Whatever happens on Tuesday, the presidency of Donald Trump has transformed the G.O.P. By Elaina Plott

November 1, 2020

3Copyright © 2020 The New York Times

Ph

oto

gra

ph

by E

rika

La

rse

n/R

ed

ux, fo

r T

he

Ne

w Y

ork

Tim

es

November 1, 2020

7 Screenland Town Square By Mattathias Schwartz / 11 Talk Armstrong Williams By David Marchese / 14 The Ethicist An Adult Child Returns

By Kwame Anthony Appiah / 16 Diagnosis Throbbing Head and Vision Trouble By Lisa Sanders, M.D. / 18 Letter of Recommendation The ‘‘Purge’’ Films

By Blair McClendon / 20 Eat Shiro, a Ground-Chickpea Stew By Samin Nosrat

4 Contributors / 5 The Thread / 10 Poem / 14 Judge John Hodgman / 19 Tip / 40, 44, 46 Puzzles / 40 Puzzle Answers

Nicodemus Acosta, a Navy veteran,

was convicted in Kuwait for dealing

marijuana — a crime he did not

commit — and spent a year in jail

there. Page 28.

Behind the Cover Gail Bichler, design director: ‘‘Th is week’s cover story, by Elaina Plott, argues that over the past four years, the Republican Party

has become almost completely defi ned by its members’ loyalty to President Trump. At the center of the cover is the Republican Party’s elephant. Its trunk,

made up of headlines from Trump’s presidency, snakes outward to reveal the president’s profi le.’’ Cover illustration by Mike McQuade.

22 In His Image

By Elaina Plott / The Republican

Party is now Donald Trump’s party,

whether he wins or loses the

election. Its politicians, activists

and voters are still figuring out

what that means.

28 Left Behind

By Doug Bock Clark / Over the last

five years, at least 28 American

military contractors have been

imprisoned in Kuwait — some of

them on trumped-up drug charges,

and many after being physically

abused. Why has the government

done so little to help them?

34 Baseball’s Quiet Season

By Rowan Ricardo Phillips / Empty

stadiums, player protests and

Covid-19 outbreaks shook up the

sport. Maybe that’s a good thing.

4

Contributors

11.1.20

‘‘Left Behind,’’Page 28

‘‘Baseball’s Quiet Season,’’Page 34

Diagnosis,Page 16

Screenland,Page 7

‘‘In His Image,’’Page 22

Doug Bock Clark

Rowan Ricardo

Phillips

Lisa Sanders, M.D.

Mattathias Schwartz

Dear Reader: What Prompts The Biggest Eye Roll From You?

Lisa Sanders is an internist and associate

professor at the Yale School of Medicine in

New Haven, Conn. She has written the

Diagnosis column since 2002, and it was

recently developed into a Netflix series.

Elaina Plott is a national political reporter

for The New York Times, where she covers the

Republican Party and conservatism. Her

last article for the magazine was a profile of

Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s former attorney

general, who was permanently exiled from

Trump’s orbit for a seeming show of disloyalty.

Her cover story for this issue explores the degree

to which Trump’s takeover of the Republican

Party has been at once total and superficial.

‘‘The fact that the only guiding principle of today’s

G.O.P. is loyalty to Donald Trump has in many

ways been great for party unity,’’ Plott says.

‘‘The problem for the party is that Trump has had

no interest in forming a cogent ideological

vision to propel it in his absence. So when he’s

gone, whether that’s in 2021 or 2025, what’s

left of this institution?’’

Doug Bock Clark is a writer whose book,

‘‘The Last Whalers,’’ about a hunter- gatherer

tribe grappling with globalization, won

the Lowell Thomas Travel Book Silver Award.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of ‘‘Living

Weapon’’ and ‘‘The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey.’’

He won the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary

Sports Writing.

Mattathias Schwartz is a contributing writer

for the magazine who lives in Washington.

He previously wrote a profile of Attorney General

William P. Barr.

The magazine publishes the results of a study conducted online in March 2020 by The New York Times’s research- and- analytics department, refl ecting the opinions of 2,250 subscribers who chose to participate.

Editor in Chief JAKE SILVERSTEIN

Deputy Editors JESSICA LUSTIG,

BILL WASIK

Managing Editor ERIKA SOMMER

Creative Director GAIL BICHLER

Director of Photography KATHY RYAN

Art Director BEN GRANDGENETT

Features Editor ILENA SILVERMAN

Politics Editor CHARLES HOMANS

Culture Editor SASHA WEISS

Digital Director BLAKE WILSON

Story Editors NITSUH ABEBE,

SHEILA GLASER,

CLAIRE GUTIERREZ,

LUKE MITCHELL,

DEAN ROBINSON,

WILLY STALEY

At War Editor LAUREN KATZENBERG

Assistant Managing Editor JEANNIE CHOI

Associate Editors IVA DIXIT,

KYLE LIGMAN

Poetry Editor NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Staff Writers SAM ANDERSON,

EMILY BAZELON,

RONEN BERGMAN,

TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER,

C. J. CHIVERS,

PAMELA COLLOFF,

NICHOLAS CONFESSORE,

SUSAN DOMINUS,

MAUREEN DOWD,

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES,

JAZMINE HUGHES,

JENEEN INTERLANDI,

MARK LEIBOVICH,

JONATHAN MAHLER,

DAVID MARCHESE,

WESLEY MORRIS,

JENNA WORTHAM

At War Reporter JOHN ISMAY

Digital Art Director KATE LARUE

Designers CLAUDIA RUBÍN,

RACHEL WILLEY

Deputy Director of Photography JESSICA DIMSON

Senior Photo Editor AMY KELLNER

Photo Editor KRISTEN GEISLER

Contributing Photo Editor DAVID CARTHAS

Photo Assistant PIA PETERSON

Copy Chief ROB HOERBURGER

Copy Editors HARVEY DICKSON,

DANIEL FROMSON,

MARGARET PREBULA,

ANDREW WILLETT

Head of Research NANDI RODRIGO

Research Editors RILEY BLANTON,

ALEX CARP,

CYNTHIA COTTS,

JAMIE FISHER,

LU FONG,

TIM HODLER,

ROBERT LIGUORI,

LIA MILLER,

STEVEN STERN,

MARK VAN DE WALLE,

BILL VOURVOULIAS

Production Chief ANICK PLEVEN

Production Editors PATTY RUSH,

HILARY SHANAHAN

Managing Director, MARILYN McCAULEY

Specialty Printing

Manager, Magazine Layout THOMAS GILLESPIE

Editorial Assistant ALEXANDER SAMAHA

NYT FOR KIDS

Editorial Director CAITLIN ROPER

Art Director DEB BISHOP

Editor AMBER WILLIAMS

Staff Editor MOLLY BENNET

Associate Editor LOVIA GYARKYE

Designer NAJEEBAH AL-GHADBAN

Social Editor ALEXA DÍAZ

Elaina Plott

5%

Did not answer

28%

No-fat diet18%

Kombucha15%

Crocs 11%

Slime

10%

Spinners 10%

Beanie Babies3%

Rainbow Loom

5Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri

‘When the masks come off and there is more facial hair, the exploration of ‘‘Why?’’ is arguably fundamental in these times.’

The Thread

THE STORY,

ON INSTAGRAM

I love your cover art lately! @doubleoroos

comments, both good and bad. My young son at onetime said that my hair was turn-ing white but my mustache was going green. Keep it.Nicholas Paslawsky, Manasquan, N.J.

