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I hesitate to speak for other Never Trumpers, but we’ve gotten used to losing, haven’t we? In three consecutive presidential elections, our doughty gang of dissidents has failed spectacularly in its attempts to shake Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP. At this year’s Republican National Convention—that great festival of Trumpian celebration—Never Trump Republicanism was invisible, for the second convention in a row. Never Trump writers and pundits have frequently contributed to national media outlets (including here in The Atlantic), but in the GOP itself, the group has been derided and purged.
Now some Never Trumpers are finding a place elsewhere: Last night in Wisconsin, I was invited to moderate a discussion between the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris, and her new ally Liz Cheney. The two had spent the day on a campaign tour through the so-called blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Seeing them together felt surreal: As I said at the event, Harris and Cheney make an odd couple—and their alliance is a sign of a not-at-all-normal election. It also marks a crucial shift in the focus of the Democratic case. When Harris launched her campaign this summer, she leaned heavily into a message of joy and good vibes. Her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, rose to prominence by calling the Trumpists “weird,” rather than an existential menace, as Joe Biden had argued during his campaign. But then the polls tightened, and Harris brought in Liz Cheney.
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how unlikely this development is. Among many Democratic voters, the name Cheney is radioactive, going back to the years of her father’s vice presidency; Liz Cheney herself spent years as a fierce right-wing ideological warrior and party loyalist, rising to the leadership ranks of the House GOP. Cheney was not an original Never Trumper. Unlike those of us who have been publicly expressing our concern since he came down the golden escalator in 2015, Cheney says she voted for Trump twice, and in Congress, she backed his administration more than 90 percent of the time. Then came January 6. Although her disillusionment with Trump had obviously been festering for some time, the insurrection led to Cheney’s full-throated denunciation. Her willingness to sacrifice her standing with the party and her seat in Congress made her a symbol of principled GOP resistance. Her role as vice chair of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol made her the most famous Never Trumper in the country.
And there she was Monday night with a Democrat she had once denounced as a dangerous radical. The usual alignments of right and left and Democrat and Republican simply don’t apply anymore, because Donald Trump poses a unique danger to the entire American order. “We’ve never faced a threat like this before,” Cheney said, “and I think it’s so important for people to realize this republic only survives if we protect it, and that means putting partisan politics aside and standing up for the Constitution and for what’s right and loving our country.”
This is what Never Trumpers have been shouting into the GOP void for the past nine years. And in the last two weeks of the campaign, Harris and her team have decided to make it their closing argument. Although Harris now frequently refers to Trump as “an unserious man,” she also warns that the “consequences” of his return to power are “brutally serious.” Sounding that alarm also has meant reaching out to the battered remnants of the Never Trump movement. (Bulwark’s publisher, Sarah Longwell—a leading figure of the Never Trump movement—moderated the Harris-Cheney event in Pennsylvania.) Why the Never Trumpers? Because they have been making the case for years that voting against Trump isn’t a betrayal of party principles. They are particularly well positioned to argue that it isn’t necessary to embrace Democratic policies to vote for Harris, because the stakes are so much higher than mere party politics. And that’s an argument that Harris is now trying to make to swing voters. The question is, will that argument actually persuade these voters in the way Harris hopes it will?
The majority of Republican voters across the country will vote for Trump, and Cheney’s involvement is unlikely to move many of them. Harris also faces challenges in persuading conservative voters to overlook her past stances on issues such as transgender health care, the Green New Deal, and immigration. Meanwhile, the largest known group of undecideds is unsure about voting at all.
But this election could come down to a sliver of a percent, and the Harris campaign has decided to make a concerted play for disillusioned and discarded Republican voters in places like Waukesha County, where we met Monday night. In April’s GOP presidential primary, Nikki Haley won about 14 percent of the vote in Waukesha County. Some of those voters were in the audience Monday when Cheney made it clear to them that voting for a Democrat was okay because Trump should never be allowed in any office of public trust again. Perhaps her words will give a few Republican voters the cover they need to make a decision that might feel like a betrayal but is in fact an act of loyalty to country above all.
The Israeli military said that one of its air strikes in early October killed Hashem Safieddine, a top Hezbollah leader who was a potential successor to Hezbollah’s recently assassinated longtime leader. Hezbollah did not immediately respond to the claim.
A federal judge ordered Rudy Giuliani, a former Trump lawyer and former mayor of New York City, to turn over his New York apartment and his valuable personal items to the two Georgia election workers he defamed.
A federal appeals court upheld the conviction of Couy Griffin, the Cowboys for Trump leader who was found guilty of a trespassing charge that was used against many other January 6 defendants.
Evening Read
Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta at home with her children in Santa Cruz, California Jenna Garrett for The Atlantic
This Influencer Says You Can’t Parent Too Gently
By Olga Khazan
The kids held it together pretty well until right after gymnastics. At the end of a long day that included school, a chaotic playdate, and a mostly ignored lunch of sandwiches, the parenting coach Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta picked up her twins from the tumbling gym around 5:30. The two 8-year-olds joined their 6-year-old sister inside Chelsey’s silver minivan.
Chelsey, an energetic 41-year-old, promotes gentle parenting, a philosophy in which prioritizing a good relationship with your kid trumps getting them to obey you. I was tagging along with her family for a few days to see how her strategy—stay calm, name emotions, don’t punish kids for acting out—works in practice.
Marvel. No one knows how big pumpkins can get, Yasmin Tayag writes. Now the 3,000-pound mark is within sight.
Debate. Apparently a whole-grain, seed-coated loaf of bread counts as an ultra-processed food, just like Twinkies, Coke, and sugary cereals, Nicholas Florko writes.
In September, Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying an AK-47-style gun near Donald Trump’s Palm Beach golf course—in an apparent attempt, the FBI concluded, to assassinate the former president. To some, the thwarted violence was a bleak testament to the times: one more reminder that politics, when approached as an endless war, will come with collateral damage. To Elon Musk, however, it was an opportunity. The billionaire, treating his control of X as a means of owning the libs, gave the Palm Beach news a MAGA-friendly twist. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote on the platform, punctuating the line with a thinking-face emoji.
Musk was wrong—authorities have arrested several people for death threats made against the president and vice president—and he eventually deleted the post. But he did not apologize for the mistake. Instead, earlier this month, Musk used an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X-based show as a chance to workshop the line. “Nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala,” Musk told Carlson, “because it’s pointless. What do you achieve?”
At this, both men guffawed. Musk, having found an appreciative audience, kept going, finding new ways to suggest that the vice president was not worth the trouble of assassinating. Carlson’s reply: “That’s hilarious.”
First as tragedy, then as farce, the adage goes. If only the old order still applied. Not that long ago, public figures such as Carlson and Musk might have been embarrassed to be seen using political violence as a punch line. But embarrassment, these days, is a partisan affliction. It can ail only the soft, the sincere—the people willing to be caught caring in public. The brand of politics that Musk and Carlson practice is swaggering and provocative and, as a result, entirely devoid of shame. And so the two men, wielding their mockery, make a show of each chortle and smirk. They may consider their delight to be defiant—a rebuke to the humorless masses who see the violence and not the lol—but it is not defiant. It is banal. This is the way of things now. The tragedy and the farce, the menace that winks, the joke that threatens, the emoji that cries with joy and the one that simply cries: They bleed together, all of them. Irony storms the Capitol. Cynicism reigns.
Trump, that louche comedian, is partially to blame. His humor—some of it crude, some of it cruel, most of it treating politics and the people who engage in them as the butt of an endless joke—is more than a performance. It is also permission. Musk and Carlson laughed at the thought of Harris’s death both because they wanted to and because they knew they could. Trump and his crowbar will come for every Overton window. Now no claim is too much. No joke is too soon. Deportations, assassinations, the casual suggestion that America is due for its own version of Kristallnacht: Invoked as ideas and implications, they might be threats. They might be omens. For Trump and the many who humor him, though, they’re simply material—fodder for jokes in a set that never ends.
“Not The Onion,” people might warn one another on social media, as they share the video of Trump’s nearly 40-minute attempt to turn a town hall into a one-man dance party. “Beyond parody,” they might moan, as J. D. Vance spreads racist lies about immigrants snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. The disclaimers are hardly necessary. Americans, whatever their political convictions, have become accustomed to politics that read as dark comedy—and to politicians who commit fully to the bit. These leaders don’t merely lie or misspeak or make light of life and death. To them, leadership itself is a joke. They’re trolling one another. They’re trolling us. They’ve made mischief a mandate.
Call it the trolligarchy—and have no doubt that its regime is inescapable. Trump says that if reelected he’ll be a dictator on “day one” and then insists that he’s only joking. Under Musk, X’s email for press inquiries auto-responds to reporters’ questions with a poop emoji. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a congressional seat in Georgia by turning trolling into a campaign strategy, has been using the House bill-amendment process as an opportunity for cheap acts of score-settling. In a proposed amendment to a bill meant to allocate funding to aid Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion, she stipulated, among other things, that any colleague who voted for it would be conscripted into Ukraine’s military.
“Messaging bills” may be fairly common among politicians seeking new ways to rack up political points. And Greene’s amendment was roundly defeated. Her stunt, though, wrote tragedy and farce into the congressional record. Roll Call, reporting on it, quoted social-media posts from Matt Glassman, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute. There have “always been chucklehead Members of the House,” Glassman wrote of Greene’s antics. “But the prominence of many of the chuckleheads in the GOP and the ever-increasing general level of chucklehead behavior worries me.”
Life under the trolligarchy requires constant acts of micro-translation: Did she mean it? Was he joking? Were they lying? The lulz, as a result, can be exhausting. The scholar Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, analyzing fMRI studies that illustrate how the brain processes jokes, argues that humor can impose a cognitive tax. Jokes, for all their delights, ask more of their audiences than other forms of discourse do: They require more split-second parsing, more energy, more work. And a troll is a joke unhinged—which makes it extra taxing. Its terms are particularly murky. Its claims are especially suspect. Under its influence, the old categories fail. Nihilism takes over. Fatigue sets in. Sincerity and irony, like stars whose centers cannot hold, collapse into each other.
Humor is an age-old political tradition—Common Sense, the pamphlet that persuaded many Americans to become revolutionaries, was powerful in part because it was often quite funny—but trolling, as a mode of political engagement, is not comedy. It is its antithesis. Nazis of both the past and present have tried to hide in plain sight by characterizing their racism as merely ironic. As The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in a 2017 essay, jokes deployed as rhetoric played a crucial role in helping Trump win the presidency.
