The Greatest Opportunity That Wasn’t

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This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.You know America’s most controversial appliance when you hear it: The leaf blower is loud, it’s messy, and it’s a hazard to the environment. But Ian Bogost recently argued that we’re thinking about leaf blowers all wrong: “Excessive use of blowers, not the tools themselves, should be taken as the villain here,” he wrote. A full ban on the appliance is impossible as long as yards are part of American life, so limiting its use would be the best path forward.Today’s newsletter explores the appliances we’ve relied on for decades, and those that claim to usher in new ways of living—with varied success.On Our AppliancesA Defense of the Leaf BlowerBy Ian BogostReassessing America’s most hated applianceRead the article.A $700 Kitchen Tool That’s Meant to Be Seen, Not UsedBy Ellen CushingKitchenAid’s newest stand mixer seems like a great appliance—for people who don’t actually bake.Read the article.The Microwave Makes No SenseBy Jacob SweetEvery kitchen appliance is getting smart—except one.Read the article.Still Curious? Your TV is too good for you: 4K resolution is a sham, Ian Bogost argues. KitchenAid did it right 87 years ago: Modern appliances are rarely built to last. They could learn something from the KitchenAid stand mixer, Anna Kramer argues. Other Diversions The silliest, sexiest show of the year Why you might need an adventure Why are baseball players always eating? P.S. Courtesy of John Ambrose I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. John Ambrose, 72, wrote that he took this photo “looking due west from my front door in Glastonbury, CT. The sky kept changing and went from an orange to a deep pink.” I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.— Isabel

On December 14, 2016, President-elect Donald Trump crammed a handful of America’s most recognizable moguls into a conference room on the 25th floor of his Manhattan headquarters. The group included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Despite having just won the most powerful position on the planet, Trump assumed a sycophantic pose.“There’s nobody like you in the world!” Trump exclaimed. “In the world!”He wanted them to know: “I’m here to help you folks do well.”At that early date, Trump was a somewhat unknown quantity, at least as far as these billionaires were concerned. They couldn’t be sure if he was actually aligned with their interests, given his support of tariffs, hostility toward immigration, and fulminations against globalism. Besides, it was an especially inflamed moment in American politics, and the executives had reason to fear that their workforces, not to mention their customers, might furiously protest an intimate working relationship with Trump. So after the meeting adjourned, Trump’s offer of an alliance was left dangling.If Trump prevails on November 5, a version of the partnership he hinted at eight years ago will finally emerge, and in a far more robust form than he could have ever imagined at the time. That’s because many of the wealthiest Americans have reached the cold conclusion that the opportunities presented by Trump outweigh whatever social opprobrium might follow an embrace.There’s a word for this type of cozy arrangement: oligarchy. The term conjures the corrupt illiberal system that governs Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But like fascism or democracy, the concept varies from country to country, a product of its native political culture and sources of wealth.The Trumpist oligarchy that is taking shape is far different from the post-Soviet strain. What makes it distinct is that Trump is entering into a partnership with the most powerful technologists in the world. But the core problem of oligarchy is the same. The symbiotic relationship between a corrupt leader and a business elite always entails the trading of favors. The regime does the bidding of the billionaires and, in turn, the billionaires do the bidding of the regime. Power grows ever more concentrated as the owners and the corrupt leaders conspire to protect their mutual hold on it. In short order, this arrangement has the potential to deliver a double blow to the American system: It could undermine capitalism and erode democracy all at once.Perhaps it will soon be possible to look back on the first Trump term with nostalgia. Back in those days, there was rampant corruption, but it was relatively small-time. Jared Kushner and the Trump kids traded on the family name. In the mix were old friends of the president like Tom Barrack, who allegedly attempted to parlay his presidential friendship to win clients in the Middle East. Supplicants usually ingratiated themselves with Trump by buying units in his buildings and hosting events at his resorts. When the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute wanted the administration’s help, it spent more than $700,000 on an event at a Trump golf resort. In a second term, that brand of blatant transactionalism will reappear, and likely get much worse, because it’s now clear that there are no consequences for engaging in it.