I wanted this piece to go on forever. I thank Wesley Morris for his witty, lyrical writing and intelligent commentary about his world — our world — one we should all be trying to understand together. When the masks come off and there is more facial hair, the exploration of ‘‘Why?’’ is arguably fundamental in these times. S Nesbitt, Muir Beach, Calif.

What an incredibly poignant piece of writing. The several ties between his-torical fi gures, family relatives and Mor-ris’s own self are so intricately drawn and woven together. You know a piece is transcendent when you can so clearly see your own life experience at the same time. I feel a form of double duty, read-ing the lines and between them, like the spacing between the letters are a mirror into my own dedication to long hair. I’m sure there’s a deep and complex history of long hair for Chinese men, though I haven’t put into words my own unspoken desire to maintain long hair. It may not have the same political weightiness of the mustache and of being Black, but it’s an avenue nonetheless worth mining as another facet of self-identifi cation. Brandon Wang, Brooklyn, N.Y.

I’m an old white man. I think you carry the mustache well. What I’m thinking, though, is that nonwhite men are compelled to see themselves through so many lenses — the famous double consciousness — while white men (especially straight white men) are not. This lens-shifting strikes me as

Readers respond to the 10.18.20 issue.

RE: MY MUSTACHE, MY SELF

Wesley Morris wrote about growing a mus-tache in quarantine, and how it led to a deep consideration of his own Blackness.

Mr. Morris, your piece grabbed my mind with a torrent of imagery, masculine rela-tional dynamics, crafted storytelling, deep honesty and exposure to aspects of life that I have never felt, or perhaps even known. I was drawn to learn more of your many cultural references. But the strength of your narrative captivated me most. I could not stop reading. Thank you for sharing so deeply of yourself.John Havlicek, Th ousand Oaks, Calif.

Thank you for one of the best reading experiences I have had in a long time. Your writing is exquisite and enjoyable. I wish I had discovered you when you wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle. On a personal note, I started to grow my mustache on the day I arrived in Vietnam, in June 1968. It is part of me, and I have never considered shaving it off . I think I would be afraid of what I looked like. Beards and goatees have come and gone over the years, but the mustache is who I am . In my opinion, your mustache is who you are, and I think you should continue to wear it with pride.Jim Cercone, San Francisco

I was pulled in as soon as I saw the word ‘‘mustache,’’ and enjoyed every word of your article. My mundane reason for growing a mustache at the age of 16 (it took two years) was a snowball that hit me in the lip and left me with fi ve stitch-es. From there, I never looked back. I’m 65 now and have lived through endless

both exhausting and insightful. I’ve had beards, long hair, short hair, mustaches and never wondered what they meant — which I can see is both an amazing priv-ilege and a missed opportunity. John, California

Wesley Morris is a great critic, in my humble opinion. But this piece shows the state of our society, especially our nar-cissism and our national obsession with identity distinctions, which has reached a level of obsession in all aspects of life that makes little sense to most of the world’s inhabitants. On one level, we have here a pleasant piece of entertainment and a resonating truth about the mustache. On another level, everyone is writing heart-felt essays that a decade ago would have been pieces in The Onion.Daniel Morris, Massachusetts

Wesley, as with everything you write, this had me racing to the bottom, and then sad it was over. I often think about the vari-ous modes through which women express themselves via hair, and have considered that facial hair is the equivalent for men. Your exploration of the mustache through the lens of being Black and gay illuminates the semiotics of how we groom ourselves so well. And I love the turtleneck. Emily, Austin, Tex.

CORRECTION:

An interview on Sept. 27 about Ilhan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman from Min-nesota, referred incorrectly to her family’s arrival in the United States in 1995. Th ey came to the United States as refugees. Th ey were not granted asylum status.

Send your thoughts to magazine@nytimes.com.

711.1.20

Screenland

Th e most revealing contrast in the presidential debates came during the one that didn’t happen. ⬤ By Mattathias Schwartz ⬤ Perhaps the town hall should have stayed in town. With its move to TV, it has become a patronizing format. The millions of muted viewers are supposed to believe themselves part of the ‘‘town,’’ despite having had no role in choosing the handful of ‘‘citizens’’ whose embodiment of

Town Square

8 11.1.20

So

urc

e p

ho

tog

rap

hs,

ab

ove

: H

eid

i G

utm

an

/AB

C, v

ia G

ett

y I

ma

ge

s;

scre

en

gra

bs

fro

m Y

ouT

ub

e. O

pe

nin

g p

ag

e: S

cre

en

gra

b f

rom

Yo

uTu

be

.

Screenland

Photo illustration by Mark Harris

the average American’s idea of an average American has earned them the privilege of asking a question. The resulting spectacle is part ritual, a performance of account-ability and deliberation. It is also a parody, in which the consent of the governed boils down to the power switch on the remote.

Born in 1992 and patterned after the then-thriving afternoon talk-show for-mat, the tradition of presidential town halls puttered along until October of this year, when, for reasons of candidate health and national sanity, the debate in that format was scrapped. Donald Trump and Joe Biden instead addressed two sep-arate town halls — Trump at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and Biden at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The

weirdest thing about the double-town-hall format was its simultaneity, which undermined the conceit that the intended audience was undecided voters, looking to make an informed decision. Instead, Americans all had to vote beforehand, in a sense, by choosing between screens.

In Philadelphia, Biden sat in a soft white chair across from George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. The circular stage had been done up to look like a stately living room at the bottom of an abbreviated theater-in-the-round. The voters were scattered high and wide across social distances. To meet their eyes, Biden sometimes had to pivot and peer up into the lights, with the minor but palpable discomfort that has been threaded through the entirety

of his pandemic-infl ected campaign. In contrast with Trump — who has contin-ued to hold White House gatherings and tightly packed rallies as if everything were normal — Biden has given 2020’s dystopian precautions a starring role in his campaign, with chalk circles and long tables cutting him off from his supporters.

At the town hall, the strangeness of the set backdropped a performance so understated that it verged on boring. Around the dial on NBC, Trump perched against a tall stool on a stage that put him on equal footing with the voters. He treat-ed their questions as prompts; it was left up to the moderator to try and pin him down on matters like white supremacy and the peaceful transfer of power, on

Biden showed one of his rarer qualities — an almost painfully keen awareness of his own inadequacies.

9

which Trump previously tried to stake out some provocative middle ground. Biden seemed to be betting that Americans would choose reassurance over drama. At its core, his pitch was conservative. Some of his nimbler moments came when he ducked questions, one on the Supreme Court, another on his own proposed coronavirus response.

Stephanopoulos introduced Biden’s fourth questioner as a progressive Dem-ocrat. His name was Cedric Humphrey; he was from Harrisburg and was now in his senior year at the University of Pitts-burgh. Humphrey proceeded to throw the night’s only hardball question — allud-ing to the time when Biden, his temper fl aring, had said, ‘‘If you have a problem

fi guring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.’’

Humphrey linked that gaff e to a larg-er concern. ‘‘What do you have to say to young Black voters who see voting for you as further participation in a system that continually fails to protect them?’’ he asked.

Biden embarked on a rambling reply. He quoted John Lewis. He cited a jumbled array of policy initiatives — some in the past, some for the future; some intended to help Black institutions and citizens spe-cifi cally, some targeted at broader popu-lations including small-business owners and fi rst-time home buyers. Humphrey didn’t look convinced. His question had made it clear that he wasn’t looking for piecemeal reform.

