“We are in this to win it,” No Labels’ chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, told me one morning earlier this month. Clancy and 16 other representatives of the beleaguered centrist group were staring at me through their respective Zoom boxes during a private briefing, electoral maps and polling data at the ready, all in defense of their quest to alter the course of the 2024 presidential campaign.
He continued: “And that’s a function not only of having a ticket eventually that can accumulate electoral votes—”
That’s when Nancy Jacobson, the group’s CEO and founder, interjected.
“But I just want to clarify, this organization is not in it to win it,” Jacobson said, a truly unusual statement for a political operative.
“This organization is in it to give people a choice.”
In the coming weeks, No Labels seems poised to intervene in the presidential race with a “unity ticket”—ideally one Republican and one Democrat—meant to appeal to the large number of Americans dissatisfied with the likely major-party nominees, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Unlike Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, and other independent or third-party contenders, the No Labels candidates will likely be mainstream and, to use No Labels’ preferred language, offer “commonsense” values.
Even if the forthcoming White House bid ends up as nothing but a sideshow, it is still garnering attention: Polls indicate that a No Labels ballot line may well draw more votes away from Biden than Trump. It could be the deciding variable that secures Trump’s return to power.
Why is No labels doing this? Some of the group’s opponents allege that No Labels is nothing more than a money-raising grift. Others have suggested that No Labels is a shadowy Republican dark-money group, and that the “unity ticket” is a stalking-horse bid to help Trump. Yet another theory is that No Labels is full of idealists who, whether they realize it or not, are playing Russian roulette with American democracy, as one critic recently put it to me. Jacobson and the organization vehemently deny all of the above accusations.
I’ve spent the past several weeks talking with No Labels’ leaders, staffers, consultants, and opponents, trying to understand the organization’s endgame. I came away confused, and convinced that the people behind No Labels are confused, too. They’ve correctly diagnosed serious problems in the American political system, but their proposed solution could help lead to its undoing.
Nancy Jacobson, a longtime Democratic fundraiser who is married to the longtime Democratic pollster Mark Penn, founded No Labels 15 years ago. Back then, her goal was to build the voice of the “commonsense majority” and bring compromise to Capitol Hill during what was then seen as an era of division and dysfunction. (It looks bucolic compared with the present day.) The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, an earnest, relatively uncontroversial coalition of Democrats and Republicans, eventually emerged in the House of Representatives as the result of No Labels’ work.
So many political observers view Jacobson as a Beltway operator that her colleague and friend of 30 years, Holly Page, who sits on No Labels’ board of advisers, came to our interview prepared to dispute that characterization before I even mentioned it. Page informed me that Jacobson is not, in fact “a conventional creature of Washington,” and instead likened her to a Silicon Valley disrupter who’s willing to “try things” and “challenge conventional norms.”
Disruptive is certainly one way to describe the group’s recent change in focus from congressional gridlock to the White House, where its leaders saw a much bigger problem. Given the timing of this pivot, one might assume this bigger problem they identified was a dictator knocking at the door. Not quite.
No Labels’ leaders look at the 2024 race and see failure on both sides underscored by a larger failure of choice. They see Trump lumbering toward another Republican nomination as he faces the possibility of conviction(s) and imprisonment. They view Biden as both far too old and having tacked too far to the left, a man who didn’t keep his campaign promises and abandoned his long-held reach-across-the-aisle mentality. No Labels raised $21.2 million in 2022, up from $11.3 million the year before. (The 2023 figures are not yet available to the public.)
In mid-January, I sat down for a group interview with three of No Labels’ leaders—Clancy, Page, and a co-executive director, Margaret White. Clancy told me that Biden had abused his presidential power in signing an executive order to forgive student-loan payments. He compared this decision to Trump’s executive action to fund the construction of a southern border wall.
I asked everyone to share whom they’d voted for in the 2020 election. Clancy and Page both said they’d voted for Biden. White demurred: “Oh, I don’t know if I want to answer that question.” I asked again, this time about 2016. Page voted for Hillary Clinton, Clancy for Gary Johnson. “Yeah, I don’t want to—I’m not interested in putting that out there,” White said once more.
No Labels’ leaders are hardly alone in hating their 2024 options. In late January, a Decision Desk HQ/NewsNation poll showed that 59 percent of voters are “not too enthusiastic” or “not at all enthusiastic” about the prospect of a 2020 rematch. A separate poll in December found roughly the same thing.
But unlike all the people sitting around complaining about the coming election, No Labels is trying to do something. And sometimes that something is described in grandiose terms. In one email to me, Jacobson shared that her college-age daughter had decided to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces upon graduation. “I am scared for her as a parent. Terrified,” Jacobson wrote. “But how can I not celebrate her when I myself am risking so much for a cause I believe in?”
Over the past two years, her group has been working to place its name on ballots around the country. It has succeeded in 16 states so far, and aims to reach 33 in the coming months. In the remaining states, No Labels is leaving the task of getting on the ballot up to its eventual “unity ticket” candidates. Though No Labels would dispute that these candidates would really be “its” candidates in any meaningful sense.
The group insists that it is merely a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization and not, as one might assume, a nascent political party. But not everyone at No Labels is on message. At the private briefing this month, one team member shared their screen with a chart boasting that 110,000 people were “No Labels Party Members.” When I asked about that specific word—party—which contradicts the organization’s central argument, Clancy, the chief strategist, said, “To the extent that this is convoluted, we can blame our campaign-finance laws.” A day later, a No Labels representative emailed me a lengthy statement explaining the difference between what a political party does and what No Labels is doing. I can’t say I was able to discern a clear distinction.
Perhaps oddly for an organization dedicated to political choice, No Labels also insists on keeping secret the selection process for the “unity ticket” candidates. Guessing the eventual ticket has become a sort of parlor game during an otherwise boring primary season. While still not official, Clancy told me it was looking “pretty likely” that No Labels would announce a ticket, though he added that no politician has “an inside track” to the ballot line. Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland and a former No Labels co-chair, was believed to be in consideration, but he is instead pursuing a Senate bid. So was Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a centrist Democrat, who this month went so far as to float Senator Mitt Romney as a potential running mate. “Third-party run, everything is on the table,” Manchin told reporters. A day later, he announced that he wouldn’t run for president at all. Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination, is already a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, and recently said he’d consider running on a “unity ticket” if the conditions were right.
Back in November, the organization’s leaders scuttled plans for an April 2024 in-person convention in Dallas. My request for details about a rumored replacement “virtual convention” went unanswered, perhaps under the logic that they can’t plan a convention if they don’t have candidates. So the conversations are happening quietly.
More generally, the group is cagey about its internal operations, and won’t even share the names of its donors. (Harlan Crow, the Texas real-estate tycoon who has financially supported conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is one.)
Even once the ballot-access work is finished and the candidates are secured, No Labels’ plan seems quixotic. In the United States, it remains nearly impossible for a third-party candidate to win a presidential election. The most successful third-party candidate of the modern era, Ross Perot, whom No Labels often name-drops, received just less than 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 despite briefly dropping out of the race, but didn’t secure a single electoral vote.
In an email to me, Jacobson alluded to the idea that “winning” a majority of the vote is not necessarily No Labels’ main goal. “Abraham Lincoln was actually a winner with 39% running on the No Labels of his day—the little-known Republican Party,” Jacobson wrote. “Ross Perot in 1992 before he pulled out was actually polling at 39%, ahead of both Bush and Clinton. Most people don’t realize that you don’t need 50% to win—you only need 35% or slightly above that.”
Back in December, Clancy raised the head-scratching idea of creating a “coalition government.” He noted that if no candidate secured the requisite 270 electoral votes to claim the presidency, certain “unbound electors” could be “traded” among candidates. This sounded a bit like something out of a West Wing episode.
Around this time, another No Labels co-founder, former Representative Tom Davis, told NBC News that No Labels candidates could potentially “cut a deal” with another party’s ticket and offer electors in exchange for Cabinet positions, or even the vice presidency. A different path, Davis said, was that a contingent election could simply be decided by the House. Such an outcome would almost certainly throw the election to Trump.
Rick Wilson, one of the founders of the “never Trump” Lincoln Project, is a vocal No Labels critic. He believes the formerly centrist group has evolved into yet another cadre of Trump enablers, and that its ballot-access plan is far from benevolent.
“While No Labels has every right in the world to try to put somebody on the ballot, we have an equally sacred right under the First Amendment to object to it,” Wilson told me. “I feel like No Labels is doing something dangerous and definitely stupid,” he added. “Probably extremely dangerous. Likely to cause the return of Donald Trump. And in those things, I’m going to speak out.”
But it’s not just No Labels’ opponents who are questioning the group’s recent actions. Former Senator Evan Bayh, a personal and political ally of Jacobson’s for 25 years, whom she recommended I interview for this story, is fully supporting Biden. “It’s possible to be friendly with someone and disagree with them—or even occasionally strongly disagree,” Bayh told me. He spoke highly of Jacobson’s character and her integrity, but he also told me that several months ago, he expressed concern about her approach. “Look, I know you’re doing what you think is the right thing here,” Bayh said he told his friend. “But the consequences of error could be profound.”
In that warning, Bayh articulated the most common criticism you tend to hear of No Labels: that its leaders are, to use a tired political metaphor, way out over their skis. As the “unity ticket” unveiling supposedly approaches, more veteran Democrats and Republicans are beginning to take notice, and voice concerns. On February 5, a bipartisan group of 11 former members of Congress sent a letter to three No Labels leaders warning them that a contingent election would be “calamitous.”
