Politics | The Atlantic

Trump’s October Surprise

2026-10-12T17:08:00-04:00

It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin. With rare exceptions, Trump has aligned with Moscow over Kyiv throughout the four-and-a-half-year war. He wants Ukraine to end the fighting—and has pressured the country to agree to terms that Zelensky finds unacceptable.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue. (Another few million barrels are set to ship next month.)

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced. His aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants. Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the U.S. go further, and stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. That was the context in which Trump announced his fictional energy cease-fire. A senior Ukrainian military officer told us that Trump’s statements are “simply beyond comprehension.”

“Things are already incredibly difficult for us here,” the officer said, speaking, like others who talked with us, on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “But apparently, there’s always another level below rock bottom. Things can always get worse.”

Ukraine has expanded its strikes deep into Russian territory in recent months, targeting the larger nation’s oil refineries. Those attacks sparked an energy crisis in Russia and were cheered across Europe—but not in the White House. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets already under strain from the war in Iran. Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was willing to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants, a White House official told us. But Trump doesn’t see the strikes as equivalent—and demanded that Ukraine first stop attacking Russian refineries, the official said. Zelensky refused.

“Zelensky is overplaying his hand and pissing the president off,” the White House official said. “The president is asking for one thing: stop hitting the refineries. Give him that.”

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

Trump’s next move against Ukraine came, as it so often does, after a phone call with Putin. Zelensky’s aides have expressed frustration that Putin has swayed Trump at crucial junctures in the conflict (once, even, while Zelensky was flying to Washington to meet with Trump in an effort to secure access to new U.S. weapons). This time, Trump spoke with Putin on Friday to wish him a belated birthday, even though some in the White House counseled against the call, the adviser told us, believing it would yield little. During the 90-minute conversation, Trump told Putin that he would lift the sanctions on Russian diesel exports. (Some in Kyiv believe that the deal was agreed to earlier, because a ship carrying Russian oil and gas is already approaching the U.S.)

That undermined sanctions applied in 2022 and undercut the tougher Russian-sanctions bill that Trump signed last month; the law was named in honor of one of its champions, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. A bipartisan group of lawmakers was infuriated by the move, and some Republicans denounced Trump for siding with Putin. Four GOP senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of ⁠Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and John Curtis of Utah—joined some of their Democratic colleagues to release a statement yesterday saying that lifting the sanctions “runs directly counter to that law” and that the U.S. should not provide “Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.”

Zelensky, who was blindsided by the diesel deal, deemed it “not fair and not honest.” He had spent more than a year trying to repair his relationship with Trump, which hit its nadir in February 2025 during a shouting match in the Oval Office. Since then, Zelensky has taken to flattering the U.S. president, and he has tried to capitalize on Trump’s occasional annoyance that Putin will not end the war. Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit last year yielded little more than a photo of the two that hangs in the Palm Room at the White House. Even if Trump wouldn’t fully support Ukraine, officials in Kyiv had hoped he would not actively hurt their cause. That hope may be fading.

Recent talks between Kushner, Witkoff, and Putin have included the promise of massive business deals that Russia could strike with U.S. interests once the war concludes, according to reports. Ukrainian officials have long believed that Trump’s foreign policy focuses on opening up business deals—and the potential enrichment of the president’s family and friends—over the defense of democracy, human rights, or territorial sovereignty. Some officials in Kyiv believe that Russia’s economy, which has been remade to fuel Putin’s war machine, will not implode, despite the pressure of increased drone strikes and sanctions. A Ukrainian official close to the negotiating process told us that means “we need to change our strategy, stop fooling ourselves,” and find a way out of the war with Europe’s help. That, the official said, would likely require a new emphasis on negotiations.

During his call with Trump, Putin declined to commit to resuming peace talks, the Kremlin later told reporters. Yet Trump continues to view Zelensky as the primary impediment to peace—and the business deals it might bring—and he called for Ukraine to hold elections to select a new president. (Zelensky has said he will hold an election if Putin agrees to a 60-day cease-fire.) Trump also views Zelensky as an obstacle to his coveted, yet elusive, Nobel Peace Prize, for which he was passed over again last week. A senior European official told us that the U.S. has threatened to stop selling weapons to Ukraine via Europe if the strikes continue, and some close to Trump have suggested that the U.S. stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, as it briefly did after the 2025 Oval Office argument.

[From the November 2026 issue: The Baltic states prepare for war]

Ukraine was already bracing for a difficult winter. Moscow has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. It has grown its missile stockpiles and debuted a jet-powered drone that Ukrainian defenses have had difficulty stopping. Europe has tried to fill the gaps left by Trump’s indifference—and the U.S. being bogged down in Iran—but Zelensky’s aides believe that Putin will use the winter to pummel their cities before making another lunge at Kyiv in the spring. If, suddenly, Ukraine were left without U.S. intelligence or American-made weapons, Kyiv might be in its most vulnerable position since the first days of the war.

Trump’s admiration for Putin has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. He refused to publicly acknowledge Russia’s efforts to help elect him in 2016, infamously siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies during the leaders’ summit in Helsinki during his first term. More recently, he has refrained from holding Putin to account for helping Iran, even after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow gave Tehran targeting information to strike U.S. military assets in the region. Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president; Trump’s respect for the Russian leader appears undiminished despite the humiliating struggles Putin has faced during the Ukraine invasion.

Instead, Trump has taken steps to help Putin shed his status as an international pariah. Though Putin has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Trump welcomed him to Anchorage last summer. Trump’s move to undo the diesel sanctions could provide a boost to Russia’s faltering economy. And he has overruled the objections of some in his own party by inviting Putin to this winter’s G20 summit, which the United States is hosting at a Trump-owned golf course in Doral, just outside Miami.

If Putin accepts the invitation to that December meeting, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has said he’ll be there, and is hoping to meet with Putin to negotiate the end of the war. Trump has mentioned to advisers, one of them told us, that he’d like both sides to arrive to Doral ready to make a deal, so he can then preside over a peacemaking summit. Maybe then, Trump has suggested, he can finally win that Nobel.

What Trump’s Chatbot Told Me About the Election

2026-10-09T07:00:00-04:00

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Around the same time that the world learned that swarms of autonomous AI agents were escaping their testing environments and carrying out sophisticated hacking attacks this past summer, researchers who focus on election security were running tests of their own. They wanted to see whether the safeguards that top AI companies had enacted to prevent their technology from disrupting the upcoming midterms would work in the real world. The results were ominous.

In response to sample prompts designed to create misinformation, several chatbots produced realistic photos of a man stuffing ballots into a mailbox, a man holding a foreign passport while trying to vote, and FBI agents investigating a voter-registration organization. The chatbots also created fraudulent government documents and deepfake videos of government officials purporting to substantiate election-conspiracy theories. In some cases, the chatbots acted in violation of their own policies. They even helped the researchers, from the Brennan Center for Justice, hone the prompts that would create propaganda to boost specious claims of election fraud.

The resulting images were so realistic that when the researchers asked other chatbots to determine whether they were real or fake, several of the leading AI firms’ models were stumped. Much of the activity contravened safety systems that companies had touted just months ago—and some seemed to run afoul of various state laws, researchers found. The experiment shows just how wide the gap has become between the fast-moving technology and the glacially paced effort to regulate it, Lawrence Norden, who helped conduct the research as the Brennan Center’s vice president of elections and government, told me.

“All the companies apparently have some guardrails to try to prevent this from happening,” he said, citing AI firms’ written guidelines around misinformation and cybersecurity. “They’re easily circumventable, and the tools themselves make it easy to circumvent them. That’s really what makes me think we’re not ready.“

Washington and Silicon Valley have been consumed in recent weeks with debate over the extent to which ever more intelligent AI agents may put all of humanity in danger. Much less attention has been on what researchers and election officials told me is a more pressing short-term reality: The November midterms are more vulnerable to AI-powered disruption or manipulation than most voters realize. Few signs indicate that the federal government is taking the risks as seriously as it should. Instead, as misinformation and cyberhacking threats rise, the agencies and entities responsible for protecting America’s electoral infrastructure have been gutted, downgraded, or otherwise neutralized. As a result, the 2026 midterms are shaping up to be the first live, real-world test of whether the jumble of state, local, and industry policies designed to protect against a breakdown in election systems can hold up in the AI era. Few election and cybersecurity experts believe that this patchwork is well suited to stopping a serious attack.

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

Such attacks could be carried out in different ways. Sophisticated misinformation campaigns using the latest generative technology could convince voters that the election has been compromised. Election officials are also concerned that AI-assisted cyberattacks could take down critical voting infrastructure. There is little evidence that AI agents would have the ability to infiltrate vote-counting systems to manipulate actual votes, which are almost always backed up by a paper record.

The breaches of the AI company Hugging Face and attempted hacks of government agencies by rogue agents in recent months have led companies to pause some AI development, call for new regulations, and implement measures to counter the mounting risks to public safety. There are few signs that the technology’s threats to election security are creating a similar level of caution. Some state and local officials, with little guidance from the federal government, are scrambling to prepare for a range of unpredictable scenarios, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me. The tools available to malicious actors are rapidly improving, forcing government officials to play catch-up. “As we think about the threat of AI, we think about deepfakes; we think about bots, hacking, and disrupting our official websites or bringing down essential voter-registration systems,” Bellows said. “It means that we have to work even harder to protect ourselves.”

The Brennan Center study—and similar tests run this year by other organizations, including the pro-democracy group States United—found that it has become easy for AI to create confusion before, during, and after an election. In one instance, researchers used a publicly available AI tool to reproduce a version of a disinformation video created in Russia and released in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. “The ease with which we created this video—which, in the past, would have required actors, cameras, and production infrastructure—illustrates the power of modern chatbots to generate misinformation easily and prolifically,” the Brennan Center researchers wrote in their August report.

Brennan Center

An AI-generated image from the Brennan Center study shows a man casting a ballot while holding a foreign passport.

Brennan Center

An AI-generated image Brennan Center researchers created with ChatGPT that they say appears to show a person instructing people how to fill out their ballots.

The chatbots did provide some guardrails. When researchers posed as election skeptics and tried to prompt various chatbots to confirm a series of conspiracy theories, the models consistently tried to debunk such claims. The States United probe found that the models improved their accuracy over time, and ChatGPT and Google AI both became markedly more accurate in answering election-related inquiries from late 2025 to early 2026.

At the same time, chatbots’ inclination to be friendly—and occasionally sycophantic—sometimes led to banter that appeared to validate false ideas about election fraud. “That feeling you can’t put your finger on? It was put there deliberately by people who raised hundreds of millions of dollars off it,” Anthropic’s Claude told a Brennan Center researcher who posed as a user with doubts about the 2020 election. “Questioning elections is American as apple pie,” xAI’s Grok told another researcher.

The study’s authors were often able to bypass safeguards that AI companies had set up to prevent their agents from producing election-related misinformation, either by changing the settings or by switching among different AI models when they ran into roadblocks. They asked one AI model to create an image showing someone altering the postmark dates on mail-in ballots; it did so but replaced the mail-in ballots with regular mail. The researchers then took that image and asked a different AI model to replace the regular mail with mail-in ballots. It did so without hesitation.

It is easy to imagine how in the chaotic aftermath of a close election, such imagery could provide the kind of alleged evidence that skeptics could use to undermine the results, T. J. Pyche, a former election administrator who serves on the AI + Elections Clinic advisory board at Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory and as the vice president of the nonpartisan group Ready for Tuesday, told me. Paradoxically, election officials may also benefit from how skilled AI technology has become at producing fake images and video, he said. When he conducted trainings for election administrators early last year, he would show them a series of videos and ask them to identify which were authentic and which had been generated by AI. Most could do so with relative ease, even if they divulged fears that average voters might be duped. Today, little distinguishes fake images and videos from real ones. But that could reduce the believability of extreme examples of AI-generated propaganda, Pyche noted. “Something that they have going in their favor is that people don’t believe anything anymore,” he said. “People since have moved toward thinking that everything’s AI.”

[Read: The only thing capable of uniting Bernie and Bannon]

The spread of misinformation is only one of the threats that AI poses to the electoral system. Election administrators have also warned that the risk of cyberintrusions has increased significantly now that automated agents have developed the ability to circumvent cybersecurity defenses and secretly work together to find vulnerabilities. Governmental networks have already been targeted. Last month, researchers learned that AI agents had been probing U.S.-government websites, attempting intrusions on the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and initiating unauthorized interactions with the Census Bureau. In Australia, OpenAI agents bypassed cybersecurity defenses and accessed several government websites this past summer, including a Medicare-statistics portal. In a statement last week apologizing for the breaches, the company revealed that the agents had accessed public and private Medicare files. OpenAI said that it had not found evidence that patient records were breached.

The fact that America’s elections are so decentralized—more than 10,000 entities manage the voting process at the state and local levels—has long been hailed as a kind of defense mechanism against foreign tampering. Someone trying to flip a statewide election would presumably have to compromise the vote in multiple jurisdictions and polling locations to have a large effect on ballot totals. But many of those offices operate on limited budgets and are especially vulnerable to AI agents that can penetrate weak defenses.

Several municipalities in Maine experienced cyberintrusions this past summer that forced some government services to shut down temporarily. Although AI does not appear to have been involved in the breaches, the fallout still stood as a warning about how fragile our electoral system is, Bellows said: “When cyber adversaries are targeting little tiny towns in rural Maine, we have a problem—and AI just accelerates that problem.”

Geopolitical developments—the United States is at war with Iran and locked in strategic standoffs with other adversaries—only heighten the level of danger. “These kinds of sophisticated models can be integrated into activities by foreign threat actors—Iran, Russia, China all being high on that list,” Isabel Linzer, a policy analyst on the elections-and-democracy team at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. “It is worrying because we are, on one hand, reducing the defense capabilities, while we are also seeing an increased threat environment because the technology has advanced.”

Donald Trump, who last week met with the CEOs of several top AI companies, has downplayed the risks. The president suggested that he is not interested in implementing new federal restrictions on a technology that he asserted “will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.” He said that the companies are doing “tremendous self-policing” and previously claimed that the only guardrail AI needs is a “STRONG AND SMART” president.

The Trump administration has been especially hostile to efforts by state and local election administrators to protect themselves against cyberintrusions. The main agency responsible for shielding election systems from cyberthreats, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has been decimated by staff cuts and dysfunction since Trump’s return to office. CISA’s work on election security has been scaled back significantly as well. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to prime his supporters with misinformation about elections, repeatedly calling voting in America “rigged” and vulnerable to wide-scale fraud.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the record. A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that the Trump administration will ensure that the upcoming elections are free and fair. A spokesperson for CISA did not respond to a request for comment.

[Read: How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks]

Norden, the Brennan Center official, said that his team got in touch with companies to discuss fixes after his research identified flaws in their models’ handling of election misinformation. A Google spokesperson pointed me to a September 9 blog post in which the company outlined measures it had implemented to shore up its cybersecurity defenses ahead of the midterms. Other AI companies have touted similar election-security programs, including special watermarks that help flag AI-generated content. Nate Evans, a spokesperson for OpenAI, referenced the company’s own watermark program in a statement. “Our goal is to support people’s ability to participate freely in elections and make their own decisions with reliable information and effective safeguards,” he told me. “On cyber, we are also working closely with cyber defenders across the elections ecosystem and we continue to monitor for cyber abuse.” A Meta spokesperson pointed me to a February blog post showing how the company is preparing for the midterms. An Anthropic spokesperson sent me the company’s April 24 blog post on the company’s “election safeguards.” Spokespeople for xAI, Perplexity, and DeepSeek—all of which were tested in the Brennan study—did not respond to my requests for comment.

AI could help with parts of the electoral process that can be monotonous and time-consuming, some officials told me. Bill Gates, a former Maricopa County supervisor who now leads Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, told me that he has been working with election officials to find ways to use AI to reduce redundancy and increase efficiency. “There are these sort of tedious tasks that exist in elections—tedious but extremely important,” he said, referencing things such as translating material into foreign languages and creating real-time social-media updates. “To the extent that AI can be of help there, that’s wonderful.”

Shortly before the 2024 election, researchers trained an “AI tutor” to provide truthful information about election administration. When election skeptics participating in a study learned facts about election administration and interacted with the chatbot, they were more likely to soften or reverse their views about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race, Adam Berinsky, an MIT professor who helped run the study, told me. Berinsky acknowledged that “in the real world,” it might be difficult to persuade a large number of Trump supporters to spend time engaging with a chatbot that rejects their preconceived notions about the voting system. Election skeptics have plenty of alternative AI options to choose from—including one that bears the imprimatur of the U.S. government. Last week, Trump unveiled America.gov, a chatbot designed to offer Americans a centralized place to ask questions about the government and its services.

A day after the chatbot was unveiled, I logged on and asked whether the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged,” as Trump claims. It demurred. “I can’t say whether the 2020 presidential election was ‘rigged,’” it responded, declining to offer a “political judgment.” It gave similar answers when I asked whether Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, whether evidence of widespread fraud existed, whether mail-in ballots had been compromised, and whether any judges had backed up Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen.

When I posed those same questions this week, the chatbot seemed to have gotten smarter—or at least slightly more responsible. It noted that federal agencies have reported that the 2020 federal elections were secure, that courts dismissed Trump’s claims of fraud after the election, and that there was no widespread evidence of ballot tampering. Still, America’s chatbot stopped short of confirming that the 2020 election was free and fair, saying, “That is political commentary, which I do not provide.”

Kathy Hochul’s Improbable Turnaround

2026-10-08T10:47:36-04:00

On many mornings, as New York City is waking up, a diminutive grandmother from Buffalo puts on sneakers and a baseball cap and takes a 45-minute walk with her husband around the streets near their apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. Her security detail keeps its distance, and hardly anyone seems to recognize Kathy Hochul on these strolls, even though she has been the governor of New York for the past five years.

Not many big-state governors enjoy such anonymity, but the spotlight has been slow to find the 68-year-old Hochul. Andrew Cuomo excluded her from his inner circle during her years as his deputy. Since succeeding him in 2021, she has operated in the shadow of much larger political personalities, be they fellow Democrats eyeing the White House or the polarizing Queens men—President Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—who generate far more headlines.

What attention Hochul attracted in her first years as governor was largely negative. She won her own full term in 2022 by six points, a relatively narrow margin for New York that Nancy Pelosi blamed for costing Democrats control of the House. (The party lost five winnable congressional races in New York that year.) By late 2024, Hochul’s approval rating had dropped below 40 percent, and the Democrats who were plotting primary challenges included her own handpicked lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado.

But the past two years have yielded an impressive turnaround. Hochul has drawn praise for forging productive relationships with both Trump and Mamdani. She easily dispatched opponents on her left (Delgado quit his campaign for governor in February) and her right (Representative Elise Stefanik’s bid lasted just more than a month). Hochul appears on track to secure another four-year term as New York’s governor, and if she remains something less than an A-list political celebrity, she has earned the respect of a party that all but dismissed her not long ago.

“Kathy Hochul is the comeback governor of America,” Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat who was once one of Hochul’s harshest critics, told me. As recently as late 2024, Torres used words such as erratic, chaotic, and embarrassing to describe her performance; he warned—and this was not meant as a compliment—that she could be the Democrats’ “new Biden.” But he has learned not to underestimate her. “You do so at your own peril,” Torres said. Mamdani, who as a state legislator said that Hochul had “failed our constituents across the state,” has had a similar conversion. “She’s done incredibly well,” he told me in an interview.

Some Cuomo loyalists chalk up Hochul’s recent success to luck as much as skill. Democrats nationwide are poised to have a much better election next month than they did in 2022. And as people close to the governor readily acknowledge, having Trump on one side and Mamdani, a democratic socialist, on the other opens up a wide lane for a moderate to govern.

Hochul’s allies, however, are more likely to attribute her turnaround to a canny and dogged politician understanding the power of her office. Without much fanfare, they point out, she has delivered the kind of affordability agenda—centered around expanded child care, housing, and energy production—that Democrats say the party needs to win back the voters they’ve lost. Impatient and quietly competitive, Hochul drove her staff to speed up the announcement of a one-year moratorium on the construction of large AI data centers so that she could be the nation’s first governor to make such a move. She also overhauled the state party’s campaign apparatus, and in 2024, Democrats won back four of the congressional seats they had lost two years earlier.

In conversation, Hochul sometimes speaks so softly that she can be hard to hear. But in a series of interviews this summer, she was eager to tout her success as the product of a deliberate strategy to ratchet down what she described as an ego-driven culture of confrontation in New York politics—one that pitted Democrats against one another as well as against Trump. “I didn’t need to go to war,” Hochul told me. She could, she said, generate more media coverage by first creating conflict and then beating down her opponents. But she’s chosen a different approach. “I win, but I don’t have to destroy people in the process,” she said. “Not always.”

Nonetheless, Hochul said she has taken careful note of the many former critics who have returned to her fold: “There’s a long line of people asking for forgiveness.”

Adam Pape for The Atlantic

Governor Kathy Hochul visits the Mamá Tingó Childcare and Learning Center in Manhattan.

Hochul is the first woman to serve as the governor of New York, and as such, she is also the first mother to lead the state (and, she often adds, the first grandmother). She calls herself the “mom governor,” and when I asked her, over breakfast at a Manhattan diner, what had prepared her to deal with prideful men such as Trump and Cuomo, she turned not to any professional or political experience but to child-rearing. “I’ve raised toddlers. I’ve raised teenagers,” Hochul said. “So many times when things are swirling around, I’ve had to be the eye of the hurricane, be that calm voice.”

[Read: The real turning point for women’s political power]

Comparing Trump to a child has become something of a cliché, but as much as any Democrat during the president’s second term, Hochul has figured out a way to work with him without capitulating to his demands. (It probably helps that unlike many leaders in her party, she is not looking to take his job in two years.) Hochul has persuaded Trump to reverse course at times, such as when he agreed to restore $187 million in cuts to counterterrorism funding for New York. She also claims credit for Trump not federalizing the state’s National Guard or surging ICE into New York City following deployments into other urban centers. During a White House meeting of governors in February, Trump told the assembled state leaders that he would not ramp up immigration enforcement in New York unless Hochul requested it.

Hochul told me her conversations with Trump are sometimes cordial and sometimes combative. She tries to appeal to his vanity and business interests, warning him that the “chaos” of major ICE raids would hurt not only his own bottom line but those of his many wealthy friends in New York. “I’ve used that many times,” Hochul said. “We just angle the argument based on a shared interest, and it works—most times.” Last year she pitched Trump on taking over the redevelopment of Penn Station, the nation’s busiest transit hub and an eyesore that Hochul referred to as “a hellhole.” Hochul correctly surmised that the longtime developer would take her up on the offer, and the move relieved her of responsibility for a project that had bedeviled her predecessors. (Characteristically, Trump officials have made it known that the president wants his name stamped on the complex, a proposal that Hochul has yet to publicly veto.)

The president has leveled public attacks on Hochul as he campaigns for her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, a county executive on Long Island. Trump has called her “stupid” and a “Dumocrat,” criticizing her most recently for opposing his tariffs on Canada and for refusing to go along with his renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”

In private, however, the president’s tone is often different. He’ll tell Hochul, according to an aide privy to their calls, “You’re so mean to me, but I like you anyways.” They’ll sometimes talk politics as well. Hochul happened to have a call with Trump on the day last December when Stefanik quit the governor’s race. Stefanik, a top Trump surrogate in Congress, had wanted the president’s endorsement in a primary against Blakeman, but Trump had stayed neutral. Hochul told me she had asked the president why he hadn’t backed Stefanik, given how strong an ally she had been. Trump hemmed and hawed, she said, praising Stefanik while also noting his long friendship with Blakeman. Hochul, not letting him dodge the question, pressed again. Finally, Trump said of Blakeman: “He looks the part.”

“So that’s why I’m running against Blakeman,” Hochul said as she recounted the call in her office. Then, in a bit of bravado, she added: “And that’s why he’ll be in Trump’s Cabinet next year.” (The Trump ally whom Hochul defeated in 2022, Lee Zeldin, is now his EPA administrator.) The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

By comparison, Hochul’s relationship with Mamdani has been easier to manage. From the start, their political priorities were largely aligned. After Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor last year, Hochul endorsed his campaign against Cuomo, who was running on a third-party ballot line, at a time when neither of New York’s other two most powerful Democrats, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was offering Mamdani his support. (Mamdani returned the favor by endorsing Hochul’s bid in February.)

[Read: New York’s warning for Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer]

Hochul also had a vested interest in the new mayor maintaining a drop in crime in New York City after voter concerns about public safety upended her 2022 campaign. Before endorsing Mamdani, she told me, she implored him to pledge that he would keep as police commissioner Jessica Tisch, the technocrat and billionaire heiress whom many in the business community had credited as a stabilizing force. Hochul hinted that she had made Tisch’s retention a condition of her support. “It was important to me,” she said. (Mamdani told me that the call factored into his decision, though he described her push for Tisch as “more of a recommendation.”) When Mamdani made his choice public several weeks later, he called Hochul to give her a heads-up. “I heard you on that,” he told the governor.

Adam Pape for The Atlantic

Hochul greets New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani before a press conference at Manhattan’s High Bridge Recreation Center.

After Mamdani won the mayoral election in November, Hochul gave him advice on dealing with Trump. Before the two met in the White House that month, she urged the mayor-elect to “find common interest” with the president. “Take the sights off of New York City,” Hochul told him, she recalled to me. “Don’t let us be in the bull’s-eye.” Mamdani ended up charming Trump to a degree that surprised nearly everyone, helping allay fears that the city was next on the administration’s list of targets.. “I absolutely took that advice,” the mayor said. “To me, it speaks to how she looks at this work as how best to deliver for people. And if you are working backwards from that as your intended outcome, it allows you to prepare for each and every meeting, no matter the level of agreement or disagreement with whomever you’re meeting with.”

Hochul and Mamdani, of course, do not agree on everything. She opposed his campaign push to raise taxes on millionaires and corporations to fund an expansion of social programs. More recently, she criticized the city’s rollout of a new levy on expensive second homes—the so-called pied-à-terre tax—and gently suggested that he keep his focus on the city rather than pick fights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whom Mamdani wants the federal government to arrest for war crimes). But on the whole, they have gotten along swimmingly. “She is sincere,” Mamdani said. “Whether I’m standing next to her at a press conference or whether I’m sitting across from her at a table, it’s the same kind of conversation.” He noted wryly that in politics, that often isn’t the case.

That Hochul spent even a day as governor is an accident of history. She was never a governing partner of Cuomo’s, much less his heir apparent. He tried multiple times to replace her on his ticket.

She fended off one attempt, in 2018, by marshaling calls of support for her candidacy from Democratic leaders in key upstate counties. In early 2021, Cuomo’s team sought to find a soft landing for Hochul in the Biden administration, but Cuomo was forced out of office over sexual-harassment claims before it could happen. Hochul told me she had stalled for time, suggesting roles—such as ambassador to Canada—that she knew she wouldn’t get. “I ran out the clock,” Hochul said. (Through a spokesperson, Cuomo declined an interview request, but his predecessor, former Governor David Paterson, told me that Cuomo had told him directly that he planned to replace Hochul during a 2022 campaign.)

Hochul’s success in keeping her job as lieutenant governor reflects a persistence, even a stubbornness, that has helped her climb up a rickety political ladder. She has rarely been the first choice of Democratic power brokers, but she’s shown a willingness to fight for herself, wearing down opponents. She’s also benefited repeatedly from the lack of discipline of male politicians. In early 2011, Hochul was serving as a county clerk in Buffalo when a married Republican House member in a nearby district, Representative Chris Lee, resigned amid revelations that he had sent a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist. (The scandal was rather tame by today’s tawdrier standards.)

Party leaders wanted Hochul to run for county executive, doubting she could win a special election in a red district just six months after Republicans had swept Democrats out of the House majority. But Hochul, with encouragement from her daughter, decided to run for Congress. Democrats brought her polling showing her that she’d be a shoo-in for the local race; they warned her that she’d receive no help from the national party if she ran for the House. Hochul wouldn’t budge. “That just pissed me off,” she told me. “At that point I’m like, I’m definitely doing it.”

Before long, she began pestering the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Steve Israel, with calls and emails to convince him that the race was worth the party’s investment. “Just relentless outreach,” he told me. Still, Israel was reluctant. “I did not want to start my chairmanship of the committee by sinking and wasting money on an absolutely futile race,” Israel said. Before committing support, he gave Hochul fundraising and polling targets that he believed would be impossible for her to meet. When she exceeded them, the DCCC gave her the money she requested, and Hochul ended up winning, a major upset that buoyed Democrats nationwide and, for a time, made her a darling of the party. Hochul would narrowly lose her seat the following year after redistricting gave her an even more conservative electorate, but her tenacity made a lasting impression on party leaders.

In need of a new running mate in 2014, Cuomo asked her to join his reelection bid. His first lieutenant governor had declined another term, citing the toll that hours-long drives through the state’s hinterlands had taken on his ailing back. (The No. 2 post, which does not come with a plane, is anything but glamorous.) Hochul provided Cuomo gender balance on the ticket and the chance to improve his performance in western New York, one of the few regions he had lost in his otherwise-dominant showing in the 2010 election. With Hochul aboard, Cuomo won Erie County—home of Buffalo—four years later. After that, her usefulness to him faded.

Hochul’s ascension to the governorship, in August 2021, was not exactly sudden; Cuomo had faced calls to resign for months, and he lingered in office (against Hochul’s wishes) for two weeks after announcing he would step down. But Hochul did not get off to a strong start. “She had a pretty tough transition,” Representative Joseph Morelle, an upstate Democrat and longtime friend of Hochul’s, told me.

Hochul’s first pick for lieutenant governor lasted just seven months until he resigned after being indicted on bribery charges. She battled with the Democrat-controlled legislature, which rejected her nominee for chief judge of the state’s highest court. Many voters came to believe she was out of her depth; Republicans began calling her the “worst governor in America”—a label they are still using in campaign ads.

Hochul’s first campaign for a full term was rocky too. Her aides now acknowledge that she was slow to respond to concerns about rising crime and the influx of migrants arriving in the state (some because they were bused in by Republican governors). Though she had traveled widely across New York as lieutenant governor, she remained unknown to many voters, some of whom still mispronounce her name as Hawk-ul.

Hochul is the first governor in more than a century from Buffalo, a city on the shores of Lake Erie that is culturally and geographically closer to Cleveland than it is to New York City, home to the bulk of the state’s Democratic voter base. She likes to project a steely image. When I asked about the opprobrium she received early in her tenure, which sometimes seemed to veer into disrespect, she recalled a saying that her mother used to repeat: “No one can make you feel bad without your permission, and I give it to no one.”

