The Election Season That Fell Out of a Coconut Tree

At 9 P.M. on June 27th, David Chalian, CNN’s political director, was tucked into a crowded production truck on the grounds of the network’s campus, in Atlanta, watching Joe Biden, the eighty-one-year-old President, walk stiffly to a lectern set up on a nearby studio stage. “Folks, howff are ya?” he said. It was the earliest Presidential debate in recent memory. Biden’s team had wanted to refocus the campaign on Donald Trump, and away from questions about Biden’s age and fitness. Anita Dunn, a senior adviser for Biden at the time, later told Politico that it was the campaign’s belief, “bolstered by our research, that once voters actually were exposed to [Trump] again, they would be reminded strongly why they had not felt that they should reelect him.”

On July 1st, Representative Joe Morelle was in Rochester, New York, the largest city in his congressional district, when he got a text from a staff member informing him that the Supreme Court had ruled in Trump v. United States. In an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held, by a 6–3 margin, that Donald Trump had broad immunity from prosecution for acts he committed while President, potentially bringing an end to the Trump legal-case era. Morelle isn’t embarrassed to say that his mind went immediately to the Founding Fathers. “It struck me as so at odds with what they would have wanted,” he said. “We’d just ended a bloody war with a king, and chosen not to create another monarchy.”

On the night of June 27th, Lloyd Doggett, in his residence in Washington, D.C., turned on the TV to watch Donald Trump debate Joe Biden. Doggett, a Democrat from Austin, Texas, has represented the city in Congress since 1995; he was seventy-seven, four months younger than Trump and four years younger than Biden. “I was stunned by the President’s inability to respond, to point out the many lies that Trump told,” Doggett said. At one point, Biden said, “I’m gonna continue to move until we get the total ban on the—the total initiative relative to what we’re gonna do with—more Border Patrol.” Trump responded, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

Anna Moneymaker, a twenty-nine-year-old photographer for Getty, woke up early on the morning of July 13th. She was staying at a Hilton hotel near the Pittsburgh airport; she’d come to western Pennsylvania to take pictures of a Donald Trump rally in nearby Butler. Moneymaker put on her work uniform—loose-fitting cargo pants, a polo shirt, and a ball cap—and ate a breakfast of bacon and eggs (“Before a day of shooting, it’s good to have something filling, to give you energy,” she said) before heading to the grounds of the Butler Farm Show, where she set up her equipment and waited for Trump to arrive. “I was walking around, shooting the crowd,” she said. “At one point, they were playing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ and people were getting annoyed. They wanted Kid Rock.”

Salena Zito, a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner, had been scheduled to interview Donald Trump for five minutes, before his rally in Butler began. Trump’s team kept changing the plan, so Zito figured they were probably going to end up cancelling at the last second—it happens. Then a member of Trump’s campaign texted Zito to switch the plans again. Would she wait until after the rally for the interview, and fly to Bedminster, New Jersey, with Trump, so they could have a longer conversation? The campaign would provide her with transportation home. Zito’s daughter, Shannon, works as her photographer, and Shannon’s husband, Michael, had come to the rally with her. The trio was at the foot of the stage when shots started ringing out.

When Joe Biden announced his withdrawal—in a letter posted to social media at 1:46 P.M.—Bakari Sellers, a lawyer and a former South Carolina legislator, glimpsed the news on his phone, while packing a suitcase at home in Columbia. The announcement had the effect of a starting gun: Sellers was part of what he called an “uncoördinated infrastructure” to cement support for Kamala Harris as the nominee in the event that Biden stepped aside. Sellers “went to work,” he said, calling dozens of people to ask for explicit endorsements of Harris. Having previously served on the rules committee of the Democratic National Convention, he was focussed mostly on securing the support of Convention delegates who would have the actual power to choose the nominee in the event of a contested Convention.

The pop musician Charli XCX was lounging by her pool, in Los Angeles, waiting for her fiancé to finish making lunch. She fired off a tweet: “kamala IS brat.” Not long afterward, the Harris campaign would undergo a rebrand. It changed its banner, on X, to a lime-green background with “kamala hq” written in low-res text—a reference to the cover art for Charli XCX’s album “brat.” Cable-news anchors puzzled over the term, and what it had to do with Harris, given that Charli XCX had previously described it as representing someone who might have “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.”

As Kamala Harris prepared to address a gathering of a Black sorority in Houston—Sigma Gamma Rho’s Biennial Boule—Donald Trump strode across a stage in Chicago to sit for a panel interview at the annual conference for the National Association of Black Journalists. “There is no question that this was a big risk for him and his team,” Semafor’s political reporter Kadia Goba said. “I think he did it because he and Republicans at large think they have an advantage with Black people and could chip away at some of Biden and Harris’s inroads with this community.”

