Donald Trump has long detested Barack Obama and sought to present himself as the opposite of his presidential predecessor in every way. But in his takeover of the Republican National Committee, he risks echoing one of Obama’s biggest political mistakes.
Last night, Trump’s handpicked leadership of the RNC took charge and conducted a purge. The new regime, led by the new chair, Michael Whatley; the vice chair, Lara Trump; and the chief of staff, Chris LaCivita, fired about 60 employees—about a quarter of the staff—as part of “streamlining.” The “bloodbath” includes members of the communications, data, and political departments. Insiders told Politico they anticipate that existing contracts with vendors will be voided.
When the new leaders were announced last month, I suggested that the GOP was ceasing to function as a political party, and becoming another subsidiary of Trump Inc. But there is another way to view it. For years now, the RNC has struggled. Republicans might have lost the 2016 presidential election if not for the emergence of Trump, who shook up the party’s longtime platform and forged a new coalition, turning out voters no other recent candidate had. Since then, however, Republicans have continued to lag, even with Trump juicing turnout. Republicans got slammed in the 2018 midterms, lost the 2020 presidential race, and missed expectations in 2022. Special elections have been a Democratic playground. The RNC is entering the 2024 election with a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves.
From this perspective, it’s about time that Trump took charge and cleared out the deadwood. Allies such as Charlie Kirk and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene were jubilant at the overhaul. Although Trump’s appointments of his daughter-in-law and a top campaign aide are unusual, nominees typically take over the campaign apparatus ahead of a presidential election, the better to align aims.
Truth be told, Trump can’t really distance himself from the recent mismanagement. The deposed chair, Ronna McDaniel, was Trump’s pick in 2017, and his main complaint about her is that she was insufficiently compliant. If Trump just wants more of the same, that’s bad news for the party. Trump critics within the GOP also fear that he intends to use the party coffers as a personal defense fund, underwriting his substantial legal bills. Last week, the committee pointedly rejected a proposal by an old-line member to prevent that.
Let’s take the best-case scenario for Republicans, though. In the past, the RNC seemed like the professionals compared with the chaotic, amateurish Trump campaigns of 2016 and 2020. (There’s a reason Trump resorted to appointing RNC Chair Reince Priebus as his first White House chief of staff, despite Priebus representing the establishment Trump hated.) This year, however, the Trump campaign has seemed organized and disciplined, and LaCivita is reportedly a big part of that. National committees tend to be bloated and old-fashioned. A more focused, streamlined operation could fix what ails the GOP.
The problem is that Trump sees his own success and the success of the Republican Party as bound up together. But some things that are good for Trump are not good for the Republican Party over the long run. This is where Obama offers a cautionary tale.
When he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Obama was an insurgent; the DNC had long been dominated by allies of Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the primary. He wasn’t as deeply embedded in the old way of doing things. Obama viewed the Democratic Party as essentially a national organization, with the goal of supporting his political goals and his reelection. Upon winning the presidency, he moved key DNC functions to Chicago, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.
The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections. After Senator Ted Kennedy died, Democrats managed to lose a 2010 special election for his seat in Massachusetts, of all places—a failure that some Democrats blamed on the national party. The loss delayed the passage of the Affordable Care Act and required congressional Democrats to water it down to pass it.
The Bay State special was a harbinger. As Matt Yglesias calculated in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. All of this happened at the same time that Democratic presidential candidates won the national popular vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections (as they would again in 2020).
Democrats, including Obama, suffered for their missteps. As the Obamacare experience shows, it’s harder to push a policy agenda when you lose elections. Losing control of the Senate makes it difficult to confirm judges, especially to crucial spots such as the Supreme Court—just ask Justice Merrick Garland. And implementing policy is challenging if governors and state Houses are working against you.
An excessive focus on presidential races is also the danger of Trump’s RNC takeover. He and his aides have announced that, like Obama, they see the party committee as basically an instrument for the presidential election. “Our mission is straightforward: maximize the Republican Party’s resources to get President Trump elected,” LaCivita told The New York Times last month. Echoing Obama’s Chicago move, the RNC is reportedly already moving most of its operations to Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters. All of this makes sense. Trump is a narcissist who can’t and won’t separate his self-interest from the party’s or the nation’s.
Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels. Several state parties are already a mess. The chair of the Florida GOP was recently ousted amid a sex scandal. Michigan’s GOP chair, a fervent Trump backer, was also deposed after a tumultuous stint, and the state party is reportedly broke. The Arizona GOP also recently lost its chair and has been racked by feuds. But more MAGA is unlikely to be the solution to these problems, because infighting and obsession with Trump’s election denial have been at the center of several blowups. The most effective wing of the GOP apparatus right now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has succeeded by managing to create some insulation from Trump, allowing it to select strong candidates. In 2020, Republican congressional candidates mostly ran ahead of Trump.
And even if Trump’s theory of the RNC works out in 2024, what happens next? Trump will not always be the president or the nominee. Someday, Republicans will need to choose a new leader, and they may be left with only a shell of a party committee, gutted and stretched to be part of Trump’s personal election apparatus. It’s a hard and long road to rebuilding from there. Just ask a Democrat.
Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.
Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.
He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic crusade against “globalism” had started to hit too close to home for the Republican Party of 12 years ago; perhaps their warnings about, of all people, Newt Gingrich—a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose onetime membership on the Council on Foreign Relations, as Smart saw it, revealed his “globalist” vision for conservatism—had rankled the Republican powers that be.
In any event, the ouster had made the news, coming as it had after a change in leadership at the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. “When they applied, I said, ‘I don’t want any segregationist groups at CPAC; it sends the wrong message,’” Al Cárdenas, the ACU chair from 2011 to 2014, told me recently. “And that was that.” For some optimistic observers, the decision had signified a small but symbolic effort to purge the movement of its most “highly offensive” elements, as one report put it.
Though CPAC has long catered more to the activist base of the Republican Party than to its establishment, the event has marched steadily closer to the fringes in the years since Donald Trump’s election, the barrier to entry for speakers and organizations being little more than a sufficient appreciation of the 45th president. But even Smart seemed a touch surprised by the ease of it all in 2023; when he applied on behalf of the John Birch Society for a booth at CPAC, and when, after the fuss and hand-wringing of 11 years earlier, the application was approved.
“It was a very basic process,” he recalled with a shrug. (CPAC organizers did not respond to a request for comment about the John Birch Society’s presence at the conference.)
It was half past noon yesterday, day two of the 2024 gathering, and Smart, a soft-spoken, genial man wearing a trim blazer and slacks, was standing before the red-white-and-blue curtained backdrop of the John Birch Society booth. He occasionally paused our conversation to direct curious passersby to the literature spread across a nearby table—brochures outlining the history of the organization (“How are we unique?”); copies of its latest “Freedom Index,” or congressional scorecard; issues of TheNew American, the group’s in-house journal, including a “TRUMP WORLD” collector’s edition featuring such articles as “Trumping the Deep State” and “The Deplorables.” It was the contemporary output of an organization with an older and more controversial heritage than probably any other group featured this year at CPAC. And yet what was most striking about the John Birch Society of 2024 was how utterly unremarkable it appeared among the various booths lining this hotel conference center.
The John Birch Society, once the scourge of some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives, relegated to the outermost edges of the movement, now fits neatly into the mainstream of the American right. David Giordano, another field coordinator for the organization who was attending CPAC, credited Trump for hastening the shift, challenging the global elite in ways that past Republican presidents had only ever talked about doing. “What were the things they said about him? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’—that got my attention,” Giordano told me, smiling. “What’d they say about the John Birch Society? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic.’ That’s when you know you’re over the target.” Longtime members and officers of the organization exuded the polite but unmistakable air of I told you so at the conference. “A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, my grandmother or my dad was a member. We used to think he was crazy, but now, not so much,’” Smart said, beaming. “Because we’ve been warning people about a lot of this stuff for decades, obviously.”
The John Birch Society, so named for a U.S. Army intelligence officer and Christian missionary killed by Chinese Communists toward the end of World War II, was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who made his fortune by way of Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints. Welch persuaded a handful of the country’s wealthiest anti–New Deal businessmen to join him in a mission to extinguish the “international communist conspiracy” he believed had penetrated the U.S. government and was set to consume every facet of American life. President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles—all of them, Welch insisted, were dedicated agents of the U.S.S.R.
For Welch, the Warren Court was incontrovertible evidence of the Soviet mandate in motion, given its decision outlawing prayer in public schools and, crucially, its ushering of America into a racially desegregated future. Donations flooded in as the John Birch Society took aim at the civil-rights movement, the United Nations, local public libraries and school boards, and the diabolical plot apparently enshrouding all of them. As the organization grew in prominence, a number of conservative leaders, including National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., agonized over how to contain Welch’s influence without alienating the electrified legion of Americans—many of them subscribers to Buckley’s magazine—whom Welch had brought into the movement. In the early 1960s, Buckley would publish a series of editorials critical of Welch and his worldview, urging conservatives to unite in rejection of his “false counsels.” By the mid-’70s, the organization’s formal ranks and funding had significantly dwindled.
Yet the Bircher worldview never really went away. On the margins of the right, it continued to find purchase in new candidates and new personalities who adapted it to meet new moments. The society’s anti-communist crusade translated into alarm over a post–Cold War plot by the global elite to construct a “new world order” defined by porous borders and centralized, socialist rule; the birther conspiracy theories of the Tea Party era fit well within the Bircher tradition. And then, in 2016, the John Birch Society saw many of its core instincts finally reflected in the White House.
Giordano was at first skeptical of Trump’s candidacy. But then he watched as President Trump in short succession scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—dramatic blows, in Giordano’s view, to plans for the new world order. Giordano counts COVID—the lockdowns, the vaccines—as the wake-up event for many Americans, himself and others in the John Birch Society included. “I’ve been a member since 1994. And I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if this new world order will come in my lifetime,’” he recalled. And then came 2020. “They said, ‘Go home and flatten the curve.’ And I said, ‘This is the new world order. It’s here.’” He refused to take a vaccine or ever wear a face covering in public, recalling to me the time he successfully wore down a sales associate at Designer Shoe Warehouse who’d asked him to abide by the store policy on masks.
The John Birch Society, Giordano claimed, has been in a “growing phase” in the years since. “I’m constantly signing people up—I’ve got a new chapter in Ocean County; we had no chapters in Delaware, and now I’ve got a new chapter right in Wilmington.” Oddly enough, it’s a Trump victory in November that he fears could reverse the tide. “If Trump wins—which I personally hope—our membership will drop,” he predicted. “‘Oh,’ they’ll all say, ‘he’s gonna save us.’ And I explain to people, we’re the watchers on the Wall. The Founders said, ‘Here’s a constitution; this is forever; you got to fight every day to keep it.’”
Giordano’s claims of growth dovetail with the recent uptick in references to the John Birch Society by right-wing celebrities. Last May, in conversation with the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich on his War Room podcast, Steve Bannon mocked left-wing efforts to deploy the “Bircher” label as a smear. “They say, ‘Oh! Moms for Liberty is just the modern version of the John Birch Society,’” Bannon said, laughing, before turning back to Descovich: “You’re doing something right, girl.” A few months before that, Nick Fuentes, a far-right vlogger and white supremacist who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, heralded the John Birch Society as a “prelude to the Groypers”—the army of neo-Nazi activists and online influencers Fuentes counts as followers.
Some national Republicans, moreover, no longer try to maintain even a nominal distance from the organization. Joining the John Birch Society for its return to CPAC in 2023 were lawmakers including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Ronny Jackson of Texas, both of whom sat for livestreamed interviews with The New American as throngs of conference-goers listened from the sidelines. At this year’s conference, a woman helping staff the booth urged me to check out the magazine’s January issue, the cover of which featured a close-up portrait of Andy Biggs; the Arizona congressman—former chair of the House Freedom Caucus—had sat for an exclusive interview on “many of the issues facing our country,” including President Joe Biden’s “corruption,” as the magazine put it, “immigration, and China.”
It’s unclear just how large the John Birch Society is today—even Smart told me, “They keep those numbers close”—but to measure its influence by membership is to miss the point. Naturally, as the principles and positions of the John Birch Society have insinuated themselves into the mainstream on the right, the Birchers’ own claim to those ideas has weakened. The organization’s rogue crusades of the past are now so familiar and universal that the original fingerprints are no longer visible.
Consider fluoride. At the height of the group’s relevance in the ’60s, the John Birch Society railed against fluoridated drinking water as a communist conspiracy to poison Americans en masse, a go-to data point for the National Review set and others invested in the political exile of the Birchers. As soon as I stepped off the escalator at the convention center outside Washington, D.C., that hosted CPAC, though, I came upon cocktail tables scattered with brochures listing “Fun Facts on Fluoride,” among them that “Fluoride was used by Hitler and Stalin” and that “it will kill you.”
There was no stated affiliation with the John Birch Society, and no person around to discuss the pamphlets. And perhaps that was telling; far from the niche boogeyman of one conservative organization, the perils of fluoride had become part of the generic paraphernalia of the movement. (The “Myth vs Facts” section of the John Birch Society website, I should note, currently states that “while the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation because it is a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest, it was never opposed as a mind-control plot.”)
Plenty have noted the John Birch Society’s echoes in the GOP’s oft-invoked specter of the “deep state,” the conspiracism that immediately hijacked the memory of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July 2016. Yet to attend CPAC today is to see those instincts taken to their most troublingly banal ends. Lifestyle and wellness products are hawked as solutions that the medical establishment never wanted you to find; a payment-processing company warns, with a massive image of a human-silhouette target riddled with bullet holes, “Your business is a target.”
For the John Birch Society, returning to CPAC has meant slipping seamlessly back in among groups and personalities that for years have been operating within its legacy, whether they knew it or not. The organization has been “eclipsed by many different groups and offshoots, so they’re not controversial in the same way that, say, Richard Spencer was a few years ago,” Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, told me.
Why was the John Birch Society invited back to CPAC? The better question, in Dallek’s view: “Why wouldn’t it be?”
NEW YORK — A judge has delivered a ruling Friday in Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial.