Five minutes in, Stephanopoulos tried to cut Biden off . ‘‘Did you hear what you needed to hear?’’ he asked Humphrey.

‘‘Uh,’’ Humphrey replied. ‘‘I think so.’’ Biden seemed aware that he hadn’t

closed the deal. ‘‘There’s a lot more,’’ he said. ‘‘If you can hang around afterward, I’ll tell you more.’’

Biden knew as well as anyone that just as there was no ‘‘town,’’ there was unlikely to be any ‘‘afterward,’’ at least not with Humphrey. Biden’s occasional willingness to press his phone number into the hands of a few of the every-day people he meets is evidence that he understands the impersonal nature of political representation. Campaigns require candidates to mass-produce

America’s first town-

hall debate was

held in Dorchester,

Mass., in 1633.

The oldest town hall

in continuous use

is in Pelham, Mass.,

and dates to 1743.

10 11.1.20

Biden’s commitment was not so much to a fi xed policy platform as to an endangered set of traditions and manners.

Illustration by R. O. Blechman

moments of intimacy; on the trail Biden displays a quixotic determination to salvage something real from them, to forge lasting friendships with a security guard in an elevator or a boy struggling with a stutter, genuine relationships that are in turn harvested by his cam-paign. As he tried to forge this kind of connection with Humphrey, Biden showed one of his rarer qualities — an almost painfully keen awareness of his own inadequacies.

‘‘No, but I really mean it,’’ he said, and rambled a bit further, through an account of his own (white) family’s fi nancial dif-fi culties, before fi nally chancing on the words he was looking for. ‘‘You’re behind an eight-ball,’’ he said. ‘‘The vast majority of people of color are behind an eight-ball.’’ Here was some safe middle ground. ‘‘Behind an eight-ball’’ didn’t contradict Biden’s broadly optimistic rhetoric of America as the land of possibilities, but it did at least hint at something structural and endemic about racial inequality.

Stephanopoulos cut in again to switch to a diff erent questioner. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ Biden said softly, turning back to Hum-phrey. It sounded as if he were sorry for his answer, which didn’t go as far as Humphrey might have wanted, but also sorry that they didn’t have more time for some back-and-forth. Within the fake context of the fake town hall, he believed that he and Humphrey might actually be talking to, and not past, each other. His commitment was not so much to a fi xed policy platform as to an endangered set of traditions and manners, one that rejected Trump’s pol-itics of contempt.

In the fi nal debate a week later, Biden groped for a metaphor to convincingly portray the country as a union that crisis could strengthen rather than divide. He eventually landed on the classic trope of a middle-class family at a kitchen table, faced with tough economic choices. The cliché was too much for Trump, who interrupted the moderator to get in a rebuttal.

‘‘A typical political statement,’’ he said, and then added, snidely: ‘‘The family, around the table, everything.’’ Trump knew that the merciless shattering of collective illusions was what the voters of 2016 had wanted from him. ‘‘I’m not a typical politician,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s why I got elected.’’�

Th is is what we have had to do, amid pandemic, grief, political chaos, fi res, human rights disasters: continue on with our lives. Doing chores . . . taking walks . . . teaching kids . . . trying to stay steady. In his brilliant forthcoming book, ‘‘Tethered to Stars,’’ Fady Joudah writes about the mysterious cosmos swirling with intricate linkages — as his phone is pinging. Ah, yes, Jerusalem, the Holy City! Right now, let’s call all our cities holy. Let’s hope our trees continue to communicate, whatever humans can or can’t accomplish.

Screenland

Poem Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye

Gemini By Fady Joudah

After yoga, I took my car to the shop.Coils, spark plugs, computer chips, and a two-mile walk home, our fossilized public transportation, elementary school recess hour, kids whirling joy, the all-familiar neighborhood. And then another newly demolished house. How long since I’ve been out walking? A message appeared on my phone: an American literary magazinecalling for a special issue on Jerusalem, deadline approaching, art and the ashes of light. At the construction sitethe live oak that appeared my age when I became a father was now being dismembered. The machinery and its men: almost always men, poor or cheap labor, colored with American dreams. The permit to snuff the tree was legally obtained. The new house is likely destined for a nice couple with children. Their children won’t know there was a tree. I paused to watch the live oak brutalized limb by limb until its trunk stood hanged, and the wind couldn’t bear the place:who loves the smell of fresh sap in the morning, the waft of SOS the tree’s been sending to other trees? How many feathers will relocate since nearby can absorb the birds?Farewell for days on end. They were digging a hole around the tree’s base to uproot and chop it then repurpose its life.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her most recent book is ‘‘Everything Comes Next — Collected & New Poems’’ (Greenwillow Books). Fady Joudah’s fi fth book of original poems is ‘‘Tethered to Stars’’ (Milkweed Editions, March 2021). He has translated poetry collections from Arabic and has received a Gugg enheim Fellowship, the Griffi n Poetry Prize and the PEN Translation Prize. He practices internal medicine in Houston.

Talk By David Marchese

11Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya

Armstrong Williams on Republican soul-searching: ‘As a Christian, I have a lot to pray about, because there are things about the president that I turn a blind eye to.’

12 11.1.20

Talk

For more than 30 years, Armstrong Wil-liams has been a Zelig of American conser-vatism. In the 1980s, he worked as an aide to Clarence Thomas when Thomas was the head of the Equal Employment Opportuni-ty Commission. Then Williams popped up again alongside Thomas in the early 1990s, acting as a spokesman during Thomas’s contentious Supreme Court nomination hearing. From there, Williams moved to TV and radio, hosting nationally syndicat-ed talk shows as well as writing op-eds, also nationally syndicated. He got wide-spread negative attention in 2005 when it was revealed that he’d been cheerleading for the No Child Left Behind Act without publicly disclosing that he was being paid by the Department of Education to pro-mote it.1 The controversy slowed Williams, who advised Ben Carson during his 2016 presidential campaign, relatively briefl y: ‘‘The Armstrong Williams Show’’ current-ly airs across the country, mostly on affi l-iates owned by the right- leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group. (The same Sinclair from which Williams bought several TV stations starting in 2013 under very, very favorable terms.) And last month, President Trump tapped Williams, who recently published a new book, ‘‘What Black and White America Must Do Now,’’ to conduct one of his fi rst interviews after announcing his administration’s economic plan for Black Americans. ‘‘There is no way that someone who’s liberal and who happens to be Black could get a chance to sit down and talk to the president,’’ Williams says. ‘‘That’s just the way politics work.’’

