Politics | The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2024-03-18T13:52:03-04:00Copyright 2024 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677777<p>Joe Biden <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/12/teamsters-biden-trump-unions/#:~:text=But%20in%202020%2C%20Biden%20secured,good%20shot%2C%20I%20think.%E2%80%9D">courted</a> the leaders of the Teamsters this week, looking for the endorsement of the 1.3-million-member union. He will probably get it. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, <a href="https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/8-ways-the-biden-administration-has-fought-for-working-people-by-strengthening-unions/#:~:text=American%20workers%20want%20to%20unionize,pro%2Dunion%20president%20in%20history.">calls him</a> “the most pro-union president in history.” He’s already won the endorsement of many of the country’s most important unions, including the United Auto Workers, the AFSCME public employees’ union, the Service Employees International Union, and the main umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO.</p><p>Biden’s real concern in November, though, isn’t getting the support of union leaders; it’s winning the support of union <i>members</i>. Labor’s rank and file were a valuable part of his winning coalition in 2020, when, according to AP VoteCast, he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/12/teamsters-biden-trump-unions/">got 56 percent</a> of the union vote. Today, things on this front are looking a little shakier, particularly in key electoral battlegrounds. A <i>New York Times</i>/Siena survey of swing states late last year, for instance, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/31/politics/union-voters-election-trump-biden/index.html">found</a> that Biden was tied with Donald Trump among union voters (who, that same survey noted, had voted for Biden by an eight-point margin in the previous general election).</p><p>That slippage is not itself a reason for Democratic panic, because it suggests that the drop-off in union support has been similar to the decline in support for Biden generally. But the softening support among union voters is striking in light of how hard Biden has tried to win their trust. He has certainly shown his love for workers during his three-plus years in office, but not even unionized workers seem to love him back.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/biden-railroad-labor-unions-deal-erik-loomis/671445/?utm_source=feed">Read: Is Biden the most pro-union president in history?</a>]</i></p><p>Biden has made plenty of symbolic and rhetorical gestures, including <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-wasnt-invited-to-white-house-electric-cars-summit-2021-8">the exclusion</a> of Tesla CEO Elon Musk from a 2021 electric-vehicle summit at the White House, most likely because of Musk’s anti-union stance, and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-makes-history-striking-auto-workers-picket-line-rcna117348">walking</a> a UAW picket line during the union’s strike against the Big Three carmakers last fall. He’s made support for labor, and the working class generally, a legislative priority, pushing bills that subsidize investments in infrastructure and manufacturing, protect union pension funds, fund apprenticeships, and boost wages for federal contractors. He also kept Trump’s trade tariffs, which industrial unions mostly favored, in place. And the people he appointed to the National Labor Relations Board have handed down a series of rulings that <a href="https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-28-bidens-nlrb-brings-workers-rights-back/">have made it easier</a> for workers to organize and harder for employers to punish them for doing so. To give just one metric (<a href="https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/8-ways-the-biden-administration-has-fought-for-working-people-by-strengthening-unions/">from the Center for American Progress</a>), the NLRB ordered companies to hire back more illegally fired workers in Biden’s first year than it did during Trump’s entire four years in office.</p><p>Biden has done all of this at a time when unions are enjoying a big surge in popularity. Fifteen years ago, public support for unions, as <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx">measured by</a> Gallup, dipped below 50 percent for the first time since it was first surveyed, in the 1930s. Today, more than two-thirds of Americans say they support unions, one of the highest marks since the ’60s, and polling <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/510281/unions-strengthening.aspx">found that</a> two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans supported the recent strikes by the UAW and by Hollywood screenwriters and actors, which not only enjoyed a high profile but were also successful. Perhaps this means that Biden would be doing even worse in the polls if he hadn’t been so pro-labor. But so far, the political rewards seem to have been meager at best.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/auto-industry-uaw-strike-profit/675418/?utm_source=feed">James Surowiecki: The Big Three’s inevitable collision with the UAW</a>]</i></p><p>Some of this can be explained straightforwardly by the fact that the same issues dragging down Biden’s popularity among voters generally, such as inflation and immigration, also hurt him with union voters. That seems particularly true for white men working in old-line industries, a segment of workers who were already disposed to support Trump. (According to a <a href="https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/unions-critical-democratic-partys-electoral-success/">Center for American Progress Action Fund study</a>, white male non-college-educated union workers supported Trump over Biden by 27 points in 2020, though Biden did nine points better with them than he did with white male non-college <i>non-union</i> workers.)</p><p>On top of this, the percentage of American workers in unions has not risen over the past three years—only about 10 percent of all workers are unionized, according to <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf">the Bureau of Labor Statistics</a>, and in the private sector, that proportion falls below 7 percent (despite some high-profile organizing campaigns such as the one at Starbucks). So even though the public has become more supportive of labor organizations, union issues simply have less cultural and political resonance than they once did. And unions themselves are less integral to their members’ daily lives than they once were, particularly in former industrial strongholds that are now swing states, as the Harvard scholars Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol document in their recent book, <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/rust-belt-union-blues/9780231208826"><i>Rust Belt Union Blues</i></a>. That means it takes more work to reach union voters and win their support; endorsements from leaders alone won’t deliver workers’ votes.</p><p>Another dimension of Biden’s limited success is that he faces an opponent in Trump who, unlike most Republican presidential candidates, has also courted union voters aggressively while selling himself as a tribune of the working class. That stand is mostly marketing: During Trump’s presidency, the NLRB was actively hostile to union organizing efforts, and when House Democrats passed a bill that would make joining unions easier for workers and significantly weaken states’ right-to-work laws, the Trump White House <a href="https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/union-leaders-laud-house-passage-of-pro-act-trump-veto-threatened/">threatened to veto it</a>. (The president never got the chance; the bill did not come up for a vote in the Senate.) But Trump’s rhetorical nods toward labor have helped blur the contrast between him and Biden. And the fact that Trump’s signature economic issue is raising tariffs has also helped him with union voters.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/where-trump-gm-strike/598189/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: Why isn’t Trump helping the autoworkers?</a>]</i></p><p>What that suggests, of course, is that Biden needs to do a better job of sharpening that contrast on labor policy. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. Much of the struggle over workers’ rights and interests today takes place in a courtroom or through administrative hearings or via regulatory changes. This sort of bureaucratic haggling means that it’s hard to make labor issues vivid for voters—even union voters. For all the difference in the NLRB’s record during the Biden administration compared with that under Trump, administrative-agency rulings are not the stuff of a rousing stump speech.</p><p>These problems are not insurmountable—and the unions themselves will be trying to help Biden surmount them. (The Service Employees International Union, for instance, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/13/seiu-biden-democrats-election/">just announced</a> that it would be spending $200 million on voter education in this election cycle.) And once the presidential campaign gets fully under way, union voters may well move back in Biden’s direction. But Biden’s difficulty in landing their support is a microcosm of his struggles with voters broadly: The way they feel about him seems disconnected from what he’s done.</p>James Surowieckihttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-surowiecki/?utm_source=feedBridget Bennett / The New York Times / ReduxWhy Biden’s Pro-worker Stance Isn’t Working2024-03-18T07:30:00-04:002024-03-18T13:52:03-04:00The most pro-labor president in history could hardly do more for unions, but their members aren’t feeling it.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677764<p>On Election Day in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia was 70 years old and had been serving on the Supreme Court for 20 years. That year would have been an opportune time for him to retire—Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and they could have confirmed a young conservative justice who likely would have held the seat for decades to come. Instead, he tried to stay on the Court until the next time a Republican president would have a clear shot to nominate and confirm a conservative successor.</p><p>He didn’t make it—he died unexpectedly in February 2016, at the age of 79, while Barack Obama was president. Conservatives nevertheless engineered some good fortune: There was divided control of government, and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the seat. Donald Trump won that fall’s election and named Neil Gorsuch to the seat that McConnell had held open.</p><p>But imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, as many expected. By running a few points stronger, she might have taken Democratic candidates across the finish line in close races in Pennsylvania and Missouri, resulting in Democratic control of the Senate. In that scenario, Clinton would have named a liberal successor to Scalia—more liberal than Garland—and conservatives would have lost control of the Court, all because of Scalia’s failure to retire at the opportune moment.</p><p>Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia<b> </b>died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent<b> </b>when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.</p><p>But if Sotomayor does not retire this year, we don’t know when she will next be able to retire with a likely liberal replacement. It’s possible that Democrats will retain the presidency and the Senate in this year’s elections, in which case the insurance created by a Sotomayor retirement won’t have been necessary. But if Democrats lose the presidency or the Senate this fall—or both—she’ll need to stay on the bench until the party once again controls them. That could be just a few years, or it could be longer. Democrats have previously had to wait as long as 14 years (1995 to 2009). In other words, if Sotomayor doesn’t retire this year, she’ll be making a bet that she will remain fit to serve until possibly age 78 or even 82 or 84—and she’ll be forcing the whole Democratic Party to make that high-stakes bet with her.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/supreme-court-justices-public-conflict/672494/?utm_source=feed">Steven Mazie: The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be getting along</a>]</i></p><p>If Democrats lose the bet, the Court’s 6–3 conservative majority will turn into a 7–2 majority at some point within the next decade. If they win the bet, what do they win? They win the opportunity to read dissents written by Sotomayor instead of some other liberal justice. This is obviously an insane trade. Democrats talk a lot about the importance of the Court and the damage that has been done since it has swung in a more conservative direction, most obviously including the end of constitutional protections for abortion rights. So why aren’t Democrats demanding Sotomayor’s retirement?</p><p>Well, they are whispering about it. <i>Politico</i> <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2023/01/11/what-to-do-about-sotomayor-00077506">reported in January</a>:</p><blockquote>
<p>Some Democrats close to the Biden administration and high-profile lawyers with past White House experience spoke to West Wing Playbook on condition of anonymity about their support for Sotomayor’s retirement. But none would go on the record about it. They worried that publicly calling for the first Latina justice to step down would appear gauche or insensitive. Privately, they say Sotomayor has provided an important liberal voice on the court, even as they concede that it would be smart for the party if she stepped down before the 2024 election.</p>
</blockquote><p>This is incredibly gutless. You’re worried about putting control of the Court completely out of reach for more than a generation, but because she is Latina, you can’t hurry along an official who’s <i>putting your entire policy project at risk</i>? If this is how the Democratic Party operates, it deserves to lose.</p><p>The cowardice in speaking up about Sotomayor—<a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sonia-sotomayor-medic-retirement_n_65d8ec05e4b0cc1f2f7bab77">a diabetic who has in some instances traveled with a medic</a>—is part of a broader insanity in the way that the Democratic Party thinks about diversity and representation. Representation is supposed to be important because the presence of different sorts of people in positions of power helps ensure that the interests and preferences of various communities are taken into account when making policy. But in practice, Democratic Party actions regarding diversity <a href="https://www.joshbarro.com/p/fire-xavier-becerra">tend to be taken for the benefit of <i>officials</i> rather than demographic groups</a>. What’s more important for ordinary Latina women who support Democrats—that there not be one more vote against abortion rights on the Supreme Court, or that Sotomayor is personally there to write dissenting opinions? The answer is obvious, unless you work in Democratic politics for a living, in which case it apparently becomes a difficult call.</p><p>I thought Democrats had learned a lesson from the Ruth Bader Ginsburg episode about the importance of playing defense on a Court where you don’t hold the majority. Building a cult of personality around one particular justice served to reinforce the idea that it was reasonable for her to stay on the bench far into old age, and her unfortunate choice to do so ultimately led to Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment and a string of conservative policy victories. All liberals have to show for this stubbornness is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dissent-Ruth-Bader-Ginsburg-Makes/dp/1481465597">a bunch of dissents</a> and <a href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/287541973/our-lady-of-dissent-prayer-candle?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_us_c-home_and_living-home_decor-other&utm_custom1=_k_CjwKCAiAloavBhBOEiwAbtAJO2JqIadLLDuP8uDmTvbg8jr2kh_r9ZZCgSNauESqWf7u8PJkQUaRDBoCrBIQAvD_BwE_k_&utm_content=go_12569671679_118325095334_507439143269_aud-2007167693709:pla-303663660129_c__287541973_109490211&utm_custom2=12569671679&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADtcfRIAFN9S1ckOazf05C9n0d4ms&gclid=CjwKCAiAloavBhBOEiwAbtAJO2JqIadLLDuP8uDmTvbg8jr2kh_r9ZZCgSNauESqWf7u8PJkQUaRDBoCrBIQAvD_BwE">kitsch home decor</a>. In 2021, it seemed that liberals had indeed learned their lesson—not only was there a well-organized effort to hound the elderly Stephen Breyer out of office, but the effort was quite rude. (I’m not sure screaming “<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/snls-michael-che-earns-groans-mocking-bidens-vow-to-put-black-woman-on-scotus">Retire, bitch</a>” at Stephen Breyer was strictly necessary, but I wasn’t bothered by it either—he was a big boy, and he could take it.) But I guess maybe the lesson was learned only for instances where the justice in question is a white man.</p><p>One obvious response to this argument is that the president is also old—much older, indeed, than Sonia Sotomayor. I am aware, and I consider this to be a serious problem. But Democrats are <a href="https://www.joshbarro.com/p/democrats-are-still-better-off-with">unlikely to find a way to replace Biden</a> with a younger candidate who enhances their odds of winning the election. The Sotomayor situation is different. Her age problem can be dealt with very simply by her retiring and the president picking a candidate to replace her who is young and broadly acceptable (maybe even exciting) to Democratic Party insiders. And if Democrats want to increase the odds of getting there, they should be saying in public that she should step down. In order to do that, they’ll have to get over their fear of being called racist or sexist or ageist.</p><p></p><p><i>This article was adapted from </i><a href="https://www.joshbarro.com/p/sonia-sotomayor-must-retire"><i>a post</i></a> <i>on Josh Barro’s Substack, </i><a href="https://www.joshbarro.com/"><i>Very Serious</i></a><i>.</i></p>Josh Barrohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/josh-barro/?utm_source=feedIllustration by The Atlantic. Source: J. Scott Applewhite / AP.Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now2024-03-18T06:00:00-04:002024-03-18T09:24:32-04:00If she leaves the Court this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677783<p>For the venerable American Civil Liberties Union, Donald Trump’s four years in the White House had the intensity of life during wartime.</p><p>The group filed its <a href="https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/groups-challenge-trump-immigration-ban-after-refugees-detained-airports">first lawsuit</a> against the Trump administration on January 28, 2017, just eight days after Trump took office and one day after he promulgated his first attempt at banning the entry into the U.S. of travelers from several Muslim-majority nations.</p><p>The pace of the organization’s legal combat against Trump never let up. Ultimately the ACLU filed more than 250 lawsuits against Trump’s administration on issues as varied as immigration, abortion, contraception, fair housing, and the rights of racial-justice protesters forcibly dispersed by federal troops around the White House.</p><p>Like environmental groups, media outlets, and other institutions to the left of center in American politics, the ACLU experienced a renewed burst of relevance and visibility during the Trump years. Fueled by the demand for unstinting “resistance” from the many voters and donors stunned by Trump’s election and horrified by his actions, the group’s staff during his presidency roughly doubled, its budget nearly tripled, and its membership increased by a factor of four. The ACLU won some big cases (overturning Trump’s policy of separating migrant parents from their children and blocking his effort to add a citizenship question to the census) and lost others (the Supreme Court eventually upheld Trump’s third try at the Muslim ban after courts rejected two earlier iterations). The fights placed the ACLU at the center of the political arena, nearly 100 years after it was founded, in 1920.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-2024-reelection-civil-rights-discrimination/676138/?utm_source=feed">From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone</a>]</i></p><p>In an interview last week, Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU’s longtime executive director, told me that he believes protecting civil liberties will be even harder if Trump wins a second term in November. I spoke with Romero about the challenges that a reelected Trump could pose to rights and liberties, how the ACLU is already coordinating with other advocacy groups to develop plans for fighting Trump’s agenda in the courts, and why Romero thinks legal battles may be less important than public protest in determining how American democracy will look in 2029 if Trump wins.</p><p><i>The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.</i></p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p><b>Ronald Brownstein:</b> When you look across both what Trump has explicitly already said and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/03/florida-dont-say-gay-law/627021/?utm_source=feed">what you see unfolding in the red states</a> as a template, what are you most concerned about in terms of civil rights and civil liberties in a second Trump term?</p><p><b>Anthony D. Romero:</b> Our greatest concerns have to do with the areas where Donald Trump already has a track record. Clearly, we expect him to double down on the immigration issue. It is the centerpiece of his “Make America great again” ideology. The Muslim ban was the first executive order he signed.</p><p>We can expect a militarization of the border, the third-country transit ban, the shutting down of asylum. This time, he’s likely to make good <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/?utm_source=feed">on his promise</a> to create a deportation force and enact nationwide deportations. So immigration will be front and center.</p><p>A second issue will be abortion, because it is animating politics in the Republican Party. Trump is already playing with the idea of a federal abortion ban—whether it’s 14 weeks, 15 weeks, he hasn’t made up his mind yet—but it’s clear that is the direction he’s going to be pushed into by his party.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> Will he also face greater pressure in the party <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/12/medication-abortion-mifepristone-trump/676930/?utm_source=feed">for executive-branch action on abortion</a>?</p><p><b>Romero:</b> Correct. Whether it’s mifepristone, the Comstock Act, restrictions on the U.S. Postal Service—you bet.</p><p>Certainly he will address the other culture-war grievances from the Republican Party: restrictions on gender-affirming health care for transgender individuals; attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion; the attack on birthright citizenship. He said it was a target when he was running for office the first time around, but he didn’t do anything on it; this time he is more likely to. Birthright citizenship, in addition to it being at the core of the immigration issue, is also at the core of race relations and racial justice. It was the way that America converted African slaves into U.S. citizens. It is hallowed ground for the civil-rights community, which is an invitation for him to trample all over it.</p><p>The final set of buckets, I would say, would be around his weaponization of the Department of Justice to go after his political adversaries; his threatened use of the Insurrection Act to curtail demonstrations; the threat to use police and even the National Guard to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-liberal-america-reelection-law-enforcement/676136/?utm_source=feed">deal with crime in blue cities</a>. He’s going to want to pick a fight in blue-state jurisdictions and use the power of the federal government to do so.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> Another area, I suppose, in immigration would be <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/texass-immigration-policy-biden/674784/?utm_source=feed">allowing red states to enforce the immigration laws</a>?</p><p><b>Romero:</b> I think he will endeavor to enact the restrictive policies <i>for </i>them. But if he gives the red states the carte blanche to do what they want, then it’s going to be hard for him to curtail the blue states from enacting sanctuary-city laws. Consistency has never been an impediment to Trump, but from a legal-theory point of view, I’m not sure he is going to want to throw away the preeminence of the executive branch by allowing the state governors to usurp the federal-government role. I think he’s going to want to fill that role himself.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> Why do you think that this term could be more difficult even than his first?</p><p><b>Romero:</b> I think the adults in the Republican Party are not going to get in the room with him this time. I think you will only have the most zealous and ideological of players join a second Trump administration, and the institutionalists and the establishment types who curtailed his worst abuses will be in a form of exile even while they are in power.</p><p>The retirement of Mitch McConnell, health issues aside, points to this very issue: The institutionalists and the establishment Republicans are not going to populate the administration and the Cabinet the way they once did. Stephen Miller will be more like the norm rather than the exception.</p><p>Then I think they are going to be smarter and more experienced and therefore more effective the second time around. They are not going to make rookie mistakes like the Muslim ban—the fact that it took them three tries to perfect it. I think you see a greater level of focus even in what he talks about on the campaign and the [lack of focus] that was endemic to Trump One might be mitigated with greater discipline and greater focus the second time around.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> In the interview <a href="https://www.truthnetwork.com/show/the-charlie-kirk-show-charlie-kirk/72387/">where Miller laid out in remarkable detail</a> their plans on mass deportation, he also said, <i>We’re going to be doing so many things at once that no one can respond to, </i>and that is part of the strategy.</p><p><b>Romero:</b> I don’t doubt it. And in some ways, they have finally woken up to the fact that what they have on their side is the scale of the federal government. It was always a bit astonishing to me that we could make as much progress as we could in Trump’s first term, given the awesome asymmetry between the power of the federal government and the power of civil society.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> What is your feeling about the kind of bulwark the Supreme Court will be for civil liberties?</p><p><b>Romero:</b> I am worried, and yet I think we must give it our best shot. At this point, all we need to do is get to five [votes on the Supreme Court], and on any case or controversy, the point is, what other two justices can you peel away [to join the three Democratic-appointed justices]? I’m not willing to give up the litigation ghost in a second Trump administration. At some level, all we must do is survive four years; we don’t have to survive eight years of Trump. All we have to do is play for his final four years, because that’s all he’s got.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> What do you consider potentially the most volatile or incendiary of his proposals? To me, the various ways in which he is talking about using federal forces in blue cities seems the most explosive.</p><p><b>Romero: </b>Definitely. The deportation force can implicate 11 million to 13 million undocumented people. Remember that undocumented people live in families and communities alongside many American citizens, so the level of disruption when you start ripping out people who don’t have legal papers can be extensive.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/?utm_source=feed">Ronald Brownstein: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’</a>]</i></p><p>Certainly, the power of the National Guard and use of the Insurrection Act put a lot of things at his fingertips that are incredibly worrisome. That’s why litigation, I think, will be important; litigation preserves the status quo, litigation takes time, and when you are buying time, that is a good thing.</p><p>Litigation also helps focus public attention. Part of what happened in the first Trump administration is the avalanche of Trump policies and outrages became a little numbing for the public at one level, and yet with litigation, you could really focus a spotlight on key policies. Family separation is an example I would use: The litigation that we filed engendered such a public outcry that even Trump himself had to backtrack on the policy.</p><p>But lawyers are going to play a much less important role in a second Trump administration, because of the specter of a much more consistent and greater assault on civil liberties and civil rights. That’s where you really have to convert the public into a protagonist and not a spectator. And you saw elements of that in the first Trump administration. The women’s marches were largely a spontaneous outburst of energy from constituents. Certainly, the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/todays-protest-movements-are-as-big-as-the-1960s/613207/?utm_source=feed">George Floyd protests</a> that happened in the summer of 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, were also an indication that people were willing to take to the streets on issues that really mattered to them. I’ve got to believe that we’ll have the potential of mobilizing the public in that way. Part of what we’ve got to do is get ready for that kind of energy and activism that will be beyond any of our control—the work we have to do as legal observers on protests, know-your-rights training.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> Is that under way?</p><p><b>Romero:</b> We’re beginning to map that out—what we need to do, and relationships we need to build.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> If Trump wins, I don’t know if he does everything that he’s saying. But if he does even two-thirds of what he is saying, what do blue state governors like J. B. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom, and Kathy Hochul do? What do their attorneys general do? How much pressure could Trump put on the fundamental cohesion of the country if he follows through on this idea of using federal force in blue jurisdictions?</p><p><b>Romero:</b> The real wild card is the extent to which it devolves into a confusing chaos or even violence, in which case Trump’s use of the executive powers will look more justifiable in the eyes of ordinary Americans. Remember the play he made around [sending federal forces to quell the 2020 protests in] Portland? There was an element of Trump’s actions in Portland that resonated with the American public. In some ways, the greatest danger is when Trump’s extreme policies tap into the commonsense reactions of the American people, when he truly is playing the populist role. That’s what I think is the most dangerous.</p><p><b>Brownstein:</b> How different could America look after four years of another Trump presidency? And what do you think could be the most important differences from where we are now that we might face?</p><p><b>Romero:</b> I think we could very much be on the brink of losing our democracy and losing certain rights and liberties that would be lost for a generation. I am not one given to hyperbole, especially in the face of real threat, but the efforts to curtail protest and demonstrations; the promise to enact gestapo-like searches and deportation forces; <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/11/gop-congress-2022-midterm-elections-rights/671996/?utm_source=feed">the enactment of federal bans</a> on reproductive rights or gender-affirming care or diversity-and-inclusion efforts could fundamentally change the way that we think about rights and liberties in the United States.</p><p>Right now, we bemoan the idea that our zip code determines our rights and liberties. That if I am 10010 in New York—my zip code—I am de facto going to have a much greater enjoyment of rights and liberties than if I were in a zip code in Alabama or Mississippi. And the challenge with a second Trump administration is that rights and liberties may be lost even in blue states. We are already living with a status quo where rights and liberties are curtailed in red states, but it’s the metastasis into blue states and liberal and progressive jurisdictions that is perhaps the most concerning.</p>Ronald Brownsteinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ronald-brownstein/?utm_source=feedIllustration by The Atlantic. Source: Paul Morigi / Getty.‘All We Must Do Is Survive Four Years’2024-03-17T08:00:00-04:002024-03-17T14:26:27-04:00The ACLU’s game plan for protecting civil rights through a potential second Trump administrationtag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677762<p class="dropcap">M<span class="smallcaps">atthew Graves is</span> not shy about promoting his success in prosecuting those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. By his count, Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has charged <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/37-months-since-the-jan-6-attack-on-the-capitol">more than 1,358 individuals</a>, spread across nearly all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for assaulting police, destroying federal property, and other crimes. He issues a press release for most cases, and he held a rare news conference this past January to tout his achievements.</p><p>But Graves’s record of bringing violent criminals to justice on the streets of D.C. has put him on the defensive. Alone among U.S. attorneys nationwide, Graves, appointed by the president and accountable to the U.S. attorney general, is responsible for overseeing both federal and local crime in his city. In 2022, prosecutors under Graves pressed charges on a record-low <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao/resources/annual-statistical-reports">33 percent</a> of arrests in the District. Although the rate increased to <a href="https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/p/prosecution-rates-increased-11-over">44 percent</a> last fiscal year and continues to increase, other cities have achieved much higher rates: Philadelphia had a <a href="https://data.philadao.com/Arrest_Report.html">96 percent</a> prosecution rate in 2022, while <a href="https://issuu.com/cookcountysao/docs/ccsao2022review">Cook County, Illinois</a>, which includes Chicago, and <a href="https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/dispos/index.htm">New York City</a> were both at 86 percent. D.C.’s own rate hovered in the 60s and 70s for years, until it began a sharp slide in 2016.