Trump could be hit with millions of dollars in penalties and other sanctions in the decision by Judge Arthur Engoron, who has already ruled that the former president inflated his wealth on financial statements that were given to banks, insurers and others to make deals and secure loans.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking $370 million and a ban on Trump and other defendants from doing business in the state. A penalty like that could potentially wound the real estate empire that helped Trump craft his image as a savvy billionaire businessman and vaulted him to fame and the White House.
Engoron is set to rule after two months of testimony from 40 witnesses, including Trump. Closing arguments were held Jan. 11. The judge is deciding the case because juries are not allowed in this type of lawsuit and neither James’ office nor Trump’s lawyers asked for one.
Engoron is expected to release his decision Friday, barring unforeseen circumstances that would necessitate a delay, court officials said.
It has already been a big week in court for Trump. On Thursday, a different New York judge ruled that Trump will stand trial March 25 on charges that he falsified his company’s records as part of an effort to buy the silence of people with potentially embarrassing stories about alleged infidelity. Trump says he is innocent.
If the schedule holds, it will be the first of his four criminal cases to go to trial.
James’ office has estimated that Trump exaggerated his wealth by as much as $3.6 billion. State lawyers contend Trump used the inflated numbers to get lower insurance premiums and favorable loan terms, saving at least $168 million on interest alone.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and his lawyers have said they’ll appeal if Engoron rules against him.
The Republican presidential front-runner testified Nov. 6 that his financial statements actually understated his net worth and that banks did their own research and were happy with his business. During closing arguments in January, he decried the case as a “fraud on me.”
Engoron is deciding six claims in James’ lawsuit, including allegations of conspiracy, falsifying business records and insurance fraud.
Before the trial, Engoron ruled on James’ top claim, finding that Trump’s financial statements were fraudulent. As punishment, the judge ordered some of his companies removed from his control and dissolved. An appeals court has put that on hold.
Because it is civil, not criminal in nature, there is no possibility of prison time.
Former President Trump revealed his criteria for a running mate on Sunday, but he told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that he won’t announce a vice presidential pick “for a little while.”
Trump made the comments in an interview with Bartiromo that aired on “Sunday Morning Futures.” He said the most important factor is to ensure his running mate would be able to step up and handle the presidency in the case of an emergency.
“What criteria are you using to identify who your running mate is?” Bartiromo asked.
“Always it’s gotta be who is going to be a good president. Obviously you always have to think that, because in case of emergency. Things happen, right? No matter who you are, things happen. That’s gotta be number one,” Trump responded.
Former President Trump revealed his criteria for a running mate on Sunday, but he told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that he won’t announce a vice presidential pick “for a little while.”
“You know, I called [South Carolina Sen.] Tim Scott and people like Tim Scott, and I said you’re a much better candidate for me than you are for yourself,” Trump said. “When I watched him, he was fine. He was good, but he was very low key.”
Trump says Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., is a better advocate for the Trump campaign than he was even for his own presidential campaign.
“I watched him in the last week, defending me and sticking up for me and fighting for me – I said, man, you’re a much better person for me than you are for yourself,” he continued.
Trump went on to praise South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as well, noting that she said publicly that she would never run against him, “because I could never beat him.”
Former President Donald Trump leaves the courtroom for a lunch break during his civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on November 06, 2023 in New York City.
Trump also denied reports that his campaign had reached out to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to explore a potential ticket with him early on in the campaign season. Trump said the interaction “never happened.”
Elise Stefanik and I had been speaking for only about a minute when she offered this stark self-assessment: “I have been an exceptional member of Congress.”
Her confidence reminded me of the many immodest pronouncements of Donald Trump (“I would give myself an A+”), and that’s probably not an accident. Stefanik has been everywhere lately, amassing fans among Trump’s base at a crucial moment—both for the GOP and for her future.
Stefanik spent October presiding over the leaderless House GOP’s search for a new speaker—a post that Stefanik, the chair of the conference, conspicuously declined to seek for herself. In a congressional hearing last month, she pressed three of America’s most prominent university presidents to say whether they’d allow students to call for Jewish genocide; directly or indirectly, her interrogation brought down two of them. And for the past several weeks, Stefanik has been making an enthusiastic case for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
She campaigned with him in New Hampshire last weekend, defending his mental acuity in the face of obvious gaffes (“President Trump has not lost a step,” she insisted) and rejecting a jury’s conclusion that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. She parrots his baseless claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that the defendants charged with storming the Capitol to keep him in office are “hostages.” After a GOP congressional candidate was caught on tape mildly criticizing Trump, Stefanik publicly withdrew her endorsement. Barely an hour after the networks declared Trump the winner of the Iowa caucus—before Iowans had even finished voting—she issued a statement calling on his remaining opponents to drop out of the race.
I spoke with Stefanik about her fierce defense of Trump, which has won her praise from the former president. In New Hampshire, he called her “brilliant” and lauded her questioning of the university presidents as “surgical.” (He did, however, butcher her name.) Just about everyone can see that Stefanik has been mounting an elaborate audition. The 39-year-old clearly didn’t pass up a bid for House speaker because she lacks ambition. On the contrary, she seems to have a bigger promotion in mind: not second in line to the presidency, but first. In our conversation, Stefanik didn’t make much effort to dispel the perception that she wants to be Trump’s running mate. “I’d be honored to serve in any capacity in the Trump administration,” she told me, repeating a line she’s used before.
Her displays of fealty aside, Stefanik has a lot going for her. She has become, without question, the most powerful Republican in New York, where her prodigious fundraising helped give the GOP a majority. Stefanik’s House GOP colleagues say she is extremely smart, and she still draws compliments for her behind-the-scenes role during last fall’s speakership crisis, when she ran a tense and seemingly endless series of closed-door conference meetings. Whether or not her declining to run for speaker was tied to the vice presidency, it was politically shrewd. “It didn’t work out well for most others,” joked Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who briefly served as acting speaker and similarly turned down a chance to win the job permanently. “She saw the writing on the wall,” a fellow New York Republican, Representative Andrew Garbarino, told me. “She was smart enough to say, ‘I’m not popping my head up only to get it chopped off.’”
The fervor that Stefanik brings to her Trump defense has made her a favorite for VP among some of his staunchest allies, including Steve Bannon, who remains a force in MAGA world. “She’s a show horse and a workhorse, and that in and of itself is pretty extraordinary in modern American politics,” Bannon told me. “She’s at, if not the top, very close to the top of the list.”
Stefanik may not be subtle, but she’s made herself relevant in a party still devoted to Trump. Her future success now depends on his—and whether he rewards her loyalty with the prize she so clearly wants.
Stefanik routinely boasts that she was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s reelection. That’s true as far as 2024 goes, but it neatly obscures the fact that she did not back his primary campaign in 2016. Nor did she show much support for Trump’s movement as it took root in the GOP.
After graduating from Harvard, Stefanik began her political career in the George W. Bush White House and later served as an aide to Paul Ryan during his vice-presidential run. In 2014, at age 30, she was elected to the House—the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time—and carved out a reputation as a moderate in both policy and tone. She made an abrupt turn toward Trumpism during the former president’s first impeachment hearings, in 2019, and eagerly backed his reelection the following year. In 2021, she replaced the ousted Trump critic Representative Liz Cheney as conference chair, making her the fourth-ranking Republican in the House.
Not one for public introspection, Stefanik has never fully explained her transformation into a Trump devotee beyond saying she was impressed by his policies as president. The simplest answer is that she followed the will of her upstate–New York constituents, who came to embrace Trump after favoring Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. “I reflect, I would say, the voters in my district,” she told me shortly before the 2020 election.
To say that Stefanik displays the zeal of a convert doesn’t do justice to the phrase. She has become one of Trump’s foremost defenders and enforcers in Congress. At first “it was surprising,” former Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican colleague of Stefanik’s for eight years, told me of her Trump pivot. “Now it’s just gross.”
Kinzinger and Stefanik had both served as leaders of a group of moderate House Republicans, but they took opposite paths during the Trump years. Kinzinger voted to impeach Trump after January 6 and left Congress two years later. “In her core, she’s a deep opportunist and has put her personal ambition over what she knows is good for the country,” Kinzinger said. Although Stefanik has been in Trump’s corner for more than four years now, Kinzinger said she “has ramped up her sycophancy” as the chances of Trump’s renomination—and the possibility of her serving on the national ticket—have come more fully into view.
Close allies of Stefanik naturally dispute this characterization; they told me that although they think she’d make an excellent vice president, she has not once brought up the topic with them. “He’s going to have great options, but Elise will be at the top of that list,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise told me. When I asked Stefanik whether she was campaigning to be on Trump’s ticket, she replied: “I’m focused on doing my job.”
Other contenders frequently mentioned as possible Trump running mates include South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem; Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as one of Trump’s White House press secretaries; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; and the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.
One senior Republican who is friendly with both Stefanik and Trump lauded her leadership skills and political acumen but doubted that Trump would pick her. “She doesn’t have executive experience,” the Republican told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about Stefanik’s chances. A Trump-campaign spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Even as they praise her, Stefanik allies occasionally describe her in ways that suggest she lacks authenticity. “She’s a highly intelligent, calculated individual,” Chris Tague, a Republican in the New York legislature, told me. Representative Marc Molinaro, a member of New York’s House delegation, described Stefanik as “a calming force” inside a House Republican conference often marred by infighting. When I noted that this characterization seemed to be at odds with her combative style in public, Molinaro explained that Stefanik’s “outward persona” helps her keep the conference from getting out of hand. “We all know Elise. She’s strong. She’s tough,” he said. “She didn’t need to be that person, because we know she can be that person.”
Still, Kinzinger said, unlike some Republicans in Congress, Stefanik does not speak differently about Trump in private than she does in public. “I got that wink and nod from a lot of people, not from her,” he said. “She’s smart enough to know that if she says something in private, it could get out.”
Stefanik is also smart enough, Kinzinger told me, to understand that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election, which she now recites, are not true. “She knows the drill,” he said. “She would say exactly what I would say if she had the freedom to do it, but she’s all in.”
To interview Stefanik is to strike a sort of deal: access in exchange for browbeating. She answered my questions even as she rebuked me for asking about such trifling matters as election denialism and January 6. “Everyday Americans are sick and tired of the biased media, including you, Russell, and the types of questions you’re asking,” Stefanik told me. I started to ask her about her recent appearance on Meet the Press, where she had casually referred to the January 6 defendants as “hostages”—an unsubtle echo of Trump’s language. The comment prompted a predictable round of shocked-but-not-surprised reactions from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. A New York Democrat, Representative Dan Goldman, introduced a resolution to censure Stefanik over the remark.
Even though Stefanik made a show of protesting my line of inquiry, she beat me to the question. I had barely uttered “Meet the Press … ” before she started speaking over me: “I know—you’re so predictable—what you’re going to ask. You’re going to ask about the January 6 hostages.” Bingo. Without missing a beat, Stefanik proceeded to read aloud snippets from New York Times and NPR reports about poor conditions and alleged mistreatment of inmates charged with January 6 crimes. “The American people are smart. They see through this,” she said. “They know that there is a double standard of justice in this country.”
Stefanik was trying to argue that these news reports justified her use of a term usually reserved for victims of terrorism. The specifics of the reports weren’t really the point. More than anything, she seemed to want to demonstrate that, like Trump, she wouldn’t back down or apologize. She sounded almost cheerful, like a happy warrior for Trump—his pugnacious defender who would engage with the biased mainstream media without giving in to them, without conceding a single premise or hemming and hawing through an interview.
Stefanik was riding high in MAGA world when we spoke. Her Meet the Press appearance was “a master class,” Bannon told me. In addition to the “hostages” line, she refused to commit to certifying the 2024 election, generating outrage that only added to the performance. “This is what we’re thinking. This is us. This is who we are,” Susan McNeil, a GOP county chair in Stefanik’s district, told me, referring to Stefanik’s comments about certification. “Do I trust this election right now? No.”
“For her to stand strong and make those statements? Good. You’re not being bullied,” McNeil continued. “You’re not gonna get pressured to cave in to saying something that you’re not ready to dignify with an answer yet.”
Stefanik has no interest in appearing humble or self-deprecating. When I brought up the Meet the Press interview, she used the same word that Bannon had to describe her performance. “It was a master class in pushing back” against the media, she told me, “and it has been widely hailed.”
Cooperating with this story, like appearing on the D.C. establishment’s favorite talk show, seemed to be part of Stefanik’s unofficial, unacknowledged audition for VP. It was a low-risk bet. A positive portrayal might impress the media-conscious Trump. If, on the other hand, she didn’t like how the piece turned out, she could hold it up to Trump supporters as confirmation that the press has it out for them. Stefanik’s team lined up nearly a dozen local and national validators to speak with me, including Bannon, Scalise, and Representative James Comer, who heads the committee leading the Biden-impeachment inquiry.
Trump clearly prizes loyalty above just about anything else. Mike Pence displayed that quality in spades, until suddenly, at the most climactic moment of Trump’s presidency, he did not. To test whether Stefanik’s allegiance had a limit, I asked whether a Trump conviction for any of the crimes with which he’s been charged would affect her support in any way. “No,” she replied without hesitation. “It’s a witch hunt by the Department of Justice. I believe Joe Biden is the most corrupt president not just in modern history, but in the history of our country.”
Stefanik was more circumspect when I asked her what she would have done differently from Pence had she been responsible, as vice president, for presiding over the certification of Electoral College ballots on January 6. Trump had pressured Pence to throw out ballots from states where he was contesting the vote. Pence had refused. Given Stefanik’s apparent interest in Pence’s old job, it seemed relevant.
At first, she dodged the question by claiming that the election was rigged and referring to a speech she delivered on the House floor in the early hours of January 7, when she voted against certifying Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania. But that speech was worded far more carefully than the outright claims of fraud that Stefanik makes today. Back then, she couched her objections as representing the views of her “concerned” constituents. She didn’t say the election was stolen, nor did she say what action Pence should have taken.
When I pressed her on Pence’s decision not to intervene and what she would have done, Stefanik replied simply, “I disagreed, and I believe it was an unconstitutional election.” She would go no further than that.
At some point over the next several months, Stefanik’s dual roles as Trump booster and protector of the vanishing House majority could come into conflict. She has made clear that she wants Republicans to unify around Trump, and sooner rather than later. Control of the House, however, might well be determined in her deep-blue state, where the nation’s most vulnerable Republicans represent districts that Trump lost in 2020. Embracing Trump this fall could cost some of them their seats.