You’ve been deeply involved in conser-vative politics for a long time. You just published a book about race. How has President Trump changed the dynamics there? This is going to shock you: There has been no person who I’ve been up close to that has been more serious about the Black vote than Donald Trump. This guy has had real relationships, whether it was Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. He had a relationship with Oprah Winfrey, with Don King. He may not always use the best rhetoric, but I don’t get bogged down in what he says — even what he did with the Central Park Five.2 This guy has real relationships in that community.Can you think of a relationship the pres-ident has with a Black person who isn’t rich or famous? His chauff eurs. I can’t get into it, because that’s personal. You

may think that he brags about everything, but the relationship he has with everyday Black people, where he empowers them, he wants no credit for it.If Trump loses re- election, and particu-larly if he loses decisively, will there be any conservative soul- searching about the best way to move forward? Here is my answer: There are two types of Trump supporters. One is a cult following; they support him no matter what. Then there are the other ones. Much more intelli-gent. Much more sophisticated. They may not like his character, but they think, I’m going to hold my nose because it suits my agenda. That’s the calculation they make. As a Christian, I have a lot to pray about, because there are things about the president that I turn a blind eye to. I realize that I’m dumbing down my values in the process. So we make this calculation: It’s about the economy. It’s about deregulation. It’s about creating an environment where entrepreneurship and business can thrive. But when I go to bed at night and I get on my knees

and pray, I never lie to myself. Because I know exactly what he is.So what is he? He is fl awed! This man, the fact that he was demanding to go back to the White House, where he could expose people to the corona virus? He should be selfl ess. How can you even think about exposing people? That bothers me. He goes out on the debate stage, and he doesn’t condemn white supremacy? Just condemn them! I don’t know if he’s capa-ble of being normal. People are trying to say he was faking having Covid-19. I know this man got the virus, OK? You know how I know? My videographer, a few days after the interview with the president, said he wasn’t feeling well.3 I said, ‘‘Where do you think all this started?’’ He said, ‘‘With the interview of the president.’’ I had to stop to think. What if he’s right? So I do know this man got it. There is no doubt in my mind.You think your cameraman caught the corona virus from the president? I’m not going to speculate. Listen, I was saying the same thing the president was saying about masks. I’m not saying that

Below: President Ronald Reagan greeting Armstrong Williams and Richard Pryor at a Black History Month event in 1983. Opposite page: Williams interviewing President Trump in September.

David Marchese

is the magazine’s Talk columnist.

1 USA Today broke the story that Williams had been paid $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind. Multiple newspapers stopped carrying Williams’s columns in the aftermath of his failure to have publicly clarified his business relationship with the Bush administration. It wasn’t Williams’s only controversy: He settled sexual-harassment lawsuits in 1999 and 2017.

2 In 1989, five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongly convicted of the rape of a jogger in Central Park. In the wake of that crime, Trump took out full-page newspaper advertisements calling for New York State to adopt the death penalty.

3 Armstrong interviewed the president on his show on Sept. 25. The president’s positive coronavirus test was made public on Oct. 2.

4 In comparison, Trump won 6 percent of the Black vote in the 2016 election.

5 In addition to his media gigs and ownership of TV stations, Williams has investments in hotels and real estate.

6 Williams was an aide to Thurmond, a South Carolina senator who was well known for his longstanding opposition to civil rights legislation.

7 The Platinum Plan called for a nearly $500 billion increase in ‘‘access to capital in Black communities.’’

13

any longer. They must wear masks. I got a reality check. Who would be in that space with the president, and then your videographer contracted — I can’t ignore that. It hit home.I’ve read your books, which have to do with the idea that the Black electorate is fundamentally socially conservative. But Gerald Ford in 1976 was the last Republican presidential candidate to get even 15 percent4 of the Black vote. What accounts for that disconnect? I’m glad you asked. I’ll tell you this: Most Blacks are socially conservative. There’s just one issue that they don’t believe the Republican Party can get right. It’s not the economy. It’s not creating more jobs. It’s not creating wealth and economic oppor-tunity. They don’t trust the Republican Party on the issue of race. For some rea-son, they believe that if the Republicans win, they’ll turn back the clock. The Dem-ocrats have done a good job of making the community believe that. They referred to Donald Trump as a racist when he ran for president. So did they with Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, his father, Ronald Rea-gan, John McCain. That’s what is assigned to Republican candidates: They’re racist, they’re cold, they’re insensitive and they don’t care about us.And that has nothing to do with policy? No. It’s perception. Look at the policies that uplift people and sustain them. Capi-talism is the best instrument to uplift peo-ple out of poverty. People have to learn to work and do for themselves. They need to know how to create and use their hands to take care of their households. For me, I’m an entrepreneur.5 I get into commu-nities, fi nd these young people, give them opportunity, let them know that corpo-rate America is for them. It’s not racist.I think some people on the left have a hard time understanding the calculation that goes into a person of color’s continu-ing to support a Republican Party that seems so intent on being the party of white grievance. What’s your response to that confusion? I’m a third- generation Republican. I never left the party of Lin-coln. But I don’t feel that I belong to the Republican Party. The Republican Party belongs to me. No matter how fl awed it may be, we must be a people where we always have someone at that table. You’ve got to have people inside the house. If we were not at the table, it would be fright-ening. It’s the things that I know — that if P

ho

tog

rap

hs

fro

m A

rmst

ron

g W

illia

ms

I had not been at the table, it could have been disastrous.What’s an example? I saw it with Senator Strom Thurmond.6 He had so many peo-ple against his support of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday. He didn’t see its value initially. I said: ‘‘But it has value. Do you understand what this country has done to Black people? You’ve got to right those wrongs.’’ I challenged him. I said, ‘‘Meet with Coretta Scott King, and that will give you a perspective.’’ Not only did he support it, he became the advocate for it. He was willing to get away from his peanut gallery to listen to a diff erent per-spective. That’s important.You got an interview with Trump after he announced his economic plan for Black Americans.7 Why did he go to you? I got a call saying, ‘‘We’re doing this, and the president thinks you’re the best person to do it.’’ I was a little uptight because I never said I would consider him a friend, because I don’t know how he feels. So during the interview, he says: ‘‘Oh, we’ve known each other a long time. We’ve been friends a long time.’’ But in terms of a broadcaster, they were looking for the best vehicle for his message. Somebody who will not go and do some puff job, who is going to ask him tough questions.I watched that interview. What do you think was the toughest question you asked? I said to him: ‘‘You know, Atlanta — it’s the bedrock of civil rights, the home of Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King talked about civil rights but said the next paradigm would be economic

empowerment and entrepreneurship, and this is what you’re doing.’’ The pres-ident knows that I’m not out to do some ‘‘gotcha’’ question. And the more I asked, whether it was about the importance of entrepreneurship or homeownership, he really answered the question.In that interview, he also said, ‘‘We were seeing amazing unity before the virus’’ and ‘‘We saved millions of lives because we closed up.’’ Did you think those were statements not worth following up on? I have so much I want to follow up on with the president, and I would love to have that opportunity.What would you like people to be think-ing about when they’re in the voting booth on Nov. 3? That’s a good question. We’ve invested so much in our political parties that we’ve lost our own view of right and wrong. You must do an inventory of yourself and get away from Republicans and Democrats. You must ask yourself, What is best to move our country forward? What works best for your value system and where you see us going with the economy? We must vote our conscience.And where does your conscience lead you? I never share with people whom I vote for. I like Trump. I do. But I’m going to do what’s in the best interest of the country. No matter what happens on Nov. 3, whether Donald Trump is re- elected or Joe Biden is our president, I will support him and accept the will of the people.�

Th is interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

I am a research dean and professor, and I’ve been working from home during the pandemic. I anticipate this will continue for the entire academic year. My husband retired on disability many years ago.

Last December, our 30-something son lost his job and asked if he could move in with us, and how long he could stay. I told him that depended on how good of a roommate he was. Th e answer? Terrible. He is moody and volatile. I live on edge because I never know when he is going to blow up. He kicked a hole in a solid wood door. He has called me many derogatory names, told me I was ugly and stupid. If I don’t remember something, he accuses me of lying. I bear the brunt of our son’s behavior because my husband is mostly in bed. When my son is in a good mood, he is OK, but I never know what to expect.