</p><p>These figures help account for the fact that, as most major U.S. cities recorded <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-murder-rate-decline-crime-statistics/674290/?utm_source=feed">decreases</a> in murders last year, killings in the nation’s capital <a href="https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance">headed in the other direction</a>: 274 homicides in 2023, the highest number in a quarter century, <a href="https://dcwitness.org/d-c-witness-data-shows-annual-homicide-rate-increased-nearly-fifty-percent-since-2015/">amounting to</a> a nearly 50 percent increase since 2015. Violent crime, from <a href="https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/carjacking">carjackings</a> to <a href="https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance">armed robberies</a>, also rose last year. Some types of crime in the District are trending down so far in 2024, but the capital has already transformed from one of the safest urban centers in America not long ago to one in which random violence can take a car or a life even in neighborhoods once considered crime free.</p><p>Journalists and experts have offered up various explanations for D.C.’s defiance of national crime trends. The Metropolitan Police Department is down 467 officers from the 3,800 employed in 2020; Police Chief Pamela Smith <a href="https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/release_content/attachments/Chief%20Smith%20Testimony_MPD%20Perf%20Hearing_02%2013%2024_FINAL.pdf">has said</a> it could take “more than a decade” to reach that number again. But the number of police officers <a href="https://www.policeforum.org/staffing2023">has</a> <a href="https://portal.cops.usdoj.gov/resourcecenter/content.ashx/cops-r1136-pub.pdf">decreased</a> nationwide. The coronavirus pandemic stalled criminal-court procedures in D.C., but that was also the case across the country. The 13-member D.C. city council, dominated by progressives, tightened regulations on police use of force after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, but many local councils across the country passed similar laws. Reacting to public pressure, the D.C. council this month passed, and Mayor Muriel Bowser signed, a public-safety bill that rolls back some policing restrictions and includes tougher penalties for crimes such as illegal gun possession and retail theft.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-murder-rate-decline-crime-statistics/674290/?utm_source=feed">Jeff Asher: The murder rate is suddenly falling</a>]</i></p><p>As a journalist who has covered crime in the District for four decades, I believe that one aspect of the D.C. justice system sets it apart, exacerbating crime and demanding remedy: Voters here cannot elect their own district attorney to prosecute local adult crimes.</p><p>The District’s 679,000 residents and the millions of tourists who visit the capital every year could be safer if D.C. chose its own D.A., responsive to the community’s needs and accountable to voters. D.C. residents have no say in who sits atop their criminal-justice system with the awesome discretion to bring charges or not. Giving voters the right to elect their own D.A. would not only move the criminal-justice system closer to the community. It would also reform one of the more undemocratic, unjust sections of the Home Rule Act. The 1973 law, known for granting the District limited self-government, also <a href="https://dccouncil.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Home-Rule-Act-2018-for-printing-9-13-182.pdf">maintained federal control</a> of D.C.’s criminal-justice system; the president appoints not just the chief prosecutor but also judges to superior and district courts.</p><p>“Putting prosecution into the hands of a federal appointee is a complete violation of the founding principles this country was built on,” Karl Racine, who served as D.C.’s first elected attorney general, from 2015 to 2023, told me. (The District’s A.G. has jurisdiction over juvenile crime.) “Power is best exercised locally.”</p><p>Allowing the District to elect its own D.A. would not solve D.C.’s crime problem easily or quickly. Bringing criminals to justice is enormously complicated, from arrest to prosecution to adjudication and potential incarceration; this doesn’t fall solely on Graves or any previous U.S. attorney. The change would require Congress to revise the Home Rule charter, and given the politics of the moment and Republican control of the House, it’s a political long shot. In a 2002 referendum, 82 percent of District voters approved of a locally elected D.A. Four years later, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s longtime Democratic delegate to Congress, <a href="https://norton.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/norton-introduces-bill-for-an-elected-dc-district-attorney-july-13-2006">began introducing legislation</a> to give D.C. its own prosecutor. But her efforts have gone nowhere, regardless of which party controlled Congress or the White House.</p><p>Many Republicans in Congress—as well as former President Donald Trump—like to hold up the District as a crime-ridden example of liberal policies gone wrong, and they have repeatedly called for increased federal control to make the city safer. Ironically, what distinguishes the District from every other U.S. city is that its criminal-justice system is already under federal control. If Republicans really want to make D.C. safer, they should consider empowering a local D.A. who could focus exclusively on city crime.</p><p>In two interviews, Graves defended his record of prosecuting local crime and pointed to other factors contributing to D.C.’s homicide rate. “The city is lucky to have the career prosecutors it has,” he told me. He questioned whether a locally elected D.A. would be any more aggressive on crime. But he also said he is fundamentally in favor of the District’s right to democratically control its criminal-justice system.</p><p>“I personally support statehood,” he said. “Obviously, if D.C. were a state, then part of that deal would be having to assume responsibility for its prosecutions.”</p><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">he District’s</span> porous criminal-justice system has long afflicted its Black community in particular; in <a href="https://cjcc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/cjcc/NICJR%20GVPA%20Summary%20Report%20%28January%202024%29.pdf">more than 90 percent of homicides</a> here, both the victims and the suspects are Black. Since the 1980s, I have heard a constant refrain from Washingtonians east of the Anacostia River that “someone arrested Friday night with a gun in their belt is back on the street Saturday morning.”</p><p>In the District’s bloodiest days, during the crack epidemic, murders in the city mercilessly rose, <a href="https://ocme.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/ocme/publication/attachments/APPENDIX%20A%20-%2030%20year.pdf">peaking in 1991 at 509</a>. From 1986 to 1990, prosecutions for homicide, assault, and robbery <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/131487NCJRS.pdf">increased by 96 percent</a>. Over the next two decades, homicides and violent crime gradually decreased; murders reached a low of <a href="https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachments/2012_AR_1.pdf">88 in 2012</a>. That year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecution rate in D.C. Superior Court was <a href="https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/p/prosecution-rates-increased-11-over">70 percent</a>. But the District’s crime rate seemed to correspond more to nationwide trends than to any dramatic changes in the prosecution rate.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/low-crime-rates-public-opinion/676365/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: America’s peace wave</a>]</i></p><p>The rate of federal prosecution of local crime in the District stood at 65 percent as recently as 2017 but fell precipitously during a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/02/26/graves-prosecutor-dc-capitol-riot/">period</a> of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/politics/us-attorneys-office-washington-criminal-division.html">turbulence</a> in the U.S. Attorney’s Office under President Trump, when multiple people cycled through the lead-prosecutor spot. (“That is your best argument about the danger of being under federal control,” Graves told me.) After a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and Graves took office later that year, he temporarily redeployed 15 of the office’s 370 permanent prosecutors to press cases against the violent intruders in D.C. federal court. The prosecution rate for local crime stood at 46 percent in 2021 but plummeted to the nadir of 33 percent in 2022.</p><p>“It was a massive resource challenge,” Graves said of the January 6 prosecutions. “It’s definitely a focus of mine, a priority of mine.” But he added: “We all viewed the 33 percent as a problem.”</p><p>Graves, 48, an intense, hard-driving lawyer from eastern Pennsylvania, told me that his job, “first and foremost, is keeping the community safe.” He has a track record in the District: He joined the D.C. federal prosecutor’s operation in 2007 and worked on local violent crime before moving up to become the acting chief of the department’s fraud and public-corruption section. He went into private practice in 2016 and returned when President Joe Biden nominated him to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in July 2021. He has lived in the District for more than 20 years. “It’s my adopted home,” he said.</p><p>Graves attributes D.C.’s rising murder rate in large part to the fact that the number of illegal guns in D.C. “rocketed up” in 2022 and 2023: Police recovered <a href="https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance">more than 3,100</a> illegal firearms in each of those years, compared with 2,300 in 2021. “D.C. doesn’t appropriately hold people accountable for illegally possessing firearms,” he told me. According to Graves, D.C. judges detain only about 10 percent of defendants charged with illegal possession of a firearm.</p><p>He attributed his office’s low prosecution rates to two main causes: first, pandemic restrictions that dramatically cut back on in-person jury trials, including grand juries, where prosecutors must present evidence to bring indictments. Without grand juries, Graves said, prosecutors could not indict suspects who were “sitting out in the community.” Second, the <a href="https://dfs.dc.gov/">District’s crime lab</a> lost its accreditation in April 2021 and was <a href="https://dcist.com/story/23/02/01/dc-troubled-crime-lab-wont-regain-accreditation-until-2024/">out of commission</a> until its partial reinstatement at the end of 2023. Without forensic evidence, prosecutors struggled to trace DNA, drugs, firearm cartridges, and other evidence, Graves explained: “It was a massive mess that had nothing to do with our office.” Police and prosecutors were unable to bring charges for drug crimes until the Drug Enforcement Agency agreed in March 2022 <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/dea-agrees-assist-testing-suspected-narcotics-cases-being-prosecuted-dc-superior-court">to handle narcotics testing</a>.</p><p>Even with these impediments, Graves said his office last year charged 90 percent of “serious violent crime” cases in D.C., including <a href="https://wtop.com/dc/2024/02/how-dc-prosecutor-is-using-social-media-federal-help-to-combat-violent-crime/">137 homicides</a>, in part by increasing the number of prosecutors handling violent crime cases in 2022 and 2023.</p><p>But accepting Graves’s explanations doesn’t account for at least 18 murder suspects in 2023 who had previously been arrested but were not detained—either because prosecutors had dropped charges or pleaded down sentences (in some cases before Graves’s tenure), or because judges released the defendants. (The 18 murder suspects were tracked by the author of the anonymous DC Crime Facts Substack and confirmed in public records.) “Where the office does not go forward with a firearms case at the time of arrest, it is either because of concerns about whether the stop that led to the arrest was constitutional or because there is insufficient evidence connecting the person arrested to the firearm,” Graves told me in an email.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/america-gun-ownership-laws-culture-mass-shootings/638430/?utm_source=feed">Andrew Exum: We need to learn to live with guns</a>]</i></p><p>Last month, the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, a research and advocacy nonprofit, <a href="https://cjcc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/cjcc/NICJR%20GVPA%20Summary%20Report%20%28January%202024%29.pdf">released a report</a> showing that in 2021 and 2022, homicide victims and suspects both had, on average, more than six prior criminal cases, and that most of those cases had been dismissed. Police and nonprofit groups working to tamp down violence described “a feeling of impunity among many people on the streets that may be encouraging criminal behavior.” Police “also complained of some cases not being charged or when they are, the defendant being allowed to go home to await court proceedings,” according to the report, which cited interviews with more than 70 Metropolitan Police Department employees.</p><p>“Swift and reliable punishment is the most effective deterrent,” Vanessa Batters-Thompson, the executive director of the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for increased local governance, told me.</p><p>In January, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-surge-resources-fight-violent-crime-washington-dc">the Justice Department announced</a> that it would “surge” more federal prosecutors and investigators to “target the individuals and organizations that are driving violent crime in the nation’s capital,” in the words of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. Graves welcomed the move, which he said has added about 10 prosecutors so far and will create a special unit to analyze crime data that could provide investigators with leads. Similar “surges” have been deployed in Memphis and Houston.</p><p>“But [D.C. has] no control over what that surge is,” Batters-Thompson said—how large or long-lasting it is. Even if federal crime fighters make a dent in the District’s violence and homicide rates, the effort would amount to a temporary fix.</p><p class="dropcap">E<span class="smallcaps">lecting a D.A.</span> for D.C. would not only take Congress reforming the Home Rule Act. There’s also the considerable expense of creating a district attorney’s office and absorbing the cost now borne by the federal government. (It’s an imperfect comparison, but the D.C. Office of the Attorney General’s operating budget for fiscal year 2024 is approximately <a href="https://app.box.com/s/wjiy9uv4tntch5bmjt978fi61ilp56j9">$154 million</a>.) Republicans in control of the House are more intent on repealing the Home Rule Act than granting District residents more autonomy.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/dc-statehood-capitol-attack/617621/?utm_source=feed">Hannah Giorgis: D.C. statehood is more urgent than ever</a>]</i></p><p>But if Republicans want D.C. to tackle its crime problem, why shouldn’t its residents—like those of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Denver, Boston, Seattle, and elsewhere—be able to elect a district attorney dedicated to that effort? Crime is often intimate and neighborhood-based, especially in a relatively small city such as the District. Effective prosecution requires connection and trust with the community, both to send a message about the consequences of bad behavior and to provide victims and their families with some solace and closure. Those relationships are much more difficult to forge with a federally appointed prosecutor whose jurisdiction is split between federal and local matters, and who is not accountable to the people he or she serves.</p><p>Racine, the former D.C. attorney general, was regularly required to testify in oversight hearings before the city council. Graves doesn’t have to show up for hearings before the District’s elected council, though he couldn’t help but note to me that progressive council members have in the past accused D.C.’s criminal-justice system of being too punitive.</p><p>Graves told me that his office has a special community-engagement unit, that he attends community meetings multiple times a month, and that his office is “latched up at every level” with the police, especially with the chief, with whom Graves said he emails or talks weekly.</p><p>“Given our unique role,” he said, “we have to make ourselves accountable to the community.”</p><p>Sounds like the perfect platform to run on for D.C.’s first elected district attorney.</p>Harry Jaffehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/harry-jaffe/?utm_source=feedMatt McClain / The Washington Post / GettyD.C.’s Crime Problem Is a Democracy Problem2024-03-15T07:00:00-04:002024-03-15T07:01:57-04:00Homicides have risen in the nation’s capital while falling elsewhere. One key difference: D.C. residents can’t elect their own D.A.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677740<p data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small><i>Sign up for </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/the-decision-a-2024-newsletter/?utm_source=feed"><i>The Decision</i></a><i>, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.</i></small></p><p>First impressions stick. After a big story hits, the initial conclusions can turn out to be wrong, or partly wrong, but the revisions are not what people remember. They remember the headlines in imposing font, the solemn tone from a presenter, the avalanche of ironic summaries on social media. Political operatives know this, and it’s that indelible impression they want, one that sticks like a greasy fingerprint and that no number of follow-ups or awkward corrections could possibly wipe away.</p><p>Five years ago, a partisan political operative with the credibility of a long career in government service misled the public about official documents in order to get Donald Trump the positive spin he wanted in the press. The play worked so well that a special counsel appointed to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, ran it again.</p><p>In 2019, then–Attorney General Bill Barr—who would later resign amid Trump’s attempts to suborn the Justice Department into backing his effort to seize power after losing reelection—announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on allegations that he had assisted in a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election and had obstructed an investigation into that effort. Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of several Trump associates, but he later testified that Justice Department policy <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/robert-mueller-did-not-determine-if-trump-committed-crime.html">barred prosecuting a sitting president, and so indicting Trump was not an option.</a> Barr’s summary—which suggested that Trump had been absolved of any crimes—was so misleading that it drew a rebuke not only from Mueller himself but from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/us/politics/barr-trump-obstruction-russia-inquiry.html">a federal judge in a public-records lawsuit</a> over material related to the investigation. That judge, Reggie Walton, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/us/politics/mueller-report-barr-judge-walton.html">wrote in 2020</a> that the discrepancies “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/special-counsels-devastating-charge-against-biden/677396/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: The Special Counsel’s devastating description of Biden</a>]</i></p><p>As my colleague David Graham <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/barr-misled-the-publicand-it-worked/588463/?utm_source=feed">wrote at the time</a>, the ploy worked. Trump claimed “total exoneration,” and mainstream outlets blared his innocence in towering headlines. Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found “no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice.”</p><p>Now this same pattern has emerged once again, only instead of working in the president’s favor, it has undermined him. Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden for potential criminal wrongdoing after classified documents were found at his home. (Trump has <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-charges-indictment-documents-case-mar-a-lago/">been indicted on charges</a> that he deliberately mishandled classified documents after storing such documents at his home in Florida and deliberately showing them off to visitors as “highly confidential” and “secret information.”)</p><p>In Hur’s <a href="https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/af07e020c210293d/8dac19a5-full.pdf">own summary of his investigation</a>, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even absent DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. But that part was not what caught the media’s attention. Rather it was Hur’s characterization of Biden as having memory problems, validating conservative attacks on the president as too old to do the job. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released yesterday by House Democrats, suggest that characterization—politically convenient for Republicans and the Trump campaign—was misleading. </p><p>Sparking alarming headlines about Biden’s mental faculties, Hur had written that Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.” As with Barr’s, that conclusion set off a media frenzy in <a href="https://popular.info/p/manufacturing-a-political-crisis">which many mainstream outlets</a> strongly reinforced conservative propaganda that Biden was mentally unfit to serve, a narrative that reverberated until the president’s animated <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/joe-biden-sotu-congress/677690/?utm_source=feed">delivery of the State of the Union</a> address last week.</p><p>In press coverage following the report, Hur’s phrase was <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/bidens-memory-issues-draw-attention-neurologists-weigh-rcna138135">frequently shortened</a> to an “elderly man with a poor memory,” turning the evaluation of a potential legal strategy into something akin to a medical diagnosis. A cacophony of mainstream-media coverage <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/joe-biden/political-press-runs-hurs-scurrilous-partisan-attack">questioning Biden’s age and fitness followed</a>, while <a href="https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1755740301300310312">conservative politicians</a> and media figures <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/joe-biden/right-wing-media-figures-call-biden-be-ousted-under-25th-amendment">outright declared Biden incapacitated</a> and demanded he be removed from office according to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for succession in case a president is “unable to discharge his duties.”</p><p>The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden illuminate Hur’s summary as uncharitable at best. As a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/12/biden-hur-transcript-classified-documents/">report in <i>The Washington Post </i>noted</a>, “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”</p><p>Hur wrote that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” Yet the transcript <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/hur-biden-memory-transcript.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20240312&instance_id=117398&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=54305562&segment_id=160545&te=1&user_id=4ee826d5fc3f2f396efceb19e053e04a">shows Biden remembering the exact day</a>, May 30, after which staffers offer the year—2015—and Biden says, “Was it 2015 he had died?” In another exchange Hur singled out as indicative of Biden’s poor memory, he said Biden mischaracterized the point of view of an Obama-administration official who had opposed a surge of combat troops to the war in Afghanistan, but left out that Biden correctly stated the official’s views in an exchange later that day. The transcript also shows Biden struggling with other dates while answering questions about when he obtained certain documents or in the interval between the Obama and Biden administrations, when he decided to run for president. But as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/hur-biden-memory-transcript.html"><i>The New York Times</i> reported</a>, “In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.”</p><p>The transcript does not completely refute Hur’s description of Biden’s memory, but it is entirely incompatible with the <a href="https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1755695786795348323">conservative refrain that Biden</a> has “age-related dementia.” Indeed, both Barr and Hur framed their conclusions with a telltale lawyerly touch that would push the media and the public toward a far broader conclusion about Trump’s supposed innocence or Biden’s alleged decline while allowing them to deny that they had been so explicit.</p><p>There’s no question that both Biden and Trump are much older than they used to be. To watch clips of either of them from 20 years ago is to recognize a significant difference. But the transcript shows Biden exactly as he appeared in the State of the Union last week, as someone who has lost a step or two as he’s aged but is fully capable of grasping the politics and policy implications demanded by the presidency. “Mr. Biden went into great detail about many matters, the transcript shows,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/hur-biden-memory-transcript.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20240312&instance_id=117398&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=54305562&segment_id=160545&te=1&user_id=4ee826d5fc3f2f396efceb19e053e04a">the <i>Times</i> reported</a>. “He made jokes over the two days, teasing the prosecutors. And at certain points, he corrected his interrogators when they were the ones who misspoke.” During an exchange about Biden’s home, Hur remarked that Biden had a “photographic understanding and recall of the house,” a remark Hur acknowledged in yesterday’s testimony before the House that <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1767582923417383128">he had left out of his original report</a>.</p><p>People with serious cognitive decline do not simply have verbal flubs or memory lapses of the sort both campaigns are constantly highlighting on social media. They avoid asking questions they fear might betray their loss of memory; they struggle to recollect the season, the time of day, the state they are currently in. They awkwardly attempt to hide their inability to recall recently relayed information in ways that simply underline its absence. They repeat innocuous statements that they do not realize they made minutes earlier. They pretend to know people they’ve never met and fail to recognize people they’ve known for decades. The late Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the clearest recent example of this in politics, was <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/dianne-feinstein-health-crisis-senate-resign-1234734590/">reported to have</a> had incidents such as a meeting at <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/dianne-feinstein-senate-17079487.php">which lawmakers had to</a> “reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours,” as the <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> reported in 2022.</p><p>During his testimony before the House, Hur <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/biden-hur-special-counsel-takeaways.html">insisted </a>that “partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work.” He tried to have it both ways, insisting that his report was accurate while <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/12/robert-hur-testimony-biden-age/">refuting the most uncharitable</a> right-wing characterizations of Biden’s memory. But as legal experts <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4016437">pointed out</a> after the report was released, Hur’s description of Biden’s memory was not a necessary element of his duties, and it is unlikely that someone with as much experience in Washington as Hur would be so naive as to not understand how those phrases would be used politically.</p><p>Yet Hur’s report is itself something of a self-inflicted wound for Democrats, a predictable result of their efforts to rebut bad-faith criticism from partisan actors by going out of their way to seem nonpartisan. The age story caught fire in the press, not only because of genuine voter concern over Biden’s age but because this is the sort of superficially nonideological criticism that some reporters feel comfortable repeating in their own words, believing that it illustrates their lack of partisanship to conservative sources and audiences. Coverage of the Hillary Clinton email investigation <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/12/7/16747712/study-media-2016-election-clintons-emails">reached saturation levels</a> in 2016 for similar reasons.</p><p>There are more parallels between those stories. Then-President Barack Obama appointed James Comey, a Republican, to run the FBI, in an effort to illustrate his commitment to bipartisanship; Attorney General Garland’s decision to appoint Hur probably had similar intentions. Comey, like Hur, declined to press charges but then broke protocol. In Comey’s case, he did so by first holding a press conference in which he criticized Clinton, and later, during the final days of the presidential campaign, announcing that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton while keeping the bureau’s investigation into Trump a secret. A 2017 analysis published by <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/"><i>FiveThirtyEight</i></a> makes a compelling argument that the latter decision threw a close election to Trump.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/biden-age-special-counsel/677399/?utm_source=feed">Helen Lewis: Biden’s age is now unavoidable</a>]</i></p><p>For reasons that remain unclear to me, Democrats seem to have internalized the Republican insistence that only Republicans are capable of the fairness and objectivity necessary to investigate or enforce the law. Any lifelong Republican who fails to put partisanship above their duties is instantly and retroactively turned into a left-wing operative by the conservative media. Acting to prevent complaints of bias (as opposed to actually being fair) is ultimately futile: Comey’s last-minute gift to the Trump campaign didn’t prevent Trump from <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/comey-memo-conservatives/558521/?utm_source=feed">smearing him as a liberal stooge</a>.</p><p>These efforts to <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-working-the-refs/">work the refs</a> pay off. Right-wing criticism of Obama probably influenced him to pick a grandstanding Republican to head the FBI, an agency that has never been run by a Democrat, just as it likely influenced Garland to pick a grandstanding Republican to investigate Biden. Conservative criticism of the mainstream press leads too many journalists to attempt to prove they aren’t liberals, which results in wholesale amplification of right-wing propaganda to deflect criticisms that the media aren’t objective; the facts become a secondary concern.</p><p>Fairness, objectivity, and due process are important values, but there is a difference between upholding them and seeking to convince everyone that that’s what you’re doing. Performatively pursuing the latter can easily come at the expense of the former. If you try too hard to convince people you are doing the right thing instead of just doing the right thing, you often end up doing the wrong thing.</p>Adam Serwerhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/adam-serwer/?utm_source=feedWin McNamee / GettyHow Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory2024-03-13T10:59:17-04:002024-03-13T15:23:01-04:00The saga has been something of a self-inflicted wound for Democrats.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677731<p data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small><i>Sign up for </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/the-decision-a-2024-newsletter/?utm_source=feed"><i>The Decision</i></a><i>, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.</i></small></p><p data-flatplan-paragraph="true">Donald Trump has long detested Barack Obama and sought to present himself as the opposite of his presidential predecessor in every way. But in his takeover of the Republican National Committee, he risks echoing one of Obama’s biggest political mistakes.</p><p>Last night, Trump’s handpicked leadership of the RNC took charge and conducted a purge. The new regime, led by the new chair, Michael Whatley; the vice chair, Lara Trump; and the chief of staff, Chris LaCivita, fired about 60 employees—about a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/us/politics/rnc-trump-layoffs.html">quarter</a> of the staff—as part of “<a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/03/12/rnc-trump-team-fires-staff-reports">streamlining</a>.” The <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/bloodbath-at-rnc-trump-team-slashes-staff-at-committee-00146368">“bloodbath”</a> includes members of the communications, data, and political departments. Insiders <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/bloodbath-at-rnc-trump-team-slashes-staff-at-committee-00146368">told <em>Politico</em></a> they anticipate that existing contracts with vendors will be voided.</p><p>When the new leaders were announced last month, I suggested that the GOP was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/republicans-are-no-longer-political-party/677437/?utm_source=feed">ceasing to function as a political party</a>, and becoming another subsidiary of Trump Inc. But there is another way to view it. For years now, the RNC has struggled. Republicans might have lost the 2016 presidential election if not for the emergence of Trump, who shook up the party’s longtime platform and forged a new coalition, turning out voters no other recent candidate had. Since then, however, Republicans have continued to lag, even with Trump juicing turnout. Republicans got slammed in the 2018 midterms, lost the 2020 presidential race, and missed expectations in 2022. Special elections have been a Democratic playground. The RNC is entering the 2024 election with <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/bloodbath-at-rnc-trump-team-slashes-staff-at-committee-00146368">a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves</a>.</p><p>From this perspective, it’s about time that Trump took charge and cleared out the deadwood. Allies such as Charlie Kirk and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene were <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/03/12/rnc-trump-team-fires-staff-reports">jubilant</a> at the overhaul. Although Trump’s appointments of his daughter-in-law and a top campaign aide are unusual, nominees typically take over the campaign apparatus ahead of a presidential election, the better to align aims.