[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]The biggest difference between Trump I and Trump II is that he would return to office at a uniquely perilous moment in the history of American government. Never before has the state been such a lucrative profit center for private business. And not since the Gilded Age has it been so vulnerable to corrupt manipulation.In part, this is because of a bipartisan shift in ideology. Over the past decade, both political parties have come to embrace what’s called “industrial policy.” That is, to varying degrees, Republicans and Democrats agree that the government should play the role of investment bank, spending billions to subsidize sectors of the economy vital to the national interest—and to protect those domestic firms from foreign competition with tariffs.At the same time, the federal government has become a massive consumer of technology, in the form of cloud computing and artificial intelligence and rockets, that it can’t efficiently produce itself. From 2019 to 2022, according to a study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the Pentagon and intelligence community spent at least $53 billion on contracts with Big Technology firms.All that government spending comes at a time when the bureaucracy that oversees such expenditures is especially precarious. Over the summer, the Supreme Court issued a decision gutting the power of federal agencies. Trump would likely strike another grievous blow against it, extending his power to fire civil servants to purge a tier of experts, lawyers, and clerks hired to be neutral arbiters of the national interest so that he can replace them with his cronies.Without that accountability, the vast sums the government spends can be more easily funneled to favorite firms; regulation can be more easily manipulated to punish rivals of those firms. Those billionaires with access to the government will have something close to unchallenged control of the economy’s commanding heights.None of this would exactly resemble Putin’s oligarchy, which largely consists of old chums from the KGB and his childhood friends from St. Petersburg. Russia is an aristocracy of apparatchiks, whose primary goal is to protect ill-gotten wealth amassed during the country’s chaotic transition from communism, a mission that has required brutality and suppression.But Trump’s and Putin’s oligarchs share one important similarity. The Big Tech billionaires attracted to Trump would hope to protect their monopolies by providing essential services that make them indispensable to the government and the nation. This indispensability will also—so the theory goes—insulate them from antitrust enforcement. It’s far harder to make the case for breaking up a monopoly when that monopoly supplies the Pentagon with communications technologies and runs cloud-computing services for intelligence agencies.[Read: Jeff Bezos is blaming the victim]But there’s a distinct twist to the aims of the Big Tech oligarchs: They don’t simply want to insulate themselves from regulators and courts. Ultimately, they want to exploit their relationship with the government in order to supplant it. They want to be the ones who gain control of programs and systems that were once the purview of the state. Their alliance with Trump is, at bottom, a power grab.Take space exploration. Musk and Bezos don’t just want the government to subsidize their rockets and supply the funds that will further grow their aerospace firms. They want to become the architects of human life in the heavens, to design celestial colonies, to shape the future of space. Then there are the tech billionaires promoting cryptocurrency. They don’t simply want to remove regulatory restraints on the industry. In their vision, their companies will replace the U.S. Treasury. And some of these businesses hope to fend off the regulation of artificial intelligence, so that they can exert more invisible control over the flow of information and commerce.The central activity of an oligarchical system is the mutual scratching of backs. The head of state helps spread the lucre, but also collects a fee for his services. In Russia and Ukraine, presidents received actual monetary fees in the form of kickbacks. Oligarchs laundered money on their behalf, shifting cash into offshore accounts and buying them ornate villas. In essence, oligarchs serve as errand boys. If they own media, then they use their outlets to subtly make the case for their patron; they hire editors more inclined to spout the party line and to steer coverage in a preferred direction.It’s hard to imagine transplanting Russian oligarchy to these shores, given the American rule of law and the higher standards of American capitalism. But it’s possible to glimpse how the CEOs have begun to play the game—the way Musk has used X to relentlessly extol Trump, or how Bezos canceled The Washington Post’s endorsement of Harris and hired an alumnus of Rupert Murdoch’s empire to serve as publisher.Every oligarchical system writes its own informal rules, arriving at its own set of furtive understandings. In contrast to Putin, Trump is aligning with genuinely creative entrepreneurs. Yet that doesn’t make the American model better—just uniquely dangerous. Trump’s transactionalism will be tethered to people driven by greed, but also by messianic fervor, and the result will be like nothing you’ve ever seen.