He was supposed to be working on a website to support himself. My understanding was that his staying with us was temporary. I would like him to move out. Although he complains bitterly about how horrible it is living with us, when we asked him to move, he refused. We live in

a city where tenancy laws mean we would have to legally evict him. He thinks he can’t be evicted because he has been here for more than 30 days, but he doesn’t pay rent or utilities and has no lease. (He did not grow up here. We moved here a few years ago and live in an apartment that wasn’t intended for three adults.)

I off ered to sign him up for health insurance and pay for it, but he refused. I am paying for his car because I co-signed the loan, so I can’t aff ord a separate apartment for him. We strongly suspect he has mental-health issues, but he considers his problems external and won’t see a therapist — that it’s all mumbo jumbo. Given his mental state, is it unethical to evict him? I feel like I’m in an abusive relationship and desperately want him out. I realize that if we evict him, it may be the end of our relationship with him, but much of the time that feels preferable (and saner) to me than what I am living with.

Name Withheld

I’m so sorry to hear about the diffi cul-ties you are facing with your son. The

14 11.1.20 Illustration by Tomi Um

Illu

stra

tio

n b

y L

ou

ise

Ze

rga

en

g P

om

ero

y

The Ethicist By Kwame Anthony Appiah

To submit a query: Send an email to ethicist@nytimes.com; or send mail to The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. (Include a daytime phone number.)

Jake writes: My

wife puts ketchup

on her macaroni

and cheese. I

disagree with this,

but I don’t mind.

Today, however, she

dumped ketchup

right into a container

of leftovers with three

servings left . She

sees nothing wrong. I

see a monster.

————

We made mac and

cheese this week

too, plus meatloaf,

all within 48 hours.

Pre-pandemic,

these would be

sometimes foods.

But now, in Week 31,

we’re approaching a

comfort-food event

horizon, where all

our meals finally

collapse into one

unmediated junk

feast, and my body

becomes a black

hole from which no

calorie can escape.

Yes, your wife’s

preference is gross,

but I cannot forbid

whatever consoles

her. However,

pouring ketchup into

your shared leftovers

is unacceptable.

Next time she does

this, counterattack

with my personally

preferred topping:

Worcestershire

sauce. Come at me,

readers. It’s delicious .

Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman

pandemic, naturally, makes situations like yours worse; it has become harder to seek relief from domestic pressures in other areas of our social lives. But you should be clear on one point: You do not owe it to anyone, including your own adult children, to let them make a habit of abusing you, whether physical-ly or verbally. Allowing such abuse out of a sense of obligation is a moral mis-take. And it may be a mistake in other respects too: Once someone feels he has you under his thumb, he has no incentive to change his behavior.

Of course, if people have a serious mental illness, it can be inappropri-ate to hold them fully responsible for everything they do. But even they can be capable of responding, to some degree, to the anger and resentment (and, con-versely, the pleasure and gratitude) that their behavior produces. Very few peo-ple are incapable of controlling some of their behavior if the incentives are right. Abandoning all blame amounts, in the end, to ceasing to treat a person as a moral agent at all.

If your son believed that you would fi nd a way to kick him out if he went on misbehaving, then he’d feel more pres-sure to restrain himself from lashing out at you. But I don’t see that you have given him much reason to believe this. You’ve already allowed him to refuse to leave. You evidently have not asked him to give up the car. (You bring up the car payments only to explain why you can’t aff ord to pay for housing elsewhere.) You have, in short, continued to repay his appalling behav-ior with great generosity. A painful twist is that his anger might be fueled in part by that generosity: He may experience his dependence on you, at an age when people are supposed to be set up on their own, as humiliating.

Then there’s the matter of psychiatric assistance. People who need treatment sometimes don’t recognize that fact, but this can make them impossible to help. Psychiatrists often distinguish between mood disorders and personality disor-ders, the latter of which are said to be more stable and medication-resistant. (There are various drugs for bipolar dis-order; the F.D.A. has approved no drug specifi cally for borderline personality disorder.) Whatever the nature of his psy-chological diffi culties, though, the advice of a mental-health professional could be

My Adult Son Moved In. It’s a Nightmare. Can I Kick Him Out?

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. His books include ‘‘Cosmopolitanism,’’ ‘‘The Honor Code’’ and ‘‘The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.’’

Abandoning all blame amounts, in the end, to ceasing to treat a person as a moral agent at all.

seem to increase the probability that they’ll do it.)

So you could have been less tactful in your message, and you might want to say to him, perhaps better in person than in an email: ‘‘You mentioned suicide when we were talking last night. Is that some-thing you’re really thinking about?’’ Lis-tening sympathetically to someone’s trou-bles seems to help — that’s high on the N.I.M.H. list, too. So is making sure that the person has access to a suicide-preven-tion help line.

All this could prove an overreaction, but it also amounts to a simple gesture of human solidarity — an expression of caring and concern. And, whether or not your colleague is at risk for suicide, that seldom goes wrong.�

helpful; the trouble is that even a profes-sional would have a hard time knowing what to advise without meeting him.

You could make such a consultation a condition of his staying with you. But it seems he has already decided that you won’t really toss him out. Could someone mediate a conversation with the three of you? True, getting to the point of accept-ing mediation would require negotiations you may not want to face. But if you can, you might want to give it a try.

Otherwise, you could consult a law-yer to see what your legal options are. If you get serious about demanding that he moves out, you may need to have some-one other than your disabled husband around in order to protect you in case your son turns violent, which I’d think he is less likely to do in front of a wit-ness. You live in an apartment building: If there are doormen, you can ask the building not to admit him without your permission. And you can tell him that you’re willing to discuss, by phone or email, what forms of help you will off er him in the future, provided he conducts himself with some measure of civility. You may feel that you invited this hell upon yourself. But you don’t deserve it, and you shouldn’t accept it.

While under the infl uence of alcohol at a party, a senior emergency-medicine resident repeatedly stated that he was unhappy with his career and wished to end it all. He was cheerfully uninhibited , then proceeded to profess high hopes for his next clinical attachment to another hospital.

Th e next day, I was texted by a senior colleague who was present at the gathering to assess the resident’s risk of harming himself. Another attending, who is the resident’s supervisor and confi dante, told me that there was nothing to worry about — that I should ‘‘forget about it, as it is the alcohol talking.’’ Given that I organized the gathering where the resident declared his life a disappointment, I texted him with a nonthreatening general message: ‘‘Th anks for sterling attendance. You and the rest were great fun. Stay sane and safe.’’ (Th e last sentence refers to the coalface of delivering care during the Covid pandemic.)

I am not sure about calling the resident to talk about his intoxicated declarations, because he has yet to respond to my text. Th e resident’s supervisors and confi dantes believe that he is not at risk, but I know

that doctors are more vulnerable to a completed suicide. Th ey tell me that they will not perform a welfare check because his declaring his unhappiness publicly means he is not hiding a serious intention of killing himself. Th e resident’s optimism about starting a new job sugg ests he plans to weather the storm. How should I proceed?