Although it’s stocked with former elected officials and veteran Washington power brokers, No Labels can seem naive about the ugly contours of contemporary American politics. On a Thursday morning last month, the organization held an event at the National Press Club. All the No Labels luminaries were there: former Senator Joe Lieberman, the civil-rights activist Benjamin Chavis, former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory. I thought the group might finally announce its candidates, and I suspect that many of the roughly two dozen other reporters in attendance assumed the same. No such luck. We were handed a purple folder containing a letter sent to the Department of Justice alleging an “illegal conspiracy to use intimidation, harassment, and fear against representatives of No Labels, its donors, and its potential candidates.”
The letter claims that Melissa Moss, a consultant associated with the Lincoln Project, told Page, “You have no idea of the forces aligned against you. You will never be able to work in Democratic politics again.” And: “You are going to get it with both barrels.” (Page told me that this happened last summer over lunch in a public setting; Moss declined to comment for this story.) In a video screened at the press conference, Rick Wilson can be heard saying on a podcast that “they”—No Labels—“need to be burned to the fucking ground.” Jonathan V. Last, the editor of The Bulwark who has contributed to The Atlantic and other outlets, is also heard saying, “Anybody who participates in this No Labels malarkey should have their lives ruined,” and “The people who are affiliated with No Labels should be publicly shamed to society’s utmost ability to do so.”
As the clip rolled on a flatscreen TV, the No Labels representatives looked out at the assembled reporters, solemn-faced. McCrory, the group’s national co-chair, raised his voice in disbelief when it was his turn to speak from the dais. “I mean, did you see that video? Did you listen to that video?” he asked. “Who do they think they are, Tony Soprano?”
Though scheduled to last an hour, the event ended after 45 minutes when the Q&A portion was abruptly cut short without apparent reason. The No Labels brass exited the room. Out in the hallway, journalists were told that a follow-up “gaggle” was imminent. But it never happened. Several reporters stood around talking for a bit, then, one by one, dispersed.
Later, when I spoke with Wilson about his comments in the clip, he said the video screened for reporters had been disingenuously edited.
“I am not a person who is known for holding back,” Wilson said. “I was shocked, though, when they elided a quote of mine in their press conference, where I said they had to be burned to the effing ground. But then I said the next word. The word they cut off was politically.”
The full quote does appear in the DOJ letter. But the whole episode seemed, to me, less an example of bad faith and mendacity than a simple loss of focus. Why spend all this time and effort complaining about your opponents’ tactics when you’re supposed to be selling the public on your ability to beat them?
As of now, the top of the “unity ticket” seems likely to go to a Republican—if it goes to anyone. During last month’s press conference, Lieberman said that the current Republican candidate and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley could be a No Labels contender of “the most serious consideration.” Haley’s campaign immediately said she’s not interested. On Sunday, Joe Cunningham, No Labels’ national director, raised the prospect again. Once more, her campaign immediately said no thanks.
Nevertheless, Haley’s name keeps coming up in conversations.
At the virtual briefing earlier this month, one No Labels adviser, Charlie Black, a Republican strategist who worked on presidential campaigns for John McCain, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes, told me he was personally rooting for Haley in the Republican primary and hopes she pulls off “a miracle.” Were this to happen, it’s unlikely that No Labels would launch a ticket. I asked whether it had been more difficult than anticipated to secure candidates for the No Labels ballot line. Black replied that the group had only begun talking to prospective candidates this month—an assertion contradicted by prior reporting.
No Labels’ recent shift in priority from Congress to the executive branch has caught many by surprise, and some of the group’s supporters are asking questions about the pivot. Last month, two members of the Durst family sued the organization over breach of contract and “unjust enrichment.” Douglas and Jonathan Durst, who are cousins in a real-estate dynasty, allege that No Labels pulled a “bait and switch” with their $145,000 donation in pursuing this third-party presidential project. In an email to me, a lawyer representing the Dursts wrote, “The commitment No Labels made to its donors was that it would not be a third party but, rather, a facilitator of bipartisanship to bridge the political divide. It has now broken that commitment and must be held accountable for it.”
Clancy, for his part, told me that the Durst lawsuit lacks credibility, and described it as part of a broader effort to make his and his colleagues’ lives “difficult” during the current ballot-access push. “I mean, they might have a leg to stand on if they gave money six months ago with some expectation this is only going to congressional work,” Clancy said. “They gave money six years ago and three years ago, respectively. We didn’t even start this 2024 project until two years ago.”
Clancy also dismissed criticism of the organization as fundamentally unjust. “Look, I don’t mean to keep pleading the refs, saying our opponents are being unfair,” Clancy told me. “Though they are.”
“The way that, just repeatedly, the worst motives are ascribed to No Labels, and to Nancy—it’s very frustrating,” Clancy said a bit later. “Nancy and No Labels are very comfortable operating quietly, and just hoping that good stuff gets done.”
During the private briefing, Andy Bursky, the group’s chair, told me unprompted: “No Labels’ ballot-access infrastructure is not the work of crackpots or crazy dreamers or amateurs. Rather, it’s an effort led and staffed by clear-eyed, sober professionals, animated by a shared concern for our democracy and, in particular, the choices that the two-party duopoly is shoving down the throats of the electorate.” A few minutes later, Jacobson chimed in with a more macro, and more confusing, thought: “No Labels will never, ever be involved in politics.”
Perhaps they assumed that everyone viewed the 2024 election through No Labels’ lens: that once ballot-access was secured, some patriotic, high-profile politician would be grateful to be tapped for the third-party nomination. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Near the end of my in-person interview with Page, Clancy, and White, I asked them point-blank if they’d lose sleep at night if No Labels ran a candidate and, as a result, Trump won the election. Clancy virtually repeated my words back to me, as if articulating them gave them extra weight.
“I’d lose sleep if I thought I was part of an effort that was responsible for getting Trump back in the White House,” he said.
“Me too,” Page added.
“Yeah, absolutely,” White said.
In an email, Jacobson told me, “Personally, I would never vote for Trump ever, nor would the leaders or the donors to the group.”
Her email signature features an animated GIF of Washington Crossing the Delaware with the words BE BRAVE and her group’s logo hovering above the painting’s choppy waters. Jacobson and her allies seem to earnestly feel they are doing just that—being brave—but in the fog of presidential-election war, they may also have lost sight of their enemy.
The afternoon before Donald Trump’s blowout win in South Carolina’s primary, Shellie Hargenrader and Julianne Poulnot emerged from a rally for the former president bubbling with righteous conviction.
They had spent the previous hour listening to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. regale supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in an office park outside Charleston. The crowd had been energized, frequently calling out in response to his words as if at a church service, while Trump Jr. lacerated President Joe Biden, the media, the multiple legal proceedings against his father, and the punishment of the January 6 insurrectionists. “Trump is my president,” one man shouted.
Hargenrader and Poulnot were still feeling that spirit when they stopped on their way out from the rally to talk with me. When I asked them why they were supporting Trump over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, they started with conventional reasons. “Because he did a great job and he can do it again,” Hargenrader told me. Poulnot cut in to add: “He stands for the people and he tells the truth.”
But within moments, the two women moved to a higher plane in their praise of Trump and condemnation of Haley. “I think the Lord has him in the chair,” Hargenrader told me. “He’s God’s man.” Poulnot jumped in again. “And the election was stolen from him,” she said. “You have to live on Mars to not realize that.” And Haley? “I think she’s an opportunist and … she sold her soul to the devil,” Poulnot told me.
Such is the level of evangelical fervor for Trump within much of the GOP base that buried Haley in her home state on Saturday. Haley had said her goal in South Carolina was to match the 43 percent of the vote she received in last month’s New Hampshire primary, an exceedingly modest aspiration. But she appeared to fall short of even that low bar, as Trump routed her by a tally of about 60 percent to 40 percent, at the latest count.
Trump’s victory in South Carolina placed him in a virtually impregnable position for the nomination. Since South Carolina established its primary near the front of the GOP calendar in 1980, the candidate who won here has captured the Republican nomination in every contested race except one. With his win tonight, Trump became the first GOP contender other than an incumbent president to sweep the big three early contests of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Reinforcing the message from the key initial contests of Iowa and New Hampshire, the South Carolina result showed that Haley faces a ceiling on her support too low to beat Trump. For Haley to catch Trump now would require some massive external event, and even that might not be enough.
But for all the evidence of Trump’s strength within the party, the South Carolina results again showed that a meaningful floor of GOP voters remains uneasy with returning him to leadership. “I like his policies, but I’d like to cut his thumbs off and tape his mouth shut,” Juanita Gwilt of Isle of Palms told me last night just outside Charleston, before Haley’s final rally leading up the primary. In Haley’s speech to her supporters, she insisted that she would remain in the race. “I’m an accountant. I know 40 percent is not 50 percent,” she said. “But I also know 40 percent is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.”
As in Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump’s pattern of support in South Carolina simultaneously underscored his dominant position in the party while pointing to some potential vulnerabilities for the general election. In this deeply conservative state, Trump carried virtually every major demographic group. Trump beat Haley, for instance, by nearly as much among women as men and by nearly as much among suburban as rural voters, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. The robust overall turnout testified again to Trump’s greatest political strength—his extraordinary ability to motivate his base voters.
Still, some warning signs for him persisted: About one-third of all primary voters and even one-fourth of self-identified Republicans said they would not consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. More than four in five Haley voters said he would be unfit if convicted, about the same elevated share as in Iowa and New Hampshire. And as in the earlier states, Trump faced much more resistance among primary voters with a college degree than those without one, and among voters who did not identify as evangelical Christians than those who did. (The exit polls showed Haley narrowly carrying both groups.) As in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump won only about two in five independents in South Carolina, the exit polls found.