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/republicans-are-no-longer-political-party/677437/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: Republicans are no longer a political party</a>]</i></p><p>Truth be told, Trump can’t really distance himself from the recent mismanagement. The deposed chair, Ronna McDaniel, was Trump’s pick in 2017, and his main complaint about her is that she was insufficiently compliant. If Trump just wants more of the same, that’s bad news for the party. Trump critics within the GOP also fear that he intends to use the party coffers as a personal defense fund, underwriting his substantial legal bills. Last week, the committee pointedly <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/03/05/super-tuesday-2024/the-rnc-and-trumps-legal-bills-00145197">rejected a proposal</a> by an old-line member to prevent that.</p><p>Let’s take the best-case scenario for Republicans, though. In the past, the RNC seemed like the professionals compared with the chaotic, amateurish Trump campaigns of 2016 and 2020. (There’s a reason Trump resorted to appointing RNC Chair Reince Priebus as his first White House chief of staff, despite Priebus representing the establishment Trump hated.) This year, however, the Trump campaign has seemed organized and disciplined, and LaCivita is reportedly a big part of that. National committees tend to be bloated and old-fashioned. A more focused, streamlined operation could fix what ails the GOP.</p><p>The problem is that Trump sees his own success and the success of the Republican Party as bound up together. But some things that are good for Trump are not good for the Republican Party over the long run. This is where Obama offers a cautionary tale.</p><p>When he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Obama was an insurgent; the DNC had long been dominated by allies of Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the primary. He wasn’t as deeply embedded in the old way of doing things. Obama viewed the Democratic Party as essentially a national organization, with the goal of supporting his political goals and his reelection. Upon winning the presidency, he <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2008/06/obama-moves-quickly-to-reshape-dnc-011045">moved key DNC functions to Chicago</a>, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.</p><p>The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections. After Senator Ted Kennedy died, Democrats managed to lose a 2010 special election for his seat in Massachusetts, of all places—a failure that <a href="https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2010/01/coakley-adviser-memo-dc-dems-failed-coakley-024307">some Democrats blamed on the national party</a>. The loss delayed the passage of the Affordable Care Act and required congressional Democrats to water it down to pass it.</p><p>The Bay State special was a harbinger. As Matt Yglesias <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/10/14211994/obama-democrats-downballot">calculated</a> in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. All of this happened at the same time that Democratic presidential candidates won the national popular vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections (as they would again in 2020).</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/the-post-obama-democratic-party/512885/?utm_source=feed">Read: What happens to the Democratic Party after Obama?</a>]</i></p><p>Democrats, including Obama, suffered for their missteps. As the Obamacare experience shows, it’s harder to push a policy agenda when you lose elections. Losing control of the Senate makes it difficult to confirm judges, especially to crucial spots such as the Supreme Court—just ask <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/06/29/624467256/what-happened-with-merrick-garland-in-2016-and-why-it-matters-now">Justice Merrick Garland</a>. And implementing policy is challenging if governors and state Houses are working against you.</p><p>An excessive focus on presidential races is also the danger of Trump’s RNC takeover. He and his aides have announced that, like Obama, they see the party committee as basically an instrument for the presidential election. “Our mission is straightforward: maximize the Republican Party’s resources to get President Trump elected,” LaCivita <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/us/politics/trump-republican-party-establishment.html">told <em>The New York Times </em>last month</a>. Echoing Obama’s Chicago move, the RNC is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/us/politics/rnc-trump-layoffs.html">reportedly</a> already moving most of its operations to Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters. All of this makes sense. Trump is a narcissist who can’t and won’t separate his self-interest from the party’s or the nation’s.</p><p>Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels. Several state parties are already a mess. The chair of the Florida GOP was recently <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/08/christian-ziegler-ousted-rape-accusation-00134327">ousted</a> amid a sex scandal. Michigan’s GOP chair, a fervent Trump backer, was also deposed after a tumultuous stint, and the state party is reportedly broke. The Arizona GOP also recently lost its chair and has been racked by feuds. But more MAGA is unlikely to be the solution to these problems, because infighting and obsession with Trump’s election denial have been at the center of several blowups. The most effective wing of the GOP apparatus right now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has succeeded by managing to create some insulation from Trump, allowing it to select strong candidates. In 2020, Republican congressional candidates <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-did-house-democrats-underperform-compared-to-joe-biden/">mostly ran ahead of Trump</a>.</p><p>And even if Trump’s theory of the RNC works out in 2024, what happens next? Trump will not always be the president or the nominee. Someday, Republicans will need to choose a new leader, and they may be left with only a shell of a party committee, gutted and stretched to be part of Trump’s personal election apparatus. It’s a hard and long road to rebuilding from there. Just ask a Democrat.</p>David A. Grahamhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-a-graham/?utm_source=feedCallaghan O'Hare / Bloomberg / GettyTrump Repeats Obama’s Mistake2024-03-12T14:23:14-04:002024-03-13T15:22:17-04:00Political parties suffer when their focus narrows to the presidency.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677723<p class="dropcap">J<span class="smallcaps">udging by recent headlines</span>, young men and women are more politically divided now than ever before. “A new global gender divide is emerging,” the <i>Financial Times </i>data journalist John Burn-Murdoch <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998">wrote</a> in a widely cited January article. Burn-Murdoch’s analysis featured several eye-popping graphs that appeared to show a huge ideological rift opening up between young men and young women over the past decade. The implications—for politics, of course, but also for male-female relations and, by extension, the future of the species—were alarming. A <i>New York Times </i>opinion podcast convened to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/opinion/gen-z-gender-political-ideology.html">discuss</a>, according to the episode title, “The Gender Split and the ‘Looming Apocalypse of the Developed World.’” The <i>Washington Post</i> editorial board <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/22/marriage-polarization-dating-trump/">warned</a>, “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.”</p><p>But nearly as quickly as the theory gained attention, it has come under scrutiny. “For every survey question where you can find a unique gender gap among the youngest age cohort, you can find many other questions where you don’t find that gap,” John Sides, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Where we started with this whole conversation was that there’s this big thing happening; it’s happening worldwide. Then you just pick at it for a few minutes, and it becomes this really complex story.” Skeptics point out that, at least as far as the United States goes, the claims about a new gender divide rest on selective readings of inconclusive evidence. Although several studies show young men and women splitting apart, at least as many suggest that the gender gap is stable. And at the ballot box, the evidence of a growing divide is hard to find. The Gen Z war of the sexes, in other words, is probably not apocalyptic. It may not even exist at all.</p><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">he gender gap</span> in voting—women to the left, men to the right—has been a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/07/28/a-closer-look-at-the-gender-gap-in-presidential-voting/">fixture</a> of American politics since at least the 1980 presidential election, when, according to exit polls, Ronald Reagan <a href="https://cawp.rutgers.edu/gender-gap-voting-choices-presidential-elections">won</a> 55 percent of male voters but only 47 of women.</p><p>Some evidence suggests that the divide has recently widened. In 2023, according to Gallup <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx">data</a>, 18-to-29-year-old women were 15 percentage points more likely than men in the same age group to identify as liberal, compared with only seven points a decade ago. Young men’s ideology has remained more stable, but some surveys suggest that young white men in particular have been drifting rightward. The Harvard Youth Poll, for example, found that 33 percent of white men aged 18 to 24 identified as Republican in 2016, compared with 41 percent in 2023. This trend has begun appearing in new-voter-registration data as well, according to Tom Bonier, a Democratic political strategist. “Believe me, as a partisan Democrat, I would prefer that it’s not the case—but it appears to be true,” he told me. “We’re still generally arguing about if it’s happening, which to me is silly. The conversation hasn’t moved to <i>why</i>.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/gen-z-millennials-vote-republican/674328/?utm_source=feed">Ronald Brownstein: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?</a>]</i></p><p>Why indeed? Several factors present themselves for consideration. One is social-media-induced gender polarization. (Think misogynistic “manosphere” influencers and women who talk about how “all men are trash.”) Another, as always, is Donald Trump. Twenty-something-year-old women seemed repelled by Trump’s ascendance in 2016, John Della Volpe, who heads the Harvard Youth Poll, told me. They were much more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Then there’s the #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2017, soon after Trump took office. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market-conservative think tank, argues that it durably shaped young women’s political consciousness. A 2022 poll found that nearly <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/09/29/more-than-twice-as-many-americans-support-than-oppose-the-metoo-movement/">three-quarters</a> of women under 30 say they support #MeToo, the highest of any age group. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn <i>Roe v. Wade</i> also seems to have been a turning point. Going into the 2022 midterm election, 61 percent of young women said abortion was a “critical” concern, according to a <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/gender-generation-and-abortion-shifting-politics-and-perspectives-after-roe/">survey</a> conducted by AEI. “Young women increasingly believe that what happens to any woman in the United States impacts their lives and experiences as well,” Cox told me. “That became really salient after <i>Roe</i> was overturned.” Gen Z women are <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/generation-z-and-the-transformation-of-american-adolescence-how-gen-zs-formative-experiences-shape-its-politics-priorities-and-future/">more likely</a> than Generation X or Baby Boomer women—though slightly <i>less</i> likely than Millennial women—to say that they have been discriminated against because of their gender at some point in their life.</p><p>Not so fast, say young men. Gen Z men are <i>also </i>more likely than older generations to say that they’ve been discriminated against based on gender. “There’s this kind of weird ping-pong going on between Gen Z men and women about who’s really struggling, who’s really the victim,” Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Reeves, who founded the American Institute for Boys and Men, argues that although men still dominate the highest levels of society in the U.S., those on the lower rungs are doing worse than ever. They are far less likely than women to go to college or find a good job, and far more likely to end up in prison or dead. These young men feel—rightly, in Reeves’s view—that mainstream institutions and the Democratic Party haven’t addressed their problems. And, in the aftermath of #MeToo, some seem to believe that society has turned against men. Survey data <a href="https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-young-men-are-turning-against-feminism/#:~:text=Only%2043%20percent%20of%20Gen,Z%20than%20any%20other%20generation.">indicate</a> that Gen Z men are much less likely to identify as feminists than Millennial men are, and about as likely as middle-aged men. “I really do worry that we’re trending toward a bit of a women’s party and a men’s party in politics,” Reeves told me.</p><p class="dropcap">B<span class="smallcaps">ut if young men</span> and women really were drifting apart politically, you would expect to see evidence on Election Day. And here’s where the theory starts showing cracks. The Cooperative Election Study, a national survey administered by YouGov, <a href="https://cooperativeelectionstudy.shinyapps.io/VoteTrends/">found</a> that nearly 68 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, compared with about 70 percent of women in that age group—the same percentage gap as in 2008. (The split was larger—nearly seven points—in 2016, when Trump’s personal behavior toward women was especially salient.) Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results based on voter-file data, found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections. In the 2022 midterms, according to Pew’s analysis of validated voters, considered the gold standard of postelection polling, the youngest voters had the <i>smallest</i> gender divide, and overwhelmingly supported Democrats.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/progressive-gen-z-politics-voting/671130/?utm_source=feed">R</a>]</i><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/boys-delayed-entry-school-start-redshirting/671238/?utm_source=feed">ichard V. Reeves: Redshirt the boys</a></p><p>Many of the polls that show a widening gender divide ask about <i>ideology</i>. But <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-science-research-and-methods/article/selfreported-political-ideology/C2BED995008303104F4D43819B5FCC1E">research</a> shows that many people don’t have a clear idea of what the labels mean. Gallup, whose data partly inspired the gender-gap frenzy, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/467888/democrats-identification-liberal-new-high.aspx">notes</a> that only about half of Democrats identify as liberal. Ten percent describe themselves as conservative, and the remainder say their views are moderate. The ideological lines are only slightly less scrambled among self-identified Republicans. “Everything here hinges on what characteristics or questions we are trying to measure,” Sides told me. “When you ask people if they identify as liberal or as a feminist, you learn whether people believe that label describes them. But you didn’t ask how they define that label.” People might dislike the term <i>liberal</i> but still support, say, abortion access and high government spending. Indeed, 2020 polling data from <a href="https://goodauthority.org/news/maybe-young-men-and-women-arent-so-ideologically-different/">Nationscape</a>, which assesses people’s positions on individual issues, indicated that young men and women are no more divided than older generations. In every age group, for example, women are more in favor of banning assault rifles and providing universal health care than men are, by a comparable margin.</p><p>Or perhaps the unique Gen Z gender divide just hasn’t shown up electorally <i>yet. </i>Most 2024 election polling doesn’t break down different age groups by gender—and even if it did, trying to draw firm conclusions would be foolish. Twenty-somethings are just hard to study. Young people are less engaged in politics, with high rates of independent and unaffiliated voters. Their worldviews are still malleable. Many of them are reluctant to answer questions, especially over the phone. Under those circumstances, even high-quality polls show wildly, even implausibly divergent possibilities for the youth vote. A recent <i>USA Today</i>/Suffolk University <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/01/01/biden-trump-poll-odds-black-hispanic-young-voters/72072111007/">poll</a> found that, in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, Trump beat out Biden among registered voters under 35—an almost-unheard-of shift within four years. In October, a <i>New York Times</i>/Siena <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/upshot/poll-biden-young-voters.html">poll</a> suggested that the youngest generation is equally split between Trump and Biden, whereas last month’s <i>Times </i>survey <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/03/us/elections/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html">showed</a> Biden winning young voters by double digits even as he lost ground overall.<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/03/us/elections/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html"> </a></p><p>Whatever is going on inside all of those young minds, the old people studying them have yet to figure it out. The biggest chasm, as always, may be not between young men and young women, but between young people and everyone else.</p>Rose Horowitchhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/rose-horowitch/?utm_source=feedIllustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart?2024-03-12T07:00:00-04:002024-03-12T08:13:44-04:00The much-theorized political rift has yet to show up in actual voting behavior.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677695<p><small><em>Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on March 11, 2024</em></small></p><p>Chaos reigns in Alabama—or at least in the Alabama world of reproductive health. Three weeks ago, the state’s supreme court ruled that embryos should be treated as children, thrusting the future of in vitro fertilization, and of thousands of would-be Alabama parents, into uncertainty. Last week, state lawmakers scrambled to pass a legislative fix to protect the right of prospective parents to seek IVF, but they did so without addressing the court’s existential questions about personhood.</p><p>Meanwhile, those in the wider anti-abortion movement who oppose IVF are feeling hopeful. Whatever the outcome in Alabama, the situation has yanked the issue “into the public consciousness” nationwide, Aaron Kheriaty, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. He and his allies object to IVF for the same reason that they object to abortion: Both procedures result, they believe, in the destruction of innocent life. And in an America without federal abortion protections, in which states will continue to redefine and recategorize what qualifies as <i>life</i>, more citizens will soon encounter what Kheriaty considers the moral hazards of IVF.</p><p>In his ideal world, the anti-abortion movement would make ending IVF its new goal—the next frontier in a post-<i>Roe</i> society. The problem, of course, is that crossing that frontier will be bumpy, to say the least. IVF is extremely popular, and banning it is not—something President Joe Biden made a point of highlighting in his State of the Union speech last week. (A full 86 percent of Americans support keeping it legal, according to the <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4507514-overwhelming-majority-americans-support-keeping-ivf-legal-for-women-poll/">latest polling</a>.) “Even a lot of pro-lifers don’t want to touch this issue,” Kheriaty acknowledged. “It’s almost easier to talk about abortion.” But he and his allies see the Alabama ruling as a chance to start a national conversation about the morality of IVF—even if, at first, Americans don’t want to listen.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/03/alabama-ivf-ruling-embryo-fertility-pregnancy/677663/?utm_source=feed">Read: The anti-abortion movement’s attack on unwanted pregnancies</a>]</i></p><p>After all, their movement has already won another unpopular, decades-long fight: With patience and dedication, pro-life activists succeeded in transforming abortion rights from a niche issue in religious circles to a mainstream cause—eventually making opposition to <i>Roe</i> a litmus test for Republican candidates. Perhaps, the thinking goes, pro-lifers could achieve the same with IVF.</p><p>The typical IVF procedure goes like this: A doctor retrieves a number of eggs from a woman’s ovaries—maybe eight to 10—and fertilizes them with sperm in laboratory conditions. The fertilized eggs will grow in the lab for a few days, before one or more embryos will be selected for transfer to the woman’s uterus. A patient using IVF to get pregnant will likely have several embryos left over, and it’s up to the patient whether those extras are discarded, frozen for future use, or donated, either to research or to another couple.<b> </b></p><p>In the Alabama case, three couples were storing frozen embryos at an IVF clinic, where they were mistakenly destroyed. When the couples sued the clinic in a civil trial for the wrongful death of a child, the state supreme court ruled that they were entitled to damages, declaring in a novel interpretation of Alabama law that embryos qualify as children. The public’s response to the ruling can perhaps best be described as <i>panicked</i>. Two of the state’s major in-vitro-fertilization clinics immediately paused operations, citing uncertain legal liability, which disrupted many couples’ medical treatments and forced some out of state for care. Lawmakers across the country raced to clarify their position.</p><p>But the ruling shouldn’t have come as such a shock, at least to the pro-life community. After all, “it’s a very morally consistent outcome” with what anti-abortion advocates have long argued—that life begins at conception—Andrew T. Walker, an ethics and public-theology professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told me: “It’s the culmination of other pro-life arguments about human dignity, brought to the IVF domain.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/michelle-obamas-ivf-story-means-lot-black-women/575824/?utm_source=feed">Read: The significance of Michelle Obama’s fertility story</a>]</i></p><p>The central criticism of IVF from Walker and others who share his opinion concerns the destruction of extra embryos, which they view as fully human. For some people, a degree of cognitive dissociation is required to look at a tiny embryo and see a human baby, which is a point that IVF defenders commonly make. (“I would invite them to try to change the diaper of an in vitro–fertilized egg,” Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy and policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told me. More soberly, Kate Devine, the medical director of US Fertility, a network of reproduction-focused practices, told me that referring to an embryo as a baby “is unjust and inaccurate and threatens to withhold highly efficacious family-building treatments from people affected by the disease of infertility.”)</p><p>To IVF critics, however, an embryo is just a very young person. “The only real difference between those frozen embryos and me sitting here having this conversation with you is time,” Katy Faust, the president of the anti-abortion nonprofit Them Before Us, told me. “If you believe that children have a right to life, and that life begins at conception, then ‘Big Fertility’ as an industry is responsible for more child deaths than the abortion industry.” Faust’s organization argues from a “children’s rights” perspective, meaning it also believes that IVF is wrong, in part, because it allows single women and homosexual couples to have babies, which deprives children of having both a mother and a father.</p><p>This leads to the other major criticism of IVF: that the process itself is so unnatural that it devalues sex and treats children as a commodity. The argument to which many religious Americans subscribe is that having children is a “cooperative act among husband, wife, and God himself,” John M. Haas, a former president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, <a href="https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/reproductive-technology/begotten-not-made-a-catholic-view-of-reproductive-technology">has written</a>. “Children, in the final analysis, should be begotten not made.” The secular version of that opinion is that IVF poses all kinds of thorny bioethical quandaries, including questions about the implications of preimplantation genetic testing and the selection for sex and other traits. When a doctor takes babies “out of the normal process of conception, lines them up in a row, and picks which is the <i>best</i> baby, that brings a eugenicist mindset into it that’s really destructive,” Leah Sargeant, <a href="https://www.otherfeminisms.com/">a Catholic writer</a>, told me. “There are big moral complications and red flags that aren’t being treated as such.”</p><p>She and the others believe that now is the time to stop ignoring those red flags. The Alabama Supreme Court has offered a chance to teach people about IVF—and the implications they may not yet be aware of. Some couples who’ve undergone IVF don’t even consider the consequences “until they themselves have seven [extra] frozen embryos,” Faust said, “and now they go, ‘Oh, shit, what do we do?’” The more Americans learn about IVF, the less they’ll use it, opponents argue, just as Americans <a href="https://www.umass.edu/ruddchair/sites/default/files/rudd.baden.pdf">have broadly moved away</a> from international adoption for ethical reasons. Walker would advise faith leaders to counsel couples against the process. “As I’ve talked with people, they’ve come around,” he said.</p><p>The IVF opponents I interviewed all made clear that they sympathize with couples struggling with infertility. But they also believe that not all couples will be able to have biological children. “Not every way of pursuing children turns out to be a good way,” Sargeant said; people will have to accept that “you don’t have total control over whether you get one.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/donald-trump-abortion-limit-republicans/677540/?utm_source=feed">Read: The pro-life movement’s not-so-secret plan for Trump</a>]</i></p><p>None of these arguments is going to be an applause line for anti-IVF campaigners in most parts of the country. “I know that my view is deeply unpopular,” Walker told me, with a laugh. The Alabama ruling left Republicans in disarray: Even some hard-line social conservatives in Congress, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-navigates-ivf-backlash-offering-symbolic-measures-rcna141423">including House Speaker Mike Johnson</a>, have tried to distance themselves from it, arguing that they oppose abortion but support IVF from a natalist position. Democrats, meanwhile, are already <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/02/29/scoop-vulnerable-house-republicans-sign-pro-ivf-measure">using the issue</a> as a wedge: If, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, they can connect Republicans’ support for <i>Dobbs</i> to the possible end of IVF, they’ll have an even easier job painting the GOP as extreme on reproductive health and out of touch with the average American voter.</p><p>Even so, the anti-IVF people I interviewed say, at least Americans would be talking about it. Talking, they believe, is the beginning of persuasion. And they’re prepared to be patient.</p><p>Earlier this week, Kheriaty texted me with what he seems to take as evidence that his movement is already making progress. He sent a comment he’d gotten from a reader in response to <a href="https://aaronkheriaty.substack.com/p/after-alabama-ruling-time-for-a-serious">his latest column</a> about the perils of IVF. “This troubling dilemma wasn’t on top of mind when we embarked on our IVF path,” the reader had written. The clinic had explained what would happen to their unused embryos, the woman said, but she hadn’t realized the issue “would loom” so heavily over her afterward.</p><hr><p><em><small>This article originally identified John M. Haas as the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center; in fact, he is a former president of the center.</small></em></p>Elaine Godfreyhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaine-godfrey/?utm_source=feedJim Dyson / GettyThe People Rooting for the End of IVF2024-03-11T07:00:00-04:002024-03-18T11:46:03-04:00An Alabama court ruling that recognized an embryo as a child has put the popular fertility treatment into the center of a national ethics debate.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677708<p class="dropcap"><span class="smallcaps">Former President Donald Trump</span>, perhaps threatened by President Joe Biden’s well-received State of the Union address, mocked his opponent’s lifelong stutter at a rally in Georgia yesterday. “Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together?” Trump <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5109610/president-trump-mocks-stuttering">asked</a> sarcastically. He kept the bit going, slipping into a Biden caricature. “‘I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-together,’” Trump said, straining and narrowing his mouth for comedic effect.</p><p>Trump has made a new habit of this. “‘He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” Trump said in his vaudeville Biden character at a January rally in Iowa. That jibe was also a response to a big Biden speech—one tied to the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. (Guess who the <em>he</em> was in that sentence.)</p><p>More than Trump’s ugly taunt, one thing stands out to me about these moments: the sound of Trump’s supporters laughing right along with him. This is a building block of Trumpism. The man at the top gives his followers permission to be the worst version of themselves.</p><p>I was on my way to meet friends last night when someone texted me a link to Trump’s latest fake-stuttering clip. I am a lifelong stutterer, and as I rode the subway, holding my phone up to my ear, out came that old familiar mockery—like Adam Sandler in <em>Billy Madison</em> saying, “Tuh-tuh-tuh-today, junior!” Only this time the taunt was coming from a 77-year-old man.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/joe-biden-stutter-profile/602401/?utm_source=feed">Read: What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say</a>]</i></p><p>Stuttering is one of many disabilities to have entered Trump’s crosshairs. In 2015, he infamously made fun of a <em>New York Times</em> reporter’s disabled upper-body movements. Three years later, as president, when planning a White House event for military veterans, he asked his staff not to include amputees wounded in combat, saying, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/?utm_source=feed">“Nobody wants to see that.”</a> Stuttering is a neurological disorder that affects roughly 3 million Americans. Biden has stuttered since childhood. He has worked to manage his disfluent speech for decades, but, contrary to the story he tells about his life, he has never fully “beat” it.</p><p>As I noted in 2019 when I <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/joe-biden-stutter-profile/602401/?utm_source=feed">first wrote</a> about Biden’s relationship to his stutter, living with this disorder is by no means a quest for pity. And having a stutter is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for any verbal flub. Sometimes, when Biden mixes up a name, date, or fact, he is doing just that: making a mistake, and his stutter is not the reason. I am among those who believe the balance of Biden’s stuttering to non-stuttering-related verbal issues has shifted since I interviewed him five years ago.</p><p>And yet, Biden can still come off confident, conversational, and lucid. Although he’s not a naturally gifted orator like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, he can still be an effective public speaker—someone who, as my colleague Jennifer Senior noted, understands <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/joe-biden-sotu-congress/677690/?utm_source=feed">“the connect.”</a> Notably, he can find a way to do all of the above while still periodically stuttering, as he proved during his State of the Union speech. Depending on the day, his voice might be booming or it might be shaky. He may go long stretches of time without interruption, or visibly and audibly repeat certain sounds in a classic stutter formation. Such moments are outside of Biden’s control, as they are for any stutterer, which makes them an appealing pressure point for Trump, the bully.</p><p>For a time, Trump exercised a modicum of restraint around this topic. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/trump-mocks-biden-rally-video/616966/?utm_source=feed">As I once wrote</a>, Trump was probably wise enough to realize that, to paraphrase Michael Jordan, <em>Republicans stutter too</em>. (Including Trump’s friend <a href="https://www.stutteringhelp.org/content/herschel-walker">Herschel Walker</a>, who has his place on the Stuttering Foundation’s website, along with <a href="https://www.stutteringhelp.org/content/president-joe-biden">Biden</a>.) During the 2020 election, Trump wouldn’t go right for the jugular with the S-word. Instead, at his final campaign events, he would play a sizzle reel of Biden’s vocal stumbles, looking up at the screen and laughing at Biden along with the crowd. Back then, Trump left most of the direct stuttering vitriol to his allies and family. “Joe, can you get it out? Let’s get the words out, Joe,” his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, said at a Women for Trump event. She’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/us/politics/trump-rnc-lara-michael-whatley.html">now</a> RNC co-chair.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/republicans-are-no-longer-political-party/677437/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: Republicans are no longer a political party</a>]</i></p><p>Watching this new clip brought me back to my conversation with Biden five years ago. At the time, I asked him whether he thought Trump would one day nickname him “St-St-St-Stuttering Joe.” If Trump were to go there, Biden told me, “it’ll just expose him for what he is.”</p><p>Trump has now definitively gone there. What has that exposed? Only what we already knew: Trump may be among the most famous and powerful people in modern history, but he remains a small-minded bully. He mocks Biden’s disability because he believes the voters will reward him for it—that there is more to be gained than lost by dehumanizing his rival and the millions of other Americans who stutter, or who go through life managing other disorders and disabilities. I would like to believe that more people are repulsed than entertained, and that Trump has made a grave miscalculation. We have eight more months of this until we find out.