Since then, the trolling has only intensified. But it has also become—in a twist that can read as a cosmic kind of troll—ever more banal. In 2008, The New York Times published “The Trolls Among Us,” a lengthy introduction to a subculture that was then emerging from the dark recesses of the internet. The article is remarkably prescient. It treats trolling as a novelty but frames it as a new moral problem. It parses the cruelty that has become a standard feature of online engagement. But it was also written when trolls’ power was relatively contained. Trolling, today, having slipped the surly bonds of 4chan, is no longer subculture. It is culture.
Many trolls of the early internet hid behind pseudonyms and anonymity; they largely performed for one another rather than for a mass audience. But trolling, as a political style, demands credit for the chaos it sows. Trump, the “troll in chief,” channels that status as brand identity. He will happily lie, his followers know; maybe he’ll lie on their behalf. He will trick his opponents. He will set traps. He will reveal his rivals’ foolishness. He will humiliate them. That old Times article captured one of the abiding ironies of this brave new mode of digital engagement. Trolling may manifest as pranks. But many practitioners insist that their hijinks have ethical ends. Trolls claim to be puncturing pieties, saving the sanctimonious from themselves. They’re righting social wrongs as they subject “elites” to a barrage of corrective humiliations meant to reveal empathy and equality and other such values as nothing more than smug little lies.
Trolling, in that way, can be self-rationalizing, and therefore particularly powerful when its logic comes for our politics. Trump once gave a speech in the rain and then bragged about the sun shining down on his performance. His bravado was propaganda in its most basic and recognizable form—overt, insistent, blunt. It did what propaganda typically will, imposing its preferred reality onto the one that actually exists. But the lie was also so casual, so basic, so fundamentally absurd—even the heavens, Trump says, will do his bidding—that it barely registered as propaganda at all.
Trump came of age as a public figure in the 1980s, long before irony was alleged to have died—a time, on the contrary, when cynicism had become cultural currency. It was a period when earnestness, or at least the appearance of it, was curdling into a liability. Trump has taken the irony-infused assumptions of those years and used them as tools of power. His lies invade and destroy, trampling the truths that stand in their way with casual, cunning brutality. But Trump’s jokes can be similarly, if more subtly, ruinous. A troll reserves the right, always, to be kidding—even about matters of life and death.
That attitude, once it takes hold of the body politic, spreads rapidly. People talk about “irony poisoning” because irony, in the end, has so few antidotes. Greene’s attempt to troll her colleagues as they determined aid to Ukraine led to several more proposed amendments—this time from Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic representative from Florida. One proposed to appoint Greene as “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” Another suggested renaming Greene’s office for Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who is widely denigrated for his appeasement of Hitler.
Recommending that a congressional office be called the Neville Chamberlain Room may not be a great joke; it’s even worse, though, as a mode of government. Democracy is an earnest enterprise: It requires us—challenges us—to care. It assumes that people will disagree, about the small things and the big ones. It further assumes that they will settle differences through acts of debate. But cynicism makes argument impossible. “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked in her 2017 essay, and the question still has no good answer. The old insult comic remains onstage, serving up the same routine to a crowd that cackles and roars. He’ll roast anyone in his path. He’ll soak up the applause. He’ll trust that, in all the levity, people will miss the obvious: When the comedy keeps punching down, anyone can become the butt of the joke.
The twinge begins in the afternoon: toes. At my desk, toes, itching. Toes, toes, toes.
I don’t normally think about my toes. But as I commute home in a crowded subway car, my feet are burning, and I cannot reach them. Even if I could, what would I do with my sneakers? My ankles are itchy too. But I’m wearing jeans, which are difficult to scratch through, unless you have a fork or something similarly rigid and sharp. I contemplate getting off at the next stop, finding a spot on a bench, removing my shoes, and scratching for a while. But I need to get home. Growing desperate, I scrape at my scalp, which is not itchy. This somehow quiets things down.
I am full of these kinds of tricks. A lot of folks, if you tell them you’re itchy, will recommend a specific brand of lotion. I hate these people. My husband made me a T-shirt that reads yes, I have tried lotions. They do not work. No, not that one either. Zen types will tell you to accept the itch, to meditate on it, as you might do if you were in pain. These people have no idea what they are talking about. Watching someone scratch makes you itchy; worrying about something pruritogenic, like a tick crawling on you, makes you itchy; focusing on how itchy you are when you are itchy makes you itchier. The trick, if you are itchy, is to not think about it, using those ancient psychological tricks disfavored in today’s therapeutic environments: avoidance, deflection, compartmentalization, denial.
Cruelest of all are the people who tell you not to scratch. They have a point, I admit. Scratching spurs cells in your immune system to secrete the hormone histamine, which makes you itchy; in this way, scratching leads to itching just as itching leads to scratching. But if you itch like I itch, like a lot of people itch, there’s no not scratching. It would be like telling someone to stop sneezing or not to pee. “I never tell people not to scratch,” Gil Yosipovitch, a dermatologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine known as “the godfather of itch,” told me, something I found enormously validating.
No, the techniques that work are the techniques that work. During the day, I pace. Overnight, when the itching intensifies, I balance frozen bags of corn on my legs or dunk myself in a cold bath. I apply menthol, whose cold-tingle overrides the hot-tingle for a while. I jerk my hair or pinch myself with the edges of my nails or dig a diabetic lancet into my stomach. And I scratch.
My body bears the evidence. Right now I am not itchy—well, I am mildly itchy, because writing about being itchy makes me itchy—yet my feet and legs are covered in patches of thick, lichenified skin. This spring, I dug a bloody hole into the inside of my cheek with my teeth. I’ve taken out patches of my scalp, shredded the edge of my belly button, and more than once, desperate to get to an itch inside of me, abraded the walls of my vagina.
During my first pregnancy, when the itching began, it was so unrelenting and extreme that I begged for a surgeon to amputate my limbs; during the second, my doctor induced labor early to stop it. Still, I ended up hallucinating because I was so sleep-deprived. Now I have long spells when I feel normal. Until something happens; I wish I knew what. I get brain-fogged, blowing deadlines, struggling to remember to-dos, failing to understand how anyone eats dinner at 8 p.m., sleeping only to wake up tired. And I get itchy. Maybe it will last forever, I think. It stops. And then it starts again.
One in five people will experience chronic itch in their lifetime, often caused by cancer, a skin condition, liver or kidney disease, or a medication such as an opiate. (Mine is caused by a rare disease called primary biliary cholangitis, or PBC.) The itching is the corporeal equivalent of a car alarm, a constant, obnoxious, and shrill reminder that you are in a body: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. It is associated with elevated levels of stress, anxiety, and depression; causes sleep deprivation; and intensifies suicidal ideation. In one study, the average patient with chronic itch said they would give up 13 percent of their lifespan to stop it.
Yet itching is taken less seriously than its cousin in misery, pain. Physicians often dismiss it or ignore it entirely. Not that they could treat it effectively if they wanted to, in many cases. There are scores of FDA-approved medications for chronic pain, from ibuprofen to fentanyl. There are no medications approved for chronic itch. “Pain has so much more research, in terms of our understanding of the pathophysiology and drug development. There’s so much more compassion from doctors and family members,” Shawn Kwatra of the University of Maryland School of Medicine told me. Itch, he added, “is just not respected.”
Perhaps doctors do not respect it because, until recently, they did not really understand it. Only in the late aughts did scientists establish that itch is a sensation distinct from pain and begin figuring out the physiology of chronic itch. And only in the past decade did researchers find drugs that resolve it. “We’re having all these breakthroughs,” Kwatra said, ticking off a list of medications, pathways, proteins, and techniques. “We’re in a golden age.”
Once left to suffer through their commutes and to ice their shins with frozen vegetables, millions of Americans are finding relief in their medicine cabinet. For them, science is finally scratching that itch. Still, so far, none of those treatments works on me.
Itching is one of those tautological sensations, like hunger or thirst, characterized by the action that resolves it. The classic definition, the one still used in medical textbooks, comes from a 17th-century German physician: “an unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch.” Physicians today classify it in a few ways. Itching can be acute, or it can be chronic, lasting for more than six weeks. It can be exogenous, caused by a bug bite or a drug, or endogenous, generated from within. It can be a problem of the skin, the brain and nervous system, the liver, the kidneys.
Most itching is acute and exogenous. This kind of itch, scientists understand pretty well. In simplified terms, poison ivy or laundry detergent irritates the skin and spurs the body’s immune system to react; immune cells secrete histamine, which activates the nervous system; the brain hallucinates itch into being; the person starts to scratch. The episode ends when the offending irritant is gone and the body heals. Usually medicine can vanquish the itch by quieting a person’s immune response (as steroids do) or blocking histamine from arousing the nervous system (as antihistamines do).
Yet some people itch for no clear reason, for months or even years. And many itching spells do not respond to steroids or antihistamines. This kind of itch, until recently, posed some “fundamental, basic science questions,” Diana Bautista, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley, told me. Scientists had little idea what was happening.
In the 1800s, physicians were studying the nervous system, trying to figure out how the body is capable of feeling such an astonishing panoply of sensations. Researchers found that tiny patches of skin respond to specific stimuli: You might feel a needle prick at one spot, but feel nothing a hair’s breadth away. This indicated that the body has different nerve circuits for different sensations: hot, warm, cold, cool, crushing, stabbing. (Migratory birds have receptors in their eyes that detect the world’s magnetic field.) The brain synthesizes signals from nerve endings and broadcasts what it senses with obscene specificity: the kiss of a raindrop, the crack of an electric shock.
In the 1920s, a German physiologist noted that when researchers poked a pain point on the skin, itch often followed ouch. This led scientists to believe that the sensations shared the same nervous-system circuits, with the brain interpreting weak messages of pain as itch. This became known as the “intensity theory”—itchis pain, below some threshold—and it became the “canonical view,” Brian Kim, a dermatologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told me.
It never made much sense. If you catch your finger in a door, the stinging sensation does not dissipate into itch as the swelling goes down. That the body might have different circuitries for itch and pain seemed plausible for other reasons, too. “If you take 10 patients experiencing pain and give them morphine, probably all of them will feel better. If you take 10 patients with chronic itch and you give them morphine, none of them would,” Kim said. “That tells you right there.” Moreover, pain alleviates itch. It interrupts it. That is, in part, why you scratch: The pain creates the pleasure of relief. “The behavioral output is very different,” Bautista told me. “If you encounter poison ivy or get a bug bite, you don’t try to avoid the injury. You attack it. But with pain, you withdraw; you have these protective reflexes.”