The magnitude of Trump’s victory was especially striking given the mismatch in time and money the two candidates devoted to the state. Haley camped out in South Carolina for most of the month before the vote, barnstorming the state in a bus; Trump parachuted in for a few large rallies. Her campaign, and the super PACs supporting her, spent nearly $9.4 million in South Carolina advertising, about nine times as much as Trump and his supporters, according to data provided by AdImpact.
In South Carolina, Haley also delivered a case against Trump that was far more cogent and cohesive than she offered earlier in the race. During the multiple nationally televised Republican debates through 2023, Haley barely raised a complaint about Trump. Through Iowa and New Hampshire—when she had the concentrated attention of the national media—she refused to go any further in criticizing Trump than declaring that “chaos follows him, rightly or wrongly.”
But after allowing those opportunities to pass, she notably escalated her challenge to Trump over the past month in her South Carolina rallies and a succession of television appearances. This morning, after she voted near her home in Kiawah Island, reporters asked her about some racist comments Trump made last night at an event in Columbia. In her response, no trace remained of that passive voice. “That’s the chaos that comes with Donald Trump,” she said firmly, now clearly describing him as the source of the chaos rather than a bystander to its eruption. “That’s the offensiveness that is going to happen every day between now and the general election.”
Yesterday, at a rally in Moncks Corner, a small town about an hour north of Charleston, Haley delivered a biting critique of Trump’s comments that he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries that don’t meet the alliance’s guidelines for spending on their own defense. “Trump is siding with a thug where half a million people have died or been wounded because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin invaded Ukraine,” she said. “Trump is siding with a dictator who kills his political opponents. Trump is siding with a tyrant who arrests American journalists and holds them hostage.”
A few minutes later, Haley lashed Trump for questioning why her husband, who is on a military deployment, has not appeared with her during the campaign. “Donald Trump’s never been near a uniform,” she said. “He’s never had to sleep on the ground. The closest he’s ever come to harm’s way is if a golf ball happens to hit him on the golf course.” Later, she criticized Trump for using tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to pay his own legal bills. And she insisted that he cannot win a general election.
Haley remains careful to balance every criticism of Trump with an equal jab at Biden. But though she portrays both Biden and Trump as destabilizing forces, the core of her retooled message is a repudiation of Trump’s insistence that he will make America great again. No, she says, the challenge for the next president is to make America normal again. “Our kids want to know what normal feels like,” she insisted in Moncks Corner.
Taken together, this is an argument quite distinct from the case against Trump from Biden, or his sharpest Republican critics, including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Representative Liz Cheney. Haley doesn’t join them in framing Trump as a threat to democracy or an aspiring autocrat. The refusal to embrace that claim as well as the staunch conservatism of her own agenda and her repeated indications that she’ll likely support Trump if he wins the nomination probably explains why Haley failed to attract as many independent and Democratic voters as she needed to participate today. Those non-Republicans cast only about 30 percent of the total votes, according to the exit polls. That’s about the same share as in both the 2016 and 2012 South Carolina primaries, and far less than the nearly 40 percent share then-Senator John McCain turned out in his “maverick” 2000 presidential bid against George W. Bush. (And even with that, Bush beat him by consolidating a big majority of partisan Republican voters, as Trump did earlier today.)
Instead, in South Carolina, Haley offered a case against Trump aimed more directly at wavering Republicans. She accused Trump of failing to display the personal characteristics that conservatives insist they value. It’s telling that at Haley’s rallies yesterday, she drew almost no applause when she criticized Trump on policy grounds for enlarging the federal deficit or supporting sweeping tariffs. But she inspired cries of disdain from her audience when she disparaged Trump, in so many words, as a grifter, a liar, and a self-absorbed narcissist more focused on his own grudges than on his voters’ needs. “Poor guy,” one man yelled out last night after Haley complained about Trump constantly portraying himself as a victim.
Would it have made any difference if Haley had pressed these assertions earlier in the race, when she had the large national audience of the debates, and Trump had not progressed so far toward the nomination? Several GOP strategists and operatives this week told me that attacking Trump while the field was still crowded would only have hurt Haley and benefited the other contenders who stayed out of the fray. Even now, in a one-on-one race, directly confronting Trump is rapidly raising Haley’s negative rating among GOP voters. Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster, told me as the results came in Saturday night that GOP voters who voted for Trump twice might take it as a personal insult about their own prior decisions if Haley echoed Christie and Cheney in portraying the former president as “unfit for office and a threat to democracy.”
Hargenrader and Poulnot underscored Ayres’s point yesterday: They speak for millions of Republican voters who see Trump in quasi-religious terms as uniquely fighting for them, and the legal challenges ensnaring him only as evidence of the burdens he’s bearing on their behalf. “I don’t think people appreciate sufficiently the fine line Nikki Haley has to walk with this coalition,” Ayres told me.
After months of vacillation and caution, Haley is now making a forceful case against Trump, and displaying great political courage in doing so: She is standing virtually alone while most of the GOP establishment (including virtually all of the political leadership in South Carolina) aligns behind him. Ayres believes that Haley is speaking for a large enough minority of the party to justify continuing in the race for as long as she wants—even if there’s virtually no chance anymore that she can expand her coalition enough to truly threaten Trump. “Nikki Haley represents a perspective, an outlook on the world, and a set of values that are still held by what remains of the Reagan-Bush coalition in the Republican Party,” Ayres told me.
But the bill for treating Trump so gingerly for so many months has now come due for Haley in South Carolina. Haley waited until the concrete in this race had almost hardened before giving Republican voters a real reason to think twice about nominating Trump again. Perhaps the circle of GOP voters open to an alternative was never large enough to support a serious challenge to the former president. What’s clear after his decisive victory in South Carolina is that neither Haley nor anyone else in the GOP tried hard enough to test that proposition until it was too late.
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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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N
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.
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In the last spring of the Obama administration, Michelle Obama was delivering her final commencement address as first lady, at City College of New York. Then, as now, the specter of Donald Trump had become the inescapable backdrop to everything. He’d spent the past year smashing every precept of restraint, every dignified tradition of the supposedly kindhearted nation he was seeking to lead. Obama couldn’t help but lob some barely cloaked denunciations of Trump’s wrecking-ball presidential campaign—the one that would soon be ratified with the Republican nomination. “That is not who we are,” the first lady assured the graduates. “That is not what this country stands for, no.”
The promise did not age well. Not that November, and not since.
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“This is not who we are”: The would-be guardians of America’s better angels have been scolding us with this line for years. Or maybe they mean it as an affirmation. Either way, the axiom prompts a question: Who is “we” anyway? Because it sure seems like a lot of this “we” keeps voting for Trump. Today the dictum sounds more like a liberal wish than any true assessment of our national character.
In retrospect, so many of the high-minded appeals of the Obama era—“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”; “When they go low, we go high”—feel deeply naive. Question for Michelle: What if they keep going lower and lower—and that keeps landing the lowest of the low back in the White House?
Recently, I read through some old articles and notes of mine from the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, when Trump first cannonballed into our serene political bathtub. This was back when “we”—the out-of-touch media know-it-alls—were trying to understand Trump’s appeal. What did his supporters love so much about their noisy new savior? I dropped into a few rallies and heard the same basic idea over and over: Trump says things that no one else will say. They didn’t necessarily agree with or believe everything their candidate declared. But he spoke on their behalf.
When political elites insisted “We’re better than this!”—a close cousin of “This is not who we are”—many Trump disciples heard “We’re better than them.” Hillary Clinton ably confirmed this when she dismissed half of the Republican nominee’s supporters—at an LGBTQ fundraiser in New York—as people who held views that were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Whether or not she was correct, the targets of her judgment did not appreciate it. And the disdain was mutual. “He’s our murder weapon,” said the conservative political scientist Charles Murray, summarizing the appeal that Trump held for many of his loyalists.
After the shock of Trump’s victory in 2016, the denial and rationalizations kicked in fast. Just ride out the embarrassment for a few years, many thought, and then America would revert to something in the ballpark of sanity. But one of the overlooked portents of 2020 (many Democrats were too relieved to notice) was that the election was still extremely close. Trump received 74 million votes, nearly 47 percent of the electorate. That’s a huge amount of support, especially after such an ordeal of a presidency—the “very fine people on both sides,” the “perfect” phone call, the bleach, the daily OMG and WTF of it all. The populist nerves that Trump had jangled in 2016 remained very much aroused. Many of his voters’ grievances were unresolved. They clung to their murder weapon.
Trump has continued to test their loyalty. He hasn’t exactly enhanced his résumé since 2020, unless you count a second impeachment, several loser endorsements, and a bunch of indictments as selling points (some do, apparently: more medallions for his victimhood). January 6 posed the biggest hazard—the brutality of it, the fever of the multitudes, and Trump’s obvious pride in the whole furor. Even the GOP lawmakers who still vouched for Trump from their Capitol safe rooms seemed shaken.
“This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace, the newly elected Republican of South Carolina, said of the deadly riot. “We’re better than this.” There was a lot of that: thoughts and prayers from freaked-out Americans. “Let me be very clear,” President-elect Joe Biden tried to reassure the country that day. “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”
One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists. But then, on the very day the Capitol had been ransacked, 147 House and Senate Republicans voted not to certify Biden’s election. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, skulked back to the ousted president a few weeks later, and the pucker-up parade to Mar-a-Lago was on. Large majorities of Republicans never stopped supporting Trump, and claim they never stopped believing that Biden stole the 2020 election and that Crooked Joe’s regime is abusing the legal system to persecute Trump out of the way.
Here we remain, amazingly enough, ready to do this all again. Trump might be the ultimate con man, but his essential nature has never been a mystery. Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent. A durable coalition seems fully comfortable entrusting the White House to the guy who left behind a Capitol encircled with razor-wire fence and 25,000 National Guard troops protecting the federal government from his own supporters.