</p>John Hendricksonhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/john-hendrickson/?utm_source=feedIllustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Shawn Thew / EPA / Bloomberg.Trump Finds Another Line to Cross2024-03-10T11:54:00-04:002024-03-11T12:12:46-04:00The former president used to exercise a modicum of restraint around Joe Biden’s stutter. No longer.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677700<p>The millions of people who crowd into New York City’s busiest subway stations every day have recently encountered a sight reminiscent of a frightening, bygone era: National Guard troops with long guns patrolling platforms and checking bags.</p><p>After 9/11 and at moments of high alert in the years since, New York deployed soldiers in the subway to deter would-be terrorists and reassure the public that the transit system was safe from attack. The National Guard is now there for a different reason. Earlier this week, Governor Kathy Hochul <a href="https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-subway-national-guard-crime-f046ecaac79601f6113efa8a0c8f25c7">sent</a> 1,000 state police officers and National Guard troops into the city’s underground labyrinth not to scour for bombs but to combat far more ordinary crime—a recent spate of assaults, thefts, and stabbings, including against transit workers.</p><p>The order, which Hochul issued independently of the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, prompted immediate criticism. Progressives accused her of militarizing the subways and validating Republican exaggerations about a spike in crime, potentially making people even more fearful of using public transit. Law-enforcement advocates, a group that typically supports a robust show of force, didn’t like the idea either.</p><p>“I would describe it as the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage,” William Bratton, who led the police departments of New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, told me. “It will actually do nothing to stop the flow of blood, because it’s not going to the source of where the blood is coming from.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/new-york-subway-shooting-transit-crime-death-spiral/629554/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: The subway-crime death spiral</a>]</i></p><p>Bratton’s success in reducing subway crime as the chief of New York City’s transit police in the early 1990s led then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to appoint him as NYPD commissioner. He returned to the post under a much different mayor, Democrat Bill de Blasio, nearly two decades later. During a 40-minute phone interview yesterday, Bratton acknowledged that many New Yorkers perceive subway crime to be more pervasive than it really is; rates of violent crime in New York City (and many other urban centers) have come down since the early months of pandemic and are much lower than they were in 1990, when he took over the transit police.</p><p>Bratton is most famous—and, in the minds of many, notorious—as a practitioner of the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/?utm_source=feed">“broken windows”</a> theory of policing, which calls for aggressive enforcement of minor crime as a precondition for tackling more serious offenses. The idea has been widely criticized for being racially discriminatory and contributing to mass incarceration. But Bratton remains a strong proponent.</p><p>He blamed the fact that crime remains unacceptably high for many people—and for politicians in an election year—on a culture of leniency brought on by well-intentioned criminal-justice reformers. Changes to the bail system that were enacted in 2019—some of which have been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/nyregion/bail-reform-ny.html">scaled back</a>—have made it harder to keep convicted criminals off the streets, Bratton said, while city leaders are more reluctant to forcibly remove homeless people who resist intervention due to mental illness. Bratton said that police officers are less likely to arrest people for fare evasion, which leads to more serious infractions. “We are not punishing people for inappropriate behavior,” Bratton said.</p><p>The subways need more police officers, Bratton said, and Adams had already announced a deployment of an additional 1,000 last month. But an influx of National Guard troops won’t be as effective, he argued. They can’t arrest people, and the items they are looking for in bags—explosive devices and guns, mainly—aren’t the source of most subway crime. The highest-profile incidents have involved small knives or assailants who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/nyregion/subway-attack-nyc.html">pushed</a> people onto the subway tracks. “What are the bag checks actually going to accomplish?” he asked. “The deterrence really is not there.”</p><p>Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p><b>Russell Berman:</b> What did you think of the governor’s decision to send the National Guard and the state police into the subways?</p><p><b>William Bratton:</b> I would describe it basically as a public-relations initiative that is the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. It will actually do nothing to stop the flow of blood, because it’s not going to the source of where the blood is coming from.</p><p>The problem with crime in the subways, as with crime in the streets, is the idea that we are not punishing people for inappropriate behavior, whether it’s as simple as a fare evasion or something more significant—assaults and robberies and, in some instances, murders.</p><p>The presence of the National Guard in the subway system is not needed, not necessary; nor are, for that matter, state troopers. The NYPD and the MTA are fully capable of policing the subways and the train systems.</p><p><b>Berman:</b> This is going to remind people of what New York was like in the months and years after 9/11, when you routinely saw National Guard troops doing bag checks in busy stations. Was it more effective to do that then, because people were worried about what was in those bags? Now they are more worried about other things.</p><p><b>Bratton:</b> That was appropriate then. People understood that what the National Guard was looking for in that era were bombs. So the bag checks made sense. It wasn’t so much the level of crime in the subways. What they were fearful of was terrorists, so the use of the National Guard for that purpose was appropriate at that time.</p><p>What is the problem in terms of crime in the subway? It is the actions of the mentally ill, who have been involved in assaults and shoving people onto the tracks. It is the actions of a relatively small number of repeat criminals. And what are the bag checks actually going to accomplish? If you are carrying a gun, if you’re carrying a knife, you walk downstairs and see a bag check, you’re going to walk back up the stairs and down the block and go in another entrance and go right on through. So the deterrence is really not there.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/police-reform-violent-crime-wave-new-york/670497/?utm_source=feed">William Bratton: Police reform needs to come from within</a>]</i></p><p><b>Berman:</b> Did those bag checks back then after 9/11 ever find anything significant, or was it mostly for making people feel like someone was watching?</p><p><b>Bratton:</b> I’m not aware that anything was ever detected. Might something have been deterred? Possibly somebody who was coming into the subway with a device and decides, <i>Well, I’m not going to do it after all</i>. But I can’t say with any certainty or knowledge.</p><p><b>Berman:</b> Governor Hochul is also proposing a bill that would allow judges to ban anyone from the public-transit system who has been convicted of assault within the system. What do you make of that?</p><p><b>Bratton:</b> It would be difficult to enforce. They’d be banned from the system, but if they’re on the system behaving themselves, who’s going to know?</p><p><b>Berman:</b> Earlier you mentioned that law enforcement should be punishing fare evasion more than they do. When people hear that, they might think of the “broken windows” theory of policing. These people aren’t necessarily violent; they’re just jumping the gate. Is your argument that you’re trying to address higher-level crime by prosecuting lower-level crime?</p><p><b>Bratton:</b> “Broken windows” is correcting the behavior when it’s at a minor stage before it becomes more serious. Somebody who’s not paying their fare might be coming into the subway system with some type of weapon. Oftentimes they’re coming into the system to commit a crime—or, if they encounter a situation in the subway, out comes a box cutter, out comes the knife, out comes the gun. The situation escalates.</p>Russell Bermanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/russell-berman/?utm_source=feedLokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu / GettyWhy the National Guard Won’t Make the Subways Safer2024-03-09T07:30:00-05:002024-03-09T07:30:56-05:00Former police commissioner William Bratton calls the New York governor’s recent reforms “the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage.”tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677693<p>You might not have known it from Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal last night—a performance derided by members of her own party as “bizarre” and “confusing”—but up until then, Britt had distinguished herself in the Senate with a reputation for being startlingly, well, normal.</p><p>As in, she wasn’t obsessed with Twitter (or X, as it’s now called). She evinced more than a passing interest in policy. For her, conservatism seemed to mean things other than simply “supporting Trump.”</p><p>It was just five days ago that Newt Gingrich was imagining the possibilities for Britt’s future, framing the freshman senator from Alabama’s coming rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as her “big audition.” “It will be interesting to see if Britt rises to the occasion,” the former House speaker had mused to a New York talk-radio host. “If she does, it will be a major step up in her potentially being Trump’s vice-presidential candidate.”</p><p>When I called Gingrich this morning and asked if Britt had, in fact, risen to the occasion last night, he sounded flustered. “Ah, well, um, I don’t have any comment right now, thank you.” He hung up.</p><p>Gingrich is far from the only Republican skirting on-the-record conversations today about Britt’s performance. The Alabamian’s 17-minute address, delivered from her own kitchen, surprised many in the party for its tonal confusion and the dramatic affectations that often distracted from the message itself—a party-line discourse on illegal immigration and the imperiled future of American families. The speech has been mocked widely on social media and cable news, including by various right-wing commentators. But lawmakers and other prominent Republicans—those who had cast the event as Britt’s potential star turn—have mostly stayed quiet.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/state-of-the-union-president-biden/677680/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: The most unusual State of the Union in living memory</a>]</i></p><p>Why did the GOP assign such stakes to a speech from someone who, before last night, most Americans had never heard of?</p><p>Pressure is of course inherent to any State of the Union rebuttal; parties have long used the event to sell Americans on a vision for the future of their institution, the kind of leadership voters can expect if they just stick it out (promise!). Yet the hopeful anticipation attending Britt’s appearance was unusual, and not only because her party is desperate to showcase that young, college-educated mothers still exist within their ranks: Britt, married with two children, was just 40 when she was sworn in as Alabama’s junior senator last year, the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the upper chamber.</p><p>Britt’s real distinction, however, has been her ability to move with startling ease among the various factions of her party, maintaining good standing among the chamber-of-commerce types responsible for her political rise while steadily earning the trust of her more overtly MAGA colleagues and voters back home. In a moment when the GOP base diligently screens elected leaders for even a phantasm of apostasy, Britt’s 66 percent <a href="https://www.wbrc.com/2024/02/09/exclusive-gray-televisionala-daily-news-poll-finds-wide-support-trump-ivey-britt-tuberville-freeze-deboer/">approval rating</a> in Alabama suggests that not even her cross-aisle friendships—she’s been vocally supportive of Democrat and fellow freshman Senator John Fetterman, who early in his tenure sought inpatient treatment for clinical depression—have compromised perceptions of her purity. (Her approval rating is three points higher than that of Tommy Tuberville, Alabama’s other senator, whose politics, from his 2020 campaign on, have been anchored in little more than outspoken devotion to former President Donald Trump.)</p><p>Call it the Richard Shelby example. Shelby, the longtime Alabama senator who retired in 2023 after 44 years in Congress, first met Britt in 2004; he hired her as a press aide on the recommendation of his wife, who had taught Britt at the University of Alabama. Twelve years later—during which time Britt graduated from her alma mater’s law school and practiced in Birmingham—Shelby named her chief of staff. From 2016 to 2018, Britt observed up close her party’s shifting dynamics in the Trump era and the skill with which her boss navigated them; rather than rushing to Fox News to discuss the president’s latest tweet, he quietly wielded the power he’d patiently amassed atop some of the most powerful committees in Congress. When running to succeed Shelby, Britt assured his legions of deep-pocketed supporters that she would take her former boss’s lessons to heart. Translation: She would leave the sound bites to the Auburn football coach.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/senate-hold-procedure/675315/?utm_source=feed">Norm Ornstein: The Senate’s deep and dirty secret</a>]</i></p><p>But as she campaigned, she also showcased her ability to win over the most ardent of Trump fans—including Trump himself. Though Trump had endorsed her chief primary opponent, Mo Brooks, the ultra-right-wing congressman from northern Alabama, early in the race, Britt lobbied for the former president’s backing as soon as his relationship with Brooks showed signs of fraying. Trump soon announced his support for Britt; in the space of a year, he had gone from calling her an unqualified “assistant” to a “RINO Senator” to praising her as a “fearless America First warrior.”</p><p>In her short time in the Senate, Britt has followed, more or less, Shelby’s head-down approach, securing a coveted spot on the Appropriations Committee and impressing her party’s leadership with unusual initiative in fundraising for her senior colleagues. “If she aspires to rise through elected leadership, I see a pretty clear path forward,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/23/britt-face-post-trump-future-00117753">told <em>Politico</em>’s Jonathan Martin</a> last year.</p><p>Less than a year into her tenure, Britt set out to promote the release of a memoir, <em>God Calls Us to Do Hard Things: Lessons From the Alabama Wiregrass</em>. Asked by a CBS host about her interest in joining the Trump ticket, Britt laughed off the question. Since then, Britt’s name has landed on any number of VP longlists drawn up by major media outlets. (Trump, for his part, has never suggested the Alabama lawmaker as a possible candidate.)</p><p>For prominent Republicans, Thursday was the night to introduce the woman lauded in the halls of Congress to the rest of America. If the responses (and non-responses) have been any indication, it wasn’t the unveiling they’d hoped for. Addressing the camera from her own kitchen table in Montgomery, Britt seemed to ricochet from one practiced emotion to another as she conjured an apocalyptic portrait of America under the “dithering and diminished” Biden. She focused much of her speech on illegal immigration, sharing in detail her encounter with a young girl sex-trafficked by a cartel, and referencing the Venezuelan migrant charged in the recent killing of the Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.</p><p>“Right now,” Britt said, “the American dream has turned into a nightmare.”</p><p>At times her facial expressions seemed incongruous—a strained smile as she shared her fear for “the future of children in every corner of our nation”; a flicker of aw-shucks pity at some mentions of Biden, seemingly at odds with the studied malevolence she would go on to attribute to him. At other points, she paired an intense gaze with a whispered voice, including in a direct appeal to American parents “and, in particular, to my fellow moms”: “We see you, we hear you, and we stand with you.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/joe-biden-sotu-congress/677690/?utm_source=feed">Jennifer Senior: Joe Biden’s happy place</a>]</i></p><p>Her own Senate colleague’s clumsy assessment of the speech seemed to reinforce precisely the stereotype of the GOP that Katie Britt, in being tapped to deliver the party’s response to Biden, was theoretically meant to counteract. “She was picked as a housewife, not just a senator, somebody who sees it from a different perspective,” Tuberville told reporters today. (Britt’s office did not respond to an interview request, but in a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/katie-britt-state-of-the-union-speech-reactions-republicans-2024-3">statement to <em>Business Insider</em></a>, her spokesperson said: “Joe Biden angrily screamed for an hour and was roundly praised for a ‘fiery’ speech. Katie Britt passionately made the case on the need for a new direction and is being criticized by the liberal media. Color me surprised.”)</p><p>When I reached Shelby by phone this morning, he told me he had stayed up to watch his former chief. How had she done? “Well, I think this: You know, she’s young, she’s dynamic. You never know where you’ll go, but she’s on a fast track, and …” His voice briefly trailed off. “I thought she did well last night. You’ve gotta remember, that’s a lot of pressure; that is a lot of pressure to follow a State of the Union.”</p><p>He went on: “She touched on some bases; of course, she’s expected to do some things, and I thought she came [off] pretty—pretty well. I couldn’t have done it, you know?”</p><p>Shelby brought up the chatter about Britt as a contender for Trump’s running mate. I asked what advice he would give her if Trump invited her onto the ticket. “Well, she doesn’t need any advice—she can make her own decision,” he said. “But, you know, to run on a national ticket—not many people ever turn that down.”</p><p>For all the various takes on Britt’s performance last night, and what it might mean for her political future, she seems to have done well by the person who arguably has the most power over it, at least in this moment.</p><p>“Katie Britt was a GREAT contrast to an Angry, and obviously very Disturbed, ‘President,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. “She was compassionate and caring, especially concerning Women and Women’s Issues. Her conversation on Migrant Crime was powerful and insightful. Great job Katie!”</p>Elaina Plott Calabrohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaina-plott/?utm_source=feedTom Williams / GettyKatie Britt’s Strange Speech2024-03-08T20:45:00-05:002024-03-11T15:01:26-04:00Before last night, the Alabama senator had distinguished herself with a reputation for being, well, normal.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677670<p dir="ltr">As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back.</p><p dir="ltr">In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office. The second is to structure it as a comparison between his four years and Trump’s four years as president. The third is to offer it as a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House.</p><p dir="ltr">The referendum route already looks like a dead end for Biden. The comparison path remains difficult terrain for him, given that voters now express more satisfaction with Trump’s performance as president than they ever did while he was in office. The third option probably offers Biden the best chance to recover from his consistent deficit to Trump in polls.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/case-biden/677591/?utm_source=feed">Read: Biden is still the Democrats’ best bet for November</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Political scientists agree: Every presidential reelection campaign combines elements of a backward-looking referendum on the incumbent and a forward-looking choice between the incumbent and the challenger.</p><p dir="ltr">But on balance, the referendum element of presidential reelection campaigns has appeared to influence the outcome the most. Since modern polling began, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/interactives/507569/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx">the presidents whose approval ratings stood well above 50 percent in Gallup surveys</a> through the election year (including Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) all won a second term comfortably. Conversely, the presidents whose approval ratings fell well below 50 percent in election-year Gallup polls all lost their reelection bids: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Trump.</p><p dir="ltr">That history isn’t encouraging for Biden. His approval rating in a wide array of national polls <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/joe-biden/?ex_cid=abcpromo">has been stuck</a> at about 40 percent or less. What’s more, most voters are returning intensely negative verdicts on specific elements of Biden’s record. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/05/us/elections/times-siena-poll-likely-electorate-crosstabs.html">In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last weekend</a>, just 20 percent of Americans said Biden’s policies had helped them personally; more than twice as many said his policies had hurt them. <a href="https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/03/Fox_February-25-28-2024_Complete_National_Cross-Tabs_March-3-Release.pdf">In the lastest Fox News poll</a>, about three-fifths of Americans said Biden had mostly failed at helping working-class Americans, handling the economy, and improving America’s image around the world, while about seven in 10 said he had failed at managing security at the border.</p><p dir="ltr">In the past, such withering judgments almost certainly would have ensured defeat for an incumbent president, and if Biden loses in November, analysts may conclude that he simply failed a referendum on his performance.</p><p dir="ltr">But Democrats, and even some Republicans, see more opportunity for Biden than previous presidents to surmount negative grades about his tenure.</p><p dir="ltr">One reason is that in an era when distrust of political leaders and institutions is so endemic, officeholders are winning reelection with approval ratings much lower than in earlier generations, pollsters in both parties told me. The other reason is that the intense passions provoked by Trump may make this year less of a referendum and more of a choice than is typical in reelection campaigns.</p><p dir="ltr">The choice, though, has unusual dimensions that complicate Biden’s situation, including an especially concrete element of comparison: Trump was president so recently that most voters still have strong impressions about his performance. For Biden, comparing his four years to Trump’s represents the second broad way to frame the election. But at this point, that doesn’t look like a winning hand for the incumbent either.</p><p dir="ltr">One of the scariest trends for Democrats is that retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance are rising, perhaps in reaction to voter discontent over Biden’s record. <a href="https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/WSJ_Partial_Results_Feb_2024.pdf">Nearly half of voters in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal national poll</a> said they now approve of Trump’s performance as president—10 percentage points more than those who said the same about Biden’s current performance.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump has made clear that he wants voters to view the contest mostly as a comparison between his time in office and Biden’s. “We had everything going so beautifully,” Trump declared in his victory speech after the Super Tuesday primaries. “Joe Biden, if he would have just left everything alone, he could have gone to the beach. He would have had a tremendous success at the border and elsewhere.”</p><p dir="ltr">Facing these dismal reviews in polls of his job performance, and the tendency among many voters to view Trump’s record more favorably than his, Biden naturally will be tempted in tonight’s State of the Union to emphasize all that he has accomplished. And he has many positive trends that he can highlight.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet every Democratic strategist I spoke with in recent days agreed that Biden would be mistaken to spend too much time trying to burnish perceptions of his record. “The challenge for Biden is his inclination to want credit and claim credit and talk about the greatest economy in 50 years or whatever,” David Axelrod, who served as the top political adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, told me. “You have to resist that.”</p><p dir="ltr">The veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg reacts as if he hears nails on a chalkboard whenever Biden stresses positive trends in the economy. That emphasis, he argues, is “missing how angry voters are,” particularly over the cumulative increase in prices for essentials such as groceries and rent since Biden took office. Greenberg told me, “That defines the economy for people, and they are angry at the huge inequality, the big monopolies that are profiteering. They are also angry about what’s happening with crime, and they are angry now with the border.” To tout other accomplishments against that backdrop, Greenberg said, makes Biden look out of touch.</p><p dir="ltr">Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, says that although Biden may want to accentuate the positive, it is more important for him to acknowledge the frustration that so many Americans feel about their “lived experience with inflation and immigration.” “You can’t just race ahead with your policy prescriptions without people feeling that you actually get it and telling them that they are right to feel the way they do,” he told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Gaspard, Axelrod, and Greenberg each said he believed that Biden, rather than looking back, must shift the economic argument as much as possible toward what he and Trump would do if returned to power. That’s Biden’s third broad option for framing the race. “I don’t think you want to argue about whether you are better off in those [Trump] years or these years,” Axelrod told me. “You want to argue about who will help you be better off in the future, and what you have to do to make people better off in the future.”</p><p dir="ltr">That future-oriented frame, all three said, will allow Biden to highlight more effectively his legislative achievements not as proof of how much he has accomplished for Americans but as evidence that he’s committed in a second term to fighting for average families against powerful interests.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden has already been portraying himself in that populist mode, with his regulatory moves against “junk fees” and surprise medical bills, and the ongoing negotiations <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/politics/biden-older-voters-2024/index.html">by Medicare with big pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for seniors</a>. “President Biden took on drug companies to get a better deal for the American people, and he won,” Neera Tanden, the chief White House domestic policy adviser, told reporters yesterday, in a preview of what will likely be a common refrain through the campaign. </p><p dir="ltr">Greenberg believes that the president needs to drastically amplify the volume on this argument: He says that Democratic base voters expressing discontent over Biden are eager to hear him take on “the top one percent, the big companies, the monopolies that have price gouged, [made] huge profits at your expense, didn’t raise your wages, didn’t cut prices.” Greenberg, like many other Democrats, also thinks Biden’s best chance to narrow Trump’s advantage on the economy is to portray him as most concerned about serving the same powerful interests that voters are angry about.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet the viewpoint of many, Black and Latino voters included, that they were better off under Trump could blunt the impact of those Democratic arguments. Many voters may not mind that Trump’s presidency delivered the greatest rewards to the affluent and corporations if they feel that they also benefited more from his tenure than they have under Biden. With inflation still weighing so heavily on voters living paycheck to paycheck, “they blame [Biden] for the problem in the first place, and they don’t think his solutions help the situation,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Democrats view the rising retrospective ratings for Trump’s presidency as a sign that many voters are forgetting what they didn’t like about it at the time, whether his belligerent tweets or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With those memories fading, fewer voters in polls are expressing alarm about the dangers a reelected Trump could pose to democracy and the rule of law as Democrats hoped or expected.</p><p dir="ltr">“This is one of the existential narratives of the campaign: How do we make people really fear his second term?” Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, told me. “People aren’t focused. They are still in the denial phase. They think, <em>Oh, he’s just a showman</em>.”</p><p dir="ltr"> A survey of swing voters released earlier this week by Save My Country Action Fund, a group that Dach co-founded, quantified that challenge. The survey found that less than one-third of swing voters in key states had heard much about Trump’s most inflammatory recent statements, such as his declaration that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and his pledge to pardon some of the January 6 rioters. Extreme comments like those, Dach argues, provide Democrats with an opportunity to refresh voters’ concerns that a second Trump term will bring chaos, division, and even violence.</p><p dir="ltr">“He has created an extraordinary body of evidence that he will be more extreme and more dangerous in a second term than he was in the first, and he keeps refreshing the body of evidence every day,” Geoff Garin, who conducted the poll, told me.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-political-science-concept/677536/?utm_source=feed">Read: The Americans who need chaos</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Abortion may offer Biden similar opportunities. <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-trump-leads-biden-economy/">In the new CBS/YouGov poll</a>, just one-third of voters said Trump deserved blame for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rescinding the nationwide right to abortion, even though he’s claimed credit for appointing the three justices who tipped the balance. If Biden and his allies can increase the share who blame Trump, they will likely make voters more concerned that a reelected Trump would seek to ban abortion nationwide. Climate could serve the same function for young people: <a href="https://climatepower.us/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ClimatePower_SuperTuesday_Poll_20240306.pdf">A survey of battleground states released yesterday</a> by the advocacy group Climate Power found that “when people are reminded about Trump’s [climate] record, they become more concerned about what he will do” if reelected, Christina Polizzi, the group’s deputy managing director for communications, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Though a race focused more on the future than the past might improve Biden’s prospects, it wouldn’t offer him guarantees. Voters’ judgments about what the two men will do are influenced by their assessments of what they have done; significantly more voters in the CBS/YouGov poll, for instance, said that Trump’s policies going forward were more likely than Biden’s to improve both inflation and border security. And a forward-looking race also forces voters to consider which man they believe is physically more capable of handling the job for the next four years.</p><p>In the 2022 election, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/11/midterm-election-results-democrats-avoid-red-wave/672050/?utm_source=feed">Democrats won an unprecedented number of voters with negative views of Biden’s performance and the economy</a> because those voters considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. That dynamic may work for Biden again—but only to a point: There’s a limit to how many voters disappointed in an incumbent president will vote for him anyway because they consider the alternative unacceptable. If Biden, starting tonight, can’t generate at least some additional hope about what his own second term would bring, fear about a second Trump term may not be enough to save him.</p>Ronald Brownsteinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ronald-brownstein/?utm_source=feedThe Atlantic. Source: MELINA MARA / Getty.Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?2024-03-07T09:42:00-05:002024-03-11T12:31:08-04:00Letting go of the past may be the key to his future.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677657<p data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small><i>Sign up for </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/the-decision-a-2024-newsletter/?utm_source=feed"><i>The Decision</i></a><i>, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.</i></small></p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">A<span class="smallcaps">t about 10 a.m.</span> on Monday, the eve of Super Tuesday, the Supreme Court released its unanimous decision that former President Donald Trump was eligible to appear on the 2024 Colorado election ballot. Shortly after this news broke, Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, posted on social media that she was <a href="https://twitter.com/JenaGriswold/status/1764670650592186392">“disappointed”</a> in the Court’s ruling, and that, in her view, the justices were stripping states of their authority to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Sitting in her downtown-Denver office yesterday afternoon, Griswold showed me some of the DMs she’d received over the previous 24 hours. “Well, one of the things—you probably don’t want to print this—is I’m being called a cunt every two minutes,” she said.