Many scientists preferred an alternative theory: that itch had its own dedicated “labeled line” within the body. It took until 2007 for neuroscientists to uncover an itch-specific circuitry that many had long suspected was there. Mice genetically engineered to lack a specific receptor, scientists found, felt “thermal, mechanical, inflammatory, and neuropathic pain,” but not itch.
Since then, neuroscientists have refined and complicated their understanding of how things work—in particular, extending their understanding of what amplifies or overrides itch and the relationship between the pain and itch circuitries. And doctors have come to understand itch as a disease in and of itself.
And a curious disease, at that. In any given year, one epidemiological survey found, chronic itch afflicts 16 percent of the general adult population, making it half as common as chronic pain. Yet there are scores of American medical centers dedicated to treating pain and none for itch. On Facebook, I found hundreds of peer-support groups for people with chronic pain. For chronic itch, I found just one, dedicated to sufferers of the miserable dermatological condition prurigo nodularis.
Millions of us are scratching alone, a social reality with deep physiological roots. Itching is isolating. The touch of another person can be unbearable. When I get really itchy at night, I build a pillow wall between myself and my cuddle-enthusiast husband, so he does not accidentally wake me up, kickstart the itch-scratch cycle, and mechanically increase our chance of divorce. Studies also show that itch is both contagious and repellent. In the 1990s, scientists in Germany rigged up cameras in a lecture hall and filmed members of the public who came to watch a talk on pruritus. Inevitably, people in the crowd began scratching themselves. Yet people reflexively move away from others who are itching, and toward those in pain.
At best, scratching yourself is like chewing with your mouth open, embarrassing and undignified. At worst, it broadcasts uncleanliness, infestation, derangement, and disease, raising the specter of bedbugs, scabies, chicken pox, roseola, gonorrhea, insanity, and who knows what else. In ancient times, people believed that lice were a form of godly punishment: They generated spontaneously in a person’s flesh, tunneled their way out, and consumed their host, thus transfiguring them into bugs. Plato is one of many historical figures accused by his haters of being so lousy, literally, that it killed him. And maybe it did. An extreme lice infestation can cause a person to die from a blood infection or anemia.
At least the ancients grasped how miserable being itchy can be. In 1365, a scabies-ridden Petrarch complained to Boccaccio that his hands could not hold a pen, as “they serve only to scratch and scrape.” In Dante’s Inferno, itching is meted out as a punishment to alchemists in the eighthring of hell. Murderers in the seventh ring, including Attila the Hun, get a mere eternal dunk in a boiling river of blood.
In my experience, people do not meet an itchy person and grasp that they might be beyond the boiling river. (The physician and journalist Atul Gawande wrote about a patient who scratched all the way through her skull into her brain.) The stigma and the dismissal compound the body horror. When I explain that I itch, and at some point might start itching and never stop, many people respond with a nervous giggle or incredulousness. One of my dumb lines on it involves being a distant relative of a participant—to be clear, an accuser—in the Salem witch trials. Who knew that curses work so well!
Itch is a curse, an eldritch one. At night, I sometimes feel crumbs or sand on my sheets, go to brush the grit off, and find the bed clean. One day, I was rummaging around in a basement and felt a spider drop onto my shoulder from the ceiling. I felt that same, vivid sensation a hundred times more over the next few days. The inside of my body itches, like I have bug bites on my intestines and my lungs. I swear that I can feel the floss-thin electric fibers under my skin, pinging their signals back and forth.
The worst is when I need the itch to stop and I cannot get it to stop, not by dunking myself in ice water or abrading myself with a fork or stabbing myself with a needle or taking so much Benadryl that I brown out. It generates the fight-or-flight response; it feels like being trapped. I don’t know; maybe it is akin to drowning.
My chronic itch might be a disease unto itself, but it is also a symptom. At some point in my early 30s, my immune system erred and started to destroy the cells lining the small bile ducts in my liver. This inflamed them, obstructing the flow of sticky green bile into my digestive system. The ducts are now developing lattices of scar tissue, which will spread through my liver, perhaps resulting in cirrhosis, perhaps resulting in death.
Primary biliary cholangitis is degenerative and incurable, and was until recently considered fatal. The prognosis was radically improved by the discovery that a hundred-year-old drug used to dissolve gallstones slows its progression, reducing inflammation and making bile secretion easier. But a minority of people do not respond to the medication. I am one of them.
PBC is generally slow moving. Science keeps advancing; my doctors have me on an off-label drug that seems to be working. Still, I am sick, and I always will be. I feel fine much of the time. The dissonance is weird, as is the disease. What am I supposed to do with the knowledge of my illness? Am I at the end of the healthy part of my life, at the beginning of the dying part?
I am stuck with questions I cannot answer, trying to ignore them, all the while reminded of them over and over again, itchy.
Some answers, however, are coming. Having found nerve circuits dedicated to itch, scientists also began finding receptors triggered by substances other than histamine, thus unlocking the secrets of chronic itch. “We know more about the neural circuits that allow you to experience this sensation, regardless of cause,” Bautista told me. “We know more about inflammatory mediators and how they activate the circuits. We know more about triggers and priming the immune system and priming the nervous system.”
I asked a number of experts to help me understand chronic itch in the same way I understood acute itch—to show me an itch map. “It’s complicated,” Kwatra told me. “Complicated,” Kim agreed. “Complex,” said Xinzhong Dong of Johns Hopkins. The issue is that there’s not really a map for chronic itch. There are multiple itch maps, many body circuits going haywire in many ways.
Still, Dong gave me one example. The drug chloroquine “works really well to kill malaria,” he explained. But chloroquine can cause extreme itchiness in people with dark skin tones. “The phenomenon is not an allergic reaction,” Dong told me; and antihistamines do not ease it. In 2009, his lab figured it out: In highly simplified terms, melanin holds chloroquine in the skin, and chloroquine lights up an itch receptor.
Because there is no single map for chronic itch, there is no “big itch switch that you can turn off reliably with a drug,” Kim told me. “I’m not so convinced that it is even doable.” (Dong thought that it probably is. It just might cause debilitating side effects or even kill the itchy person in the process.) Still, there are lots of smaller itch switches, and researchers are figuring out how to flip them, one by one.
These include a pair of cytokines called interleukin 4 and interleukin 13. When a person encounters an allergen, the body secretes these chemical messengers to rev up the immune system. Yet the messengers also spur the body to produce itch-related cytokines and make the nervous system more sensitive to them. In 2017, the FDA approved a drug called Dupixent, which blocks the pair of cytokines, to treat atopic dermatitis, a form of eczema; the agency later approved it for asthma, laryngitis, and other inflammatory conditions (at a retail cost of $59,000 a year).
Michael McDaniel found a single open blister on his bicep when he was traveling in Europe in 2013. Within a few days, he told me, a crackling, bleeding rash had engulfed his upper extremities, oozing a honey-colored liquid. His knuckles were so swollen that his hands stiffened.
Back in the United States one miserable week after his trip, he saw a dermatologist, who diagnosed him with atopic dermatitis. Nothing McDaniel tried—steroids, bathing in diluted bleach, avoiding cigarette smoke and dryer sheets, praying to any god who would listen—ended his misery. He bled through socks and shirts. He hid his hands in photographs. “I was able to get my symptoms to a manageable baseline,” he told me. “It wasn’t really manageable, though. I just got used to it.”
McDaniel muddled through this circle of hell for seven years, until his dermatologist gave him an infusion of Dupixent. Twenty-four hours later, “my skin was the calmest it had been since my symptoms appeared,” McDaniel told me. The drug was a “miracle.”
Numerous drugs similar to Dupixent have been found over the past seven years to work on chronic itch, and physicians are refining techniques such as nerve blocks and ketamine infusions. But finding treatments for itching that is not related to an immune response has proved harder. Progress is throttled by the relatively small number of researchers working on itch, and the limited sums Big Pharma is willing to pump into drug development and trials. Plus, treatment options do not readily translate into treatment; a lot of folks are still being told to try Benadryl, even if all it does is make them groggy.
When I saw my hepatologist in August, that’s exactly what he suggested. The drug would help to quell the itching caused by my scratching, at a minimum, and help me sleep.
“I hate Benadryl,” I snapped. (Maybe I need a new T-shirt.) He suggested Zyrtec or Claritin.
As I continued to press for more options, he reviewed my bloodwork. My liver enzymes were still high. He suggested more tests, a biopsy. And he said we could start trialing drugs to manage my symptoms better. SSRIs, used to treat depression, sometimes ease itch in patients with PBC. Opioid antagonists, used to treat heroin overdoses, sometimes do the same. Cholestyramine, which soaks up bile acid (a known pruritogen), could work. Maybe UVB phototherapy. Maybe a cream charged with fatty acids that activate the endocannabinoid system. Maybe rifampin, an antibiotic.
These ragtag off-label treatment options reflect the fact that physicians have not yet figured out PBC’s itch map. Some patients just itch and itch and itch and it never ends. I once asked my old hepatologist what she would do if that happened to me. “Transplant your liver,” she told me, not even looking up from her computer.
This was not a comforting answer. Organ transplantation is a lifesaving miracle, but a saved life is not an easy one. Recovery from a liver transplant takes at least a year. Grafts die, not infrequently. Many patients never heal fully. The five-year survival rate is 14 percentage points lower for PBC patients with liver transplants than it is for PBC patients who respond to the standard treatment and do not need one.
When I shared this prognosis with my mother, she responded, “You better start being nice to your siblings!” (I would rather die.) When I broke it to my husband, he paused a beat before saying he might go call his therapist.
Would I rather just live with the itch? How would I do it? I could not find a support group for the chronically itchy. But I did find two people with PBC who were willing to share their experiences with me. Carol Davis is a retired kindergarten teacher. More than a decade ago, she started itching “like crazy,” she told me. “It would wake me up in the night.” A doctor diagnosed her with PBC; like me, she itches on and off, and doctors have never found a set of drugs to quell her itch without causing miserable side effects.