You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “This Is Who We Are.”
Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?”
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I did not understand how so many ostensibly patriotic voters could subsequently embrace Trump, but mainly I couldn’t understand his soul sickness: How does a person come to such a rotten, depraved thought?
That day in the White House, I mentioned to Kushner one of Trump’s more recent calumnies and told him that, in my view, his father-in-law’s incivility was damaging the country. Strangely, Kushner seemed to agree with me: “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”
I was confused at first. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment.
Perverse, of course. But revelatory as well, and more than a little prophetic. Because Trump, in the intervening years, has gone lower, and lower, and lower. If there is a bottom—no sure thing—he’s getting closer. Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet “fascist.”
“For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” In a separate speech, Trump, Nichols wrote, “melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.”
Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency. As David A. Graham, one of our magazine’s chroniclers of the Trump era, wrote recently, “The former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.”
There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.
And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.
The Atlantic, as our loyal readers know, is deliberately not a partisan magazine. “Of no party or clique” is our original 1857 motto, and it is true today. Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.
This editor’s note appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Warning.”
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.
The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.
In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.
Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.
“It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist who advises former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”
That conundrum will only intensify for Republicans, because it is highly likely that this is merely the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. As the first indictment against a former president, the New York proceeding has thrust the U.S. into uncharted waters. But the country today is not nearly as far from shore as it may be in just a few months. Trump faces multiple additional potential indictments. Those include possible charges from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been examining his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, as well as the twin federal probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to block congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
“I think I had a pretty good track record on my predictions and my strong belief is that there will be additional criminal charges coming in other places,” says Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think you are going to see them in Georgia and possibly [at the] federal” level.
The potential for such further criminal proceedings is why many political observers are cautious about drawing too many firm conclusions from polling around public reaction to this first indictment, which centers on Trump’s payment of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels late in the 2016 campaign.
The multiple legal nets tightening around Trump create the possibility that he could be going through one or even multiple trials by the time of next year’s general election, and conceivably even when the GOP primaries begin in the winter of 2024. In other words, Trump might bounce back and forth between campaign rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire and court appearances in New York City, Atlanta, or Washington D.C. And such jarring images could change the public perceptions that polls are recording now.
“You are just looking at a snapshot of how people feel today,” Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist, told me.
Yet even these initial reactions show how Trump’s legal troubles may place his party in a vise.
Polls consistently show that Trump, over the past several weeks, has widened his lead over DeSantis and the rest of the potential 2024 field. That may be partly because Trump has intensified his attacks on DeSantis, and because the Florida governor has at times seemed unsteady in his debut on the national stage.
But most Republicans think Trump is also benefiting from an impulse among GOP voters to lock arms around him as the Manhattan investigation has proceeded. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released this week, four-fifths of Republicans described the various investigations targeting Trump as a “witch hunt,” echoing his own denunciation of them. “There’s going to be some level of emotional response to someone being quote-unquote attacked,” Wilson said. “That’s going to get some sympathy points that will probably bolster poll numbers.”
Republican leaders, as so many times before, have tightened their own straitjacket by defending Trump on these allegations so unreservedly. House GOP leaders have launched unprecedented attempts to impede Bragg’s investigation by demanding documents and testimony, and even Trump’s potential 2024 rivals have condemned the indictment as a politically motivated hit job; DeSantis may have had the most extreme reaction by not only calling the indictment “un-American” but even insisting he would not cooperate with extraditing Trump from Florida if it came to that (a pledge that is moot because Trump has indicated he plans to turn himself in on Tuesday.)
As during the procession of outrages and controversies during Trump’s presidency, most Republicans skeptical of him have been unwilling to do anything more than remain silent. (Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot potential 2024 candidate, has been the most conspicuous exception, issuing a statement that urged Americans “to wait on the facts” before judging the case.) The refusal of party leaders to confront Trump is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because GOP voters hear no other arguments from voices they trust, they fall in line behind the assertion from Trump and the leading conservative media sources that the probes are groundless persecution. Republican elected officials then cite that dominant opinion as the justification for remaining silent.
But while the investigations may be bolstering Trump’s position inside the GOP in the near-term, they also appear to be highlighting all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters, especially those with college degrees. In that same NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, 56 percent of Americans rejected Trump’s “witch hunt” characterization and described the investigations as “fair”; 60 percent of college-educated white adults, the key constituency that abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, said the probes were fair. So did a slight majority of independent voters.
In new national results released yesterday morning, the Navigator project, a Democratic polling initiative, similarly found that 57 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of independents, agreed that Trump should be indicted when they read a description of the hush-money allegations against him.
The Manhattan indictment “may keep his people with him, it may fire them up, but he’s starting from well under 50 percent of the vote,” Mike DuHaime told me. “Somebody like that must figure out how to get new voters. And he is not gaining new voters with a controversial new indictment, whether he beats it or not.” Swing voters following the case in New York, DuHaime continued, “may not like it, they may think Democrats have gone too far, and that might be fair.” But it’s wishful thinking, he argues, to believe that voters previously resistant to Trump will conclude they need to give him another look because he’s facing criminal charges for paying off a porn star, even if they view the charges themselves as questionable.
The NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey underlines DuHaime’s point about the limits of Trump’s existing support: In that survey, a 61 percent majority of Americans—including 64 percent of independents and 70 percent of college-educated white adults—said they did not want him to be president again. That result was similar to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, which found that 60 percent of Americans do not consider themselves supporters of Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. The challenge for the GOP is that about four-fifths of Republicans said they did consider themselves part of that movement, and about three-fourths said they wanted him back in the White House.
The open question for Trump is whether this level of support, even in the GOP, may be his high-water mark as the investigations proceed. Eisner and John Dean, the former White House counsel for Richard Nixon, both told me they believe that the New York case may be more threatening to Trump than many legal analysts have suggested. “I think that the New York case is much stronger than people perceive it to be,” Dean told me yesterday. “We really don’t know the contents of the indictment, and we really won’t know for a much longer time the evidence behind the indictment.”
Whatever happens in New York, Trump still faces the prospect of indictments on the more consequential charges looming over him in Georgia and from the federal special prosecutor. Dean says that Bragg’s indictment, rather than discouraging other prosecutors to act “may have the opposite effect” of emboldening them. Trump “has escaped accountability literally his entire life and it finally appears to be catching up with him,” Dean says. Academic research, he adds, has suggested that defendants juggling multiple trials, either simultaneously or sequentially, find it “much harder to mount effective defenses.”
Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, the Democratic polling consortium that conducts the Navigator surveys, says the potential for multiple indictments presents Trump with a parallel political risk: The number of voters who believe he has committed at least one crime is very likely to rise if the criminal charges against him accumulate. “It’s hard to imagine any scenario where multiple indictments is useful” to him, Bennett told me.
DuHaime and Wilson both believe that multiple indictments eventually could weigh down Trump even in the GOP primary. “The cumulative effect takes away some of the argument that it’s just political,” DuHaime said. Each additional indictment, he continued, “may add credibility” for the public to those that came before.
Wilson believes that repeated indictments could reinforce the sense among Republican voters that Trump is being treated unfairly, and deepen their desire to turn the page from him. He likens the effect to someone living along a “Hurricane Alley,” who experiences not one destructive storm in a season but several.“The weight of a single hurricane blowing through is one thing,” Wilson told me. “But if you have several hurricanes of issues blowing through, you will get conservatives [saying], ‘I don’t know if I want to continue living in Hurricane Alley’ with Trump, and they are going to look at other candidates.”
Given Trump’s hold on a big portion of the GOP coalition, no one should discount his capacity to win the party nomination next year, no matter how many criminal cases ensnare him. And given the persistent public dissatisfaction with the economy and lackluster job approval ratings for Biden, no one dismisses the capacity of whoever captures the Republican nomination to win the general election.
The best-case scenario sketched by Trump supporters is that a succession of indictments will allow him to inspire even higher turnout among the predominantly non-college-educated and non-urban white voters who accept his argument that “liberal elites” and the “deep state” are targeting him to silence them. But even the heroic levels of turnout Trump inspired from those voters in 2020 wasn’t enough to win. For the GOP to bet that Trump could overcome swing-voter revulsion over his legal troubles and win a general election by mobilizing even more of his base voters, Bennett said, “seems to me the highest risk proposition that I can imagine.”
In the course of a single month this year, the following news reports emanated from Florida: A gun enthusiast in Tampa built a 55-foot backyard pool shaped like a revolver, with a hot tub in the hammer. A 32-year-old from Cutler Bay was arrested for biting off the head of his girlfriend’s pet python during a domestic dispute. A 40-year-old man cracked open a beer during a police traffic stop in Cape Coral. A father from East Orlando punched a bobcat in the face for attacking his daughter’s dog.
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In headlines, all of these exploits were attributed to a single character, one first popularized in 2013 by a Twitter account of the same name: “Florida Man,” also known as “the world’s worst superhero,” a creature of eccentric rule-breaking, rugged defiance, and unhinged minor atrocities. “Florida Man Known as ‘Sedition Panda’ Arrested for Allegedly Storming Capitol,” a recent news story declared, because why merely rebel against the government when you could dress up in a bear suit while doing it?
Internet memes sometimes refer to Florida as “the America of America,” but to a Brit like me, it’s more like the Australia of America: The wildlife is trying to kill you, the weather is trying to kill you, and the people retain a pioneer spirit, even when their roughest expedition is to the 18th hole. Florida’s place in the national mythology is as America’s pulsing id, a vision of life without the necessary restriction of shame. Chroniclers talk about its seasonless strangeness; the public meltdowns of its oddest residents; how retired CIA operatives, Mafia informants, and Jair Bolsonaro can be reborn there. “Whatever you’re doing dishonestly up north, you can do it in a much warmer climate with less regulation down here,” said the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who wrote about the weirder side of Florida for the Miami Herald from 1976 until his retirement in 2021.