</p><p dir="ltr">Griswold read a selection of the messages out loud—a mixture of angst, anger, sadness, and resolve in her voice. “<em>Karma will be a bitch … Build gas chambers … We are on to you … Reap what you sow … Hope you choke and die … Fuck you, ogre bitch … I’m coming … Resign now before I get you … Kill yourself in the name of democracy … Set yourself on fire ..</em>.”</p><p dir="ltr">Her eyes wide and intense, she was the image of a person on high alert: Strangers had been able to get ahold of her personal cellphone number. Messages of this nature had been coming in for a while. In one saved voicemail from her office line that she played for me, a caller told Griswold that he hopes “some fucking immigrant from fucking Iran cuts her kids’ heads off” and “somebody shoots her in the head.” His monologue lasted more than a minute and a half and concluded with a warning: “I’ll be seeing you soon.”</p><p>Griswold is in the last two years of her second and final term (her position is term-limited). Secretary of state is the first public office she ever sought, and she refused to say whether she’d run for a different position in 2026. Griswold, who was a relatively unknown Democrat in a purple state, was elected when she was just 33. She has been outspoken in her belief that Trump is a danger to democracy, but her job, by design, has a certain neutrality to it. At least, it once did.</p><p dir="ltr">Although statewide elected officials have always faced harsh public criticism and intense scrutiny, the vile tenor of the Trump era has changed the reality of the role. Yesterday, Griswold said that the Supreme Court ruling, while technically the “conclusion” of the Trump Colorado-ballot affair, will likely not mark the end of the threats and harassment she’s facing. If anything, the Court’s decision bolstered the notion that Trump is above the law, and may have even emboldened his cultlike supporters to continue to act out. Last night, Trump vanquished his final Republican challenger, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, in all but one of the Super Tuesday states. Haley dropped out of the race this morning, clearing the path for Trump altogether.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/republican-primary-nikki-haley-donald-trump/677654/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: The Republican primary is over</a>]</i></p><p>Trumpism isn’t going anywhere. And calling Trump a threat to democracy, or expressing her displeasure with the Supreme Court ruling, may well open Griswold up to more vitriol. Like other state-level bureaucrats, she has had to figure out in real time how to respond to the threat of Trump and his extremist followers.</p><p>“Those who do not speak up when they’re in positions of power become complicit,” she said. “Those who do speak up do not automatically become partisan. And I think that’s an argument from the far right: that speaking out for democracy is in some way partisan.”</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">A<span class="smallcaps">s Super Tuesday</span> kicked off, Griswold met me at a ballot-processing center in Jefferson County, a blue suburban and rural area about half an hour west of Denver. Wearing an Apple Watch and blue blazer, she was trailed by aides and one security official as she walked through the front door. Her focus, at least in that moment, was to show me how safe and secure she believed Colorado’s elections had grown under her watch—even if she, herself, was now more at risk.</p><p dir="ltr">Griswold told me that a local news outlet, <em>The Colorado Sun</em>, <a href="https://newspack-coloradosun.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/21136-CPI-CO-embargoed-Toplines-CO-Issues.pdf">had recently conducted a poll</a> and that, in the category of “trust,” those who “administer elections and count ballots in Colorado” outperformed every other civic category. She also said that, as of the last processing, an overwhelming majority of voters, no matter their party, had used a mail-in or drop-box ballot. Nevertheless, a common MAGA-world talking point is that anything other than old-school, same-day, in-person voting is tantamount to voter fraud. In Jefferson County, between 95 and 98 percent of all voters, regardless of party affiliation, opt to use ballot drop boxes or to vote by mail in lieu of using traditional voting machines at polling stations.</p><p dir="ltr">I rode the elevator with Griswold’s group and the Jefferson County clerk down to the basement of the facility for a look at the various ballot-processing procedures. We wandered long concrete hallways and toured several windowless rooms that required key-card entry: the ballot-casting room, the signature-verification room. In one area, ballots zipped through a massive machine that workers had nicknamed “HAL.” The basement was filled with election judges wearing colored lanyards denoting their political affiliation and mingling pleasantly with one another. Many of these short-term contractors are older, retired people—Griswold shook their hands and thanked them. Wherever we went, individuals stopped to take notice of the roving entourage, though it was unclear how many recognized her.</p><p>In Colorado, as in other states, ballot-counting and all related procedures are carried out by a politically diverse pool of workers. But back in 2020, Griswold told me, certain conservative election judges in the state underwent “alternative training” by Republican-aligned groups for their roles and improperly rejected “huge amounts” of legitimate ballots. In another recent scandal, former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was hit with <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2024/02/06/mesa-clerk-tina-peters-trial-delayed-july/">10 charges</a> on allegations related to a voting-systems breach. Peters maintains that she was looking for evidence of voter fraud or manipulation in the machines, which were built by Dominion Voting Systems, the same company at the center of last year’s historic Fox News settlement. (Some of the threats Griswold receives invoke Peters’s name as if she were a martyr.)</p><p>Early this morning, Griswold’s spokesperson told me that yesterday’s Super Tuesday primary went “very smoothly” and that “no major problems were reported.” What chaos might have happened had the Court ruled the other way? Would two sets of ballots have been floating around out there, like alternative Super Bowl–victory T-shirts for both teams? Griswold told me that, in the unlikely event that the Court deemed Trump ineligible, all the votes cast for him would have simply been “rejected.” She compared this outcome to that of other erstwhile Republican candidates, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, who is no longer in the race but whose name is still on the Colorado ballot because her office didn’t receive his paperwork to formally remove it. Of course, had Trump’s more than half-a-million Colorado primary votes been “rejected,” even by law, something akin to another January 6 might have taken place. Griswold acknowledged this.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/democrats-congress-trump-january-6/677545/?utm_source=feed">Read: How Democrats could disqualify Trump if the Supreme Court doesn’t</a>]</i></p><p>“We unfortunately contingency-plan for a lot of things,” she said, “including, by the way, in 2020. Everything that Trump was threatening—sending federal law enforcement to polling locations, pulling out the voting equipment, federalizing the National Guard—I took every single thing he said very seriously.”</p><p class="dropcap">G<span class="smallcaps">riswold grew up</span> in tiny, unincorporated Drake, Colorado, not far from Rocky Mountain National Park. In what sounded a bit like a phrase she’s often repeated, Griswold told me that she lived “in a cabin, with an outhouse outside, on food stamps.” She is the first member of her family to go to a four-year college. She eventually went on to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, and has more than $200,000 left in student debt. Still, as with everything about her personal experience she shared, she was wary of being perceived as weak, or helpless, or unduly complaining.</p><p dir="ltr">“I think the amount of threats and harassment coming in, if you were to internalize all of that—would be very hard to do this job,” she said. “I don’t want you to take away from this that I’m super sad and everything’s going bad.” She told me that the harassment campaign had, in a way, been galvanizing. “It’s very motivating to try to stop those guys.”</p><p dir="ltr">The threats began to trickle in after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. But they accelerated last September, when Griswold found herself as a co-defendant in the lawsuit alleging that Trump’s seditious actions in the final weeks of his presidency prevented him from holding office ever again.</p><p dir="ltr">In the months since then, Griswold has received thousands of gruesome messages and threats—she showed me a white binder of documentation nearly two inches thick. She receives intermittent physical protection from the Colorado state patrol but, much to her consternation, does not have 24/7 government-funded security. (In lieu of a round-the-clock state-patrol detail, Griswold occasionally carries out her job with private security in tow, which she pays for out of her department’s budget.) As with former Vice President Mike Pence, people at rallies have called for her hanging. A man in the Midwest called her office warning, <em>In the name of Jesus Christ, the angel of death is coming to get you.</em> “They didn’t know who he was; they just knew the phone he called from,” she said. “And then that phone started to move. The guy drove into Colorado. So, that was really unnerving.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/supreme-court-colorado-opinion-trump-disqualify/677646/?utm_source=feed">George T. Conway III: The court’s Colorado decision wasn’t about the law</a>]</i></p><p>Griswold told me she believes that certain people, including Donald Trump and Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, “opened up these floodgates.” But the problem is much more insidious, she said. “It’s every single Republican election-denier in Congress. It’s every single moderate Republican who refuses to stand up to Donald Trump or to call out the conspiracies or political violence.”</p><p>Late yesterday afternoon, back in her office, I asked Griswold if she had spoken about her situation with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who in 2020 drew Trump’s wrath and likewise received threats.</p><p>Raffensperger, Griswold said, had indeed “opened the door about his experiences” in a private conversation with her that she wouldn’t divulge on the record. “Not many people live under a constant threat environment, including not many secretaries of state,” she said. “It’s not all secretaries of state continually going through this. And so there’s not a lot of people who can relate to what it is to live like this.”</p><p>She told me that she believed the threats against her weren’t being taken seriously enough by certain government officials, perhaps because of her gender.</p><p>“I’m not telling you I don’t get upset,” she said. “I don’t think I’m avoiding it. I think I’m not allowing it to debilitate me, and that’s a big difference.”</p><p>Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represented the Colorado plaintiffs in the Fourteenth Amendment case, told me that, even in defeat, he believed that this suit had proved Trump engaged in insurrection. The six Coloradans at the center of the matter, Bookbinder added, were not extreme liberals or “Washington people,” and offered that they had “risked a lot putting themselves forward” in challenging Trump. “These were people who were active in Republican communities and really had some resistance from people they know. And they put a lot on the line to do what they thought was the right thing for the country,” he said. Heroes, in other words.</p><p>Griswold’s place in this chapter of electoral history might be less clear. I asked her how she squares her anti-Trump posture with the need to remain neutral as an election official. “I think that, No. 1, standing up for democracy is not partisan,” she said. Nor, for that matter, is standing up against those who attack our democracy, she added, “even if they’re a front-runner for the Republican Party, and even if they’re president of the United States.”</p>John Hendricksonhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/john-hendrickson/?utm_source=feedNathan Howard / Bloomberg / GettyJena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state (center), speaks with members of the media outside the U.S. Supreme Court, in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, February 8, 2024, after oral arguments over a Colorado ruling that barred Donald Trump from this year's presidential ballot because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The Fallout of Trump’s Colorado Victory2024-03-06T13:13:00-05:002024-03-08T12:01:49-05:00Secretary of State Jena Griswold believes the state’s elections are safe and secure under her watch—even if she, herself, is now at risk.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677648<p data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small><i>Sign up for </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/the-decision-a-2024-newsletter/?utm_source=feed"><i>The Decision</i></a><i>, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.</i></small></p><p>We were reminded yet again this past weekend that Joe Biden might be in deep electoral trouble. Once again, hands were wrung.</p><p>This latest bout of alarm was occasioned by a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/05/us/elections/times-siena-poll-registered-voter-crosstabs.html"><em>New York Times</em>/Siena College poll</a> showing that only 23 percent of Democratic-primary voters said they are enthusiastic about President Biden’s candidacy. Forty-five percent said Biden should not be the party’s nominee. And Donald Trump led by five points in a head-to-head matchup.</p><p>Yes, voters overwhelmingly believe that Biden is too old to be running for another term. He looks old, walks old, and seems not as sharp as he once was. This is not a new story. The premise has been challenged vigorously by the White House—to no avail.</p><p>But there might be more to voters’ acrimony toward Biden than just his age. In speaking with Democrats about the president’s reelection chances, I often pick up a sharp tone that goes beyond resignation. It sounds more like rage.</p><p>Senior citizens are not unpopular, per se. Biden himself was relatively well liked into his 70s, even among those who were not eager to vote for him. Some Democrats might have preferred Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders in past elections, but Biden still inspired a certain fondness.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/biden-age-special-counsel/677399/?utm_source=feed">Helen Lewis: Biden’s age is now unavoidable</a>]</i></p><p>Democrats were grateful that he was willing to run against, and able to defeat, Trump in 2020. It’s not at all clear that the likes of Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Pete Buttigieg could have pulled that off. Many voters appreciated the relative normalcy Biden brought to the White House after the bedlam of Trump. This gratitude was reflected in the sturdy approval ratings Biden received in the first six months of his term.</p><p>But <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/329384/presidential-approval-ratings-joe-biden.aspx">those numbers</a> have since plummeted. From the high 50s (in early 2021) to the low 40s (in much of 2022 and 2023) to the 30s (36 percent in the <em>Times</em>/Siena poll). Biden’s team has expressed bewilderment over this decline, which has coincided with an improved economy. Many pollsters pin the reversal on the bloody U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. But that does not account for Biden’s steadily falling fortunes long afterward.</p><p>As a general rule, voters tend not to appreciate late-career politicians when they’re trying to stick around. Hillary Clinton was among the <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/159587/hillary-clinton-barack-obama-admired-2012.aspx">most admired leaders</a> in America when she left her post as secretary of state, in early 2013. That esteem <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/243242/snapshot-hillary-clinton-favorable-rating-low.aspx">eroded considerably</a> when she started seeking a promotion in 2015. Perhaps Biden’s turnabout owes to a similar phenomenon: Voters preferred his presidency as a farewell tour more than an endurance run.</p><p>Even many of Biden’s biggest defenders say privately that they didn’t expect him to run again. Biden himself suggested as much. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/09/politics/joe-biden-bridge-new-generation-of-leaders/index.html">said</a> at a March 2020 campaign rally in Detroit. He <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/politics/joe-biden-vice-president-pick.html">called himself</a> a “transition candidate.” Sarah Longwell, the<em> Bulwark</em> publisher who has conducted focus groups across the political spectrum, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/09/biden-reelection-transition-president/675395/?utm_source=feed">told me</a> last September: “It seems pretty implicit in the way voters talk that they didn’t expect him to be a two-term president.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/09/biden-reelection-transition-president/675395/?utm_source=feed">Read: So much for Biden the bridge president</a>]</i></p><p>I’m struck when I speak with exasperated Biden voters by how often they bring up the “bridge” quote and the “transition candidate” line. This suggests that they viewed their past support for Biden as an emergency proposition—and that his ongoing presence violates an implied bargain. Sure, politicians are always trying to keep their options open. But you can understand how voters might feel bait-and-switched by Biden’s refusal to go away.</p><p>It’s easy to sympathize with an old-timer reluctant to give up something he loves. In Biden’s case, though, the stakes are potentially catastrophic. By running again—despite his age, despite his low approval ratings, despite his poor showing in the polls against Trump—Biden could be engaging in one of the most selfish, hubristic, and potentially destructive acts ever undertaken by an American president. If he winds up losing, that’s all anyone will remember him for. Bill Maher <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-warns-biden-only-dem-lose-trump-in-2024-ruth-bader-ginsburg-presidency">has said</a> Biden could go down as the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the presidency.” Or of democracy.</p><p>Large majorities of Americans don’t want to see Trump back in the White House. Many are terrified at the prospect—with extremely good reason. Biden has put them in an incredibly dangerous position. But the more unpopular Biden becomes, the more stubborn he appears.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/case-biden/677591/?utm_source=feed">Jonathan V. Last: Biden is still the Democrats’ best bet for November</a>]</i></p><p>Many of Biden’s defenders say it’s too late to do anything about this predicament. “Democrats are increasingly getting very, very vocal in their defense of Biden,” the Brookings Institution’s Elaine Kamarck, a member of the Democratic National Committee, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/us/politics/biden-poll.html">told <em>The New York Times</em></a> recently. “The guy’s a good guy. He’s not senile. He’s made good choices. The economy’s the best economy in the world. I mean, shut up. Let’s get behind this guy.”</p><p>I’m no political-messaging expert, but the shut-up-and-get-behind-this-guy approach seems a tad off-putting. Maybe it is too late to do anything. Or is it, really? The persistence of the question signals an enduring market for a better option. At the very least, voters seem less than thrilled with this situation. A lot of them blame Biden for it.</p><p>The plane has taken off. It is clearly sputtering. The pilot is not saying much. When he does, he sounds shaky. He is not inspiring confidence. A solid majority of passengers would much rather someone else were at the controls. They have voiced this concern repeatedly. (For the record, the Federal Aviation Administration’s compulsory retirement age for commercial pilots is 65.)</p><p>But the flight attendants keep telling us it’s too late. The plane’s already in the air. And this is the only captain we have available. Trust us, in private he’s in peak form. <em>He’s not senile</em>.</p><p>Please remain seated, and keep your seat belts fastened.</p>Mark Leibovichhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/mark-leibovich/?utm_source=feedBrendan Smialowski / AFP / GettyIt’s Not Just That Biden Is Old2024-03-06T06:00:00-05:002024-03-08T12:02:07-05:00It’s that he’s being reckless.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677631<p dir="ltr">Just since last November, the most closely watched measure of consumer confidence about the economy has soared by about 25 percent. That’s among the most rapid improvements recorded in years for the <a href="http://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/">University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment</a>, even after a slight decline in the latest figures released yesterday. </p><p dir="ltr">And yet, even as consumer confidence has rebounded since last fall, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has remained virtually unchanged—and negative. Now, as then, a solid 55 percent majority of Americans say they disapprove of his performance as president in the index maintained by FiveThirtyEight, while only about 40 percent approve.</p><p dir="ltr">That divergence between improving attitudes about the economy and stubbornly negative assessments of the president’s performance is compounding the unease of Democratic strategists as they contemplate the impending rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump. Most Democratic strategists I spoke with believe that brightening views about the economy could still benefit Biden. But many also acknowledge that each month that passes without improvement for Biden raises more questions about whether even growing economic optimism will overcome voters’ doubts about him on other fronts.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/jacob-heilbrunn-america-last-trump-putin/677609/?utm_source=feed">Read: The real reason Trump loves Putin</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser to Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection, told me that if he was in the White House again today, “I would say I’m not that concerned” about improving economic attitudes not lifting Biden yet, “because this takes time.” But, Sosnik added, “if you come back to me in six weeks or two months and we haven’t seen any movement, then I’d start becoming very concerned.”</p><p dir="ltr">Historically, measures of consumer confidence have been a revealing gauge of an incumbent president’s reelection chances. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/02/biden-presidency-comeback/621467/?utm_source=feed">as I’ve written</a>, all saw their job-approval ratings tumble when consumer confidence fell early in their first terms amid widespread unease over the economy. But when the economy revived and consumer confidence improved later in their term, each man’s approval rating rose with it. Riding the wave of those improving attitudes, all three won their reelection campaigns, Reagan in a historic 49-state landslide.</p><p dir="ltr">By contrast, when Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush lost their reelection bids, declining or stagnant consumer confidence was an early augur of their eventual defeat. Collapsing consumer confidence amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 also foreshadowed Trump’s defeat, after sustained optimism about the economy had been one of his greatest political strengths during his first three years.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/03/case-biden/677591/?utm_source=feed">Read: Biden Is still the Democrats’ best bet for November</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Polling leaves little doubt that since last fall, more Americans are starting to feel better about the economy. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/611135/immigration-surges-top-important-problem-list.aspx">An index of economic attitudes compiled by the Gallup Organization</a> recently reached its highest level since September 2021. Even after the small retreat in the latest numbers, the University of Michigan’s index is now at its highest level since the summer of 2021. A <a href="https://www.conference-board.org/topics/consumer-confidence">separate consumer-confidence survey conducted by the Conference Board</a>, a business group, also slipped slightly in February but remains higher than its level last fall.</p><p dir="ltr">None of this, though, has yet generated any discernible improvement in Biden’s standing with the public. In fact, the recent Gallup Poll that documented the rise in economic optimism since last October <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/610988/biden-job-approval-edges-down.aspx">found that Biden’s approval rating</a> over the same period had fallen, from 41 to 38 percent—a single percentage point above the lowest mark Gallup has ever measured for him. The fact that consumer confidence has revived without elevating Biden’s ratings suggests “that impressions of his economic handling have been set and will likely be hard to change as he faces other struggles with perceptions of age and capacity,” the Republican pollster Micah Roberts told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Paul Kellstedt, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, told me that two big structural shifts in public opinion help explain why Biden has not benefited more so far from these green shoots of optimism.</p><p dir="ltr">One, Kellstedt said, is that the relationship is weakening between objective economic trends and consumer confidence. Compared with the days of Reagan or Clinton, more voters in both parties are reluctant to describe even a booming economy in positive terms when the other party holds the White House, Kellstedt noted. Given Biden’s record of overall economic growth and job creation, as well as the dramatic rise in the stock market, the consumer-confidence numbers, though improving, are still lower “than they should be based on objective fundamentals,” he told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Still, optimism about the economy has increased since last fall, not only among Democrats but also among independents and even Republicans, trends that have lifted previous presidents. That points to what Kellstedt calls the second structural challenge facing Biden: The relationship between voters’ attitudes about the economy and their judgments about the president is also weakening.</p><p dir="ltr">Amid these new patterns in public opinion, “a strengthening economy is not going to hurt Biden, of course, but how much it is going to help him is quite uncertain,” Kellstedt told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Political strategists in both parties believe another central reason Biden isn’t benefiting more from the many positive economic trends under his presidency is that so many Americans remain scarred by the biggest exception: the highest inflation in four decades. Although costs aren’t rising nearly as fast as they were earlier in Biden’s presidency, for many essentials, <a href="https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SAF11">such as food</a> and rent, prices remain much higher than when he took office.</p><p dir="ltr">Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who also surveys economic attitudes for CNBC, told me that more than anything else, “what is holding back” Biden from rising is that “it is still well within your memory when you were spending at the grocery store 10 to 20 percent less than you are now.”</p><p dir="ltr">Republicans see a related factor constraining Biden’s potential gains: The baseline that voters are comparing him against is not in the distant past, but what they remember from the Trump presidency before the pandemic. Even though the University of Michigan’s consumer-confidence index and Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index have improved substantially since last year, for instance, in absolute terms they still stand well below their levels during Trump’s first three years. “There’s an alternative economic approach that voters can remember and compare to the years under Bidenomics,” Roberts told me. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s 2024 campaign, told me voters don’t credit Biden for moderating inflation largely because they blame him for causing it in the first place.</p><p dir="ltr">A silver lining in all this for Biden is that, as Kellstedt noted, voters’ judgments about which candidate can better manage the economy don’t determine their preferences in the presidential race as much as they once did. Today, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/biden-2020-trump-election/616912/?utm_source=feed">as I’ve written over the years</a>, the two political coalitions are held together more by shared cultural values than by common economic interests.</p><p dir="ltr">As recently as the 2022 election, Democratic House candidates not only carried the small share of voters who described the economy as good, but also won more than three-fifths of the much larger group who called it only fair, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/national-results/house/0">according to exit polls</a>. That was primarily because a historically large number of voters down on the economy, and Biden’s performance, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/11/midterm-election-results-democrats-avoid-red-wave/672050/?utm_source=feed">nonetheless rejected Republican candidates whom they viewed as a threat to their rights (particularly on abortion), their values, and democracy itself</a>. That same dynamic will undoubtedly help Biden in 2024, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/12/politics/joe-biden-coalition-upscale-voters-2024/index.html">particularly among upper-middle-class voters</a> who have felt less strain over inflation, are most likely to be benefiting from the stock market’s surge, and are the most receptive to Democratic charges that Trump will threaten democracy and their personal freedoms.</p><p dir="ltr">But Biden also has plenty of his own vulnerabilities on noneconomic issues. Not only Republicans but also independents give him dismal ratings for his handling of immigration and the border. His expansive support of Israel’s war against Hamas has deeply divided the Democratic coalition. And a broad consensus of voters, <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-think-both-biden-and-trump-are-too-old-serve-second-terms">now often about 80 percent or more in polls</a>, worry that Biden is too old for another term. If attitudes about the economy continue to mend, and Biden’s approval remains mired, the story “that will be written is that voters have tuned him out, they’ve made their minds up, he’s too old,” Sosnik told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump inspires such intense resistance that Biden, in a rematch, is virtually certain to win more support than any modern president from voters who are pessimistic about the economy. But that doesn’t mean Biden can overcome any deficit to Trump on the economy, no matter how large. And that deficit right now is very large: In national polls released last month by both <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-trump-economy-presidential-race-rcna136834">NBC News</a> and <a href="https://law.marquette.edu/poll/">Marquette University Law School</a>, voters trusted Trump over Biden for handling the economy by about 20 percentage points.</p><p dir="ltr">At some point, the strategists I spoke with agree, the economic hole could become too deep to climb from by relying on other issues. (Both the NBC and Marquette polls showed Biden running much closer to Trump in the ballot test than on the economy—but still trailing the former president on the ballot test.) To overtake Trump, Biden likely needs twin dynamics to continue. He needs the slight February pullback evident in the University of Michigan and Conference Board surveys to prove a blip, and the share of Americans satisfied with the economy to continue growing. And then he needs more of those satisfied voters to credit him for the improvement.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden has some powerful arguments he can marshal to sell voters on his economic record. Wages have been rising faster than prices since last spring, <a href="https://www.carsongroup.com/insights/blog/this-economy-is-also-working-well-for-lower-income-workers/">particularly for low-income workers</a>. The big three economic bills Biden passed in his first two years <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/07/biden-economic-industrial-investment-red-state-beneficiaries/674633/?utm_source=feed">have triggered an enormous investment boom</a> in new manufacturing plants for clean energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductors, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/biden-keeping-big-economic-promise/677444/?utm_source=feed">with the benefits flowing disproportionately toward smaller blue-collar communities largely excluded</a> from the tech-heavy information economy. He can also point to significant legislative achievements that are helping families afford prescription-drug and health-care costs—<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/politics/biden-older-voters-2024/index.html">a potentially powerful calling card, especially with seniors</a>. If the Federal Reserve Board cuts interest rates by this summer—which it has signaled it will do if inflation remains moderate—that could turbocharge the improvement in consumer confidence.</p><p dir="ltr">“There is so much other good news that I feel like there’s a case to be made to people that this president has substantially improved the economy,” Campbell told me. “But whether that ultimately supersedes people’s negativity about [inflation] is a question that I don’t have an answer to.”</p><p dir="ltr">Biden still has time to improve his standing on the economy, but that time isn’t unlimited. Sosnik says history has shown that voters solidify their judgments about a president’s performance in the period between the second half of his third year in office and the first half of his fourth year, about four months from now. President John F. Kennedy, speaking about the economy, famously said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The next few months will reveal whether Biden’s has run aground too deeply for that still to apply.</p>Ronald Brownsteinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ronald-brownstein/?utm_source=feedJim Watson / AFP / GettyClosing This Gap May Be Biden’s Key to a Second Term2024-03-02T09:34:00-05:002024-03-04T13:46:51-05:00The president still has time to improve his standing on the economy, but that time isn’t unlimited.