Now the longest-serving Republican in the New York delegation, Stefanik serves as a mentor for several of the state’s more recent arrivals to the House. She has helped get them seats on desired committees, and, during the speaker battle in October, she arranged for the various candidates to sit for interviews with the delegation. But Stefanik has also worked to keep them in line.
“She’s not afraid to be blunt,” Garbarino said, recalling times when Stefanik chastised him for a public statement she didn’t like. Her message? “We don’t have to do everything publicly,” Garbarino said. “Sometimes it’s better if you say this stuff behind the scenes to somebody instead of smacking them in the face publicly about it.”
Stefanik has taken the lead in fighting Democratic attempts to gerrymander New York in their favor, part of an effort to reclaim the House majority. (A recent state-court ruling didn’t help her cause.) To that end, she is working to ensure that none of the state’s GOP House members tries to save their own seat at the party’s expense or says anything in public that could undermine a potential Republican legal challenge. “She’s cracking the whip,” one Republican strategist in the state told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Stefanik’s toughest task, though, might be getting her colleagues to support Trump. Two swing-district Republicans in New York, Representatives Nick LaLota and Brandon Williams, have endorsed Trump as he easily captured the first two primary states. But others in the delegation have yet to heed Stefanik’s call. In interviews, a few of them seemed hesitant even to utter his name. “I have avoided presidential politics, and Elise has always respected that,” Molinaro told me. As for Trump, he would say only, “I intend to support the presidential nominee.”
Garbarino used almost exactly the same words when I asked about the presidential race. Two other New York Republicans in districts that Biden won, Representatives Mike Lawler and Anthony D’Esposito, declined interview requests. When I asked Stefanik if they would back Trump, she offered a guarantee: “They’re going to support President Trump, who will be the nominee, as Republicans will across the country.”
Privately, Stefanik has delivered an additional message to vulnerable Republicans in New York, according to several people I spoke with. “Stefanik has been very clear to not attack President Trump,” the GOP strategist said. “Everyone knows that in New York.” As Stefanik sees it, criticizing Trump would hurt even swing-district Republicans, because the MAGA base is now a sizable constituency in districts that Biden carried. Still, other House leaders haven’t exerted nearly as much public pressure on rank-and-file Republicans. “We all each individually take different approaches to growing our majority,” Scalise told me. “I don’t tell anybody how to manage their politics back home.”
As Stefanik’s profile has grown, and as her rhetoric has become even Trumpier, Democrats have sought to turn her into a political liability for swing-district Republicans, just as they have the former president. After Stefanik’s “hostages” comment, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who also hails from New York, said that Stefanik “should be ashamed of herself.”
But then he pivoted to a political angle. “The real question,” Jeffries told reporters, “is why haven’t House Republicans in New York, like Mike Lawler or others, denounced Elise Stefanik, and why do they continue to rely on her fundraising support in order to try to fool the voters in New York and pretend like they believe in moderation?” None of the New York Republicans took the bait, choosing to remain silent rather than cross Stefanik. (“I didn’t see the clip,” Garbarino told me, in one characteristic dodge.)
Stefanik clearly welcomes these attacks. In the MAGA world she now inhabits, enraging Democrats is the coin of the realm. Taking their fire only pushes her closer to the place she really wants to be: at Trump’s side.
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“Everybody’s waiting to write my obituary.”
This is never a good thing for a candidate to be saying on Election Day.
But Nikki Haley, the candidate, was trying—pleading—to make a larger point to CNN’s Dana Bash as they sat on raised chairs in the middle of Chez Vachon, the landmark coffee shop and makeshift TV studio on the west side of Manchester, New Hampshire.
“We had 14 candidates,” Haley said, referring to the number of people who were seeking the Republican nomination a few months ago. “It’s now down to two”—Haley and Donald Trump. “That’s not an obituary; that’s somebody who’s a fighter.”
Fair enough. Haley was indeed still here and showing up, which is something to be proud of. She is the last woman standing between the former president and an unimpeded romp to the Republican nomination. This was Haley’s “closing argument” as she made her final rounds in New Hampshire yesterday, greeting volunteers at polling places, doing interviews, and hitting the tables at Chez Vachon. She would keep fighting and continue to flout the naysayers who have trailed her for her entire career. Underestimate me is the message printed on one of Haley’s favorite T-shirts. That’ll be fun.
Almost immediately after the polls closed, a few hours later, networks declared Trump the New Hampshire winner. His margin of victory over Haley, however, looked smaller than expected. “THIS RACE IS OVER,” Trump insisted in a text blasted out to his supporter list just after 8 p.m. Nope, Haley told her Election Night revelers in Concord, vowing to persist as the campaign moved to her home state of South Carolina. “New Hampshire is first in the nation. It’s not last in the nation,” she said in her speech. “This race is far from over.”
I spent much of December and early January watching Haley campaign for the job she quite clearly has been aspiring to for years. She proved to be disciplined and polished, good enough to outlast the battalion of male challengers arrayed alongside her—“the fellas,” as she has lately taken to calling her rivals, many of whom endorsed Trump as they fell away. She has claimed repeatedly to be part of a “two-person race” against Trump, despite finishing third in Iowa behind him and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
This felt like wishful thinking at times, but it is unquestionably true now and will present Haley with what’s been a recurring dilemma of her candidacy: How hard will she be willing to campaign against Trump? Will she be as noxious and ornery as the former president surely will be against her? Will she be willing to attack Trump and seize the ample vulnerabilities he provides, even if it risks his unrestrained ire?
Haley was hesitant to go after him when the field was more crowded. She offered only the mildest of critiques—that “chaos follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly” and that he was not “the right president” for these times (as he was before). But it was hardly a sure thing that Haley would deploy her best material against Trump—about his odd behavior and mental capacity and legal problems.
The final days of the New Hampshire campaign offered clues that she might now be willing to do so. She mentioned Trump’s age throughout the day yesterday (inflating it by three years, to 80) and brought up the perplexing sequence from Trump’s Friday-night rally, in which he seemed to suggest that Haley had been in charge of security at the Capitol on January 6 (he apparently had mistaken her for Nancy Pelosi).
Perhaps more notably, Haley conveyed that she was willing to draw out the race for as long as necessary. “Joe Biden isn’t going to get any younger or any better,” she said in her speech in Concord. “We’ll have all the time we need to beat Joe Biden.” This carried a sly message directed at Trump: He wasn’t getting any younger or better, either. And the longer the race continued, the more his court cases would advance, new facts would be revealed, and his behavior could spiral. Haley pointed out that voters in 20 states would be casting ballots in the next two months. There would be many more contests to enjoy, or stay alive for.
If nothing else, Haley would live to see another Election Day, in another state.
Primary days can give off an oddly freewheeling and punch-drunk vibe. Candidates, staffers, and volunteers have all done their work. Most of them are exhausted and often battling colds, hangovers, or other ailments. There is no more practice and preparation left to do.
“The hay is in the barn,” as old political hacks like to say. Or, at least one political hack said this—to me—but I forget who it was. I’ve also seen the maxim attributed to stir-crazy football coaches (before the big game) and distance runners (before a race). The basic idea is the same: There’s not much left to do, except find a way to pass hours and burn nervous energy.
Everything that remains tends to be improvisational and hardly strategic. Candidates rush around, trying to get supporters out to vote and, in Haley’s case, to convince them that the race is not over, despite all the polls showing Trump with a big lead.
“I don’t even want to talk about numbers, and I don’t think y’all should either,” Haley admonished Bash at Chez Vachon.
She then mentioned one number in particular: six.
That reflects the sum of votes that Haley received in Dixville Notch, the tiny village in the northern tip of the state that is known for tallying its votes just after midnight on the morning of the primary. “There were more than 10 journalists for every voter,” The New YorkTimes said in its report on the wee-hours scene, which it called “as much a press spectacle as it is a serious exercise in democracy.” (The same could be said about the New Hampshire primary in general, an exercise that features a relatively tiny number of voters whose views are comically amplified by media swarms.)
“All six came to us,” Haley reported of the Dixville Notch vote. “Not part, not one—all six.”
Haley was joined at Chez Vachon by New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, her biggest supporter and frequent traveling companion across the state in recent weeks. At one point, I asked Sununu, who was standing next to the kitchen door—nearly getting run over by waitresses carrying plates loaded with pancakes, bacon, and poutine drowned in brown gravy—whether he was worried that this might be the last New Hampshire primary as we know it. Some have predicted as much, given that the Democrats are no longer holding their first contest here. Was he feeling wistful at all, nostalgic maybe?
“Nah, we’re always in this. It never leaves us,” Sununu said. He added that the Democrats had “learned their lesson”—that they never should have messed with New Hampshire and tried to take away its rightful spot at the front of the primary parade.
Sununu has shown himself willing to question Trump’s age and mental fitness more directly than Haley had been until the past few days. “If he’s off the teleprompter, he can barely keep a cogent thought,” Sununu said of Trump in an interview with Fox News yesterday. “This guy is nearly 80 years old.”
“He’s 77,” the Fox host corrected him.
“That’s nearly 80,” Sununu maintained. “We’ll do math later.”
He has an obvious point about Trump, one that’s worth making. But this is a pet peeve of mine. Sununu and Haley often say that a Donald Trump–Joe Biden rematch would feature “two 80-year-olds.” Haley recently said that if Trump were convicted, and she were elected, she would likely pardon the former president. Why? Because it’s not in the country’s interest to have “an 80-year-old man sitting in jail,” she said.
It sounds like a minor thing, but if Haley is going to attack Trump (correctly) for lying, if she’s going to try to claim some moral high ground in this race, she herself should not be fudging the facts. There’s no need to anyway; at 52, she’s clearly younger than both him and Biden.
Since I figured the encounter at Chez Vachon might be the last time that I’d be so close to Haley—maybe ever—I decided to be one of those nuisance reporters and follow her out of the restaurant.
“How old is President Trump?” I asked her as she crossed Kelley Street. Haley ignored me.
“How old is President Trump?” I tried again. She kept walking. Someone else shouted a question that I didn’t hear.
“There’s a lot of energy, that’s what we’re seeing today,” Haley said in a rote tone, disappearing into a town car and motoring off to her next stop, and then more stops after that.
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ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.
Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?
I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida GovernorRon DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)
On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And how she was determined to “humanize” the fractious issue of abortion and, rest assured, “the days of demonizing that issue are over.”
Haley is a gifted political performer, particularly in a certain kind of room. This was one of those, a politely boisterous gathering of a few hundred people, serious and professional, many still dressed for work. She came off as reasonable and solicitous, holding the same authority as she did at the various Trumpless debates she has rated so well in. You can see how Haley could rise to the level she has, the most formidable alternative to Trump or (if you prefer) first among the Republican also-rans.
After completing her set remarks to a standing ovation, Haley took audience questions, greeted a 30-minute lineup of supporters, and satisfied their various selfie and autograph needs, nailing eye contact, small talk, and drive-by rapport. “She understands that kind of customer-service approach,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu raved to me after telling the Manchester crowd that he was endorsing Haley. (“You bet your ass I am!”)
At the end of the night, Sununu stood to Haley’s left as she faced a clot of television cameras and microphones and shouted questions from reporters. She is good at this too—parrying pointed inquiries with self-assurance, then moving on before anyone can really reflect on what she said, or didn’t say.
But Haley’s sturdy pronouncements belie a certain wobbliness. Wait, what did she say exactly?
Nikki Haley supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley at the Manchester event
Beyond her expertly rendered deliveries, Haley’s actual answers can be mushy or even nonsensical, with strange constructions and frequent malaprops. In Manchester, Haley praised Sununu for having his “pulse to the ground” in his state and boasted that her campaign already had momentum before his endorsement “just gave it a speed bump.” At a November debate, she ordered Ramaswamy to “leave my daughter out of your voice” (as opposed to her daughter’s name out of his mouth). “We have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” she declares in her town halls when the subject arises (mental health, not cancer).
Later in the session, a reporter asked Haley about Trump’s then-most-recent flare-up, his statement to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on day one,” long since overshadowed by Trump’s “rot in Hell” Christmas message and his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In the moment, the “dictator” comment did feel germane, as did the question to Haley about whether that should perhaps preclude him from leading the world’s most powerful democracy.
“First of all, that’s for the voters to decide,” Haley declared, “if they want a dictator on day one.”
Yes, unquestionably. But what about Haley, the candidate we were speaking to—what did she decide?
“I’m not going to be a dictator on day one,” she assured everyone, not answering.
“I’ve always spoken in hard truths” is one of Haley’s trademark claims. In reality, the bluntness she discharges is reserved mostly for easy targets: the media, President Joe Biden, and “Kamala” (first name only, per GOP style). When it comes to speaking the hardest Republican truths of all—about Trump—Haley’s words fall feebly (wounded-bird-like), and her voice acquires a slightly halting tone and slower cadence.
Her preferred pose is one of pronounced exasperation. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough; pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough,” Haley said at the press gaggle. She shook her head and flashed a Man, I just can’t win look before escaping into a smoke screen of platitudes (“at the end of the day, I just put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may”).
For all her cultivated brashness, Haley, whose campaign declined my requests to interview her, can also convey an impression of being terrified—of saying the wrong thing, of offending too many MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters, or certainly of Trump himself.
The most excruciating example of this occurred a few days after Christmas, when a New Hampshire voter asked Haley to explain why the Civil War was fought. She provided a stem-winder of vague conservative assertions (“government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life”) while omitting the obvious cause: slavery. She appeared to be sensitive to the fact that some Americans might be sick of being reminded about the nation’s shameful, bloody history. Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has said that as president she would not play into the “national self-loathing” that she is always lamenting, “this idea that America is bad, or rotten, or racist.”
But trying to talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like trying to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 while barely touching the all-encompassing, front-running figure at the center of it all.
One of Haley’s niftier moves occurs later in her stump speech, when she builds to a seemingly dramatic revelation.
“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she reassures her audience. It is an imprecise and puzzling statement—what “time” exactly? (Charlottesville? COVID?) But Haley delivers the line with a force that sets a few heads bobbing in the crowd and leads her safely into her next credential. “I had a good working relationship with him when I was in his administration,” she further affirms.
“But …”
The words that follow this inevitable but are as fraught as any that a Republican candidate can utter. Say something like “He’s becoming crazier,” as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did of Trump last month, and you might win candor points but probably not any Republican primaries.