But under the memes and jokes, the state is also making an argument to the rest of the world about what freedom looks like, how life should be organized, and how politics should be done. This is clear even from Britain, a place characterized by drizzle and self-deprecation, the anti-Florida.
What was once the narrowest swing state has come to embody an emotional new strain of conservatism. “The general Republican mindset now is about grievances against condescending elites,” Michael Grunwald, the Miami-based author of The Swamp, told me, “and it fits with the sense that ‘we’re Florida Man; everyone makes fun of us.’ ” But criticism doesn’t faze Florida men; it emboldens them.
It is no coincidence that the two leading contenders for the Republican nomination both have their base in Florida. In one corner, you have Donald Trump, who retired, sulking, from the presidency to his “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach. (When Trump entered the 2024 presidential race, the formerly supportive New York Post jeered at him with the front-page headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement” before relegating the news story to page 26.)
In the other corner stands the state’s current governor, Ron DeSantis, raised in the Gulf Coast town of Dunedin, a man desperately trying to conceal his attendance at the elite institutions of Harvard and Yale under lashings of bronzer and highly choreographed outrages. In his speeches, the governor likes to boast that “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” In his 2022 campaign videos, he styled himself as a Top Gun pilot and possibly even Jesus himself. You couldn’t get away with that in Massachusetts.
“The thing about being the ‘punch-line state’ is that it’s all true,” the writer Craig Pittman told me over Zoom, his tropical-print shirt gleaming in the sun. “Do you remember the story about the woman who got in trouble in New Jersey for trying to board a plane with her emotional-support peacock?”
Yes, I do.
“The peacock was from Florida.”
When I first arrived in Orlando, in late October, I rented what to me was a comically large Ford SUV and drove to McDonald’s for hash browns and a cup of breakfast tea (zombie-gray, error). Then I went to a gun range, where I began by firing two pistols. The very serious man behind the desk had clocked my teeth (British), accent (Hermione Granger), and sex (female), and expressed skepticism that I would want to fire an AR‑15 assault rifle too. But I did. In the past decade, semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 have become the weapon of choice for young killers, and I needed to see what America was willing to put into the hands of teenagers in the name of freedom.
With the pistols, my shots pulled down from the recoil or the weight. But the AR‑15 nestled into my shoulder pad, and the shots skipped out of it and into the center of the target. I felt like I was in Call of Duty, with the same confidence that there would be no consequences for my actions; that if anything went wrong, I could just respawn.
Later, a friend texted to ask how firing the rifle had been. I loved it, I said. No one should be allowed to have one. This is not a sentiment to be expressed openly in DeSantis’s Florida. When the Tampa Bay Rays tweeted in support of gun control after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre last year, the governor vetoed state funding for a new training facility, saying that it was “inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation.” You might think: How petty. Or maybe: How effective.
Hold on to those thoughts. DeSantis is a politician who preaches freedom while suspending elected officials who offend him, banning classroom discussions he doesn’t like, carrying out hostile takeovers of state universities, and obstructing the release of public records whenever he can. And somehow Florida, a state that bills itself as the home of the ornery and the resistant, the obstinate and the can’t-be-trodden-on, the libertarian and the government-skeptic, has fallen for the most keenly authoritarian governor in the United States.
This is the point in the story when a foreign reporter would traditionally go to Walt Disney World and have a Big Thought about how the true religion of America is capitalism. She might include a variation on the French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s observation that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real.”
Me? I went to Disney World; bought a storm-trooper hat, a 32-ounce Coke, and a hot dog that looked like a postapocalyptic ration; then I had my photo taken high-fiving Baloo. What a great day out. The Magic Kingdom drew nearly 21 million tourists in 2019, the last year before the pandemic, and is central to Florida’s mythology. I had to go. For me, the visceral thrill came from the park’s extraordinary bureaucracy: all the attention to detail of a North Korean military parade, purely for your enjoyment.
Disney flatters its customers the way Florida flatters the rich, by hiding the machinery needed to support decadence. You absolutely never see Cinderella smoking a joint behind her castle, or Mickey Mouse losing it with a group of irritating 9-year-olds. In Florida, no one wants to hear about the costs or the consequences. Why else would people keep rebuilding fragile beachfront homes in a hurricane zone—and expect the government to offer them insurance? Of course everyone wants the Man to butt out of their life, but at the same time, the state-backed insurer of last resort hit 1 million policies in August.
Brandon Celi
Baudrillard had it precisely wrong: Disney’s success only underlines how the state is one giant theme park. “This is not a place that makes anything, and it’s not really a place that does anything, other than bring in more people,” Grunwald had told me. Having brought in those people, what Florida never tells them is no, nor does the state ask them to play nicely with the other children: “We’re not going to make you wear a mask or take a vaccine or pay your taxes or care about the schools,” Grunwald said.
I did have one Big Thought in Orlando: It’s odd that Ron DeSantis cast Disney as an avatar of the “woke mind virus” after its then-CEO, Bob Chapek, spoke out against the Parental Rights in Education bill—known to critics as the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’ ” law—which restricts the teaching of gender and sexuality in schools. Disney’s cartoons now feature LGBTQ characters, and its older films carry warnings about their outdated attitudes, but the corporation itself is deeply conservative in the discipline it demands from its staff, its deep nostalgia for the 1950s, and its celebration of American exceptionalism. At Epcot’s World Showcase, I observed national pavilions built on the kind of gleeful cultural supremacy last seen in 19th-century anthropologists marveling at the handicrafts of the natives. Britain was represented by a fish-and-chips shop, a pub, and a store where you could buy a “masonic sword” for $350. It could have been worse: Brazil, the fifth-largest country on Earth, had been reduced to a caipirinha stand.
Outside Tallahassee, I fell in love. Having driven four hours north to the Panhandle one bright day, wearing denim shorts that would be unnecessary in Britain for nine more months, I ended up in Wakulla Springs State Park.
This was primordial Florida, the swamp I had been promised, and it was heaven: a swimming spot overseen, on the opposite bank, by a 13-foot alligator named Joe Jr., something the tour guide presented as perfectly normal and not at all alarming. Unwieldy manatees glided through the water as if someone had given my SUV nostrils and flippers. Turkey vultures massed in the trees. I had bubble-gum ice cream and a root-beer float—how American is that?—and felt pure happiness flooding me like sunshine.
Here was the magic that brings so many people to Florida, a glow that returned as I traveled around the state on my two trips there: turning off an unremarkable road and finding myself in the public park outside Vero Beach, where for $3 you could walk through warm white sand on a weekday afternoon; having a beer and watching the pink-orange sunset over the marina in the small town of Stuart; the Day-Glo-graffiti walls of Wynwood, south of Miami’s Little Haiti; the revelation that there’s an entire spare Miami just over the bridge from the original. Bumped off my return flight for three days by Hurricane Nicole, I drove to the Kennedy Space Center—just in time to watch a SpaceX rocket blast off into the clear blue sky. At one point, I took a wrong turn outside of Miami onto Alligator Alley and drove 15 miles into the Everglades before I could turn around at a visitors’ center. I’ve never been somewhere so wild that also had M&M’s in vending machines.
Braided through these experiences was the sensation of Florida as a refuge from reality, something that has encapsulated both its promise and its peril since before it was part of America. In the early 1800s, enslaved people escaped from southern plantations and sheltered in Seminole lands, prompting Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, to launch the first in a series of devastating wars. Florida was soon offloaded by the Spanish, and loosely attached to the U.S. for two decades before becoming a state in 1845. It was roundly ignored for a long time after that. In 1940, it was the least populated southern state.
The reasons for its transformation after World War II are well known: air-conditioning and bug spray; generations of northeastern and midwestern seniors tempted by year-round sunshine; the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who fled Fidel Castro in the 1960s. Then came the rodent infestation: Disney, with all its money and lobbyists and special tax arrangements, and eventually its own town, called Celebration. Now the state draws crypto hustlers, digital nomads, and people who just plain hate paying state income tax. All of these migrants fueled decades of explosive growth and a landscape of construction, condos, and golf courses. In 2014, Florida’s population overtook New York’s, and in 2022, it was the nation’s fastest-growing state.
But those bare facts conceal a more fundamental change. As Florida has become America, America has become more like Florida: older, more racially diverse but not necessarily more liberal, and more at risk from climate change. “The state that looks most like what we’d expect the United States to look like in 2060?” Philip Bump writes in his new book, The Aftermath. “Florida.”
For so many who choose to live here, arriving in Florida feels like a relief: a liberation from cold winters, from COVID mandates, from the paralyzing fear of political correctness, from the warnings of climatologists and guilt trips by Greta Thunberg. “This is an irresponsible place,” Grunwald told me—a counterweight to Plymouth Rock and the puritanism of the Northeast. When I drove across the border into Georgia, a battery of signs greeted me, warning against speeding and littering, as if to say: Look, we’re relaxed here, but not Florida relaxed. In freedom-loving Florida, you presume, every warning and restriction has been reluctantly imposed in response to a highly specific problem. (Exhibit A, the hotel swimming-pool sign: No swimming with diarrhea.)
Before arriving in the state, I had called the political strategist Anthony Pedicini, who has worked for multiple Republican state representatives and members of Congress in Florida since moving there two decades ago from New York. He expressed a general frustration with the fussiness and rule-making of Democratic-controlled areas: “You’ve dealt with these blue-state politics that have raised your taxes, defunded your police, rewarded homelessness, made the schools a mockery—you’re fed up with it.” And so you go to Florida.