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677591<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Let’s start with the obvious. The concerns about Joe Biden are valid: He’s old. He talks slowly. He occasionally bumbles the basics in public appearances.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden’s age is so concerning that many Biden supporters now believe he should step aside and let some other candidate become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. <em>The New York Times</em> journalist Ezra Klein made the best-available case for this view recently in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/opinion/ezra-klein-biden-audio-essay.html">a 4,000-word piece</a> that garnered intense attention by arguing that Biden is no longer up to the task of campaign life. “He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago,” Klein writes. “The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.”</p><p dir="ltr">In one sense Klein is correct. As the political strategist Mike Murphy said many moons ago, Biden’s age is like a gigantic pair of antlers he wears on his head, all day every day. Even when he does something exceptional—like visit a war zone in Ukraine, or whip inflation—the people applauding him are thinking, Can’t. Stop. Staring. At. The antlers.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden can’t shed these antlers. He’s going to wear them from now until November 5. If anything, they’ll probably grow.</p><p dir="ltr">That said, there’s another point worth noting up front: Joe Biden is almost certainly the strongest possible candidate Democrats can field against Donald Trump in 2024.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Biden’s strengths as a candidate are considerable. He has presided over an extraordinarily productive first term in which he’s passed multiple pieces of popular legislation with bipartisan majorities.</p><p dir="ltr">Unemployment is at its lowest low, GDP growth is robust, real wage gains have been led by the bottom quartile, and the American economy has achieved a post-COVID soft landing that makes us the envy of the world. He has no major scandals. His handling of American foreign policy has been stronger and defter than any recent president’s.</p><p dir="ltr">Moreover, he is a known quantity. The recent Michigan primary results underscored that Democratic voters don’t actually have an appetite for leaving Biden. In 2012, 11 percent of Michigan Democrats voted “uncommitted” against Barack Obama when he had no opposition. This week, with two challengers on the ballot and progressive activists whipping votes against Biden, the “uncommitted” vote share was just 13 percent. Biden is fully vetted, his liabilities priced in. Voters are not being asked to take a chance on him.</p><p dir="ltr">This last part is crucial, because 2024 pits a current president against a former president, making both quasi-incumbents. If Biden was replaced, another Democrat would have her or his own strengths—but would be an insurgent. Asking voters to roll the dice on a fresh face against a functionally incumbent President Trump is a bigger ask than you might think.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/joe-biden-democratic-party-age-nomination/677434/?utm_source=feed">Read: Democrats should pick a new presidential candidate now</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">But the biggest problem plaguing arguments for Biden’s retirement is: Who then? Pretend you are a Democrat and have been handed a magical monkey’s paw. You believe that Biden is too old to defeat Trump and so you make a wish: I want a younger, more vigorous Democrat. There’s a puff of smoke and Kamala Harris is the nominee.</p><p dir="ltr">Do you feel better about the odds of defeating Trump in nine months?</p><p dir="ltr">You shouldn’t. Harris’s approval rating is slightly lower than Biden’s. People skeptical of her political abilities point to her time as vice president, but that’s not really fair: Very few vice presidents look like plausible successors during their time in office. (George H. W. Bush and Al Gore are the exceptions.)</p><p dir="ltr">What should worry you about Harris is her 2020 campaign, which was somehow both disorganized and insular. She did not exhibit the kind of management skills or political instincts that inspire confidence in her ability to win a national campaign. Worse, she only rarely exhibited top-level-candidate skills.</p><p dir="ltr">Harris had some great moments in 2020. Her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4ecapNBaXU">announcement speech</a> and <a href="https://www.thebulwark.com/the-democrats-have-their-big-four/">first debate performance</a> were riveting. But more often she was flat-footed and awkward. She fell apart <a href="https://www.thebulwark.com/joe-biden-is-already-running-against-trump-as-the-democratic-nominee/">at the Michigan debate</a> in 2019 and never got polling traction. (My colleague Sarah Longwell likens Harris to a professional golfer who’s got the yips.)</p><p dir="ltr">Some public polling on this question fills out the picture: Emerson finds <a href="https://twitter.com/EmersonPolling/status/1758448456111141263">Harris losing to Trump by three percentage points</a> (Biden is down one point in the same poll). Fox has <a href="https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/11/Fox_November-10-13-2023_National_Topline_November-15-Release.pdf">Harris losing by five points</a> (it also has Biden down by one point). These are just two polls and the questions were hypothetical, but at best, you can say that Harris is not obviously superior to Biden in terms of electability. At worst, she might give Democrats longer odds.</p><p dir="ltr">So you go back to the monkey’s paw with another wish: a younger, more vigorous Democrat who’s not Kamala Harris, please.</p><p dir="ltr">I’m not sure how it would work logistically—would the Democratic Party turn its back on the sitting vice president?—but this is magic, so just roll with it. There’s a puff of smoke and Gavin Newsom walks onstage.</p><p dir="ltr">Newsom is one of those people who, like Bill Clinton, has been running for president since he was 5 years old. Also like Clinton, Newsom is a good talker with some ideas in his head. But Clinton was a third-way Democrat from the Deep South at a time when the Democratic Party needed southern blue-collar voters. Today, the Democratic Party needs Rust Belt blue-collar voters—and Newsom is a liberal from San Francisco. Not a great starting position.</p><p dir="ltr">Every non-Harris Democrat begins from a place of lower name recognition, meaning that there would be a rush to define them in the minds of voters. Republicans have convinced 45 percent of the country that Scrantonian Joe Biden is a Communist. What do you think they’d do with Newsom? In the Fox poll, he runs even with Vice President Harris at -4 to Trump. In the more recent Emerson poll, Newsom trails Trump by 10 points.</p><p dir="ltr">Then there’s the eyeball test. Look at Newsom’s slicked-back hair, his gleaming smile, and tell me: Does he look like the guy to eat into Trump’s margins among working-class whites in Pennsylvania and Michigan?</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">What about Pennsylvania and Michigan? You have only one wish left on the monkey’s paw, and Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro—popular governors who won big in swing states in 2022—are sitting right there. Maybe you should put one of them on the ticket in place of Biden?</p><p dir="ltr">There’s some polling to back you up: <a href="https://www.mrgmi.com/presidential-politics-poll-results-october-2023">Whitmer would probably beat Trump in Michigan</a> and <a href="https://www.muhlenberg.edu/media/contentassets/pdf/about/polling/December%202023%20--%20Pennsylvania%20Presidential%20Election%20Survey.pdf">Shapiro would probably beat Trump in Pennsylvania.</a></p><p dir="ltr">Nationally, it’s a much different question. I haven’t found anyone who’s polled Shapiro-Trump nationally, but Emerson and Fox both have Whitmer polling worse than Biden. (Emerson has Whitmer 12 points behind Trump.)</p><p dir="ltr">Name recognition accounts for part of this gap, but not all of it. In 2022, Whitmer won her gubernatorial race <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Michigan_gubernatorial_election">by 11 points</a> while Shapiro won <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Pennsylvania_gubernatorial_election">by 15.</a> But each ran against an underfunded MAGA extremist. In the Michigan poll pitting Whitmer against Trump, she leads by only six points; in the Pennsylvania poll with Shapiro, he leads Trump by 11. So even in states where everyone knows them, these potential saviors are softer against Trump than they were against their 2022 MAGA tomato cans.</p><p dir="ltr">Sure, Whitmer and Shapiro seem like strong candidates at the midsize-state level. But you never know whether a candidate will pop until they hit the national stage. Scott Walker, Ron DeSantis, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Kamala Harris—all of these politicians looked formidable too. Then the presidential-election MRI for the soul exposed their liabilities. Always remember that Barack Obama’s ascent from promising senator to generational political talent was the exception, not the rule.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/no-labels-2024-election/677570/?utm_source=feed">Read: A wild and dangerous 2024 experiment</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Let’s say that one of these not–Kamala Harris candidates is chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August. In the span of 10 weeks they would have to:</p><ol>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Define themselves to the national audience while simultaneously resisting Trump’s attempts to define them.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Build a national campaign structure and get-out-the-vote operation.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Unify the Democratic Party.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Fend off any surprises uncovered during their public (and at-scale) vetting.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Earn credit in the minds of voters for the Biden economy.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Distance themselves from unpopular Biden policies.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Portray themselves as a credible commander in chief.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Lay out a coherent governing vision.</p>
</li>
<li aria-level="1" dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr" role="presentation">Persuade roughly 51 percent of the country to support them.</p>
</li>
</ol><p dir="ltr">Perhaps it’s possible. But that strikes me as a particularly tall order, even if one of them is a generational political talent. Which—again with the odds—they probably aren’t.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">We’ve got one final problem with the monkey’s paw: It doesn’t exist. If Biden withdrew from the race, the Democratic Party would confront a messy, time-consuming process to replace him. Perhaps a rigorous but amicable write-in campaign would produce a strong nominee and a unified party. But perhaps the party would experience a demolition derby that results in a suboptimal nominee and hard feelings.</p><p>Or maybe party elites at a brokered convention would choose a good nominee. (This is the Ezra Klein scenario, and I’m sympathetic to it. Smoke-filled back rooms get a bad rap; historically they produced better candidates than the modern primary system.) But very few living people have participated in a brokered convention. It could easily devolve into chaos and fracture the moderate, liberal, and progressive wings of the party.</p><p dir="ltr">The point is: Biden has a 50–50 shot. Maybe a little bit worse, maybe a little bit better—like playing blackjack. Every other option is a crapshoot in which the best outcome you can reasonably hope for is 50–50 odds and the worst outcome pushes the odds to something like one in three.</p><p dir="ltr">Joe Biden is Joe Biden. He isn’t going to win a 10-point, realigning victory. But his path to reelection is clear: Focus like a laser on suburban and working-class white voters in a handful of swing states. Remind them that Trump is a chaos agent who wrecked the economy. Show them how good the economy is now. Make a couple of jokes about the antlers. And then bring these people home—because many of them already voted for him once.</p><p dir="ltr"><br>
Having a sure thing would certainly be nice, given the ongoing authoritarian threat we face. But there isn’t one. Joe Biden is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_R6QSuGST0">the best deal democracy is going to get.</a></p>Jonathan V. Lasthttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/jonathan-v-last/?utm_source=feedSamuel Corum / Bloomberg / GettyBiden Is Still the Democrats’ Best Bet for November2024-03-02T06:30:00-05:002024-03-02T06:31:56-05:00No amount of wishful thinking is going to magically produce a winning Candidate B.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677570<p data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small><i>Sign up for </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/the-decision-a-2024-newsletter/?utm_source=feed"><i>The Decision</i></a><i>, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.</i></small></p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">“W<span class="smallcaps">e are in this</span> 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.</p><p>He continued: “And that’s a function not only of having a ticket eventually that can accumulate electoral votes—”</p><p>That’s when Nancy Jacobson, the group’s CEO and founder, interjected.</p><p dir="ltr">“But I just want to clarify, this organization is <em>not</em> in it to win it,” Jacobson said, a truly unusual statement for a political operative.</p><p dir="ltr">“This organization is in it to give people a <em>choice</em>.”</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/06/robert-f-kennedy-jr-presidential-campaign-misinformation-maga-support/674490/?utm_source=feed">Robert F. Kennedy Jr.</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/07/biden-cornel-west-no-labels-2024-election/674757/?utm_source=feed">Cornel West</a>, 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.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/no-labels-logic/677279/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: The brain-breaking logic of No Labels</a>]</i></p><p>Even if the forthcoming White House bid ends up as nothing but a sideshow, it is still garnering attention: Polls <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/why-third-party-candidates-threaten-biden-in-2024-b639e64f">indicate</a> 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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">N<span class="smallcaps">ancy Jacobson,</span> 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 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160328062208/http://www.nolabels.org/press-releases/no-labels-applauds-creation-of-congressional-problem-solvers-caucus/">as the result</a> of No Labels’ work.</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p>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.</p><p dir="ltr">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 <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/271432208">raised</a> $21.2 million in 2022, up from $11.3 million the year before. (The 2023 figures are not yet available to the public.)</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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. </p><p class="dropcap">N<span class="smallcaps">o Labels’ leaders </span>are hardly alone in hating their 2024 options. In late January, a <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4419421-vast-majority-voters-unenthusiastic-trump-biden-rematch/">Decision Desk HQ/NewsNation poll</a> showed that 59 percent of voters are “not too enthusiastic” or “not at all enthusiastic” about the prospect of a 2020 rematch. A <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/voters-biden-trump-rematch-now-facing-longest-campaign/story?id=106765698">separate poll</a> in December found roughly the same thing.</p><p>But unlike all the people sitting around complaining about the coming election, No Labels is trying to <em>do something</em>. 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?”</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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—<em>party</em>—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.</p><p dir="ltr">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,” <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/joe-manchin-floats-mitt-romney-potential-running-mate-rcna138977">Manchin told reporters</a>. 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.</p><p dir="ltr">Back in November, the organization’s leaders <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/11/30/no-labels-presidential-convention-event-virtual">scuttled</a> 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.</p><p dir="ltr">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, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/172059/no-labels-took-100000-clarence-thomas-buddy-harlan-crow">is one</a>.)</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p>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.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ross-perots-lasting-legacy/593569/?utm_source=feed">Todd S. Purdum: Ross Perot’s lasting legacy</a>]</i></p><p>Back in December, Clancy <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/no-labels-coalition-government-electoral-college-rcna130709">raised</a> 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 <em>West Wing</em> episode.</p><p dir="ltr">Around this time, another No Labels co-founder, former Representative Tom Davis, told <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/no-labels-coalition-government-electoral-college-rcna130709">NBC News</a> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p dir="ltr">“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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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 <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24409146-february-5-2024-bipartisan-letter">sent a letter</a> to three No Labels leaders warning them that a contingent election would be “calamitous.”</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">A<span class="smallcaps">lthough it’s stocked</span> 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.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/07/joe-lieberman-interview-no-labels-2024-election/674711/?utm_source=feed">Read: Joe Lieberman weighs the Trump risk</a>]</i></p><p>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 <a href="https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1644145691252457473">video</a> 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 <em>The Bulwark</em> who has contributed to <em>The Atlantic</em> 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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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?”</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">Later, when I spoke with Wilson about his comments in the clip, he said the video screened for reporters had been disingenuously edited.</p><p dir="ltr">“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 <em>politically</em>.”</p><p dir="ltr">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?</p><p class="dropcap">A<span class="smallcaps">s of now, </span>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 <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/18/no-labels-nikki-haley-00136369">said</a> she’s not interested. On Sunday, Joe Cunningham, No Labels’ national director, <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4488229-no-labels-director-says-nikki-haley-somebody-wed-definitely-be-interested-in/">raised the prospect again</a>. Once more, her campaign immediately said no thanks.</p><p>Nevertheless, Haley’s name keeps coming up in conversations.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/27/clinton-pollster-2024-00138163">prior reporting</a>.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/joe-manchin-third-party-candidates/676178/?utm_source=feed">Elliot Ackerman: Meet the super SPAC</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">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 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/us/politics/durst-no-labels-lawsuit-election-donors.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare">sued the organization</a> 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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p dir="ltr">“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.”</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">D<span class="smallcaps">uring the private briefing</span>, 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.” </p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/07/biden-cornel-west-no-labels-2024-election/674757/?utm_source=feed">Read: The long-shot candidate who has the White House worried</a>]</i></p><p>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.</p><p>“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.</p><p>“Me too,” Page added.</p><p>“Yeah, absolutely,” White said.</p><p>In an email, Jacobson told me, “Personally, I would never vote for Trump ever, nor would the leaders or the donors to the group.”</p><p>Her email signature features an animated GIF of <em>Washington Crossing the Delaware</em> with the words <span class="smallcaps">BE BRAVE</span> 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.</p>John Hendricksonhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/john-hendrickson/?utm_source=feedIllustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.A Wild and Dangerous 2024 Experiment2024-02-27T06:00:00-05:002024-03-01T09:35:17-05:00Inside No Labels, the most confounding third-party gambit of the 2024 electiontag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677550<p class="dropcap">N<span class="smallcaps">ot too long ago,</span> Donald Trump looked finished. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the repeal of <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, and a poor Republican showing in the 2022 midterms, the GOP seemed eager to move on from the former president. <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2020/11/09/the-post-trump-era-begins-490845">The</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/what-post-trump-era-feels-like/617249/?utm_source=feed">post</a>-<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/opinion/kari-lake-glenn-youngkin-post-trump-republicans.html">Trump</a> <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/598480-the-post-trump-era-has-begun/">era</a> had supposedly begun.</p><p>Just one week after the midterms, he entered the 2024 race, announcing his candidacy to a room of <a href="https://twitter.com/SarahAMatthews1/status/1592708100116852737?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1592708100116852737%7Ctwgr%5E338f2f355bd7805adea9dd0f1a5a5917e4cea7d6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rollingstone.com%2Fpolitics%2Fpolitics-news%2Ftrump-2024-announcement-boring-fox-news-cuts-away-1234631603%2F">bored-looking</a> hangers-on. Even his children weren’t there. Security had to <a href="https://twitter.com/OliviaRubinABC/status/1592720067200188417?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1592720067200188417%7Ctwgr%5E7722d0bdfe47fceb6a21c9b9e31a8567b72f7c26%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fus-politics%2Fcrowd-stopped-from-leaving-trump-s-2024-announcement-speech-b2226082.html">pen people in</a> to keep them from leaving during his meandering speech.</p><p>Today, thanks to Trump’s dominant performance in South Carolina, the Republican primary is all but over. Trump’s margin was so comfortable that the Associated Press called the race as soon as polls closed. How did we get here? How did Trump go from historically weak to unassailable?</p><p>I talk with Republican-primary voters in <a href="https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast/focus-group/">focus groups</a> every week, and through these conversations, I’ve learned that the answer has as much to do with Trump’s party and his would-be competitors as it does with Trump himself. Most Republican leaders have profoundly misread their base in this moment.</p><p>The other candidates hoped to be able to defeat Trump even as they accommodated his behavior and made excuses for his criminality. They even said they would support his reelection. By doing so, they established a permission structure for Republican voters to return to Trump, all but ensuring his rise.</p><p class="dropcap">M<span class="smallcaps">y focus groups</span> over the past few years can be seen as a travelogue through the GOP’s journey back to Trump. Three key themes emerged that help explain why Trump’s opponents failed to gain traction.</p><p>First, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Republican field didn’t offer voters anything new.</p><p>Nikki Haley and Mike Pence cast themselves as avatars of the pre-Trump GOP. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy did their best to imitate Trump, presenting themselves as younger and more competent stewards of the same MAGA agenda. None of them offered a viable alternative to Trump; instead, they spent their resources trying not to anger his supporters.</p><p>But Republican voters don’t want Reagan Republicanism. Old-school conservatives may pine for a return to balanced budgets, personal responsibility, and American leadership in the world (guilty). But a greater share of Republican voters prefer an isolationist foreign policy and candidates who promise to punish their domestic enemies.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/trump-vice-president-nikki-haley/677066/?utm_source=feed">Read: Nikki Haley’s endgame</a>]</i></p><p>“The feds, both parties, the elites … want everything to go back to the way it was before Trump got elected,” said Bret, a two-time Trump voter from Georgia. “And that would be the wrong direction, in my opinion.”</p><p>And voters aren’t interested in Trump-lite when they can have the real thing. Trump’s supporters see in him a leader who’s willing to fight for them. No other candidate proved they could do that better than Trump.</p><p>“We need a man that is strong as hell, a brick house,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from South Carolina, in May 2023. “He is that man.”</p><p>Larry, an Iowa Republican, called Trump “a disrupter. In the business world, you bring in a disrupter when everybody’s stuck in groupthink. That’s what I hired him to do: blow stuff up.”</p><p>Contrast that with how Republican voters saw his opponents. “If you want to be president, you’ve got to be hated by half the country,” said Dakota, a two-time Trump voter from Iowa, adding, about Nikki Haley: “I don’t think she can do it.”</p><p>“Does it kind of feel in a sense that he just kind of gave up?” Ashley, another Iowa Republican, asked about DeSantis before he dropped out of the race.</p><p>Pence, Chris Christie, and the other also-rans came in for much worse criticism. “I don’t know if anyone would vote for him, just his family at this point,” Justin, a two-time Trump voter from Texas, said of Pence. “I think he’s alienated everyone.”</p><p>The second theme: Trump’s competitors declined to hit him on his 91 felony counts, despite the fact that voters say they have <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/08/03/republicans-vote-trump-prison-poll-jan-6-trial">serious concerns</a> about them. Instead, most of them (with the honorable exceptions of Christie and Asa Hutchinson) actively defended Trump.</p><p>DeSantis <a href="https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4153958-desantis-says-recent-trump-indictment-exemplifies-criminalization-of-politics/">called</a> the charges the “criminalization of politics.” Haley <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3909990-haley-manhattan-da-case-against-trump-more-about-revenge-than-it-is-about-justice/">said</a> the charges were “more about revenge than … about justice.” And Ramaswamy <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=And+Vivek+Ramaswamy+promised+to+pardon+Trump+on+day+one&oq=And+Vivek+Ramaswamy+promised+to+pardon+Trump+on+day+one&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBBzc5MmowajeoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">promised</a> to pardon Trump “on day one.”</p><p>By the time Haley started attacking Trump in recent weeks, it was already too late. She can call him “<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/02/14/nikki-haley-calls-trump-diminished-echoing-dojs-biden-description/?sh=1518e6762396">diminished</a>,” “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4465485-haley-calls-trump-unhinged/">unhinged</a>,” “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4476866-haley-calls-trump-weak-in-the-knees-on-putin-after-navalny-death/">weak in the knees</a>,” and “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4046308-haley-says-trump-incredibly-reckless-if-charges-in-indictment-are-true/">incredibly reckless</a>,” but voters saw her <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/us/politics/trump-convicted-republican-debate-hands.html">raise her hand</a> six months ago when asked whether she would support him if he became the nominee.</p><p>If Trump’s primary opponents weren’t going to hold his indictments against him, why should GOP voters? “It’s all a witch hunt,” Dennis, a two-time Trump voter from Michigan, said of the charges. The Department of Justice and state prosecutors bringing the cases “are terrified of Trump for whatever reason … because they’re afraid he will run and they’re afraid he will win.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/republicans-are-no-longer-political-party/677437/?utm_source=feed">Read: Republicans are no longer a political party</a>]</i></p><p>Lastly, Trump started to be seen as electable. This represented a big shift from a year ago, when voters had concerns about Trump’s ability to beat President Joe Biden in a rematch.</p><p>In February 2023, Isaac, a Pennsylvania Republican, said of Trump: “I just feel he is unelectable. I think you could put him up there against fricking Donald Duck and Donald Duck will end up coming out ahead. He just ticks too many people off.”</p><p>But as they got a better look at the alternatives—and as they <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/us/politics/biden-trump-republican-primary.html">came to believe</a> that Biden was too frail, weak, and senile to be competitive in the general election—GOP voters came around.</p><p>“I’m convinced that he is in the final stages of dementia,” Clifton, an Iowa Republican, said of Biden. “I mean, yeah, Trump’s an asshole and he doesn’t have a filter and he says stupid things, but it doesn’t matter.”</p><p>These voters have come to believe that the election is a choice between senility and recklessness. And they’ve decided they prefer the latter.</p><p class="dropcap">D<span class="smallcaps">eSantis’s rise and fall</span> is the clearest demonstration of how we got here. For a time, he looked like the greatest threat to Trump, leveraging <a href="https://time.com/6282255/ron-desantis-elon-musk-campaign-culture-war/">culture-war issues</a> to gin up the base while projecting an image of being, as one voter put it to me, “Trump <i>not</i> on steroids.”</p><p>He sent refugees to Martha’s Vineyard, went after Disney, banned books—and the base loved him for it. “For the most part, from what I hear, he’s doing a good job in Florida,” said Chris, a Republican voter from Illinois, in March 2023. “He stands for a lot of the same values that I think I do.”</p><p>But over time, DeSantis’s star began to fade. The more retail campaigning he did, and the more voters were exposed to him, the less they liked what they saw.</p><p>“I think he was a strong candidate before he was actually a candidate,” said Fred, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, in December 2023. He cited “things he’s done in Florida and how big he won his last governor’s election.” But now, he said, “I think he got a little too into the social issues.”</p><p>By the time DeSantis dropped out, skepticism had turned to contempt among the Republican voters I spoke with. Sean, a two-time Trump voter from New Hampshire, put it succinctly last month: “He has a punchable face, and I just don’t like him.”</p><p>This time last year, DeSantis had a real shot at consolidating the move-on-from-Trump faction of the GOP while making inroads with the maybe-Trumpers—each of which constitutes about a third of the party. Instead, he tried to wrestle the former president for his always-Trump base, a doomed effort. He couldn’t get traction with the always-Trumpers and he alienated the move-on-from-Trumpers. It was a hopeless strategy for a flawed candidate.</p><p>Haley may hold out for a few more weeks, even though she has virtually no chance of beating Trump outright. Her only real incentive for remaining in the race is to be the last person standing in the event that he is imprisoned or suffers a major health event. Barring either of these scenarios, Trump’s path to the nomination is clear.</p><p>This outcome wasn’t inevitable; Trump was beatable. His opponents had real opportunities to cleave off his support, but they squandered them.</p><p>The reason is simple: Republican elites don’t understand their voters. They spent eight years making excuses for Trump and supporting him at every turn, sending the clear signal that this is his party. They spent nearly a decade saying that he was a persecuted martyr—and the greatest president in history. It’s frightening, but not surprising, that their voters think he’s the only man for the job.</p>Sarah Longwellhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/sarah-longwell/?utm_source=feedMark Peterson / ReduxHow Donald Trump Became Unbeatable2024-02-25T06:00:00-05:002024-02-26T09:08:36-05:00How did we get here again?tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677563<p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/why-south-carolina-matters/677531/?utm_source=feed">the candidate who won here has captured the Republican nomination</a> 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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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 <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/trump-about-steamroll-nikki-haley/677207/?utm_source=feed">refused to go any further in criticizing Trump</a> than declaring that “chaos follows him, rightly or wrongly.”</p><p dir="ltr">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,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INzHYiloJFU&ab_channel=NikkiHaley">she said firmly</a>, 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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/why-south-carolina-matters/677531/?utm_source=feed">Read: Could South Carolina change everything?</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.)</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/how-the-gops-thinking-on-international-issues-evolved/677505/?utm_source=feed">Read: The GOP has crossed an ominous threshold on foreign policy</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p><p dir="ltr">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.