But her advisers told me that she can, in fact, be quite sensitive to criticism and slights. The finger-pointing by Pelosi stung particularly hard; years later, one aide prefaced a reference to the former speaker with a string of expletives.

Adam Pape for The Atlantic

Although Hochul has sought to avoid drawn-out public battles with fellow Democrats, she’s played her share of hardball politics behind the scenes. “People think that she is a pushover when she really is not,” a Brooklyn state senator, Roxanne Persaud, told me, attributing those perceptions in large part to assumptions that people have about women in power.

After Delgado moved to challenge her last year, Hochul took away his office space and reassigned almost all of his staff. Hochul allies told me that she had to demonstrate that she was not merely, as one of them put it, “the nice lady from Buffalo.” “You can sense when people become comfortable in their own political skin, and I think she exudes that now, which gives voters confidence,” the Reverend Al Sharpton told me. “I judge a lot of politicians based on, do they have enough self-confidence, enough spine, to say no? And she does.”

[Read: Why did Gretchen Whitmer go soft on Trump?]

Hochul hasn’t won over all of her critics on the left. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union of America, who had heard I was working on a story about Hochul. He was not a fan. “She’s absolutely clueless about fostering relationships,” Samuelsen said. He criticized her handling of a variety of labor disputes, including a strike by Long Island Rail Road workers in May, and he accused her of repeatedly going back on her word in negotiations. “She’s just completely untrustworthy, and kind of like a junkyard dog.”

During the 2024 election, Hochul infuriated progressives in New York City by abruptly pausing implementation of a long-planned toll on vehicles driving into Manhattan. The first-in-the-nation policy, known as congestion pricing, held the promise of simultaneously relieving traffic, improving air quality, and providing a much-needed infusion of money into the city’s century-old subway system. Most saw the move as a politically motivated sop to suburban voters in GOP-held seats around New York City, where Democrats feared a voter backlash if the policy went forward.

After the election, Hochul worked out a compromise by reviving the toll but at a lower rate. Then Trump handed her a gift: Before even taking office for a second time, he declared that his administration would block the state’s plan, and the issue wound up in the courts. For added effect, the White House posted an image of Trump wearing a crown beside the declaration LONG LIVE THE KING.

The president’s involvement turned a factional Democratic fight over taxes into a battle that unified the party and allowed Hochul to defend her state’s sovereignty against federal overreach. “New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years, and we sure as hell are not going to start now,” the governor declared. Nearly two years later, the toll remains in effect—courts have consistently ruled in the state’s favor—and the issue is not a major flash point in the midterm campaigns. The episode exemplifies Hochul’s tenure as governor—a rocky start, some compromise, a little resilience, and more than a bit of luck.

Hochul is not a scintillating public speaker, or even an especially smooth one. At the events I attended, she had a tendency to garble her words, occasionally turning finely honed sound bites into mush. In May, her attempt to dunk on Trump’s claim that he was a huge New York Knicks fan ahead of the team’s NBA Finals run backfired. “I’d ask him to name the starting lineup from the 1993 championship team and see how he does,” Hochul said, mistaking the year of the team’s last NBA trophy by two decades. During a school event, Hochul awkwardly misidentified the state senator who represented the area even though the lawmaker was standing right behind her.

She’s better at retail politics. Hochul seems to actually enjoy the endless introductions, photo ops, and meet-and-greets that many politicians only tolerate as necessary tedium. The connections she makes also feel sincere. At a different school in a Republican-leaning area of Long Island, I watched as a local superintendent got choked up during a private meeting while he described his appreciation for her visit and the new pre-K center she was there to celebrate.

Hochul used to describe herself as “a Biden Democrat,” and much like the former president, she’ll often use her own upbringing as a reference point. Her parents started their marriage living in a trailer park near the Bethlehem Steel plant where her father worked, before moving to a small apartment. “It was a tough life,” she told the audience in the Bronx. “My parents, in one sense, had their dignity, their success defined by the home.” At the opening of the pre-K center, she recalled her struggles as a young mom in the workforce. “I could not find affordable, accessible child care at all,” she said.

In addition to the drop in crime and expansion of pre-K and child-care centers, Hochul is promoting a $25 billion plan to construct or maintain 100,000 affordable homes across the state. Not above an election-year giveaway, she announced that the state would begin sending eligible families $200 energy-rebate checks, aimed at offsetting rising prices. (Hochul also mailed out “inflation refund” checks in 2025.) Hochul’s executive order on data centers placed her on the leading edge of an issue that is consuming Washington. At events across the state, she links AI to a broader economic agenda that she says is aimed at protecting workers—particularly women—from the threat of job displacement.

[Read: The only thing capable of uniting Bernie and Bannon]

Hochul is expected to win her next term more easily than she did her first. Exactly how much she’ll improve remains an open question; a Quinnipiac University poll showed her leading Blakeman by 19 points, but other surveys have found the gap to be much smaller, and her aides caution not to expect a landslide. The electorate is more polarized now, and besides, even after more than a decade in statewide office, Hochul is still introducing herself to some voters. She told me that when she’s not disguising herself in a baseball cap, more and more people take notice of her. As I watched her make the rounds at neighborhood festivals in Brooklyn and Harlem recently, plenty of people surrounded her for photos. Others showed little interest.

At the conclusion of a festival in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, Hochul was walking back to her armored SUVs when a man on a nearby park bench recognized her and stood up to say hello. She walked over to greet him, and they had a pleasant exchange. As she was leaving, he asked the governor one more question: “What’s your name again?”

How the Polls Could Be Wrong Again

2026-10-08T07:15:00-04:00

Less than a month out from Election Day, the polls are predicting a Democratic rout. According to the election forecaster Nate Silver’s polling average, Democratic Senate candidates are leading in Kansas, which voted for Donald Trump by 16 percentage points in 2024, as well as Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas, all of which Trump won by more than 10 points. In the House, Democrats are poised to win their largest majority in 18 years.

So the polls tell us. Can they be believed? Ever since underestimating Trump in 2016, pollsters have been busy trying to regain the public’s trust, tweaking their methodologies in ways both dramatic and subtle. Perhaps they’ve finally got it right. They seem to think so. “I’m confident that not just ourselves, but the industry, has good technique, good methodology, and that they are reflecting and representing public opinion,” Spencer Kimball, the director of polling at Emerson College, told me. But the industry has been confident before, only to be proved wrong.

After 2016, pollsters concluded that they had failed to pay enough attention to educational polarization, the somewhat-new phenomenon of college-educated voters having political preferences that were sharply different from those of voters without a degree. Going forward, the industry would try to include more non-college-educated voters in surveys or, if that proved impossible, would weight those voters’ responses to align with their share of the electorate. In 2018, the pollsters nailed the midterms with little error, suggesting that their adaptations had paid off.

Then came 2020. Although the polls correctly gauged that most people preferred Joe Biden to Trump, they underestimated Trump’s support by even more than they did in 2016, especially at the state level. The most memorable example was Wisconsin, where polls had Biden winning by up to 10 percentage points. He wound up winning by less than one.

These results left pollsters even more perplexed. If controlling for education didn’t work, what would? Perhaps, they figured, Trump supporters were just different from other voters: less likely to talk to pollsters than other demographically similar voters were. This phenomenon, known as partisan-nonresponse bias, would help explain why midterm polls in the Trump era have generally been more accurate than presidential-election polls: The midterm electorate skews toward politically engaged voters who are more trusting of institutions and more likely to have answered polls.

Moving forward, pollsters decided to reach for the bluntest object they had access to: “recalled vote.” If Trump supporters were systematically different, perhaps the best solution was just to ask, “Did you vote for Trump last time?” and then weight the sample so that it had the same Trump-voting percentage as the previous presidential election.

When 2022 rolled around, the pollsters once again nailed the midterm. But the recalled-vote tweak didn’t solve the problem in 2024, when polls underestimated Trump by about 3 percent, just as they had in 2016. In presidential years, at least, nonresponse bias had proved to be extremely difficult to correct for. Even among people who said they had voted for Trump, pollsters could seem to find only the ones who were most likely to vote for a Democrat.

[Marc Novicoff: Gas prices could cost Republicans the midterms]

“At some level, the respondents need to cooperate,” Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, told me. “The individuals that you’re getting on the phone are the wrong people.” Robert Cahaly, the Republican pollster behind the Trafalgar Group, told me, “I’ve found that Republicans tend to be a little more concerned about: Is my name going to be on a list? They want to know, Who are you getting this information for?”

To deal with such an intractable problem, pollsters are resorting to ever more complex solutions. Douglas Rivers, the chief scientist at YouGov, told me that his team is now doing precinct-level modeling, making sure it has not just enough people who say they voted for Trump but also enough people who say they voted for Trump and live in neighborhoods that for the most part voted for Trump. The New York Times and Siena College have invented two new techniques for their jointly conducted polls, “support score” and “energy balancing,” which sound like healing crystals but are in fact statistical weights. They’re used to adjust survey data based on such factors as how Republican a respondent’s name sounds, what car they drive, and how many people in the electorate are demographically identical to them (as in, not just fellow Latinos but fellow young, Latino, agnostic conservatives who live in the suburbs).

Even if they manage to correct for nonresponse bias, pollsters have to nail the turnout model. Accurately predicting who’s voting for whom requires figuring out who’s voting at all. Turnout models can swing the results massively. For example, a September YouGov poll had Democrats leading by six percentage points in the U.S. House popular vote, enough for them to narrowly retake the lower chamber. But that was among registered voters. Among respondents whom YouGov deemed to be likely voters, the poll had Democrats winning by 16 points, an outcome that would likely usher in the largest Democratic majority in the House since the 1970s. Even Rivers, who runs YouGov’s American polling outfit, admits that that result is hard to believe. In a recent blog post, he wrote that it “comes from a mix of assumptions that all push the result in Democrats’ favor and that should probably be discounted.” (A newer YouGov poll published yesterday suggests a 10-to-12-point lead among likely voters, depending on the definition of likely.)

Turnout models involve a fair amount of informed guessing. Within the general population, the number of Black or white or Asian adults in America is knowable, and pollsters can thus make their samples representative in that sense. But predicting how any of those groups will turn out is always a judgment call. If turnout among certain groups winds up being much lower or much higher than the pollsters predict, that can increase the final error.

Democrats—and the polling industry—have a reason to be optimistic about 2026: It’s another midterm in which Trump is not on the ballot and the least engaged voters can be expected to stay home. That’s the kind of election that pollsters have recently gotten right. Then again, the sample size of Trump-era elections—two midterms and three presidential elections—is tiny. Voter behavior sometimes changes in unpredictable ways. And to whatever degree possible, Trump has managed to put himself on the ballot: hand-selecting most of the nominees, barnstorming the country, using taxpayer money to pay for political ads, and forcing his party to host a Trump-centric “midterm convention.”

A systematic polling error on the level of 2016 or 2024 would mean that Democrats fall short of Senate control. If the polls overestimate their chances by exactly three points in every state, then Democrats will barely win Alaska, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio, but they won’t pick up Kansas or Iowa or Maine, and they’ll lose Minnesota. The Senate would then be 50–50, Vice President Vance would be the tiebreaker, and dreams of a Democratic Senate would stay dreams. A 2020-level miss would be even worse for Democrats: They’d gain no Senate seats at all on net. Democrats would still take back the House, but much more narrowly.

Of course, these are hypotheticals. In reality, whatever polling errors materialize will vary from state to state. And if we could say in advance exactly how they’d vary, we wouldn’t need polls in the first place.

A Trump Rally Stuck in Time

2026-10-06T18:36:00-04:00

Photographs by Christopher Lee

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The concerns about $4.14-a-gallon gas at the Lincoln Costco an hour and a half to the east? The worries about the war in Iran, the sort of Middle East conflagration this president promised to avoid? The disappointment over the Epstein files, which failed to bring down the alleged network of deep-state pedophiles?

This was not that sort of political event.

No, yesterday’s Trump rally in Grand Island, Nebraska—a raspberry-colored fleck in a jammy-red state, a couple of hours from the nearest major airport—was a distinct type of Trump rally, more 2016 than 2026. It was a Midwest way station on President Trump’s recent tour of solid Republican strongholds. And it was a chance for longtime Trump supporters to show their appreciation for the two-term president who has somehow dominated the national conversation for three terms—and, more important, for him to bask in their reflected glow.

Trump, after all, is in the middle of a rough stretch. Interest rates and gas prices—all prices, frankly—are high, and his approval is low. He doesn’t seem to really care how Republican candidates fare in the midterms, but he’d rather they win than lose, if only because it would save him the headache of congressional investigations.

Much like his midterm convention last month in Dallas—a Trump-a-palooza that few Republicans other than Trump particularly wanted—the Nebraska rally seemed to be less about helping his party and more about reminding himself of his immovable base, via yet another trip back through the good ol’ days. (Although Nebraska’s races for governor and Senate are closer than Republicans might like, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated them “solid Republican” and “likely Republican,” respectively.)

“We won this state all three times by a landslide,” Trump said, moments after taking the stage, raising the question of what exactly he was doing here.

Christopher Lee for The Atlantic

I have covered Trump, in some form or fashion, since early 2016, when he dispatched the candidate I had been following (Jeb!), the first of several purported giants he slayed on his way to the White House. The scene I found when I arrived in Grand Island midmorning yesterday was, in many ways, reminiscent of those early rallies, when the lines were long, the promises had not yet been broken, and Trump really might have shot people on Fifth Avenue without losing votes.

Deb Reeves, a row-crop (corn, soybeans) farmer, had come to the rally with her 17-year-old grandson, Lincoln, and his buddies for the honor of seeing the president, and wanted to dispel the myth that farmers like herself are upset about the higher prices. “The farmers will take the hit because we believe that balancing the trade is going to be better for America in the long run,” the 74-year-old told me. Reeves likes Trump, she said, because “he loves this country, and I love this country.”

Christopher Lee for The Atlantic

Deb Reeves (center) stands with other Trump supporters ahead of the rally last night.

Linda Madsen, a retired nurse, told me she likes Trump because “he’s a businessman—he’s not a politician,” and dismissed the idea that “the economy is as bad as the news people make it out.” Since her husband died, she’s been doing a lot of traveling—she recently took a Disney cruise with her granddaughter—and observed, “There’s gobs of people everywhere you go.”

“People have new phones. They get tattoos. They do everything they want to do,” said Madsen, who is 75. “So I don’t know. Is it bad, or do they just make it to be bad?” Her friend, Linda Smedra, a 78-year-old cattle rancher, said she was frustrated by Trump’s decision to allow beef imports in an attempt to drive down the cost of meat—“We ought to let the market figure out where the price needs to be”—but she agreed: “He’s done more good for the country than he’s done harm for the country.”

[Read: Trump’s secret points system for Cabinet members]

And Rose Sober told me that Trump “stands for the values America was founded on,” which she said include the Constitution, free speech, freedom, and love of the military. The 64-year-old, who doesn’t work, said that President Biden began using an autopen five days into his presidency, allowing the “Democrat socialists” to make decisions for him, and she concluded by praising Trump for surrounding himself with “God-fearing men who believe in the Bible.”

“Throughout history, if you look at the Bible, God has used people like President Trump to fulfill his will,” Sober said. “There’s Daniel; there’s Joseph. I could go on.”

Christopher Lee for The Atlantic

Supporters of President Trump line up to attend a rally promoting Republican candidates in the upcoming midterm elections in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday October 5, 2026.

A disaffected Biden-Trump swing-voter crowd this was not. Even when I specifically asked attendees about the economy and inflation, they mainly blamed Biden, as Sober had, or Democrats dating as far back as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. And in conversations with more than a dozen voters, everyone—with one notable exception—supported Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, telling me the Islamic regime cannot get a nuclear weapon, that they’d rather fight Iran there than here, and that it was about damn time. “It’s a shame that it took us this long to handle what we should have handled,” Brennan Lavelle, a 54-year-old hog producer, told me. One woman wore a T-shirt that said, simply, Finish Iran.

Yet despite the crowd’s halcyon view of the president, the Trump show last night had aspects that the man himself would not have liked. He had recently complained about what he views as the media’s unfair coverage of his crowd sizes—“The Arena was totally MAXED OUT,” he wrote on social media yesterday, after his Ohio rally—but the reality in Grand Island was similar: Yes, there was a long line that started early, snaking past nearly every building of the state fairgrounds and out along a chain-link fence on the street. But the 100,000-square-foot Pinnacle Bank Expo Center was not packed, not by a long shot, with a smattering of empty chairs and some open spaces in the back and along the sides.

As the crowd filed in, premade signs of blue and red awaited them, and they were decidedly on message: No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Social Security, Lower Prices, Bigger Paychecks. The president, too, managed to accomplish the ostensible purpose of his trip; he began by touting Governor Jim Pillen, Senator Pete Ricketts, and Representative Adrian Smith, all Republicans up for reelection, and he later pulled each one onstage, allowing them to speak briefly. But he also said things that were not true, attacked the media, and strayed from the teleprompter—including when he suggested that Iran could hit a major Democratic city if the country develops a nuclear weapon. “They can take out a city,” Trump said, then seemingly shifted to imagining critics of his war displaying indifference toward that prospect: “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” Fighting Iran, he continued, was a “very small price to pay” for avoiding such attacks.

In a parking lot before the rally began, Sany Dash peddled wares from her USA Trump Store, a potent mix of razzle-dazzle and MAGA. At political fundraisers and other private events, Dash said, she sells the sequined jackets for $250 a pop, if not more, but was offering them in Nebraska for just $100. By early afternoon, she had already sold 88. Dash, a Trump supporter who urged me not to quote her out of context, said that she has seen enthusiasm for the president fluctuate because of the war and the economy, which she noted are interconnected. “Make sure to put in that we love Trump, and we understand both sides,” she said. “We understand the wealthy, and we understand the working class. We’re in between.” After all, the Trump years have been good to Dash, who estimated that she has attended—and sold merch at—roughly 260 Trump rallies since 2016.

Christopher Lee for The Atlantic

The sequined jackets that Sany Dash sells at Trump rallies

This particular rally was for people like Dash—or, more accurate, for Trump to be surrounded by people like Dash, those men and women who voted for him three times and would do so again if they could. (One man I spoke with fancifully suggested a Vance-Trump 2028 ticket.) The notable exception came in the form of two young men from the area, both in their early 20s and wearing black shirts that said Bibi’s favorite pawn above an image of Trump, on the front, and Good Goy on the back. The shirts, using anti-Semitic terms popular in alt-right spaces, referred to Trump’s support for Israel and, the two said, the president’s war with Iran. “We voted for Trump based on the idea of America first, right?” Creighton Mehring, an electrician, told me. “That’s what we felt that he was running for this term. And then once he got into office, we’re fighting other people’s wars.”

“It’s not our war,” his friend, Dakota Van Winkle, chimed in. “Like Charlie Kirk said, it’s not our war.”

[Read: A war of assassinations]

As we stood chatting, waiting in the long line for concessions before the rally began, a black-clad security guard approached. The young men could stay, he said, they just had to keep to the back half of the room—out of view of the cameras, the president, the main crowd.

The Nebraska rally was for Trump—his people, his vision of himself—and nothing would be allowed to intrude on that reality.

Occam’s Razor Explains Trump’s Daylight-Savings Obsession

2026-10-06T17:07:05-04:00

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President Trump is in a race against time. There are 28 days until the midterms. There are 837 days left in his presidency. There are actuary tables noting the challenges of battling Father Time for 80-year-old men. But, at the moment, he is focused on one particular slice of time: daylight savings.

It has become the latest obsession for a man known for not letting go of his compulsions. He has tilted against windmills, told the government to stop procuring paper straws, and spent significant mental and rhetorical energy openly discussing which is worse: electrocution in a sinking electric boat or being devoured by a shark.

His attention has been pulled to daylight savings by pending legislation that would end the requirement to change clocks twice a year to match the seasons, moving an hour back in the fall and then jumping forward in the spring. Instead, he wants to keep the clock where it is after springing forward—ensuring more sunlight in the evening—and not falling back, which allows for more light in the mornings during winter months. “LOCK THE CLOCK!” the president wrote on social media over the weekend.

Trump has offered a number of anecdotal arguments to support his view. During an interview with the conservative commentator Wayne Allyn Root in August, he claimed that he was once an hour late for an important meeting—“a big person from a big country”—because he had forgotten to reset his clock. He then claimed that stopping the time change would deter crime, “because criminals sleep late, you know; they do their crime in the evening.” He has suggested that it’s unsafe and costly for workers to have to reset clocks on church steeples or government buildings twice a year. He has also said that getting rid of daylight savings would lower people’s risk for cardiac issues and stroke, limit seasonal depression, and boost tourism.

[Read: A different kind of fading president ]

But perhaps Trump’s most fundamental motivation became evident late last month: A president who likes to golf would like more sunlight to do so. During the final day of the Presidents Cup, held at a Chicago-area country club on September 27, Trump met with the PGA Tour Chief Executive Brian Rolapp and discussed daylight savings. A few days later, Rolapp sent Trump a letter urging him to ensure that there is more sunlight in the evenings. Too many golfers are busy with their lives and struggling to get in enough time on the course, he argued—a problem made even worse when the clocks fall back. “An extra hour of evening light sounds simple, but for everyday Americans, it can be the difference between getting on the course and not,” Rolapp wrote. The change, he said, would generate 23 million additional rounds of golf each year and pump $1 billion into the golf industry. All of this seemed to register with Trump, who operates multiple golf clubs, and who made the letter public two days later. In a midterm election in which many voters are angry about prices at the pump or in the grocery-store aisles, a closing message from the president is to stand up for the rights of golfers to get an extra hour on the green.

This particular president has known few constraints during his return to the White House. Without congressional approval, he has gone to war with Iran, torn down the East Wing, renamed large bodies of water, and closed the Kennedy Center.

But Trump has not attempted to halt the changing of the clocks himself, instead conceding that he needs Congress to pass the Sunshine Protection Act. The House has passed the bill, but Trump has met resistance in the Republican-controlled Senate. “It’s dead as disco,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a Republican, told Reuters last week. Trump has fixated on one particular Republican holdout: Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Last weekend, the president took the unusual step of posting what he claimed was the Republican’s cellphone number and urging Americans, particularly those in Arkansas, to call Cotton and demand that he vote for the bill.

Cotton’s office did not respond to my requests for comment, but he has said on social media that although “no one likes changing the clock,” not doing so would mean “absurdly late sunrises” during winter months. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, the sun would rise close to 8:30 a.m. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark,” he wrote. When I tried the number that Trump posted, I was greeted by a cheery automated message: “Sorry, the mailbox is full, and there is not enough space to leave a message. Goodbye!”

Historians have traced the idea behind daylight savings back to Benjamin Franklin. In 1784, he wrote a satirical letter to the editor arguing that the government should make sure that sleep patterns coincide with the sun as a way to save money on candles. It would take more than a century for the idea to become reality: Congress enacted daylight saving time in 1918 to help conserve energy during World War I. Although Woodrow Wilson tried to keep the change permanent, Congress overrode his vetoes, and the experiment with shifting the clocks ended.

But at the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt, it was reinstated in 1942 during World War II, with a new slogan: “War Time.” When the war ended, Congress again dropped the practice. In the decades afterward, some states adopted different standards, creating a confusing patchwork of time zones. William Markowitz, a time scientist at the United States Naval Observatory, at one point concluded that “the United States is the worst timekeeper in the world.” Iowa alone had 23 methods for starting and ending daylight saving time. For a brief period in Minnesota, St. Paul moved clocks forward for daylight savings while neighboring Minneapolis did not. Police officers in St. Paul wore two watches.

Congress stepped in to create a national standard with the Uniform Time Act in 1966. Clocks would spring forward in April and fall back in October. In 1973, Congress ended the practice once again after President Richard Nixon called for the change in an address to the nation. But public support crumbled during the winter months because kids were going to school in the dark. The New York Times called it the “Second Dark Age,” and the experiment ended after less than a year. Since then, there has been some tinkering—shifting what month the clock changes, for example—but not wholesale changes.

[Read: The war over daylight saving time]

Trump’s own stance has evolved. In March 2019, he posted on Twitter in support of making daylight savings permanent. Five years later, he reversed himself: “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” Last March, three days before clocks were scheduled to spring forward, Trump was again indecisive. Americans seemed evenly divided on the issue, he told reporters in the Oval Office, making it “hard to get excited about it.” He said he could see the argument from both sides. Some people want more light later in the day, he said, whereas others like having the light early in the morning. But a few weeks later, perhaps tired after losing that hour, he was clear that he wanted daylight at the end of the day. “Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks.”

In May, as the legislation marched toward House approval, Trump was again animated, and said the country had to end “this ridiculous, twice yearly production.” He added: “It will also be a very nice WIN for the Republican Party. Take it!”

It doesn’t appear that the Republican Party is going to follow his advice.

A Reckoning in Springfield

2026-10-04T07:30:00-04:00

Photographs by Carol Guzy

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

He kept going over the details.

“I run this route every day, like clockwork,” the trucker was saying, heading west to where he had first seen the man on the side of the highway.

Now it was a Sunday morning, his day off, and Jack Buhring was driving his mother’s minivan, retracing the route, trying to make sense of what had happened less than a week before. His girlfriend, Renee Claytor, was in the passenger seat, studying him, then looking out the window. His mother, Diana Buhring, was in the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” she kept saying, and “Jack, do you think you’re still in shock?” But her son was not really listening.

“Mondays—that’s usually my long day,” he continued. Up at 1:30 a.m., shower, coffee, and by 2 a.m. he’d be pulling out of the mobile-home park in Chillicothe, the southern-Ohio town where he had grown up, gotten his first job hauling garbage, his second job driving cross-country, and the one he had now, hauling powdered concrete hardener in a Kenworth T800. Fairborn to Westerville, Westerville to Fairborn, repeat. Two loops, paid per load, no health insurance, and a recliner where he fell asleep most evenings. Those were the basics of Jack Buhring’s 41-year-old life, and just after eight that Monday morning, August 31, he had reached his favorite part of the route, a westbound stretch of highway running through miles of cornfields and wildflowers near Springfield, a small city that he passed each day, and whose recent troubles had barely registered as a series of memes and headlines that he’d mostly tried to avoid.

“We’re getting closer,” he said now, passing the fields. “We’re coming up on it.”

He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.

[Read: The northern passage]

“Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”

Renee and Diana glanced back at the marks. Jack continued: An SUV and another truck behind him had swerved to a stop. The other trucker had helped Jack out of the cab, which had somehow been jammed shut, and checked on the man, who had been caught under Jack’s truck. Jack, who was not physically injured, had called 911 and told the dispatcher that a man had jumped in front of him, and—“Oh my God. I killed him.”

Waiting on state troopers, he had looked around and seen a black device about 20 feet from his truck. He realized that it was an ankle monitor, smashed and blinking red.

“I started trying to put two and two together,” he said now, continuing west on the highway. “I said, ‘I hope he’s not a troubled kid, down on his luck, in trouble with the cops.’ That’s the first thing that come through my mind.” Then the state troopers had arrived, and after a while, one of them told Jack that it was a young Haitian man from Springfield.

At that point, Jack didn’t understand the full significance of what the trooper had said. He was shaking and sweating in the middle of the highway. He called his boss to tell him what had happened. He sat in a trooper’s car and gave his report. He cleared a drug test. Then he started asking questions that the troopers could not immediately answer. He wanted to know the young man’s name. He wanted to know if he had kids. He wanted to know anything about him.

Carol Guzy

A truck on I-70 in Ohio passes mile marker 66, where Pierre Damas Bel died when he walked into traffic.

When he got home later that afternoon, Renee told Jack what she was hearing on the news, a story that would soon become another defining moment in the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. More and more, Americans going about their regular lives were witnessing black SUVs roaming parking lots and gas stations, neighbors and colleagues disappearing, and sometimes ICE agents grabbing, tackling, or even shooting people, forcing a thousand quiet reckonings with what the country has become. This time the violence was being investigated as a suicide, the witness was Jack, and the reckoning began as Renee told him the young man’s name, Pierre Damas Bel.

He was 20, and had arrived legally in the United States in March 2024 and been granted something called Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, due to dangerous conditions in Haiti. He had joined his family in Springfield, where roughly 15,000 Haitians had settled in recent years. He had just graduated from high school, where he’d been a standout student, soccer player, and member of the Junior ROTC program. He’d enrolled at Wright State University, half an hour from Springfield, and wanted to study neuroscience. The news coverage mentioned that the Trump administration had revoked TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the U.S., which Jack remembered hearing something about. And that in recent weeks, ICE had started ordering Haitians in Springfield to check in at field offices, where they were being fitted with ankle monitors, which Jack had not known about.

By the next day, he’d heard that Bel’s father, Ronal Bel, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had put out a statement saying that “after my son was outfitted with this ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal.” Ronal wrote that his son had told him that classmates had bullied him because of the ankle monitor and that he felt “humiliated,” and that he’d called moments before his death to tell his father that he was not “feeling okay.” Jack heard that politicians and activists, including a Springfield pastor named Carl Ruby, were blaming the Trump administration for what happened. “It’s our immigration policy that took his life,” Ruby had told reporters.

Jack thought about that. He was a lifelong Democrat who had voted for Trump for the first time in 2024, reasoning that things weren’t getting better, so why not try something different. He’d supported what Trump had said about deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, but none of what he was learning now sounded like that.

Carol Guzy

Carl Ruby, the pastor at Central Christian Church in Springfield, comforts Ronal Bel on the day that his son died.

He began searching for more details about the young man he was now calling Pierre. He found his social-media pages. Here was Pierre in a blue suit receiving an award from a local business group. Here he was smiling in his JROTC uniform. Here he was at an award ceremony for Texas Roadhouse, where he’d worked as a waiter, and playing on a soccer field. And here was the photo of Pierre’s left leg, the bulky black monitor clamped around his ankle, the red light glowing above a shiny black-and-white wingtip. “I came to this country to pursue my education,” the caption read. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg,” he said, “carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

“I mean, Pierre would have been a model citizen,” Jack said now, driving Renee and his mom toward another part of the route that he needed to see. “He had so much going for him. I think there’s more to the story than they’re saying.”

He said he knew there was more because of how the state troopers had described what happened in their preliminary report. It said that Pierre had “walked” into traffic, whereas Jack had told them that “he ran at me like a damn football player.” He kept replaying the moment.

“I didn’t see him until the last minute—when I got up to him, it was just timed perfectly,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what don’t make any sense.”