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Starbucks announced this week that starting November 7, its US and Canada stores will drop extra charges for plant-based milks — including oat, soy, almond, and coconut — that add 70 to 80 cents to a drink’s cost. It’s a change that plant-based food advocates have long campaigned for, citing the dairy industry’s grave animal welfare and climate impacts. In 2022, Succession actor James Cromwell — in partnership with PETA — superglued himself to a Starbucks counter in New York City in protest of the upcharge. The news comes as the coffee giant tries to win customers back after a marked drop in sales over the last year. Some customers are leaving due to inflation, “balking at $8 lattes, while others are boycotting the chain for a variety of reasons,” according to the New York Times (including the war in Gaza and union busting, though it’s unclear how much impact that’s had on Starbucks’s business). The plant milk fee hasn’t helped. In the US, around one quarter of Starbucks’ drinks that include milk are ordered with plant-based milk, according to data from 2021, and the upcharge adds much more to the cost of a drink for the customer than the actual cost of the plant-based milk to Starbucks.  According to Switch4Good, a nonprofit that advocates for shifting away from dairy and has long agitated against the plant milk surcharge, it costs Starbucks between 9 and 28 cents extra to make a drink with soy, almond, or oat milk. That means the extra 70- to 80-cent charge could amount to a markup of more than 700 percent, depending on the milk alternative. A Starbucks spokesperson told Vox that the decision to drop the surcharge was made to benefit customers but didn’t answer questions about Switch4Good’s analysis. The company has also been sued for the upcharge on discrimination grounds because around one-third of Americans — disproportionately people of color — have difficulty digesting lactose, a sugar found in milk.  While changing course on the plant milk upcharge was, above all, a business decision, it could also be a milestone in the food industry’s stalled efforts to combat climate change, given milk’s big carbon footprint. The switch will also help to further mainstream dairy-free milk, a more humane and sustainable alternative to conventional dairy, during what has otherwise been a turbulent year for the plant-based food market.  Starbucks’s new policy is a big deal for the climate  Producing cow’s milk has outsize social and environmental costs compared to plant-based milks — costs that aren’t priced into what consumers pay for dairy, which benefits from a range of government subsidies designed to make animal products cheap and plentiful.  For one, there’s the animal cruelty. The dairy business model depends on artificially inseminating cows and separating them from their calves at birth so humans can take their milk. The calves are typically forced to live alone in small enclosures while dairy cows are kept in large, industrial sheds, spending little to no time in pasture. After multiple cycles of pregnancy and birth, when a dairy cow’s milk productivity wanes, she’s typically sent to slaughter.  More important to Starbucks, however, is milk’s greenhouse gas emissions, which comprise more than one-fifth of the company’s global carbon footprint. Dairy production devours dramatically more land and water, and contributes far more greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution, than plant-based alternatives. Climate scientists agree that reducing dairy and meat consumption in wealthy countries is a necessary part of climate mitigation. Starbucks has committed to halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and expanding its plant-based menu options is a key component of that goal. Removing the plant milk upcharge, a Starbucks spokesperson said in a statement, also contributes to the company’s sustainability plans.  As of 2023, the coffee chain had made minimal progress toward reducing its carbon footprint; its overall emissions had increased from its 2019 baseline, in part because its emissions from cow’s milk were up 8 percent over that period. Starbucks is such a large buyer of milk that dairy emissions across its global operations is equivalent to around 2 percent of emissions from all US dairy production. Food companies are struggling to cut their emissions because most of their menus revolve around meat and dairy, the most carbon-intensive foods. Starbucks’s decision to drop its dairy-free surcharge should help. Substituting nondairy milks is already Starbucks’s second most requested drink customization, according to the company, so the change could push even more of its customers to go dairy-free. It could also push other chains to follow.  What the Starbucks change could mean for the future of plant-based dairy The move represents a rare win in recent years for the US plant-based food industry. After a meteoric rise in the late 2010s — as Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers went mainstream and Oatly became the it-milk of baristas and consumers alike — the sector has since faltered. A number of fast food chains have dropped plant-based burgers from their menus, while the incumbent livestock sector has attacked plant-based startups. Shoppers have opted for cheaper animal products amid high inflation.  Plant-based milk, though, has managed to weather the plant-based backlash better than most; from 2021 to 2023, revenues were up 9 percent, accounting for almost 15 percent of total milk sales (though the number of nondairy milk units fell). Meanwhile, plant-based meat sales fell by an estimated 13 percent during that same period.  