Then Pedicini said something unexpected. “You ever read The Iliad and The Odyssey?” I know them reasonably well, I responded, with the caution of someone who is anticipating a quiz.
“So there was one of the chapters where the ship is going by the Sirens, calling the sailors off,” he continued. “Odysseus strapped himself to the mast so he wouldn’t go, but he made all his sailors plug their ears with wax and cotton. I think Ron DeSantis is like a siren call to all of these suburban Republicans living in these blue states.”
Right, but weren’t the sirens luring people … to their death?
Pedicini was unperturbed. “I’ll tell you this, to give you background on me. I lost my mother during the pandemic to COVID. My mother chose not to get a shot, the only one in our family. Do I blame it on the governor? Absolutely not. Do I blame my mother? No, she made a choice for her that she thought was best for her. It resulted in a disastrous consequence. But the government didn’t have the right to make that choice.”
Everyone I met in Florida agreed that DeSantis was ambitious, hardworking, and smart—but, you know, so were Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. Where were the fizz and the fire and the electric crackle of change that he claimed to be offering?
During a rally held at the American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, on the Space Coast, I got to see DeSantis in person, floodlit like a Pink Floyd concert and flanked by sweet vintage rides. Flags fluttered in the parking lot, declaring BLUE LIVES MATTER and LET’S GO BRANDON, but the experience was underwhelming. DeSantis’s speech was a rote recital of approved villains, lacking the chaos and danger that Donald Trump brings to his rallies.
Brandon Celi
Any serious consideration of DeSantis inevitably runs headlong into his lack of charisma. Can you win the presidency without being able to make small talk? The Republican donor class is very keen to lubricate his path to power, but they worry he can’t schmooze and flatter as well as he bullies and schemes. He has courted partisan YouTubers and talk-radio hosts, but throughout his reelection campaign last year, he did not grant a sit-down interview to any mainstream publication, and declined to cooperate with profiles in The New Yorker, the Financial Times, and The New York Times. His press team specializes in insults that read as though ChatGPT has been trained on Trump speeches—gratuitous, yet somehow bloodless. (Asked to respond to fact-checking queries for this article, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, replied by email: “You aren’t interested in the truth; this is just yet another worthless Atlantic editorial.”)
The governor’s closest adviser is generally agreed to be his wife, Casey—ironically, a former television reporter—who survived breast cancer in 2022, and made a campaign ad extolling the support DeSantis gave her. In general, he reveals little about his inner life. Until recently, he had not spoken publicly about the unexpected death of his sister, Christine, at age 30 in 2015. In February, when the New York Post followed him to Dunedin, to see the governor in his home environment, the most the reporter got out of him was that he’d parlayed his success as a Little League pitcher—his teammates called him “D”—into a job at an electrical store in town. His mother was a nurse and his father installed Nielsen boxes; his middle name is Dion; vacations were spent visiting his grandparents in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He was smart and worked hard enough to get into Yale.
Ah, the Ivy League. This is where DeSantis’s story really takes off: the small-town Florida boy thrust into a world of inherited privilege, elite tastes, and left-wing opinions. “I showed up my first day in jean shorts and a T-shirt because that’s what we wore on the west coast of Florida,” he told Tucker Carlson in April 2021. “That was not something that was received very warmly. And I never quite fit in there, and it was a total culture shock to me.” For the first time, he told Carlson, he heard someone criticize America—and God, and Christianity. “They hated God,” he said. “They hated the country.” For the first time, in other words, the young Ron met people with different political opinions—and he didn’t like it one bit.
After college, DeSantis spent a year teaching at the private Darlington School, in Georgia, where, according to the Times, one student recalled him as a “total jock” who “was definitely proud that he graduated Ivy and thought he was very special.” DeSantis once dared a student who had been boasting about how much milk he could drink to prove it. The student threw up in front of his classmates.
Unlike Trump, DeSantis could have succeeded by the elite’s rules. Like George H. W. Bush, he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and the captain of the baseball team. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale. His performance got him into Harvard Law School, after which he joined the legal arm of the U.S. Navy.
He spent Christmas 2006 at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay—not as an inmate, he would later joke on the campaign trail. One former Guantánamo prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, has accused DeSantis of laughing as he was force-fed; Adayfi says he threw up in the young lawyer’s face. “I was screaming,” Adayfi told Eyes Left, which describes itself as a socialist anti-war podcast hosted by veterans. “I looked at him, and he was actually smiling. Like someone who was enjoying it.” Adayfi was released in 2016 after being detained without charge for 14 years, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights later classified this force-feeding as torture. (In his 2023 book, The Courage to Be Free, DeSantis offers few details about his stint at Guantánamo, saying that although detainees would often “claim ‘abuse’ ” in U.S. facilities, “in Iraqi custody they really would get abused and treated inhumanely.”)
In 2007, DeSantis deployed to Iraq with SEAL Team 1, not as a stone-cold killer himself, but as the stone-cold killers’ lawyer. The year before, he had met his future wife on a golf course (very Florida), and in 2009 he married her at Disney World (even more Florida). In honor of the couple’s Italian heritage, the reception was at Italy Isola in Epcot, a private terrace next to a small faux-Venetian canal. They now have three children: Mamie, Mason, and Madison.
Casey DeSantis’s job as a local TV host meant she couldn’t move out of the state, so her husband decided to leave the military and began contemplating his future while serving as a special assistant U.S. attorney in central Florida. He wanted to run for Congress in Florida’s Sixth District, north of Orlando, but he knew he had a problem. “I viewed having earned degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School to be political scarlet letters as far as the GOP primary went,” he later wrote. He needed a mythology. He needed to embrace his destiny as a Florida Man, a crusader for people who want to open-carry in Publix against the blue-state pencil-necks who worship Rachel Maddow and scoff at birtherism. “If I could withstand seven years of indoctrination in the Ivy League,” he took to telling audiences, “then I will be able to survive D.C. without going native!”
Driving back from Melbourne to Orlando took me past the Reedy Creek Improvement District—a forgettable euphemism for Disney’s private fiefdom, 25,000 acres of land around Lake Buena Vista, where for more than half a century the company was able to control building codes, utilities, and waste collection. Until it crossed Ron DeSantis.
The treatment of Disney—which has more than 70,000 employees in the state—has become the cornerstone of DeSantis’s pitch to voters; he calls it “the Florida equivalent of the shot heard ’round the world.” It reveals both his governing philosophy and the evolution of the Republican attitude toward corporations. In February, on the eve of his book’s publication, DeSantis signed a bill ending Disney’s control of the district and replacing its board of supervisors with his own handpicked choices. These included Bridget Ziegler, an education activist whose husband had been elected earlier that month as chair of the Florida Republican Party. For a guy who had never run anything before becoming governor, DeSantis has shown an incredible aptitude for patronage.
The campaign against one of Florida’s largest private employers is DeSantisism distilled into its purest form, a kind of Mafia bargain reminiscent of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary: Don’t come for me and I won’t come for you. Corporations can be supportive of ruling politicians, or studiously neutral. What they must not do is cause trouble.
What else does DeSantis believe? We know from the media tour for The Courage to Be Free that he is far from a foreign-policy hawk. He has said that it is not in America’s interests to become “further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia.” His first book, 2011’s Dreams From Our Founding Fathers—published by a Florida vanity press called High-Pitched Hum, and clearly riffing on the title of Barack Obama’s first memoir—paints him as an originalist; he claims that the Founding Fathers considered the Constitution a “fundamental law with a stable meaning” rather than a “living document.” He confidently asserts that the country’s first Black president betrayed the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who “did not dream of a transformation of America in which the foundational principles of the nation were tossed aside.”
Dreams From Our Founding Fathers was DeSantis’s calling card for his successful 2012 congressional run. He quickly became a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus. Aware of the Tea Party energy coursing through the party, DeSantis was careful not to appear co-opted by the establishment. He slept in his office instead of renting an apartment in Washington, declined the congressional pension plan, and flew back to Florida—and his growing family—as soon as votes ended each week.
During his third term, DeSantis made his bid for promotion to governor—and that is when he received the blessing of this story’s other Florida Man, Donald Trump. The facts are disputed: Trump recently claimed that DeSantis begged him with “tears coming down from his eyes” for an endorsement; other sources have the president moved by watching the potential candidate praise him on Fox News. Either way, in late 2017 Trump posted a tweet describing DeSantis as “a brilliant young leader, Yale and then Harvard Law, who would make a GREAT Governor of Florida.”
That endorsement allowed DeSantis to become a staple of Fox News, with more than 100 appearances in 2018. “The once little-known congressman spent so much time broadcasting Fox News TV hits from Washington this year that he learned to apply his own powder so he could look as polished as he sounded,” Politico reported.
Brandon Celi
Buoyed by Trump’s blessing and the support of right-wing media, DeSantis won Florida’s Republican primary for governor in August 2018 by 20 points. Two months later, he went on to win the general election by just 32,463 votes. In The Courage to Be Free, he recalls asking his transition team to draw up an “exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor. I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.” If DeSantis ever sits behind the Resolute Desk, you can bet he’ll do more than order Diet Cokes and compulsively check Twitter.
In January, after DeSantis had been reelected as governor by 1.5 million votes, I returned to Florida, landing in Miami. This time, the car-rental agency offered me an upgrade to a Cadillac Escalade. I got all the way to climbing up the little step to the driver’s seat, where I looked backwards at two more rows of seats and a trunk, before I decided to set out instead in a positively demure GMC Terrain.
I had been told that there were three Floridas: the Panhandle, best viewed as an extension of the Deep South; the state’s central belt, where maps should read “Here Be Seniors”; and the south, where condo towers and bustling Spanish-speaking enclaves merge slowly into the laid-back beaches of the Keys. Visiting Miami, I could barely comprehend how the city—with its bitcoin brunches and graffiti district and cops who look like male strippers—could be in the same country as Tallahassee, never mind the same state.