I asked her how she has dealt with it, not in terms of doctors and drugs and lotions but in a more cosmic sense. “When you’re at the end of your lifespan, you just have the mindset: These things are going to happen,” Davis told me. “If I had been younger, like you, it might have been more scary.” Then she ticked off a list of things she looks forward to: games of Farkle, Bible study, going to the gym, seeing her friends from her sorority, spending time with her husband of 54 years. She got out of her head, she meant. And when she found herself back there, itching or afraid or in pain, she told me, “I don’t dwell on myself. I don’t ask the Lord to make me well. I dwell on Him!”
Gail Fisher is 84 “and a half,” she told me, and a harpist, gardener, and motor-home enthusiast. She lives alone in rural Effingham County, Illinois. Her PBC has developed into cirrhosis, and she also has arthritis and thyroid disease. The itching drives her nuts sometimes too, she told me. But she does not dwell on it either. “Gosh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “You don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring anyway!”
When the itch is at its worst—not a bodily sensation but an existential blight, not a force begging for resignation but one driving a person to madness—that’s easier said than done. Still, I knew that following Davis’s and Fisher’s advice would do me more good than lotion or Benadryl ever has.
There is something ironic about the fact that, of all the countries in the Middle East, Iran is the one that now finds itself on the brink of war with Israel. Iran is not one of the 22 Arab states party to the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Its population, unlike those of many Arab countries, harbors little anti-Israel sentiment. During the past year, mass rallies in support of the Palestinians have taken place in cities all over the world: Baghdad, Sanaa, New York, and Madrid, to name only a few. Nothing like this has happened at scale in Tehran—when Iranians really protest en masse, they tend to do so against their own regime and its obsession with Israel.
Alas, wars are waged by governments, not peoples. And because the regime ruling Iran has long made hostility toward Israel central to its identity, Iran now faces a direct confrontation with the Jewish state, regardless of whether most Iranians want such a war. For the country’s opposition, the prospect has occasioned a divide—between those who fear that the next round of fighting will be a costly setback to their efforts and those who cautiously hope that it will shake something loose.
In the first camp are many Iranian dissidents, both inside and outside the country, who loudly protested Iran’s missile attacks on Israel in April and October. Now they are also opposed to an Israeli counterattack on Iran: All-out war between the two countries, these activists say, would be a disaster in both humanitarian and political terms, making life worse for ordinary Iranians without weakening the Islamic Republic.
Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights advocate imprisoned in Tehran, and Atena Daemi, an activist who recently fled Iran after years in prison, have issued statements decrying a potential war. Mohammad Habibi, the spokesperson for Iran’s teachers’ union, wrote on X that he opposed “any war”; he added that he considered Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. Sadegh Zibakalam, an outspoken political-science professor at the University of Tehran, has repeatedly criticized the Iranian regime’s declared goal of destroying Israel.
The position of this part of the Iranian opposition is friendly neither to Iranian aggression against Israel nor to Israeli strikes on Iran, on the grounds that such hostilities are most likely to preserve the power of the current regime. An Israeli attack on the Iranian oil industry would just collapse the country’s infrastructure and immiserate its people, Hossein Yazdi, a social-democratic activist and former political prisoner in Tehran, told me, and attacking the country’s nuclear sites could bring about a humanitarian disaster. Politically, Yazdi said, an Iran-Israel war would have terrible consequences. “Iranians are the least Islamist people in this region,” Yazdi says. “They are mostly secular and friendly to the West. But a war can make fanatics out of people and give a new lease on life to the Islamic Republic.”
Many of the regime’s most vociferous opponents in exile think along similar lines. Hamed Esmaeilion, a 47-year-old novelist based in Toronto, has emerged as a major voice for Iran’s secular democratic opposition in recent years. His wife and 9-year-old daughter were among the passengers on PS752, the Ukrainian airliner downed by the Iranian regime under suspicious circumstances in January 2020. Esmaeilion became renowned for his advocacy on behalf of those victims’ families. He published a statement on October 5, a few days after Iran’s latest missile attacks on Israel, calling for opposition both to the Iranian regime and to the “fundamentalist government of Israel, which ignores international treaties and kills many civilians.”
By spelling this out, Esmaeilion was speaking to another group of Iranians who oppose their government: those who favor a war with Israel, or at least regard it as a potentially useful lever for toppling the regime. I encountered such sentiments among many Iranians I talked with—and sometimes in surprising quarters. A mid-level manager at a government ministry told me, “We are in limbo now. If Israel attacks, things can be done with the regime once and for all.” I spoke with some Iranians who said they just hoped that an Israeli attack would hurt the regime leaders and not ordinary people, and some who fantasized that a military confrontation with Israel would lead to a mass uprising that would finally end the regime.
Some in this camp, though not all, support the leadership aspirations of Reza Pahlavi, who was Iran’s crown prince before his father was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. Pahlavi and his supporters have drawn close to Donald Trump and other elements of the international right. In April 2023, the Iranian royal visited Israel and met with Netanyahu. Some of Pahlavi’s supporters work for hawkish Washington, D.C., outfits, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Pahlavi spoke at the National Conservatism conference, held in July in Washington. Last month, he was a keynote speaker at the Israeli American Council’s annual summit in D.C., alongside Trump.
Pahlavi has long vocally opposed military attacks on Iran. But in the days after Iran’s October 1 missile barrage against Israel, when an Israeli retaliation seemed imminent, Pahlavi published a video message that some took to be an implicit invitation. He called on the people of the region not to fear chaos if Iran’s regime should collapse. “We will not allow a power vacuum,” he promised, pledging that “patriotic Iranians” would replace the regime.
In the days that followed, Pahlavi clarified that he still opposed war. “We have seen diplomacy fail, and war is not a solution,” he told Fox News on October 16. The West must “invest in the Iranian people,” Pahlavi added, meaning that it should “abandon the policy of appeasement” and exert “maximum pressure on the regime” while also giving “maximum support” to the Iranian people to organize themselves.
Cameron Khansarinia is a well-known Pahlavi supporter and the vice president of a Washington-based Iranian American organization that backs the Iranian royal. I asked Khansarinia whether he supported an Israeli attack on Iran. He said that he disagreed with the “framing of the question.” He told me that he hoped “no innocent Iranians are injured in Israel’s inevitable retaliation,” and that he supported Pahlavi’s policy of “maximum pressure” alongside “maximum support” for Iranians. Khansarinia pointed to Israel’s killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in recent weeks as an effective means of putting pressure on the Iranian regime while supporting the people.
I even spoke with an Iranian socialist activist in Washington who has come to support both Pahlavi and Israel’s war (a very unusual stance within his corner of the opposition): Farhad Moradi, who arrived in the United States as a refugee a few years ago, told me that Israel should avoid attacking Iran’s nuclear sites or port infrastructure, because doing so wouldn’t help ordinary Iranians or weaken the regime politically. But he did support Israel hitting military sites or assassinating regime figures.
Esmaeilion, the novelist and spokesperson for the passengers killed on the Ukraine-bound flight, worries that those who embrace the possibility of war with Israel do so based on delusions about what both war and regime change really entail. Iranians need a “revolution” to bring down their regime, he said in his statement—not a foreign conflict. And doing battle with Israel could be terribly costly. “The current Israeli government has shown that it’s not really committed to international law,” he told me. “Many innocent people have died. If a broad war breaks out between Iran and Israel, many more innocents will die. The regime will also use people as human shields and cannon fodder.”
Esmaeilion is of the generation that can vividly remember the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. Many of his novels are set during that conflict, which killed as many as half a million people. The talk of potential Israeli attacks on Iranian infrastructure recalls very specific traumas. “My father worked at the Kermanshah refinery when it was bombed on July 24, 1986,” he said. “He lost six of his colleagues there. Three days later, my uncle was killed when Iraq bombed the aluminum works in Arak. Many of my relatives died at the front in that war. What remained was pain and suffering for many years to follow. War can be terrible.”
Esmaeilion agrees with Hossein Yazdi, the activist in Tehran, that a war with Israel risks strengthening the regime. The opposition is fractious, and the Islamic Republic could use war as a pretext to clamp down on fragile networks that need shoring up: “We must organize our forces, bring about strikes and uprisings and finish this nightmare of a regime once and for all,” he told me. “A war will hurt this process.”
The divisions within the Iranian opposition are deep and often rancorous. Yazdi told me that he found Pahlavi’s intervention ominous. “It’s very scary for the prime minister of Israel to meet with a fugitive Iranian prince,” he told me. Many Iranians will even back the current regime if the alternative is an Israeli-backed restoration of the fallen monarchy, he said. Last year, Esmaeilion joined an anti-regime coalition that included Pahlavi and others, including the U.S.-based women’s-rights activist Masih Alinejad—but the effort collapsed in less than a month over disagreements about Iran’s future.
In the end, debates among Iranian dissidents over the desirability of an Israeli attack matter only so much. The Iranian opposition does not get to decide what Israel will do. It is watching events, not shaping them—and until and unless it gets organized, that will be true within Iran as well.
Under normal circumstances, you would not expect a crowd of regular Americans—even those engaged enough to go to a political rally—to recognize an assistant secretary of health and human services. But the crowd at Donald Trump’s appearance earlier this month at the Santander Arena, in Reading, Pennsylvania, started booing as soon as Rachel Levine’s image appeared on the Jumbotron.
That’s because Levine is the highest-profile transgender official in the Biden administration, and she has become a public face of the American left’s support for medical gender transition by minors. Having heard the Reading crowd’s ugly, full-throated reaction to Levine’s mere image, I understand why the prospect of a second Trump term might alarm transgender Americans—or the parents of gender-nonconforming children. I also more clearly understand Trump’s strategy: to rile up voters over positions that he thinks the Democrats won’t dare defend.
Back in 2016, the Republican presidential nominee portrayed himself as a moderate on trans rights, saying that Caitlyn Jenner was welcome to use whatever bathroom she wanted to at Trump Tower. But Trump’s rhetoric has become steadily more inflammatory, and his positions have hardened. Many commentators have nevertheless been surprised by the ferocity of Republican attacks on this issue. In 2022, the party’s efforts to exploit trans-rights controversies for electoral gain repelled more voters than they attracted, and recent polling in three swing states shows that more than half of respondents agreed that “society should accept transgender people as having the gender they identify with.”
Yet polls have also detected considerable public skepticism on three specific points: gender-related medical interventions for minors, the incarceration of trans women in women’s jails, and trans women’s participation in female sports. In Pennsylvania, one attack ad is on repeat throughout prime-time television. It ends: “Kamala’s for they/them; President Trump is for you.” The Republicans have spent $17 million on ads like this, according to NPR. “Republicans see an issue that can break through, especially with Trump voters who’ve been supporting Democratic candidates for Senate,” Semafor’s Dave Weigel wrote recently.