Name Withheld, Australia

In Australia, where you live , suicide is the leading cause of death among peo-ple between 15 and 44. Your colleague’s remarks may or may not have been a worrisome sign, but technically they’d indicate ‘‘suicidal ideation,’’ which, no surprise, is a risk factor for suicide. The National Institute of Mental Health (N.I.M.H.) guidelines here in the United States suggest that you should ask peo-ple you have concerns about whether they’re thinking of killing themselves. (Raising the issue with someone doesn’t

16 11.1.20 Illustrations by Ina Jang

Diagnosis By Lisa Sanders, M.D.

The 61-year-old woman put on her read-ing glasses to try to decipher the tiny black squiggles on the back of the pack-age of instant pudding. Was it two cups of milk? Or three? The glasses didn’t seem to help. The fuzzy, faded marks refused to become letters. The right side of her head throbbed — as it had for weeks. The constant aggravation of the headache made everything harder, and it certainly wasn’t helping her read this label. She rubbed her forehead, then brought her hand down to cover her right eye. The box disappeared into darkness. She could see only the upper- left corner of the instructions. Every-thing else was black. She quickly moved her hand to cover her left eye. The tiny letters sprang into focus.

She moved back to the right: black-ness. Over to the left: light and letters. That scared her. For the past few months, she’d had one of the worst headaches she had ever experienced in her lifetime of headaches. One that wouldn’t go away no matter how much ibuprofen she took. One that persisted through all the diff erent medications she was given for her migraines. Was this terrible headache now aff ecting her vision? The neurologists she saw over the years always asked her about visual changes. She’d never had them, until now.

‘‘Should I take you to the hospital?’’ her husband asked anxiously when she told him about her nearly sightless left eye. ‘‘This could be serious.’’ She thought for a moment. No, tomorrow was Monday; her neurologist’s offi ce would be open, and the doctor would see her right away. She was always reliable that way.

The patient had bad headaches for most of her adult life. They were always on the right side. They were always throb-bing. They could last for days, or weeks, or sometimes months. Loud noises were always bothersome. With really bad head-aches, her eye would water and her nose would run, just on that side. Bending over was agony. For the past few weeks, her headache had been so severe that if she dropped something on the fl oor, she had to leave it there. When she bent down, the pounding was excruciating.

When she was younger, the head-aches seemed to come on with her periods. So in her mid-30s, after she had her daughter, she had her uterus and ovaries taken out. She was hopeful

The throbbing headache persisted for months. Then she realized she could barely see out of one eye. Were the two things somehow connected?

17

for the fi rst couple of weeks, but then the episodes of throbbing pain came back, bad as ever. Her doctors told her they were migraines. And it seemed that she had been on every migraine medi-cation ever created. Her newest doctor had her on an anti- seizure medication used to prevent migraines, along with Excedrin Migraine to take once they got started. She had been taking this twin therapy for weeks, but this headache just wouldn’t relent.

↓ A ‘Second Heart’

The woman saw her neurologist early the next afternoon. The doctor was worried, too. She ordered an M.R.I. and referred the patient to Dr. Robert Lesser, a neuro- ophthalmologist just outside New Haven, Conn. In Lesser’s exam room, the patient explained fi rst to the technician, then to the doctor, that she’d had this headache for months. Sometimes the pain was worse, some-times better, but it was always there, throbbing and pounding on the right side of her head. It was as if she had a second heart crammed into her skull, beating, squeezing, crowding. Recently, her vision seemed to get worse, blurri-er. Blinking didn’t help. And then she discovered that when she covered the right eye, she could see hardly anything.

The constant presence of the head-ache, and for weeks at a time, imme-diately brought to Lesser’s mind a rare condition called hemi crania continua. As the name suggests, it’s a unilateral headache that persists long past the nor-mal duration and is often accompanied by eye redness or tearing. It’s a strange kind of headache, related to other odd headaches — like cluster headaches — in which the underlying causes are still mys-terious. He’d seen maybe 20 cases in the past. While those patients often had eye symptoms, they were always on the same side as the headache. This patient report-ed changes in the other eye. What would cause pain on one side and a loss of vision on the other? Multiple sclerosis could cause neurological symptoms anywhere in the body. Or was this a mass some-where in her brain? It would take several space- occupying lesions to cause the kind of pressure and pain she described and aff ect her vision. But she had already had an M.R.I., and nothing was seen.

Lesser examined her eyes. Even up close, they looked normal. Each pupil responded to light equally. He took pic-tures of the back of her eyes, fi rst the right, then the left. There are two plac-es of special interest in the retina. The optic disc is the area where the nerves carrying visual information connect to the brain. Increased pressure in the eye, from a mass or from glaucoma, can cause swelling or atrophy in the nerves, which can often be seen. But in this woman, the optic nerve on both sides looked com-pletely normal. Another region on the retina, called the macula, is where most of the visual receptors are located. This tiny region is responsible for most of our color and detail perception. In this patient, the macula was normal on the right but appeared swollen and discol-ored on the left.

↓ Disconnect

Seeing this, Lesser knew that the head-ache and the visual changes were caused by separate disease processes. The head-ache was most likely hemi crania conti-nua. The test to confi rm this diagnosis is a therapeutic trial of an old medicine called indo methacin, a relative of ibupro-fen and naproxen. This type of headache is wonderfully responsive to this particu-lar drug, probably because it more easily crosses the blood-brain barrier, which

keeps out so many other drugs. The lesion on the woman’s retina was

more concerning. It could be something common like central serous chorio-retinopathy (C.S.C.), which causes places in the retina to swell. It’s more common in young people and those with Type A personalities. C.S.C. can cause distress-ing vision abnormalities and sometimes requires treatment if it doesn’t resolve on its own within a month or two. That was the most likely diagnosis. But there was another possibility that was far more serious: malignant melanoma of the retina. This is much less common but potentially deadly. The patient needed to be seen by a retina specialist to distin-guish between these two very diff erent possibilities. Lesser sat down with the woman. It was a good news-bad news type of conversation. She may be able to get rid of her lifetime headache with a pill she would take twice a day. But she also may have one of the most dangerous forms of cancer known.

↓ Dark Side, Bright Side

The woman saw Dr. Thomas Berenberg, a retina specialist in Lesser’s group prac-tice. It was melanoma. She had radiation therapy, which eliminated the growth in her eye. Although that was nearly a year and a half ago, she still must have reg-ular follow- up exams to make certain it stays gone.

On the brighter side, she started taking indo methacin right after she saw Lesser. It took a couple of weeks, but fi nally her headache melted away and, for the most part, has stayed away. She had a hint of a recurrence and started the indomethacin immediately, and the throbbing pain van-ished and hasn’t come back. Still, her sight hasn’t recovered in her left eye, which forced her to retire from her job as a court reporter. The double vision caused by the damaged eye keeps her from reading. She is optimistic, though. She feels as though she dodged a bullet. The cursed throb-bing pain led to a diagnosis that saved her life. And as an extra bonus, she got rid of her constant headache. This past year, she and her husband moved to South Caro-lina, where their daughter lives. And the woman is getting a contact lens to block the vision in her left eye, so she should be able to read once more very soon. All in all, she tells me, she feels pretty lucky.�

Lisa Sanders, M.D.,

is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her latest book is ‘‘Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffl ing Medical Mysteries.’’ If you have a solved case to share with Dr. Sanders, write her at Lisa.Sandersmd@gmail.com.