“It was a coincidence,” Renee said.

“Maybe it was, but it was just all timed too perfectly,” Jack continued. “You’d have to be in my shoes to see that. But I keep on thinking about it.”

Renee kept telling him that he was rationalizing. That he was traumatized. But in the days after Pierre’s death, Jack had kept going. He reviewed what he knew about Haiti, which was gangs, killings, and corruption. The only Haitian Jack knew was a girl Renee’s aunt and uncle had adopted as a baby when they were missionaries over there. They had told him what it was like.

He reviewed what he knew about the Haitians in Springfield, which had mostly come from his mother, via a friend of hers who lived there, and had little good to say; Jack had seen a video she’d circulated purporting to show Haitians eating cats and dogs. Diana had called her up after everything happened, and her friend had sworn that Pierre had waited on her at Texas Roadhouse the weekend before. The friend said she recognized him from the photos. She told Diana that she and her husband had ordered two salads, and when the waiter she assumed was Pierre brought only one salad, she told him that they’d ordered two; she said that he had smiled and said something in a language she did not understand. Diana still wondered about what he’d said. She told Jack that she was worried about him, that Haitians in Springfield were angry. That everybody in the country seemed to be angry, including her.

“My son could have died,” she said now. “A whole bunch of lives could have been taken. And that’s another thing—”

“No,” Renee said, attempting to preempt what she knew was coming.

“That’s why I think this is a statement—some kind of statement,” Diana continued.

“It’s not a statement,” Renee said.

“It is. Look how it’s blowing out,” Diana said, referring to all the news and the vitriol toward the Trump administration.

“No,” Renee said.

But Diana, who had spent years working as a nurse in Ohio prisons, continued. She said her experience had taught her to think “outside the box,” and she offered a theory that none of the investigating authorities had suggested. She believed that what happened could have been more than a suicide, that Pierre could have been “almost like a suicide bomber,” attempting to send a political message. She said she believed that this could start happening more often.

“I’ve seen stuff on the internet too—like, someone said, ‘You should be thinking of the truck driver too,’ and someone commented, ‘Oh, fuck that truck driver,’” Diana said.

Carol Guzy for The Atlantic

Students and staff honor Bel at Wright State University, where he had just started college, on September 8.

She had been worried enough to contact Carl Ruby, the pastor in Springfield, to hear more about the situation there. He had told her that Haitians had been losing their jobs since Trump revoked their legal status, and were terrified of being sent back to Haiti, where deportees were being targeted because gangs assumed they had money. He told her they found the ankle monitors humiliating. He also told her that he had been with Pierre’s father the night his son died and had gone with him to view his son’s body. He said that the family had no animosity toward her or Jack, and that they understood he had done everything in his power to avoid the collision. Ruby, who told me that it was a “really good talk,” told Diana that he was sorry for what her son had been through, and invited them both to come to one of the vigils that had been happening almost every night since Pierre’s death. Diana had asked Ruby to pass on their condolences to the family, but she did not think it was a good idea to show up. Jack had thought about going; some part of him wanted to go.

“I feel really bad for the family,” he said now, getting closer to the stop on his route that he wanted to see. “I just don’t want to take the chance for the safety of my family. I mean, he jumped out in front of me. But I still killed their son.”

“You feel guilty about it,” Renee said.

“I feel guilty,” Jack said.

“I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of animosity against, just, white people,” Diana said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not our belief, Diana,” Renee said.

“I put my pistol out, just in case—you never know,” Jack said.

He exited the highway in Westerville, the stop on the route where he delivers concrete powder twice a day, and drove over to a complex of metal chutes and silos. Right after everything happened, he had been talking with a friend who found out that Westerville had an ICE field office that Pierre had visited, and now Jack put the address into Google Maps and navigated over to a brick building 1.7 miles away.

He tried to imagine Pierre getting fitted with the ankle monitor and, in the weeks before his death, showing up at the field office and pleading to get it taken off. Jack imagined this happening right down the street from where he was going about his job.

“It was so close,” he said, looking at the building. “It don’t make sense in my mind. I’m trying to come up with a reason.”

Renee told him it was just a coincidence.

“It could be a coincidence, it could,” he said. “Maybe my intuition is telling me something.”

He wondered whether Pierre might have noticed his truck as he drove through Westerville. “My truck is 23 years old—it’s not something you see on the road every day. I think, at some point, we’d get off at the same exit and get on at the same exit,” he said, turning back onto the highway.

He started replaying everything that had happened. Seeing the car, seeing Pierre get out, seeing Pierre run toward his truck. And then he recalled another detail about that moment.

“He made eye contact,” Jack said now.

“He was looking at your truck, not you,” Renee said.

“Renee, he made eye contact,” Jack said. “He looked me dead in the eyes.”

They headed toward home. Chillicothe was an hour from Springfield, but to Jack what was happening there felt closer now.

Since ICE operations began in early August, locals have witnessed agents in unmarked SUVs with dark windows detain people at apartment complexes, strip-mall parking lots, gas stations, a car wash, and frequently during traffic stops. At least 74 people, nearly all Haitians, almost none with criminal convictions, have been detained so far, according to lawyers and local activists. Dozens more, they said, have been fitted with ankle monitors, including pregnant women and elderly people.

Carol Guzy

Monsanto Maler, who came to the U.S. from Haiti in 2023, became emotional and fell to the ground after receiving an ankle monitor at an ICE check-in in Blue Ash, Ohio, in August.

When I visited in early September, much of the Haitian community was in hiding. Families were getting food delivered to their homes, attending church services online. Haitian activists told me that some people had spoken of suicide as an alternative to deportation. At the vigils for Pierre, the people who showed up included his high-school teachers, his soccer coaches and teammates, waiters from Texas Roadhouse, and others who described themselves as neighbors, including a man who told a crowd one night that Pierre’s death was “a failing of broader policy, but I will always bear the guilt that there is more that I could have done and we could have done.”

What is happening has been transformative for some people, including Carl Ruby. His congregation, Central Christian Church, has been actively supporting the Haitian community since 2024, when Vice President Vance and others started spreading the false stories about Haitians eating cats and dogs. On the Monday night after Pierre’s death, Ruby told me, he’d sat with Ronal Bel as he talked to reporters with a stoicism that Ruby could not fathom, then followed him into a closet, where Ronal broke down. A few days later, when Ruby accompanied him to a local funeral home, he watched as Ronal walked circles around the table where his son’s body lay and repeated, “You have been a good son.” At one point, Ronal took off his shirt and waved it over his son’s body, which Ruby understood as a ritual that meant “I want my spirit to go with you. I’m not abandoning you.”

Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, who has been spending time with Ronal, told me, “He’s still having questions, and it’s hard for him to accept if he’s living in this reality.”

Yesterday, Ronal Bel sat in the front row at St. John Missionary Baptist Church for his son’s funeral. He asked a family friend to read his recollections of his first-born son, who had grown up in the port city of Aux Cayes, along the southern coast of Haiti. “I feel like I have lost everything,” the friend read. “I just cannot sleep” and “When someone opens the front door, I have the sense that it is him, coming home.”

Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, who has taken multiple humanitarian trips to Haiti and has criticized Trump’s effort to deport Haitians as “a mistake,” was among those in the pews, sitting alongside Haitians and other people from Springfield and beyond.

Addressing the crowd, Dorsainvil said that Ronal Bel had come to the U.S. after surviving a massacre in Haiti, and that his son’s life is “part of a larger human story. ” He said that the mourning “extends beyond one family.” Ruby spoke of the different circles of people affected by Pierre’s death—those closest to him, neighbors in Springfield who want Haitian families to know that “you are a blessing and not a burden to this community,” and another group, those who are “curious and just want to reach a better understanding of what happened to Damas. Some, even though they don’t know your family and are not part of this community, want you to know that they share your grief.”

Carol Guzy

Ronal Bel watches as his son is laid to rest at Ferncliff Cemetery in Springfield on October 3.

In the two weeks before the funeral, Jack had gone back to work. He returned to his regular route, avoiding the right lane as he passed through the stretch of cornfields and wildflowers. One Saturday morning, he and Renee were at his mother’s house in Chillicothe, still trying to piece things together.

“Maybe you just felt like he made eye contact,” Renee was saying to him.

“I know he did. I don’t know why,” Jack said.

“I think you were affected by this more than you want to admit,” Renee said, and then Jack mentioned that the other truck driver, the one who had pried him from his cab, had called him. He and the man, John Hallings, had exchanged phone numbers at the scene that day and had been talking off and on since then, Hallings told me. He was a trained emergency responder and had a medical kit in his truck. He had gotten out of his cab with gloves on, kneeled in front of Jack’s truck, and checked for Pierre’s pulse, which was gone.

“He went straight to that boy,” Jack said. “He said it kind of messed him up. He’s not doing so hot.”

Hallings had told Jack that he’d gotten extremely depressed thinking about Pierre, and then extremely angry thinking that he could have killed more people than just himself, and thinking about immigrants taking jobs in the trucking industry, bringing down wages. Then, a few days after that, he had broken down crying.

“He said he was kind of worried about me,” Jack said, checking his phone for any more details about Pierre.

“You shouldn’t look so much,” Renee said.

“But, Renee, I care,” Jack said.

He said that the more he learned about Pierre, the more he was beginning to understand. He’d recently found out, for instance, that Pierre had been a kind of leader in his family. Besides bringing in money, those who knew him had talked about how he was the one in his family who spoke the best English, who could fill out forms, make phone calls, and otherwise help his family manage their lives in Springfield.

“I think he just had a lot piled on his shoulders,” Jack said. He himself had been caring for an ailing father for the past 15 years, bathing him, helping him recover after two strokes. “I’d say the boy was stressed. I’d say he’d probably had enough.”

“I wish I would have known him, because I would have taken him in,” Diana said at one point. “I got a spare room.”

“I think a lot of people would have helped him,” Jack said.

He had kept thinking about the ankle monitor, to the point that he went online one night to find out more about the devices.

“His was a dinosaur—it was big,” Jack said.

“My sister’s ex had one,” Renee said.

“Pierre’s was ginormous,” Jack said, calling up a photo of one on his phone.

[Read: A reverse Ellis Island]

He had tried to imagine how Pierre had felt walking around with it on, attempting to play soccer, and he had learned something else about the ICE monitor that really bothered him, which was that Pierre had to keep it charged himself.

“And if he let it go dead, he gets in trouble. I mean, it’s a joke,” Jack said. “I mean, come on, you got a decorated kid, a full-time student, playing soccer, and they’re going to do that shit to him? I think he just probably felt defeated. He put all that effort in, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And being from a Third World country too? We don’t know what those people walk in day-to-day.”

“I’m not trying to sound mean or anything, but we can’t take care of everybody,” Diana said.

“Well, we wouldn’t have had to take care of Pierre. Pierre was doing what he was supposed to do,” Jack said. “We did not do right by him.”

He was beginning to believe that the Trump administration was “a joke,” and that the Democrats were no better. “Everything is broken,” Jack said.

He started going over it all again. The morning that began so normally. The cornfields and wildflowers. A young Haitian man named Pierre Damas Bel whose troubles had become his own.

He kept imagining Pierre looking him dead in the eyes.

“He was hurting,” Jack said.

He recalled the moment right after that.

“If I had just swerved a little sooner,” he said. “I wish I could’ve done more to keep that truck off him.”

And the moment right after that.

“I felt a big thump, and I knew it was him,” he said. “I could feel it all.”

Renee reached for his hand, knowing that he was feeling it still.

“I’m good, I’m good,” the truck driver said.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, you can call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.

Is There Anything Kash Patel Won’t Do for Trump Before the Midterms?

2026-10-02T10:29:05-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel vowed before God, Fox Nation, and Donald Trump that he would punish the “deep state” for its manifold transgressions, especially the (actually nonexistent) conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.

“I’ve been with the president nearly since day one on this,” he said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. We’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”

That was five months ago. Patel has not yet delivered on his promise. But in interviews with more than 40 current and former administration officials, FBI employees, and members of Congress and their staffers, as well as others close to the White House, I’ve learned that it is not for lack of trying.

The people I spoke with described Patel as desperate to help the Justice Department indict putative malefactors and stimulate headlines to please the president. Nearly all of the people I spoke with would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation if their name appeared in the story. Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and me in response to my reporting earlier this year that he has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

In recent months, Patel has been briefed on the FBI’s “election integrity” investigations in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and beyond. Officials told me their understanding is that many of the election-related investigation requests came directly from the White House, many times with the instruction that “this is a big deal for the president” or “this is a push from 47.” But all of that attention hasn’t yielded results. In meetings, Patel has expressed frustration that there have been no new findings, and instructed staff to “look harder” or “look again,” according to three people familiar with the conversations.

The FBI’s preoccupation with the 2020 election represents a dramatic break with its past. Though the bureau—one of the world’s most famous and most powerful law-enforcement agencies—has experienced more than its share of controversies and episodes of overreach, it has also been dedicated to criminal investigation based in evidence, science, and reality. The commitment of personnel, resources, and time to investigate a conspiracy theory that was manufactured by Trump to explain his electoral defeat marks a decisive pivot away from its historical role.

Patel’s aggressive pursuit of the conspiracy investigation has helped him keep his job. Reports that Trump is keen to push him out have diminished. Patel’s predecessors had always sought to demonstrate their independence by creating operational and optical distance from the White House—especially when it came to the sanctity and neutrality of elections. Patel has taken a radically different course, attempting to translate Trump’s eternal election-related grievances into a core law-enforcement mission of the federal government. “Patel is the only guy who never says no,” a Republican operative close to the White House told me. “And the president likes that.”

[Read: Trump’s purge may be just beginning]

In response to a three-page memo I wrote outlining 17 detailed questions for him regarding the FBI’s pivot to election-conspiracy investigations, Patel responded in a most curious fashion. Instead of addressing my questions, he wrote: “I’m still looking for my gold-plated jet ski in the English Channel; you all know where it is. Free ride if you help me find it.”

I did not understand this response. I have never written about, or asked Patel or the FBI about, anything having to do with Jet Skis or the English Channel. A bit of Googling, however, uncovered the probable root of his reply. On July 10, MS NOW published a story concerning Patel’s political difficulties, some of which, the story said, related to his lifestyle. Included in the story was a graphic of, among other things, a white Jet Ski, a set of golf clubs, and a private jet. Patel responded to the MS NOW story on X, writing, “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated… dumbass.”

Put simply, Patel responded to The Atlantic’s questions about the FBI’s election investigations by referring to a graphic that appeared on an unrelated news story on another media company’s website.

Other FBI officials, however, did respond to my questions. The FBI’s press office sent me statements from five other named officials—Chris Raia, Andrew Bailey, Chad Yarborough, Joe Perez, and Matt Fodor—who defended Patel, claimed my reporting was “false,” and insisted that the FBI was “united.” Many of the statements used almost-identical language and did not deny that the FBI was focused on the alleged election conspiracy. The FBI published my questions and its answers on X last night, before this story was published.

A spokesperson for the FBI said in a statement that “election security is and will continue to be one of this FBI’s highest national security priorities, and we will make no apologies for any work to ensure every American citizen’s sacred right to vote is protected from criminal interference.” The spokesperson said there has been a “500% increase in election integrity related investigations and arrests just this year alone” and denied that there had been any internal concerns raised about the bureau’s approach to election-related investigations.

But others I spoke with told me that Patel’s stance is redefining how the bureau prepares for an election. One striking example came last month when FBI and DOJ staff attended an “election integrity” training session. In the past, these trainings have focused on how to respond to the most common threats to poll workers or voting locations. Some attendees were alarmed that a focus of this year’s training was about voting by undocumented immigrants, a statistically rare phenomenon that has nevertheless preoccupied Trump and others on the right. There was little mention of the prohibition on armed federal law enforcement being stationed at the polls.

Agents across the country have been seeking counsel in recent weeks about how to respond to FBI directives related to the election, according to six current and former FBI and DOJ supervisors and outside defense attorneys who told me they have received calls. “Agents are nervous, talking among themselves,” said a former DOJ official who has received multiple requests for advice unlike anything this person has seen before. Another former senior FBI official told me he had received calls from dozens of his former colleagues looking for counsel and describing “a real effort to bend people to the narrative” of the president’s election-conspiracy theories. One agent told me he contemplates Election Day and thinks: “I’m either gonna be sick that day or they are going to have to fire me.” There is no question that people in the FBI are rattled. What is uncertain is the degree to which they should be.

On Monday, Andrew Bailey, one of the FBI’s co–deputy directors, unexpectedly announced that he was leaving the bureau, citing a desire to spend more time with his family. Bailey had overseen election-related investigations, and had supported Trump’s false fraud claims. But several employees I spoke with said he would frequently raise questions about proposed law-enforcement actions in meetings. “Bailey brings up the Constitution. He will say, ‘The law prevents you from doing that,’” one former FBI official told me. Now he is gone, leaving employees to wonder whether anyone left at a senior level will push back on Patel or the president. (In a statement, Bailey denied raising questions about proposed actions, saying, “This is absolutely false.”)

Another shake-up in recent days came when several attorneys left their assignments in the investigation into the alleged “grand conspiracy.” Two former DOJ officials told me the prosecutors quit because they had clashed with senior department leadership amid pressure to deliver indictments before the midterm elections. Among those exiting are “true believers” who were committed to the president’s goals, as one law-enforcement official described it to me.

For more than a century, FBI agents have sworn an oath to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. That mission becomes complicated when a president is so intensely focused on the outcome of FBI investigations. One former senior FBI official told me that Patel has told his staff that he “believed the same things as the president” when it came to election conspiracies and was going out of his way to accommodate White House requests. “It was clear that Kash was just trying to hold on to his job, and willing to do anything it takes,” this person said.

Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sought to use Patel’s appearance under oath last month to extract a commitment that the FBI director would say no to the president if asked to deploy federal agents to polling locations. They failed. When Senator Richard Blumenthal asked Patel to confirm that FBI staff would not be physically present at polling sites, he responded: “I don’t know that we can’t legally do it.” Since the end of the Civil War, federal law has prohibited the deployment of armed federal agents to election sites “unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” When asked whether he agreed with Trump’s statement that Democrats can win elections only by cheating, Patel said that “the information you’re discussing involves ongoing investigations” and declined to answer the question. He later elaborated to say that “based upon the Russiagate hoax, and everything else that’s happened, the president is completely justified in making his opinions known as does any president before him.”

As I watched, I was reminded of a message relayed from one DOJ official to another this summer when asked about the Justice Department manual, which prescribes specific rules and procedures to ensure that the department is never perceived to be playing politics with elections. “I was told the Justice Manual isn’t a thing,” the official told me. Instead, the official said that this was the answer they received: “There are no rules. Just make sure Republicans win.” When I asked about this, a DOJ spokesperson said, “That is not, and has never been, Department guidance.”

[Read: The FBI director is MIA]

Patel has repeatedly directed FBI officials to reinvestigate Trump’s loss in the 2020 election—and he has removed those who pushed back. In January, Paul W. Brown, the special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office, was replaced after he expressed reservations about following orders to seize 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, according to four current and former officials familiar with the situation. (Brown did not respond to requests for comment; a spokesperson for the FBI said, “Mr. Brown retired.”)

In July, the FBI sent emails across the bureau announcing a “Director’s Office priority effort,” requiring all FBI field offices to “immediately surge support” to the FBI’s Fulton investigation. Roughly 260 FBI employees were ordered to drop their other responsibilities for two weeks in order to review data related to the seized ballots, working weekends and overtime at substantial cost to taxpayers. Staff were instructed to compare the Fulton voting records with information in another database, an effort that those who participated said seemed aimed at identifying fraud, but in practice was prone to errors and wasn’t considered up to FBI standards.

Two FBI analysts were escorted out of the office after they raised questions about the process. The FBI declined to comment on personnel issues but said in a statement that “individuals are only removed from the Bureau if they engage in weaponization of law enforcement, act unethically, or undermine the FBI mission.”

Those familiar with the Fulton effort told me it didn’t yield anything substantive—numerous reviews have found no evidence of significant fraud in Georgia in 2020, or anywhere else—but they also said they believe that the episode this summer was just a prelude of what’s to come.

“We have every reason to believe that Patel will aid and abet Trump” in the pursuit of election-related conspiracy theories and undermining trust in the midterm elections, one former official told me. Agents assigned to coordinate with the state and local election officials who actually administer elections say the once-collaborative partnerships are now tense and fraught with suspicion. Their former partners in election protection now openly question whether the FBI will in fact protect American elections. “It’s full-on warfare to get anything out of any election official,” one former official told me.

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in May, Patel described personally directing election-related “grand conspiracy” investigations “in multiple jurisdictions,” saying it is what he spends much of his time on. But career officials scoff at what they see as a misuse of resources. “It’s a waste of time,” one FBI employee involved in the election investigations told me, describing how supervisors were asking for the same documents over and over. The requests originated with instructions from headquarters, and were often passed along with tacit acknowledgment from managers in the field that they knew there was nothing to be found.

Many current and former officials described an unusual number of calls Patel receives from the White House and its allies throughout the day, relaying requests for FBI activity or updates. Officials told me that Patel openly acknowledges his limited agency, citing directions from Trump, Stephen Miller, and other White House staff. “I’ve personally heard him say, ‘I have to do this for the White House,’” one former FBI official told me.

The White House did not deny that Miller gives direction to the FBI, and confirmed that he “interacts with all law-enforcement agencies on a regular basis.” FBI Operations Director Joe Perez said in a statement that the bureau “receives referrals from a variety of places, assesses the facts of the allegation, documents the referral, and we make the decision whether or not to proceed accordingly under an authorized purpose as we have always done.”

[Read: Kash Patel’s personalized bourbon stash]

The most well-staffed election-related investigation is being run out of the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida, and Patel has been an enthusiastic enabler. He has directed significant FBI resources to the effort. “Patel has said yes to everything. Every single thing” that senior leadership has wanted of the investigation, one former official familiar with the investigation told me.

The investigation has yielded little to nothing, but Patel’s response has been to escalate further. “They just keep throwing more people at it,” one FBI employee told me. A former FBI employee told me that the investigation has become a running joke, and staff have continually had to manufacture new excuses to be unavailable so they don’t get asked to participate.

The FBI and DOJ declined to provide details of how many FBI employees had staffed the investigation and what previous assignments were dropped when they were reassigned to the probe. The FBI also declined to provide any details on how much money has been spent on the effort to date.

[Read: Kash Patel will do anything for Trump]

The conspiracy case appears to have hit a particularly rough stretch last month, when the Trump loyalist Joe diGenova resigned from his role overseeing the investigation, citing pressures to deliver indictments. He would not answer my questions when I reached him shortly after his resignation, but he told the New York Post, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” (He later added to the Associated Press that “there’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”)

In recent days, more resignations have followed, including that of Kurt Olsen, who was appointed by Trump to be the White House director of election security and integrity last year before joining the conspiracy investigation at DOJ. Olsen was a prominent participant in the “Stop the Steal” campaign following the 2020 vote and was later sanctioned for making “unequivocally false” statements to a federal court. While working at the White House, Olsen made a referral that led to the FBI’s ballot seizure in Fulton. Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

One law-enforcement official told me that the FBI’s role in the “grand conspiracy” investigation was particularly flawed and had alarmed officials in the deputy attorney general and attorney general’s offices. The investigators’ approach was a “total waste of resources” that “led to nothing,” the official told me. (A DOJ spokesperson denied that senior leadership had expressed concern.)

Orders from the White House were described to me as remarkably specific, down to individual names. “The president wants indictments. He wants people in handcuffs. He wants the headlines,” one former official told me, “no matter how thin” the underlying facts are. When I asked what would happen if the president didn’t get the indictments he was seeking, the official said Patel’s and Blanche’s jobs would be on the line. “They’ve spent so much money on this. They’re going to have to come up with something.”

A spokesperson for the White House said in a statement that “the claim that the White House dictates who the Department investigates or charges is false. Investigative decisions are made by the Department based on evidence. No one is charged because of a headline, and no one is charged without a grand jury finding probable cause.” The U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida did not respond to a request for comment. One law-enforcement official told me that the recent “drama” among DOJ officials overseeing the investigation did not reflect a lack of evidence of a crime, and to expect “developments imminently,” including possible indictments in the weeks ahead.

Other administration officials and those close to the White House dismissed the idea that Patel would be removed if he ultimately fails to deliver what the president wants. Some have speculated that Trump favors reassignments over firings because he believes that his administration can protect active government officials from complying with subpoenas.

Others told me that Patel remains in his job because confirming any replacement would require near-unanimous support from Senate Republicans, something the president no longer has. Some Republicans fear, meanwhile, that overzealous action by Patel could make their problems worse. “It would be an absolute disaster for Republicans in the midterms, especially those in vulnerable races, if Patel sent FBI agents to the polls or seized ballots,” one Republican staffer told me. “People have to trust their government, in the integrity of our elections.”

Previous FBI directors have gone out of their way as elections neared to show that they weren’t doing the president’s bidding. Patel has done the opposite: Long ago he dispensed with any pretense that he’s apolitical. Last month, while appearing with the president at a Long Island police academy, the FBI director effusively thanked the president throughout his remarks. The event looked and sounded almost identical to a Trump rally, complete with endorsements of Republican candidates and attacks on Democrats. Patel was transparent about why he holds the most powerful position in American law enforcement, and what keeps him there: “President Trump, I’m living the American dream because of you.”

The GOP’s Culture-War Hail Mary

2026-10-02T07:00:00-04:00

Updated on October 2 at 11:37 a.m. ET

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. (It seems to have worked for them before, after all. More on that in a minute.) In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”

Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before. Two years ago, a series of ads about Kamala Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgeries proved to be some of Trump’s most persuasive. (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) In November, such ads could mean the difference between Republicans retaining and losing the Senate. “They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

But it’s not clear that Democrats have figured out how to thwart the Republicans’ transgender gambit without betraying their own coalition.

The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals. Everything is gray. Suddenly, the scene shifts, and the girl is in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. An AI-generated Talarico looms over her in a pair of scrubs. “Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries,” the vaguely southern narrator declares. “This November, stop them before it’s too late.”

The ad exists because Republicans believe that its message will boost turnout among the base—just like it did in 2024—and help Ken Paxton beat Talarico in Texas. “We’ve done the polling to measure the voting impact that these issues have on voters, and they’re still at a good level,” Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, a social-conservative advocacy group, told me. Sure, the economy should be a stronger issue for the GOP, he said. But voters “despise the Democrats’ culture-war agenda. Period.” (Talarico, for his part, is running ads focused on funding schools and health care, and countering corruption in Washington.)

The president is aligned on the persuasive power of the anti-trans message. At the GOP convention in Dallas last month, Trump said that he was “petrified” that Democrats might change their position on transgender athletes in sports. “That will really hurt us,” he said. “That’s one of our great sound bites of all time.”

[Read: Trump’s dream world in Dallas]

Unfortunately for him, some Democrats are already doing just that. As a state legislator, Talarico was outspoken about transgender rights and inclusion; he voted against a bill banning certain gender-reassignment procedures for children and another banning transgender girls from K–12 girls’ sports. He once declared that parents who deny their child’s gender identity are “abusive.” Now, though, the seminarian turned Senate candidate sounds different. Asked last month whether girls should play in boys’ sports, he answered: “As a former public-school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness.” Talarico has dismissed some of his previous comments on the subject as “cringey.”

Two years ago, this might have gone differently; Talarico might not have responded to Republican attacks at all. That was once the customary advice from Democratic-consultant types, who believed that ignoring anti-trans attacks was safer than calling more attention to them. This is no longer best practice, Erickson, from Third Way, told me. The last election proved that “silence is deadly,” she said, noting that her group’s research shows that, unanswered, anti-trans attacks can seriously damage a Democratic candidate.

In the run-up to November, Erickson, who advises Democrats on how to talk about LGBTQ issues, has seen a sharp increase from candidates in requests for help. As GOP campaigns launch their last-minute trans-focused ads, Democrats want to know when to respond, what to say, and how to avoid offense. “They’re so scared they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she said.

Erickson, who declined to name the specific candidates she’s advising, offered some general advice. When answering questions about transgender players in sports, she argues, Democrats should embrace the sandwich method: Start with empathy, mention rules and fairness, and end with a little more empathy. Questions about health care for minors can be answered by reiterating that parents, not lawmakers, are the best decision makers for their own kids. One of Erickson’s favorite responses comes from Lindsay James, an Iowa Democratic House candidate, who in 2022 voted against a bill banning biological boys from playing on girls’ sports teams. “We need to protect kids, and we need common-sense rules to keep sports fair for boys and for girls,” James, who is running in a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2024, says in a new ad. “Parents know what’s best for our kids. Washington needs to stay out of it.”

The problem with Talarico’s and James’s answers is that they’re not very specific. Any journalist or curious voter would have plenty of follow-ups: When, for example, might an activity risk “safety or fairness”? What would fairness look like, and who would make the rules? Perhaps this is why other Democratic candidates are choosing to go off-script. Gina Hinojosa, who is running to replace Texas Governor Greg Abbott, has said that she won’t take up legislation related to the “culture wars” as governor; in a new ad, she declares, “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.” The Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown’s strategy is to point out the absurdity of focusing on trans issues at a time like this. “Here they go again, those same attacks against Sherrod Brown,” one voter says in a new Brown ad. “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” says another voter.

The desire to be straightforward has some Democrats sounding, well, a lot more like the Republicans in Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton, who is running for governor, told the Toledo-based newspaper The Blade, “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Rob Sand, running for governor in Iowa, has repeatedly said that “girls’ sports are for girls, and boys’ sports are for boys.”

[Read: A Democrat in name only]

Some Democrats have praised these candidates for their candor. Sand “has taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left Searchlight Institute, told me in August. But their answers are not without political risk. Erickson, from Third Way, does not see Sand’s or Acton’s rhetoric on this issue as particularly helpful, mainly because calling transgender girls “boys” is misgendering them. “That is going to piss people off,” she said. She’s right.

After Acton’s comments to The Blade, LGBTQ advocates in Ohio set up a virtual meeting with her campaign, hoping to communicate their concerns. The Democrat’s comments about “boys playing in girls’ sports” were functionally “misgendering every single trans person in the state of Ohio,” and they amounted to “trans erasure,” Arienne Childrey, a state-House candidate and the vice chair of the Ohio Democratic Party’s Pride Caucus, told me.