Haley’s next line barely deviates a word, speech to speech: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” You could construct a tidy diagram to illustrate the perfect passivity she achieves here. Haley assigns no judgment (“rightly or wrongly”) and makes no suggestion that Trump might have ever said or done anything that actually caused this “chaos”—a euphemism for, say, the events of January 6 or whatever else is embedded in those 91 criminal counts. All of this “chaos” somehow comes randomly to rest upon the 45th president.
“Chaos follows him,” Haley said again at a December 14 town hall in the southern–New Hampshire town of Atkinson. “You know I’m right” was the extent of her elaboration.
“It just does.”
Haley’s soft landing at “chaos follows him” comes after a zig-zagging and sometimes turbulent journey with Trump. The odyssey began during the 2016 campaign, when Haley called him “scary” and the embodiment of “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio—like Haley, a child of immigrants—by saying she was excited to support a candidate who “was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
Haley speaks at the Manchester town hall.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley said, reluctantly, that she would vote for him. Trump asked her to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations reportedly as a favor to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, a big Trump supporter, who wanted Haley out of the way so he could become governor. The UN job allowed Haley to burnish her foreign-policy résumé, and being in New York kept her removed from the daily discord of Trump’s White House. She served until 2018. “I got out of the administration without a tweet,” she likes to say.
Following Trump’s 2020 defeat and the January 6 insurrection, Haley sounded eager to bury her former boss and get on with her pursuit of his job. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” she declared in a January 7 speech at a Republican National Committee meeting. Haley said there was no chance Trump would ever run for federal office again. When those predictions proved premature, she reportedly tried to pay a quick make-up visit to Mar-a-Lago but was told by the proprietor not to bother. Less than three weeks after the insurrection, she told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham that everyone should “give the man a break.”
That April, Haley promised that she would support Trump if he ran for president again in 2024. And if he did, she said, she would not run herself.
Until … never mind.
As a candidate, Haley, whom Trump has taken to calling “Birdbrain,” frequently mentions how much better she would fare against Biden than Trump or DeSantis would. She often cites a Wall Street Journal poll from last month that shows her leading Biden by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup (Trump wins by four points). No doubt “electability” is a compelling argument, but this hypothetical Haley blowout is also premised on a dubious assumption—that Trump would be a gracious loser and urge his supporters to vote for their Republican standard-bearer, Ambassador Birdbrain.
When it comes to Trump’s indictments, Haley can’t bat away questions fast enough. “A lot of these cases have been politicized, we all know that,” she said in Manchester. Haley has promised to support the GOP nominee, whether it’s Trump or someone else. And in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the end of December, she said that if she were elected president and Trump were convicted, she would likely pardon him “so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”
Such flaccid scolding is of course a big part of why Trump is still here. Appeasement has been the Republican business model since 2015. “It’s like what happened last time—nobody wanted to criticize Trump,” Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. Sanford, who declined to speak about Haley on the record, lost his 2018 House primary after becoming a strident Trump critic. “They figured he would go away,” Sanford said, referring to Trump’s Republican opponents over the years. “And they sort of waited and waited and waited, and he didn’t go away.”
Eight years later, Haley seems to be of a similarly passive mindset: put up tepid resistance to Trump, at least early on; stay alive; and hope that someone, or something, comes along to take care of the problem. “Maybe she catches a break from a jury,” Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican strategist in South Carolina told me, referring to the possibility of Trump being convicted in the coming months. Felkel, who is not affiliated with Haley’s campaign, says that he’s no fan of hers but that he’s hugely hostile to Trump, so he’ll support his former governor.
Chris Christie offers a different specimen of Trump alternative: a former friend and longtime ally of the 45th president whose unambiguous denunciations were the centerpiece of his campaign. Christie has held back little, calling Trump a “coward,” a “fool,” and a “self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”
In other words, Christie has been the rare candidate willing to tell actual hard truths about Trump. He will also not be the Republican nominee: He suspended his campaign last night.
Will Haley be the nominee? Are her pillowy “attacks” on the front-runner simply the undignified price of Republican viability today? Has this approach at least given her the best shot of any Republican to defeat Trump—an extremely long shot, but a shot nonetheless?
Her theory of the race is straightforward enough: Beat DeSantis for second in Iowa; be competitive with Trump in New Hampshire, where she’s gained in recent polls but still trails by double digits in most; and then parlay that momentum into defeating Trump in her home state (where the former president also remains well ahead).
Both Christie and Haley are pragmatic former governors who appeal to independents and college-educated moderates. Polling this past fall showed that a significant portion of his backers in New Hampshire would migrate to Haley if he bowed out of the race before the state’s January 23 primary.
A week before Christmas, Christie faced growing public pressure, much of it from people backing Haley, to drop out in the name of stopping Trump. The former New Jersey governor had made a sustained and effective case against Trump over several months, but struggled to boost his support into the teens and was strongly considering it.
But he held off for a few weeks. Christie has been frustrated, even appalled, by Haley’s unwillingness to say how she really feels about Trump, according to sources close to Christie. He has become less and less shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with her in public. He has taunted Haley for not ruling out a role as Trump’s running mate, as he and DeSantis have. “I don’t play for second” has been Haley’s standard answer to the vice-presidential question, an emphatic non-denial. “That’s why she’s not saying strong things against Donald Trump,” Christie said on Face the Nation.
His reaction to Haley’s slavery misadventure was especially pointed. “She’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” he said in Epping, New Hampshire. “It’s worse to be able to be dishonest with people, and that’s what’s happening here.”
Now that Christie’s out of the primary, Haley will surely get some of his voters, though an endorsement seems unlikely anytime soon. Shortly before Christie announced his exit last night, at a town hall in New Hampshire, a hot mic caught him saying of Haley: “She’s gonna get smoked … She’s not up to this.”
Christie’s quandary over Haley is one that many Trump-skeptical Republicans identify with. “It’s the Nikki Haley dilemma,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican media consultant who has deep loathing for Trump and would love to see him lose, told me. He finds Haley’s cynicism depressing and is disgusted by her willingness to pander to “the latest insipid GOP crowd-pleasing trope,” as he recently wrote on Substack.
“Still, compared to Trump, she’s Gandhi,” Murphy continued. And he thinks she has a real chance to beat Trump in New Hampshire, where Murphy helped John McCain upset George W. Bush in 2000. “If I lived in New Hampshire, I’d vote for Haley in a heartbeat,” he told me.
Left: Haley signs an autograph. Right: Supporters leave after the town hall.
Haley’s knack for connecting one-on-one with voters does not always extend to political peers. On the contrary, her career has featured an array of disposable alliances, stubborn grudges, and a sense of paranoia about opponents, as my colleague Tim Alberta, then of Politico, documented in a 2021 profile of Haley. “She cut me off,” Sanford told Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki,” he continued. “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”
“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust,” Haley told Alberta. “Friend,” she added, “is a loose term.” She is fond of saying she wears heels not as a fashion statement but “for ammunition.”
No doubt Haley comes to this worldview honestly, having grown up as an Indian American in the Deep South of the 1970s and ’80s. She has faced discrimination, racism, sexism, and smears—not subtle ones, either. When she ran for governor, in 2010, a South Carolina political blogger and a lobbyist working for one of Haley’s rivals in the race both claimed to have had affairs with Haley (she denied them), and a Republican state senator called her a “raghead.”
“Every South Carolina politician here has been through that, all of us,” Katon Dawson, the former chair of the South Carolina GOP and a Haley supporter, told me. “We’re from South Carolina, and it is a bare-knuckled brawl.”
For Haley to win, Felkel, the South Carolina strategist, said he thinks she will have to channel some of that South Carolina pugilism and “open up a can of whoop-ass” on Trump. “We need to see more stiletto weaponry from her, and less ‘bless your heart,’” Felkel said.
In recent days, Haley has taken a somewhat more combative tack against Trump, after a pro-Trump super PAC released a campaign ad in New Hampshire that accused her of supporting a gas-tax increase in South Carolina and dubbed her “‘High Tax’ Haley.” (Haley had backed a gas-tax hike coupled with an income-tax cut.) “In his commercials and in his temper tantrums, every single thing that he’s said has been a lie,” she told an audience at a January 2 town hall on the New Hampshire coast.
“So if he’s gonna lie about me,” Haley went on, “I’m gonna tell you the truth about him.” The line drew the biggest applause of the event. Haley delivered it slowly, clearly, and with authority—like a candidate to be reckoned with, who might just be willing to escalate things.
But wasn’t Haley supposedly telling “hard truths” all along? Isn’t that kind of her signature thing? “She’s admitting that her retaliation to Trump’s lying about her is that she will stop lying about him,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in TheBulwark. Last dubbed Haley’s line “the most complete exposure to a politician’s subconscious I’ve ever seen.”
Or maybe this was always Haley’s conscious plan—to gradually parcel out her clever “hard truths” if convenient and when openings arise, and impress the right people and donors while doing so. Perhaps Haley already views this foray as a success. Even if she never seriously threatens Trump, she’s likely to perform respectably in the early states, win a second place or two, outlast DeSantis, and land some breezy swipes at Trump. Then, when his nomination becomes inevitable again, she can safely endorse her old boss (they always had a good working relationship!) and move on to her next campaign, to be Trump’s vice president or to try again in 2028.
Related Podcast
Listen to Mark Leibovich discuss Nikki Haley on Radio Atlantic:
Trump wants to be “Dictator” but don’t worry, just for one day! Next, maybe he’ll be “Queen for a Day!”
Trump says he’ll only be a Dictator for a day – but there are so many more days in a Presidential Term, so I immediately signed up for ‘Costumes & Props’!
I’ll spare you the names of the world’s notorious Dictators as you know who they are & their rap sheets & that’s a good thing because we don’t need another one!
But Trump said, ‘Just 1 day’ – so we’ll just have to find out on Election Day who wouldn’t mind giving him his little request on his first day!
DAY TWO
He won’t be a Dictator anymore – he’ll be QUEEN FOR A DAY!
DAY THREE
He’ll be A SINGER!
“What a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours…” Hit song by THE Dinah Washington
DAY FOUR
He’ll be THE VILLAGE IDIOT!
DAY FIVE
He’ll be A FARMER!
DAY SIX
He’ll be A PREACHER!
DAY SEVEN
He’ll be A METAMUCIL SPOKESPERSON!
DAY EIGHT
He’ll be A POSTAGE STAMP MODEL!
And, DAY NINE… PRISONER FOR LIFE! **
** if not sooner!
Marilyn Sands is a former 80’s Stand-Up Comic & Comic Booker. Sold Jokes to Joan Rivers & lesser lights. Was up one night & wrote 2 Madcap Screenplays & a Stage Play. Her hilarious book “CAN YOU PEE OUTDOORS” On-Line Dating Straight Lines is on amazon.com/dp/1733487409And, “OWNING THE STAGE, RENTING THE BALLS”!My Life as a Funny Girlis on amazon.com/dp/1733487417″Living proofyou don’t have to be a success to write a Memoir”!And yes, this bio is my OBIT too!haha
Does Nikki Haleyreally have a shot at beating Donald Trump? Does any Republican?
On Monday afternoon, a basketball gym in Bluffton, South Carolina, was packed with people who had come to hear Haley’s latest sales pitch. Hundreds more were waiting outside. No Republican candidate besides Trump can reliably draw more than a thousand attendees, but about 2,500 showed up for Haley. (Granted, this speech was in Haley’s home state, where she formerly served as governor. Also, the gym was a stone’s throw from the Sun City retirement community, a place where, gently speaking, people may have had nothing better to do at 2 p.m. on a Monday.) One of Haley’s volunteers told me this weekday event had originally been booked at a nearby restaurant, but that, given the current excitement of the campaign, organizers pivoted to the gym, on the University of South Carolina at Beaufort campus. Everyone in Haley’s orbit is understandably riveted. She’s squarely challenging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for second place in the Republican presidential primary, no matter how second that place may be.
While the former president still floats high above his dwindling field of competitors, Haley is the only person who keeps rising in the polls. Her climb is steady, not a blip. Haley’s campaign and super PAC are planning to spend $10 million on advertisements over the next eight weeks across Iowa and New Hampshire. On Tuesday, she received an endorsement from the Koch brothers’ network, Americans for Prosperity Action, and along with it an undisclosed amount of financial support. (It will be a lot.) But this year-end, all-in effort to stop Trump ignores the fact that he is a singular vortex, a once-in-a-century figure, a living martyr with a traveling Grateful Dead–like roadshow. His abhorrent behavior and legal woes do not matter. Three weeks ago, at his rally in South Florida, vendors told me that items with Trump’s mug shot are their biggest sellers. How does a mere generational figure, as her supporters hope Haley might be, compete with that?
Haley bounded up onstage in a light-blue blazer and jeans. “We’ve been through a lot together,” she told the crowd. She meandered back and forth—no lectern, no teleprompter. When you ask people what they like about her, many point to her presence, her poise. Haley delivers her stump speech in a singsong voice. A few words, a pause, a smile. Speaking to the Low Country crowd, she seemed to be thickening her southern accent and peppering in a few extra-emphatic finger points for good measure. She’s just a down-home, neighborly southerner whose most recent job happened to be in Manhattan, serving at the United Nations. The volunteer who had bragged to me about the venue change later pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of himself and Haley at a wedding reception. He pointed to her bare feet. She’s so real, he said.
Several women in the audience were wearing pink shirts with a Margaret Thatcher quote on the back: If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman. Sue Ruby, a 74-year-old attendee from nearby Savannah, Georgia, was wearing a WOMEN FOR NIKKI button on her sweater. “I feel like we’ve given men a lot of years to straighten our society out, and they haven’t done so great, so let’s try a woman,” she said. Ruby told me she’s a Republican who begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the past two elections because she viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. A Sun City resident named Lorraine, age 79, told me that “it’s time for a woman,” but that she would nevertheless vote for Trump if he wins the nomination. “I don’t want to vote for the opposite,” she said, refusing to say Biden’s name. Carolyn Ballard, an 80-year-old woman from Hilton Head, South Carolina, told me she’s a lifelong Republican who voted for Trump twice, but that she believes he’s past his prime and that Haley is her candidate. “He just irritates people and he stirs up a lot of trouble,” she said of Trump. “Although he’s very smart, and he did a lot for the country. I mean, everybody was happy when he was president.”