18 Illustration by Hayley Wall

Letter of Recommendation

I loathe the idea of a topical movie. The process of fi lmmaking doesn’t even real-ly allow for it. A tight turnaround from idea to distribution is two years. If you started writing a screenplay when the N.F.L. made the rule requiring players to stand for the national anthem, you would be wrapping up the edit right around the time Minneapolis began to burn. To be on time, you have to think years ahead, or else have an intuitive understanding of the history and form of a society.

‘‘The Purge’’ is always on time. The franchise, created by James DeMonaco, operates around a simple but provocative premise: After years of rising crime and societal breakdown, a quasi-fascist gov-ernment is swept into power promising to restore peace by instituting an annual bloodletting — one night when all crime is legal. Each entry fi nds a diff erent group of Americans just before the purge is set to begin. It’s a tidy narrative conceit prom-ising violence and a ticking clock. That it has been a wildly successful series even

The ‘Purge’ FilmsBy Blair McClendon

though it dumps its main characters — generally played by semi-recognizable TV actors — with each iteration is shocking enough. What’s more impressive is that it manages to do it in the tradition of the best B movies: They are cheap and willing to wallow in the muck, and consequently less likely to lie about the violence that underpins American law and order.

Although they’re rarely mentioned in the same breath, it’s notable that the franchise came from Blumhouse, the same company behind ‘‘Get Out.’’ It has

11.1.20

B movies often tell more honest stories than Oscar bait.

3-6-1-6-6-7-5-1-3

3-6-1-6-6-7-5-1-3

19Illustration by Radio

Tip By Malia Wollan

put together a string of projects whose animating principle is asking ‘‘Who will survive in America?’’ These movies com-mit to portraying our society in a way that fi nely calibrated awards-season fi lms rare-ly do. Oscar bait’s great sin is not artistic pretension; it’s a lack of curiosity. We have developed a tradition of quality for our big ‘‘message’’ fi lms — well shot, well acted, well made, redemptive and toothless. The better fare is praised for humanizing its characters, as though the realization that the working class also falls in love, faces disappointment and makes meaning were some sort of mind-bending epiphany. In these movies, a few good men can always outrun a history of violence. Real-ism reigns over the art form, yet it keeps returning to the same story: ‘‘Things might be bad, but they’re getting better all the time.’’ In the real world you might ask: ‘‘For whom have things been getting better?’’

Far from comforting fantasies, the ‘‘Purge’’ movies are shrieking depictions of the shape of political life. They concern themselves with the fact of the power men have over women, white people over Black people, the rich over the poor. Even under a regime of legalized crime, violence runs in the same riverbeds as it does now. ‘‘Purgers’’ often wear garish masks in the movies, but they can’t resist tearing them off and exposing that they are exactly who you thought they were.

Just as in John Carpenter’s fi lms, to which this franchise is deeply indebted, the politics can be blunt. In one fi lm, a man threatens a woman he knows because ear-lier, before the purge began, she rejected him; in the fourth installment, the inhab-itants of public housing must fi ght a racist militia full of war-on-terror mercenaries bent on wiping out welfare recipients. This movie, a prequel to all the rest, reveals that the purge began as a concerted eff ort to eradicate the poor. Carpenter beat them to it in a few ways, but questions about who really runs things have not become any less pertinent since the 1980s.

With B movies it is in the eye of the beholder whether something is ham-hand-ed or merely concise. In the fi rst ‘‘Purge,’’ over the span of a few minutes, a Black man seeks refuge in a white family’s sub-urban palace, and the father of the family living there tries to shoot him, only to be ambushed by his teenage daughter’s boyfriend — who has arrived to dispense with the disapproving father. Patriarchal

possessiveness, economically segregated housing and white supremacy all come together in an exchange of gunfi re. ‘‘Things like this are not supposed to happen in our neighborhood,’’ the father asserts. ‘‘Well, they are happening,’’ his wife replies.

The dialogue does not reach the heights of August Wilson, but the action admits to fears that are often too unseemly to acknowledge. In 2013, the fi lm asked you to imagine the owners of suburban man-sions toting long guns while screaming at a Black person to get off their property. Seven years later, the McCloskeys, a St. Louis couple famous for doing just that, spoke at the Republican National Conven-tion. Indulging in the grotesque is what has given these fi lms their prescience.

However gloomy they may sound, the fi lms do off er a way forward. Unlike

with our rosier movies, hope does not reside in a preternaturally gifted mem-ber of an oppressed class. Each fi lm ultimately argues that the only way out is through collective action. Families, neighborhoods, revolutionary cells — all must band together if they expect to do so much as survive one night. This is perhaps the franchise’s most sustained belief. In the era of superheroes’ team-ing up with the C.I.A. to defeat terror-istic supervillains, ‘‘The Purge’’ depicts ordinary people willing to protect and support one another in the face of a polit-ical system abandoning them to a cruel fate. If there’s any lesson for the political artist to be found in these fi lms, it is this: It’s better to be clumsy in the pursuit of an ugly truth than eloquent in telling a fl attering lie.�

How to Build an

Intentional Community

‘‘You need a dream,’’ says Shirley Mere-deen, 90, a founding member of the Older Women’s Co-Housing Project, a group of 26 women over 50 who live together in North London. In 1998, Meredeen and a friend, both 68 and living alone, went to a presentation about co-housing, an outgrowth from the communes of the 1960s, which started in Denmark among private households clustered around shared spaces. Afterward, Meredeen and her friend imagined a place where women could age together and not end up in a nursing home, alone, ‘‘dribbling in the cor-ner,’’ Meredeen says. ‘‘We wanted to be in charge of our own lives as we got older.’’

Write down some guiding principles. For the Older Women’s Co-Housing

Project, these include: counter ageist stereotypes; maintain balance between privacy and community; and no men. The women had all spent their lives in households or workplaces where men assumed leadership positions. ‘‘We didn’t want that sort of hierarchy,’’ Meredeen says. Keep membership to a maximum of 30 people, which will allow everyone to know one another and make decisions collectively. If you seek to build multiunit infrastructure and not just move in with roommates, you’ll most likely need a lim-ited liability corporation, land, fi nancing, architects and builders. It took years, but now the collective consists of 17 apart-ments owned by their occupants and eight more for renters on fi xed incomes.

‘‘You have to commit to doing work,’’ Meredeen says. Members rotate among various tasks: fi nances, gardening, corona-virus sanitizing. Decisions are made by consensus during monthly meetings. Though the pandemic has limited their socializing, they have divided up into small groups who check in daily. Young-er members do the grocery shopping and prescription pickups. The women can donate money to a charitable trust that helps members who need assistance. That friend Meredeen fi rst schemed with in a pub didn’t live to see the project complet-ed — Meredeen moved in in 2016 — but she knows her friend would have been thrilled. ‘‘It’s working so much better than we ever dreamed,’’ she says.�

Indulging in the grotesque is what has given these fi lms their prescience.

Blair McClendon is a writer and fi lm editor in New York City.

Photograph by Heami Lee20

Years before I ever stepped foot in Rome or the Chianti Valley, I traveled there by reading cookbooks. I pored through Ada Boni’s ‘‘Italian Regional Cooking,’’ commit-ting pictures to memory so that one day I might, say, set up my own wood-fi red rotisserie and prepare three different types of fowl at once, too. I learned from the photos in midcentury cookbooks how fresh anchovies and piles of sunbaked sea

salt are harvested in Sicily. When I read ‘‘Honey From a Weed,’’ I sopped up the fl avors of Patience Gray’s tales of cooking off the land while chasing marble across the Mediterranean with her sculptor beau. From a handful of single-subject books I still treasure, I spent hours learning about the regional diff erences in pasta sauces and the individual histories of dozens, if not hundreds, of pasta shapes I hoped to one

day taste. I grew to love the hot-blooded, tradition-protecting Italian culinary sen-sibility I got to know through these books — so much so that I learned the language and eventually moved to the country.