Maria-Elena Lopez, the vice chair of the Miami-Dade Democrats, volunteered to tell me why the traditionally blue and “rabidly Latin” county had voted for DeSantis by 11 points in November (he lost there by 21 points in 2018). Her answer was simple: Its more recent arrivals were middle-class conservatives in their countries of origin, and “they didn’t come here to fight the fight of the other people.” Also, she said, “Latin Americans love strongmen.”
Lopez, who came to the United States from Cuba at age 4, also underlined the complicated relationship between recent migrants and the idea of government help, explaining that her fellow Cubans were particularly triggered by anything that smacked of socialism. She pointed to Hialeah, “which is probably our most Latin city in Miami-Dade County … and there is the highest enrollment of what is casually called Obamacare. Okay. Yet they’re like, ‘Obama was Communist.’ Oh, but you like his insurance policies? The messaging does not go with what the actual reality is.”
In the November election, DeSantis’s success was not an outlier in Florida; Senator Marco Rubio notched an equally large win, and the party gained four House seats. Yet DeSantis deserves some credit for this: He had pushed an exquisitely gerrymandered redistricting proposal through the state legislature. “His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state,” ProPublica reported last year. As one example, the DeSantis map shattered the seat held by the Black Democrat Al Lawson, which stretched along the border with Georgia, dividing it into four pieces, each of which was inserted into a majority-white district. (DeSantis has rejected the criticisms, calling the old district itself “a 200-mile gerrymander that divvies up people based on the color of their skin.”)
DeSantis also established an Office of Election Crimes and Security, whose officers carried out widely publicized arrests for alleged voter fraud. Fentrice Driskell, the state House minority leader, points to the chilling effect of police officers “parading around 20 individuals who thought that they had registered to vote lawfully” in front of the cameras. (Three defendants have so far had their charges dismissed.) “They were just bogus cases,” Driskell told me, “being used to gin up a big lie that there’s election fraud in Florida.”
Sunday morning in Ron DeSantis’s vision of hell, and I was drinking bottomless mimosas. This was R House, a drag bar in Wynwood, an area of Miami that has made the journey from sketchy to bougie in just two decades. Last July, a viral video filmed at R House showed a drag performer, her implausible breasts barely covered with pasties, dollar bills stuffed into her thong, showing a small child how to strut along a catwalk. “Children belong at drag shows!!!!” read the caption. “Children deserve to see fun & expression & freedom.” DeSantis responded by ordering a government investigation of the restaurant.
When I visited R House, I didn’t see any minors, although the menu did offer a $30 kids’ brunch. If anything, the drag show revealed how thoroughly gay culture has been absorbed into the mainstream; judging by all the sashes and tiaras, most of the customers were part of bachelorette parties. At the table next to me, a woman daintily fed a glass of water to a chihuahua in a jeweled collar. Fans were snapped, dollar bills were waved, and a few performers did some light twerking, but the only serious danger to children here would have been from a flying wig.
I left perplexed. In all honesty, I had found the viral video disturbing; as the DeSantis administration’s complaint argued, the performance had a “sexualized nature” that was clearly inappropriate for kids to watch. But it was no more disturbing to me than giving an 8-year-old a “purity ring,” or letting them fire a pistol, or forcing 10-year-olds to bear their rapists’ babies. Why can’t America just be normal? And why wouldn’t DeSantis, extoller of “parental rights in education,” let moms and dads decide what to show their own children? The paradox of freedom, Florida style, is that it’s really an assertion of control. People like us should be free to do what we want, and free to stop other people from doing what they want when we don’t approve. That’s why it would be deeply unfair to call Ron DeSantis a petty tyrant. If he is a tyrant, he is an expansive one.
Ask Andrew Warren. After the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the twice-elected Democratic state attorney in Hillsborough County signed a pledge that he would not prosecute women who sought abortions, or doctors providing gender surgery or hormones to minors. The DeSantis administration responded by suspending him while he was in the middle of an unrelated grand-jury case. “Five minutes after receiving the email about the suspension, I was escorted out of my office by an armed deputy,” he told me. There wasn’t even enough time to collect his house keys from his desk. In January, a judge ruled that DeSantis had violated Warren’s First Amendment rights and the Florida Constitution, but said he had no authority to reinstate him.
Warren believes his suspension was designed to be a warning to others: “This is what authoritarians do, right? They say that we need to quell dissent, because dissent is so inherently dangerous.”
Similarly stuntlike was DeSantis’s decision to fly 49 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard last year, which became a reliable applause line in the governor’s stump speech. Everything about that story stinks, including the fact that the aviation company involved, Vertol—which had close ties to DeSantis aides—made a handsome profit. That’s part of a pattern. When DeSantis owns the libs, his donors and loyalists tend to benefit. At the start of the year, under the guise of his “war on woke,” he appointed six right-wing activists as trustees of the New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college in Sarasota. The board promptly forced the president out and replaced her with Richard Corcoran, a former Republican speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives, on a salary of $699,000 (more than double the previous president’s). One of the new board members was Christopher Rufo, who has achieved fame among the Very Online for turning critical race theory into a household term. So what if Rufo lives in Washington State? He is big on Twitter and a beloved brand among Tucker Carlson viewers.
At 44, DeSantis represents a new generation of Republicans who have learned to speak Rumble—the unmoderated alternative to YouTube—as well as fluent Fox. He knows which of his actions to shout about, and which ones are better smothered in boredom. At a flashy press conference on April 19, 2021, for example, DeSantis surrounded himself with cops to sign the Combating Public Disorder Act, which was presented as taming the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement but—according to Jason Garcia, a former Orlando Sentinel investigative reporter who now runs a Substack called Seeking Rents—gave police extra power to quell dissent and civil disobedience more generally. That was a moment worth staging for applause by the Blue Lives Matter contingent. By contrast, the governor waited until just before midnight the same day to approve Senate Bill 50, a blandly worded law that collects sales tax from online shoppers while giving tax breaks to Florida businesses. The difference between the splashy staging of the anti-riot bill and the quiet enactment of S.B. 50 “illustrates DeSantis to me so perfectly,” Garcia said. “He’s a governor that is masterful at driving these angry social-war fights that divide people, then turning around and governing like a pro-corporate Republican.”
From the outside, Mar-a-Lago looks less like a millionaires’ playground and more like an all-inclusive Mediterranean resort. But Trump’s Palm Beach estate does have a watchtower outside, and a guard who was not keen to let me in, even to speak to the manager.
No matter. Instead I headed around the corner to the house owned by the real-estate billionaire Jeff Greene, hoping that he had insight into the one man who could crush DeSantis’s ambitions. Someone, somewhere, buzzed me into the gate, but Greene was playing tennis when I arrived, so I wandered around the estate for five minutes, worried about being shot by an overzealous security guard. When Greene finally brought me inside, his house was everything I had hoped for: toilets with self-warming seats, a terrace backing onto the beach, photos of him embracing world leaders, the works. “That’s a Picasso,” he said, leading me down a corridor to his terrace. This was the Palm Beach lifestyle I had heard so much about.
Greene was once a member of Mar-a-Lago, but he let his membership lapse after he ran as a Democratic candidate for governor in 2018 (he came in fourth in the primary). His campaign promoted him as someone willing to stand up to Donald Trump, using a grainy video of him and Trump gesticulating at each other in the dining room at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in December 2016 as proof. Despite this history, Greene had sympathy for Trump’s complaint that DeSantis would be nothing without him.
Trump seems to feel DeSantis’s betrayal keenly. Shortly before the November election, he debuted a new nickname for his rival: Ron DeSanctimonious. But it didn’t land, somehow, and Trump’s more recent efforts—Meatball Ron, Shutdown Ron, Tiny D—have not been as devastating as Low-Energy Jeb or Little Marco. Locked away for two years in Mar-a-Lago like the world’s most gregarious shut-in, the former president has been consumed by his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, long past when it stopped being a useful, base-enraging lie.
The demands of Palm Beach socializing meant that Greene was certain to encounter Trump again—in fact, Greene was due at Mar-a-Lago the following weekend for a benefit in aid of the Palm Beach Police and Fire Foundation. That might be awkward, because a few months earlier he had told the Financial Times that Trump had “no friends.” Then came the former president’s dinner with Ye—Kanye West—who was going around saying things like “I like Hitler,” and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
“I realized that I probably should call the Financial Times to say I owe President Trump an apology,” Greene told me, looking the least apologetic a man has ever looked, an attitude the tennis whites amplified, “because he really does have two friends.”
Was he not worried about going to Mar-a-Lago under the circumstances? Not at all, it turned out, because Greene would be accompanied by his friend Mehmet Oz, Trump’s anointed (and failed) candidate for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, as well as by his best man, with whom he had just spent two weeks in St. Barts.
And who would that be? Mike Tyson.
I blinked a few times, before my brain supplied the necessary explanation: Florida.
On January 3, DeSantis was sworn in as governor for a second time, on the steps of the capitol in Tallahassee. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., but at 10:20, the public seating area was full, and stragglers had to watch on a giant television screen on South Monroe Street, which had been renamed “Ron DeSantis Way” for the occasion. (Other elected officials were assigned smaller side streets in their honor.) Again, I felt inescapably British: We wouldn’t let our politicians get carried away like this.
In the press pen, an enthusiastic livestreamer broadcast his hope that Pfizer, Moderna, and the media would be held accountable for their crimes, then emitted an audible “Ooh” of appreciation when Casey DeSantis stepped out in a mint-green caped dress, with elbow-length white gloves. Her husband took a seat on the dais, splay-legged, his hands disconcertingly locked into a diamond in front of his crotch.