Jessica Reed Kraus, who writes a Substack called House Inhabit, was mulling a nap at her home in Orange County when she received a video from the journalist Olivia Nuzzi. The X account of the independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., had posted, “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @NewYorker. . . .” Kraus watched as Kennedy, seated at a kitchen table filled with slabs of meat, told the comedian Roseanne Barr about the time when, ten years earlier, he had loaded a dead baby bear into the trunk of his car and, after a day of falconing and a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, decided to dump the carcass in Central Park and make it look as if the bear had been killed by a cyclist. Kraus and Nuzzi, who had profiled Kennedy the previous fall, were amused.

On August 5th, the night before Kamala Harris was expected to announce her running mate, Jacob Reitan decided not to set an alarm. Harris had narrowed down her list to two candidates, one of whom was Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. Reitan knew the governor personally—Walz had served as the faculty adviser to the first Gay-Straight Alliance at West High School, in Mankato, Minnesota, which Reitan had founded in 1999. Now forty-two years old, Reitan had gone on to become a personal-injury and disability attorney and an L.G.B.T.Q.-rights activist. He had also maintained a friendship with Walz and his wife, Gwen, Reitan’s former English teacher. To avoid sitting around and waiting for the news to break, Reitan slept in.

Nate Holden, a ninety-five-year-old former city councilman and state senator, was lounging in bed, in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles, watching MSNBC, when a feed from Mar-a-Lago, all flags and gilded surfaces, appeared onscreen: former President Trump was holding a press conference, his first since Kamala Harris had replaced Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket. A reporter asked Trump to comment on Harris’s long-ago “relationship with Willie Brown,” the former mayor of San Francisco, and “how that intersected with her career trajectory.” Trump’s reply? “Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” he said. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is the end.”

This summer, Louis Money, a middle-aged former employee of a “slew” of pre-Internet porn shops around Greensboro, North Carolina, began preparing for the release of a punk album called “True Stories” with his band, Trailer Park Orchestra. The album’s concept, Money explained recently, “was basically fucked-up shit that we’d done.” Money’s contribution wasn’t news to his friends, but it was to the world: North Carolina’s MAGA Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, still hadn’t paid him for a “hardcore bootleg porn” tape. Money said he had cut the video in the early two-thousands after a trip to New York, where the thematic offerings were more plentiful: “fisting, peeing, pooping.” Money said of the tape, “I can’t tell you if Mark was into it. But he took it and never paid me.”

Italo Medelius was born in Peru, grew up on the shore of North Carolina, went to college in Asheville, and got a law degree in Durham. To put himself through school, he worked as a packer in an Amazon warehouse. When Bernie Sanders ran for President in 2020, Medelius volunteered; he was particularly impressed by one of Sanders’s surrogates, the public intellectual Cornel West, whom he heard on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “I believed the campaign message of a political revolution—that you could make these big changes from within the Democratic Party,” Medelius said. After 2020, he stayed involved, serving on the executive committee of the North Carolina Democratic Party, but he soon grew disillusioned.

In late August, J. D. Vance walked into Holt’s Sweet Shop, in Valdosta, Georgia, near the Florida line, with an entourage. “The zoo has come to town,” he announced to a curly-haired young white man and a Black woman who stood behind the counter, seemingly bemused. As C-SPAN cameras rolled—and the woman asked not to be filmed—Vance placed an order with an unusual coda: “a lot of glazed here, some sprinkle stuff, some of these cinnamon rolls—just whatever makes sense.” Casually, he said, “I’m J. D. Vance. I’m running for Vice-President. Good to see you.” “O.K.,” the woman responded. Vance plodded on, trying to dislodge some bit of affinity.

Allison Jaslow often goes to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the fallen. She served in Iraq and runs a veterans’ organization in Washington, D.C. “I literally just like to walk the rows of headstones and honestly just spend some time seeing people’s names,” Jaslow said. In late August, she’d gone to Section 60, where casualties of America’s recent foreign wars are buried, to see a friend’s twin brother. A few days later, Jaslow was with her sister in Colorado, when her phone started vibrating with texts and calls from fellow-veterans. Donald Trump was at Arlington for a wreath-laying ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the Abbey Gate bombing, in which thirteen American service members were killed during the Biden Administration’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan.

For the past year, Moises has lived with his wife and their twelve-year-old daughter in a run-down apartment at a red brick housing complex in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. When the family first moved in, the place had been promising in one respect: it was cheaper than the alternatives. The family was from Venezuela, and had just spent four months travelling to the U.S. through some of the most dangerous territory in the world. A generous stranger in Texas had given them bus fare to Colorado. When they arrived in Aurora, they had nothing. They were starting from scratch.

Not long before the second Presidential debate, a woman from Springfield, Ohio, posted a message to a local Facebook group about a missing cat, and issued a “warning to all about our beloved pets.” The cat belonged to the friend of a neighbor’s daughter, the post went on, and the neighbor had “stepped out of her car, looked towards a neighbors house, where Haitians live, & saw her cat hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat.” Laura Loomer, the podcast host and online agitator, who had been posting about the nascent pet-eating crisis, was at home when she got a call from Donald Trump asking if she wanted to attend the debate, in Philadelphia, as his guest.