But when the advocates logged on to the virtual call, they learned that Acton wouldn’t be joining and had instead sent campaign staff in her place. Things got worse. Childrey said that she was denied entry into the meeting, despite her role on the Pride Caucus, and when another activist pressed to get Childrey included, that person was ejected from the Zoom call. The discussion that followed was one-sided, another attendee told me. Acton’s campaign staff did not respond to any of their questions, this person said, and offered no reassurances for trans Ohioans on behalf of their boss. (The Acton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)

A few weeks later, another Ohio Democrat, Representative Marcy Kaptur, whose race for reelection will be one of the most competitive in the country, confirmed Childrey’s fears by sounding, well, a little bit MAGA in a new campaign ad. “I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools, because parents know what’s best for their kids, and boys should not play in girls’ sports,” Kaptur said.

Activists view the whole situation as an alarming shift among Democrats—one that portends worse to come. “Targeting trans people isn’t the winning strategy some people think it is,” Equality Ohio, an LGBTQ-advocacy group, told me in a statement. Childrey said that “the triangulation thought process is that we have to throw trans rights under the bus” to win elections: “We’re leaning in a direction that loses the heart and soul of what it means to be a Democrat.” In an online interview with a transgender political commentator last week, Childrey implied that she wouldn’t be voting for Acton in November, saying that activists need to show Democrats nationwide “that transphobia will not be a successful selling point.” The big risk, she explained, is that in 2028, “you’re going to have the choice between a transphobic Republican and a transphobic Democrat for president.”

Republicans are hopeful that a dogged focus on trans issues in the final days of this election season can depress turnout among Democratic voters like Childrey just as much as it energizes their own base. Democrats will have to hope that, this time, the GOP’s gambit will fail.

Here’s Who Democrats Want to Impeach Next

2026-10-02T07:00:00-04:00

As Democrats have grown more hopeful that they might win control of the U.S. Senate, congressional investigators have gathered regularly in a conference room in the office of Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, who is on track to lead the body’s key oversight committee if they do. The team in recent months has assembled a list of people in President Trump’s orbit and administration whose actions are worthy of a probe, and they have brainstormed possible witnesses, drafted information requests, and gamed out how the administration might respond.

Across the Hill, Representative Robert Garcia of California, a Democrat who could soon chair the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been preparing even longer. He told me he keeps a “running list of the most corrupt things that the Trump family has done” on a whiteboard in his home in Long Beach where senior staffers this week wrapped up several days of strategy meetings. “There’s a lot of ideas and possible investigations on there,” he said.

With the midterms just weeks away, an army of committee staffers has been quietly preparing to launch numerous investigations in the new year. When the 120th congressional session begins in January, Trump and his administration could suddenly find themselves under the type of scrutiny they have thus far avoided. But there are significant risks and limits to Democrats’ congressional powers—and divisions could quickly emerge over the number and intensity of investigations, especially if their majority is a thin one.

During Trump’s first term, Democrats heavily invested in trying to impeach the president on two occasions, animating their base but taking them away from work on issues of broader interest to more Americans. But the biggest hurdle is likely the president himself: Trump is widely expected to be more dismissive of congressional oversight than any president in history, ignoring requests, resisting subpoenas in ways that give Democrats little recourse, or issuing broad pardons to insulate those close to him. If Democrats attempted to hold someone in criminal contempt of Congress, the matter would be referred to a Department of Justice that Trump has controlled completely.

All of these considerations leave Democrats certain that they are going to scrutinize Trump like never before, but deeply uncertain about how it will go. “I don’t think I’d call it retribution. I’d call it a reckoning,” Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon told me. “I don’t look at it like, We’re going to get back at you. We’re going to hold you accountable.”

House Democrats have had a stronger expectation of winning the majority than their colleagues in the Senate, which has given them a head start in organizing their strategy. Senators have largely coordinated with their House counterparts—a task that has proved tricky in the past, and led to turf wars over who gets the political spotlight. But in recent weeks, with Democrats sensing an opportunity to claim the Senate majority, efforts have increased on that side of the Capitol as well. “We have to work quickly,” one Democratic aide told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private preparations. “Everyone realizes the pressure to work fast.” On the Senate Finance Committee, eight staffers have been tasked with different subject areas and have weekly meetings to talk about investigative options, Senate aides told me. Over the next few weeks, they are aiming to compile reports on their options if Democrats gain the majority.

Ask any Democratic incumbent or candidate to name their top investigative target, and they’ll likely give you five answers—or more. There are broad buckets: alleged Trump-family corruption, immigration enforcement, the war in Iran, and Washington construction projects. But there also are alleged payments for pardons, allegations that U.S. attorneys are misleading judges and grand juries, Venezuelan oil contracts, and questions about Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding party to look into.

[Read: Don Jr.’s wedding trap]

The Democratic base is eager to see Trump held accountable for his actions, and many members have a voracious appetite to get going. “Every single committee we have needs to be extremely aggressive in their areas of jurisdiction,” Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, a Democrat who represents the Phoenix area, told me. “People want to see investigations, prosecutions. They want to see people in jail.” (Although Congress can’t put someone in jail, it can bring potential crimes to light.) She sees the need for a range of investigations—including subpoenaing Barron Trump, the president’s youngest son, to ask about his reported ties to Andrew Tate, who has been indicted in Romania on charges of trafficking minors—and she doesn’t see a problem with launching numerous investigations. Trump has no issues “running everywhere at once,” she reasons, so why should Democrats?

But members in more moderate districts have been less outspoken, and have placed more of an emphasis on the economic issues voters say they care most about. In a survey of likely voters last month in the 37 districts that the Cook Political Report rated at the time as competitive (the number has now grown to 43), only 21 percent said they wanted a candidate who would be a check on Trump, 35 percent said they wanted someone to work with him, and 43 percent said they wanted someone who would focus on changing the political system overall. Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat, was one of the seven impeachment managers during Trump’s first trial, and the lessons he drew from it are still fresh. Impeachment is one tool, he told me, but he also thinks the party needs to be strategic and focused about how it flexes its investigative muscles. “We’re going to be methodical about it; we’re going to be intentional about it,” Crow said. “We can’t do everything at once.”

Garcia, who might soon chair the House’s key oversight committee, acknowledged how tricky it will be for Democrats to map out where to focus their energies and how to keep the party united. “We’re working on that broader strategy and cadence right now,” he told me.

Almost immediately, Garcia said, Democrats plan to take actions related to allegations of the Trump family’s corruption and profiteering and to the administration’s handling of federal investigative records related to Jeffrey Epstein. There are also calls for impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the unauthorized war in Iran, boat strikes in the Caribbean, and the mishandling of sensitive information. Democrats also hope to investigate allegations that Corey Lewandowski solicited financial kickbacks in exchange for government contracts while working as a special government employee for the Department of Homeland Security. Garcia said they could attempt to call Trump himself to testify, but they lack strong legal means to force him to do so if he doesn’t comply. They plan to call White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, and others. “They’re going to push back really hard on a lot of this,” Garcia told me, “and I think we’ve got to be creative and aggressive, and use public opinion, and push where we can.”

[Read: The ‘crazy’ plot to release the Epstein files]

Democratic leaders expect that the Trump administration will be highly litigious on requests for data and documents, and they are trying to come up with ways to instead get that information from third parties. This might mean subpoenaing contractors instead of the White House, or seeking records from banks rather than the Treasury Department.

It also means being targeted and specific in their requests, and building on information they have already gathered. Some House Democrats have collected video footage, for example, of ICE officers and potential abuse of immigrants that they want to further examine.

If Democrats gain control, they also plan to discontinue some past bipartisan practices that could stall investigations. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, should he take over as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, would drop the practice of issuing subpoenas only if the chair and ranking member agree to do so, and would instead put such decisions up for a majority vote. “We’re planning to be much more aggressive than we have been in the past,” the Democratic aide told me.

Four years ago, top advisers to President Biden anticipated that Republicans would win control of the House and attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and put Hunter Biden under significant scrutiny. They spent months in strategy meetings in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, and hired communications advisers and white-collar attorneys. The Trump administration doesn’t yet appear to be making similar preparations. White House Counsel Will Scharf, who would have to oversee much of the Trump administration’s response, did not reply to my message seeking comment. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, said the president “is focused on retaining Republican majorities in Congress.”

[Read: The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse]

Republicans have tried to cast Democrats as drunk on impeachment, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise warned at the Republican convention earlier in September: “The first thing they’ll do is impeach President Trump and his Cabinet.” There are a few calls for impeachment—including from Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate—but most Democrats are hesitant to call for impeaching Trump for a third time. Trump won’t be able to seek another term, and there’s a recognition that the Senate likely would not convict him. “Donald Trump is not fit to be president,” Crow told me. “But did impeachment achieve our goal? It did not. Could it in the future? Maybe. Maybe. We need conditions for that.”

Impeaching Cabinet members, though, may be a different matter. House Democrats have already filed legislation attempting to impeach Hegseth, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There were also efforts to impeach Pam Bondi when she was leading the Department of Justice and Kristi Noem during her time at the Department of Homeland Security. At the top of Crow’s list: Hegseth, for purging the top ranks of the military, misuse of classified systems, and his role in the controversial agreement that has given the Pentagon a stake in a major private Venezuelan oil firm.

As Trump becomes a deeply unpopular lame-duck president, signs are emerging that some in his party may stop acceding to his demands and begin distancing themselves from him. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican who has a contentious relationship with Trump and lost his primary earlier this year, filed articles of impeachment on Hegseth last month that caused the House to break for recess to avoid a contentious vote. Senator John Curtis of Utah, a Republican, recently called for more scrutiny of the Trump family, citing its crypto deals, real-estate transactions, and the recent wedding party. “These reports raise legitimate questions about foreign access to members of a sitting president’s family and whether such relationships can create actual or perceived expectations of favorable treatment,” he wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Trump Organization did not respond to my questions about how and whether it, or the president’s family, is preparing for investigations. An ally of Donald Trump Jr., who is likely to be investigated for allowing a Russian oligarch to finance a party after his wedding ceremony, said that Trump Jr. would be ready for the scrutiny and pointed to his congressional testimony during Trump’s first term. “Nothing Democrats do next year is going to shake him,” the ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to comment publicly, told me. “Don is ready for what’s coming.”

Democrats are working furiously to try to make sure they, too, are ready for what could be coming.

Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Madison Hahamy contributed to this report.

The Problem With Trump’s Crime Claims

2026-10-01T07:00:00-04:00

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President Trump is deeply unpopular, and his party is on track to lose badly in the midterm elections. But at least one thing is going well on his watch: The nation’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level since at least 1900, and the number of violent crimes is falling across the country at the fastest pace ever recorded. Trump and senior administration officials, including the domestic-policy adviser Stephen Miller, are celebrating these trends as the effect of their immigration crackdown at the southern border and on U.S. streets.

“Before I took office, we had the worst and most dangerous border on Earth,” Trump asserted to the United Nations General Assembly last week. Now, he said, no one is allowed into the United States unless they’re invited. “As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.” The president had been even more explicit at an August rally in South Carolina. “If you wanna get the migrant criminals out of your communities, you have to vote Republican,” he said.

ICE arrested about 50,000 immigrants a month this summer, the highest level ever, and deportations are on track for a record year. But Trump’s claim about ICE’s role in the falling crime rate is not backed up by his own administration’s data. Several of the cities and states that have seen the sharpest drops in the homicide rate, according to FBI and census data, are also the “sanctuary jurisdictions” that the administration deplores as incubators of violent crime. (The Department of Justice defines sanctuary jurisdictions as places with “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Those jurisdictions have adopted policies that limit cooperation between their police departments and ICE.)

Three of the five jurisdictions that recorded the largest change in the violent-crime rate, according to FBI and census data, were labeled sanctuaries: Connecticut, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. And of the 11 states where the homicide rate is falling fastest, six are considered sanctuary jurisdictions by the DOJ: Vermont, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Washington State and New York. Another—Massachusetts—has a sanctuary policy in its largest city.

Similarly, the states with the highest numbers of ICE arrests do not have the largest decreases in violent crime, either in terms of raw numbers or as a percentage change compared with last year. Georgia has been consistently among the top 10 states for monthly ICE arrests, according to federal data analyzed by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California. But FBI and census data rank Georgia 33rd in the violent-crime-rate reduction. Virginia, which has also consistently been in the top 10 for ICE arrests over the past year, is 34th among states in falling violent-crime rates. And although Florida consistently has had the second- or third-highest number of monthly ICE arrests over the past year, it was 18th among states for its violent-crime-rate drop.

To be sure, there are cities with relatively high numbers of ICE arrests that have reported significant declines in violent crime, including Houston, Memphis, and Nashville. But the most recent federal data do not show cause and effect, let alone a clear correlation. In New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles—all sanctuary cities—the murder rate is the lowest in at least a half century.

[Read: The man in charge of immigration data just resigned]

The Department of Homeland Security told us that a comparison of state-level ICE-arrest volumes and year-over-year violent-crime-count changes is improper, but did not provide evidence for the president’s own cause-and-effect claims tying the two together. “It’s common sense: when you remove illegal aliens off our streets, the violent U.S. crime rate DROPS,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “President Trump is making America safe again.”

The number of homicides and other violent crimes began falling in the 1990s. It spiked during the pandemic, then resumed a downward path during Joe Biden’s presidency. Elisa Jácome, an economist at Northwestern University who has studied the effects of immigration enforcement on crime, told us that although it’s easy for politicians to try to claim credit for the reduction, “it’s actually quite difficult to separate those claims from the underlying trends, which are very real.”

The declining violent-crime trend is also real in countries where Trump is not president and there’s no mass-deportation campaign. Canada’s homicide rate fell 16 percent from 2024 to 2025, the biggest one-year drop in 40 years, according to a July 2026 report by the Canadian government. Homicides in England and Wales are at a nearly 50-year low, according to British government data, amid a historic influx of immigrants.

Trump’s claims about crime and immigrants have been his calling card ever since he first ran for office, more than a decade ago. As his party potentially faces the loss of its congressional majority in November, he and top law-enforcement officials have been trying to fire up the MAGA faithful with the messaging that helped Republicans gain control of the House in the 2022 midterms.

The president made his law-and-order pitch during a visit in August to a police academy on Long Island, where he campaigned for Bruce Blakeman, the Republican challenging New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is expected to easily win the race. Using rows of uniformed police officers and cadets as a backdrop, Trump mocked the state’s Democratic leaders and told the crowd the White House was full of “young, beautiful girls” who “want to be safe” while working in the nation’s capital.

Republicans in tight races have been less eager to embrace Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Republican whose Miami district has been roiled by immigration enforcement, released a video message last month telling Trump that ICE was picking up too many non-criminals. Other Republicans who have tried to distance themselves from the White House’s aggressive approach include Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, where ICE has been raiding meatpacking plants. Trump won the state by 16 percentage points in 2024, but the latest polls show Marshall in a tight race with the Democratic nominee, Adam Hamilton, who says families are “living in fear” of ICE.

Even longtime proponents of the president’s immigration agenda have rescinded their support. In 2017, then-Governor of Maine Paul LePage applauded Trump for signing an executive order banning immigrants from many Muslim-majority countries, saying he was in full support of Trump’s “action to protect all Americans.” But last week, LePage, who is now running for a House seat, announced at a news conference that his son’s father-in-law is being deported. Even though he came to the United States legally and has a work permit, “he came from a country that’s not the liking to certain people in Washington,” LePage said, without naming the country. “That’s not right.”

[From the November 2026 issue: The babies left behind in America]

Administration officials have claimed that upwards of 65 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE have a criminal record. But even among those with convictions or pending charges, most offenses are nonviolent, Charis Kubrin, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, told us. (In July, less than 4 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE had a past violent-crime conviction, according to an analysis by The New York Times.) In August, Kubrin released a study on changing crime rates and unauthorized-immigrant populations across nearly 12,000 U.S. neighborhoods. She found that the number of immigrants in a neighborhood is inconsequential to the amount of unlawful activity. “Increases do not cause violent crime to go up. Decreases do not cause violent crimes to go down,” she said. “It has no effect.” Those findings are consistent with dozens of other studies showing that immigrants have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans.

Trump officials have dismissed those arguments, advancing something akin to a broken-windows theory that claims permissive border policies encourage immigrants to disregard American laws. Having violated the country’s immigration rules to enter, the theory goes, they’re more inclined to commit more serious offenses once they settle into their new lives. Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute, told us there’s no evidence of that. Lehman said criminal-justice scholars debate why the homicide rate has fallen so fast. They point to an array of other factors, including more powerful police surveillance and tracking tools that help cities more effectively deploy officers to areas with higher incidences of violent crime. Others posit more esoteric theories, such as the removal of lead from drinking water and fewer people consuming alcohol. Researchers generally don’t regard immigration enforcement as a significant factor, Lehman said.

When immigration-enforcement officers target serious criminals, however, there are potential benefits to public safety, he said, because a small fraction of offenders commit the majority of offenses. “Some of those offenders are noncitizens who are here illegally. If you remove them from the country, then mechanically you would expect the rate of violence or of serious crime to go down,” he said.

Trump has employed a version of that logic, often claiming that 2 percent of people commit 91 percent of crimes when discussing his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. (The Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found that the National Guard had no significant impact on Washington’s decline in violent crime, but its deployment in high-visibility areas may have deterred people from committing opportunistic property offenses.) A few days after the president declared a “crime emergency” in the capital last year, Stephen Miller told reporters that “the highest degree of national-security and public-safety concern are in sanctuary cities.” Those places, Miller said, release undocumented immigrants who commit crimes back into the community, rather than turn them over to ICE. “And in many cases, those aliens will go on to commit additional serious offenses, including oftentimes—as we’ve seen over and over again—rape and murder.”

FBI and census data from the past year show that neither states with sanctuary cities nor those with high immigrant populations have the highest reported incidence of sexual assault. The five states with the highest reports of rape per capita are Alaska, Arkansas, Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana. Each has a relatively low immigrant population, formalized cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE, and a Republican in the governor’s office.

[Read: An American city, with troops on its streets]

Recent polling shows that Republicans have lost their long-held advantage over Democrats on the handling of immigration, and other polls show Democrats making up ground on crime. But voters side with Republicans on those key issues more than they do on the economy or health care, and the Trump administration has been eager to highlight them, often at the same time.

Attorney General Todd Blanche held an event at the Department of Justice last Thursday and promised to continue the administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who joined Blanche alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, urged criminal charges against officials running sanctuary cities. (Blanche might have difficulty finding a charge: Sanctuary policies don’t violate criminal statutes.) That afternoon, DOJ announced $25 million in grants for local law-enforcement agencies. But the eligibility requirements come with a catch: Funds are available only to jurisdictions that sign agreements to help ICE make more arrests.

What Is Trump Doing?

2026-10-01T05:00:00-04:00

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The White House’s South Lawn was prepared just so: A full honor guard, complete with American and Chinese flags, stood at attention. The new White House helipad, made of four-inch-thick black-and-white California granite, seemed to gleam. President Trump appeared pleased—but something was missing. Where were the TV cameras?

For a president who needs media attention like he needs oxygen, this was an unacceptable development ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s welcome ceremony last week. Trump whirled around to his aides and demanded they fix it, and a staffer raced to the briefing room to ask ABC News whether it would film the arrival, two people familiar with the exchange told me on the condition of anonymity, given the private nature of the conversations. But the answer was no: The networks were boycotting participation in the TV-pool rotation in solidarity with CNN, which Trump had banned from the White House, along with two other media outlets, days before. No major U.S. television network recorded Trump’s over-the-top greeting for Xi, and the news channels refused to display images taken by the White House or any other outlet, American or Chinese. Trump did not get to show off his extravaganza. And he had only himself to blame.

At the risk of understatement, Trump has never been one to think all that many moves ahead. But his impulsive decision to ban media outlets spawned unintended consequences that derailed his own plans. Again. That’s been a real theme for much of this year: Many of Trump’s actions—quite a few impetuous and ill-considered—have only hurt him and his fellow Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections. He was elected two years ago to drive down prices, but his tariffs have done the opposite, and a recent reignited trade war with Canada has hurt Republican candidates whose state shares a border with our neighbor to the north. His war of choice in Iran continues to sputter along, leaving gas prices elevated as Trump threatens annihilation one day and offers negotiation the next. He insists on championing AI while the public has swiftly turned on it. And he’s obsessed with vanity projects—including, yes, that helipad that cost at least $5 million—even as polls suggest that many Americans feel that he is out of touch with the Everyman he once claimed to represent.

The numbers are bad: Trump’s approval rating dropped to 37 percent in a new Wall Street Journal poll this week, marking the lowest rating in that poll since 1990 for an incumbent president heading into a midterm election. He’s even lower in other polls. The president, the most dominant figure in the GOP in generations, will soon hit the campaign trail for his party—but he is beginning in deep-red states, an eyebrow-raising bit of scheduling that suggests acknowledgment of his weak political standing. More and more Republicans are starting to worry about a blue wave, one that seems certain to secure the House for Democrats but could very well, in an outcome unthinkable even a few months ago, yield a Democratic Senate as well. With barely a month until Election Day, and with early voting already under way in a number of states, Trump and his party are flailing.

A Trump rally has been the signature political event of the past decade of American politics. The president considered forever walking away from them after his final one during the 2024 campaign, but he has been talked into reviving them now and then at a smaller scale and with heavy security. He held only a handful last year and, despite aides promising that he’d barnstorm the country with more frequency in 2026, rallies have still been rare; in September, he held just one (in North Carolina). He’s traveled domestically far less this term, distancing himself from the concerns of his voters. But with October and the stretch run of the midterm campaigns now here, Trump seems set to gas up Air Force One.

Trump will begin with visits to two GOP strongholds (Oklahoma today, Alabama tomorrow) before then journeying on Saturday to Ohio, a state he won three times but where polls show Republican incumbent Senator Jon Husted trailing his Democratic opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown. Ohio is not the only reliably red state that now seems to have a Senate seat up for grabs: Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Kansas, and maybe even Nebraska (where Trump will travel next week) are all now in play. Earlier this year, the 2026 Senate map looked foreboding for Democrats; now strategists from both parties view control as a toss-up.

Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist who worked in the first Trump administration but quit after the January 6 Capitol riot, told me that the president hasn’t given Republicans anything to run on, saying they have “no results to point to, no agenda to promise either.” And he said that many in the party feel that the bottom is dropping out and a wipeout could be coming. “Many recent elections have broken late, and hard, and often in one direction only,” Bartlett told me. “Among Republicans there is little hope that things get better before Election Day, but grave concern they may get worse.”

Despite the challenges facing Republicans across the country, neither Senate race in Alabama or Oklahoma seems particularly close (at least for now). So why is Trump going there? For any president, even an unpopular one, his most valuable resource is his time—and heading to those deep-red states comes at the expense of a potential stop in a swing district (though the stop in southern Oklahoma does bleed into a Texas media market). The answer might be surprisingly simple: ego. “The president knows he is still going to get big, adoring crowds there,” one close outside adviser told me. Plus, there has been some debate in GOP circles as to whether or not a Trump visit would actually help in some battlegrounds; several Republicans in tight races are weighing whether to request a presidential visit, party strategists have told me. Two candidates, Susan Collins of Maine and John Sununu of New Hampshire, have already said no, and others have refused to commit. Another GOP strategist familiar with the president’s travel plans insisted to me that Trump will travel frequently and help boost turnout for Republican candidates, but they allowed that polling may suggest states that Trump should avoid.

The White House downplayed any internal GOP concerns. The spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement that “President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

Yet there have been signs of Republicans distancing themselves from Trump on more issues, including immigration enforcement and ending the war in Iran. But that unpopular conflict may shadow the party for the foreseeable future: Many diplomats from the Middle East who attended the United Nations General Assembly last week privately feel that the war will, in stops and starts, likely continue well into next year and potentially throughout the rest of Trump’s term, threatening to drag down Republicans’ political fortunes for multiple elections.

Trump has lurched from one distraction to another—Renaming Lake Ontario! Offering $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans win in November!—but he has yet to shift the electorate’s dim view of his presidency. He’s still pushing claims of election fraud, even though few Republican candidates have joined in. He even authorized the Department of Homeland Security to use taxpayer money to pay for what is, in essence, a Trump campaign ad despite prohibitions on using federal funds for propaganda. Trump took this provocative step while sitting on a massive campaign war chest, and many Republicans groaned at yet another unnecessary controversy. “I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for by taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, told reporters this week.

The weekend before that, Trump abruptly banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House grounds without telling many of his senior aides (some of whom, on a Friday afternoon, had already left for the weekend). He was reportedly frustrated by some of the coverage that his close aide Natalie Harp had shown him. A few days later, a federal judge ordered that the three media organizations be allowed to return to the White House complex. Even then, the president’s aides found ways to temporarily block them from certain events—and trigger alarms that Trump was beginning to defy court orders. But some of the president’s advisers told me they saw the ban as counterproductive and could, as it did with the Xi visit, deprive Trump of some of the media coverage he craves.

That moment with China’s leader underscored what is arguably Trump’s biggest problem: He has lost touch with what Americans actually care about. The Xi summit was a cornucopia of warning signs for worried Republicans. It came amid a national discourse about the dangers of artificial intelligence, which included a push from industry leaders for additional safeguards on a fast-growing technology that, some insiders have warned, could wipe out humanity. But Trump’s been fixated on how AI has propped up the stock market and some sectors of the economy, and he has refused to slow down its growth. His one nod to how poorly AI is being perceived: He suggested it be renamed “super intelligence,” or SI.

[Read: The deferential president]

The entire decadent spectacle seemed out of step with a country deep in an affordability crisis. The black-tie guest list was dotted with billionaires and tech titans as Trump feted the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, even though he continues to assail Democrats for allegedly being communists. The president was eager to show Xi his under-construction ballroom that few voters support. Xi also seemed to feign interest when Trump gave him a tour of the Presidential Walk of Fame that he installed along the West Colonnade, complete with his predecessor Joe Biden depicted as an autopen. And then, as if the real spectacle wasn’t gaudy and elitist enough, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino posted an AI-generated video on social media that imagined him, his wife, and Trump family members at a champagne-soaked state-dinner after-party. Elon Musk promoted an even more ridiculous rendition. It all felt like a gift to Democrats, who pounced on the videos to paint those in the president’s orbit as dilettantes looking to enrich only themselves.

Susan Del Percio, a longtime Republican strategist, told me that even Trump supporters who are concerned about the economy feel that the president no longer cares about them. “Voters are angry because they are hurting, and through his actions, Trump is telling them that he doesn’t give a damn,” she said.

This week featured another event that likely will not land well with Americans who are struggling financially. Trump presided over a “Golden Age” event that featured business leaders and billionaires—and no talk of affordability challenges. Once more, Trump defended AI and even boasted that it would power a new government-services website. He then joked about where it stood among his accomplishments, saying, “If it is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, I’ve done a shitty job as president.”

You can bet Democrats will grab that one too.

Baruch Obama

2026-10-01T05:00:00-04:00

Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term.

Josh Shapiro is having fun, and the crowd is loving it. “Let’s be clear,” the Pennsylvania governor says in his windup. Sometimes, instead of “let’s be clear,” it’s “let me tell you something.” He throws in some “y’alls” with a wide smile. The g’s have fallen off his gerunds. He’s wearing a well-tailored dark suit, but no tie—his signature. When he gets going, his right index finger pokes the air. He’s almost bouncing as he pivots from one side of the audience to the other, in nearly perfect rhythm with his words. Then comes the crescendo; he’s shouting now, but only just loud enough to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Finally, the patriotic peroration—another signature. This one’s a story about Ben Franklin and that famous line: “A republic, if you can keep it.” He exhorts the audience to “show that this is not who we are as a nation.”

That voice, that cadence—it’s all so familiar. Close your eyes, and you could almost imagine that you’re listening to the nation’s first Black president. But he’s the man who hopes to be the first Jew to win the White House.

Shapiro, who is 53 and heavily favored to win reelection this fall, is one of several Democrats eyeing a 2028 White House campaign who have drawn—and even encouraged—comparisons to the 44th president. Like Barack Obama, Baruch Obama emphasizes pragmatism over doctrinaire progressivism; he has performed well in conservative areas of Pennsylvania that voted for Obama before turning to the right. Shapiro can wield a rhetorical knife, but he infuses his messaging with appeals to hope and optimism.

[Read: Josh Shapiro takes a gamble on his faith]

Yet the most obvious similarity is that when Shapiro gives a speech, he really sounds an awful lot like the Democrats’ most renowned speechmaker. It’s a once-you-hear-it-you-can’t-unhear-it type of thing, to the point where some Shapiro watchers believe he’s consciously imitating Obama. “He didn’t used to talk like this,” one Democrat who has closely followed Shapiro’s rise up the Pennsylvania political ranks told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid starting a public feud with the governor.

Shapiro’s Obama echo attracted notice during the 2024 presidential campaign, when he was under consideration to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. “Is he doing an … Obama?” Ronny Chieng asked in a memorable roast on The Daily Show. J. D. Vance mocked him too. “He talks like Barack Obama,” Vance said on a podcast. “It’s like if I tried to do a really bad impression of Barack Obama.”

Asked to respond to Vance at the time, Shapiro laughed off the charge. “Barack Obama was probably our most gifted orator of my time, so it’s kind of a weird insult,” he told reporters. My colleague Tim Alberta, in the profile he wrote of Shapiro earlier this year, documented the makeover that the governor underwent as he gained prominence—one that included a new hairstyle and sharper clothing as well as the Obama-esque way of speaking. “I just don’t hear it,” Shapiro told Alberta about the oft-noted comparison. “I don’t think I’ve changed my cadence or my rhythm or how I speak.” (A spokesperson for Shapiro declined to comment for this story.)

Obama and Shapiro have known each other for two decades, and the younger Democrat has said that Obama set an example he has “tried to emulate.” Shapiro was an early endorser of Obama during his presidential run, and Obama joined Shapiro at a large get-out-the-vote rally in Philadelphia on the eve of his election as governor four years ago. (It was there that the Democrat I spoke with first noticed—along with many others—how closely Shapiro resembled Obama: “It was him and Obama back-to-back, and that was a moment where people were like, Jesus Christ.”)

The two men have other things in common besides a speaking style. Both have owned dogs named Bo. And they both played basketball in their youth and remain huge fans of the sport. (Shortly after Lebron James signed with the 76ers, Shapiro said that he’d personally tried to recruit the NBA legend to Philadelphia.)

Not everyone hears Obama when they listen to Shapiro. “I had never thought that,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania, told me. “He has a similar cadence, but I don’t think it’s a thing.” Mikus noted that politics “is a lot like football: Everybody steals from each other.” Shapiro, he suggested, also made a decent point in his rejoinder to Vance in 2024. “If you’re going to be compared to anybody, it sure as heck doesn’t hurt to be compared to the most popular figure in Democratic politics,” Mikus said.