</p>Ronald Brownsteinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ronald-brownstein/?utm_source=feedPatrick T. Fallon / AFP / GettyIn South Carolina, Nikki Haley’s Bill Comes Due2024-02-24T21:41:00-05:002024-02-26T11:59:01-05:00The state’s GOP primary showed that Donald Trump is dominant yet still vulnerable.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677542<p>Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.</p><p>Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.</p><p>He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic crusade against “globalism” had started to hit too close to home for the Republican Party of 12 years ago; perhaps their warnings about, of all people, Newt Gingrich—a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose <a href="https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110900/witnesses/HHRG-116-HA00-Bio-GingrichN-20200717.pdf">onetime membership</a> on the Council on Foreign Relations, as Smart saw it, revealed his “globalist” vision for conservatism—had rankled the Republican powers that be.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/03/cpac-gop-donald-trump-speech/673292/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be</a>]</i></p><p>In any event, the ouster had made the news, coming as it had after a change in leadership at the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. “When they applied, I said, ‘I don’t want any segregationist groups at CPAC; it sends the wrong message,’” Al Cárdenas, the ACU chair from 2011 to 2014, told me recently. “And that was that.” For some optimistic observers, the decision had signified a small but symbolic effort to purge the movement of its most “highly offensive” elements, <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2011/07/29/goproud-and-birchers-ousted-as-cpac-co-sponsors-david-horowitz-survives-vote/">as one report put it</a>.</p><p>Though CPAC has long catered more to the activist base of the Republican Party than to its establishment, the event has marched steadily closer to the fringes in the years since Donald Trump’s election, the barrier to entry for speakers and organizations being little more than a sufficient appreciation of the 45th president. But even Smart seemed a touch surprised by the ease of it all in 2023; when he applied on behalf of the John Birch Society for a booth at CPAC, and when, after the fuss and hand-wringing of 11 years earlier, the application was approved.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/03/donald-trump-cpac-speech-message/673288/?utm_source=feed">Read: The martyr at CPAC</a>]</i></p><p>“It was a very basic process,” he recalled with a shrug. (CPAC organizers did not respond to a request for comment about the John Birch Society’s presence at the conference.)</p><p>It was half past noon yesterday, day two of the 2024 gathering, and Smart, a soft-spoken, genial man wearing a trim blazer and slacks, was standing before the red-white-and-blue curtained backdrop of the John Birch Society booth. He occasionally paused our conversation to direct curious passersby to the literature spread across a nearby table—brochures outlining the history of the organization (“How are we unique?”); copies of its latest “Freedom Index,” or congressional scorecard; issues of <em>The</em> <em>New American</em>, the group’s in-house journal, including a “<span class="smallcaps">TRUMP WORLD</span>” collector’s edition featuring such articles as “Trumping the Deep State” and “The Deplorables.” It was the contemporary output of an organization with an older and more controversial heritage than probably any other group featured this year at CPAC. And yet what was most striking about the John Birch Society of 2024 was how utterly unremarkable it appeared among the various booths lining this hotel conference center.</p><p>The John Birch Society, once the scourge of some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives, relegated to the outermost edges of the movement, now fits neatly into the mainstream of the American right. David Giordano, another field coordinator for the organization who was attending CPAC, credited Trump for hastening the shift, challenging the global elite in ways that past Republican presidents had only ever talked about doing. “What were the things they said about him? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’—that got my attention,” Giordano told me, smiling. “What’d they say about the John Birch Society? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic.’ That’s when you know you’re over the target.” Longtime members and officers of the organization exuded the polite but unmistakable air of <em>I told you so </em>at the conference<em>. </em>“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, my grandmother or my dad was a member. We used to think he was crazy, but now, not so much,’” Smart said, beaming. “Because we’ve been warning people about a lot of this stuff for decades, obviously.”</p><p>The John Birch Society, so named for a U.S. Army intelligence officer and Christian missionary killed by Chinese Communists toward the end of World War II, was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who made his fortune by way of Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints. Welch persuaded a handful of the country’s wealthiest anti–New Deal businessmen to join him in a mission to extinguish the “international communist conspiracy” he believed had penetrated the U.S. government and was set to consume every facet of American life. President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles—all of them, Welch insisted, were dedicated agents of the U.S.S.R.</p><p>For Welch, the Warren Court was incontrovertible evidence of the Soviet mandate in motion, given its decision outlawing prayer in public schools and, crucially, its ushering of America into a racially desegregated future. Donations flooded in as the John Birch Society took aim at the civil-rights movement, the United Nations, local public libraries and school boards, and the diabolical plot apparently enshrouding all of them. As the organization grew in prominence, a number of conservative leaders, including <em>National Review </em>founder William F. Buckley Jr., agonized over how to contain Welch’s influence without alienating the electrified legion of Americans—many of them subscribers to Buckley’s magazine—whom Welch had brought into the movement. In the early 1960s, Buckley would publish a series of editorials critical of Welch and his worldview, urging conservatives to unite in rejection of his “false counsels.” By the mid-’70s, the organization’s formal ranks and funding had significantly dwindled.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/john-birch-society-trump-far-right-extremism/673404/?utm_source=feed">Matthew Dallek: How far-right movements die</a>]</i></p><p>Yet the Bircher worldview never really went away. On the margins of the right, it continued to find purchase in new candidates and new personalities who adapted it to meet new moments. The society’s anti-communist crusade translated into alarm over a post–Cold War plot by the global elite to construct a “new world order” defined by porous borders and centralized, socialist rule; the birther conspiracy theories of the Tea Party era fit well within the Bircher tradition. And then, in 2016, the John Birch Society saw many of its core instincts finally reflected in the White House.</p><p>Giordano was at first skeptical of Trump’s candidacy. But then he watched as President Trump in short succession scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—dramatic blows, in Giordano’s view, to plans for the new world order. Giordano counts COVID—the lockdowns, the vaccines—as the wake-up event for many Americans, himself and others in the John Birch Society included. “I’ve been a member since 1994. And I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if this new world order will come in my lifetime,’” he recalled. And then came 2020. “They said, ‘Go home and flatten the curve.’ And I said, ‘This is the new world order. It’s here.’” He refused to take a vaccine or ever wear a face covering in public, recalling to me the time he successfully wore down a sales associate at Designer Shoe Warehouse who’d asked him to abide by the store policy on masks.</p><p>The John Birch Society, Giordano claimed, has been in a “growing phase” in the years since. “I’m constantly signing people up—I’ve got a new chapter in Ocean County; we had no chapters in Delaware, and now I’ve got a new chapter right in Wilmington.” Oddly enough, it’s a Trump <em>victory </em>in November that he fears could reverse the tide. “If Trump wins—which I personally hope—our membership will drop,” he predicted. “‘Oh,’ they’ll all say, ‘he’s gonna save us.’ And I explain to people, we’re the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Watchers_on_the_Wall">watchers on the Wall</a>. The Founders said, ‘Here’s a constitution; this is forever; you got to fight every day to keep it.’”</p><p>Giordano’s claims of growth dovetail with the recent uptick in references to the John Birch Society by right-wing celebrities. Last May, in conversation with the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich on his <em>War Room </em>podcast, Steve Bannon mocked left-wing efforts to deploy the “Bircher” label as a smear. “They say, ‘Oh! Moms for Liberty is just the modern version of the John Birch Society,’” Bannon said, laughing, before turning back to Descovich: “You’re doing something right, girl.” A few months before that, Nick Fuentes, a far-right vlogger and white supremacist who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, heralded the John Birch Society as a “prelude to the Groypers”—the army of neo-Nazi activists and online influencers Fuentes counts as followers.</p><p>Some national Republicans, moreover, no longer try to maintain even a nominal distance from the organization. Joining the John Birch Society for its return to CPAC in 2023 were lawmakers including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Ronny Jackson of Texas, both of whom sat for livestreamed interviews with <em>The New American </em>as throngs of conference-goers listened from the sidelines. At this year’s conference, a woman helping staff the booth urged me to check out the magazine’s January issue, the cover of which featured a close-up portrait of Andy Biggs; the Arizona congressman—former chair of the House Freedom Caucus—had sat for an exclusive interview on “many of the issues facing our country,” including President Joe Biden’s “corruption,” as the magazine put it, “immigration, and China.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/marjorie-taylor-greene-congress-georgia-election-background/672229/?utm_source=feed">From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?</a>]</i></p><p>It’s unclear just how large the John Birch Society is today—even Smart told me, “They keep those numbers close”—but to measure its influence by membership is to miss the point. Naturally, as the principles and positions of the John Birch Society have insinuated themselves into the mainstream on the right, the Birchers’ own claim to those ideas has weakened. The organization’s rogue crusades of the past are now so familiar and universal that the original fingerprints are no longer visible.</p><p>Consider fluoride. At the height of the group’s relevance in the ’60s, the John Birch Society railed against fluoridated drinking water as a communist conspiracy to poison Americans en masse, a go-to data point for the <em>National Review</em> set and others invested in the political exile of the Birchers. As soon as I stepped off the escalator at the convention center outside Washington, D.C., that hosted CPAC, though, I came upon cocktail tables scattered with brochures listing “Fun Facts on Fluoride,” among them that “Fluoride was used by Hitler and Stalin” and that “it will kill you.”</p><p>There was no stated affiliation with the John Birch Society, and no person around to discuss the pamphlets. And perhaps that was telling; far from the niche boogeyman of one conservative organization, the perils of fluoride had become part of the generic paraphernalia of the movement. (The “Myth vs Facts” section of the John Birch Society website, I should note, currently states that “while the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation because it is a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest, it was never opposed as a mind-control plot.”)</p><p>Plenty have noted the John Birch Society’s echoes in the GOP’s oft-invoked specter of the “deep state,” the conspiracism that immediately hijacked the memory of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July 2016. Yet to attend CPAC today is to see those instincts taken to their most troublingly banal ends. Lifestyle and wellness products are hawked as solutions that the medical establishment never wanted you to find; a payment-processing company warns, with a massive image of a human-silhouette target riddled with bullet holes, “Your business is a target.”</p><p>For the John Birch Society, returning to CPAC has meant slipping seamlessly back in among groups and personalities that for years have been operating within its legacy, whether they knew it or not. The organization has been “eclipsed by many different groups and offshoots, so they’re not controversial in the same way that, say, Richard Spencer was a few years ago,” Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and the author of <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9781541673564"><em>Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right</em></a>, told me<em>.</em></p><p>Why was the John Birch Society invited back to CPAC? The better question, in Dallek’s view: “Why wouldn’t it be?”</p>Elaina Plott Calabrohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaina-plott/?utm_source=feedAnna Moneymaker / GettyThe Return of the John Birch Society2024-02-23T13:05:00-05:002024-02-23T13:35:17-05:00The organization, once relegated to the outermost edges of the conservative movement, now fits neatly into its mainstream.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677545<p><small><em>Updated at 9:13 a.m. ET on February 28, 2024</em></small></p><p>Near the end of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments about whether Colorado could exclude former President Donald Trump from its ballot as an insurrectionist, the attorney representing voters from the state offered a warning to the justices—one evoking the January 6 riot that had set the case in motion.</p><p>By this point in the hearing, the justices had made clear that they didn’t like the idea of allowing a single state to kick Trump out of the presidential race, and they didn’t appear comfortable with the Court doing so either. Sensing that Trump would likely stay on the ballot, the attorney, Jason Murray, said that if the Supreme Court didn’t resolve the question of Trump’s eligibility, “it could come back with a vengeance”—after the election, when Congress meets once again to count and certify the votes of the Electoral College.</p><p>Murray and other legal scholars say that, absent clear guidance from the Supreme Court, a Trump win could lead to a constitutional crisis in Congress. Democrats would have to choose between confirming a winner many of them believe is ineligible and defying the will of voters who elected him. Their choice could be decisive: As their victory in a House special election in New York last week demonstrated, Democrats have a serious chance of winning a majority in Congress in November, even if Trump recaptures the presidency on the same day. If that happens, they could have the votes to prevent him from taking office.</p><p>In interviews, senior House Democrats would not commit to certifying a Trump win, saying they would do so only if the Supreme Court affirms his eligibility. But during oral arguments, liberal and conservative justices alike seemed inclined to dodge the question of his eligibility altogether and throw the decision to Congress.</p><p>“That would be a colossal disaster,” Representative Adam Schiff of California told me. “We already had one horrendous January 6. We don’t need another.”</p><p>The justices could conclude definitively that Trump is eligible to serve another term as president. The Fourteenth Amendment bars people who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office, but it does not define those terms. Trump has not been convicted of fomenting an insurrection, nor do any of his 91 indictments charge him with that particular crime. But in early 2021, every House Democrat (along with 10 Republicans) voted to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” and a significant majority of those lawmakers will still be in Congress next year.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/supreme-court-colorado-oral-argument-trump-disqualify/677408/?utm_source=feed">Edward B. Foley: What the Colorado oral argument missed</a>]</i></p><p>If the Court deems Trump eligible, even a few of his most fervent Democratic critics told me they would vote for certification should he win. “I’m going to follow the law,” Representative Eric Swalwell of California told me. “I would not object out of protest of how the Supreme Court comes down. It would be doing what I didn’t like about the January 6 Republicans.” Schiff, who served on the committee that investigated Trump’s role in the Capitol riot, believes that the Supreme Court should rule that Trump is disqualified. But if the Court deems Trump eligible, Schiff said, he wouldn’t object to a Trump victory.</p><p>What if the Court declines to answer? “I don’t want to get into the chaos hypothetical,” Schiff told me. Nor did Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who served in the party leadership for two decades. “I think he’s an insurrectionist,” he said of Trump. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who would become speaker if Democrats retake the House, did not respond to questions sent to his office.</p><p>Even as Democrats left open the possibility of challenging a Trump win, they shuddered at its potential repercussions. For three years they have attacked the 147 Republicans—including a majority of the party’s House conference—who voted to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. More recently they’ve criticized top congressional Republicans such as Representative Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, for refusing to commit to certifying a Biden win.</p><p>The choice that Democrats would face if Trump won without a definitive ruling on his eligibility was almost too fraught for Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland to contemplate. He told me he didn’t know how he’d vote in that scenario. As we spoke about what might happen, he recalled the brutality of January 6. “There was blood all over the Capitol in the hypothetical you posit,” Raskin, who served on the January 6 committee with Schiff, told me.</p><p>Theoretically, the House and Senate could act before the election by passing a law that defines the meaning of “insurrection” in the Fourteenth Amendment and establishes a process to determine whether a candidate is barred from holding a particular office, including the presidency. But such a bill would have to get through the Republican-controlled House, whose leaders have all endorsed Trump’s candidacy. “There’s absolutely no chance in the world,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who also served on the January 6 committee, told me.</p><p>In late 2022, Congress did enact reforms to the Electoral Count Act. That bill raised the threshold for objecting to a state’s slate of electors, and it clarified that the vice president, in presiding over the opening of Electoral College ballots, has no real power to affect the outcome of the election. But it did not address the question of insurrection.</p><p>As Republicans are fond of pointing out, Democrats have objected to the certification of each GOP presidential winner since 2000. None of those challenges went anywhere, and they were all premised on disputing the outcome or legitimacy of the election itself. Contesting a presidential election by claiming that the winner is ineligible, however, has no precedent. “It’s very murky,” Lofgren said. She believes that Trump is “clearly ineligible,” but acknowledged that “there’s no procedure, per se, for challenging on this basis.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/trump-v-anderson-supreme-court-fourteenth-amendment/677394/?utm_source=feed">Quinta Jurecic: The Supreme Court is eager to rid itself of this difficult Trump question</a>]</i></p><p>In an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, a trio of legal scholars—Edward Foley, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Richard Hasen—warned the justices that if they did not rule on Trump’s eligibility, “it is a certainty” that members of Congress would seek to disqualify him on January 6, 2025. I asked Lofgren whether she would be one of those lawmakers. “I might be.”</p><p>(After this article was published, Lofgren issued a statement to “clarify” her position. “I would consider objecting to the electoral vote certification under the Electoral Count Act if the Supreme Court rules that the 14th Amendment required such action despite the Electoral Count Act,” she said. “I am not considering objecting prior to the Supreme Court issuing its decision and if the decision provides that path legally.”)</p><p>The scholars also warned that serious political instability and violence could ensue. That possibility was on Raskin’s mind, too. He conceded that the threat of violence could influence what Democrats do if Trump wins. But, Raskin added, it wouldn’t necessarily stop them from trying to disqualify him. “We might just decide that’s something we need to prepare for.”</p>Russell Bermanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/russell-berman/?utm_source=feedAmanda Andrade-Rhoades / ReutersHow Democrats Could Disqualify Trump If the Supreme Court Doesn’t2024-02-23T11:50:00-05:002024-02-28T09:16:52-05:00Without clear guidance from the Court, House Democrats suggest that they might not certify a Trump win on January 6.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677540<p data-flatplan-paragraph="true"><small><i>Sign up for </i><a data-event-element="inline link" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/the-decision-a-2024-newsletter/?utm_source=feed"><i>The Decision</i></a><i>, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.</i></small></p><p>Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he regards his party’s position on reproductive rights as a political liability. He <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/03/donald-trump-abortion-midterms-republicans">blamed</a> the “abortion issue” for his party’s disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms, and he recently <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/09/anti-abortion-movement-donald-trump/675410/?utm_source=feed">blasted</a> Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s support for a six-week abortion ban. Trump seems eager to be the Republican who can turn this loser of a political issue into a winner.</p><p>And we’ve just gotten a peek at how he plans to do it. Last week, <i>The New York Times</i> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/us/politics/trump-abortion-ban.html">reported</a> that Trump has expressed support for the idea of a national ban on abortions after 16 weeks of pregnancy except in the case of rape or incest, or to save the mother’s life.</p><p>Anti-abortion activists, of course, don’t think such a restriction <a href="https://twitter.com/KristanHawkins/status/1758580127791718637">goes far enough</a>. Some of Trump’s most important allies—including evangelical leaders and policy advisers—emphatically support a total ban, a position that Trump knows is poisonous. Trump doesn’t want to say anything official about a 16-week ban, the report said, until he’s clinched the nomination, to avoid turning off any hard-core primary voters who favor a total ban.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/republican-primaries-south-carolina-trump-haley/677526/?utm_source=feed">Conor Friedersdorf: The strongest case against Donald Trump</a>]</i></p><p>After that, embracing a 16-week limit could benefit him in the general election. It would put some distance between himself and the hard-liners in his orbit, while helping him appeal to more moderate voters. And just as important, by making the conversation about gestational limits, Trump and his allies would distract voters from the far more expansive goals of dedicated abortion opponents.</p><p>To unpack the 16-week proposal a little: The number is biologically arbitrary, for it bears no relation to fetal viability, as some state limits do. Sixteen is, apparently, just a pleasing number. “Know what I like about 16?” he reportedly said. “It’s even. It’s four months.” Trump and his allies see this as a compromise position, because it’s stricter than <i>Roe v. Wade</i>’s roughly 24-week viability standard, but it still provides a larger window than the six-week limit in Georgia and South Carolina, or the outright bans that conservatives have fought for in 14 states, <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/a-guide-to-abortion-laws-by-state">including</a> Alabama, Texas, and Indiana.</p><p>In November, a proposal for a 16-week federal limit could, in theory, be a politically advantageous position for Trump. Almost all available polling suggests that most Americans support legal access to abortion—with some limits. Several countries in Europe already apply a 12- or 15-week limit on terminations, although in practice U.S. state bans <a href="https://www.vox.com/23741997/republicans-12-week-abortion-bans-europe-roe-dobbs">are much more restrictive</a>.</p><p>Now, at least, Trump will have a response when President Joe Biden attacks him and other Republicans for being too extreme on abortion. “The rule of politics is: When you’re talking generically about abortion rights, the Democrats are doing well, and when you’re talking about the details of abortion—number of weeks, parental consent—Republicans are winning,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist (who says he’s not a fan of Trump), told me. Republicans, he said, will be able to put Democrats on the defensive by forcing them to justify abortion after 16 weeks—which would likely involve needing to make more complex arguments about how tests that reveal serious fetal abnormalities or maternal health risks typically take place as late as 20 weeks.</p><p>Still, a ban is a ban. Although voters say in polls that they support some kind of abortion limit, at the ballot box, they haven’t. Last year, Glenn Youngkin, who flipped Virginia’s governorship from blue to red in 2021, persuaded several Republican candidates to coalesce around a 15-week abortion ban ahead of state elections in November. The position was meant to signal reasonableness and help turn the state legislature back to Republicans. But the strategy <a href="https://virginiamercury.com/2023/11/08/virginia-democrats-triumph-in-statehouse-elections-reducing-youngkins-power/">failed miserably</a>: Democrats maintained their state-Senate majority and also flipped control of the House of Delegates.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/anti-abortion-movement-trump-reelection-roe-dobbs/676132/?utm_source=feed">From the January/February 2024 issue: A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere</a>]</i></p><p>“Voters are seeing through the efforts to veil a position as moderate that’s actually an abortion ban,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive organization Swing Left, told me. And Trump’s 16-week position, she believes, would be “a huge miscalculation of where voters are.”</p><p>At this point, any Trump endorsement of a national abortion limit is nothing more than strategic messaging—a ploy to win over moderate voters in the general election. Such a measure would require 60 votes in the Senate, which makes it virtually impossible to enact—even if Republicans win back majorities in the House and the Senate. It’s just not happening. Which is why the 16-week proposal is also a diversion.</p><p>The question people should be asking is whether Trump will give free rein to the anti-abortion advisers in his orbit, Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, told me. The big thing those advisers are pushing for is the reinterpretation and enforcement of the Comstock Act. As I <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/anti-abortion-movement-trump-reelection-roe-dobbs/676132/?utm_source=feed">wrote in December</a>, activists believe they can use this largely dormant 150-year-old anti-obscenity law to ban abortion nationally because it prohibits the shipping of any object that could be used for terminating pregnancies. The Heritage Foundation’s <i>Project 2025</i>, <a href="https://www.project2025.org/policy/">a 920-page playbook</a> written by a collective of pro-Trump conservatives, urges the next Republican president to seek the criminal prosecution of those who send or receive abortion supplies under the Comstock Act. The 2025 plan also proposes that the FDA should withdraw its approval of the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol.</p><p>“Federal bans can’t pass,” one anti-abortion attorney, who requested anonymity in order to comment freely on a matter dear to his political allies, told me—but there’d be no need to try with Comstock on the books. The administration could kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid by saying that the women’s-health-care provider violates the act, he suggested. It could launch criminal investigations into abortion funds and abortion-pill distribution networks. Of course, if Trump is interested in doing any of that, he can’t mention it on the campaign trail, the attorney said: “It’s obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal [legislative] ban, and see if that works” to get elected.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/kate-cox-abortion-texas-dobbs/676373/?utm_source=feed">Adam Serwer: Texas becomes an abortion dystopia</a>]</i></p><p>Some of the authors of <i>Project 2025</i>—Gene Hamilton, Roger Severino, and Stephen Miller—have worked for Trump in the past, and would likely serve as close advisers in a second administration. The idea seems to be that Trump is so uninterested in the technical details of abortion-related matters that he’ll rely on this trusty circle of advisers to shape policy. We saw a similar approach during Trump’s first term, when the president’s senior aides <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/us/politics/trump-deep-state-impeachment.html">would find ways</a> <i>not</i> to do the extreme, dangerous things Trump wanted and hoped he wouldn’t notice. This time around, if Trump is reelected, his advisers seem likely to circumvent the president in order to accomplish their own extreme goals.</p><p>“I hope they’re not talking to him about Comstock,” the attorney said. “I don’t want Trump to know Comstock exists.”</p><p>When I reached Severino, who currently works for the Heritage Foundation and wrote the <i>Project 2025</i> section on abortion policy, he declined to make any specific predictions about the strategy. But his answer hinted at his movement’s aspirations. “All I can say is that [Trump] had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policy in history,” he said. “That’s our best indicator as to the type of policies that he would implement the second time around.”</p>Elaine Godfreyhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaine-godfrey/?utm_source=feedCarlos Barria / ReutersThe Pro-life Movement’s Not-So-Secret Plan for Trump2024-02-23T06:00:00-05:002024-02-26T11:58:58-05:00The Republican candidate wants to seem moderate on abortion. His would-be advisers have other ideas.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677531<p dir="ltr">For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again.</p><p dir="ltr">Since the state moved to its prominent early position on the GOP presidential-primary calendar in 1980, the candidate who has won there has captured the nomination in every contested race except one. Given Donald Trump’s overall lead in the GOP race, a victory for him in South Carolina over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, would likely uphold that streak.</p><p dir="ltr">“We all underestimate how deeply ingrained the Trump message is in the rank and file of our party,” Warren Tompkins, a longtime South Carolina–based GOP strategist and lobbyist, told me. “Take the personality out of it: What he stands for, what he says he’ll do, and what he did as president; he’s on the money.”</p><p dir="ltr">This year, though, there may be a twist in South Carolina’s usual role of confirming the eventual GOP winner: Even as the state demonstrates Trump’s strength in the primary, it may also spotlight his potential difficulties as a general-election nominee. Like the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina may show that though most Republican voters are ready to renominate Trump, a substantial minority of the GOP coalition has grown disaffected from him. And in a general-election rematch, that could provide a crucial opening for President Joe Biden, despite all of his vulnerabilities, to attract some ordinarily Republican-leaning voters.</p><p dir="ltr">“Trump is essentially the incumbent leader of the party who is not able to get higher than, say, 65 percent” in the primaries, Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Local observers say Haley has run a textbook South Carolina campaign, barnstorming the state in a bus, appearing relentlessly on national television, spending heavily on television advertising, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhQnV_mEozk">notably intensifying her criticism</a> of Trump as “unhinged” and “diminished.” Trump, meanwhile, has breezed through the state as quickly as a snowbird motoring down I-95 from New York to Florida for the winter. Yet he has retained an imposing lead reaching as high as two to one over Haley in the polls.</p><p dir="ltr">“I think you can argue Haley is running a fantastic campaign” in South Carolina, Jordan Ragusa, a political scientist at the College of Charleston and a co-author of a history of the South Carolina primary, told me. “But the pool of available voters is just so small that no matter what she does, it’s going to be hard for her to move the needle.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/how-the-gops-thinking-on-international-issues-evolved/677505/?utm_source=feed">Read: The GOP has crossed an ominous threshold on foreign policy</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Over the past generation, South Carolina has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the outcome of GOP presidential-nomination contests. The state moved near the front of the GOP primary calendar in 1980, when Republicans were just establishing themselves as a competitive force in the state. GOP leaders created the primary, with its unusual scheduling on a Saturday, as a way to generate more attention for the party, which had previously selected its delegates at a convention attended by party insiders.