Haley doesn’tlean as hard into gender dynamics as past female presidential candidates have. Nevertheless, she skillfully uses her womanhood and Indian heritage as setups for certain lines. “I have been underestimated in everything I’ve ever done,” she told the room. “And it’s a blessing, because it makes me scrappy. No one’s going to outwork me in this race. No one’s going to outsmart me in this race.” Or this: “Strong girls become strong women, and strong women become strong leaders,” which had a surprise left turn: “And none of that happens if we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports.” (Huge applause.)
Courting Never Trump voters, exhausted Trump voters, and, yes, even some likely Trump voters simultaneously is not an easy trick. She hardly ever criticizes her former boss. Here’s her most biting critique from Monday: “I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time … and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” (Note the passivity; she won’t even say Trump catalyzes the chaos.) Having already served as his ambassador to the UN, she may be under consideration for vice president. Compared with his attacks on Ron DeSantis, Trump has gone relatively soft on her, opting for the mid-century misogynistic slight “birdbrain.” Like most of her competitors, Haley has said she would pardon him.
Whereas Trump has tacked authoritarian and apocalyptic, Haley has mostly kept her messaging grounded. At the rally, she bemoaned the price of groceries and gas. “Biden worries more about sagebrush lizards than he does about Americans being able to afford their energy,” she quipped. (She also called out her fellow Republicans for adding to the deficit.) She’s a military wife, and spoke about her husband’s PTSD and the persistent problem of homeless veterans. Though she lacks Trump’s innate knack for zingers, she landed one about how things might change if members of Congress got their health care through the VA: “It’ll be the best health care you’ve ever seen, guaranteed.”
Although many of her fellow Republicans have adopted a nativist view of the world, Haley waxes at length about America’s geopolitical role. (And subsequently gets tagged as a globalist.) “The world is literally on fire,” she said Monday. She affirmed her support for both Israel and Ukraine, and went long on the triple threat of Russia, China, and Iran, paying particular attention to China as a national-security issue. In doing so, knowingly or not, she began to sound quite Trumpy. “They’re already here. They’ve already infiltrated our country,” Haley said. “We’ve got to start looking at China the way they look at us.” She called for an end to normal trade relations with China until they stop “murdering” Americans with fentanyl. She chastened the audience with images of China’s 500 nuclear warheads and its rapidly expanding naval fleet. “Dictators are actually very transparent. They tell us exactly what they’re going to do,” she said.
Perhaps Haley’s biggest advantage right now is her relative youth. She’ll turn 52 three days before the New Hampshire primary. Trump has lately been making old-man gaffes, drawing comparisons to Biden, who was first elected to the Senate the year Haley was born. She speaks wistfully of “tomorrow,” of leaving certain things—unspecified baggage—in the past. “You have to go with a new generational leader,” Haley proclaimed. Onstage, she endorsed congressional term limits and the idea of mental-competency tests for public servants older than 75. The Senate, she joked, had become “the most privileged nursing home in the country.” Throwing shade at both Trump and Biden, she spoke of the need for leaders at “the top of their game.” Hundreds of gray-and-white-haired supporters before her nodded and murmured in approval.
Monday’s event took place roughly 90 miles south of Charleston, where, in 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church, hoping to start a race war. At the time, Haley was governor of South Carolina, and Trump—who had descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy for president just the day before—still seemed like a carnival act. Photos of Roof posing with a Confederate flag ricocheted across social media. Haley had the flag taken down from the South Carolina statehouse, a reversal from her earlier position on the flag. Five years later, after the murder of George Floyd, Haley tweeted that, “in order to heal,” Floyd’s death “needs to be personal and painful for everyone.” During Monday’s rally, though, she sounded much more like an old-school Republican: “America’s not racist; we’re blessed,” she said. “Our kids need to love America. They need to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance when they start school.”
As her audience grows, she continues to tiptoe along a very fine line: not MAGA, not anti-MAGA. In lieu of Trump-style airbrushed fireworks and bald eagles and Lee Greenwood, she’s going for something slightly classier (leaving the stage to Tom Petty’s “American Girl”) while still seizing every opportunity to own the libs. At the rally, she attacked the military’s gender-pronoun training and received substantial applause. “We’ve got to end this national self-loathing that’s taken over our country,” she said. Early in her speech, she promised that she would speak hard truths. As she approached her conclusion, one hard truth stuck out: “Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. That is nothing to be proud of. We should want to win the majority of Americans.” It was the closest thing to a truly forward-thinking message that any serious Republican has offered this cycle.
In the most generous of interpretations, the race for the GOP nomination is now among three people: Haley, DeSantis, and Trump. Mike Pence is already out. Tim Scott, Haley’s fellow South Carolinian, dropped out two weeks ago. Vivek Ramaswamy, who has struggled to break out of single digits in the polls, recently rented an apartment in Des Moines and will almost certainly stay in the race through the Iowa caucuses. Ramaswamy has also unexpectedly become Haley’s punching bag: Her campaign said she pulled in $1 million in donations after calling him “scum” during the last debate.
At next week’s debate in Alabama, the stage will likely be winnowed to Ramaswamy, Haley, and DeSantis. (“When the stage gets smaller, our chances get bigger,” Haley told her rally crowd.) DeSantis seems to be betting his whole campaign on Iowa, and has secured the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. This weekend, DeSantis will complete his 99-county tour of the state. Haley needs to beat DeSantis, but she also needs his voters if she has any serious shot of taking on Trump. If DeSantis drops out before Haley, his supporters are far more likely to flock to Trump. So maybe Haley needs a deus ex machina. In 2020, Biden’s campaign was viewed as all but cooked when, here in South Carolina, with the help of Representative Jim Clyburn, everything turned around, propelling him to Super Tuesday and the nomination.
Haley’s campaign declined to let her speak with me. A spokesperson, Olivia Perez-Cubas, instead emailed me the following statement: “Poll after poll show Nikki Haley is the best challenger to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That’s why the largest conservative grassroots coalition in the country just got behind her. Nikki is second in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina and is the only candidate with the momentum to go the distance. Ron DeSantis has a short shelf life with his Iowa-or-bust strategy.”
As rally-goers made their way to the parking lot, I struck up conversation with a man in a T-shirt that read NOPE NOT AGAIN, with Trump’s hair and giant red necktie decorating the O. He wore a camouflage baseball hat with an American flag on the dome. The man, Mike Stevens, told me he was a 25-year Army veteran, and that he was disgusted with Trump.
“He’s a bully. He’s not good. He causes hate and discontent,” Stevens said. “I mean, he didn’t uphold the Constitution. And now we’ve had a judge say that. First time ever—no peaceful transfer of power? Even Al Gore did it. I’ve always been a Republican, but if it’s him and Biden, I’ll vote for Biden, I guess.”
He was excited about Haley, and had been texting his friends and family about her rally—trying to wean them off their Trump addiction. But he also told me he had written Haley a letter: He was dismayed by her promise to pardon Trump, and he needed her to know that.
Three words told the story. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign had billed this afternoon’s event in Philadelphia as a “much-anticipated announcement.” Of course, that specific phrase may have been more true than intended.
Ever since Kennedy entered the Democratic presidential primary race in the spring, observers had been anticipating that he’d one day announce his honest intentions as a 2024 candidate. Given Kennedy’s rhetoric, his positions, and his support from conservative operatives, was he really running as a Democrat? A couple thousand people—supporters, journalists, campaign volunteers, people with nothing to do—trekked to Philly to find out.
The candidate was nothing if not on message. Standing in front of a backdrop that read DECLARE YOUR INDEPENDENCE, Kennedy looked out at Independence Hall as he spoke of “a new declaration of independence for our entire nation.” He rattled off a list of everything we’d soon be independent from: cynical elites, the mainstream media, wealthy donors. (Though, presumably, not the same wealthy donors who recently raised more than $2 million for him and his super PAC at a private estate in Brentwood, California, with help from his friend Eric Clapton). Onstage, Kennedy formally declared his independence “from the Democratic Party and all other political parties”—perhaps an unsubtle way to shoot down speculation that he might change his mind and run as a Libertarian, or even a Republican. As his wife, Cheryl Hines, said a bit cryptically before her husband took the stage: “Are you really ready for Bobby Kennedy?”
Kennedy, whom many came to know as a Boomer environmentalist, was the star of this mellow show with a distinct ’60s campus vibe. At one table, attendees were invited to literally sketch their vision of the future on blank sheets of paper with colored pens. Throngs gathered on the grass in front of the National Constitution Center and were led in a Native American tribal dance, followed by the inoffensive piano stylings of Tim Hockenberry, who covered “Jersey Girl” in a Springsteen growl. Outside the entrance, enterprising vendors sold an array of Kennedy memorabilia: buttons that read RESIST INSANITY, RAGE AGAINST THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE, and FIT TO BE PRESIDENT, featuring a photo of a buff, shirtless Kennedy. One attendee waved a giant black-and-white flag with a message for their fellow Kennedy-heads: WE ARE THE CONTROL GROUP. Many people wore fedoras.
They came from all over. Michael Schroth, 69, and his wife, Luz, had taken a 4:30 a.m. bus down from Boston. Schroth told me he voted for Barack Obama twice, but also voted for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader twice, as well as Jill Stein in 2016. “I look for the best candidate, and I don’t care if they’re going to win or not. It’s getting the idea out,” he said. Chris Devol, 56, from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, was wearing a Philadelphia Eagles hoodie and smiling ear to ear as he awaited Kennedy’s arrival. Devol told me he had voted for the third-party candidate Ross Perot in 1992, and that although he wasn’t sure whether he’d support Kennedy next November, he “100 percent” supported the idea of him competing in the Democratic primary. An elderly woman named Barbara (last name withheld), a retired teacher from Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, told me she believed that President Joe Biden wasn’t doing anything to address the nation’s drug problem. She said a bag of fentanyl was recently found on the steps of her local church, then asked me if I was familiar with the Boxer Rebellion.
Prior to Kennedy’s address, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, one of the opening speakers, asked for a moment of silence to honor the violence of this past weekend. Someone in the crowd yelled out “Warmonger!” Another screamed, “Free the Palestinians!” Boteach acknowledged neither individual, and said he greatly respects Kennedy, who has been accused of anti-Semitism, as a man of faith. Later, Kennedy said he had arrived at a place where he was serving only his conscience, his creator, and “you”—the voters.
This afternoon marked the culmination of what he described as a “very painful” decision. He noted his long-standing ties to the Democrats, the party of his family, which he casually referred to as a dynasty, before tearing into the tyranny of the two-party system. For weeks, Kennedy had been attacking the Democratic National Committee for “rigging” the primary process. (The DNC has refused to hold primary debates, as is custom when a party’s incumbents are running for reelection.) Kennedy has been polling in the double digits against Biden, but his support hasn’t grown meaningfully since he launched his campaign. As of last Friday, according to the FiveThirtyEight average, Kennedy was polling at 16.4 percent compared with Biden’s 61.2 percent. Four of his siblings—Kerry Kennedy, Rory Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy II, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend—issued a statement today denouncing their brother’s newly independent candidacy, calling his decision “perilous for our country.” Kennedy acknowledged the challenge ahead of him. “There have been independent candidates in this country before,” he said. “But this time it’s going to be different.”
Kennedy is the second candidate in as many weeks to go rogue. Cornel West dropped his Green Party affiliation in favor of an independent bid, telling The New York Times, “I am a jazz man in politics and the life of the mind who refuses to play only in a party band!” Though neither Democrats nor Republicans seem particularly worried about the candidacies of West or Marianne Williamson, Kennedy is different. “The Democrats are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Biden, and the Republicans are frightened that I’m going to spoil the election for President Trump,” Kennedy said. He waited for a strategic beat. “The truth is, they’re both right.”
All year long, mainstream Democrats have tried to pretend that Kennedy simply doesn’t exist, with mixed results. Both the Biden campaign and the DNC declined to comment today on Kennedy’s switch. The RNC, for its part, blasted out a list of “23 Reasons to Oppose RFK Jr.,” and reports have been circulating that Trump’s allies are preparing to pummel Kennedy with opposition research. Last week, the election analyst Nate Silver argued that Kennedy’s independent run won’t necessarily hurt Biden, and it might even help him. David Axelrod, the chief strategist of Barack Obama’s campaigns, took a different view. “I think anything that lowers the threshold for winning helps Trump, who has a high floor and low ceiling [of support,]” Axelrod told me.
Kennedy tantalized the crowd with nuggets that purport to make the case for his electability: “I have seen the polls that they won’t show you.” He pointed out that 63 percent of Americans want an independent to run for president. Though he didn’t cite the origin of this statistic, it aligns with recent Gallup polling, which also showed that 58 percent of Republicans endorse a third U.S. political party, up from 45 percent last year.
Kennedy has built his candidacy, and his career as a lawyer and writer more broadly, on the idea that there are lots of things “they won’t show you.” As I wrote in a profile of Kennedy this summer, he has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”
“He’s drawing from many of those Trump voters—the two-time Obama, onetime Trump—that are still disaffected, want change, and maybe haven’t found a permanent home in the Trump movement,” Steve Bannon told me as I was reporting the profile. “Populist left, populist right, and where that Venn diagram overlaps—he’s talking to those people.”
The reality is that Kennedy will have an extremely hard time even getting his name on the ballot. The GOP “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who earlier this year was accused of being among those propping up Kennedy’s candidacy (something he has repeatedly denied), told me in a text message that Kennedy faces a “Herculean task” with “50 different state laws written by Republicans and Democrats working together to make ballot access as difficult as possible.” Even if Kennedy is right and voters are looking for a true alternative to Trump and Biden, mathematically, Kennedy’s path to 270 electoral votes is almost incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, he said he believes that he is at the start of a new American moment. “Something is stirring in us that says, It doesn’t have to be this way,” Kennedy said onstage. He nodded to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech from the eve of his assassination and quoted Abraham Lincoln quoting Jesus Christ: “A house divided cannot stand.” He said that the left and the right had become “all mixed up.” He said that he was proud to count those on both sides of the abortion debate among his supporters, in addition to “climate activists” and “climate skeptics,” and, of course, the “vaccinated” and the “unvaccinated.” Perhaps saying the quiet part out loud, Kennedy said it would be very hard for people to tell “whether my administration is left or right.” He had no shortage of curious metaphors. He promised not just to “take the wheel,” but to “reboot the GPS.” The nation’s two-party system? “A two-headed monster that leads us over a cliff.” And, in case it wasn’t clear: “At the bottom of that cliff is the destruction of our country.”
