliest hires, told me. Pennington is a partner at a progressive consulting firm called Middle Seat, which he said had not adopted the use of generative AI in any significant way and had no immediate plans to. “Part of what our approach and selling point is as a team, and as a firm, is authenticity and creativity, which I think is not a strong suit of a tool like ChatGPT,” Pennington said. “It’s robotic. I don’t think it’s ready for prime time in politics.”

    If AI optimists and pessimists agree on anything, it’s that the technology will allow more people to participate in the political process. Whether that’s a good thing is another question.

    Just as AI platforms could allow, say, a schoolteacher running for city council to draft press releases in between grading papers, so too can they help a far-right activist with millions of followers create a semi-believable deep-fake video of President Joe Biden announcing a military draft.

    “We’ve democratized access to the ability to create sophisticated fakes,” Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at UC Berkeley, told me.

    Fears over deep-fakes have escalated in the past month. In response to Biden’s formal declaration of his reelection bid, the Republican National Committee released a video that used AI-generated images to depict a dystopian future. Within days, Democratic Representative Yvette Clarke of New York introduced legislation to require political ads to disclose any use of generative AI (which the RNC ad did). Early this month, the bipartisan American Association of Political Consultants issued a statement condemning the use of “deep-fake generative AI content” as a violation of its code of ethics.

    Read: Just wait until Trump is a chatbot

    Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story expressed some degree of concern over the role that deep-fakes could play in the 2024 election. One scenario that came up repeatedly was the possibility that a compelling deep-fake could be released on the eve of the election, leaving too little time for it to be widely debunked. Clarke told me she worried specifically about a bad actor suppressing the vote by releasing invented audio or video of a trusted voice in a particular community announcing a change or closure of polling sites.

    But the true nightmare scenario is what Farid called “death by a thousand cuts”—a slow bleed of deep-fakes that destroys trust in authentic sound bites and videos. “If we enter this world where anything could be fake, you can deny reality. Nothing has to be real,” Farid said.

    This alarm extends well beyond politics. A consortium of media and tech companies are advocating for a global set of standards for the use of AI, including efforts to authenticate images and videos as well as to identify, through watermarks or other digital fingerprints, content that has been generated or manipulated by AI. The group is led by Adobe, whose Photoshop helped introduce the widespread use of computer-image editing. “We believe that this is an existential threat to democracy if we don’t solve the deep-fake problem,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, told me. “If people don’t have a way to believe the truth, we’re not going to be able to decide policy, laws, government issues.”

    Not everyone is so concerned. As vice president of the American Association of Political Consultants, Larry Hyuhn helped draft the statement that the organization put out denouncing deep-fakes and warning its members against using them. But he’s relatively untroubled about the threats they pose. “Frankly, in my experience, it’s harder than everyone thinks it is,” said Hyuhn, whose day job is providing digital strategy to Democratic clients who include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Am I afraid of it? No,” Hyuhn told me. “Does it concern me that there are always going to be bad actors doing bad things? That’s just life.”

    Betsy Hoover, a former Obama-campaign organizer who now runs a venture-capital fund that invests in campaign tech, argued that voters are more discerning than people give them credit for. In her view, decades of steadily more sophisticated disinformation campaigns have conditioned the electorate to question what they see on the internet. “Voters have had to decide what to listen to and where to get their information for a really long time,” she told me. “And at the end of the day, for the most part, they’ve figured it out.”

    Deep-fake videos are sure to get more convincing, but for the time being, many are pretty easy to spot. Those that impersonate Biden, for example, do a decent job of capturing his voice and appearance. But they make him sound slightly, well, younger than he is. His speech is smoother, without the verbal stumbles and stuttering that have become more pronounced in recent years. The technology “does require someone with some real skill to make use of,” he said. “You can give me a football; I still can’t throw it 50 yards.”

    The same limitations apply to AI’s potential for revolutionizing campaigns, as anyone who’s played around with ChatGPT can attest. When I asked ChatGPT to write a press release from the Trump campaign announcing a hypothetical endorsement of the former president by his current Republican rival, Nikki Haley, within seconds the bot delivered a serviceable first draft that accurately captured the format of a press release and made up believable, if generic, quotes from Trump and Haley. But it omitted key background information that any junior-level staffer would have known to include—that Haley was the governor of South Carolina, for example, and then served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

    Still, anyone confident enough to predict AI’s impact on an election nearly a year and a half away is making a risky bet. ChatGPT didn’t even exist six months ago. Uncertainty pervaded my conversations with the technology’s boosters and skeptics alike. Pennington told me to take everything he said about AI, both its promise and its peril, “with a grain of salt” because he could be proved wrong. “I think some people are overhyping it. I think some people are not thinking about it who should be,” Hoover said. “There’s a really wide spectrum because all of this is just evolving so much day to day.”

    Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it

    That constant and rapid evolution is what sets AI apart from other technologies that have been touted as democratic disrupters. “This is one of the few technologies in the history of planet Earth that is continuously and exponentially bettering itself,” Kurucz, Sterling’s founder, said. Of all the predictions I heard about AI’s impact on campaigns, his were the most assured. (Because AI forms the basis of his sales pitch to clients, perhaps his prognostication, too, should be taken with a grain of salt.) Although he was unsure exactly how fast AI could transform campaigns, he was certain it would.

    “You no longer need average people and average consultants and average anything,” Kurucz said. “Because AI can do average.” He compared the skeptics in his field to executives at Blockbuster who passed on the chance to buy Netflix before the start-up eventually destroyed the video-rental giant. “The old guard,” Kurucz concluded, “is just not ready to be replaced.”

    Hoover offered no such bravado, but she said Democrats in particular shouldn’t let their fears of AI stop them from trying to harness its potential. “The genie is out of the bottle,” she said. “We have a choice, then, as campaigners: to take the good from it and allow it to make our work better and more effective, or to hide under a rock and pretend it’s not here, because we’re afraid of it.”

    “I don’t think we can afford to do the latter,” she added.

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    Russell Berman

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