</p><p dir="ltr">The other key factor in creating the primary was support from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, including Lee Atwater, a prominent GOP strategist then based in South Carolina. South Carolina did what Atwater hoped when Reagan won it in a rout, after unexpectedly losing the Iowa caucus to George H. W. Bush.</p><p dir="ltr">Reagan’s victory in South Carolina placed him back on the path for the GOP nomination and cut a mold that has endured, with only one exception, in every contested GOP presidential-primary race through 2016. Each of those races followed the same formula: One candidate won the Iowa caucus, a second candidate won the New Hampshire primary, and then one of those two won South Carolina and eventually captured the nomination. (The exception came in 2012, when a backlash to a debate question about his marriage propelled Newt Gingrich to a decisive South Carolina win over Mitt Romney, who recovered to claim the nomination.)</p><p dir="ltr">In 2016, Trump’s narrow victory in South Carolina effectively cemented the nomination for him after he had lost Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and then recovered to win in New Hampshire. A victory for Trump on Saturday would allow him to equal a feat achieved only by incumbent GOP presidents: sweeping Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.</p><p dir="ltr">Three factors, above all, explain South Carolina’s enduring influence in the GOP race. One is that it reflects the overall Republican coalition better than either of the two states that precede it. In Iowa, the Republican electorate leans heavily toward evangelical Christians who prioritize social issues; in New Hampshire, where there are few evangelicals, economic conservatives focused on taxes and spending, as well as a sizable group of libertarian voters, have dominated. South Carolina is the synthesis of both: It has a large evangelical population and a substantial cohort of suburban, business-oriented Republicans outside its three principal population centers of Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston.</p><p dir="ltr">“In a lot of ways, the state party here is a microcosm of the national party,” Jim Guth, a longtime political scientist at Furman University, in Greenville, told me. “We replicate the profile of the national party maybe better than New Hampshire [or] Iowa.”</p><p dir="ltr">It has been possible for candidates over the years to win Iowa or New Hampshire primarily by mobilizing just one group, such as social conservatives in Iowa and moderate independents in New Hampshire. But because the South Carolina GOP contains so many different power centers, “you have to have a broader appeal,” Tompkins, who has worked in every GOP presidential primary since Reagan, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">The second key factor in South Carolina’s importance has been its placement on the GOP calendar. From the outset, in 1980, the primary was designed by its sponsors as a “First in the South” contest that they hoped would signal to voters across the region which candidate had emerged as the favorite. As more southern states over the years concentrated their primaries on Super Tuesday, in early March, that multiplied the domino effect of winning the state.</p><p dir="ltr">“Given the demographic alignment between South Carolina and a lot of the southern Super Tuesday states, and the momentum effect, it really made South Carolina pivotal,” Ragusa said.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/trump-about-steamroll-nikki-haley/677207/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump is about to steamroll Nikki Haley</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The third dynamic underpinning South Carolina’s influence has been its role as a fire wall against insurgent candidates such as John McCain in 2000 and Patrick J. Buchanan in the 1990s. South Carolina’s Republican leadership has usually coalesced predominantly behind the candidate with the most support from the national party establishment and then helped power them to victory in the state. That model wavered in 2012, when Gingrich won his upset victory, and even in 2016, when Trump won despite clear splits in the national GOP establishment about his candidacy. But most often, South Carolina has been an empire-strikes-back place where the establishment-backed front-runner in the race snuffs out the last flickers of viable opposition.</p><p dir="ltr">All of these historic factors appear virtually certain to benefit Trump this year. Super Tuesday no longer revolves as much around southern states. But <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-primary-elections/calendar">it remains a huge landscape</a>: 15 states and American Samoa will all pick a combined 874 Republican delegates on March 5, nearly three-fourths of the total required to win the nomination.</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/trump-haley-polls-south-carolina-super-tuesday">In the limited polling across the Super Tuesday states</a>, Trump now leads, usually commandingly, in all of them. Haley has already announced campaign appearances in Super Tuesday states through next week. But with all of the Super Tuesday states voting just 10 days after South Carolina, it will be virtually impossible for Haley to close the gap in so many places at once without winning her home state or at least significantly exceeding expectations. Like earlier underdogs, she faces a stark equation: To change the race anywhere on Super Tuesday, she must change it everywhere through her showing in South Carolina.</p><p dir="ltr">Saturday’s result could also reconfirm South Carolina’s other key historic roles. Trump is now the candidate of most of the GOP establishment—a dynamic reflected in his endorsement by virtually all of the leading Republicans in Haley’s home state. He’s also become the contender with the broadest appeal inside the Republican Party. Because Trump is so polarizing for the general public, it’s difficult to see him in that light. But South Carolina is likely to buttress the indications from Iowa and New Hampshire that Trump, as a quasi-incumbent, now has a broader reach across the Republican Party than Haley does, or, for that matter, than he himself did in 2016. <a href="https://www.winthrop.edu/winthroppoll/2024-february-winthroppoll-results.aspx">In most South Carolina polls</a>, Trump is now leading her with every major demographic group, except among the independents who plan to participate in the primary.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet South Carolina, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/what-trumps-victory-in-iowa-reveals/677139/?utm_source=feed">like Iowa</a> and New Hampshire before it, will also provide important clues about the extent of the remaining resistance to Trump within the Republican coalition.</p><p dir="ltr">Haley is likely to perform best among well-educated voters around the population centers of Columbia and Charleston. “Haley must run up the score with traditional Reagan Republicans who want to actually nominate a candidate who can win in the general election,” Stroman told me. “She is going to be absolutely swamped in the MAGA-rich right-wing upstate, and in rural areas across the state—so she needs the suburbs and cities to turn out to hopefully keep her closer than expected.”</p><p dir="ltr">In New Hampshire, Haley finished closer to Trump than most polls projected, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/primaries-and-caucuses/exit-polls/new-hampshire/republican-primary/0">because a large number of independent voters</a>, and even a slice of Democrats, turned out to support her. She’ll need a similar dynamic to finish credibly in South Carolina, where she has said her goal is to exceed her 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. The better the showing for Haley among independents, and among college-educated voters in the suburbs, the stronger the general-election warning signs for Trump.</p><p dir="ltr">Democratic voters could be a wild card on Saturday after relatively few of them turned out for the party’s own primary earlier this month. South Carolina does not have party registration, which means that any voter who did not participate in the Democratic primary can vote in the Republican contest. A group called Primary Pivot has launched a campaign to encourage Democrats and independents to swarm the GOP primary to weaken Trump. If Haley exceeds expectations in South Carolina, it will be because, as in New Hampshire, more independents and Democrats turn out for her than pollsters anticipated.</p><p>Besting Trump for the nomination may no longer be a realistic goal for Haley if she loses her home state. But, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/trump-about-steamroll-nikki-haley/677207/?utm_source=feed">after mostly dodging confrontation with Trump for months</a>, she is now delivering <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?533696-1/nikki-haley-delivers-remarks-state-gop-presidential-primary-race">a more cogent and caustic argument against him</a>, and showing a determination to force Republicans to wrestle with the general-election risks they are accepting by renominating him. The biggest question in South Carolina may not be whether Haley can beat Trump, but whether the state provides her more evidence, even in defeat, to make that case.</p>Ronald Brownsteinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ronald-brownstein/?utm_source=feedJulia Nikhinson / AFP / GettyCould South Carolina Change Everything?2024-02-22T08:00:00-05:002024-02-22T11:48:46-05:00The twist in the state’s GOP primary this yeartag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677505<p dir="ltr">The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point.</p><p dir="ltr">Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every Republican presidency from Dwight Eisenhower through George W. Bush.</p><p dir="ltr">But even so, during Trump’s four years in office, a substantial remnant of traditionally internationalist Republicans in Congress and in the key national-security positions of his own administration resisted his efforts to unravel America’s traditional alliances.</p><p dir="ltr">Now though, evidence is rapidly accumulating on multiple fronts that the internal GOP resistance is crumbling to Trump’s determination to steer America away from its traditional role as a global leader.</p><p dir="ltr">In Congress, that shift was evident in last week’s widespread Senate and House Republican opposition to continued aid for Ukraine. The same movement is occurring among Republican voters, as a <a href="https://brnw.ch/21wGX2g">new Chicago Council on Global Affairs study</a> demonstrates.</p><p dir="ltr">The study used the council’s annual national surveys of American attitudes about foreign affairs to examine the evolution of thinking within the GOP on key international issues. It divided Republicans into two roughly equal groups: those who said they held a very favorable view of Trump and the slightly larger group that viewed him either only somewhat favorably or unfavorably.</p><p dir="ltr">The analysis found that skepticism of international engagement—and in particular resistance to supporting Ukraine in its grueling war against Russia—is growing across the GOP. But it also found that the Republicans most sympathetic to Trump have moved most sharply away from support for an engaged American role. Now a clear majority of those Trump-favorable Republicans reject an active American role in world affairs, the study found.</p><p dir="ltr">“Trumpism is the dominant tendency in Republican foreign policy and it’s isolationist, it’s unilateralist, it’s amoral,” Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the director of policy planning at the State Department under George W. Bush, told me a few months ago.</p><p dir="ltr">That dynamic has big implications for a second Trump term. The growing tendency of Republican voters and elected officials alike to embrace Trump’s nationalist vision means that a reelected Trump would face much less internal opposition than he did in his first term if he moves to actually extract America from NATO, reduce the presence of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia, coddle Russian President Vladimir Putin, or impose sweeping tariffs on imports.</p><p dir="ltr">During Trump’s first term, “the party was not yet prepared to abandon internationalism and therefore opposed him,” Ivo Daalder, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Council, told me. “On Russia sanctions, on NATO, on other issues, he had people in the government who undermined him consistently. That won’t happen in a second term. In a second term, his views are clear: He will only appoint people who agree with them, and he has cowed the entire Republican Party.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/01/trump-obamacare-repeal-replace/677067/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The erosion of GOP resistance to Trump’s approach has been dramatically underscored in just the past few days. Most Senate Republicans last week voted against the $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. After that bill passed the Senate anyway, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that he would not bring it to a vote. All of this unfolded as an array of GOP leaders defended Trump for his remarks at a rally in South Carolina last weekend when he again expressed disdain for NATO <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/10/us/politics/trump-nato-russia.html">and said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want”</a> to members of the alliance who don’t spend enough on their own defense.</p><p dir="ltr">Many of the 22 GOP Republicans who voted for the aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan were veteran senators whose views about America’s international role were shaped under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or George W. Bush, long before Trump and his “America First” movement loomed so large in conservative politics. It was telling that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who was first elected to the Senate while Reagan was president in 1984, was the aid package’s most ardent GOP supporter.</p><p dir="ltr">By contrast, many of the 26 Republican senators who voted no were newer members, elected since Trump became the party’s leading man. Republican Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, one of Trump’s most ardent acolytes, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W53wILyEyEc">delivered an impassioned speech</a>, in which he portrayed the aid to Ukraine as the latest in a long series of catastrophic missteps by the internationalist forces in both parties that included the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.</p><p dir="ltr">Soon after the bill passed, first-term Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri noted a stark generational contrast in the vote. “Nearly every Republican Senator under the age of 55 voted NO on this America Last bill,” <a href="https://x.com/Eric_Schmitt/status/1757368160116670818?s=20">Schmitt posted on social media</a>. “15 out of 17 elected since 2018 voted NO[.] Things are changing just not fast enough.”</p><p dir="ltr">Just as revealing of the changing current in the party was the vote against the package by two GOP senators considered pillars of the party’s internationalist wing: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida. Both also unequivocally defended Trump against criticism over his remarks at the South Carolina rally that seemed to encourage Putin to attack NATO countries that have not met the alliance’s guidelines for spending on their own defense.</p><p dir="ltr">To many observers, the retreat on Ukraine from Rubio and Graham suggests that even many GOP officials who don’t share Trump’s neo-isolationist views have concluded that they must accommodate his perspective to survive in a party firmly under his thumb. “Lindsey Graham is a poster child for the hold that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party,” Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state under President Joe Biden, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Republican elected officials still demonstrate flickers of resistance to Trump’s vision. In December, the Senate and the Republican-controlled House quietly included in the massive defense-authorization legislation a provision requiring any president to obtain congressional approval before withdrawing from NATO. The problem with that legislation is that a reelected Trump can undermine NATO without formally leaving it, said Daalder, who served as the U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama.</p><p dir="ltr">“You destroy NATO not by walking out but by just not doing anything,” Daalder told me. “If you go around saying ‘If you get attacked, we’ll send [only] a mine sweeper,’ Congress can’t do anything. Congress can declare war, but it can’t force the commander in chief to go to war.”</p><p dir="ltr">Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador and his last remaining rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has stoutly defended the traditional Reaganite view that America must provide global leadership to resist authoritarianism. She has denounced Trump’s comments on NATO, and she criticized him Friday for his repeated remarks over the years praising Putin following the reports that Alexei Navalny, the Russian leader’s chief domestic opponent, had died in prison. On Saturday, <a href="https://x.com/NikkiHaley/status/1758906541090939065?s=20">in a social-media post</a>, she blamed Putin for Navalny’s death and pointedly challenged Trump to say whether he agreed.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet Haley has struggled to attract more than about one-third of the GOP electorate against Trump. Her foreign-policy agenda isn’t the principal reason for that ceiling. But Trump’s dominance in the race is evidence that, for most GOP voters, his praise for Putin and hostility to NATO are not disqualifying.</p><p dir="ltr">The new Chicago Council study helps explain why. Just since 2017, the share of Republicans most favorable toward Trump who say the U.S. should play an active role in global affairs has fallen in the council’s polling from about 70 percent to 40 percent. Likewise, only 40 percent of Trump Republicans support continued military aid to Ukraine, the study found. Only about that many of the Trump Republicans, the Council found, would support sending U.S. troops to fulfill the NATO treaty obligation to defend the Baltic countries if they were invaded by Russia.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/02/trumps-immigration-plan-is-even-more-aggressive-now/677385/?utm_source=feed">Read: Trump’s ‘knock on the door’</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">By contrast, among the part of the GOP less favorable to Trump, majorities still support an active U.S. role in global affairs, sending troops to the Baltics if Russia invades, and continued military and economic aid to Ukraine. The “less-Trump” side of the GOP was also much less likely to agree that the U.S. should reduce its commitment to NATO or withdraw entirely.</p><p dir="ltr">Conversely, Trump Republicans were much more likely to say that they want the United States to be the dominant world leader, while two-thirds of the non-Trump Republicans wanted the U.S. to share leadership with other countries, the traditional internationalist view.</p><p dir="ltr">“Rather than the Biden administration’s heavily alliance-focused approach to U.S. foreign policy,” the report concludes, “Trump Republicans seem to prefer a United States role that is more independent, less cooperative, and more inclined to use military force to deal with the threats they see as the most pressing, such as China, Iran, and migration across the United States-Mexico border.”</p><p dir="ltr">The Chicago Council study found that the most significant demographic difference between these two groups was that the portion of the GOP more supportive of robust U.S. engagement with the world was much more likely to hold a four-year college degree. That suggests these foreign-policy concerns could join cultural disputes such as abortion and book bans as some of the issues Democrats use to try to pry away ordinarily Republican-leaning white-collar voters from Trump if he’s the GOP nominee.</p><p dir="ltr">Jeremy Rosner, a Democratic political consultant who worked on public outreach for the National Security Council under Bill Clinton, told me it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s specific views on NATO or maintaining the U.S. alliances with Japan or South Korea will become a decisive issue for many voters. More likely, Rosner said, is that Trump’s growingly militant language about NATO and other foreign-policy issues will reinforce voter concerns that a second Trump term would trigger too much chaos and disorder on many fronts.</p><p dir="ltr">“People don’t like crazy in foreign policy, and there’s a point at which the willingness to stand up to conventional wisdom or international pressure crosses the line from charmingly bold to frighteningly wacko,” Rosner told me. “To the extent he’s espousing things in the international realm that are way over the line, it will add to that mosaic picture [among voters] that he’s beyond the pale.”</p><p dir="ltr">Perhaps aware of that risk, many Republican elected officials supporting Trump have gone to great lengths to downplay the implications of his remarks criticizing NATO or praising Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Rubio, for instance, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/02/11/marco-rubio-trump-nato-russia-sotu-vpx.cnn">insisted last week</a> that he had “zero concern” that Trump would try to withdraw from NATO, because he did not do so as president.</p><p dir="ltr">Those assurances contrast with the repeated warnings from former national-security officials in both parties that Trump, having worn down the resistance in his party, is likely to do exactly what he says if reelected, at great risk to global stability. “He doesn’t understand the importance of the [NATO] alliance and how it’s critical to our security as well,” Trump’s former <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/tv/invited-russia-to-attack-trumps-ex-pentagon-chief-blasts-former-boss-has-no-doubt-would-pull-out-of-nato/">Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on CNN last week</a>. “I think it’s realistic that [if] he gets back in office, one of the first things he’ll do is cut off assistance to Ukraine if it isn’t already cut off, and then begin trying to withdraw troops and ultimately withdraw from NATO.”</p><p dir="ltr">A return to power for Trump would likely end the dominance of the internationalist wing that has held the upper hand in the GOP since Dwight Eisenhower. The bigger question is whether a second Trump term would also mean the effective end for the American-led system of alliances and international institutions that has underpinned the global order since World War II.</p>Ronald Brownsteinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/ronald-brownstein/?utm_source=feedJeff Swensen / GettyThe GOP Has Crossed an Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy2024-02-18T10:12:00-05:002024-02-20T11:13:34-05:00A new study of Republican attitudes helps explain why.tag:theatlantic.com,2024:50-677480<p>Ten years ago, I stood in the back of a large room at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump ramble. The celebrity billionaire had been loitering on the fringes of American politics for a few years, but this was my first time seeing him give a proper speech. At least, that’s what I thought he was supposed to be doing. Speaking at the Politics & Eggs forum is a rite of passage for presidential aspirants, and Trump at the time was going through his quadrennial ritual of noisily considering a bid for office. Typically, prospective candidates give variations on their stump speech in this setting. Trump was doing something else—he meandered and riffed and told disjointed stories with no evident connection to one another. The incoherence might have been startling if I had taken him seriously. But the year was 2014, and this was <em>Donald Trump</em>—the man who presided over a reality show in which Gary Busey competed in a pizza-selling contest with Meat Loaf. Nobody took Trump seriously. That was my first mistake.</p><p>Over the past decade, I’ve told the story of what happened next so many times that I can recite each beat in my sleep. The ride to the tarmac in the back of Trump’s SUV. The phone call from his pilot with news that a blizzard had shut down LaGuardia Airport. The last-minute decision to reroute his plane to Palm Beach, and his fateful insistence that the 26-year-old <em>BuzzFeed</em> reporter in the car (me) tag along. What was supposed to be a short in-flight interview turned into two surreal, and oddly intimate, days at Mar-a-Lago, which I spent studying Trump in his natural habitat.</p><p>The article I published a few weeks later—<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/36-hours-on-the-fake-campaign-trail-with-donald-trump">“36 Hours on the Fake Campaign Trail With Donald Trump”</a>—cannot exactly be called prescient, in that I rather confidently predicted that my subject would never run for office. But my portrait of Trump—his depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval—has largely held up. I described him on his plane restlessly flipping through cable news channels in search of his own face, and quoted him casually blowing off his wedding anniversary to fly to Florida. (“There are a lot of good-looking women here,” he told me once we arrived, leaning in at a poolside buffet.)</p><p>Trump, suffice it to say, did not like the article, and he responded in predictably wrathful fashion. He insulted me on Twitter (“slimebag reporter,” “true garbage with no credibility”), planted fabricated stories about me in <em>Breitbart News</em> (“<span class="smallcaps">TRUMP: ‘SCUMBAG’ BUZZFEED BLOGGER OGLED WOMEN WHILE HE ATE BISON AT MY RESORT</span>”), and got me blacklisted from covering Republican events where he was speaking. It was a jarring experience, but enlightening in its way. I’ve returned to it repeatedly over the years, mining the episode for insight into the improbable president’s psyche and the era that he’s shaped.</p><p>As the tenth anniversary of my Mar-a-Lago misadventure approached this week, much of the conversation about Trump was focused on his mental competency. There were political reasons for this. Democrats, hoping to deflect concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and memory, were circulating video clips in which Trump sounded confused and unhinged. Trump’s Republican primary opponents had suggested that he’d “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/10/25/desantis-trump-2024-new-hampshire-primary/71314899007/">lost the zip on his fastball</a>” or was “<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/17/christie-trump-putin-immigrants-00132177">becoming crazier</a>.” Nikki Haley had called on Trump (and Biden) to take a mental-acuity test. On social media and in the press, countless detractors have speculated that Trump is losing touch with reality, or sliding into dementia, or growing intoxicated by his own conspiracy theories. The sense of progression is what unites all these claims—the idea that Trump is not just bad, but<em> getting worse</em>.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/biden-age-special-counsel/677399/?utm_source=feed">Helen Lewis: Biden’s age is now unavoidable</a>]</i></p><p>To test this theory, I went back and listened to the recording of my hour-long interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2014. Half-convinced by the narrative of the former president’s worsening mental health, I expected to find in that audio file a more lucid, cogent Trump—one who hadn’t yet been unraveled by the stresses and travails of power. What I found instead illustrates both the risks of returning him to the Oval Office and the futility of trying to prevent that outcome by focusing on his mental decline: He sounded almost exactly the same as he does now.</p><p>This is not to say he sounded sharp. He struggled at times to form complete sentences, and repeatedly lost his train of thought. Throughout our conversation, he said so many obviously untrue things that I remember wondering whether he was a pathological liar or simply deluded.</p><p>Take, for example, our exchange over Trump’s embrace of the “birther” conspiracy theory. Trump had notoriously accused President Barack Obama of forging his U.S. citizenship and, near the end of the 2012 election, had offered to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choosing if he released his college transcripts.</p><p>Here is what Trump said to me, verbatim, when I asked him about the stunt:</p><blockquote>
<p>Well, I thought it was good. I mean, I offered $5 million to his charity if he produced his records, so—to his favorite charity if he produced his records. Uh, and I didn’t want to see his marks; I wanted to see where it says “place of birth.” I wanted to see what he put on there. And to this day, nobody’s ever seen any of those records. Uh, they have seen a book that was written when he was a young man saying he was a man from Kenya, a young man from Kenya, <em>ba ba ba ba ba</em>. And the publisher of the book said, “No, that’s what he said,” and then a day later he said, “No, no, that was a typographical error.” Well, you know what a typographical error—that’s when you type the word, when you put an <em>S</em> at the end of a word because it was wrong. You understand that. The word <em>Kenya</em> versus <em>the United States</em>—okay. So he has a book where he said he was from Kenya. Uh, and then, uh, they said that was a typographical error. I mean, there’s a lot of things. Um, I mean I have a whole theory on it, and I’m pretty sure I’m right. Uh, but I have a whole theory as to where he was born, uh, and what he did. And if you noticed, he spent millions and millions of dollars on trying to protect that information. And to this day, I’m shocked that with the three colleges that we’re talking about—you know, Columbia, Harvard, and, and Occidental—that somebody in the office didn’t take that file and say, “Hey, here it is.” I just am shocked. But—and by the way, if it were a positive thing, I would say that it’s something he should’ve done. Because there were a lot of people that agree with me. You know, a lot of people say, “Oh, that was controversial.” A lot of those people in the room loved me because of it. You understand this. You know, there’s a group, a big group of people—I’m not saying it’s a majority, but I want to tell you, it’s a very strong silent minority at least that agrees with me. And I actually said that if he ever did it, I would hope that it showed that I was wrong. And that everything would be perfect. I would rather have that than be right.</p>
</blockquote><p>A couple of minutes later, I asked Trump about the charges of racism he’d faced as a result of the birther crusade. His response:</p><blockquote>
<p>Don’t forget, Obama called Bill Clinton a racist, and Clinton has never forgiven him for it. Um, uh, many, they called many—anytime anybody disagrees with Obama, they call him a racist. So there have been many people called racists. No, that didn’t, it never stuck in my case, uh, at all. It’s something I was never called before, and it never stuck. At all. But if you notice, whenever anyone got tough with Obama, including Bill Clinton, and including others, they would call him, they would call that person a racist. Uh, so, it’s, it was a charge that they tried, and it never stuck. And you know why it never stuck? ’Cause I am, I am, I am so not a racist, it’s incredible. So it just never stuck. As I think you would notice.</p>
</blockquote><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/george-conway-trump-unfit-office/599128/?utm_source=feed">George T. Conway III: Unfit for office</a>]</i></p><p>What do you do with an answer like this if you’re a reporter? On a substantive level, it’s objectively detached from reality: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and there is no record of his having called Bill Clinton a racist. On a sentence level, the remarks are incoherent, confused, repetitive, and syntactically strange. Transcribing Trump is a nightmare. So is fact-checking him. In the end, I quoted eight words from this rant—“I am so not a racist, it’s incredible.”</p><p>Maybe that was a failure on my part. For years, a contingent of Trump’s critics have argued that journalists fail to show this side of the former president—that we sanitize him by extracting only his most coherent quotes for our stories. And I’ll be the first to admit that it’s difficult to capture Trump’s rambling rhetorical style in print.</p><p>But does anyone believe that publishing those comments in full would have meaningfully changed the public’s perception of Trump, then or now? There may have been a time—<a href="https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-speaking-style-interviews/">in the 1980s and ’90s</a>, perhaps—when he sounded more articulate and grounded in reality. But that Trump was long gone by the time he announced his first campaign. It was not a secret. We all watched those rallies on TV; we all saw him in those debates. And he was elected president anyway.</p><p>There’s a simple reason coverage of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and general octogenarian confusion is more damaging to Biden than it is to Trump. Biden ran for president on a platform of stability and competence, and that image is undermined by suggestions of mental decline. Accusing Trump of going crazy doesn’t work because, well, he has sounded crazy for a long time. The people who voted for him don’t seem to mind—in fact, it’s part of the appeal.</p><p>After listening to the old recording of my Trump interview, I called Sam Nunberg for a gut check. A former political operative with a thick New York accent and a collection of shiny neckties, Nunberg was the prototypical Trump acolyte when I first met him. But his relationship with his former boss has been rocky since he arranged for my access to Trump in 2014 and accompanied me on that trip to Mar-a-Lago: Trump theatrically fired him after my story came out, hired him back, fired him again, then sued him for $10 million, before eventually <a href="https://apnews.com/9caa6e179c9b45e3b44009ea9a8309e9/trump-former-campaign-aide-settle-confidentiality-dispute">agreeing to a settlement</a>.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/ronald-reagan-age-1984-election/677455/?utm_source=feed">Rich Jaroslovsky: The other time America panicked over a president’s age</a>]</i></p><p>The two men haven’t spoken in years, according to Nunberg—but that hasn’t stopped reporters from calling him up for quotes about Trump’s mental state. “They’re wanting me to say he’s not the same,” Nunberg told me. “But I don’t see it, at least publicly. I think he’s the same guy.”</p><p>And what kind of guy is that? “He’s reckless, and he’s a narcissist,” Nunberg said. But that’s not exactly news. He’s always been that way.</p>McKay Coppinshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/mckay-coppins/?utm_source=feedTom Brenner / ReutersWhy Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land2024-02-16T07:00:00-05:002024-02-16T09:38:43-05:00A decade-old interview shows he has long sounded unhinged.