When I interviewed Kennedy for the profile, I asked him what he thought would be more dangerous for the country: four more years of Biden, or another Trump term. “I can’t answer that,” he said.
Around that time, I asked his campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, if Kennedy was committed to running solely as a Democratic candidate.
“He’s running in the Democratic primary,” Kucinich responded.
“So, no chance of a third party?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
“Gotcha. And nothing could change that?”
“He’s running in the Democratic primary.”
Today, after Kennedy finished speaking, Kucinich briefly seized the mic and led the crowd in a building, dramatic chant:
Suddenly, it just tumbled out: “Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.”
That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”
Such was the onstage energy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: Chaotic, sloppy, largely substance-free. Seven candidates desperately fought for fresh relevance; none of them came away with it. Rather than pitching themselves as the candidate who can beat former President Donald Trump, these Republicans seemed to be operating most of the time in an alternate universe, in which Trump was absent not just from the stage, but from the race.
Eight years ago, so many candidates were vying for the Republican nomination that the party took to splitting primary debates into two sessions: the main event and the undercard. The latter contest was mocked as the “kids’ table” debate. So far this time around, there’s only one unified debate night. Nevertheless, Trump has such a commanding lead over his challengers that, for the second debate in a row, he hasn’t even bothered to show up and speak. Voters have no reason to believe he’ll be at any of the other contests. Trump counter-programmed last month’s Fox News debate by sitting down for a sympathetic interview with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Michigan, where a powerful union—United Auto Workers—are in the second week of a strike.
All seven candidates who qualified for the debate—individuals with honorifics such as “governor,” “senator,” and “former vice president”—spent the evening arguing at the kids’ table. Barring some sort of medical emergency, Trump seems like the inevitable 2024 GOP nominee. As Michael Scherer of The Washington Post pointed out on X (formerly Twitter), the candidates on stage were collectively polling at 36 percent. If they were to join forces and become one person (think seven Republicans stacked in a trenchcoat), Trump would still be winning by 20 percent.
How many other ways can you say this? The race is effectively over. So what, then, were they all doing there? A cynic would tell you they’re merely running for second place—for a shot at a cabinet position, maybe even VP.
One candidate decidedly not running for vice president is Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken to (gently) attacking his old boss. Nor does former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seem to want a sidekick or administration gig. Christie has staked his entire campaign on calling out Trump’s sins, and, so far, it’s not working. Earlier on Wednesday, Christie shared a photo of himself at a recent NFL game, with a cringeworthy nod to new Kansas City Chiefs fan Taylor Swift: “I was just a guy in the bleachers on Sunday… but after tonight, Trump will know we are never ever getting back together.”
At the debate, Christie stared directly into the camera like Macho Man Randy Savage, pointer finger and all, to deliver what amounted to a professional wrestling taunt. “Donald, I know you’re watching. You can’t help yourself!” Christie began. “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things, and let me tell you what’s going to happen.”
[Here it comes]
“You keep doing that, no one up here’s gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re gonna call you Donald Duck.”
“Alright,” moderator Dana Perino said.
The crowd appeared to laugh, cheer, boo, and groan.
The auto-worker’s strike, and criticisms of the larger American economy, received significant attention at the debate. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum laid the strike “at Joe Biden’s feet.” Pence came ready with a zinger: “Joe Biden doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on the unemployment line.” (Another Pence joke about sleeping with a teacher—his wife—didn’t quite land.)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s closest rival, stood center stage but spent most of the night struggling to connect as all the candidates intermittently talked over one another. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, perhaps trying to fight back against those who claim he lacks charisma, frequently went on the attack, most notably against Ramaswamy, who, in the previous debate, claimed his rivals were “bought and paid for.” Later, Scott attacked DeSantis for his past controversial comments about race: “There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott said. But he followed that up a moment later with another sound byte: “America is not a racist country.”
However earnest and honest Scott’s message may be, it was impossible to hear his words without thinking of the man he’s running against. So again: What was everyone doing Wednesday night? In an alternate reality, a red-state candidate like Scott, Haley, or Burgum might cruise to the GOP nomination. In a way, Fox Business, itself, seemed to broadcast tonight’s proceedings in that strange other world. The network kept playing retro Reagan clips as the debate came in and out of commercial breaks. And those ads? One featured South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—not a 2024 presidential candidate, but certainly a potential VP pick—making a pitch for people to move to her sparsely populated state. Another ad argued that the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes would be a boon to Mexican drug cartels. What?
It was all a sideshow. Trump’s team seemed to know it, too. With just over five minutes left in the debate, the former president’s campaign blasted out a statement to reporters from a senior advisor: “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest being dominated by President Trump.” For all of Trump’s lies, he and his acolytes can occasionally be excruciatingly honest.
I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement.
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“There’s someone to gather the facts,” Hanks said in the ad. “To bring you the story. No matter the cost. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.”
Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”
Two years earlier—a month into Trump’s presidency—the Post had affixed “Democracy dies in darkness” under its nameplate on the printed newspaper, as well as at the top of its website and on everything it produced. As the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, envisioned it, this was not a slogan but a “mission statement.” And it was not about Trump, although his allies took it to be. Producing a mission statement had been in the works for two years before Trump took office. That it emerged when it did is testimony to the tortuous, and torturous, process of coming up with something sufficiently memorable and meaningful that Bezos would bless.
Bezos, the founder and now executive chair of Amazon, had bought The Washington Post in 2013. In early 2015, he had expressed his wish for a phrase that might encapsulate the newspaper’s purpose: a phrase that would convey an idea, not a product; fit nicely on a T-shirt; make a claim uniquely ours, given our heritage and our base in the nation’s capital; and be both aspirational and disruptive. “Not a paper I want to subscribe to,” as Bezos put it, but rather “an idea I want to belong to.” The idea: We love this country, so we hold it accountable.
No small order, coming up with the right phrase. And Bezos was no distant observer. “On this topic,” he told us, “I’d like to see all the sausage-making. Don’t worry about whether it’s a good use of my time.” Bezos, so fixated on metrics in other contexts, now advised ditching them. “I just think we’re going to have to use gut and intuition.” And he insisted that the chosen words recognize our “historic mission,” not a new one. “We don’t have to be afraid of the democracy word,” he said; it’s “the thing that makes the Post unique.”
Staff teams were assembled. Months of meetings were held. Frustrations deepened. Outside branding consultants were retained, to no avail. (“Typical,” Bezos said.) Desperation led to a long list of options, venturing into the inane. The ideas totaled at least 1,000: “A bias for truth,” “Know,” “A right to know,” “You have a right to know,” “Unstoppable journalism,” “The power is yours,” “Power read,” “Relentless pursuit of the truth,” “The facts matter,” “It’s about America,” “Spotlight on democracy,” “Democracy matters,” “A light on the nation,” “Democracy lives in light,” “Democracy takes work. We’ll do our part,” “The news democracy needs,” “Toward a more perfect union” (rejected lest it summon thoughts of our own workforce union).
By September 2016, an impatient Bezos was forcing the issue. We had to settle on something. Nine Post executives and Bezos met in a private room at the Four Seasons in Georgetown to finally get over the finish line. Because of Bezos’s tight schedule, we had only half an hour, starting at 7:45 a.m. A handful of options remained on the table: “A bright light for a free people” or, simply, “A bright light for free people”; “The story must be told” (recalling the inspiring words of the late photographer Michel du Cille); “To challenge and inform”; “For a world that demands to know”; “For people who demand to know.” None of those passed muster.
In the end, we settled on “A free people demand to know” (subject to a grammar check by our copy desk, which gave its assent). Success was short-lived—mercifully, no doubt. Late that evening, Bezos dispatched an email in the “not what you’re hoping for category,” as he put it. He had run our consensus pick by his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, a novelist and “my in-house wordsmith,” who had pronounced the phrase clunky. “Frankenslogan” was the word she used.
By then, we needed Bezos to take unilateral action. Finally, he did. “Let’s go with ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ ” he decreed. It had been on our list from the start, and was a phrase Bezos had used previously in speaking of the Post’s mission; he himself had heard it from the Washington Post legend Bob Woodward. It was a twist on a phrase in a 2002 ruling by the federal-appellate-court judge Damon J. Keith, who wrote that “democracies die behind closed doors.”
“Democracy dies in darkness” made its debut, without announcement, in mid-February 2017. And I’ve never seen a slogan—I mean, mission statement—get such a reaction. It even drew attention from People’s Daily in China, which tweeted, “ ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ @washingtonpost puts on new slogan, on the same day @realDonaldTrump calls media as the enemy of Americans.” Merriam-Webster reported a sudden surge in searches for the word democracy. The Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked that some of the rejected phrases had included “No, you shut up” and “We took down Nixon—who wants next?” Twitter commentators remarked on the Post’s “new goth vibe.” The media critic Jack Shafer tweeted a handful of his own “rejected Washington Post mottos,” among them “We’re really full of ourselves” and “Democracy Gets Sunburned If It Doesn’t Use Sunscreen.”
Bezos couldn’t have been more thrilled. The mission statement was getting noticed. “It’s a good sign when you’re the subject of satire,” he said a couple of weeks later. The four words atop our journalism had certainly drawn attention to our mission. Much worse would have been a collective shrug. Like others at the Post, I had questioned the wisdom of branding all our work with death and darkness. All I could think of at that point, though, was the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
But the phrase stuck with readers, who saw it as perfect for the Trump era, even if that was not its intent.
The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, speaks to the newsroom as the staff celebrates winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
We must have been an odd-looking group, sitting around the dining-room table in the egg-shaped Blue Room of the White House: Bezos, recognizable anywhere by his bald head, short stature, booming laugh, and radiant intensity; Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, an alumnus of the Reagan administration who was a head taller than my own 5 feet 11 inches, with graying blond hair and a giant, glistening smile; the editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, a 36-year Post veteran and former foreign correspondent with an earnest, bookish look; and me, with a trimmed gray beard, woolly head of hair, and what was invariably described as a dour and taciturn demeanor.
Five months after his inauguration, President Trump had responded to a request from the publisher for a meeting, and had invited us to dinner. We were joined by the first lady, Melania Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. By coincidence, just as we were sitting down, at 7 p.m., the Postpublished a report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was inquiring into Kushner’s business dealings in Russia, part of Mueller’s investigation into that country’s interference in the 2016 election. The story followed another by the Postrevealing that Kushner had met secretly with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and had proposed that a Russian diplomatic post be used to provide a secure communications line between Trump officials and the Kremlin. The Post had reported as well that Kushner met later with Sergey Gorkov, the head of a Russian-owned development bank.
Hope Hicks, a young Trump aide, handed Kushner her phone. Our news alert had just gone out, reaching millions of mobile devices, including hers. “Very Shakespearean,” she whispered to Kushner. “Dining with your enemies.” Hiatt, who had overheard, whispered back, “We’re not your enemies.”
As we dined on cheese soufflé, pan-roasted Dover sole, and chocolate-cream tart, Trump crowed about his election victory, mocked his rivals and even people in his own orbit, boasted of imagined accomplishments, calculated how he could win yet again in four years, and described The Washington Post as the worst of all media outlets, with The New York Times just behind us in his ranking in that moment.
Trump, his family, and his team had put the Post on their enemies list, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. We had been neither servile nor sycophantic toward Trump, and we weren’t going to be. Our job was to report aggressively on the president and to hold his administration, like all others, to account. In the mind of the president and those around him, that made us the opposition.
There was political benefit to Trump in going further: We were not just his enemy—we were the country’s enemy. In his telling, we were traitors. Less than a month into his presidency, Trump had denounced the press as “the enemy of the American People” on Twitter. It was an ominous echo of the phrase “enemy of the people,” invoked by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Hitler’s propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, and deployed for the purpose of repression and murder. Trump could not have cared less about the history of such incendiary language or how it might incite physical attacks on journalists.
Whenever I was asked about Trump’s rhetoric, my own response was straightforward: “We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” But it was clear that Trump saw all of us at that table as his foes, most especially Bezos, because he owned the Post and, in Trump’s mind, was pulling the strings—or could pull them if he wished.
At our dinner, Trump sought at times to be charming. It was a superficial charm, without warmth or authenticity. He did almost all the talking. We scarcely said a word, and I said the least, out of discomfort at being there and seeking to avoid any confrontation with him over our coverage. Anything I said could set him off.
He let loose on a long list of perceived enemies and slights: The chief executive of Macy’s was a “coward” for pulling Trump products from store shelves in reaction to Trump’s remarks portraying Mexican immigrants as rapists; he would have been picketed by only “20 Mexicans. Who cares?” Trump had better relations with foreign leaders than former President Barack Obama, who was lazy and never called them. Obama had left disasters around the world for him to solve. Obama had been hesitant to allow the military to kill people in Afghanistan. He, Trump, told the military to just do it; don’t ask for permission. Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, fired FBI Director James Comey, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were slammed for reasons that are now familiar.
Two themes stayed with me from that dinner. First, Trump would govern primarily to retain the support of his base. At the table, he pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. The figure “47%” appeared above his photo. “This is the latest Rasmussen poll. I can win with that.” The message was clear: That level of support, if he held key states, was all he needed to secure a second term. What other voters thought of him, he seemed to say, would not matter.
Second, his list of grievances appeared limitless. Atop them all was the press, and atop the press was the Post. During dinner, he derided what he had been hearing about our story on the special counsel and his son-in-law, suggesting incorrectly that it alleged money laundering. “He’s a good kid,” he said of Kushner, who at the time was 36 and a father of three, and sitting right there at the table. The Post was awful, Trump said repeatedly. We treated him unfairly. With every such utterance, he poked me in the shoulder with his left elbow.
Baron’s office at the Post. (The Washington Post / Getty)
A few times during that dinner, Trump—for all the shots he had taken during the campaign at Bezos’s company—mentioned that Melania was a big Amazon shopper, prompting Bezos to joke at one point, “Consider me your personal customer-service rep.” Trump’s concern, of course, wasn’t Amazon’s delivery. He wanted Bezos to deliver him from the Post’s coverage.