Given Starbucks’s size and influence, dairy-free milk’s market share may continue to grow — and cow’s milk sales, which have been dropping for decades, may decline further. Starbucks’s policy change, however, is more than just a sign of plant-based milk’s staying power; it also demonstrates the potential for the plant-based and anti-factory farming movements to apply sustained pressure to corporations and get results.  PETA and Switch4Good have called on the company to drop the surcharge for years. While Starbucks says the change was a business decision, the protests, celebrity endorsements, and petitions likely helped, creating the very idea that charging more for plant-based options was unjust. And while the protests have at times been ridiculed as the work of whiny vegans angry about a 70-cent charge, the successful campaign will now primarily benefit Starbucks’s millions of nonvegan customers who just enjoy plant-based milks or require them due to lactose intolerance (and, of course, factory-farmed cows and the climate).     “The move follows a vigorous five-year campaign, letters from more than 160,000 PETA supporters, protests at Starbucks around the country, and help from actor James Cromwell… as well as an appeal from Sir Paul McCartney,” a PETA statement reads. PETA paused its campaign in September to give the new Starbucks CEO, Brian Niccol, time to “make the right decision,” the organization said. “And he delivered.”  If Starbucks wanted to, it could go even further by making plant-based milk the default option for its milky drinks. In 2022, Blue Bottle, a Nestlé-owned upscale coffee chain with some 100 locations around the world, announced it was making oat milk the default milk in beverage orders in US locations as part of a larger effort to cut carbon emissions. Now, if a Blue Bottle customer wants cow’s milk, they have to request it, but most don’t; a few months after making the switch, Blue Bottle reported that 63 percent of customers were sticking with oat milk.Blue Bottle’s approach, which other food companies have also embraced, shows how heavily our food choices are influenced by our food environments. Small changes — from dropping surcharges to changing default options — can nudge us toward a more climate-friendly future. Starbucks is the latest, and largest, company to put conventional dairy and plant-based milk on a level playing field. Others should follow.

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In June, Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and pro–Donald Trump activist, sat down for a chat with Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who instigated an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 over his refusal to pay grazing fees.In the video—posted on the America Happens Network, which has aired documentaries such as Bundy vs. Deep State and the series Conspiracy Truths—Raiklin explained that tens of thousands of service members had refused to comply with a Defense Department mandate that all personnel receive a vaccine for COVID-19, because they did not want to be “experimented on with an unsafe and ineffective, what I call ‘DNA-mutilation injection.’” He told Bundy that the “illegal” mandate, since rescinded, was to blame for the “total destruction of our constitutional order.”“There must be consequences,” Raiklin said, for the “unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal” vaccination program, which he also asserted, with no evidence, “ended up killing lots of people.” In fact, tens of thousands of service members did refuse the vaccine, and about 8,000 were discharged for failing to comply with the policy. But Raiklin speculated that as many as 1 million more still in uniform might “want to participate in retribution” against Pentagon leadership. (Depending on where in the world they serve, military personnel are required to receive about a dozen other vaccinations, including for polio, influenza, and typhoid.)Retribution is Raiklin’s watchword these days. He calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” settling scores from the first term and ready to do the same in a potential second. His battles aren’t only with military leaders. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Raiklin suggested that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from the states that Joe Biden had won, on the grounds that they might be fraudulent. Those ideas were later taken up by John Eastman, a lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Raiklin may be one of the intellectual founders of Trump’s election denialism.[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]More recently, Raiklin, who left the Army Reserve in 2022 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, according to an Army spokesperson, has promoted the potentially illegal idea that state legislatures could withhold their electors in the event that Trump loses. He has shown up in swing states, including North Carolina, where he pushed for lawmakers to award the electors to Trump ahead of time, on the theory that Hurricane Helene had disrupted the casting of ballots in the state.Raiklin’s ideas for ensuring a Trump victory dovetail with the plans he has hinted at for exacting retributive justice on government officials. In his conversation with Bundy, Raiklin said that he would like to “coordinate” with those members of the armed forces supposedly still aggrieved over mandatory vaccinations, “to channel those skills, training, passion, in a positive way, to kind of autocorrect the lawlessness and to create consequences for those who created that lawlessness.”Raiklin did not explicitly call for violence, even though he praised Bundy as “quite the legend” for his aggressive opposition to federal authority. Rather, he said he wanted “appropriate lawful justice”—but archly suggested that this should come from outside the court system. Raiklin chooses his words carefully, even when they are freighted with menace. Bundy asked how the ex-soldier would treat the federal prosecutors in his own case, and Raiklin replied calmly, “I