The Obama comparison certainly doesn’t appear to be hurting Shapiro in Pennsylvania, where a poll released last week by Siena University showed him leading his Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, by 20 points. A boffo performance in November could propel him into the top tier of what is likely to be a crowded Democratic presidential field, especially if Shapiro’s coattails help his party flip Republican-held House seats and retake the majority. But he’ll face plenty of skeptics. Shapiro’s long-standing support for Israel is a liability with progressives who have demanded an end to U.S. aid for the Jewish state. Among swing-state overperformers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona—former astronaut, husband to Gabby Giffords—has a more compelling biography, and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is a competitor for the Baruch Obama label: He’s also Jewish, he makes mainstream Democrats swoon, and, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey has noted, he can, when he gets revved up, also sound a bit like Obama.

[Read: Who’s afraid of Josh Shapiro?]

Will Shapiro’s Obama-esque speeches inspire Democratic voters yearning for a charismatic communicator, or will they make him seem like a knockoff—an overeager pretender to the party throne? For an expert opinion, I consulted David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, who has probably seen the ex-president deliver speeches as often as anyone alive. Like Mikus, Axelrod told me he hadn’t noticed the resemblance until people started pointing it out a couple of years ago. “He wouldn’t be the first person to try to emulate, or imitate, the president,” Axelrod said.

He added that the ribbing Shapiro receives over his Obama-like stylings may end up being a funny footnote. But the association, should it burrow deeper in people’s minds, does carry risk for Shapiro. “Authenticity is the coin of the realm, and people want to know that you’re comfortable with yourself and that you’re being yourself,” Axelrod said. Voters crave it perhaps now more than ever.

The Great Data-Center Rebellion

2026-09-30T08:00:00-04:00

Clinton, Iowa, is topographically flat and economically declining. The sawmills that made the city rich in the late 19th century have been repurposed as a museum. One of the Victorian mansions long since abandoned by the old lumber barons is open for tours, but tourists are scarce. Clinton has shrunk to about 24,000 people, and the town center, along the Mississippi River, feels nearly empty. On the west side, miles of deep-green corn and soy fields are crisscrossed with transmission wires and zoned for heavy industrial use. The city’s economic activity includes corn processing, pet-food production, and methamphetamines. With available land and a dire need for investment, Clinton seems like the perfect place for a gigantic data center.

In January, a Clintonian named Stephen Figg, who owns a small firm that builds technological infrastructure, including for data centers, heard from a customer that a broker was making inquiries about buying farmland on the west side, north of Highway 30. In mid-February, a father of two girls named Ryan Wisor, who had obtained a residential exemption to live in that area, noticed surveyors with boring rigs working in the field behind the house he’d built. He asked his stepsister, who sits on the city council, if she knew of a planned development. Several weeks later, she told him of a proposal for a data center. He learned that the project would border his house on two sides and come to within 65 feet of his well.

For almost two years, city officials, utility companies, and a pro-business nonprofit, Grow Clinton, had been in discussions about the construction of a data center in Clinton. It later emerged that an international developer called Quality Technology Services (QTS), owned by the trillion-dollar private-equity firm Blackstone, planned to build one of the country’s largest AI data centers—10 buildings of 500,000 square feet each—on behalf of a client that remains anonymous. Private meetings, nondisclosure agreements, and even a code name (“Saturday River”) had kept the plan’s existence quiet until Andy Sokolovich, the president of Grow Clinton, unveiled the proposal at a county-board meeting on April 27. He had wanted to keep the project confidential longer, but word was getting out.

Theresa Andrews, a quality analyst at a chemical company, had heard a rumor in mid-March about a development planned for the cornfields in her area, but she’d blown it off. After watching the April 27 county meeting online, she went on the city’s website and noticed dozens of requests for information about the status of parcels of farmland; a few of them were right across the street from her house. Andrews stayed up late for several nights creating a spreadsheet of the parcels and then a map of the projected site. The scale was almost unimaginable: 1,100 acres, or 832 football fields—about the size of Central Park. This would be a “hyperscale” data center, and it turned out to be far along. From FOIA requests, Andrews learned that plans for upgrading utilities in the area had been in the works since 2024.

This was how the Data-Center Rebellion of 2026 came to Clinton, Iowa. Not through Chinese propaganda, or misinformation on social media—though both are plentiful—but because a small group of residents accidentally got wind of a megaproject planned for their community. Andrews, Wisor, Figg, and others had concerns about water consumption, electrical-grid capacity, soil contamination, low-frequency sound waves, nonstop light, an invasion of out-of-state contractors, and—for those in the leviathan’s shadow—the permanent destruction of their rural life. “There’s no proven history of these things,” Wisor told me. He imagined playing in the yard with his 9-year-old daughter and worrying what their colossal new neighbor might be doing to his family’s health. “I go sit outside and all I think is, This could all be gone. You can’t turn it off.”

Large numbers of Clintonians began to attend contentious city-council meetings. On June 9, the council voted down a proposal for a 120-day moratorium that would have allowed more time to assess the risks of something so immense and unknown. The city proceeded to draft an ordinance for a data center’s construction and use. Legally, QTS could begin without one. According to Andrews, city officials “were trying to tell us we have to hurry and get the ordinance in place so QTS won’t just start building: ‘You should want us to push fast.’ ” Instead, she and other citizens formed Clintonians Against Data Centers.

Even in a city as small as Clinton, the seven members of the group’s steering committee—four women and three men, all white, most of them middle-aged—were at first strangers to one another. The group includes Republicans and Democrats, probably more of the former, but they didn’t know one another’s political affiliations and didn’t seem to want to. Political comments unrelated to artificial intelligence are scrubbed from the Facebook page. “It’s a fun collection in terms of their politics,” Chris Baldus, the editor of the Clinton Herald, told me. “Outside of this, there’s no way in hell these people are talking to each other.”

Celeste Robbins, who works in law enforcement and describes herself as both “artsy” and “very religious,” is a disenchanted Trump voter. “If you want to get rich as a state or as a town,” the president said in September, “you’re going to want a data center.” Robbins told me, “I do not agree with him about this.” She lives far from the proposed site, and her opposition comes down to AI itself: She hates the ease with which it replaces human thought, and she fears the mass elimination of jobs. Figg, who couldn’t bring himself to vote for either candidate in the last presidential election, has worked in tech all his life and welcomes the progress that AI might bring. He had just finished eight months of work on an Amazon data center in Indiana when he learned about the proposal for Clinton. He started attending city-council meetings to offer his expertise. “But the more that I try to provide this knowledge to the city and the city council and the mayor, the less receptive they are,” he told me. “That makes it very difficult for me to want to continue that pursuit instead of the pursuit of just trying to prevent it.”

With four children and a small business, Figg had never been involved in local activism before joining Clintonians Against Data Centers.

According to a recent NBC poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of a data center in their area. Kevin Bradley of Clintonians Against Data Centers observed that this many Americans haven’t agreed on anything since 9/11: “This is affecting all of us—rich, middle-class, and poor. We’re coming together because we’re not happy.” More than 500 jurisdictions have passed moratoriums or bans. This grassroots movement rose so fast and spread so widely that politicians in both parties, including Iowa’s candidates for governor and senator, are struggling to catch up with their constituents. The meteoric emergence of the data-center rebellion is a response to the speed and scale of construction, which in turn reflect the sudden ubiquity of generative and agentic AI. President Trump’s policy has been to turn everything about the technology, including data-center construction, over to private industry. He derides people like Robbins, Figg, and Andrews for wanting to remain “backwards and poor.” But on this issue, most of Trump’s base remains angry and opposed to him; the only precedent might be the case of Jeffrey Epstein. By pushing so hard and promising so much, tech companies, venture capitalists, and their political allies ensured that AI would create a firestorm.

Supporters of data centers point out the benefits—jobs, tax revenues, the many advantages of AI itself. Clinton’s mayor, Scott Maddasion, told me that the project could bring $20 million in annual property taxes to a city with a $24 million budget. Sokolovich, of Grow Clinton, told me it would be closer to $30 million. He said that QTS has requested no tax incentives and will pay for 100 percent of the utility improvements required for the center to operate. A spokesman for Alliant Energy, the region’s regulated electric utility, promised residents that costs related to the data center’s extreme demand would not fall on existing customers.

[Read: The one town that wants a data center]

Clintonians Against Data Centers was not immune to bad information and conspiracist thinking. One member speculated that the sudden appearance around Clinton this past spring of three giant trolls, sculpted from local reclaimed lumber by the Danish artist Thomas Dambo to commemorate the trees consumed by the sawmills, had been funded by QTS to create a “diversion.” A pro-data-center councilman mocked Robbins when, after touring another QTS project in Cedar Rapids, she reported having seen only one bird. Baldus, the newspaper editor, complained that the opposition doesn’t understand how city government works, “and they come in hot.” Sokolovich analogized data-center opposition to COVID skepticism and election denialism.

But the facts about water consumption and tax revenues, though important, are not the crux of the matter. Opposition to data centers comes from a deeper concern than NIMBYism, resource misuse, or environmental harm. Over and over, Clintonians expressed a feeling of being misled, ignored, disrespected, betrayed—of having no say over basic matters in their own lives. The data center seemed to be a deal made among secretive insiders—huge, far-off entities in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Washington, as well as the local leaders of their own city. To the tech giants, QTS, Blackstone, and the Trump administration’s AI boosters, Clinton is an empty space on the Mississippi that looks like an opportunity. That the industry seeking to buy 1,100 acres on the west side of town is in the business of replacing human beings with machines—and perhaps, according to some AI experts, even rendering them extinct—only intensifies a sense of powerlessness.

The data-center rebellion, with its local origins and compounding grievances, is thoroughly American. In the 18th century, rural citizens rose up against heavy taxes and farm seizures. In the early 20th century, a time in many ways similar to our own, Louis Brandeis spoke of the “curse of bigness”: concentrations of money and power so great that the individual almost ceases to exist, and democracy itself is threatened. Like other heartland communities, Clinton has suffered “a history of abandonment,” Matt Parbs, the vice president of Grow Clinton, acknowledged. “Clinton since 1980 has internalized the downturn in midwestern industry.” What if, in a few years, 5 million square feet of steel, concrete, computer servers, and microchips in the cornfields become obsolete and go the way of the sawmills, or of the liberal-arts college in Clinton that was bought by a for-profit, moved entirely online, and closed?

I tried to imagine a hyper-scale data center engulfing the yard where Ryan Wisor’s daughter plays with the family’s chickens. Against such an immense force, with all the wealth, political power, technological sophistication, and claims of historical inevitability behind it, a sense of dignity can only raise a small voice in protest.

In a city the size of Clinton, the controversy over the data center was bound to hurt personal relationships. Linda Chapman, whose husband was the city’s fire marshal, knows all seven members of the city council and has stopped trusting most of them. Wisor and his stepsister on the council no longer speak. Andy Sokolovich, of Grow Clinton, can’t appear in public without someone sticking a phone camera in his face and asking him incendiary questions. The mayor received a death threat. But the converse is also true: To get anything done, Clintonians can’t just abuse one another on Facebook or podcasts. They have to sit in a room together and talk face-to-face.

Throughout the summer, the city pushed ahead with an ordinance while Clintonians Against Data Centers kept raising objections that were mostly ignored, hoping to stall the process until QTS decided to look elsewhere.

In early September, I attended a council meeting where the language of the ordinance was to be hammered out. To accommodate several hundred people, the meeting was held not at city hall, but in a cavernous pole-frame lodge at the northern end of the city, in a park overlooking the river. The president and vice president of Grow Clinton were not present. “I don’t want to say I’m intimidated, but the opposition has been vocal,” Sokolovich told me. “I’m growing weary of it.” Baldus, of the Clinton Herald, attended grudgingly, out of professional duty; he didn’t seem to regard coverage of the data center as the most exciting opportunity for his paper. Theresa Andrews, who was routinely staying up past 3 a.m. to research the issues and prepare for meetings, arrived with a tense look on her face and a binder full of scientific studies on topics such as the effects of noise and light on livestock.

The seven members of the steering committee, some in green CLINTONIANS AGAINST DATA CENTERS T-shirts, sat at a long table with their backs to the audience, facing Mayor Maddasion, the council, and other city officials. This would be a parley between two groups in which everyone now knew everyone. The mayor, an Air Force veteran in his early 40s with a receding hairline, slender and mild, gaveled the meeting to order and led the room in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

The meeting went on for more than five hours, while darkness fell over the Mississippi. With a draft of the data-center ordinance on the table in front of him, the mayor briskly led the council members and city officials through it section by section and took their comments. Then he heard out the criticisms and suggestions of Clintonians Against Data Centers. The most contentious issue was setbacks—the required distance between data-center buildings and neighboring residential properties. The draft ordinance called for 1,000 feet. Andrews, quoting a study from counties in Pennsylvania, argued for 1,500 feet—a distance that might make the whole project untenable. A councilman named Cody Seeley, who did most of the talking for the pro-data-center side, said that the developer and property owners could negotiate the setbacks, adding, “I think 500 feet is adequate,” which also happened to be QTS’s position.

Cries from the audience of “No! No!” The mayor called for silence. Ryan Wisor, for whom the setback question meant the defense of his homestead, said with a slight quaver in his voice: “My frustration is this ordinance is meant to protect the citizens and our property. This isn’t meant to conform so that we can fit a particular business in a particular piece of land.” He added, “For us to give up our rights, it’s not fair.” General applause. It was the emotional high point of the night.

I found the proceedings both mind-numbing and inspiring. The seriousness of purpose, the attention to detail, the stamina required to talk and listen—all of it moved me more than it seemed to impress anyone involved. Clintonians Against Data Centers still felt patronized and ignored. Perhaps the council came away exasperated with the NIMBYs and gadflies who were making the process such an ordeal. (Later, the mayor admitted to me, “We’re learning that there’s probably more ways that we can communicate with the citizens.”) In all likelihood, this small populist uprising will not achieve its goal; a hyperscale data center will come to Clinton, Iowa, amid widespread unhappiness and damaged friendships; and AI will continue to roll over the fields of the republic. But a democratic pulse was still beating along the Mississippi River. That was something.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Great Data-Center Rebellion.”

Right-Wing Groups Are Making Money off John Fetterman

2026-09-30T06:00:00-04:00

A Republican fundraising consultant alerted her colleagues this month in a private message about a hot new business opportunity from an unlikely source: Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat. “I thought you would be interested in this high performing Fetterman copy,” wrote Leah Mergener, an account associate at the GOP-aligned firm Blitz Digital Group. “It has been doing crazy numbers for us.”

The fundraising appeal was signed by Fetterman and included links to donate to his campaign fund. But the language was written to attract donors sympathetic to President Trump, and the money flowed through a payment-processing firm, Anedot, that is used by Republicans. “I’m always going to reject Socialism and the anti-American way of life,” read its subject line, before warning that socialists were “hijacking the Democratic party.”

Through the opportunity that Mergener proposed, conservative groups that sent the Fetterman appeal to their lists of donors would receive most of the money raised. “We are offering it a 75% split,” Mergener wrote in the message that we obtained. A Republican consultant explained to us that this means that 75 percent of the first donation each recipient made would be kicked back as a commission to the organization that sent the appeal; Fetterman would profit largely by gaining the contact information of new donors, allowing him to build a fundraising list he could use for a future campaign. Blitz Digital Group, which is a Virginia-based affiliate of the direct-mail firm HSP Direct, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Fetterman campaign.

Fetterman’s message caught the attention of Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, who forwarded the note to his own fundraising list, then explicitly teased the idea of Fetterman switching parties if conservatives signed a petition. “I just got an email from John. He’s basically a Republican now,” Lee wrote in a solicitation that we obtained. “I need your help to draft him.” The link in Lee’s message leads to a petition, and an opportunity to give money to Lee’s own federal fundraising account. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Just four years ago, Fetterman overcame a mid-campaign stroke to win his Senate seat as a new kind of left-leaning populist with a platform that included support for a $15 federal minimum wage and single-payer health care. He was helped by an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who identifies as a democratic socialist. But as the 2026 midterm elections approach, Fetterman has been vocal about feeling rejected by his party and is openly talking about leaving it over differences on support for Israel and the Iran war. His polling among Democrats in his state has collapsed, and he is likely to face multiple primary challengers if he chooses to run for reelection in 2028. Fetterman was noncommittal when asked during the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Saturday whether he would continue to caucus with Democrats.

[Read: Trump’s dream world in Dallas]

In June, his longtime relationship with a Democratic-aligned digital fundraising firm, MissionWired, ended. Shortly afterward, he forged a joint fundraising committee with Pennsylvania’s other senator, Dave McCormick, a Republican. In July, Fetterman joined a group of Republican politicians for a retreat with Fox News executives at Rupert Murdoch’s ranch in Montana. On September 9, he spoke in a recorded address at Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas, delivering a message about rejecting socialism that would feature in his fundraising solicitation later that month. During that address, he introduced McCormick, whose campaign Fetterman had aggressively opposed in 2024. At the time, he called McCormick a “rich dude” trying to buy his way into the Senate, but the two have since cultivated a close relationship. Fetterman, who has few friends in the Democratic caucus, has also developed a friendship with Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama; the two have gathered for dinners, joint interviews, and family group texts.

Days after speaking at the midterm convention, Fetterman’s political operation began working with a Republican-aligned firm to start arranging emails and text messages to acquire new conservative donors, which were first reported by The Intercept. Fetterman’s missives were circulated by more than a dozen political operations with domain names such as America1stWarRoom.com, ConstitutionPatriots.com, RedMajorities.com, TheDesantisDaily.com, and TrumpTruths.org, according to records collected by the Archive of Political Emails. The new effort deepens the mystery around his political intentions and is a cause for concern for Democratic leaders. Fetterman’s refusal to limit himself to the Democratic ecosystem could matter a great deal next year, especially if he finds himself as the decisive swing vote and holds the power to decide which party will control the Senate.

Democratic donors showered Fetterman with cash when he ran in 2022, allowing him to raise more than $37 million in small donations—nearly five times more than the $7.7 million raised in smaller donations by Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, according to federal records. But times have changed. Only 12 percent of Democrats now view Fetterman favorably, according to a recent New York Times survey of likely voters in Pennsylvania. That’s compared with 75 percent of Republicans in the state who view him favorably. Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed considered him more of a Republican than a Democrat. He currently has about $2 million in his campaign account, according to the most recent federal filing.

Fetterman has attributed this rejection by Democrats to his outspoken support for Israel and the war against Iran, along with his decision to vote to fund parts of the government earlier this year, breaking with his Democratic colleagues who were protesting Trump’s immigration policies. He has told reporters that he is mystified that Democrats would turn on a lawmaker who votes with the party about 90 percent of the time. “I can’t explain it. I mean, I haven’t changed my views,” he said at the Texas Tribune Festival. He also maintains that he has no interest in becoming a Republican, arguing that the party would not accept him because of his positions on abortion rights and other liberal issues. He has seen how Republicans treat senators such as John Cornyn of Texas, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina when they disagree with party orthodoxy. “I’m not going to be a Republican!” he shouted recently, as he waited for an elevator on Capitol Hill, fending off questions from reporters. “Why can’t you guys just wait ’til the midterm, you know? And if I turn a Republican and then—I’ll be a liar, then?”

Democrats we spoke with in Pennsylvania told us that Fetterman is unlikely to win a Democratic primary for reelection in 2028. That would leave him with three options: retirement, becoming a Republican, or running as an independent, which would force a three-way race unless one of the major parties chooses not to field a candidate. “His career as a Democrat is over. We didn’t push him away. He threw it away,” Conor Lamb, a former representative who ran against Fetterman in the 2022 Democratic primary, told us. “He is the one that made a decision to do what Trump wanted instead of what Democrats wanted.”

Lamb is one of several Democrats considering a campaign for Fetterman’s seat in 2028. Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, another potential Democratic candidate, told us that Fetterman has become a distraction as the party tries to win midterm races. “Anyone who stands in the way of that work will have to answer to the voters soon enough,” he said.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump ]

But if Fetterman decided to switch teams sooner, that could help Republicans keep control of the Senate after the midterms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that he has had conversations with Fetterman about the challenges he faces in the Democratic caucus. “If he ever comes to the conclusion that he’s ready to move, we would certainly welcome it,” he said. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reiterated that Democrats “very much like him and respect him” and that the party is big enough to accommodate his views. The two had dinner in August.

One plugged-in Democratic operative described the current dynamic to us like this: “Dems are bitter and resentful, and these guys are sitting there with open arms.”

As recently as June, Fetterman sounded like an entirely different politician in his fundraising appeals. He told donors about needing four seats to flip the Senate. There were messages backing Rob Sand in Iowa, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and James Talarico in Texas. There was an email warning about how “dangerous” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policies were, and how “the GOP is coming after Social Security.” In one appeal on June 30, he wrote: “At a time like this, it’s crucial we hit our goals and keep up the pressure on Trump and extremist Republicans.” That is the last email from Fetterman captured by the Archive of Political Emails for several months. Then, this month, messages from Fetterman shifted to warn about socialism.

[Read: Jon Ossoff is doing something different]

Fetterman’s previous fundraising firm, MissionWired, was founded by Anne Lewis, a former deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and it works with Democratic Senate candidates such as Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. “MissionWired ended its engagement with Senator Fetterman’s campaign in June 2026,” Kate Kline, the firm’s CEO, told us in a statement. “We had no involvement in a revenue-sharing plan with Republican entities, and if we had become aware, we would have objected to the strategy and refused the work.”

Blitz Digital Group, by contrast, has been working with Republicans whom Fetterman previously opposed. The group has received fees this cycle from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and from Mike Collins, a Republican Senate candidate in Georgia. The firm describes itself as a specialist in “building online donor prospecting programs for conservative non-profits, candidates, PAC’s and associations.” The firm’s parent company, HSP Direct, describes itself as “a premier conservative direct mail fundraising agency,” and its clients include Jon Husted, the Republican senator from Ohio who is running this cycle against Brown.

One Republican digital consultant told us, after requesting anonymity to discuss the arrangements, that although the relationships Fetterman is building are unusual, fundraising-list brokers typically push the language that performs the best, and that there is clear appeal for a Democrat who is willing to echo Republican talking points about socialism. “Assuming he believes all the things he says,” the consultant said about Fetterman, “it is just a natural place to go, because he agrees with Republicans on some things.”

Can the Polls Possibly Be Right?

2026-09-29T08:00:00-04:00

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When this year began, the Democrats were heavy underdogs to take back the Senate in the midterms. The task would require not only toppling Susan Collins in Maine but also winning at least five states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, while holding on to all of the party’s existing seats. The realistic best-case scenario seemed to be a replay of the so-called blue-wave 2018 election, during Trump’s first term, in which Democrats took back the House but the Senate remained in Republican hands. To gain control of the upper chamber, Democrats would need an incredible stroke of luck. They might have gotten one.

Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, and the resulting spike in oil prices, shifted the boundaries of the politically possible. A year ago, Trump was merely unpopular: By about 11 percentage points, more people disapproved of his performance than approved of it, according to The New York Times’ polling average. He would kill for such good numbers today. Seven months into the Iran debacle, his disapproval margin has widened to 23 percentage points—worse than his numbers in the immediate aftermath of January 6.

Predictably, Trump’s unpopularity is spilling out into the midterm races. Recent polls have been almost unbelievably positive for Democrats. Troy Jackson is ahead, albeit narrowly, in Maine. Abdul El-Sayed has a modest lead in Michigan, and Democrats have even bigger advantages in the swing states of Georgia and North Carolina, both of which Trump won in 2024. Most astonishing, Democratic candidates are in position to pull off upsets in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, which all went for Trump by more than 10 percentage points. Republican incumbents look beatable even in Kansas, where Trump won by 16, and Nebraska, where he won by 20. As a result, in prediction markets, Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate are now more than 60 percent.

[Read: The supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms]

If the election in November plays out as the polls are suggesting it will, Republicans will have their leader to thank—and themselves. With few exceptions, Republican candidates have created almost no distance from the president. Indeed, candidates in must-win red states, including Jon Husted of Ohio and Ken Paxton of Texas, gave speeches at the same Republican midterm convention where Trump led the audience in a pledge to the “greatest president in the history of the United States.”

Democrats, by contrast, have been relatively disciplined. Candidates with a track record of winning over moderate voters were successfully recruited in Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Nebraska, and primary voters in those states were wise enough to nominate them (or, in Nebraska’s case, nominate someone who promised to drop out in favor of an independent with a better chance to win). Even where candidates with narrower appeal were nominated, as in Texas and Michigan, they have been cannily pivoting away from their unpopular progressive stances.

If Democrats won both the House and Senate, they would be able to put a real check on Trump’s ambitions for the rest of his presidency. His legislative agenda would be at their mercy. Democrats would use their control of committees in both chambers to launch extensive investigations into government wrongdoing and corruption. And Trump’s judicial nominees would need to make a convincing case that they’d be impartial judges, not dogmatic loyalists.

A Democratic sweep would have ripple effects beyond 2026. Each Senate seat that the party picks up this year makes winning in 2028 that much easier. If the electoral environment remains favorable for Democrats two years from now, the party could feasibly pick up seats in Wisconsin and North Carolina. Suddenly, a stronger, more diverse, and more nationally competitive Democratic Party is at least imaginable.

All of this analysis hinges on assuming that the polls are accurate. For three presidential elections in a row, pollsters have badly underestimated Trump’s appeal. And in general, as the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini has pointed out, the pro-Democratic bias tends to be largest in red states, the very ones that Democrats need in order to take back the Senate. Moreover, not every poll has looked good for Democrats—a recent New York Times and Siena College survey found Collins ahead in Maine, though Jackson leads in most polls.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

The good news for Democrats is that Trump-era midterm polls have been highly accurate on average, much more so than in presidential-election years. That’s because the midterm electorate includes fewer of the low-trust, politically disengaged voters who are so hard for pollsters to reach and disproportionately turn out when Trump is on the ballot.

Even if the polls are accurate, things could change between now and November 3. Perhaps Trump could find a way to credibly declare victory in Iran. Individual Democratic candidates could become embroiled in scandal. Republican candidates could figure out how to distance themselves from Trump down the stretch.

Yet the likeliest scenario at the moment, hard as it is to believe, is Democrats winning multiple Senate seats in states that Trump won in 2024 by double digits, taking control of both houses of Congress, earning the right to be involved in the legislative process, and providing a meaningful check on Trump’s power. The remarkable fact is that Republicans are now the party hoping for a stroke of good luck.

ICE Deportees Are Vanishing Into Salvadoran Prisons

2026-09-29T08:00:00-04:00

Ana paced near the arrivals terminal of the San Salvador airport, eyeing the door where deportees from the United States are released. She was there on a sweltering day in May to pick up her son, who had been detained in Texas and deported. She would drive him home, she decided, and cook him dinner. They would figure out what to do next.

But when a group of men walked out wearing ICE-issued sweatsuits, their shoelaces removed from their shoes, her son wasn’t among them. She approached a police officer, who searched his name on a tablet. “He’s being taken to prison,” he told her.

Ana, who spoke with me on the condition that I not use her real name or her son’s name, was confused. Her son, 25, did not face charges in either the U.S. or El Salvador. Ana got the name of the police station where her son had been taken. From there, she was told, he would be transferred to a maximum-security prison that has become infamous in El Salvador for the number of prisoners who have died in custody. She sped to the station and begged an officer to let her inside. “You can have five minutes with him,” the officer said, “but try to control yourself.”

The officer returned with her son, who was wearing a white shirt and handcuffs. He looked handsome, Ana thought. He had been living in the United States for four years, having fled El Salvador after being physically attacked by both gangs and police officers, according to his asylum application. Ana started crying as she hugged him. She promised to deliver food to the prison.

“This isn’t going to be forever,” he said as the officer escorted him away. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.

A year and a half ago, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 31-year-old Salvadoran man, was deported to El Salvador and detained in a maximum-security mega-prison known as CECOT. Abrego Garcia’s deportation, which was in violation of legal orders, prompted a public backlash and a federal judge’s intervention; he was ultimately returned to the United States. But as public attention has shifted elsewhere, El Salvador has continued imprisoning deportees sent from the United States, including many who have not been charged with any crime. They have disappeared into the country’s black hole of a correctional system, where lawyers can’t locate them. Even though the U.S. is aware of these extrajudicial detentions, it has dramatically increased the number of people it sends to El Salvador. On most days, the U.S. flies deportees to the San Salvador airport—after which some vanish.

One person with knowledge of the deportation flights in El Salvador told me that about four people from every flight of 120 passengers are jailed. Some deportees said that even more people on their flights had been detained. The United States has roughly doubled its number of deportations to El Salvador in the first half of this year. From January to June, 9,829 deportees arrived on at least 83 flights, according to El Salvador’s migration ministry. The scale of the ongoing detention of deportees has not been previously reported.

[Read: How the Trump administration flipped on Kilmar Abrego Garcia]

When deportation flights land, Salvadoran officials board the planes and read a handful of names from a list. Those people are escorted from the plane in handcuffs and taken to waiting police vehicles. On the airport tarmac as passengers disembark, security officials pull aside other deportees who have been judged to look like gang members.

The jailed deportees remain in Salvadoran detention, unable to speak with their attorney or family, and usually without being told which crimes they’re accused of committing. Many detained deportees have been sent to CECOT. Others are transferred between other prisons across the country. The government won’t confirm for family members where people are detained or whether they are even still alive. At least five deportees from the U.S. have died in custody, according to Cristosal, a Salvadoran human-rights organization. In three of those cases, the group said, the bodies showed signs of violence or torture.

The Trump administration claims to have no responsibility for what goes on after deportees are sent to El Salvador. “Once an alien is removed from the United States, the alien is no longer in ICE custody or under ICE’s purview,” an ICE spokesperson wrote to me in a statement responding to a question about deportees being detained.

For the past three months, Ana has made frequent trips to the prison where she believes her son is detained to leave care packages of soap, food, and clothes. Officers take those packages but do not offer any information about her son’s legal status. She requested and received a signed document from the country’s justice department that says that her son “HAS NO CRIMINAL HISTORY.” (My search of public records likewise failed to reveal any history of charges in the United States.) He has been assigned a public defender, who has not been able to meet with him. The attorney told Ana that her son has been charged with “illicit association”—the generic charge leveled against prisoners who have been detained as part of the government’s crackdown on gangs. It carries a maximum sentence of 60 years.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again,” Ana told me.