Trump has always used his audiences as an editor, refining his talking points based on the raw feedback of boos and cheers. At the rally in Reading, the image of Levine—pictured in the admiral’s uniform she wears as head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps—was part of a montage dedicated to condemning what Trump called the “woke military.” This video juxtaposed clips from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—meant to represent good old-fashioned military discipline—with more recent footage of drag queens lip-synching to Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam.” Never mind that Full Metal Jacket is an anti-war film showing how sustained brutalization corrodes the soul.
This video is part of Republicans’ larger argument that their opponents are big-city elitists who have attempted to change the culture by imposing radical policies from above and then refused to defend them when challenged—and instead called anyone who disagreed a bigot. Many on the left see transgender acceptance as the next frontier of the civil-rights movement and favor far-reaching efforts to uproot discrimination. Yet activists and their supporters have waved away genuinely complex questions: Some claim, despite the available evidence from most sports, that biological males have no athletic advantage over females—perhaps because this is an easier argument to make than saying that the inclusion of trans women should outweigh any question of fairness to their competitors.
Others default to the idea that underage medical transition is “lifesaving” and therefore cannot be questioned—even though systematic evidence reviews by several European countries found a dearth of goodresearch to support that assertion. According to emails unsealed earlier this year in an Alabama court case, Levine successfully urged the influential World Professional Association for Transgender Health to eliminate minimum-age guidelines for gender-transition hormones and surgeries.
The Republicans are using trans issues as a symbol of “wokeness” more generally—what conservatives paint as a rejection of common sense, and as a top-down imposition of alienating values by fiat. In right-wing online echo chambers, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is known as “Tampon Tim” for signing a state law calling for menstrual products to be placed in both girls’ and boys’ bathrooms. Throughout the speeches in Trump’s Reading event, talk of “men playing in women’s sports” and an exhortation to “keep men out of women’s sports” reliably drew the biggest cheers of the night. (Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for Senate, brought up the issue, as did Trump himself.) The former president’s 90-minute speech had an extended riff on underage transition—and how schools might avoid telling parents about their child’s shifting gender. “How about this—pushing transgender ideology onto minor children?” Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”
Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed. In the presidential debate, many commentators laughed at the bizarre phrasing of Trump’s claim that Kamala Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” But the charge was basically true: While running for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Harris replied “Yes” to an ACLU questionnaire that asked her if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”
This year, Harris has mostly avoided such issues. She has tacitly moved her position from the left toward the center without explaining the shift or answering whether she believes she was previously wrong—a microcosm of her campaign in general.
As with abortion, a compromise position on gender exists that would satisfy a plurality of voters. Essentially: Let people live however makes them happy, but be cautious about medicalizing children and insist on fair competition in female sports. But Harris has been unwilling or unable to articulate it, and candidates in downballot races have followed her lead. You can see why: Even as polls suggest that many voters are morehesitant than the median Democratic activist, any backsliding by candidates from the progressive line alienates influential LGBTQ groups. In Texas, the Democrat candidate for Senate, Colin Allred, has faced such a barrage of ads about female sports from the Ted Cruz campaign that he cut his own spot in response. “Let me be clear; I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports,” Allred says in the clip. The LGBTQ publication The Advocatewrote this up as him having “embraced far-right language around gender identity.”
Like Allred, the Harris campaign has realized, belatedly, that silence is hurting the candidate’s cause. When the vice president was interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News last week, she made sure to raise a New York Times story about how the Trump administration had also offered taxpayer-funded gender medicine in prisons. “I will follow the law,” Harris said. “And it’s a law that Donald Trump actually followed.”
Is that enough to neutralize the attacks? Seems unlikely: The Republican ads have not disappeared from the airwaves, because they bolster the party’s broader theme that Harris is more radical than she pretends to be. Which is the real Kamala Harris—the tough prosecutor of the 2010s or the ultraprogressive candidate of 2019 and 2020?
Presumably her campaign believes that every day spent talking about gender medicine for teens is one not spent discussing Trump’s mental fitness or disdain for democratic norms. In the absence of her articulating a compromise position, however, the Republicans are defining the contours of the debate in ways that could prove fateful—for Harris, for trans people, and for the country as a whole.
The singer, songwriter, and composer Randy Newman had a fascination with the legend of Faust that approached obsession. Beginning around 1981, he worked for some 15 years on an original retelling of the much-retold story of spiritual brokerage. In his version, which he conceived as a musical dark comedy, the Lord and the devil make a bet for eternal custody of the soul of an impressionable student at the University of Notre Dame. Productions were mounted at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Critics found much to admire in the songs, while theatergoers sniffed and turned away; the customary dream of a Broadway opening went unfulfilled.
When I was working for Entertainment Weekly in the ’90s, we regularly surveyed readers on the likability of our content. The week we covered Randy Newman’s Faust, that article was ranked “least appealing.” The editors puzzled over this and decided not to blame Faust. Could there be something about Randy Newman that people just didn’t like? Listening closely to the music he has made over many decades in all its varied forms, I’ve since come to accept that Randy Newman’s greatest work is indeed awfully hard to like. But I think its very unlikability is what makes it great.
For more than 60 years now, Newman has been composing and performing highly distinctive and meticulously wrought work: songs for pop (or poplike) albums that, at their best, have been intellectually sophisticated, unorthodox, and unsettling—as well as spit-take funny and profoundly emotive. In his new book, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman, Robert Hilburn, a former pop-music critic for the Los Angeles Times, set out to come to terms with Newman’s life and work. His book is straightforward, helpful in clarifying the intentions underlying Newman’s most challenging songs. This is an authorized telling, written with the participation of its subject, who contributes comments with restrained candor and wry, arch wit. Hilburn, whose previous books include solid, comprehensive biographies of three other major songwriters of the rock era—Johnny Cash, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen—knows his territory. It’s a realm in which Newman clearly fits, being gifted, white, and male, but where he is also an outlier, a pop composer steeped in classical music and Tin Pan Alley (New York’s turn-of-the-20th-century popular-music publishing scene), and a late-blooming performer who—unlike Hilburn’s previous subjects—has never been much of a rock star.
Newman has had several overlapping careers: In his earlier years, he found success writing songs for others to sing—a successor to tunesmithing specialists such as Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Dorothy Fields. Then, as singer-songwriters came into vogue in the late 1960s, he took up performing and went on to make more than a dozen solo albums. Along the way, he found himself moving into the de facto family business, composing instrumental scores for feature films, as his uncles and cousins did for hundreds of Hollywood movies. (Randy’s uncle Alfred Newman alone wrote more than 200 scores and got 45 Oscar nominations.) Through the scale of their exposure, rather than the depth of their insights, the songs Randy Newman wrote for hit kid-friendly movies—“You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from Toy Story; “I Love to See You Smile,” from Parenthood—are surely what he is best known for today. “I Love to See You Smile” was even licensed for a Colgate commercial. There’s an aural smile in the tune, though I can’t say I love to hear it play.
Although a great many other songwriters are equally adept at composing toothpaste jingles, sing-along ditties for kids’ movies, and orchestral scores for films, few songwriters of any period compare with Newman for the psychological complexity and the dramatic force of his greatest songs, many of which are also his most harrowing. As a backroom writer, he had already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to conjure landscapes of despair, as in “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” sung by Judy Collins and Dusty Springfield: Tin can at my feet / think I’ll kick it down the street / that’s the way to treat a friend. Newman began to deal with bleaker themes in his first solo album, released in 1968, which he closed with “Davy the Fat Boy,” a story told by a man entrusted with the care of his childhood friend, whom he turns into a carnival freak attraction.
In his third album, Sail Away, he conjured a wide range of emotional and social nightmares by employing multilayered irony and unreliable narrators: “Political Science,” a flag-waver about the fun in dropping the bomb—Boom goes London, boom Par-ee! More room for you and more room for me; “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” a burlesque entreaty to kink; “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind),” sung by a sadistic Lord who revels in contempt for his worshippers; and nine more, including the title song, a mordant—and infectious—rallying cry for the slave trade. In the height of the singer-songwriter era, when earnest autobiographical confessions were prized as tokens of authenticity, Newman’s use of sarcasm and unlikable protagonists was an act of literary radicalism in pop music. At the same time, the sheer unpleasantness and grimness of his story songs made them elementally darker than the stagy goth cosplay of Alice Cooper and the scowling, black-cloaked metal bands that rock critics drooled over. The darkness of Newman’s work was internal and subtextual: a horror from within, not painted on for show.
Newman’s most audacious songs are, by intent, hard to stomach. They’re deceptively amoral morality tales that Hilburn casts as social commentary: critiques of racism, avarice, political violence, and the hollow pettiness of American life. As Newman once said about “Roll With the Punches,” a song sung in the voice of a cruelly racist, xenophobic jerk, “I disagree completely with everything the guy says in the song.” If listeners don’t like what they hear, that means the songs succeeded. They’re not here to be liked. They’re here to be confronted.
Newman, who is now 80, has continued to make solo recordings probing the discomforting lower reaches of the human psyche. (His most recent album, Dark Matter, was released in 2017, and includes an attack on Vladimir Putin.) Though his albums stand as testaments to his work as art, the airy songs he has written for Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, Cats Don’t Dance, the Cars series, the Toy Story franchise, and other movies stand for his art as work. They’re good for business, and he knows it. In a vivid scene in his book, Hilburn describes the moment when John Lasseter, the director of Toy Story, first shows Newman finished scenes from the film. Newman pulled his wallet from his jacket, laid it on a table, patted it, and said in a stage whisper, “This movie is going to be very nice to you.”
There are moments of great warmth and beauty in Newman’s songs for family films. I think immediately of “When She Loved Me,” from Toy Story 2, the ballad of lost love sung by a doll about the girl who outgrew her. The first time I heard it, at a multiplex with my kids, I broke out crying in the theater, and remembering it now chokes me up a bit. Not all of Newman’s movie songs are simplistic or corny, though some certainly are. I don’t believe he should write nothing but songs about America’s violence and racism. But, looking over the course of his career, I can’t help but see it as the Faust story in reverse: the hero selling his soul to the God of goodness and light.
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In April 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search.
Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers, and members of Congress took up the cause of reform. Shortly after her remains were discovered, President Donald Trump himself invited the Guillén family to the White House. With Guillén’s mother seated beside him, Trump spent 25 minutes with the family as television cameras recorded the scene.
In the meeting, Trump maintained a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother. “I saw what happened to your daughter Vanessa, who was a spectacular person, and respected and loved by everybody, including in the military,” Trump said. Later in the conversation, he made a promise: “If I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help—I’ll help you with that,” he said. “I’ll help you out. Financially, I’ll help you.”
Natalie Khawam, the family’s attorney, responded, “I think the military will be paying—taking care of it.” Trump replied, “Good. They’ll do a military. That’s good. If you need help, I’ll help you out.” Later, a reporter covering the meeting asked Trump, “Have you offered to do that for other families before?” Trump responded, “I have. I have. Personally. I have to do it personally. I can’t do it through government.” The reporter then asked: “So you’ve written checks to help for other families before this?” Trump turned to the family, still present, and said, “I have, I have, because some families need help … Maybe you don’t need help, from a financial standpoint. I have no idea what—I just think it’s a horrific thing that happened. And if you did need help, I’m going to—I’ll be there to help you.”
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A public memorial service was held in Houston two weeks after the White House meeting. It was followed by a private funeral and burial in a local cemetery, attended by, among others, the mayor of Houston and the city’s police chief. Highways were shut down, and mourners lined the streets.
Five months later, the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, announced the results of an investigation. McCarthy cited numerous “leadership failures” at Fort Hood and relieved or suspended several officers, including the base’s commanding general. In a press conference, McCarthy said that the murder “shocked our conscience” and “forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves.”
According to a person close to Trump at the time, the president was agitated by McCarthy’s comments and raised questions about the severity of the punishments dispensed to senior officers and noncommissioned officers.
In an Oval Office meeting on December 4, 2020, officials gathered to discuss a separate national-security issue. Toward the end of the discussion, Trump asked for an update on the McCarthy investigation. Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense (Trump had fired his predecessor, Mark Esper, three weeks earlier, writing in a tweet, “Mark Esper has been terminated”), was in attendance, along with Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel. At a certain point, according to two people present at the meeting, Trump asked, “Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?”
According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.
Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.
Shortly after I emailed a series of questions to a Trump spokesperson, Alex Pfeiffer, I received an email from Khawam, who asked me to publish a statement from Mayra Guillén, Vanessa’s sister. Pfeiffer then emailed me the same statement. “I am beyond grateful for all the support President Donald Trump showed our family during a trying time,” the statement reads. “I witnessed firsthand how President Trump honors our nation’s heroes’ service. We are grateful for everything he has done and continues to do to support our troops.”
Pfeiffer told me that he did not write that statement, and emailed me a series of denials. Regarding Trump’s “fucking Mexican” comment, Pfeiffer wrote: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election.” He provided statements from Patel and a spokesman for Meadows, who denied having heard Trump make the statement. Via Pfeiffer, Meadows’s spokesman also denied that Trump had ordered Meadows not to pay for the funeral.
The statement from Patel that Pfeiffer sent me said: “As someone who was present in the room with President Trump, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice. In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”
The personal qualities displayed by Trump in his reaction to the cost of the Guillén funeral—contempt, rage, parsimony, racism—hardly surprised his inner circle. Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (“This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”)
A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.
Retired General Barry McCaffrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, told me that Trump does not comprehend such traditional military virtues as honor and self-sacrifice. “The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes,” McCaffrey said. “It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”
I’ve been interested in Trump’s understanding of military affairs for nearly a decade. At first, it was cognitive dissonance that drew me to the subject—according to my previous understanding of American political physics, Trump’s disparagement of the military, and in particular his obsessive criticism of the war record of the late Senator John McCain, should have profoundly alienated Republican voters, if not Americans generally. And in part my interest grew from the absolute novelty of Trump’s thinking. This country had never seen, to the best of my knowledge, a national political figure who insulted veterans, wounded warriors, and the fallen with metronomic regularity.
Today—two weeks before an election that could see Trump return to the White House—I’m most interested in his evident desire to wield military power, and power over the military, in the manner of Hitler and other dictators.
Trump’s singularly corrosive approach to military tradition was in evidence as recently as August, when he described the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for heroism and selflessness in combat, as inferior to the Medal of Freedom, which is awarded to civilians for career achievement. During a campaign speech, he described Medal of Honor recipients as “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” prompting the Veterans of Foreign Wars to issue a condemnation: “These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.” Later in August, Trump caused controversy by violating federal regulations prohibiting the politicization of military cemeteries, after a campaign visit to Arlington in which he gave a smiling thumbs-up while standing behind gravestones of fallen American soldiers.
His Medal of Honor comments are of a piece with his expressed desire to receive a Purple Heart without being wounded. He has also equated business success to battlefield heroism. In the summer of 2016, Khizr Khan, the father of a 27-year-old Army captain who had been killed in Iraq, told the Democratic National Convention that Trump has “sacrificed nothing.” In response, Trump disparaged the Khan family and said, “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures.”
One former Trump-administration Cabinet secretary told me of a conversation he’d had with Trump during his time in office about the Vietnam War. Trump famously escaped the draft by claiming that his feet were afflicted with bone spurs. (“I had a doctor that gave me a letter—a very strong letter on the heels,” Trump told The New York Times in 2016.) Once, when the subject of aging Vietnam veterans came up in conversation, Trump offered this observation to the Cabinet official: “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”
In 1997, Trump told the radio host Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” This was not the only time Trump has compared his sexual exploits and political challenges to military service. Last year, at a speech before a group of New York Republicans, while discussing the fallout from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, he said, “I went onto that (debate) stage just a few days later and a general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, ‘Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened.’” I asked Trump-campaign officials to provide the name of the general who allegedly said this. Pfeiffer, the campaign spokesman, said, “This is a true story and there is no good reason to give the name of an honorable man to The Atlantic so you can smear him.”
In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”
Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”
This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I. Kelly responded by explaining a simple rule: Presidents should, as a matter of politics and policy, remember that the “good guys” in any given conflict are the countries allied with the United States. Despite Trump’s lack of historical knowledge, he has been on record as saying that he knew more than his generals about warfare. He told 60 Minutes in 2018 that he knew more about NATO than James Mattis, his secretary of defense at the time, a retired four-star Marine general who had served as a NATO official. Trump also said, on a separate occasion, that it was he, not Mattis, who had “captured” the Islamic State.
As president, Trump evinced extreme sensitivity to criticism from retired flag officers; at one point, he proposed calling back to active duty Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, two highly regarded Special Operations leaders who had become critical of Trump, so that they could be court-martialed. Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir that he and Milley talked Trump out of the plan. (Asked about criticism from McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Trump responded by calling him a “Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer” and said, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?”)
Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. According to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s recent book, Donald Trump v. the United States, Trump asked Kelly, “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Kelly answered, “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.” Trump also publicly floated the idea of “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” as part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep himself in power.
On separate occasions in 2020, Trump held private conversations in the White House with national-security officials about the George Floyd protests. “The Chinese generals would know what to do,” he said, according to former officials who described the conversations to me, referring to the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, which carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. (Pfeiffer denied that Trump said this.) Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all fucking losers!”
Trump has often expressed his esteem for the type of power wielded by such autocrats as the Chinese leader Xi Jinping; his admiration, even jealousy, of Vladimir Putin is well known. In recent days, he has signaled that, should he win reelection in November, he would like to govern in the manner of these dictators—he has said explicitly that he would like to be a dictator for a day on his first day back in the White House—and he has threatened to, among other things, unleash the military on “radical-left lunatics.” (One of his four former national security advisers, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir, “It is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping who would be happiest to see Trump back in office.”)
Military leaders have condemned Trump for possessing autocratic tendencies. At his retirement ceremony last year, Milley said, “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator … We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Over the past several years, Milley has privately told several interlocutors that he believed Trump to be a fascist. Many other leaders have also been shocked by Trump’s desire for revenge against his domestic critics. At the height of the Floyd protests, Mattis wrote, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.”
Trump’s frustration with American military leaders led him to disparage them regularly. In their book A Very Stable Genius, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, both of The Washington Post, reported that in 2017, during a meeting at the Pentagon, Trump screamed at a group of generals: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” And in his book Rage, Bob Woodward reported that Trump complained that “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”
Trump’s disdain for American military officers is motivated in part by their willingness to accept low salaries. Once, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, Trump said to aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” (On another occasion, John Kelly asked Trump to guess Dunford’s annual salary. The president’s answer: $5 million. Dunford’s actual salary was less than $200,000.)
Trump has often expressed his love for the trappings of martial power, demanding of his aides that they stage the sort of armor-heavy parades foreign to American tradition. Civilian aides and generals alike pushed back. In one instance, Air Force General Paul Selva, who was then serving as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the president that he had been partially raised in Portugal, which, he explained, “was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. In America, we don’t do that. It’s not who we are.”
For Republicans in 2012, it was John McCain who served as a model of “who we are.” But by 2015, the party had shifted. In July of that year, Trump, then one of several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, made a statement that should have ended his campaign. At a forum for Christian conservatives in Iowa, Trump said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
It was an astonishing statement, and an introduction to the wider public of Trump’s uniquely corrosive view of McCain, and of his aberrant understanding of the nature of American military heroism. This wasn’t the first time Trump had insulted McCain’s war record. As early as 1999, he was insulting McCain. In an interview with Dan Rather that year, Trump asked, “Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.” (A brief primer: McCain, who had flown 22 combat missions before being shot down over Hanoi, was tortured almost continuously by his Communist captors, and turned down repeated offers to be released early, insisting that prisoners be released in the order that they’d been captured. McCain suffered physically from his injuries until his death, in 2018.) McCain partisans believe, with justification, that Trump’s loathing was prompted in part by McCain’s ability to see through Trump. “John didn’t respect him, and Trump knew that,” Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide and co-author, told me. “John McCain had a code. Trump only has grievances and impulses and appetites. In the deep recesses of his man-child soul, he knew that McCain and his achievements made him look like a mutt.”
Trump, those who have worked for him say, is unable to understand the military norm that one does not leave fellow soldiers behind on the battlefield. As president, Trump told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action. To him, they could be left behind, because they had performed poorly by getting captured.