would conduct the most peaceful and patriotic legal and moral and ethical actions that they’ve ever experienced in their life.”A New York native with a degree from the Touro Law Center, in Central Islip, Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer. He served as an intelligence officer in the National Guard in several states as well as in the regular Army, deploying to Jordan and Afghanistan. Among his numerous commendations and awards is the Bronze Star Medal, given for meritorious service or acts of valor in a combat zone. He has suggested that military personnel could be “deputized by sheriffs,” as he told Bundy in their conversation. This idea is rooted in the fringe theory that local sheriffs possess law-enforcement authority superseding that of any elected official or officer, at any level of government. Proponents of the so-called constitutional sheriffs’ movement urged sheriffs to investigate disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and to get involved this year in election administration.Bundy seemed a bit daunted by the scale of resistance that Raiklin described to him. The federal bureaucracy is “so broad,” he said, that it’s practically immovable. Raiklin reassured him: “That’s where people like me come into play, that know the system very well and in detail, to create priorities. You start with the top, and you work your way through the system.” To guide that work, Raiklin has created a “deep-state target list,” with the names of more than 300 current and former government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and others who he thinks deserve some of that “lawful justice.” The names of some of their family members are also included.The list, which is helpfully color-coded, reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them. Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list.Several former intelligence officials Raiklin has singled out told me they are well acquainted with his threats. They presume that if Trump is reelected, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies will conduct capricious audits and frivolous investigations, all designed, if not to put them in prison, then to spend large sums of money on legal fees. A few told me they worried that Raiklin would publish their addresses or details about their families. They were less concerned about him showing up at their home than about some unhinged deep-state hunter he might inspire. In interviews with right-wing podcasters, Raiklin has said he would conduct “livestreamed swatting raids” against his targets. Swatting is the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home.Raiklin’s future in a Trump administration is uncertain. But he is close to major figures in Trump’s orbit, particularly Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was indicted for lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in November 2020.Raikiln is also a board member of America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that has pursued conservative causes for decades, of which Flynn is the chair. Other board members have amplified the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory—promoted by the QAnon movement, of which Flynn is an ally—that some Democratic politicians kidnap, torture, and eat children.Like Raiklin, Flynn has long railed against suspected deep-state actors, whom he has accused of torpedoing his career in intelligence. Flynn was regarded as a brilliant tactical intelligence officer when he served in Afghanistan and Iraq. But after he became the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, senior intelligence officials worried that his erratic management style and conspiratorial attitudes made him unfit for the job. Top intelligence officials pushed Flynn out in 2014, after an unhappy and sometimes-tumultuous two-year tenure. James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time, is on Raiklin’s list.A few years later, Trump named Flynn to be his national security adviser, a position he held for just 24 days. Flynn resigned in February 2017, following revelations that he’d had contact with Russia’s ambassador to the United States and given misleading statements to senior administration officials.A Trump-campaign official told me that Raiklin has “no role or affiliation with the campaign.” Raiklin seems to like to suggest a relationship by promoting his physical proximity to Trump. In a post on X, he shared a photo of himself standing feet from Trump while he spoke from the lectern at an unidentified rally. Also standing nearby was Kash Patel, a fierce Trump loyalist said to be on a shortlist for a senior national-security position in a second Trump administration, possibly director of the CIA.[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump]Raiklin is not shy about his aspirations. I sent him an email, requesting an interview about his deep-state list. Rather than reply, he posted a screenshot of my message on X and said he would “much rather discuss” the subject, as well as the direct appointment of electors through state legislatures, “with Americans operating in good faith.” He suggested a number of conservative podcasters he thought fit the bill.Raiklin invited me to post my questions on X, “in the interest of public transparency and exposure and [to] show the world you are operating in good faith.” So I did. “What is the purpose of this list?” I asked. “Why did you select these people? Do you intend to do anything to the people on this list?”Raiklin replied with links to videos of interviews he had already done with conservative media figures, including the former television star Roseanne Barr. On her show, Raiklin explained that although the deep state went by many other names—“permanent Washington,” “the Uniparty,” “the duopoly”—“I just simply call them war-criminal scum.”