The effort quickened the next day. Kushner called Fred Ryan in the morning to get his read on how the dinner had gone. After Ryan offered thanks for their generosity and graciousness with their time, Kushner inquired whether the Post’s coverage would now improve as a result. Ryan diplomatically rebuffed him with a reminder that there were to be no expectations about coverage. “It’s not a dial we have to turn one way to make it better and another way to make it worse,” he said.
Trump would be the one to call Bezos’s cellphone that same morning at eight, urging him to get the Post to be “more fair to me.” He said, “I don’t know if you get involved in the newsroom, but I’m sure you do to some degree.” Bezos replied that he didn’t and then delivered a line he’d been prepared to say at the dinner itself if Trump had leaned on him then: “It’s really not appropriate to … I’d feel really bad about it my whole life if I did.” The call ended without bullying about Amazon but with an invitation for Bezos to seek a favor. “If there’s anything I can do for you,” Trump said.
Three days later, the bullying began. Leaders of the technology sector gathered at the White House for a meeting of the American Technology Council, which had been created by executive order a month earlier. Trump briefly pulled Bezos aside to complain bitterly about the Post’s coverage. The dinner, he said, was apparently a wasted two and a half hours.
Then, later in the year, four days after Christmas, Trump in a tweet called for the Postal Service to charge Amazon “MUCH MORE” for package deliveries, claiming that Amazon’s rates were a rip-off of American taxpayers. The following year, he attempted to intervene to obstruct Amazon in its pursuit of a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Defense Department. Bezos was to be punished for not reining in the Post.
Meanwhile, Trump was salivating to have an antitrust case filed against Amazon. The hedge-fund titan Leon Cooperman revealed in a CNBC interview that Trump had asked him twice at a White House dinner that summer whether Amazon was a monopoly. On July 24, 2017, Trump tweeted, “Is Fake News Washington Post being used as a lobbyist weapon against Congress to keep Politicians from looking into Amazon no-tax monopoly?”
As Trump sought to tighten the screws, Bezos made plain that the paper had no need to fear that he might capitulate. In March 2018, as we concluded one of our business meetings, Bezos offered some parting words: “You may have noticed that Trump keeps tweeting about us.” The remark was met with silence. “Or maybe you haven’t noticed!” Bezos joked. He wanted to reinforce a statement I had publicly made before. “We are not at war with them,” Bezos said. “They may be at war with us. We just need to do the work.” In July of that year, he once again spoke up unprompted at a business meeting. “Do not worry about me,” he said. “Just do the work. And I’ve got your back.”
A huge advantage of Bezos’s ownership was that he had his eye on a long time horizon. In Texas, he was building a “10,000-year clock” in a hollowed-out mountain—intended as a symbol, he explained, of long-term thinking. He often spoke of what the business or the landscape might look like in “20 years.” When I first heard that timeline, I was startled. News executives I’d dealt with routinely spoke, at best, of next year—and, at worst, next quarter. Even so, Bezos also made decisions at a speed that was unprecedented in my experience. He personally owned 100 percent of the company. He didn’t need to consult anyone. Whatever he spent came directly out of his bank account.
In my interactions with him, Bezos showed integrity and spine. Early in his ownership, he displayed an intuitive appreciation that an ethical compass for the Post was inseparable from its business success. There was much about Bezos and Amazon that the Post needed to vigorously cover and investigate—such as his company’s escalating market power, its heavy-handed labor practices, and the ramifications for individual privacy of its voracious data collection. There was also the announcement that Bezos and MacKenzie Scott were seeking a divorce—followed immediately by an explosive report in the National Enquirer disclosing that Bezos had been involved in a long-running extramarital relationship with Lauren Sánchez, a former TV reporter and news anchor. We were determined to fulfill our journalistic obligations with complete independence, and did so without restriction.
I came to like the Post’s owner as a human being and found him to be a far more complex, thoughtful, and agreeable character than routinely portrayed. He can be startlingly easy to talk to: Just block out any thought of his net worth. Our meetings took place typically every two weeks by teleconference, and only rarely in person. During the pandemic, we were subjected to Amazon’s exasperatingly inferior videoconferencing system, called Chime. The one-hour meetings were a lesson in his unconventional thinking, wry humor (“This is me enthusiastic. Sometimes it’s hard to tell”), and fantastic aphorisms: “Most people start building before they know what they’re building”; “The things that everybody knows are going to work, everybody is already doing.” At one session, we were discussing group subscriptions for college students. Bezos wanted to know the size of the market. As we all started to Google, Bezos interjected, “Hey, why don’t we try this? Alexa, how many college students are there in the United States?” (Alexa pulled up the data from the National Center for Education Statistics.)
In conversation, Bezos could be witty and self-deprecating (“Nothing makes me feel dumber than a New Yorker cartoon”), laughed easily, and posed penetrating questions. When a Post staffer asked him whether he’d join the crew of his space company, Blue Origin, on one of its early launches, he said he wasn’t sure. “Why don’t you wait a while and see how things go?” I advised. “That,” he said, “is the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”
Science fiction—particularly Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven—had a huge influence on Bezos in his teenage years. He has spoken of how his interest in space goes back to his childhood love of the Star Trek TV series. Star Trek inspired both the voice-activated Alexa and the name of his holding company, Zefram, drawn from the fictional character Zefram Cochrane, who developed “warp drive,” a technology that allowed space travel at faster-than-light speeds. “The reason he’s earning so much money,” his high-school girlfriend, Ursula Werner, said early in Amazon’s history, “is to get to outer space.”
Baron and the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, in 2016 (The Washington Post / Getty)
From the moment Bezos acquired the Post, he made clear that its historic journalistic mission was at the core of its business. I had been in journalism long enough to witness some executives—unmoored by crushing pressures on circulation, advertising, and profits—abandon the foundational journalistic culture, even shunning the vocabulary we use to describe our work. Many publishers took to calling journalism “content,” a term so hollow that I sarcastically advised substituting “stuff.” Journalists were recategorized as “content producers,” top editors retitled “chief content officers.” Bezos was a different breed.
He seemed to value and enjoy encounters with the news staff in small groups, even if they were infrequent. Once, at a dinner with some of the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winners, Bezos asked Carol Leonnig, who had won for exposing security lapses by the Secret Service, how she was able to get people to talk to her when the risks for them were so high. It had to be a subject of understandable curiosity for the head of Amazon, a company that routinely rebuffed reporters’ inquiries with “No comment.” Carol told him she was straightforward about what she sought and directly addressed individuals’ fears and motivations. The Post’s reputation for serious, careful investigative reporting, she told Bezos, carried a lot of weight with potential sources. They wanted injustice or malfeasance revealed, and we needed their help. The Post would protect their identity.
Anonymous leaking out of the government didn’t begin with the Trump administration. It has a long tradition in Washington. Leaks are often the only way for journalists to learn and report what is happening behind the scenes. If sources come forward publicly, they risk being fired, demoted, sidelined, or even prosecuted. The risks were heightened with a vengeful Trump targeting the so-called deep state, what he imagined to be influential government officials conspiring against him. The Department of Justice had announced early in his term that it would become even more aggressive in its search for leakers of classified national-security information. And Trump’s allies and supporters could be counted on to make life a nightmare for anyone who crossed him.
Journalists would much prefer to have government sources on the record, but anonymity has become an inextricable feature of Washington reporting. Though Trump-administration officials claimed to be unjust victims of anonymous sourcing, they were skillful practitioners and beneficiaries as well. The Trump administration was the leakiest in memory. Senior officials leaked regularly, typically as a result of internal rivalries. Trump himself leaked to get news out in a way that he viewed as helpful, just as he had done as a private citizen in New York.
Trump had assembled his government haphazardly, enlisting many individuals who had no relevant experience and no history of previously collaborating with one another—“kind of a crowd of misfit toys,” as Josh Dawsey, a White House reporter for the Post, put it to me. Some were mere opportunists. Many officials, as the Post’s Ashley Parker has observed, came to believe that working in the administration was like being a character in Game of Thrones : Better to knife others before you got knifed yourself. Odds were high that Trump would do the stabbing someday on his own. But many in government leaked out of principle. They were astonished to see the norms of governance and democracy being violated—and by the pervasive lying.
Trump’s gripes about anonymity weren’t based on the rigor of the reporting—or even, for that matter, its veracity. Leaks that reflected poorly on him were condemned as false, and the sources therefore nonexistent, even as he pressed for investigations to identify the supposedly nonexistent sources. With his followers’ distrust of the media, he had little trouble convincing them that the stories were fabrications by media out to get him—and them. Conflating his political self-interest with the public interest, he was prone to labeling the leaks as treasonous.
At the Post, the aim was to get at the facts, no matter the obstacles Trump and his allies put in our way. In January 2018, Dawsey reported that Trump, during a discussion with lawmakers about protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of an immigration deal, asked: “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” In March, Dawsey, Leonnig, and David Nakamura reported that Trump had defied cautions from his national security advisers not to offer well-wishes to Russian President Vladimir Putin on winning reelection to another six-year term. “DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” warned briefing material that Trump may or may not have read. Such advice should have been unnecessary in the first place. After all, it had been anything but a fair election. Prominent opponents were excluded from the ballot, and much of the Russian news media are controlled by the state. “If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the president’s briefing papers,” said a senior White House official who, as was common in an administration that condemned anonymous sources, insisted on anonymity.
To be sure, sources sometimes want anonymity for ignoble reasons. But providing anonymity is essential to legitimate news-gathering in the public interest. If any doubt remains as to why so many government officials require anonymity to come forward—and why responsible news outlets give them anonymity when necessary—the story of Trump’s famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offers an instructive case study.
In September 2019, congressional committees received a letter from Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. A whistleblower had filed a complaint with him, he wrote, and in Atkinson’s assessment, it qualified as credible and a matter of “urgent concern”—defined as a “serious or flagrant problem, abuse or violation of the law or Executive Order” that involves classified information but “does not include differences of opinion concerning public policy matters.”
Soon, a trio of Post national-security reporters published a story that began to flesh out the contents of the whistleblower complaint. The article, written by Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, and Shane Harris, cited anonymous sources in reporting that the complaint involved “President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader.” The incident was said to revolve around a phone call.
Step by careful step, news organizations excavated the basic facts: In a phone call with Zelensky, Trump had effectively agreed to provide $250 million in military aid to Ukraine—approved by Congress, but inexplicably put on hold by the administration—only if Zelensky launched an investigation into his likely Democratic foe in the 2020 election, Joe Biden, and his alleged activities in Ukraine. This attempted extortion would lead directly to Trump’s impeachment, making him only the third president in American history to be formally accused by the House of Representatives of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The entire universe of Trump allies endeavored to have the whistleblower’s identity revealed—widely circulating a name—with the spiteful aim of subjecting that individual to fierce harassment and intimidation, or worse. Others who ultimately went public with their concerns, as they responded to congressional subpoenas and provided sworn testimony, became targets of relentless attacks and mockery.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council, who had listened in on the phone call as part of his job, became a central witness, implicating Trump during the impeachment hearings. He was fired after having endured condemnation from the White House and deceitful insinuations by Trump allies that he might be a double agent. Vindman’s twin brother, Yevgeny, an NSC staffer who had raised protests internally about Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, was fired too. Gordon Sondland—the hotelier and Trump donor who was the ambassador to the European Union and an emissary of sorts to Ukraine as well—was also fired. He had admitted in congressional testimony that there had been an explicit quid pro quo conditioning a Zelensky visit to the White House on a Ukrainian investigation of Biden. The Vindmans and Sondland were all dismissed within two days of Trump’s acquittal in his first impeachment trial. Just before their ousters, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham had suggested on Fox News that “people should pay” for what Trump went through.
The acting Pentagon comptroller, Elaine McCusker, had her promotion rescinded, evidently for having merely questioned whether Ukraine aid could be legally withheld. She later resigned. Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general, was fired as well, leaving with a plea for whistleblowers to “use authorized channels to bravely speak up—there is no disgrace for doing so.”
“The Washington Post is constantly quoting ‘anonymous sources’ that do not exist,” Trump had tweeted in 2018 in one of his familiar lines of attack. “Rarely do they use the name of anyone because there is no one to give them the kind of negative quote that they are looking for.” The Ukraine episode made it clear that real people with incriminating information existed in substantial numbers. If they went public, they risked unemployment. If they chose anonymity, as the whistleblower did, Trump and his allies would aim to expose them and have them publicly and savagely denounced.
“We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.” When I made that comment, many fellow journalists enthusiastically embraced the idea that we should not think of ourselves as warriors but instead as professionals merely doing our job to keep the public informed. Others came to view that posture as naive: When truth and democracy are under attack, the only proper response is to be more fiercely and unashamedly bellicose ourselves. One outside critic went so far as to label my statement an “atrocity” when, after my retirement, Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, had my quote mounted on the wall overlooking the paper’s national desk.
I believe that responsible journalists should be guided by fundamental principles. Among them: We must support and defend democracy. Citizens have a right to self-governance. Without democracy, there can be no independent press, and without an independent press, there can be no democracy. We must work hard and honestly to discover the truth, and we should tell the public unflinchingly what we learn. We should support the right of all citizens to participate in the electoral process without impediment. We should endorse free speech and understand that vigorous debate over policy is essential to democracy. We should favor equitable treatment for everyone, under the law and out of moral obligation, and abundant opportunity for all to attain what they hope for themselves and their families. We owe special attention to the least fortunate in our society, and have a duty to give voice to those who otherwise would not be heard. We must oppose intolerance and hate, and stand against violence, repression, and abuse of power.
I also believe journalists can best honor those ideals by adhering to traditional professional principles. The press will do itself and our democracy no favors if it abandons what have long been bedrock standards. Too many norms of civic discourse have been trampled. For the press to hold power to account today, we will have to maintain standards that demonstrate that we are practicing our craft honorably, thoroughly, and fairly, with an open mind and with a reverence for evidence over our own opinions. In short, we should practice objective journalism.
The idea of objective journalism has uncertain origins. But it can be traced to the early 20th century, in the aftermath of World War I, when democracy seemed imperiled and propaganda had been developed into a polished instrument for manipulating public opinion and the press during warfare—and, in the United States, for deepening suspicions about marginalized people who were then widely regarded as not fully American.
