Magazine Work

All the major news organizations have called the presidential race for Joe Biden, but Donald Trump is refusing to concede. Instead, the president is digging in, alleging a conspiracy of unfathomable proportion, conceived and executed right beneath our noses, to deny him a second term in the White House. His evidence for this? Invisible. But no matter. The man who swore Barack Obama was born in Kenya, the man who insisted that millions of illegal votes were cast in 2016, has never been deterred by a lack of proof.

It was the strangest of smoke-filled rooms, a Central Park château populated by the renowned party strategist alternately called “Boy Genius” and “Turd Blossom” by his former boss; the financier and casino tycoon who would soon become a high-profile casualty of the country’s sexual harassment crackdown; and the rookie politician who had heckled and hoodwinked his way to the Republican nomination for president. It wasn’t quite how Jack and Bobby had picked LBJ, or how Reagan had settled on George Bush Sr., but a seed was planted that day.

A self-described journalist, James O’Keefe looks in the mirror and sees a muckraker in the mold of Upton Sinclair or Nellie Bly, taking bold, unconventional steps to expose what no mainstream reporter ever could. O’Keefe spent years courting and craving recognition from those he considered peers. But despite his many objective successes—leading political reporter Dave Weigel to write in Slate that O’Keefe “had more of an impact on the 2012 election than any journalist”—the validation never came. Newsrooms decried his methods, questioned his ethics and summarily dismissed him as unreliable. Spurned, O’Keefe is targeting the media itself.

The newspaper is but a shadow of the behemoth it once was. A decade's worth of layoffs and buyouts have gutted the editorial operation and purged the administrative staff crucial to running a metro daily. The institutional knowledge critical to covering a state—and paramount to reporting on the Iowa caucuses—has been all but eradicated. The only thing saving it: the global obsession with Iowa’s role in choosing leaders of the free world.

Will Hurd is too young, too talented, too ambitious not to push the limits and enter the arena with bigger and better competition. But first, he has to hang onto the toughest seat in Texas, one of the toughest in America, where Democrats will continue to invest millions of dollars in hopes of taking it back and kneecapping his rapid ascent inside the Republican Party. Hurd is growing more confident every single day, with every new social media post and every new voter he meets, that this district belongs to him. “If you want it,” Hurd says, “come and get it.”

In a period of massive political disruption, Democrats are largely left choosing between conventional figures. A former vice president. Three U.S. senators. Even the supposed insurgent, a gay, small-town mayor from the Midwest, is a Harvard and McKinsey alum who once ran for national party chairman. The remaining two candidates are the party’s two richest political donors. The only true maverick is Yang.

Most Republicans in Washington are biting their tongues when it comes to Donald Trump, fearful that any candid criticisms of the new president could invite a backlash from their constituents or, potentially worse, provoke retribution from the commander in chief himself. Mark Sanford is not like most Republicans in Washington.

History will record that in the summer and fall of 2020, at the peak of the most unusual and bitterly contested election in modern times, the president and his team made a sport of plucking minor incidents from local news feeds and distorting them into data points of a grand conspiracy to deny him a second term. History will also record that their efforts have been wildly successful.

In my travel across America this year, I detected one common feeling that binds together this deeply fractured nation: fear. Fear of violence. Fear for their livelihoods. Fear of far-left socialism or far-right authoritarianism. Fear that our best days are behind us. Fear that America is no longer capable of conquering its great challenges. Above all, fear that we are too alienated, too angry with each other, too fundamentally misunderstood by the other half of society to ever truly heal.

Having spent the 96 hours following Election Day stewing on the divisions in her party, Democratic congresswoman Elissa Slotkin came out firing in a manner that caught me off-guard. She wasn’t just interested in settling scores with the liberal left. She was intent on making her case that Donald Trump, one of the most divisive and hated politicians in American history, had exposed a weakness in her party that could lead to its destruction.

The ascent of the 45th president has left a wreckage of relationships in its wake—neighbors, friends and families divided along lines of partisanship if not political philosophy. Yet there has been no more dramatic divergence than that of Pence and Flake, once ideological soulmates and indivisible comrades who now embody the right’s most extreme reactions to Trumpism.

She may have been Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominee—the first in American history to require a tiebreaking confirmation vote cast by the vice president. Yet she runs the administration’s smallest and arguably least potent federal department. And after nine months in office, it has become apparent to the education secretary that she has limited power to transform the nation’s schools. If anything, DeVos had more influence as a private citizen in Michigan than she does now in Washington.