The first—and final—debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was over. But the election had only just begun. At around 11 P.M., Taylor Swift posted a photograph of herself holding one of her three cats, a ragdoll named Benjamin Button, on Instagram. “Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” she wrote, in the caption. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.” She described Harris as “a steady-handed, gifted leader,” and praised Walz’s record of standing up for L.G.B.T.Q.+ and reproductive rights. “We can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” she wrote, signing off with a reference to J. D. Vance’s now famous description of Democrats. “Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady.”

In the early hours of September 15th, Trump posted on Truth Social, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.” Around brunchtime, he was off to play golf. Trump and his friend Steve Witkoff settled on Trump’s course in West Palm Beach, about ten minutes away from his home at Mar-a-Lago. While Trump and Witkoff were on the fifth hole, a Secret Service agent scouting the sixth hole noticed a gun poking through the bushes. Agents fired toward the gun, jumped on Trump for the second time in two months, and then whisked him away in a golf cart. Ryan Routh, the would-be assassin, had been waiting on the course for more than twelve hours. (Routh, who was charged with attempted assassination, has pleaded not guilty.)

When the media reporter Oliver Darcy learned that Olivia Nuzzi, a reporter for New York, had engaged in a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—“I don’t want to say how,” he told me—he quickly texted Nuzzi and a representative for the magazine. “I was pretty nondescript in what I asked them,” Darcy said. “I think I didn’t even want to type it out, because it was such an explosive thing to put in a text.” Almost a year earlier, Nuzzi had written a story on Kennedy’s fringe vaccine skepticism and his potential spoiler campaign for President, in which she described a scene driving with him in his “dog car” to a morning hike in Los Angeles.

Aside from one incident, Kevin Roberts’s time as a history professor at New Mexico State University is remembered fondly by his former colleagues. He went to department potlucks. He rode bikes with faculty members. One professor ran into him at a Renaissance Faire. After Roberts left, in 2005, many of his co-workers lost track of him—until they saw headlines, recently, that Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, was an architect of Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page conservative blueprint for building a right-wing administrative state. “We were on an e-mail thread,” Jamie Bronstein, a professor of British and U.S. history, recalled. “One person said, ‘Do you remember when he killed his neighbor’s dog with a shovel?’ ”

When Liz Cheney, a Republican, and formerly the lone representative from Wyoming in the U.S. House, was scheduled to endorse Kamala Harris at an event in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party, the Harris campaign asked her what music she’d like to play. Cheney is the fifty-eight-year-old daughter of a former Vice-President. She had been a prominent Republican for most of her life, and, since January 6th, she has been perhaps Donald Trump’s most high-profile critic within the G.O.P. But she had never been such a draw on the stump that she needed walk-up music. “I happened to be with one of my daughters when the request came in,” Cheney said at this year’s New Yorker Festival, “and she immediately said, ‘Change,’ Taylor Swift.”

The McDonald’s where Donald Trump made French fries is in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, a northern suburb of Philadelphia. For about an hour, while the former President was trained at the fry station, police surrounded the restaurant, holding back pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators and shutting down Street Road, an east-west path on William Penn’s seventeenth-century maps which is today redundantly named. (Bucks County historians conjecture that “street” once meant “paved.”) Street Road starts about thirteen miles west of the McDonald’s, near Nike Park, named for the Nike missile battery, now defunct, that was installed when East Coast cities were ringed with surface-to-air missiles, in case there was a Soviet ICBM attack.

Sai Montilla, an aspiring comedian from Miami, was visiting his mother in Brooklyn recently when he went for a walk, pulled out his phone, and checked his social feeds. That morning, they were full of posts about the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who, the night before, had opened for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden. Hinchcliffe’s offensive set included lines about Black people and watermelons, tightwad Jews, rock-throwing Palestinians, Latinos “coming inside” the country, and Puerto Rico, which he called a “floating island of garbage.” It hadn’t gone over well. The Trump campaign had put out a statement, distancing its candidate from the comedian.

When Tammra Norman (Pretty Tammi the DJ) was tapped to perform at Kamala Harris’s “closing argument” rally, at the Ellipse, in Washington, D.C., she phoned her sister, Tish, whom she calls a “dope m.c. and party host.” Tish, like Tammi, is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Harris’s sorority, and Tammi knew her sister wouldn’t mind lending her talents to a fellow-A.K.A. She and Tish, who live about eleven minutes apart in Atlanta, have been officially working together for five years; the sisters call themselves “the inclusive d.j.s,” because their musical palette is so wide-ranging. Tammi wanted to be a d.j. when she was a teen-ager, but initially found a calling as an educator. In 2014, when she was forty-two, she took a five-week crash course in turntabling and launched her d.j. business.