Baron and his Boston Globe colleagues react to winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the paper’s coverage of sexual abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic Church. (The Boston Globe / Getty)
The renowned journalist and thinker Walter Lippmann helped give currency to the term when he wrote Liberty and the News, published in 1920. In that slim volume, he described a time that sounds remarkably similar to today. “There is everywhere an increasingly angry disillusionment about the press, a growing sense of being baffled and misled,” he wrote. The onslaught of news was “helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion.” The public suffered from “no rules of evidence.” He worried over democratic institutions being pushed off their foundations by the media environment.
Lippmann made no assumption that journalists could be freed of their own opinions. He assumed, in fact, just the opposite: They were as subject to biases as anyone else. He proposed an “objective” method for moving beyond them: Journalists should pursue “as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.” That idea of objectivity doesn’t preclude the lie-detector role for the press; it argues for it. It is not an idea that fosters prejudice; it labors against it. “I am convinced,” he wrote, in a line that mirrors my own thinking, “that we shall accomplish more by fighting for truth than by fighting for our theories.”
In championing “objectivity” in our work, I am swimming against what has become, lamentably, a mighty tide in my profession of nearly half a century. No word seems more unpopular today among many mainstream journalists. A report in January 2023 by a previous executive editor at The Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., and a former CBS News president, Andrew Heyward, argued that objectivity in journalism is outmoded. They quoted a former close colleague of mine: “Objectivity has got to go.”
Objectivity, in my view, has got to stay. Maintaining that standard does not guarantee the public’s confidence. But it increases the odds that journalists will earn it. The principle of objectivity has been under siege for years, but perhaps never more ferociously than during Trump’s presidency and its aftermath. Several arguments are leveled against it by my fellow journalists: None of us can honestly claim to be objective, and we shouldn’t profess to be. We all have our opinions. Objectivity also is seen as just another word for neutrality, balance, and so-called both-sidesism. It pretends, according to this view, that all assertions deserve equal weight, even when the evidence shows they don’t, and so it fails to deliver the plain truth to the public. Finally, critics argue that objectivity historically excluded the perspectives of those who have long been among the most marginalized in society (and media): women, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Indigenous Americans, the LGBTQ community, and others.
Genuine objectivity, however, does not mean any of that. This is what it really means: As journalists, we can never stop obsessing over how to get at the truth—or, to use a less lofty term, “objective reality.” Doing that requires an open mind and a rigorous method. We must be more impressed by what we don’t know than by what we know, or think we know.
Journalists routinely expect objectivity from others. Like everyone else, we want objective judges. We want objective juries. We want police officers to be objective when they make arrests and detectives to be objective in assessing evidence. We want prosecutors to evaluate cases objectively, with no prejudice or preexisting agendas. Without objectivity, there can be no equity in law enforcement, as abhorrent abuses have demonstrated all too often. We want doctors to be objective in diagnosing the medical conditions of their patients, uncontaminated by bigotry or baseless hunches. We want medical researchers and regulators to be objective in determining whether new drugs might work and can be safely consumed. We want scientists to be objective in evaluating the impact of chemicals in the soil, air, and water.
Objectivity in all these fields, and others, gets no argument from journalists. We accept it, even insist on it by seeking to expose transgressions. Journalists should insist on it for ourselves as well.
A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.
“There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”
But after hearing Trump’s abortion comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dickson, who is one of the architects of Texas’s so-called heartbeat ban, feels differently. He’d been helping plan a big Trump rally in Lubbock. Now he’s worried. “What I want to do is get up onstage and brag about Trump. But at this point, his statements do not represent what we have worked for for 50 years,” Dickson said. “The goal of the movement was not overturning Roe v. Wade—it was ending abortion in all 50 states.”
Trump confounded Dickson and the rest of the anti-abortion coalition when he told NBC’s Kristen Welker not only that a federal abortion ban would be low on his to-do list during a second term as president, but also that six-week abortion bans like the one in Florida are “terrible.” The outrage from the movement was predictably ferocious. “This isn’t just evil, it is absolutely delusional,” the conservative podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey wrote. Live Action’s founder, Lila Rose, tweeted that “Trump should not be the GOP nominee.” In an email to supporters, Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said, “Trump just broke my heart.”
Dickson felt equally bruised. If Trump really thinks Florida’s six-week ban is so bad, he mused, “then what does he believe about Texas outlawing abortion from the moment of conception?” If he thinks that’s terrible too, Trump “is going to lose a whole lot of Texas support.”
A few advocates say that, like Rose, they’re writing Trump off. Others have called on the former president to retract his comments. Neither reflex does justice to Trump, who has on occasion demonstrated savvier political instincts than his GOP opponents. What appears to be his current operating assumption—that talking about abortion bans is a turnoff for many voters—is a smart one: Most Americans support access to abortion. Trump is the only real contender among Republican presidential candidates acting in a way that acknowledges this fact. The question is: Will it hurt him?
The MAGA faithful have so far seen nothing to make them withdraw their support from Trump—after each of his multiple criminal indictments, their devotion has only deepened. Trump’s remarks about abortion seem similarly unlikely to damage his standing. In a general election, they might even help.
That’s because of Trump’s unusual capacity for shape-shifting. “He can say, ‘I gave you the Supreme Court,’ but also ‘I’d look for a compromise on a national level,’” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. He can sound moderate, in other words, “in a way that Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence would not.”
The Meet the Press interview with Welker did not immediately ring alarm bells in the pro-life camp. Although Trump refused to commit to any federal anti-abortion legislation, he did appear to embrace some form of restriction. He said he’d work with Democrats to come up with a number of weeks that will bring “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.” Standard fare for Trump: vague, noncommittal, self-aggrandizing. But then he brought up the six-week ban that his main primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had signed into law as the Heartbeat Act.
“Would you support that?” Welker asked.
“I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” Trump replied. And, well, that was that.
Right away, Team DeSantis had campaign staff posting assurances that, as president, DeSantis would “NEVER sell out conservatives to win praise from corporate media or the Left.” Other Republican primary candidates jumped into the fray too. “President Trump said he would negotiate with the Democrats and walk back away from what I believe we need, which is a 15-week limit on the federal level,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told a crowd in Mason City, Iowa. On CNN, former Vice President Mike Pence accused Trump of wanting to “marginalize the right to life.”
The right-to-life activists certainly saw it that way. “Heartbeat Laws,” Hawkins wrote in an open letter to Trump, “should be an absolute minimum for any Republican candidate committed to protecting many from death by direct abortion.” I spoke with Steven Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life. “Any time a leader of a national party throws pro-life conservatives to the curb, it’s extremely disappointing,” he told me. “I hope that his comments were a temporary aberration from an otherwise excellent record.”
One can’t help being a little surprised at their surprise. This is Donald Trump, after all—a man not noticeably wedded to any principle but self-interest, and who, in a previous life, was an abortion-rights-supporting New York Democrat. No one would mistake Trump for a true believer in the vein of, say, Pence. Even Trump’s attempt to throw some red meat to the movement in 2016 when he expressed support for punishing women who sought abortions was clumsy and counterproductive, flouting all of the anti-abortion movement’s best practices. Not that this blunder seemed to faze voters, either.
Trump has continued to exercise stubborn independence on the issue. Last year, he blamed the GOP’s disappointing midterm losses on “the abortion issue” and the extreme positions held by some Republican lawmakers. At the time, this mainly looked like an attempt to shift blame, given the poor performance of several high-profile candidates he’d endorsed; with hindsight, it also begins to look like a foretaste of how he’ll campaign in 2024.
Rose, from Live Action, was disgusted with Trump in November; this week’s comments were the last straw. “He takes us for granted, and treats us like a punching bag,” she told me. “I think that’s a huge error on his part. The pro-life movement is one of the most important voting blocs, especially in Iowa and South Carolina.”
She’s right that because Republican-primary voters are more socially conservative than general-election voters, they are more likely to oppose abortion access. And it’s possible that Trump’s position on this single issue might spur some of those voters to change their allegiance to a DeSantis or a Pence. But Rose’s assumption about the anti-abortion movement’s clout seems wishful. Trump is up by about 40 points in the latest national polls—and by about 30 in Iowa. So far, no signs point to any imminent Republican realignment, let alone one led by the anti-abortion set.
Many of Trump’s opponents have imagined that they can beat him by exposing him as a fake conservative, like Velma ripping the mask off a Scooby Doo villain. The problem with this strategy is that it has never worked. Trump doesn’t talk or campaign like a conservative, even when he governs like one. And traditional conservatives, including many anti-abortion activists, have supported him because he promised to appoint judges they favored to the U.S. Supreme Court—and did.
None of this is great news for Democrats. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden’s party would very much like the 2024 campaign to center on abortion. They believe that the path to victory lies in framing Republicans as fanatics who want to ban abortion completely; they’re probably right, given how unsuccessful attempts to restrict abortion have been since the fall of Roe. v Wade—and how salient the issue is for voters who support abortion rights. But Democrats will have a harder time tarring Trump as an extremist if he’s talking mostly about compromise and accusing his own party of extremism. Trump may end up “muting some of the intensity of the issue,” Longwell said, “because he will sound like a moderate in a way that Ron DeSantis, Pence would not.”
That could explain why, since Trump’s Great Betrayal on Sunday, not all anti-abortion groups have adopted the bitter tone of the most zealous activists. Some have done no more than call half-heartedly for clarification—or, in the case of the Susan B. Anthony List, issue a tepid plea for the candidates to please stop attacking one another. In other words, alongside the anger of the movement’s radicals is the realism of its mainstream.
Everyone is keenly aware at this point that Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. And when he does, he knows he’ll have their votes.
Just one day after former President Donald Trump was slapped with a 49-page indictment listing 37 criminal counts of seven different charges, including obstruction and mishandling of classified documents, prosecutors were hit with the news that Judge Aileen Cannon, nominated by Trump in 2020, will oversee the case.
It remains uncertain whether Cannon will preside over the entire trial, but her review of the case presents a historic twist: Cannon previously gave Trump a highly controversial favorable ruling related to the FBI’s initial search of his Mar-a-Lago residence last year. If Cannon does oversee the trial, that will make Trump the first person in U.S. history to take part in a criminal proceeding in front of a federal judge whom they appointed.
Cannon, 42, has been a member of the arch-conservative Federalist Society since 2005, and was nominated by Trump to a Florida federal court judgeship in 2020. She was little known until last September when she was assigned to the immediate aftermath of the August FBI search on Mar-a-Lago, when federal agents seized thousands of documents, some marked classified, that Trump had stored at his private club.
In a decision widely criticized by legal experts as an extraordinary affront to the separation of powers, Cannon granted Trump’s request to appoint a special master to review the documents taken by the FBI, which would have halted the case. Cannon’s decision was eventually overturned by an appeals court stacked with conservative judges in what Slate legal commentator Mark Joseph Sterncalled “one of the most humiliating appellate smackdowns in recent history.”
After the news broke on Friday, legal analysts speculated whether Cannon had been intentionally assigned to Trump’s criminal case. In an interview with ABC News, a former senior Justice Department official argued that “if the same district and magistrate judges are overseeing the case, that means the court likely considered the indictment to be ‘related’ to the search warrant and intentionally assigned it to those judges.”
As a general policy, the Southern District of Florida randomly distributes cases to its 15 active judges (along with 11 senior judges, who receive a reduced workload), though “it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump lucked out, or if an exception was made,” The New York Times noted.
Though Trump will ultimately have to face a jury of his peers, Cannon would have control over the timeline of the case, and may also have opportunities to exclude evidence.
“When you have classified documents, there is abundant opportunities to slow this down, and if they’ve got a judge who is willing to go along with slowing this down, it becomes very hard to predict when this will go to trial,” Samuel Buell, a white-collar criminal law professor at Duke, toldThe Times. If Trump can successfully punt the case until after the 2024 presidential election, then a potential Republican president—either Trump himself or another nominee—could shut down the case entirely.
“Cannon’s total lack of principle, combined with her evident incapacity to experience shame, renders her a uniquely favorable jurist for the former president,” Stern wrote on Friday. “If Cannon remains assigned to this case, Trump will not be convicted, no matter how damning the evidence.”
If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.
So why did I feel nauseous yesterday, watching coverage of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?
Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.
Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.
It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.
But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.
It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.
I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”
Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”
This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.
On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME … THEY’RE AFTER YOU,” read the caption. “I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”
As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.
“They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”
I asked her to elaborate.
“The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”
This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.
What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.
“The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”
“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”
“If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”
It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.
Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.
“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”
And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”
It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.
We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.
Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.
Precious metal distributor GovMint.com offers a new way to memorialize the upcoming presidential election with 1 ounce Silver Eagle coins paired with 2020 Biden-and Trump-themed labels
Press Release –
updated: Nov 2, 2020
BURNSVILLE, Minn., November 2, 2020 (Newswire.com)
– As the 2020 presidential election nears, many are purchasing memorabilia supporting their desired candidate. Collectible coin and precious metal distributor GovMint.com® specializes in sourcing coins from around the world, and in recent months have paired labels featuring incumbent President Donald Trump and the Democratic Nominee, Joe Biden, with 2020 American Silver Eagle coins.
“We are proud to offer a patriotic way for collectors to commemorate the upcoming election with these 2020 American Silver Eagle coins. Each silver coin is an instant keepsake that represents this year’s presidential election.”
– Kelsey Knight, Director of Digital Marketing at GovMint.com
Created by the U.S. Mint, American 1oz Silver Eagle coins are backed by the United States government; and, since their introduction in 1986, have gone on to become the most popularly purchased bullion coin in the world.
These 2020-dated coins have been certified for authenticity and graded by respected third-party grading company, Professional Coin Grading Service. Each certified 2020 American Silver Eagle coin is sonically sealed in an acrylic case and will have been awarded the highest grade of mint state “70” which ensures the coin is free of visual marks. To ensure they stand out, each fine silver coin has been paired with a striking label supporting your preferred presidential nominee.
Ideal as your own personal collectible or as a gift for someone in your life, these special 2020 American Silver Eagle coins available at GovMint.com allow you and your friends to show your support this election season.
For more information about Donald Trump- and Joe Biden-themed offerings and to purchase, visit govmint.com.