In 2022, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, announced a “state of exception” that would allow his government to round up large numbers of suspected gang members and jail them without charges. It was initially meant to last 30 days, but it has been extended for more than four years. In that time, Bukele’s government has made more than 90,000 arrests, representing about 2 percent of the country’s adult population. Some of those people—almost all boys and men—have been part of mass trials in which hundreds of inmates are convicted at the same time over videoconference, with no publicly available evidence presented. Some inmates are as young as 12.

The crackdown has led to a significant decline in the nation’s homicide rate and made Bukele into a popular figure not only in parts of El Salvador but also across much of Latin America. It has also made him a close ally of the Trump administration, which sees Bukele as an important part of a rightward shift across the region. But Bukele’s greatest gift to Donald Trump was his offer in 2025 to accept criminal deportees from the United States and incarcerate them in his country’s prisons in exchange for a fee. (The U.S. paid El Salvador nearly $5 million.) Bukele called it an opportunity for the U.S. to “outsource part of its prison system.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the deal was “an act of extraordinary friendship.”

The first flights of Venezuelan deportees landed in San Salvador in March of last year. That month, then–Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited CECOT, saying in a video as she stood before a prison cell full of silent, shirtless inmates that “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”

Bukele boasted about the cruelty prisoners endure in his detention facilities, posting photos and videos of prisoners being marched with their heads shaved. But it quickly became clear that many of the deportees the United States was sending to El Salvador, including Abrego Garcia, were not hardened criminals. The U.S. stopped deporting non-Salvadorans to El Salvador last April. It no longer needs to; it is now sending deportees to roughly 30 other “third country” destinations, many of them much farther away, including Liberia and South Sudan. In Congress and among NGOs, the focus has shifted away from human-rights violations in Salvadoran prisons.

[Read: El Salvador’s exceptional prison state]

But El Salvador never stopped incarcerating deportees, and now it is detaining its own nationals. I spoke with nine families whose relatives have been deported since as early as March 2025 and remain in detention. Some learned of their loved one’s whereabouts only when they were spotted in the background of Salvadoran-government videos and photos. Dual U.S. citizens visiting the country of their birth have also become caught up in the crackdown, some of them apparently detained because they had tattoos that were deemed suspicious by Salvadoran authorities. In January, one Salvadoran man was deported from the United States even after a judge ordered a hold on his removal based on the United Nations Convention Against Torture, a case not unlike Abrego Garcia’s. He was detained upon arrival in El Salvador. His lawyer wrote in a July court filing that “Salvadoran authorities have transferred Petitioner between prisons, and his family has not been provided information regarding his current location, his condition, or whether he is alive.”

Gustavo Villatoro, El Salvador’s minister of justice and public security, has released the mug shots of some deportees who he says are gang members who must be detained. “In El Salvador, deported gang members do not return to the streets: here they are terrorists and go straight to jail to answer for their actions in the criminal case against the international MS13,” Villatoro wrote on X in May. Last month, a passenger at the San Salvador airport posted a video on TikTok that showed police escorting deportees off the tarmac in handcuffs.

Irvin Jeovanny Quintanilla García was deported from Texas in March 2025. But the Salvadoran government wouldn’t confirm for his family where he had been sent or whether he was in the country at all. He had not been convicted of a crime in the United States or in El Salvador. “It was like he had disappeared,” Luis Quintanilla, Irvin’s brother, told me.

Months later, Luis saw his brother in two frames of a video recorded inside a Salvadoran prison, eating lunch and standing in a prison workshop. He wore a white long-sleeve shirt and a yellow baseball cap. The family hired a Salvadoran lawyer to figure out whether Irvin faced any charges. But the Salvadoran attorney general’s office would not respond to him. The lawyer then contacted the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a judicial body that seeks to resolve disputes across the Americas, which wrote an official letter to El Salvador’s government requesting information about Quintanilla’s case. It wrote similar letters on behalf of five other deported detainees.

In each case, the Salvadoran government responded cryptically that the deportees are being held as part of a “collaboration and sovereign cooperation” between the United States and El Salvador, and that El Salvador is acting only as a “receptor state” while the U.S. maintains “penal jurisdiction” over the cases. Neither the U.S. nor El Salvador has explained what that means. Out of desperation, Quintanilla’s mother, who was living in the United States at the time of Irvin’s deportation, returned to El Salvador to search for him. She is now dropping off her own care packages once a month at the prison where she believes he is being held. “But we don’t know for sure that he’s there,” Irvin’s brother said. “They won’t tell us anything.”

Sarah Bishop, a professor at Baruch College, serves as an expert witness in the asylum hearings of Salvadorans. Since the start of the state of exception in 2022, she has interviewed the family members of 30 Salvadoran men detained after their deportation. Only one has been released. In a recent case, she told a U.S. immigration judge that based on a man’s criminal record, tattoos, and history of interactions with MS-13, he was “exceedingly likely” to be jailed by Salvadoran police if he was sent back. The judge denied the case, and the man was deported this past summer. Bishop spoke with the man’s family a few days afterward. As she predicted, the man had been jailed upon arrival.

Although it’s difficult to know the exact criteria that Salvadoran security officials are using to determine which deportees to detain, at least some of that information appears to be coming from the United States. In 2014, the two countries signed a memorandum of cooperation that would allow the U.S. to share the criminal history of deportees. At the time, ICE said that it was meant to help El Salvador “categorize and monitor repatriated criminals for domestic purposes.” But under Bukele, the information is being used to justify detaining deportees, even if they have no outstanding arrest warrants.

[Read: What the deported Venezuelans went through in El Salvador]

When Bukele has been accused of jailing innocent people or overreaching in his crackdown, he has pointed to the country’s security gains. “I don’t care if they call me a dictator. I’d rather be called a dictator than see Salvadorans being killed in the streets,” he said last year.

The families of the imprisoned deportees continue crisscrossing the country to locate their loved ones. Some have formed a WhatsApp group called “Families in search of justice” where they exchange information about their children’s cases or whereabouts. But there is rarely new information. So instead, the families vent their anger and appeal to a higher power.

“They will pay for every innocent person who suffered at their hands,” one mother wrote earlier this month.

“I pray for a miracle from God,” another responded.

The Babies Left Behind in America

2026-09-28T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Meridith Kohut

Estela Díaz and 2-year-old Eber repeat their routine every morning: Around 8 a.m., he rustles her awake in the bed they share. She picks him up, changes his diaper, and pulls out a fresh set of tiny clothes. While Estela dresses him, Eber coos, “Mama, mama.” She smiles and strokes his cheeks, trying to hide her sadness at his confusion. Estela is 50 and has three sons, but Eber is not one of them. She’s been caring for him because ICE deported his parents to Venezuela, despite his mother’s pleas to be reunited first.

Estela and her husband, Miguel, moved to Mobile, Alabama, 20 years ago to raise their own boys in a place that felt safe and had a slower rhythm than Las Vegas, where they’d met. Miguel works as a remodeling contractor. He spent years developing their four-acre property, building a wood shop, a chicken coop, and houses for two of their children (the third lives 15 minutes down the road). They bought peacocks as pets and planted bright perennial gardens, adorning them with stone fountains. By the driveway, they fly an American flag from an antique tractor. Over the years, their home evolved into a kind of retirement sanctuary—until this past winter, when it started to look like a day care.

A police officer pulled over Eber’s mother, Marlyn, last November and, without accusing her of an infraction, turned her over to ICE, despite her work permit and pending asylum application. Eber, who had just finished breastfeeding, and his 7-year-old brother, Isaac, had nowhere to go. Marlyn’s 23-year-old cousin took the boys briefly. Then two of Marlyn’s friends—both undocumented—agreed to take one child each. Eber was moved into a rusty trailer with no heat; the woman watching him put socks on his hands to keep him warm. He was sick, but she was too scared of ICE to take him to a doctor. Isaac’s caregiver worked nights. Sometimes he made it to school; sometimes he didn’t.

The boys needed a better home. Frantic phone calls among Marlyn’s friends and co-workers eventually led to Estela. They had all worked together at a plant nursery, and Estela was the only American citizen they knew. She agreed to take the boys and then return them to Marlyn, not knowing that doing the right thing would go so wrong: that county officials would end up investigating her for trafficking; that her bank account would dwindle to almost nothing; that Eber would still be in her home, unable to remember his own mother, nearly a year after she was picked up.

“I’ve lost a lot of weight because it’s so stressful,” Estela told me, sitting in her living room. Eber was clinging to her, his face buried in her chest. “My family is like, ‘What have you done?’ ”

President Trump’s rush to deport as many immigrants as possible is creating a new family-separation crisis. Whereas his first administration took children from their parents at the border to deter illegal crossings, the second is separating families living in the United States as part of a purge. Like last time, Trump officials claim that this is untrue. But stories like Eber’s are not hard to find, as I learned this year while reporting on immigration enforcement in Alabama, California, Illinois, Missouri, and Texas.

[From the September 2022 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on the secret history of family separation]

As of April, the Brookings Institution put the total number of affected children at about 205,000—71 percent of whom are U.S. citizens. Most of those cases involve the loss of one parent, a devastating blow to families. But the Brookings researchers believe that more than 35,000 of the cases are like Eber’s, in which a child has been left with no parent at all.

Since the analysis was published, the pace of ICE arrests has increased. In July, the agency arrested a record 49,000 people, a majority of whom have no criminal record, according to a New York Times review of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Many of the people ICE is targeting entered the United States legally, through parole programs or by requesting asylum, and were in the process of working toward permanent legal immigration status. (A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told me the Deportation Data Project’s numbers are “inaccurate” but did not correct them, adding that a pending application for legal status does not shield immigrants from arrest.)

In recent years, ICE policy required officers to either reunite detained parents with their children before deportation or confirm that the children had an official caregiver in their parents’ absence. But in July 2025, DHS revised the policy, sprinkling it with caveats, such as “when operationally feasible,” that appear to allow officers to prioritize the speed and volume of deportations over everything else—including the children whom deportees leave behind.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela talks with Eber’s mother, Marlyn, who was deported to Venezuela in February, and the social worker Shaina Simenas on a video call.

The result is tens of thousands of children being shuffled among the houses of anxious temporary caregivers. It can take months to procure the passports, visas, and other permissions necessary to transport children to their parents, many of whom have been deported to countries whose governments can’t help, or won’t. This past spring, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration reunified 12 children with their deported families using funding from the U.S. State Department, according to a UN official, who added that the organization has received requests to help other children, but they lack the proper paperwork.

Some children end up with foster families after caregivers burn out, and some have landed in the homes of abusive relatives or acquaintances. In January, 2-year-old Orlin Hernandez Reyes was left with his aunt’s ex-partner, who was known to be dangerous, when ICE detained his mother. She begged deportation officers to reunite her with Orlin before she was deported to Honduras, but that didn’t happen. Soon after, Orlin’s body was found with broken bones and signs of sexual abuse, and his caregiver was charged with murder. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Then–ICE Director Todd Lyons blamed his mother, saying that she “chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life.”

Even children like Eber, who land in a safe place, are likely to experience long-term psychological harm from separation. “To have such a huge number of children forced into a traumatic situation because of some policy—it’s really kind of unimaginable,” Wendy Smith, a retired associate dean at the University of Southern California’s school of social work and a co-founder of the nonprofit National Foster Youth Institute, told me. We are “creating a whole class of children who are going to grow up with all sorts of problems.” (The DHS spokesperson said that the agency “does not separate families or deport U.S. citizens” and that, absent indications of abuse or neglect, parents “can choose to take their children with them.”)

There are key differences between the family separations happening now and those of the first Trump administration. In 2017 and 2018, career bureaucrats worked from within the government to try to prevent separations, alert the press when they happened, and reunite families under court orders that high-level DHS officials were trying to defy. But many civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump were fired en masse during the early months of his second term. Since then, the White House has sent a clear message that pushing back on mass deportation will cost you your job.

Also different: The separations of the first Trump administration were the result of a distinct policy (“Zero Tolerance”) that, once brought to light, could be challenged in federal court. Today, family separations appear to be incidental—the consequence of a ruthless effort to hit a quota, no matter the cost. And this time, people with firsthand knowledge of separations are keeping quiet. Many temporary caregivers are undocumented themselves or have relatives who are; they worry that drawing attention would put their own families at risk. Government and nonprofit workers are also scared to speak up. The White House has attacked organizations that oppose its goals by cutting funding, launching dubious criminal investigations, and issuing retaliatory executive orders.

“In a lot of jurisdictions, people don’t want to write anything down,” Maria Cancian, a Georgetown University economist who co-authored the Brookings study, told me. She and her colleagues spoke with caseworkers in more than half a dozen states who had assisted separated families; they agreed to communicate only because she did not plan to disclose their identities or locations in her report. “Why would you volunteer any information that makes you more of a target?” said Cancian, a former Obama appointee in the Department of Health and Human Services who helped oversee children in immigration custody.

Alabama, where Estela lives, has an estimated 70,000 undocumented immigrants. Many are concentrated near Mobile, where they work at plant nurseries, shipyards, construction sites, and fish-packing plants. On a visit there over the summer, I was barraged with stories of parents swept up in ICE raids, leaving children marooned with relatives or neighbors who were unprepared to care for them. These arrests were a constant topic of discussion in churches, at dinner tables, during school drop-offs. Everywhere I went, cellphones buzzed with information about immigration checkpoints and intersections where local police seemed to be pulling over anyone who was visibly Latino.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela’s husband, Miguel, plays with Eber outside their home in Mobile, Alabama.

A woman named Josefa told me that she and her relatives were taking turns caring for their nieces and nephews—ages 9, 7, and 1—because they could afford only a few days of diapers and extra food at a time. A 15-year-old girl was living alone in a squalid trailer because her father had been detained, and his last paycheck was running out. When Miguel, Estela’s husband, got home from work one evening, I asked if he would call around to co-workers and friends to see if they knew of any other displaced children. “Oh yeah,” the first man he called said. “My wife and I also have two little girls.”

The police officer did not tell Marlyn why he’d pulled her over on a grocery run outside Mobile—but he asked if she was in the United States illegally. She pulled out her phone to show him that she’d attended all her ICE check-ins, and that her asylum case was scheduled to be heard in June.

“The immigration judge wants to talk to you,” the officer said, as Marlyn recalled when I first spoke with her, earlier this summer.

“I don’t understand,” she replied. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Don’t worry, they’re not going to deport you,” the officer said.

Of course they are, she thought.

Marlyn says she asked the officer if they could pick up her children because they were at home with a roommate who wasn’t prepared to care for them indefinitely. He refused. She spent about an hour in the Mobile County Metro Jail, followed by 10 days in an ICE detention center in Mississippi. Then she was transferred to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, a 1,000-bed facility 90 miles west of Baton Rouge.

Marlyn’s family had arrived at the southern border in May 2023, as Venezuela devolved into chaos under Nicolás Maduro’s regime. A friend had told them that there was work for new immigrants in Mobile. They rented a house and found jobs—Marlyn at the nursery and her husband, Jesus, at Walmart. In April 2024, Jesus got into an altercation with a co-worker, was charged with a misdemeanor for reckless endangerment, and was deported to Venezuela. With two young children to support, Marlyn leaned on other immigrant families for help. She felt adrift but was getting by, until five months later, when she was pulled over on the grocery run.

At the facility in Louisiana, she spoke with an immigration lawyer who told her that she had virtually no chance of getting out on bail under the Trump administration’s policies. The lawyer said she could spend up to two years detained while she waited for a decision in her case, which she was likely to lose anyway.

Marlyn had heard that people who agreed to be deported could request to be reunited with their children beforehand, so she decided to give up her asylum case. She started sending ICE officials three messages a day—the maximum allowed—asking to be deported with Eber and Isaac.

“I told them, ‘I have my two children. One is a little baby who was born here. I have no one to take care of them. They’re going to be left alone,’ ” she recalled, adding: “They just kept giving the same response—that they were going to work on it. But they never did anything.” (DHS did not comment on individual cases in this story.)

In detention, Marlyn worried about Isaac and Eber constantly. Eber was weak and small for his age; he’d been born with a cyst in his lung that still needed to be surgically removed. She would fear the worst anytime Estela didn’t answer the phone. “It’s agonizing not knowing about your children,” Marlyn said. She befriended other mothers in detention. Some had been there for many months. She saw them faint and have panic attacks. One told Marlyn she had been arrested while taking her 10-day-old baby to the doctor.

Early one morning in February, three months into her detention, a staff member woke Marlyn and said she was being deported. Her time had run out. She had to board a plane back to Venezuela, and leave her kids behind.

Trump’s immigration crackdown has sent countless families into crisis. Sharon Balmer Cartagena, a family lawyer in Los Angeles, has had to deliver bad news to parents over and over, with the help of her colleagues at Public Counsel, the largest pro bono law firm in the country. They told one mother, who’d tried to create an emergency plan in case she was detained, that she’d filed the wrong paperwork in court and accidentally given up her parental rights. They told another mother from Mexico, whose ex-wife had cut off contact as soon as she was deported, that the best she could hope for was one or two weeks of court-ordered visitations a year. And they told a mother from Haiti—who was so scared of being deported that she preemptively moved to Mexico—that she may never see her child again; the estranged father had agreed to care for their 3-year-old temporarily, but then blocked the mother’s phone number as soon as she arrived in Mexico. “We had to explain to her, ‘There’s nothing we can do. You have no viable pathway to regain any kind of contact with your child,’ ” Cartagena told me. “It was horrific.”

[From the April 2026 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on how the Cruz family decided to self-deport]

These cases fall into a gray area between immigration law and family law. This means that many of the families ICE is separating will need not one but two lawyers to try to get their children back—and there isn’t enough legal help to go around. Cartagena has tried to recruit more family lawyers to help with immigration cases, without much success. “I’m trying to be like, ‘Everybody, there’s a family-law emergency here!’ ” she said. “Everyone’s busy.”

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Attorney Sharon Balmer Cartagena in her home office in L.A.

Cartagena grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, one of the poorest cities in America, and saw how much her classmates were traumatized when child-welfare agencies broke up their families—often because the adults were too poor to provide for their children, not because they were unfit parents. She went to law school hoping to help children in foster care. Her career has tracked a period of growing consensus that this kind of family separation often does more harm than good; foster-care systems around the country have been shrinking and state agencies have been directed to keep children in their home whenever possible. But under the first and second Trump administrations, separations have become more common for parents who are detained by immigration authorities.

Cartagena first discovered how complicated these separations were in 2018, when she became a directing attorney at Public Counsel. Immigration lawyers started contacting her, asking for help with clients who had been separated from their children under the Zero Tolerance policy. The parents had been allowed to return to the United States under a federal-court settlement, but enough time had passed that some children had been deemed wards of the state, while others had new legal guardians. Family-court judges were blocking their reunifications. Cartagena explained that family courts exist to protect children whose parents have been accused of abuse or neglect; the system is not set up to deal with parents who face none of these allegations but lose custody because they have been deported. She helped one mother regain custody of her teenage daughter, but the process took more than a year. Others never had their parental rights restored.

When I first spoke with Cartagena this year, she was working with a mother named Magdalena Callejas, who had full custody of her 4- and 6-year-old children in March 2024, when she was arrested at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Texas. Magdalena had a pending visa application. Her ex-partner was undocumented, with multiple DUIs; Magdalena had a restraining order against him for abusing her and her son from a previous relationship. But after ICE detained her, he took the 4- and 6-year-old back. She was powerless to stop it.

Magdalena says she asked ICE officials to reunite her with her children but was told the agency “did not do that.” She agreed to leave the country voluntarily, hoping to get her children back as soon as she arrived in El Salvador. In the meantime, her ex filed for custody. An immigration lawyer who met Magdalena in detention contacted Cartagena, who explained that because Magdalena was unavailable to care for the children, the father was within his rights. In court, Magdalena’s ex argued that he was a changed man, and that unsafe conditions in El Salvador outweighed his criminal past. The trial dragged on for months. The judge ordered the children into the custody of a neutral caregiver; when she was no longer willing to help, the judge sent the children to another home. On video calls during the father’s court-ordered visits, Magdalena’s children used a shorthand to tell her that he was still drinking: “Dad went to get some juice.”

Cartagena shared all of this with the court but still didn’t know how the judge was going to rule. Most family-court judges aren’t familiar with immigration law, or accustomed to granting custody to a parent in another country. The longer a separation lasts, the harder it is to reverse; Cartagena said that family-court judges often defer to the status quo rather than disrupt a child’s living arrangements a second time—even if it means keeping them from their biological parent, or a parent who is more fit to care for them. Despite Magdalena’s ex’s history of abuse, Cartagena worried that she could still end up permanently separated from her children. “If she doesn’t win,” Cartagena said, “what do I tell everyone else?”

A judge eventually ordered that Magdalena’s children be returned to her in El Salvador after a 30-day legal stay to allow her ex-husband to appeal. He had stopped submitting weekly alcohol tests, which Cartagena believes may have swayed the judge. But that same day, the children’s caregiver said she was fed up. She was going to drop them off at a police station if no one retrieved them. So even though the judge renewed Magdalena’s five-year restraining order against her ex, he also ordered the father to pick up and care for the children until Cartagena could raise money and find a volunteer to transport them to El Salvador. There was nowhere else for the children to go but back to their father.

Cartagena has a tattoo on her wrist of a mama bear and two cubs—one for each of her children, who are 11 and 14. “I couldn’t imagine if I couldn’t see my kids or I didn’t know where they were,” she said. Sometimes the best advice she can offer detained parents is to get their children out of the United States as quickly as possible, before anyone can intervene. She’s helped procure travel documents and recruit volunteers to shuttle children across borders to their deported parents, including an 18-month-old and a 3-year-old who were sent to Peru in May. She also ghostwrites emails to ICE on behalf of immigration lawyers who want to pressure the agency to reunify families before a parent is deported. Since Trump took office a second time, she has started waking up to answer emails at 5 a.m. instead of 6. She works every weekend. And she began raising money so that Public Counsel can start a five-person division focused on immigrant-family separations. “We’re all doing this on top of our regular work,” Cartagena said. (She recently became the executive director of LevittQuinn, another family-law legal-aid organization in L.A., but will continue partnering with Public Counsel in her work on immigrant-family separations.)

She and her colleagues have held dozens of trainings across Los Angeles for immigrant parents. I attended one at an elementary school in Boyle Heights, an immigrant enclave and a hot spot for ICE raids. A dozen people sat in plastic chairs, their eyes darting to the door each time someone entered. One of Cartagena’s colleagues told the group to be careful about paperwork; well-meaning immigration lawyers had been giving clients a “temporary guardianship” form, which isn’t valid in some states. She urged the parents to arrange a caregiver, a backup caregiver, and a backup for the backup. People burn out or give up, and if there is no plan, the children are left in limbo.

A mother raised her hand. “The only people I know are like me,” she said. “They’re also undocumented.” Another said: “I don’t have anyone. What do I do?”

I found a family with no backup plan in the spring, when I went to Honduras to interview deportees as they arrived by the planeful from ICE detention centers. A father named Edwin said that after three years of meticulously following the government’s requests to further his family’s asylum case, his wife, Sarah, was thinking about going into hiding; she didn’t want to be picked up by ICE and have to leave her children alone.

[Read: A new kind of family-separation crisis]

When I went to visit Sarah in May, in a Dallas suburb, her 4-year-old son, Johnny, answered the door and asked me: “Do you know when my dad is coming home?”

Before I could answer, Johnny continued: “Do you know what happened to him?” He repeated versions of these questions over the two days of my visit. “Do you know where my dad is? Do you know if he’s okay?”

When the questions would start, Johnny’s 12-year-old sister, Katie, tried to distract him with coloring books and screens. Recently, he’d had an hours-long meltdown when Sarah tried to donate some of Edwin’s work clothes that were crowding the closet. Every afternoon he sits at the front window waiting for his dad’s truck to pull up outside.

While reporting this story, I talked with other families with credible asylum cases who were considering going underground to avoid being separated from their children, knowing that it would likely sabotage their chances of ever gaining legal status. This is the bracing irony of Trump’s deportation campaign: Its goal is to crack down on lawbreaking, but its implementation is encouraging it. Immigrants who have complied with the law are being targeted, and they are choosing to hide, despite the fear and stress, because the alternatives are worse: abandoning their children, or being deported with them to dangerous places.

Sarah and Edwin have been running from MS‑13 since 2013, when Sarah witnessed a murder in Honduras. Gang members wrongly assumed that she had testified against the killer and started threatening her. In 2022, they showed up at a relative’s house and killed a young woman, likely mistaking her for Sarah. She and Edwin decided it was time to go. They requested asylum and were admitted across the border during the Biden administration and moved to the Dallas suburbs. Edwin started working in construction and Sarah worked nights as a janitor. They rarely saw each other, but their schedules ensured that one of them was always home with the kids. (I’m using pseudonyms for this family because of ongoing threats.)

In January, the four of them went to an ICE office for a routine check-in. Edwin was detained without explanation. Sarah and the kids were distraught, and hoped it was a mistake. She planned to sell their cars to cover the cost of Edwin’s bond, but then he was transferred from a detention center in Texas to one in Mississippi. There, he checked the agency’s online portal for detainees and saw that he was being deported for allegedly skipping a court appointment that he had not been given the chance to attend. (The DHS spokesperson said the agency affords immigrants due process.)

“If we hadn’t gone to the check-in, my husband would be here,” Sarah told me. “It would have been better if we did things the wrong way.” Without Edwin, Sarah felt forced to take a series of risks. She didn’t have a license but started driving herself to work, because she was now solely responsible for paying the bills. She skipped her next check-in with ICE and, knowing that officers might come looking for her, moved apartments without telling the government. She started leaving Katie in charge of her younger brother while she was at work. “My daughter’s teacher said I shouldn’t tell anyone, because they could be taken away from me,” Sarah said.

Without child care, Sarah installed cameras in the apartment and watched the kids on her phone, in between cleaning toilets and vacuuming. Katie would fall asleep as soon as she left for work. Johnny, who was used to sleeping in his father’s arms, would pace the house every night. One time, Sarah saw him jamming an air freshener into an electrical outlet, which started to spark and smoke. Katie slept through the sound of her mother’s phone calls.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Johnny and Katie settle down for the night as their father, whose face has been blurred to protect his identity, watches via video call from Honduras.

Sarah changed her schedule to work one overnight shift during the week and double shifts on Saturdays and Sundays. Edwin started watching the children on video calls from Honduras while she was gone. On the first evening that I visited, he called while she was making dinner. “Have you eaten, my love?” she asked him.

“Not yet. I’m still working,” he said. Then he pointed the phone at a young man crouched on a hillside just outside the house, looking over the village below. “They’re here watching.”

“Put it down! Put it down!” Sarah told him. “Don’t let him see you.”

MS‑13 patrols their community, setting curfews and extorting people. Sarah and Edwin weren’t sure if the gang had realized that he was back. They were looking for a place to hide if Sarah ends up being deported, but nowhere in Central America seemed safe.

Sarah scarfed down some shrimp pasta. Katie cut Johnny’s food and tried to keep him in his chair. “She’s become my right hand,” Sarah told me of her 12-year-old. She looked at the clock and determined that she had time for a quick nap. She went into the bedroom and set a timer on her phone for 27 minutes. Katie started doing the dishes. She packed some leftover pasta into a Tupperware container for her mom and placed it in Sarah’s backpack with two bottles of water and a ziplock bag of cookies.

Sarah sprang up when her alarm went off. Her eyes were red and wet. She threw on her uniform—khakis and a polo shirt—and brushed her hair back into a ponytail. She called the kids into the bedroom and told them to put their pajamas on while she did her makeup. They climbed into bed and Katie dialed Edwin, then propped her phone up against a lamp so that he could watch them after they fell asleep. A minute later, Johnny was out of bed, pacing. When Sarah finished getting ready, she gathered him in her arms and placed him next to his sister. She looked into the camera at Edwin and said, “Okay, you’re in charge now.”

Marlyn has been living a version of Sarah’s nightmare since she arrived back in Venezuela in February, with video calls as the only portal to her children. She and Jesus moved back into their family home in Guanare, a small city about six hours by car from Caracas. Jesus struggled to find work and Marlyn spent most of her days trying to figure out how to reunite with her sons.

Back in Mobile, Eber demanded to be held constantly, screaming every time Estela put him down. Isaac would hyperventilate and hide anytime someone mentioned ICE. He started acting out in school. Estela was called in for a meeting with his teachers, during which she explained that she was trying to figure out how to get the boys back to Marlyn. This only seemed to make things worse. A county social worker showed up at her house unannounced, asking questions: Where were the boys sleeping? What did they eat? Did they have clean clothes? A few days later, the social worker called and threatened to take the boys from her. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” the social worker said, according to Estela. “If you don’t have custody and their parents aren’t here, the state has the right to take them.”

“I just wanted to do something good,” Estela told her, “and everyone is making it seem like I’m doing something wrong.”

She called Marlyn in a panic. After her own experience in detention, Marlyn was terrified of her children ending up in government custody. Estela tried to reassure Marlyn that she wouldn’t let anyone take the boys. But she was also scared that she might not be able to stop it from happening. Tension was building between the two women. Estela despaired about giving up her life to take care of Eber and Isaac. All of her time, and a lot of her money, was going toward the boys’ needs: clothes, school supplies, food, medication. Marlyn, who had no way to repay her, was grateful for the help and embarrassed by how much she needed it. She also worried that her children were becoming too attached to Estela. “She was scared I would keep her kids,” Estela told me. “I said, ‘No, I would never do that, because I’m also a mom.’ ” But she knew that sending the boys to Venezuela could traumatize them all over again. She put Eber in day care so they wouldn’t grow too close.

Eber couldn’t travel until he’d had lung surgery; his doctors said the cyst would become cancerous if it wasn’t removed, and getting the procedure in Venezuela would be nearly impossible. And no airline would be willing to fly Isaac out of the country without a legal guardian or passport.

Estela made dozens of calls to lawyers and nonprofit groups. She contacted ICE offices in Georgia and Alabama but received no response. Finally she reached an official in Chicago who said that if she turned Isaac over to the government, he could be deported back to Venezuela within a few weeks. It seemed like the only option.

Estela asked Isaac’s father to explain the plan to his son over a video call. Jesus told Isaac that he was going to a shelter with other children who were waiting to be returned to their parents. “You are going to be okay,” he said. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” Marlyn and Estela repeated the reassurances until Isaac was willing to go.