“I happen to be the guy that said, You know what? I’ve had enough,” he said. “Let me expose them by name, date, place, transgression, category. And let’s start educating the country on who they are, so that they’re not able to walk anywhere, whether it’s in the digital space or physical space, without them feeling the, let’s just say, wrath of their neighbors, friends, relatives, family.”Barr then sang to Raiklin lyrics from “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” to his obvious delight.It’s hard to know whether Raiklin is a true believer—and potentially dangerous—or just a profiteering troll. His unwillingness to respond to direct questions from a journalist suggests the latter.After I pressed Raiklin to answer me, rather than post interviews he’d done with friendly hosts inclined to agree with him, he invited me to direct further questions through Minnect, an app that lets you solicit advice from self-professed experts. According to his Minnect profile, Raiklin’s current rate for answering a question via text is $50. For $100, he’ll provide a recorded video response. A video call, “for the most personalized advice,” will run you $20 a minute, with a 15-minute minimum.“Are you asking me to book you for a fee?” I wrote in his X thread. I wanted to be sure I correctly understood Raiklin’s proposal. He replied, “And 50% of the revenue created from the article you write. Send the contract to [his email] for my team to review.”I declined.A few days later, he was back to campaign work, exhorting state officials to intervene in the presidential election.“Republican State Legislatures just need to hand their States’ electors to Trump, just like the Democrat elites handed the primary ‘win’ to Kamala Harris,” he wrote Wednesday on X, adding, “276 electors on Nov 5 ... CheckMate! Then we can Castrate the Deep State and Crush the Commies immediately on January 20, 2025.”

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The biggest risk our democracy faces this election is whether the votes cast will even matter. Any number of scenarios could play out. Ballots could be (and in fact have already been) lit on fire, or the courts could intervene to throw out votes. But the possibility we should fear the most is the one we still have a chance to prevent: the United States Congress overturning the election.Donald Trump in 2020 and early 2021 tried to use Congress to do just this, but he also tried so much else that remembering the details is hard. The details, however, are important. Trump’s desperation after losing the election led him to push to disallow votes everywhere he could—browbeating state legislatures, local election boards, state courts, federal courts, and ultimately the U.S. Congress on January 6. It all failed spectacularly, but that was an amateur effort, and one that would have required near-perfect execution to succeed. Joe Biden had won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, meaning that Trump would have had to overturn the results in several states to become president.This time, the election results might be closer. A tight margin would allow Trump to play in all of the same fora as last time, and now with people who have spent years developing the art of the steal. Even if Trump loses every court case, every attempt to persuade a state governor or state legislature to toss out the popular vote, and every maneuver to try to pressure state and local officials, he may yet use Congress as a backup plan.[Tyler Austin Harper: Of course Black men are drifting toward Trump]This is, I suspect, the “big secret” Trump mentioned this week, with a grin, to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. It’s a secret only because Trump wants to keep it in his back pocket, but it may be quite similar to what he attempted last time. Under laws passed by Congress, including the Electoral Count Act and the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, here’s what is supposed to happen: On January 6, 2025, the House and Senate are to assemble to watch as electoral votes from each state are opened and counted. If a member of Congress has an objection to the vote from any particular state, the objection must be signed by at least 20 percent of the members of both chambers for it to be taken up. Only two categories of objections are permissible: if a state’s electors were not “lawfully certified” (such as if a state certified a fake slate of electors), or if an elector’s vote for a candidate was not “regularly given” (such as if the electors were bribed, voted for an ineligible candidate, or voted in the wrong manner). Otherwise, Congress is to treat a governor’s certification of a slate as “conclusive.” If the 20 percent threshold is met in both chambers, the issue will be debated for up to two hours. Afterward, both the House and the Senate must vote. The objection is sustained if a simple majority supports it in both chambers. If a simple majority in both chambers agrees with an objection to the appointment of a state’s electors as not “lawfully certified,” then that state is excluded from the Electoral College, altering the denominator in the College. (If a particular elector is struck under the “regularly given” provision, by contrast, the denominator does not change.) This means that the number of votes needed to win in the Electoral College drops accordingly when a state’s electors are struck for not being “lawfully certified.” For example, if an objection to Pennsylvania’s slate were sustained, the state’s 19 electoral votes would be eliminated, and winning the presidency would take 260 electoral votes instead of 270. Congress’s 2022 Reform Act was intended to reduce opportunities for mischief, but even so, mischief may yet emerge. For example, what does “lawfully certified” mean? If Trump claims that undocumented immigrants voted in a state, does that mean the state’s vote was not “lawfully certified”? What about claims