This is what it looks like to become the Chosen One. The former Fox host Glenn Beck had lent DeSantis his rare Bible for the swearing-in. The podcaster Dave Rubin, previously torn between the Florida governor and Trump, tweeted a photograph from the bleachers—not the VIP section, I noted—and later produced a YouTube video praising the “one line in DeSantis’ speech that made the crowd go nuts.” (I had been led to believe that Floridians going nuts would involve some combination of gasoline, swimming trunks, guns, pythons, golf carts, alcohol, and an unexplained fatality. Here, they just stood and clapped.) The donors and the party hierarchy were ready to move on from Donald Trump; so, it seemed, were the partisan media.
The speech drew on the dark Bannonite energy of the right-wing online ecosystem, name-checking “entrenched bureaucrats in D.C., jet-setters in Davos, and corporations wielding public power” and breezing through the obligatory geographic shout-outs, “from the Space Coast to the Sun Coast,” to Daytona, Hialeah, and the rest. “Freedom lives here, in our great Sunshine State of Florida!”
The rest of the 16-minute speech was a tour through the greatest hits of his campaign, followed by the predictable raising of his eyes to the horizon of greater ambitions. DeSantis wanted to offer a Florida Blueprint to the rest of America; this was a place that was preserving the “sacred fire of liberty” that had burned in Independence Hall, at Gettysburg, on the D-Day beaches of Normandy, and that had inspired a president to stand in Berlin and declare, “Tear down this wall.” Yes, the speech said, I may be currently in charge of highway maintenance and appointments to the board of chiropractic medicine, but I have so much more to give.
The central question about DeSantis is this: Is he a corporate tax-cutter or a conspiratorial frother? Is he closer to Mitch McConnell or Marjorie Taylor Greene? The great DeSantis innovation has been to realize how much cover calculated outrage provides for rewarding cronies—and that the more you preach “freedom,” the more you can get away with authoritarianism.
Although the Sunshine State forged DeSantis, he’s not a true Florida Man. Some 400 miles away from Tallahassee, at Mar-a-Lago, you could get the full sugar rush of Trump, a born performer who finds his causes by sniffing the wind, then road-tests potential lines on Truth Social and live audiences, feeling the crackle of a palpable hit. DeSantis offers a synthetic, lab-grown alternative. He’s Sweet’N Low.
During the inauguration, the Pledge of Allegiance was read by Felix Rodríguez, a paramilitary CIA officer during the Bay of Pigs incident and a recent winner of the governor’s Medal of Freedom. The 81-year-old stumbled over the words, and I realized instantly what a natural politician—Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan—would have done: walk over, take Rodríguez’s arm, and create a viral moment of human connection. DeSantis stood rigid and stern. Given a 15-hour run-up and a focus group, he might have gamed out the advantages of a small, public act of kindness. But he couldn’t get there on his own.
Nothing is more damning of the modern Republican Party than the fact that DeSantis needs to flaunt his authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and casual cruelty to court its base. Even then, the routine falls flat. DeSantis lacks the weirdness, effervescence, and recklessness that makes his home state so compelling. A true Florida Man does not master bureaucracy and use his powers of patronage to reshape institutions in his image. A true Florida Man does not make the trains run on time. A true Florida Man tries to soup up his boat with a nitro exhaust and accidentally burns down the illegal tiki bar he built in his backyard. Some are born Florida Men, some achieve Florida Manhood, and some have Florida Manhood thrust upon them by the demands of right-wing politics.
This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Magic Kingdom of Ron DeSantis.”
Former President Donald Trump gripped the CPAC lectern as he workshopped a new sales pitch: “I stand here today, and I’m the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent—and very easily—World War III.” (Wild applause.) “And you’re gonna have World War III, by the way.” (Confused applause.)
It was just one in a string of ominous sentences that the 45th president offered tonight during his nearly two-hour headlining speech at the annual conservative conference, which for years prided itself on its ties to Ronald Reagan, but is now wholly intertwined with Trumpism, if little else. Yet even amid cultish devotion, Trump seemed bored, listless, and unanimated as he spoke to a sprawling hotel ballroom that was only three-quarters full.
For much of the speech, Trump’s voice took on more of a soft and haggard whisper than the booming, throaty scream that characterized his campaign rallies. His language, by contrast, was bellicose. Tonight’s address was among the darkest speeches he has given since his “American carnage” inauguration. Trump warned that the United States was becoming “a nation in decline” and a “crime-ridden filthy communist nightmare.” He spoke of an “epic battle” against “sinister forces” on the left. He repeatedly painted himself as a martyr, a tragic hero still hoping for redemption. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way,” Trump told the room. He pulled out his best, half-hearted Patton: “We are going to finish what we started. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory.” He was heavy on adjectives, devastating with nouns. “We will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all,” he said.
This was only Trump’s fourth public event since officially entering the 2024 race last fall. Rather than lay out his vision for America, he found a mess of topics about which to complain. The White House, Trump said, “wasn’t the easiest building to live in.” He opined that “illegal immigrants come in, and we house them in the Waldorf-Astoria.” He characterized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “China-loving politician” and sounded legitimately disappointed when saying, “My wonderful travel ban is gone.” He lamented the halcyon days before he knew the terms “subpoena” and “grand jury.” He called Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “racist” and griped about the “Department of Injustice.” Shortly before his speech, Trump told James Rosen of Newsmax that he intends to stay in the 2024 presidential race even if he is indicted in one (or more) criminal investigations. Relatedly, he promised to “totally obliterate the Deep State.”
The audience, largely composed of Trump loyalists, hooted and repeatedly yelled “U-S-A!” A brief selection of the hats dotting the hallways outside the Potomac Ballroom: MAGA, ’MERICA, LET’S GO BRANDON, TRUMP WON, WE THE PEOPLE ARE PISSED. Trump’s solemn face was splashed across an array of comically dramatic acrylic paintings on display. (Kari Lake, the election denier who lost her race for Arizona governor last year, kissed one on stage Friday night.) Downstairs from the main stage, attendees could have their picture taken in a mock version of Trump’s Oval Office. Multiple people roamed the corridors in red, white, and blue “Trump 45” baseball jerseys. As the former president spoke, supporters waved bright red WE WANT TRUMP signs. But the man himself seemed only sort of into it, and very bitter.
It was a strange and lackluster conference—more of a “1 a.m. at the party” vibe than “the greatest political movement in the history of our country” that Trump invoked tonight. Perhaps, years from now, 2023 will be remembered as “the last gasp of CPAC.” Gone was the FoxNation sponsorship; Newsmax hoped to fill the void. Attendees could also linger at pop-ups from The Epoch Times, Right Side Broadcasting News, America First News, OAN, Lindell TV, Proverbs Media Group LLC, and Patriot Mobile, which was pitching itself as a Christian cell-phone company.
Aside from Trump, the CPAC lineup was missing many of its usual stars. And most of his potential 2024 challengers skipped the conference altogether this year, with several instead attending a rival Club for Growth event in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump spoke just a few hours after Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, and Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, who announced the formation of something called an “Election Crime Bureau.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado came next with a fire-and-brimstone speech peppered with Bible verses. “We must stand united in this battle against actual evil,” she told the room.
On Friday, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gently distanced themselves from their old boss in their speeches. (Haley was met with chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” after she left the stage.) The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who is also running for the Republican nomination, paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech before pledging to get rid of affirmative action, calling it a cancer. He took aim at the Georgia congresswoman and super Trump surrogate Marjorie Taylor Greene: “Do we want a national divorce, or do we want a national revival?” Trump, when rattling off thank yous and compliments early into his speech—Representative Matt Gaetz: “a great guy”; Dr. Ronny Jackson: “he’s a doctor!”—joked that Greene is a “low-key” person.
The CPAC straw poll, once a pivotal moment in the GOP election cycle, wrapped up 10 minutes ahead of schedule tonight. (On cue, someone tried to start a “Let’s Go Brandon” chant during the unveiling of the results.) Unsurprisingly, Trump won with 62 percent of the vote, crushing his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who received 20 percent. Curiously, Trump never mentioned DeSantis in his speech. (Tomorrow, DeSantis is scheduled to speak at the Reagan Presidential Library, and both candidates are soon headed to Iowa.)
Steve Bannon, proud recipient of a Trump pardon, was among the biggest celebrities of the weekend. Late Friday afternoon, Bannon marched out to the stage in all black, three pens clipped to his shirt, and attacked Fox News for its alleged “soft-ban” of Trump. He referred to the Murdoch family as “a bunch of foreigners” and said, “Note to Fox senior management: When Donald J. Trump talks, it’s newsworthy.” He fired up the crowd: “We’re not looking for unity. We’re looking for victory!” He pounded his hand on the lectern, summing up the theme of the weekend: “MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!”
As Trump spoke, another of the gathering’s many “Let’s Go Brandon!” chants broke out, and the former president thanked the crowd. At one point, he play-acted a scene between President Joe Biden and his son Hunter discussing the “laptop from hell” and received genuine laughs. Trump warned that Biden “is leading us into oblivion,” then promised to single-handedly end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Nearly every topic he touched—border security, foreign wars—had a way of coming back around to him, Trump. “NATO wouldn’t even exist if I didn’t get them to pay up,” he said. He then spoke hypothetically about Russia blowing up NATO’s headquarters.
“You know, I had a beautiful life before I did this,” Trump said wistfully at one point. “I lived in luxury. I had everything.” As the speech crossed the 90-minute mark, Trump was clearly losing the audience. He returned to the wartime language: “We will not yield. We will press forward,” he promised. “We will finish what we started.”