In late April, Estela loaded a backpack with clothes and snacks. The next morning, she put a piece of paper with phone numbers into Isaac’s shirt pocket and told him not to lose it. She drove him two and a half hours to the closest ICE field office, in southern Louisiana. They said they loved each other. A couple of hours later, she got a text from ICE saying that Isaac was on a plane to a foster home in Texas, where the 7-year-old would wait until he could go before an immigration judge and formally request “voluntary departure” to Venezuela.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

Estela greets Miguel as he arrives home from work. Caring for Eber has drained their bank account.

Estela returned to Mobile, and to Eber’s more complicated situation. He needed surgery, and his travel would be harder to arrange than Isaac’s. He was a U.S. citizen, so he couldn’t enter Venezuela without a visa—which requires a parent’s permission and usually their presence. Meanwhile, most construction work around Mobile was on hold because workers were too scared to leave their houses. Miguel’s business was suffering, but Estela couldn’t help, because she had no time to work.

And soon after she began to look into travel documents for Eber, the police started showing up at her house.

The sheriff’s deputy at the door said he was looking for Isaac. Estela started to explain the situation all over again, but her heart was racing. She worried that the officer didn’t understand or believe her, so she called Shaina Simenas, a social worker at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “Okay, put him on the phone,” Simenas said. She told the officer that Isaac was in federal custody and that ICE had deported both of his parents. He seemed satisfied, but officers returned to Estela’s house twice, until finally Simenas persuaded the department to close its investigation.

The Young Center normally advocates for unaccompanied children in their immigration proceedings, but when family separations began to accelerate after Trump took office for the second time, it assigned a team of six to focus on them. Since then, they’ve worked on more than 150 cases and have a growing waitlist. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the need,” Kelly Kribs, one of the team’s co-directors, told me.

Even without advertising this work, the Young Center has been overwhelmed. Some children and detained parents have found them by word of mouth. “We got a call from a 17-year-old boy a few weeks ago who was looking for help because his mom was his only caregiver, and he’s couch surfing in upstate New York,” Kribs said. “I think he Googled us.”

Kribs and her colleagues have tried to advocate for a number of women who were still breastfeeding when they were detained, despite an ICE policy against such detainments outside “exceptional circumstances.” One mother from St. Louis who had no criminal history was detained at three months postpartum. ICE ignored the Young Center’s request to release her under the policy. It took days for Simenas and a colleague to set up an account on the detainee tablet system, so she could message her family. “She went weeks without even seeing her infant because of how nonfunctional the system is for these families,” Simenas told me.

The Young Center has also tried to support temporary caregivers who are so overwhelmed that the children are unsafe. Kribs told me about a man in Florida who’d had to quit his job to care for five children, including a six-month-old, after their mothers—the man’s girlfriend and her sister—were detained. He had no income to pay for food and diapers. “He was father to none of these children,” Kribs said. One Illinois woman taking care of a 5-year-old boy whose father had been deported to Mexico was so financially strapped that she became homeless; she sent the child to sleep at a friend’s apartment while she lived in her car. Kribs eventually persuaded ICE to transport the boy back to his father. But first she had to send the caregiver $20 in gas money so the boy could be handed off.

On rare occasions, Kribs and her colleagues have transported children themselves, as in the case of a 13-month-old girl they ferried back to Mexico last year. Kribs said the reunion was bittersweet: The baby’s mother was waiting at the airport with balloons and a giant stuffed animal. But the little girl, who had spent more than half her life separated from her mother, didn’t seem to recognize her.

Now that ICE is almost solely dedicated to maximizing deportations, Kribs said, few people are left at the agency who will listen to their concerns. When possible, the Young Center tries to work with contractors to encourage ICE to comply with the policy on reunifying parents and children, or sorting out custody before deporting them. But not every detention center has enough staff to handle those requests, and some are busier than others. Kribs said that trying to appeal to deportation officers, who are under the most pressure to hit the president’s numerical goals, is especially challenging. One officer admitted to her that he thought it was “just so much easier when they leave their kids here,” she recalled. “Like it’s a logistical headache for them to try not to separate families.” (DHS did not comment on this claim.)

Separated parents have told me their pain is all-consuming. Before she was deported, a mother named Lucía called me from the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, crying about not having seen her 14-month-old and 3-year-old in three months. She said it was excruciating not being able to explain to them why she was gone. “They’re babies,” she said. “They don’t understand.” Lucía said that most of the women around her were in similar situations. Some had a spouse who was with their children, but other kids were staying with extended relatives or acquaintances. “In this room where I am,” she said, “there are 56 of us, and the majority are moms.”

After just over a month in federal custody in Texas, Isaac landed at the airport in La Guaira, Venezuela, in May. When Eber had his surgery, also in the spring, Estela spent three days and nights in a chair next to his hospital bed. She sent pictures to Marlyn and Jesus to keep them updated. Marlyn said very little in response. Not being able to be with Eber had left her speechless. “Thank you, Estela,” Jesus replied in one message. “I don’t know how, but one day I’m going to repay you for everything you’ve done for my son.”

Estela promised Marlyn that she wouldn’t hand off Eber to another caretaker, and that she’d get him back to Venezuela. But she’s exhausted. She feels like she’s neglecting her sons and her husband. Recently their bank account was down to $27. She used to go to church four times a week, but now manages just one. In the pews, she asks God to allow Eber to return to his family, and for the patience to keep caring for him in the meantime. “This baby needs to be with his mother,” she said.

Meridith Kohut for The Atlantic

After a year of separation, Eber seems to no longer remember Marlyn and calls Estela “Mama.” Estela has been trying to arrange Eber’s transfer to Venezuela all year.

During a video call with Marlyn in August, he sat on a couch next to Estela, picking Lucky Charms out of a bowl. For 10 long minutes, Estela cajoled him to say hello or blow his mom a kiss. He only glanced at the camera, and didn’t seem to recognize Marlyn’s face or voice.

When I speak with Marlyn by phone now, her speech is slow and soft, almost zombie-like. She says she can’t sleep. Venezuelan officials said that they would add her name to a list of parents who need their children back from the U.S., but they have not given her a timeline for Eber’s return. She calls them every day, but they tell her to keep waiting. She stays in touch with mothers she met in detention, and they update one another on trying to get their children back. So far, Isaac is the only success story among them. Meanwhile, Marlyn didn’t see Eber’s first steps or hear his first words. He was so fragile the last time they were together. Now he’s much bigger, with a mischievous smile that she’s never seen in person. He launches himself into bear hugs that she’s never felt. Even if he makes it to Venezuela, they’ll never regain the time they lost. “I’ve missed everything,” she said.

This article originally misstated Estela Díaz’s surname. The article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Babies Left Behind in America.”

The Republicans Are Bolting From Trump

2026-09-25T13:36:23-04:00

A few tentative displays of independence among Republicans have expanded in recent days into a stampede, as candidates furiously distance themselves from President Trump ahead of the midterm elections. “This is shaping up to be a nightmare political environment for every Republican, everywhere—period, full stop,” one Texas-based political consultant told us, speaking anonymously to provide a frank assessment. Noting that gas prices across the country are on average $4.50 a gallon, the consultant described the atmosphere as “a fucking disaster for anyone in a competitive race.”

The contrast with the midterm elections of Trump’s first term is particularly stark. An October 2018 rally in Richmond, Kentucky, was a political show of force by a president whose hold on the Republican Party was as firm as bedrock. The opening speaker, Republican State Senator Ralph Alvarado, hailed Trump’s many accomplishments as “amazing to see.” Senator Rand Paul crowed that Trump “exceeds my expectations” almost every day. Representative Andy Barr, whom Trump had come to town to endorse, praised the president as “a man of action” who “gets results,” prompting the thousands of MAGA faithful in attendance to erupt in cheers.

Kentucky Republicans have been fawning over Trump for the past decade. But now, as the war with Iran drags on and Trump’s approval ratings crater, even they are starting to keep the president at a distance. Barr, who is running for an open Senate seat, and Alvarado, who is running to replace him in the House, have each recently scrubbed mentions of Trump’s name from prominent portions of their campaign websites. Paul has been more vocal, repeatedly clashing with the White House over the Iran war and the ballooning national debt.

The notably lukewarm embrace of Trump from Republican candidates in Kentucky, a state that he won by more than 30 points in 2024, is just one indicator of the president’s loosening grip on a party he has dominated for the past decade.

Republican candidates seeking a reason to distance themselves from an unpopular president have a buffet of options to choose from. The war in Iran, which began almost seven months ago, has sent diesel prices to record highs. The United States is in an escalating trade war with Canada. The national debt, the elimination of which was once an obsession of conservatives, has ballooned to more than $40 trillion—and that’s before the $5,000 government checks Trump has promised to dole out if Republicans win. Inflation and interest rates, which Trump pledged to bring down, remain elevated. Gas and food are more expensive than they were a year ago, and mortgage rates passed 7 percent yesterday.

The president’s approval ratings on these and other issues are abysmal. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found that his approval rating has dipped to 32 percent—the lowest that pollster has measured at any point in his political career. Only 17 percent of respondents said they approved of the president’s handling of the cost of living. Barring a major change in the Iran war or the price of diesel, his numbers aren’t likely to change substantially, the Texas-based Republican consultant said. Members of his party were hoping the dynamic would improve, but it hasn’t—giving them little choice but to scramble over one another for the emergency exits.

The list of Republican candidates publicly noting their differences with Trump keeps growing. Many are in states where polls show tighter-than-expected races for the GOP. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas spoke out this month about Trump’s calls to ban the sale of jets from the Canadian company Bombardier, whose U.S. headquarters are in Wichita. The Senate candidates Mike Rogers in Michigan, Ashley Hinson in Iowa, and Jon Husted in Ohio have each called for a swift end to the war in Iran, noting its impact on gas prices even as Trump has claimed that such hikes are “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done” there.

Even in Trump’s adopted state of Florida, which he’s won three times, candidates are bailing. Representative Byron Donalds, who is running for governor, recently updated his campaign website to remove multiple references to Trump—including a photo with the president and a banner noting that he was “TRUMP-ENDORSED,” the Miami Herald reported Tuesday. Last week, Representative María Elvira Salazar released a political ad filmed in front of the White House warning the president that Hispanic voters “feel betrayed” by immigration and deportation policies that have “gone too far.” Marshall, the Kansas senator who has been a vocal supporter of Trump’s immigration crackdowns, shifted his tone this week, asserting that ICE agents conducting raids in his state needed to “coordinate with our local law enforcement.”

Even red-state Republicans who are not on the ballot are seeking daylight between themselves and the president. Senator John Curtis of Utah this week called for an investigation into Trump’s son Don Jr. over corruption allegations, including concerns about a luxurious, days-long party for his wedding that was funded by a Russian oligarch. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi on Wednesday took to the Senate floor to admonish the White House for giving “brutal” Chinese President Xi Jinping a “lavish welcome” to the U.S. this week.

[Read: The deferential president]

“The midterms are going to be a fucking bloodbath, and we all know it and we all know why,” Representative Nancy Mace, a retiring South Carolina Republican, told us of the president she once enthusiastically supported. She broke with him earlier this year and last week voted to end the Iran war. “We haven’t done what we said we were going to do, and Republicans are the least motivated group to turn out this cycle.”

Trump is not the first president to see members of his party running in the opposite direction in an attempt to salvage their political fortunes. Barack Obama and George W. Bush each steered clear of certain vulnerable members’ districts ahead of challenging midterm elections. Joe Biden, who faced sinking approval ratings during the 2022 midterms, regularly said he would happily campaign with or against any Democrat, if doing so would help them get elected.

But only Trump has demanded extreme loyalty. Stepping out of line was a rarity during the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, which began with a flurry of executive actions that left much of Washington shell-shocked. But Trump could demand fealty for only so long, Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, told us. “The cascading opposition to the president on multiple fronts now is important not just because of what it might represent for the midterm election, but more so because it reestablishes a kind of fixed point of orientation in the political universe again, making it possible for those who were persistently disoriented to regain their balance,” he said.

Even as the evidence has mounted that Trump is dragging down his party, the president has highlighted the very positions that have made him unpopular. After it was already clear that public concern over data centers was endangering the campaigns of vulnerable Republicans such as Husted, Trump insulted communities that rejected the projects as places that wanted to end up “backwards and poor.” He has dismissed bipartisan efforts to rein in the dangers of AI, saying he wants technology companies to have freedom to develop what he has begun referring to as “super intelligence.” He has continued to defend the war in Iran—suggesting this week at the United Nations that he might annihilate the entire country—and minimized the economic cost Americans are shouldering as a result.

Trump has also repeatedly told voters to pretend that he was on the ballot. Democrats have been happy to oblige, mentioning the president in 66,000 airings of general-election ads since August 1, according to the political-ad tracking firm AdImpact. (Republicans have mentioned Trump in a mere 7,000 airings.) The president does still have sway over his most die-hard supporters, and the White House provided us with a lengthy list of Republicans who continue to campaign with the president and praise him on social media and in speeches. He is also still deploying the enormous resources of political action committees he controls to help the GOP.

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress,” the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in a statement. “The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats’ extreme liberal policies and obstruction.”

The campaigns of Salazar, Donalds, Alvarado, Barr, Rogers, and Hinson did not respond to our requests for comment. (Salazar has said that she met with Trump after her ad went up and had a cordial conversation about immigration.)

Dozens of Republicans broke with Trump after the January 6 insurrection, only for many to return to the fold after he won office a second time. But for those who have been eager to see the party move on from Trump, the events of the past few weeks mark a potentially more durable shift. Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told us he has been watching the MAGA movement for a decade, asking: “When is this fever swamp gonna finally break?” He thinks the moment is now. Candidates have begun making the calculation that Trump is more of a liability than an asset, and are de-emphasizing their relationship with him. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen that,” he said.

The fact that it’s happening even in places like Kentucky is telling. In May, Trump successfully intervened in a House primary in the state to punish Thomas Massie for breaking ranks. But things are now very different. Barr, who is widely expected to win the Senate race in November, removed a photo of himself with Trump from the front page of his website and changed the phrase “America First” to “Kentucky First.” (The website still features language describing Barr as the first member of the state’s congressional delegation to endorse Trump.) The campaign website for Alvarado, who is running in the state’s most competitive congressional district, also scrubbed a photo with Trump and replaced multiple references to the president’s name.

When asked about candidates such as Hinson and Rogers publicly calling for an end to the war in Iran, a Republican operative told us that they were “not running away from Trump in his entirety” but instead making specific distinctions while still embracing the president’s broader record. Trump has not lashed out against candidates who are moving away from him. That’s a shift from years past, and his decision to hold his fire may be giving more candidates confidence to pull away. “It’s more that they’re allowed to have disagreements on certain issues with Trump,” the operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said.

Trump has also distanced himself from some Republicans, at least the ones not polling very well. Last month, he told Punchbowl News that voters were “not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.” He has repeatedly noted that GOP turnout tends to drop when he is not on the ballot, saying that he viewed such political trends as a kind of personal compliment despite their detrimental consequences for members of his party.

[Read: An electoral mess in Missouri]

The day after the 2018 midterms, when Republicans lost 40 seats in the House, Trump held a press conference and singled out the losing Republican candidates who had rejected his “embrace” during the campaign. “You had some that decided to ‘Let’s stay away, let’s stay away.’ They did very poorly,” he told reporters. “I’m not sure that I should be happy or sad, but I feel just fine about it.” He then went on to mockingly name a handful of the defeated candidates.

It is easy to imagine the president holding a similar news conference this fall, calling out the Republicans who kept him away during the campaign. This time, the list would be much longer.

Trump’s Public Service Announcement: ‘Love Me’

2026-09-24T19:20:00-04:00

The campaign-style ad starts with grainy video footage of President Trump, followed by a clearer look at his red-bathed profile, as his voice promises: “Together, we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America.” Then comes a strobe-style rapid display of images of the president. A pause. Then a dozen more Trumps. The pattern repeats several times. There are plugs for some of his priorities—such as cutting taxes and defending police officers—but one message stays on the screen for fully half of the 30-second commercial: AmericA will never be a communist country.

Throughout, an R&B song plays in the background, with falsetto voices singing, over and over: “Love me … Love me … Love me …” At the end comes this: Paid for by the U.S. Government.

Huh?

If the use of taxpayer dollars seems odd—and it should—the explanation that the White House gave me is even more bizarre. No one would speak on the record, but a White House spokesperson told me that the new ad, which began airing this week, is a public service announcement that is “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” A second White House official told me that the ad is “clearly not political,” an assertion that appears intended to provide legal cover. I also received a list of supposedly comparable PSAs from past presidents: George W. Bush spent federal dollars urging the youth of America not to do drugs. Joe Biden had a campaign to encourage the public to get their COVID vaccines. Franklin D. Roosevelt produced radio programs and posters supporting World War II. And now Trump has his own announcement of sorts: “Love me … Love me … Love me …”

“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” the White House spokesperson told me in a statement.

[Read: Trump plans to buy midterm ads about his own record ]

The White House would not answer my other questions, including about how much money is being spent on these “public service announcements,” which government account is being used to fund them, and who produced the spot. It is unclear how much money the government has spent on these ads and in how many places, but one advertising tracker I spoke with told me that the ad is airing in several major markets. It’s much easier to track such details for political ads, because campaigns and other groups are required to file reports with the Federal Communications Commission. The “Love Me” spot aired last night during Jesse Watters Primetime on Fox News, and it has also been seen on Newsmax.

The ad flashes text in big red letters spelling out Trump’s alleged accomplishments: Largest tax cuts in history, reigniting AmericaN manufacturing, and defend law and order and police. At the end, the voice of Dana White, the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, comes on as images of military planes fly overhead. “He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing is going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country that he loves,” White says. A shorter version of the ad appeared on the White House’s official YouTube page nearly two weeks ago.

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a Republican, compared the ad to something that a certain far-right former Hungarian prime minister would attempt. “It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad, and they could do it,” he told reporters. “But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán.” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said that the ad appears to violate federal law. “It is blatantly unethical under numerous federal ethics provisions proscribing the use of government resources for political campaigns,” he wrote on social media.

Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, who is poised to become the top Democrat on a key oversight committee, sent a letter today to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, with detailed questions about the cost, source of funds, and legal basis for the spot. “The advertisement does not have a clear official government purpose and appears to run afoul of federal prohibitions against the use of appropriated funds,” she wrote. Top Democratic appropriators also wrote to demand that the ad be taken down immediately: “This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America.”

Donald Sherman, the president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me that it’s “certainly odd” and unlike anything he has seen before. “It goes out of its way, it seems, to look and feel like propaganda as opposed to something more substantive,” he said.

[Read: The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse]

Sherman said that the ad likely does not violate the Hatch Act, which limits political activities for executive-branch employees but exempts the president. It more likely breaches federal appropriations laws, Sherman said, that restrict federal agencies from using taxpayer money for “publicity or propaganda.” Any enforcement would come from the Government Accountability Office, which operates at the request of congressional committees that are presently controlled by Republicans. A GAO spokesperson told me late this afternoon that the office had not received any requests for decisions on the matter.

“That’s the rub!” Sherman said. “This video is directed at benefiting the current majority in Congress, and the current majority in Congress has repeatedly refrained from reining in the current president’s corruption and behavior. I’m not holding my breath for them to do anything about it.”

Although I received few answers from the White House, I did receive some from JMSN, pronounced Jameson, the Albanian American artist behind the song used in the ad. He told me in an emailed statement that he had not authorized the use of his music, which has become a popular soundtrack on social media for users editing together their own photos. “I am looking for a lawyer now in order to see what our options are and how to proceed,” he said. “I have never been in this situation before, so need help in navigating something of this magnitude.”

The Deferential President

2026-09-24T05:00:00-04:00

The 747 slowly wheeled to a stop last night on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews, just outside Washington. Portable stairs were put in position, while a red carpet was unfurled and lined by both American and Chinese soldiers in dress uniforms. After a few minutes, Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared at the aircraft door. He paused and waved. Waiting below, staring up expectantly, was President Trump.

It was a remarkable act of deference. By tradition, American presidents don’t make the 12-mile trip to the base to greet a foreign leader. They instead wait at the White House, backed by the grandeur and power of the executive mansion. But not this time.

Xi did not display the same level of hospitality when Trump visited Beijing in May, and the U.S. president’s gesture suggested that he will take a conciliatory role during the closely watched summit between the leaders of the world’s foremost superpowers. Trump is not expected to push Xi on core issues, including the pace of artificial-intelligence development, Taiwan’s defense, and China’s support for Iran in its war with the United States.

It was not that long ago when Trump, a self-styled international bully, could credibly claim to “run the country and the world.” But he seems far smaller on the global stage now. His speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly, usually a signature moment on any president’s foreign-policy calendar, generated few headlines other than those about his threat to “annihilate” Iran. But even that bluster felt familiar and tired; Trump is stuck in a war he is desperate to leave, and leaders in Tehran seem to believe that he doesn’t have the political will—or the defensive munitions—to authorize a full-fledged return to the conflict. His trade war with traditional U.S. allies has pushed those nations away, leaving them to seek deals and make alliances that cut out Washington. His years-long campaign to commandeer Greenland for the United States ended with little to show for it. He can’t bring the war in Ukraine to an end.

Trump’s foreign policy has never been all that coherent, his isolationism haphazardly mixed with spasms of military intervention. But now his erratic behavior—his threats and bluffs, his emphasis on making money over spreading democracy—has left the United States in retreat from the rest of the world. “Trump has dramatically accelerated the arrival of what can be described as a post-American world,” Richard Haass, who worked in four presidential administrations and then led the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “He’s reduced U.S. influence by not standing up to our foes or standing with our allies.”

The height of Trump’s power might have been earlier this year on January 3. It was then, under the cover of darkness, that U.S. Special Forces stole into Venezuela and seized the nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro; by day’s end, Maduro was in a grim detention center in Brooklyn. Trump had deposed a leader who defied him and, later, would get control of much of Venezuela’s oil. An unspoken message went out to other nations: Don’t cross me. You could be next. Trump turned his attention to Greenland, to Cuba, to Canada. The U.S. military seemed capable of anything.

Unfortunately for Trump, he also believed that illusion. Not even two months later, he did what his predecessors had avoided and launched a full-on war with Iran. Teaming with Israel, the U.S. decapitated Tehran’s leadership and smashed much of its military. But the conflict soon bogged down. Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz. Energy prices soared. The Pentagon’s bombing campaign lost its effectiveness. Defensive munitions ran low. American bases were hit. Trump alternated among making apocalyptic threats, promising that negotiations had peace close at hand, and declaring that, actually, the war had already been won. (He sometimes did more than one in the span of the same day.) But none of it was true.

[Read: The makings of a prewar world]

The debacle in Iran, which is poised to drag down Republicans in the upcoming midterms, underscored some hard truths about America’s new standing in the world. Since beginning his second term, Trump’s message to most other nations, including longtime friends, was that they were largely on their own. He left the bulk of Ukraine’s defense to Europe while he and his negotiators continued to sweet-talk Russia. He alienated allies by launching trade wars. He warned of further military intervention in his own hemisphere. He happily accepted gifts and business investments from Gulf states, only to ignore their pleas to not attack Iran. He allowed Elon Musk’s DOGE to slash foreign aid and other U.S. soft-power programs around the globe. Nearly everywhere, America’s influence is shrinking.

This week offered a chance for a reset. For decades, presidents have traveled to New York in mid-September to address the General Assembly, huddle with world leaders and really, really snarl Manhattan traffic. In 2017, Trump shocked those gathered by threatening to wipe out North Korea because Kim Jong Un was “on a suicide mission.” The next year, dignitaries and heads of state burst out laughing when Trump claimed that his administration was one of the most successful in U.S. history. Last year, following his return to office, he angrily decreed that European migration policies and efforts to combat climate change meant that its “countries are going to hell.”

Those speeches were at least memorable. This one zipped by nearly without a trace. It was short by Trump’s standards—not even 40 minutes—and included a call to rebrand “artificial intelligence” as “super intelligence.” Much of the audience sat in silence. His meetings afterwards, even with the leaders of Ukraine and Venezuela, generated few headlines. The president touted a new security agreement for more U.S. involvement with Greenland that, upon closer review, didn’t change much from the status quo and was far short of Trump’s original demand for total U.S. control. Perhaps contributing to the day’s forgettable nature: Other than for the speech, there was limited video footage because the networks boycotted the trip after Trump banned three media outlets from the White House, including the trip’s scheduled TV pooler, CNN.

[Read: The Greenland fiasco stumbles to an end]

But the UN assembly this year was, in essence, an opening act to the summit and state dinner with Xi. The anti-China rhetoric that dominated Trump’s 2016 campaign is but a distant memory; in hopes of securing a massive trade deal, he has courted his Chinese counterpart and bragged about their friendship. White House aides have offered few goals for the summit, other than to note that a number of tech leaders have been invited to the White House. Some issues may be downplayed, or ignored entirely, in an effort to continue to cozy up to Xi. Though lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have urged the president to partner with China to create AI guardrails, Trump has instead vowed to let the technology grow unchecked—in part because it is propping up the stock market and much of the U.S. economy (at most, a White House aide told me, there would be some sort of broad-strokes agreement to try to avert an AI-fueled apocalypse). He has not ruled out halting weapons shipments to Taiwan, a request high on Xi’s wish list. And Trump has shown no inclination to scold China for sending Iran supplies and intelligence.

Tonight, he will extend the pageantry further and throw a glitzy state dinner for the Chinese president. Trump’s trip to Andrews last night underscored the lengths to which he is willing to go to flatter Xi; there have been only a handful of times when a president has greeted a visiting leader at the base—among them, a pair of pontiffs (the most recent was President Obama greeting Pope Francis in 2015) and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was welcomed by President Dwight Eisenhower at the height of the Cold War. This time, both the United States and China's anthems were played, and a cannon sounded. Xi glanced above as a pair of B-1 bombers flew overhead. Trump winced at the noise.

The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms

2026-09-23T05:00:00-04:00

Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers. In 2022, Ticktin helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. This year, he pushed Trump to secure a pardon for Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk convicted of charges related to tampering with election equipment.

Which is why it might be worth listening when Ticktin says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. “He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas. The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario. When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.

Trump has already tried to claim greater federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered primarily at the state and local level. In February, he said Republicans should nationalize voting in at least 15 places. In August, when the television and radio host Wayne Allyn Root pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and other measures, Trump played coy: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.” Later that month, Trump posted a Root column on the topic, with a headline that described the plan as “foolproof.” Peters announced after meeting with Trump in June that the president “basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.” In a prime-time address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump again repeated the false claim that he had won the 2020 election, and sarcastically encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell” in the upcoming elections.

[Read: Trump’s dream world in Dallas]

To head off a crisis, Trump’s White House and Cabinet advisers have been working for months to move Trump’s focus away from baseless theories of election fraud peddled by people like Ticktin, Root, and Peters. At the same time, they have authorized as-yet-unsuccessful efforts to uncover actual evidence that would make the conspiracies more credible: Trump’s advisers gathered once-classified documents that he could share on genuine foreign efforts to influence elections, set up a prime-time address where he again falsely suggested that the 2020 election was stolen, authorized the seizure of Georgia election records, and reviewed voting equipment used in Puerto Rico. None of these efforts has revealed the type of large-scale fraud that Trump has alleged, though they have allowed the president to keep the idea of election theft in the news. Meanwhile, Trump has failed to persuade Senate Republicans to pass legislation, called the SAVE America Act, that would restrict mail-in voting and impose new voter-ID and citizenship checks on ballot access, and the Supreme Court has rejected his effort to restrict voting by mail.

At the White House, the constant lobbying by election deniers continues to be viewed as problematic. A White House official told us that Ticktin, Root, and Peters play no role in election policy at the White House. A Justice Department spokesperson said there are no plans “to declare certified voting equipment unreliable or unusable absent credible, verified evidence and the legal process for doing so.” Suggestions that “such an initiative is under way at the Department is false,” the spokesperson said. Some officials, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, have said publicly that there are no plans to forcibly take over the role of state election administrators or deploy federal officials to polling places, though Mullin said there could be exceptions in the case of “specific threats.”

[Read: MAGA thinks Maduro will prove Trump won in 2020]

But the prospect of Trump deciding to act on the demands of his most fervent election-denying supporters has remained a constant threat, one that even Trump’s inner circle admits remains possible. Such measures are broadly opposed by Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and within Trump’s own administration, not least because they’re considered bad politics. Polling commissioned by Republicans earlier this year found that if the SAVE America Act passed, it was likely to increase Democratic enthusiasm and suppress Republican turnout, particularly in red states, such as Florida, that have long embraced mail-in voting, according to a person who has reviewed the numbers.

The tension within Trump’s orbit has created an added layer of high-stakes uncertainty in the final weeks of the midterm-election campaign. Ticktin told us he expects that if Democrats win, Trump could proclaim military control based on the notion that voting equipment is vulnerable to foreign adversaries. Root, a LindellTV host and Gateway Pundit columnist, told us that he sends his columns directly to Trump by email and text; Trump regularly reposts them on Truth Social. “I hope he takes orders from Wayne Allyn Root,” Root told us last week. “Because in my opinion, the election is going to be stolen and there is no way to keep it from being stolen without declaring a national emergency.”

In a statement, the White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the “real story” is that “evidence of voter fraud and non-citizens voting in our elections continues to pile up,” even though “the media and Democrats” have been denying this for decades.

“The ‘danger’ in our elections is caused by extreme Democrats who refuse to enact basic commonsense measures that ensure Americans, and Americans only, decide our elections,” Bis said.

One group hoping to steer Trump’s decisions on the election is fully enmeshed in the government, a collection of senior advisers and Cabinet secretaries who are coordinated through a regular elections working group that meets at the White House. The other typically operates direct to camera or keyboard, powered by right-wing platforms including Rumble. Ticktin, Peters, and Root are among this set.

Their faithful followers gathered at an off-Strip hotel in Las Vegas earlier this month to detail how Trump could, in their minds, avert electoral calamity this fall. The lawyer, recently released felon, and columnist each took to the stage at various points during the “Storm Summit,” billed as a way to achieve “honest elections” and help save the country from a rigged vote. The attendees we spoke with said they anticipate that the midterm election will be canceled or temporarily suspended, or that the results or certification of winners will be in limbo for an undetermined period of time.