My reporting during Trump’s term in office led me to publish on this site, in September 2020, an article about Trump’s attitudes toward McCain and other veterans, and his views about the ideal of national service itself. The story was based on interviews with multiple sources who had firsthand exposure to Trump and his views. In that piece, I detailed numerous instances of Trump insulting soldiers, flag officers and veterans alike. I wrote extensively about Trump’s reaction to McCain’s death in August 2018: The president told aides, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he was infuriated when he saw flags at the White House lowered to half-mast. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he said angrily. Only when Kelly told Trump that he would get “killed in the press” for showing such disrespect did the president relent. In the article, I also reported that Trump had disparaged President George H. W. Bush, a World War II naval aviator, for getting shot down by the Japanese. Two witnesses told me that Trump said, “I don’t get it. Getting shot down makes you a loser.” (Bush ultimately evaded capture, but eight other fliers were caught and executed by the Japanese).
The next year, White House officials demanded that the Navy keep the U.S.S. John S. McCain, which was named for McCain’s father and grandfather—both esteemed admirals—out of Trump’s sight during a visit to Japan. The Navy did not comply.
Trump’s preoccupation with McCain has not abated. In January, Trump condemned McCain—six years after his death—for having supported President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. “We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare,” Trump told an Iowa crowd. “Obamacare is a catastrophe. Nobody talks about it. You know, without John McCain, we would have had it done. John McCain for some reason couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember?” This was, it appears, a malicious reference to McCain’s wartime injuries—including injuries suffered during torture—which limited his upper-body mobility.
I’ve also previously reported on Trump’s 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery. Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, accompanied him. The two men visited Section 60, the 14-acre section that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars (and the site of Trump’s Arlington controversy earlier this year). Kelly’s son Robert, a Marine officer killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, is buried in Section 60. Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” At first, Kelly believed that Trump was making a reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand nontransactional life choices. I quoted one of Kelly’s friends, a fellow retired four-star general, who said of Trump, “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.” At moments when Kelly was feeling particularly frustrated by Trump, he would leave the White House and cross the Potomac to visit his son’s grave, in part to remind himself about the nature of full-measure sacrifice.
Last year Kelly told me, in reference to Mark Milley’s 44 years in uniform, “The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.”
The specific incident I reported in the 2020 article that gained the most attention also provided the story with its headline—“Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” The story concerned a visit Trump made to France in 2018, during which the president called Americans buried in a World War I cemetery “losers.” He said, in the presence of aides, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” At another moment during this trip, he referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who had lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for dying for their country.
Trump had already been scheduled to visit one cemetery, and he did not understand why his team was scheduling a second cemetery visit, especially considering that the rain would be hard on his hair. “Why two cemeteries?” Trump asked. “What the fuck?” Kelly subsequently canceled the second visit, and attended a ceremony there himself with General Dunford and their wives.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial in Belleau, France, in November 2018. (Shealah Craighead / White House)
The article sparked great controversy, and provoked an irate reaction from the Trump administration, and from Trump himself. In tweets, statements, and press conferences in the days, weeks, and years that followed, Trump labeled The Atlantic a “second-rate magazine,” a “failing magazine,” a “terrible magazine,” and a “third-rate magazine that’s not going to be in business much longer”; he also referred to me as a “con man,” among other things. Trump has continued these attacks recently, calling me a “horrible, radical-left lunatic named Goldberg” at a rally this summer.
In the days after my original article was published, both the Associated Press and, notably, Fox News, confirmed the story, causing Trump to demand that Fox fire Jennifer Griffin, its experienced and well-regarded defense reporter. A statement issued by Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, soon after publication read, “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard.”
Shortly after the story appeared, Farah asked numerous White House officials if they had heard Trump refer to veterans and war dead as suckers or losers. She reported publicly that none of the officials she asked had heard him use these terms. Eventually, Farah came out in opposition to Trump. She wrote on X last year that she’d asked the president if my story was true. “Trump told me it was false. That was a lie.”
When I spoke to Farah, who is now known as Alyssa Farah Griffin, this week, she said, “I understood that people were skeptical about the ‘suckers and losers’ story, and I was in the White House pushing back against it. But he said this to John Kelly’s face, and I fundamentally, absolutely believe that John Kelly is an honorable man who served our country and who loves and respects our troops. I’ve heard Donald Trump speak in a dehumanizing way about so many groups. After working for him in 2020 and hearing his continuous attacks on service members since that time, including my former boss General Mark Milley, I firmly and unequivocally believe General Kelly’s account.”
(Pfeiffer, the Trump spokesperson, said, in response, “Alyssa is a scorned former employee now lying in her pursuit to chase liberal adulation. President Trump would never insult our nation’s heroes.”)
Last year, I published a story in this magazine about Milley that coincided with the end of his four-year term. In it, I detailed his tumultuous relationship with Trump. Milley had resisted Trump’s autocratic urges, and also argued against his many thoughtless and impetuous national-security impulses. Shortly after that story appeared, Trump publicly suggested that Milley be executed for treason. This astonishing statement caused John Kelly to speak publicly about Trump and his relationship to the military. Kelly, who had previously called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had referred to American prisoners of war as “suckers” and described as “losers” soldiers who died while fighting for their country.
“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly asked. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs, are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
When we spoke this week, Kelly told me, “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country. There are many, many people who have heard him say these things. The visit to France wasn’t the first time he said this.”
Kelly and others have taken special note of the revulsion Trump feels in the presence of wounded veterans. After Trump attended a Bastille Day parade in France, he told Kelly and others that he would like to stage his own parade in Washington, but without the presence of wounded veterans. “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
Milley also witnessed Trump’s disdain for the wounded. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America” at his installation ceremony in 2019. Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an improvised-explosive-device attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Avila is considered a hero up and down the ranks of the Army.
It had rained earlier on the day of the ceremony, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair almost toppled over. Milley’s wife, Hollyanne, ran to help Avila, as did then–Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.
An equally serious challenge to Milley’s sense of duty came in the form of Trump’s ignorance of the rules of war. In November 2019, Trump intervened in three different brutality cases then being adjudicated by the military. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an ISIS member. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. In a highly unusual move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him. A junior Army officer named Clint Lorance was also the recipient of Trump’s sympathy. Trump pardoned Lorance, who had been convicted of ordering the shooting of three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. And in a third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he thought was a Taliban bomb maker. “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state,” Trump said at a Florida rally.
In the Gallagher case, Trump intervened to allow Gallagher to keep his Trident insignia, one of the most coveted insignia in the entire U.S. military. The Navy’s leadership found this intervention particularly offensive because tradition held that only a commanding officer or a group of SEALs on a Trident Review Board were supposed to decide who merited being a SEAL. Milley tried to convince Trump that his intrusion was hurting Navy morale. They were flying from Washington to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to attend a “dignified transfer,” a repatriation ceremony for fallen service members, when Milley tried to explain to Trump the damage that his interventions were doing.
In my story, I reported that Milley said, “Mr. President, you have to understand that the SEALs are a tribe within a larger tribe, the Navy. And it’s up to them to figure out what to do with Gallagher. You don’t want to intervene. This is up to the tribe. They have their own rules that they follow.”
Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.
“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.
“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.
Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump said he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”
Milley then summoned one of his aides, a combat-veteran SEAL officer, to the president’s Air Force One office. Milley took hold of the Trident pin on the SEAL’s chest and asked him to describe its importance. The aide explained to Trump that, by tradition, only SEALs can decide, based on assessments of competence and character, whether one of their own should lose his pin. But the president’s mind was not changed. Gallagher kept his pin.
One day, in the first year of Trump’s presidency, I had lunch with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, in his White House office. I turned the discussion, as soon as I could, to the subject of his father-in-law’s character. I mentioned one of Trump’s recent outbursts and told Kushner that, in my opinion, the president’s behavior was damaging to the country. I cited, as I tend to do, what is in my view Trump’s original sin: his mockery of John McCain’s heroism.
This is where our conversation got strange, and noteworthy. Kushner answered in a way that made it seem as though he agreed with me. “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”
I found this baffling for a moment. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment. In Trump’s mind, traditional values—values including those embraced by the armed forces of the United States having to do with honor, self-sacrifice, and integrity—have no merit, no relevance, and no meaning.
In the months leading up to a presidential election, bookstores fill with campaign memoirs. These titles are, for the most part, ghostwritten. They are devoid of psychological insights and bereft of telling moments, instead typically giving their readers the most stilted of self-portraits, produced in hackish haste. They are, really, a pretext for an aspirant’s book tour and perhaps an appearance on The View—in essence, a campaign advertisement squeezed between two covers.
But these self-serving vehicles shouldn’t indict the larger genre of political autobiography. Truly excellent books have been written about statecraft and power from the inside. And few professions brim with more humanity, in all of its flawed majesty: Politicians must confront both the irresistible temptations of high office and the inevitable shattering of high ideals, which means that they supply some very good stories. After all, some of the world’s most important writers began as failed leaders and frustrated government officials—think Niccolò Machiavelli, Nikolai Gogol, and Alexis de Tocqueville.
The books on this list were published years ago, but their distance from the present moment makes them so much more interesting than the quickies that have been churned out for the current election season. Several of them are set abroad, yet the essential moral questions about power that they document are universal. Each is a glimpse into the mind and character of those attracted to the most noble and the most crazed of professions, and offers a bracing reminder of the virtues and dangers of political life.
Intellectuals can’t help themselves. They look at the buffoons and dimwits who speechify on the stump and think, I can do better. Take Michael Ignatieff, who briefly ditched his life as a Harvard professor and journalist to become the head of Canada’s Liberal Party. In 2011, at the age of 64, he ran for prime minister—and led his party to its worst defeat since its founding in 1867. In Fire and Ashes, his memoir of his brief political career, he writes about the humiliations of the campaign trail, and his own disastrous performance on it, in the spirit of self-abasement. (The best section of the book is about the confusing indignities—visits to the dry cleaner, driving his own car—of returning to everyday life after leaving politics.) In the course of losing, Ignatieff acquired a profound new respect for the gritty business of politics and all the nose counting, horse trading, and baby kissing it requires. His crashing defeat is the stuff of redemption, having forced him to appreciate the rituals of the political vocation that he once dismissed as banal.