that absentee ballots were wrongly counted? Or that ballots arrived late?The answer to all of these is an unequivocal no. Lawfully certified has long had a much more precise and technical meaning about procedure—simply whether the state’s governor has certified the vote. That narrowness has led some to say that there is nothing to fear, especially because Congress has tightened the rules in the 2022 act and made it harder for Congress to second-guess election results. I very much hope that’s right. It should be right. It is right. But we are living in a world where the whole enterprise and meaning of law is contested, and where politicians stretch laws past their breaking point. James Madison warned us about this in The Federalist Papers, calling law a mere “parchment barrier.” This time, the parchment may not hold.Here’s how the nightmare scenario could play out. Imagine the election puts Kamala Harris in the lead, with 277 to Trump’s 261 votes. Further imagine that part of that lead comes from Pennsylvania. And then imagine that Pennsylvania decides to count mail-in ballots that are missing the required handwritten date on the envelope. Trump then challenges that practice, claiming that the Pennsylvania legislature has set rules that forbid counting those ballots. He goes through the Pennsylvania courts, all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which rejects his challenge and allows the ballots to be counted. Trump then goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also rejects his challenge.Although that should be the end of the madness, it may not be. On January 6, one-fifth of the House and one-fifth of the Senate can claim that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acted improperly by counting these ballots, in defiance of state law. They can assert that they have the right to interpret the law independently, and that Pennsylvania has acted lawlessly. The good news here is that Congress in 2022 foreclosed that independent congressional-determination route, and said that court decisions are binding on Congress when it acts on January 6. But there is room for tendentious arguments about what Congress actually legislated, and some (including Senator Ted Cruz) have already said they believe that the 2022 act is unconstitutional. So despite Congress’s very strong 2022 efforts in this regard, an unprincipled House and Senate could try to assert these powers. The assertion of such powers would be bogus, but a debate on the floor would then ensue, and if a raw majority of the House and Senate sustain the objection—no matter how specious it is—Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes would be struck, leaving 258 electoral votes for Harris and 260 for Trump. Trump would then be declared the president.Such a decision could and should be contested in court, and challenged all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the challenge should win. Congress would be defying the parts of the 2022 law that tightly restricted the types of objections, as well as provisions in the law that make court determinations conclusive on Congress. The question is, if Congress acts lawlessly, what will the Supreme Court do about it? Some are pointing to the Court’s recent decision to permit Virginia to strike 1,600 individuals from the voting rolls as evidence of its politicization, but defenders of the Court can point to the fact that it stayed out of the mischief in 2020, with hopes that it will act responsibly again in this go-round. The situations are, however, different. The 2020 request was on the part of the mischief makers, asking for the Court to affirmatively intervene in Trump’s favor—something the Court was apparently loath to do. This time, nonintervention favors Trump. The Court can say it is acting neutrally by not hearing the case and, by doing so, effectively hand the presidency to Trump in defiance of the will of the people.[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]The Supreme Court, of course, is fully capable of realizing the difference between affirmatively intervening in 2020 (where it was being asked to facilitate Trump’s theft of the election) and 2024 (where it would be asked to prevent such a thing). A decision to stay out in the face of congressional lawlessness should be unthinkable. And let us hope that it is (recall the Court just last year in Moore v. Harper rejected, by a 6–3 vote, a Republican Party theory that would have given it an immense advantage in federal elections). But just in case, one important thing must be done to prevent this nightmare from unfolding: vote.If as a result of the vote on November 5, Harris claims a decisive victory in the Electoral College, then there is little to fear, much as Trump might try to fight it. And even if the Electoral College is close, remember that Americans also vote for the House and the Senate on November 5. And the new House and Senate, not the existing ones, will make all of the decisions outlined above on January 6, 2025. If the Democrats control the House, or hold the Senate, this divided government will prevent the nightmare scenario from coming to fruition. And even if the Republicans control both houses in 2025, electing people who will honor the language and purpose of the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act—which, again, was written to prevent this scenario—will put an end to the madness.So when you vote, vote for candidates who will ensure that the will of the people will govern. James Madison in “Federalist No. 55” reminds us that the “degree of depravity in mankind … requires a certain degree of … distrust,” but “there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” Republican government, Madison went on, depends on the latter. Let us pray that those qualities lead Americans to the polls on Tuesday and, once there, that they vote to protect our democracy.