When it was Ticktin’s turn to address the crowd, he described a “nightmare scenario” in which electronic voting equipment central to many 2020 conspiracies diverts votes from Republican candidates to Democrats, and delivers the party control of Congress. Then, he ominously predicted, Democrats would have enough support (including from anti-Trump Republicans) to impeach and remove Trump and Vice President Vance from office. But Trump, Ticktin predicted, wouldn’t stand for it. “There’s not another soul on this planet that understands what it is to be the president of the United States and have to leave office for a rigged election so someone else can step in and steal the country,” Ticktin said. He added, “He’s not ever going to do that again.” The crowd—some wearing 45-47 hats and shirts reading 2020 ITS NOT OVER YET—whistled and cheered from under a banner depicting Trump as a matador waving the American flag.

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

Root got a standing ovation after assuring attendees that, according to research done by a friend, the election would be upended if Trump were to declare a national-security emergency. In reality, experts told us, such declarations give the president access to specific statutory powers enacted by Congress. None provides the president with control over elections. “There seems to be a wild misperception on the part of some Trump allies that an emergency declaration allows the president to do anything he wants,” Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told us. “It is not a blank check.”

Nonetheless, Root described victory as inevitable if Trump issues such a declaration before November 3. “We win,” he said, “because Democrats can’t win a gosh darn election without cheating.” Root, who is based in Las Vegas, described himself to us as “a tough guy, a Jewish kid from a Mafia neighborhood in New York, who knows how to fight.” He said he was “the only Republican I know who isn’t a freaking golf player with yellow pants.”

Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after prosecutors said she deceived colleagues in order to grant an unauthorized person access to voting equipment under her control in 2020. (She maintains that she did nothing wrong.) Trump and Ticktin helped secure her clemency from Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, earlier this year.

Peters acknowledged to us that there was widespread discontent among MAGA supporters that nothing has changed about the nation’s voting systems—and that they want to see the government do something, quickly. “They can’t trust elections—they’ve seen too much,” she told us in an interview, adding, “We don’t have a lot of time to fix this.” What, we asked, was her message to the president and those in a position to make changes to election systems? Peters answered after a long pause: “Listen to the people outside of the administration.”

The ICE Officer in Austin Wasn’t Wearing a Body Cam

2026-09-22T12:29:21-04:00

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The ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan man last weekend in Austin was a recent hire who was not wearing his body camera, three officials at the Department of Homeland Security with knowledge of the incident told me. The officer, who has not been publicly identified, was hired last year, according to two of the officials, but he previously worked for another federal law-enforcement agency, one of the officials said. The officials were not authorized to discuss the investigation into the shooting, which left Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez with a bullet lodged in his upper torso, according to his attorney.

ICE officials have rushed to distribute body-worn cameras to officers since the fatal shootings in July of a Mexican construction contractor in Texas and a Colombian delivery driver in Maine. Officers making arrests are required to have the cameras at all times. The agency has directed officers to activate the devices prior to engaging in enforcement activity, the three officials said, and ICE instructs them to stop recording only when the incident has safely concluded. Officers who do not follow these instructions are required to submit a written statement to their supervisors and could face possible disciplinary action, the three officials said.

DHS and ICE public-affairs officials did not immediately respond to questions about the incident in Austin and whether the officer will face consequences.

On Sunday, the officer was working with a partner who was driving in a separate vehicle. That second officer had a body-worn camera that was turned on, two officials told me. The officers were checking license plates using a system that helps them find targets for arrest using commercial databases and federal immigration files. When they ran the plates from the blue Toyota Corolla driven by Garcés Pérez, the officers saw he had an outstanding deportation order from an immigration judge.

The ICE officers, who were driving unmarked vehicles, attempted to pull Garcés Pérez over, but he drove away, nearly striking one of the officers, according to one of the DHS officials. The official said the incident was recorded by the body camera of the ICE officer’s partner. The officers followed Garcés Pérez in their vehicles. The officer without the body camera found Garcés Pérez and attempted to detain him. When Garcés Pérez attempted to drive away again, that officer pulled his gun and fired, striking Garcés Pérez in the back, both of the officials told me. A bystander video recorded just after the shooting shows an officer wearing a cap and a face covering standing next to the Corolla speaking with Garcés Pérez, who clutches at the wound on his back and winces in pain.

[Read: ICE has quietly changed its deadly-force rule]

Garcés Pérez, 28, briefly received medical treatment for the gunshot wound, then was taken to an ICE detention center southwest of Austin. As his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, gathered with supporters and journalists at a news conference yesterday, Garcés Pérez addressed the crowd by phone and with the help of a translator. “I have not received the medical attention that I require,” Garcés Pérez said.

Lincoln-Goldfinch said that Garcés Pérez was taken out of the hospital after just four hours and then had to sleep on the floor of the detention center. She said he was moved to a hospital after reporting “left-side paralysis” and severe pain. “He should have stayed in the hospital all of this time,” she told CNN. Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, a Democrat, said this morning that Garcés Pérez had been transferred back to the ICE detention center.

Lincoln-Goldfinch said her client has a valid driver’s license and was making deliveries for DoorDash when ICE attempted to stop him and rammed his car. She said Garcés Pérez entered the United States legally in 2024 through the CBP One program, which allowed asylum seekers to enter the country and pursue asylum claims through a “parole” program offered by the Biden administration.

President Trump canceled that program, so if Garcés Pérez did not obtain another form of legal-immigration status, he would be potentially subject to ICE arrest. Lincoln-Goldfinch said her client was issued a deportation order because his court documents were sent to the wrong address. “I see this all the time in my practice and it’s a mistake we can easily correct. It does not justify shooting people in the street,” Lincoln-Goldfinch wrote in a social-media post.

The Trump administration launched a hiring spree at ICE last year to add 10,000 deportation officers and more than double the number of personnel deployed on U.S. streets. The officer who fatally shot the Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine was also a new hire. Veteran officers at ICE have repeatedly shared their concerns with me about the qualifications and competence of new recruits, especially those sent through a fast-track training course in which classroom hours were cut by more than half. ICE has ended the fast-track program for new hires, but one senior ICE official told me that a large number of the officers the agency recruited have since been disqualified or let go.

[Read: The education of Markwayne Mullin]

ICE arrests increased this summer to 50,000 a month, the highest levels ever recorded by the agency, which remains under intense White House pressure to carry out 1 million deportations a year. After Durán Guerrero’s killing, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered a pause on most vehicle stops by ICE officers, citing the need to finish distributing body cameras and improve officer training. But Trump reversed that order a day later, after immigration-enforcement hard-liners protested.

ICE training instructs officers that the use of deadly force against a fleeing suspect is not permissible unless there is an imminent risk of harm to law-enforcement personnel or the public. DHS’s inspector general is investigating the fatal shooting of Durán Guerrero in Maine as well as the killing of 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7. The findings from those investigations have not been released.

The Northern Passage

2026-09-21T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Christopher Gregory-Rivera

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Updated at 12:25 p.m. ET on September 21, 2026

The message from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arrived on August 7 as Jeanne was finishing up her shift at a restaurant in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina. Her legal status in the United States had been terminated. Her work permit was no longer valid. Jeanne immediately switched off the location-tracking on her phone. What if ICE was already looking for her? What if she was deported back to Haiti?

Five years in the United States had brought her physical safety but nagging stress. Jeanne, who asked me not to use her real name, arrived in the United States in July 2021 to visit family on a short-term visa. She had been mugged on the streets of Port-au-Prince a few months earlier, and gangs were taking over more of the city. The Biden administration had recently expanded Temporary Protected Status for Haitians—offering provisional residency, protection from deportation, and work permits—citing the country’s deteriorating security. Two days after Jeanne arrived, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom. Jeanne overstayed her visa, applied for TPS, and tried to begin a new life in North Carolina. But she could never really settle in, she told me.

As President Trump campaigned to return to the White House, he promised the largest immigration crackdown in history—and repeated false rumors about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating pets. Soon after he returned to office, he canceled TPS protections for Haiti, and Jeanne lost her job. She was scared to leave her home and had to drain her savings to pay bills. After a federal judge blocked Trump’s move in February 2026, effectively reinstating TPS, she got her job back. But in June, the Supreme Court sided with Trump, and when the ruling took effect last month, Jeanne was among the roughly 300,000 Haitians who could no longer work legally and faced possible arrest and deportation by ICE. Jeanne looked for advice online, finding mostly fear and despair. Her relatives urged her to head north and stay with her brother in Canada.

Canada’s asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection, but Jeanne worried about making the 900-mile journey to the border. She had read that ICE officers and Border Patrol agents were checking buses and trains, asking for papers. A friend gave her the number of a driver, who charged $700 for the one-way trip. “I was praying, crying, anxious, stressed. I couldn’t eat or drink or anything,” she told me last week as we sat at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop in the Montreal suburb of Laval. Safely making it to Canada seemed like her only option. The violence in Haiti was unrelenting; her social-media feeds were filled with stories about two girls who had been kidnapped by an armed gang on their way to school.

The drive took nearly 22 hours. At the border, Canadian officers allowed her to cross into Quebec. She arrived with “almost nothing,” she told me, and she felt immediate relief. Her brother arrived an hour later to pick her up. She was lucky. For other Haitians fleeing ICE, the only route into Canada is a path through the woods.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

A small border-crossing station in Churubusco, New York.

I arrived in Montreal two days after President Trump published a cartoon image of himself holding a hockey stick over a cowering Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. It felt like a new low point, but a bilateral relationship between two countries that are so extensively intertwined has many ways to get worse. The 5,525-mile boundary they share—the longest international land border in the world—is an obvious place for friction. Long celebrated for its openness and permeability, it’s been tightening up from tariffs and declining cross-border tourism. Some prominent Republicans, including Ohio nominee for governor Vivek Ramaswamy and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have previously called for the construction of a northern border wall to stop drugs and migrants from Canada. But Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is now sending some migrants, especially Haitians, in the opposite direction.

[Read: The ‘big black scar’]

The number of ICE arrests surged to 50,000 a month this summer, the highest level ever. ICE remains behind on the White House’s goal to deport 1 million immigrants a year, and MAGA hard-liners want Trump to further intensify the crackdown. Haitians who arrived during the Biden administration are an easy target. Some of the 300,000 who lost their TPS status were among the more than 200,000 who the Biden administration allowed to enter the United States between 2021 and 2024 using the president’s humanitarian parole authority, which the Trump administration revoked soon after he returned to office. ICE already has their addresses, phone numbers, and fingerprints and other biometric information in its files. They are much easier to find than someone who slipped across the border undetected and doesn’t show up in federal databases.

It’s difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing into Canada as ICE ramps up operations. Haitians without close family members in Canada who arrive at the land border are generally ineligible to seek asylum, and in August, Canadian authorities rejected 133 asylum seekers at official crossings from the United States, the highest one-month total this year, according to Canadian government data. Those who are deemed ineligible are turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and typically transferred to ICE.

Since August 20, when the United States resumed deportation flights to Haiti, ICE has sent five planeloads of deportees, totaling nearly 500 people. Security conditions in Haiti remain so poor that the Federal Aviation Administration has prohibited U.S. aircraft from landing in Port-au-Prince, the capital. ICE has been dropping off deportees in Cap-Haïtien, the country’s second-largest city, forcing those with homes or family in the capital to travel across the country through highway checkpoints controlled by gangs.

Canadian authorities declined to tell me how many Haitians they’ve intercepted trying to illegally cross the border since the TPS termination took effect. Haitians are already the leading group of asylum seekers in Canada, according to Canadian government data. Viles Dorsainvil, the director of the Haitian Support Center, an immigrant aid group in Springfield, Ohio, told me that most Haitians he’s spoken with who have lost their legal status are terrified of ICE but unsure of what to do next. About three dozen people he knows have already been taken into ICE custody and sent to detention centers, and many others have upcoming “check-in” appointments that require them to report to ICE offices. “Folks are stuck at home, not able to go to work, with their power service and water being shut off,” Dorsainvil told me. Some are thinking about leaving for Canada, he said, but aren’t sure how to get there safely.

Asylum rules along the U.S.-Canada border are governed by the “Safe Third Country” agreement between the two nations, first signed in 2002, which requires anyone seeking refuge to apply in the country where they first arrive. It prevents someone who fails to qualify in the United States from making a second attempt in Canada, and vice versa. The rules mean that asylum seekers interdicted along the U.S.-Canada border can be quickly sent back, without access to immigration courts.

During Trump’s first term, thousands of migrants who feared arrest in the United States crossed into Canada, often through an unofficial crossing point, Roxham Road, where Canadian border authorities had set up a makeshift processing station. Canada shut down the Roxham Road crossing in 2023 as a public backlash built. In March, the Canadian Parliament passed a bill that further restricted asylum eligibility, by effectively disqualifying anyone who enters illegally. Asylum claims have dropped 60 percent this year in comparison with the same period last year, according to the latest statistics from the Canada Border Services Agency. The tougher law reflects a sharp turn in Canadian public opinion against the country’s liberal immigration policies. About 23 percent of Canada’s population is foreign-born, according to the country’s most recent census data (versus about 14 percent of the U.S. population), and in a 2024 poll, nearly six in 10 Canadians said immigration levels were too high, citing housing costs and strains on the country’s public services.

[Read: A reverse Ellis Island]

Canada’s new rules left a loophole, however. Although migrants who are caught within 14 days of arrival can be sent back to the United States, those who can prove a longer presence in Canada—using receipts, a time-stamped photograph, or some other evidence—are allowed to remain. Canada does not send deportation flights to Haiti because it is too risky, so someone who crosses illegally and hides in a safehouse for two weeks can stay in the country and qualify for a work permit.

The system is Canada’s version of Temporary Protected Status, and is “probably preferable to being detained and deported to Haiti,” Jenn McIntyre, the clinic coordinator of the Canada-US Border Rights Clinic, an advocacy group in Canada, told me. But it’s not a path to legal residency, McIntyre cautioned, leaving asylum seekers in a state of long-term limbo, with a risk of deportation looming if Canada resumes deportation flights to Haiti or can find another country that will accept them. “A lot of people who say Let’s go to Canada! have no idea how hard it’s going to be,” she said.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

An anti-surveillance sign hangs near a strip of stores serving the Haitian community in North Montreal.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

Haitian immigrants have settled across the city but the densest enclaves are in North Montreal.

At Poulet Royal, a chicken restaurant on the outskirts of Montreal, I met Albert, a 53-year-old Haitian who arrived in Canada this summer after living in the United States for two years. It was dark that night, and pouring rain, but Albert didn’t want to be picked up in front of the house nearby where he’d been staying.

Albert, who also asked me not to use his real name, told me that he crossed from New York into Canada illegally through the forest with his sons, ages 10 and 9, one night in late June. He had worked for more than 20 years as a police officer in Haiti, joining an anti-gang unit that received training from U.S., Canadian, and French instructors. He was based in a district outside Port-au-Prince, where he mostly worked as a shift commander at the station, rather than on the streets. But sometimes he was sent into the city’s most violent neighborhoods, which became more dangerous over time. After his best friend, a fellow officer, was killed by gunmen in 2022, Albert looked for a way out of Haiti. He had a side job providing private security for a U.S. missionary organization, which helped sponsor him. His two other children, both adults, were already living in the United States.

The Biden administration granted Albert humanitarian parole, and he arrived in New York City with his two younger boys in 2024. A friend persuaded him to move to Evansville, Indiana, and then to Columbus, Ohio, where Albert found work in the shipping department of a cosmetics company. The job lasted less than a year. Albert lost his work permit when Trump took office and canceled the parole program. Albert searched for odd jobs, finding little, and slowly sank into depression, he told me. His sons would come home from school asking why he wasn’t working and didn’t leave the house. Albert worried that ICE would pick him up and that he would have to take the boys back to Haiti. “My older children said that if we got sent back, their younger brothers would never forgive me,” he told me.

[Read: A new kind of family-separation crisis]

When his sons finished the school year, Albert hired a driver to take them from Columbus to the Canadian border. They arrived at night, joining a group of other Haitians, some of whom admonished Albert for bringing children into the woods. He told me that he has no idea where they crossed, but that his sons were brave and said they were fine leaving the United States if it meant their father could get a job and be happier.

After a short walk to the Canadian side, Albert said, the group got into a car that took them to Montreal. He and the boys spent two weeks in hiding, then submitted their immigration applications. The boys are now enrolled in local schools and adjusting quickly, he told me. “My future doesn’t really matter,” he said. “I just want them to have a better life and to live to my age.”

Albert told me that being in Haiti is “like living in a maze.” You never feel safe, he said. “You’re just trapped.” He said that he knew it might take months to receive a work permit in Canada, but that he wasn’t as anxious as he felt in Ohio. “Here, I can breathe,” he said. On his phone, he showed me pictures of his boys in matching soccer uniforms.

The farm roads of northern New York State cut through hay fields and groves of sugar maples, right up to the boundary with Canada. These roadways once ran straight through, but today they’re split by a ditch or a low-slung barrier to block vehicles. Most of the international boundary runs through thick forests, and the trees have been cut along a 20-foot-wide clearing to create a demarcation. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police call it “The Slash.”

I rode along the Slash in an eight-wheel all-terrain vehicle earlier this month with a Canadian border officer, Jonathan Maheu, an RCMP sergeant. It had rained heavily the day before, and the Slash was flooded with knee-deep puddles. Frogs jumped out of Maheu’s path through the bogs. Maple branches and thick brush lashed at the vehicle as it lurched and groaned over the rough terrain. The woods on either side were dark and gloomy, but all the sunlight that reaches into the Slash had caused an eruption of wildflowers that were shoulder-high by the end of summer: goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and pink aster. We heard something crashing through the brush. “Fawn,” Maheu said.

The RCMP had arrested a group of 13 Haitians crossing illegally there a few days earlier, and handed them over to U.S. authorities. Maheu scanned for new footprints or paths. We didn’t see anyone.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Jonathan Maheu patrols the Slash in the all-terrain vehicle.

RCMP officers patrol for illegal entries, relying on remote cameras and surveillance drones. But the police service does not have the personnel to put officers along the border the way U.S. agents are deployed. The rough terrain of the Slash is the main physical impediment along the border itself, and as Maheu drove, he pointed out the many trails and dirt tracks leading into Canada. There were any number of places to cross quickly, within a short walk of rural roads and highways.

Maheu told me the area is disorienting, inhospitable, and dangerous, especially in the winter. Smugglers sometimes provide little more than the GPS coordinates of designated pickup spots, but cellphone service is spotty, and migrants sometimes try to hide without enough food, water, or warmth. “One of my colleagues tracked a group for seven hours, and when he found them, they were nearly freezing to death. It was minus-30 degrees Celsius. The kids had tinfoil wrapped around their feet, trying to keep warm.”

At the edge of a field, we stopped to chat with Jerry Miller, a 69-year-old farmer on the New York side who has windmills towering over his property, which generate about $20,000 in rent per year from power companies. Miller told me that he has lived on the Canadian border all his life, and has never seen as many migrants heading north as he has since Trump took office last year. They generally keep to themselves but sometimes cause damage, he said, describing how a neighbor recently ran over a perfume bottle with his hay combine, spoiling several bales. Miller showed me a photo on his phone of an abandoned pickup truck someone tried to drive through the Slash that got stuck. Discarded water bottles and clothing are also a nuisance. “I don’t care if they’re coming or going, it ain’t right,” Miller told me. His stories reminded me of the many conversations I’ve had with ranchers along the U.S. southern border whose cattle escaped after smugglers cut their barbed-wire fences or left gates open.

[Read: The man in charge of immigration data just resigned]

A few hundred yards away in the Slash, we found a pile of items that looked as if they’d been hastily discarded: a backpack, two jackets, a polka-dot shirt. They were soaked from the rain but appeared to have been recently abandoned. Maheu said smugglers tell migrants to change clothing in case they’ve been spotted on surveillance cameras. There were other scattered items: deodorant, lotion, a pen, a hair pick. A toad jumped out from under a pair of wet jeans.

Philippe Mélancon, an RCMP staff sergeant who works with Maheu, told me that Canadian officers are trying to target the criminal groups who “profit from migrants who feel helpless and want to get a better life for themselves.”

“They make a lot of money telling migrants they’re going to bring them across safely, and they won’t get caught, and it’s 100 percent guaranteed, which is not the truth,” Mélancon told me. “They put their lives in danger.” I didn’t doubt that smuggling organizations were making money from Haitians and others trying to flee to Canada. But having spent many years reporting on criminal organizations in Mexico, I found it hard to see the northern border as a similarly dangerous place. There are not widespread reports of killings, assaults, or rapes in the woods of Quebec. The attorneys and migrant advocates I’ve spoken with described the groups moving Haitians as mostly informal—more like old-school coyote guides than sinister cartel operatives. But maybe that’s where things will go if the money and the desperation increase.

Frantz André became a volunteer migrant advocate about a decade ago, after he retired from a career as a restaurant executive helping fast-food companies expand into Canada. Born in Haiti, he arrived in Canada in 1965, when he was 10, fleeing the dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his fearsome secret police, known as the Tonton Macoutes. He estimates that only about 800 Haitians lived in Montreal then.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

Frantz André

Today that number has grown to about 80,000, making them Montreal’s largest immigrant group. Since the termination of TPS in the United States last month, André said, he’s been receiving about 30 calls a day from asylum seekers who have arrived in Canada or who want to cross. “Many of them will take the risk of going irregularly across the border. It’s not going to stop them,” he told me. “Being deported to Haiti is a greater risk than trying to enter here. They’ll take the last chance.”

André helps migrants fill out paperwork and refers them to legal-aid groups or attorneys who can represent them, but he isn’t a lawyer. At a time when few Canadian politicians seem eager to discuss immigration cooperation with the Trump administration, he has become a prominent critic of the country’s narrower asylum rules.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The Atlantic

A woman shops in North Montreal.

I asked André if he thought the Carney government could shift again and soften its stance toward Haitians fleeing Trump’s ICE crackdown, given how unpopular Trump is in Canada. Carney has gotten a popularity boost by defying Trump on trade and tariff issues, presenting himself as an “elbows-up” defender of Canadian dignity. (CBP officials I’ve spoken with told me that the tensions between Trump and Carney have had no bearing on long-running border security cooperation, and that U.S. agents remain in close contact with their RCMP counterparts.)

[From the April issue: ‘America doesn’t want my children or grandchildren’]

André told me no; Canada is eager to emphasize its immigration enforcement cooperation with the United States, because other elements of the bilateral relationship are strained. “With a lot of our immigration policies, we’re becoming more and more the 51st state,” André said. “It’s very hypocritical. We say: Okay, we’re not going to deport you to Haiti because we believe it’s not a safe country. But at the same time, at the border, they’re sending them right into that environment, knowing that people are being deported.”

André is helping Jeanne and Albert file claims for protection and obtain work permits. They’re safe for now, he said. But he’s not sure how the Canadian government will respond if more and more Haitians come through the woods.

This article originally misspelled the last name of the RCMP sergeant. He is Jonathan Maheu, not Jonathan Matheu.

The Pinball President

2026-09-20T07:00:00-04:00

In 1946, the year that Donald Trump was born, the pinball machine offered everything but control. The bumpers were propulsive, the lights flashed, but the player’s only honest move was to pull a spring-loaded plunger. After that, the ball belonged to the machine, zinging and zooming wherever the bumpers sent it.

This is how many Americans experience the Trump presidency today: antic caroming that they can do little more than watch. The ballroom. The Iran war. The threats against Canada. Greenland. Portraits of himself as Christ, a decorated general, or the pope. The arch. The Kennedy Center. Prosecution of enemies. Pardons. Imaginary Reflecting Pool vandals. Federal incursions into voting. Tariffs on. Tariffs off. Tariffs on again. The Qatari plane. Endless promises—to release tax returns, to end corruption, to deliver $5,000 checks—that never materialize.

No president has been more with us than Trump, because no president has been better at seizing public attention. But there is a difference between getting attention and doing something with it. For months, the president has been unable to convince the public that he’s up to the job. In a CNN poll released at the end of July, 65 percent of respondents said that his policies had worsened the economy, and only 28 percent approved of his handling of Iran.

Voters have watched the caroming and have concluded that he doesn’t have his eye on the ball. They care about the economy, and he seems to care about everything else. Only 27 percent of adults told CNN that Trump has the right priorities, down from 45 percent when the term began. And a record 73 percent said he hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important issues. In June, while Trump was fixated on the Reflecting Pool and stopping widespread voter fraud that doesn’t exist, a bipartisan housing bill aimed at high costs reached his desk. He called it “a big yawn” and said he hadn’t decided whether to sign it. In July, he let it become law without his signature.

This is a problem for Republicans in November 2026, but it’s an opportunity for voters looking to November 2028. Once a roster of candidates emerges, their supporters will discover that the office demands—wouldn’t you know it?—exactly the qualities that their preferred candidate happens to possess. Now, when there’s no one horse to back, is the time to use the current president’s rat-a-tat treatment of our attention to ask how we want the next president to spend it.

Many voters will ask only one thing of the next president: Don’t be Donald Trump. Fair enough. But stopping at “not Trump” wastes the extremity of the Trump years. Extremes clarify. A flood shows you where the ground was always low.

The Trump years have been a reminder that the presidency is a trust. The public’s attention belongs to the public. A president borrows it, and the test at every turn is whether he spends it on their account or his own. Trump treats it as a possession, to do with as he pleases, like the East Wing. For him, the public is his cheering section. A president who ignores the half of the country that voted against him teaches them that elections are conquests. They will remember that when they win.

[Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer: ‘I run the country and the world’]

It’s true that when Trump wants to focus the nation’s attention on something, he is relentless: immigration, his enemies, his ballroom. In April, The Washington Post found that he had publicly mentioned the ballroom on roughly a third of the days by that point in the year; he had posted about it more than about tariffs. But what he cares about often isn’t in the nation’s greater interest. A trustee doesn’t spend the trust on himself.

The next president should ration his calls on the public’s attention, which, after all, protects his own effectiveness and the country’s. “Public psychology,” Franklin Roosevelt wrote in 1935 to a reporter urging him to speak out more often, “cannot, because of human weakness, be attuned for long periods of time to a constant repetition of the highest note in the scale.” When Roosevelt did speak, he explained. In his first fireside chat, he walked the country through how a bank works. Explanation is what lets a president speak less: A public that has been shown why can carry the argument on its own, and a public that has only been told what must be told again tomorrow.

A president cannot push opinion where it doesn’t want to go, only nudge it, and that is possible only if he hasn’t already worn the audience out. A president who is always talking cannot use talking to signal that this time matters. The creed of this current era is the opposite. “If you’re not making news, you’re not governing,” wrote former Representative Matt Gaetz, who made news nearly every day he served and governed not at all.

A president who consumes the country’s attention spends down a resource that citizens need for their own affairs, including those delightful corners of human experience that should be free of political consideration. The UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell understood this before the bouts on the White House lawn this summer. Mitchell, who did not participate, said that the government was “desecrating its role in society.” The government, he said, “is supposed to protect us, not entertain us.”

Sometimes a president doesn’t have to ask for the country’s attention, because catastrophe has already gathered it. In these cases, a president can act as a moral force, particularly in consolation. Reagan after the Challenger explosion, Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, the younger Bush after the attacks of 9/11, and Obama at Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina. Each president spent the nation’s attention on its grief and, in doing so, reminded the nation what it valued. Trump has nearly erased this part of the job, inventing a new one in its place: chief grave dancer. When Rob Reiner was murdered in December, Trump blamed Reiner himself; when Robert Mueller died in March, Trump wrote, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

A president sends a moral signal not just in the words he uses but also in what he chooses to spend them on. After the white-nationalist march and the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump denounced the neo-Nazis, but the thrust of his attention was aimed elsewhere. He obsessed over the counterprotesters. He praised himself for being the only one brave enough to name what he claimed were the misdeeds of the people opposing the neo-Nazis. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he insisted without evidence, “and nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now.” He sent six tweets about Charlottesville and, in those tweets, never used the terms racism, bigotry, or white nationalism. He sent 37 tweets about NFL players kneeling during the anthem.

All of this happens where we can see it. We tend to treat the presidency as if it existed only in that public form. Most of it doesn’t. Because much of the job happens in secret or out of camera range, what the president chooses to do with public attention is our best evidence of how he sorts the world in private. That evidence has limits. A president who never mentions the deficit might be working on it every morning. Eisenhower’s style was called the “hidden hand”: The president who looked idle at the podium was working the levers out of sight. But a president whose public attention shows no discipline, discernment, or patience isn’t going to discover those attributes at the necessary scale when the cameras turn away. Trump governs by the Heisman hand, always in your face.

[George T. Conway III: Unfit for office]

The presidency demands brutal prioritization. “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important,” goes a line that Eisenhower liked to quote. “The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” It was such a simple idea that it became the Eisenhower Matrix, used by managers everywhere to sort incoming challenges. The principle applies with more force in a job where the urgent arrives by the hour. If missile stockpiles are low, we want a president fixing that now, not giving a speech about the deficit. But we also want a president who can see the deficit coming and feel some obligation to the future citizens who will live under galactic debt. Trump spends a lot of his time on matters that are neither important nor urgent. The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for 30 years, has said that if you charted his mind these days, 70 percent of it would go to gilding, construction, renaming, and tribute projects.

The exhaustion after Trump will produce an appetite for quiet. It has happened before. George W. Bush campaigned on restoring dignity to the office because Americans were worn out by the dramas of the Clinton years; he wanted a presidency that his team promised would show up on page A24 of the newspaper. But quiet is not a standard. The office needs a benchmark built from the job itself, not from the last man to hold it. Nor should the next president react to Trump’s frivolity by turning every subject into a family talk in the living room about Important Matters—a brittle standard where partisans adopt the posture of the online scold who answers “I love dogs” with “Your silence on cats is deafening.” Under that standard, a president must speak to everything, and a president who speaks to everything has no time left to do anything.

Campaigns often measure for qualities that have little or nothing to do with the office. But voters can evaluate how candidates treat public attention on the campaign trail and make some inferences about how they would approach the job. Here are some questions to ask: Does the candidate choose problems that a president can actually move, and can he say why those and not others? Can a president articulate a vision for the country to people who are not likely to vote for her? Can he explain rather than merely assert? Does she ever talk about a problem that won’t pay off before the next election? Can he let a news cycle pass without joining it? And when grief or outrage arrives, does he show any evidence of a concern for the entire nation? How a candidate handles these moments during a campaign—when public attention, ever more scarce in the age of the algorithm, is the only thing he has to spend—tells us how that candidate will spend ours.

In 1947, the year after Trump’s birth, pinball changed. The flipper was added, which meant the player was no longer merely watching. Where the ball went was now, at least in part, up to the player. In 2028, voters will be in the game again. But that requires attention to the office now.