This 1952 memoir is still thrust in the hands of budding young conservatives, as a means of inculcating them into the movement. Published during an annus mirabilis for conservative treatises, just as the American right was beginning to emerge in its modern incarnation, Witness is draped in apocalyptic rhetoric about the battle for the future of mankind—a style that helped establish the Manichaean mentality of postwar conservatism. But the book is more than an example of an outlook: It tells a series of epic stories. Chambers narrates his time as an underground Communist activist in the ’30s, a fascinating tale of subterfuge. An even larger stretch of the book is devoted to one of the great spectacles in modern American politics, the Alger Hiss affair. In 1948, after defecting from his sect, Chambers delivered devastating testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee accusing Hiss, a former State Department official and a paragon of the liberal establishment, of being a Soviet spy. History vindicates Chambers’s version of events, and his propulsive storytelling withstands the test of time.
Humans have a deep longing to canonize political heroes as saints. But many successful activists are unpleasant human beings—frequently, in fact, royal pains in the ass. Nobody did more than Friedan to popularly advance the cause of feminism in the 1960s, but her method consisted of stubborn obstreperousness and an unstinting faith in her own righteousness. Her memoir is both a disturbing account of her marriage to an abusive man and the inside story of the founding of the National Organization for Women. Friedan’s charmingly self-aware prose provides a window into how feminist ideas were translated into an agenda—and a peek into the mind of one of America’s most effective, if occasionally self-defeating, reformers.
Vidal wrote some of the greatest American novels about politics—Burr, Lincoln, 1876. In this magnificently malicious memoir, he trains that political acumen on himself. He could write so vividly about the salons, cloakrooms, and dark corridors of Washington because he extracted texture, color, and understanding from his own life. His grandfather was T. P. Gore, a senator from Oklahoma. Jacqueline Onassis was his relative by marriage, and he writes about growing up alongside her on the banks of the Potomac. And for years, he baldly admits, he harbored the illusion that he might become a great politician himself, unsuccessfully running for Congress in 1960, and then for Senate in 1982. Vidal didn’t have a politician’s temperament, to say the least: He lived to feud. Robert F. Kennedy became Vidal’s nemesis after kicking him out of the White House for an embarrassing display of drunkenness; William F. Buckley, whom Vidal debated live in prime time during the political conventions of 1968, was another hated rival. The critic John Lahr once said that “no one quite pisses from the height that Vidal does,” which is pretty much the perfect blurb for this journey into a mind bursting with schadenfreude, hauteur, and an abiding affection for politics.
In defeat, Ignatieff came to appreciate the nobility of politics. The life of Liberia’s Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female president—or, to borrow a cliché, “Africa’s Iron Lady”—is closer to the embodiment of that ideal. She led Liberia after suffering under the terrifying reigns of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, who corruptly governed their country; Taylor notoriously built an army of child soldiers and used rape as a weapon. As a leader of the opposition to these despots, Sirleaf survived imprisonment, exile, and an abusive husband. She narrowly avoided execution at the hands of a firing squad. Her literary style is modest, sometimes wonky—she’s a trained economist—but her memoir contains the complicated, tragic story of a nation, which she describes as “a conundrum wrapped in complexity and stuffed inside a paradox.” (That story is, in fact, a damning indictment of U.S. foreign policy.) Her biography is electrifying, an urgently useful example of persistence in the face of despair.
Only a fraction of this hilarious, gorgeous memoir is about politics, but it’s so delightful that it merits a place on this list. Like Vidal and Igantieff, Mount is an intellectual who tried his hand at electoral politics. But when he ran for the British Parliament as a Tory, he had shortcomings: He spoke with “a languid gabble that communicated all too vividly my inner nervous state … I found myself overcome with boredom by the sound of my own voice. This sudden sensation of tedium verging on disgust did not go away with practice.” A few years later, he turned up as a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, as well as her chief policy adviser. As he chronicles life at 10 Downing Street, his ironic sensibility is the chief source of pleasure. His descriptions of Thatcher, especially her inability to read social cues, mingle with his admiration for her leadership and ideological zeal. There are shelves of gossipy books by aides; Mount’s wry retelling of his stint in the inner sanctum is my favorite.
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There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.
It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the same thing about the previous world-record holder, a 2,702-pound beast grown in Italy in 2021, or the world-record holder before that, a Belgian 2,624-pounder in 2016. Each year around this time, giant pumpkins across the globe are forklifted into pickup trucks and transported to competitions where they break new records.
Michael Jordan set the record at California’s Half Moon Bay Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, considered the Super Bowl of North American pumpkin-growing. The first winner of the competition, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. In 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. “At that time, we thought, Gee whiz, can we push these things any farther?” Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that establishes global standards for competition, told me. Yet in just another decade, the record passed the 2,000-pound mark. “We’ve zoomed past that now,” Travis Gienger, the grower from Minnesota who cultivated Michael Jordan, told me. For champion growers, there’s only one thing to do next: try to break 3,000.
Last year, Michael Jordan weighed in at a world-record 2,749 pounds. (Alex Washburn / AP)
Giant pumpkins aren’t quite supersize versions of what you find in the grocery store. All competitive pumpkins are Curcubita maxima, the largest species of squash—which, in the wild, can grow to 200 pounds, about 10 times heavier than the common Halloween pumpkin. But decades of selective breeding—crossing only the largest plants—has created colossal varieties.
Virtually all of today’s champions trace their lineage to Dill’s Atlantic Giant, a variety bred in the 1970s by a Canadian grower named Howard Dill. Very competitive growers source their seeds from one another, through seed exchanges and auctions, where a single seed can be sold for thousands of dollars, Michael Estadt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Extension who has cultivated giant pumpkins, told me. Seeds from Gienger’s champions are in high demand, yet even he is constantly aiming to improve the genetics of his line. “I’m looking for heavy,” he said.
Yet even a pumpkin with a prize-winning pedigree won’t reach its full size unless it’s managed well. Like babies, they require immense upkeep, even before they are born. Months before planting, at least 1,000 square feet of soil per pumpkin must be fertilized and weeded. Once seedlings are planted, they have to be watered daily for their entire growing period, roughly four months. No mere garden hose can do the trick; each plant needs at least one inch of water a week, which allows the pumpkin to gain up to 70 pounds in a single day. The fruit and leaves must also be inspected at least once daily for pests and disease—no small feat as their surface area balloons. Quickly spotting and excising the eggs of an insect called the squash-vine borer, then bandaging the wounded vine, is paramount. One day, you might have a great pumpkin, “then boom, the next day, all of the vine is completely dead,” says Julie Weisenhorn, a horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota who has grown giant pumpkins—named Seymour (744 pounds) and Audrey (592 pounds).
Growers can keep pushing the pumpkin weight limit by ensuring that a plant isn’t pollinated by a variety that has subpar genes. To do so, they hand-pollinate, painstakingly dusting pollen from a plant’s male flowers into the female ones. This usually leads the plant to bear three or four fruit, but only the most promising is allowed to survive. The rest are killed off in an attempt to direct all of the plant’s resources toward a single giant. In the same vein, wayward vines are nipped, and emerging roots thrust deep into the ground, in hopes of harnessing every last nutrient for the potential champion.
Still, some factors are beyond anyone’s control. The weather can literally make or break a pumpkin. Too much rain can cause a pumpkin to grow too quickly, cracking open its flesh, which would disqualify it from competition. Too much sunlight hardens the flesh, making it prone to fractures. It’s not uncommon for giant pumpkins to have custom-built personal sunshades. North America’s giant-pumpkin capitals—Half Moon Bay, Nova Scotia, and Minnesota—have nature on their side, with low humidity and nighttime temperatures. Cooler nights mean less respiration, which means less wasted energy.
Yet nature bests even the world’s champions. This year, Gienger couldn’t break the record he set with Michael Jordan; he blames cold and wet weather, which made it harder to feed micronutrients to his pumpkin, Rudy. (At 2,471 pounds, it still won the Half Moon Bay competition.) And no matter how big a pumpkin grows, it needs to pack a few extra pounds for the road: Once they’re cut from the vine, they rapidly lose their weight in water. A pumpkin can drop roughly 10 pounds in a single day.
All of the experts I spoke with believe that 3,000 pounds is within reach. “It’s still an upward trend,” said Grande, who noted that a 2,907-pounder has already been recorded, albeit a damaged one. Pumpkin genetics are continually improving; more 2,000-pounders have been grown in the past year than ever before, according to Grande. Growers are constantly developing new practices. Each year, the Great Pumpkin Conference holds an international summit for growers and scientists to trade techniques (last year’s was in Belgium, and this year’s will be in the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field). Shifting goals have precipitated new (and expensive) methods: Carbon dioxide and gibberellic acid are being used as growth stimulants; some pumpkins are fully grown in greenhouses.
The reason that giant-pumpkin weights increased 20-fold in half a century is the same reason that runners keep running faster marathons, that skyscrapers keep clawing at the sky, and that people spend so much on anti-aging. To push nature’s limits is a reliably exhilarating endeavor; to be the one to succeed is a point of pride. Food companies, in particular, build their entire businesses on developing the biggest and best. Wild strawberries are the size of a nickel, but domesticated ones are as huge as Ping-Pong balls. Industrial breeding turned the scrawny, two-and-a-half-pound chickens of the 1920s into today’s six-pounders. There’s still room for them to grow: Strawberries can get as big as a saucer, and the heaviest chicken on record was a 22-pounder named Weirdo. But foods sold commercially are subject to other constraints on growth, such as transportation, storage, processing, and customer preference. Unusually big foods are associated with less flavor, and their size can be off-putting. When it comes to food, there is such a thing as too big.
Giant pumpkins, by contrast, have a singular purpose: to become as heavy as possible. They don’t have to be beautiful, taste good, or withstand transport, because they are not food. When companies develop boundary-pushing crops and animals, that tends to be an isolationist enterprise, shrouded in secrecy. But in the giant-pumpkin community, there is less incentive to guard seeds and techniques. Most competitions are low-stakes local affairs, and nobody ever became rich off giant pumpkins, not even Howard Dill.
Breaking records is largely seen as a communal effort. “The secret to our success is that we are a sharing community,” Grande said. In a few contests, the investment is worth it—the Half Moon Bay prize for world-record-breakers is $30,000—but “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Estadt told me. People do it, he said, “for the thrill of the win.”
All of the pumpkin experts I spoke with acknowledged that there must be a limit. But nobody has any idea what it is. Four thousand pounds, 5,000—as far as growers can tell, these are as feasible as any other goal. Every milestone they reach marks another human achievement, another triumph over nature. But even the most majestic of pumpkins inevitably meets the same fate: devoured by livestock, and returned to the earth.