In this moment, I fi nd the kind of escape that cookbooks off er to be espe-cially welcome. But what has occurred to me in the last several years — and what feels particularly acute right now — is how

Shiro, ground-chickpea stew.

How I Escape These Days: Cookbooks teach me about dishes I wouldn’t otherwise know, including shiro, a silky, spicy stew from Eritrea.

20 Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.11.1.20

Eat By Samin Nosrat

21

We deserve more cookbooks from more parts of the world, written by people whose stories they tell.

½ cup canola oil

2 tablespoons homemade or store-bought berbere spice mix

Fine sea salt

3 medium vine-ripened tomatoes (about 11 ounces), coarsely chopped

½ cup chickpea fl our

1-2 jalapeños, stemmed and thinly sliced

injera or baguette, for serving

1. Prepare the spice mix: Place cinnamon,

coriander, fenugreek, peppercorns, cardamom

and allspice in a small heavy skillet set

over medium heat. Cook, stirring constantly,

until the smell is very aromatic and spices are

lightly toasted, 2-3 minutes. Let cool.

2. Transfer the mixture to a clean coffee

grinder, add the chiles and onion flakes, and

grind to a fine powder (or use a mortar

and pestle). Transfer the ground spices to

a fine-mesh sieve set over a bowl, and

sift. Regrind whatever large pieces remain

in the sieve, and add them to the bowl

with the ground spices. Add the paprika,

ginger and nutmeg. Whisk well to combine,

and transfer the mixture to an airtight jar.

(Makes about ½ cup.) Set aside.

3. Prepare the shiro: Place the onion and garlic

in a food processor, and pulse until very finely

minced, stopping periodically to scrape down

the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula

to ensure even chopping. Set aside.

4. Set a large Dutch oven or similar pot

over medium-low heat. When the pot is warm,

add oil, onion purée, berbere and a large

pinch of salt. Stir to combine, then cover pot,

and let aromatics cook gently while you

prepare tomatoes.

5. Place tomatoes in the food processor,

and pulse until puréed. Add to onion mixture,

and increase heat to high. When mixture

boils, reduce heat to low, and whisk in chickpea

flour. The mixture will be quite thick, like

peanut butter. While stirring, slowly pour in

2 cups water in a thin stream to loosen

the mixture. Keep stirring until the mixture

becomes smooth and integrated.

6. Increase heat to medium-high to bring

shiro to a boil, then reduce heat to low, and

simmer for about 5 minutes to cook off the

raw taste of the chickpea flour and integrate

all the flavors. Stir in the jalapeños, and

season to taste with salt.

7. Serve immediately. (Leftovers can be stored

in an airtight container in the refrigerator

for up to a few days. Store unused berbere in

a cool, dark place for up to 3 months.)

Yield: 4 servings (about 5 cups).

Adapted from Hawa Hassan and Ghennet Tesfamicael with Julia Turshen.�

Shiro (Ground-Chickpea Stew)

Time: 20 minutes

For the berbere spice mix:

1 (1-inch) piece cinnamon stick

1 tablespoon coriander seeds

1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

6 green cardamom pods

3 allspice berries

4 dried chiles de árbol, stemmed and seeded

¼ cup dried onion fl akes

3 tablespoons ground sweet paprika

½ teaspoon ground ginger

½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

For the shiro:

1 large red onion, coarsely chopped

10 garlic cloves, peeled

unevenly represented diff erent parts of the world are on my shelves. About fi ve years ago, I made a commitment to expand my cookbook library beyond its largely Western-focused canon. But it has proved to be a more diffi cult endeavor than I expected — I can’t buy what isn’t being published. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve found some incredible resources, includ-ing Archana Pidathala’s ‘‘Five Morsels of Love,’’ which transported me straight into her grandmother’s kitchen in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. But by and large, while new French and Italian cookbooks are still being published each year, it’s hard to fi nd authoritative cook-books written by authors who are deep-ly familiar with the cuisines of countries that Americans don’t typically visit on summer vacation.

So when I fi rst heard that a book focus-ing on the recipes of grandmothers from eight African countries was being pub-lished this year, I begged for an advance copy. I’ve spent the last few months with ‘‘In Bibi’s Kitchen,’’ by Hawa Hassan, try-ing to get a sense for the cooking, culture and atmosphere of each African country represented. By far, my favorite thing about the book, which the Somali-born Hassan wrote with Julia Turshen, is the detailed portrait that emerges of each bibi — Swahili for grandmother — through photos and an in-depth interview, along with a few of her recipes. They are all proud women. Some are irreverent, some are shy, some are hilarious, but all of them are honored to represent their families and their cultures.

One of my favorite interviews is with Ghennet Tesfamicael, a preschool teach-er in Yonkers originally from Eritrea who champions shiro, a simple ground-chick-pea stew. ‘‘It’s the most loved and appre-ciated dish by the Eritrean people,’’ she tells Hassan in the book. ‘‘And it’s easy.’’ According to Tesfamicael, in Eritrea, shiro powder, a mixture of ground chick-peas, garlic, onion and spices, is a staple in every kitchen. Across the country, shiro is an important source of protein for people who can’t aff ord meat, but others improvise with the powder, sprinkling it atop food as a seasoning, using it as a base for soup or even as a sauce for spaghetti.

Tesfamicael’s enthusiasm for shiro inspired me to prepare the dish, which I might have otherwise overlooked. Though I was concerned about fi nding

shiro powder, the recipe cleverly sug-gests replacing it with chickpea fl our and a homemade blend of berbere spice. I toasted and ground chiles and warm spices including cardamom, cinnamon and ginger to make the berbere, which I then simmered with a base of puréed onion, garlic and tomatoes. I stirred in chickpea fl our and water, and cooked the mixture, now the color and texture of a thick butternut squash soup, until it no longer tasted raw. Then I added sliced jalapeños, sautéed a pile of spinach with garlic and made myself a plate.

As I sat down to eat, I grabbed my lap-top, curious to search for ‘‘shiro.’’ I was dismayed, if not surprised, to fi nd that the top result was written by a white food blogger from San Diego, and a bunch of others were based on that. But looking up the recipe online was almost beside the point. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try my hand at shiro had I not read about it in detail in ‘‘In Bibi’s Kitchen.’’ Now I was enjoying scooping up bites with the fresh injera I’d bought that morning.

The best cookbooks are so much more than recipe collections — they’re oral his-tories, documentaries, time capsules, love letters, geopolitical texts, nature guides. And we, as readers, deserve to see more of them from more parts of the world, written by the people whose stories they tell. I’m convinced that it’s how we’ll become better cooks. At the very least, we’ll get to travel a bit.

22

K8P0V4L

23

IN HIS IMAGEBy Elaina Plott

The Republican Party is now Donald Trump’s party, whether he wins or loses the election. Its politicians, activists and voters are still figuring out what that means.

Photo illustration by Mike McQuade

The tourism bureau of Manatee County, popu-lation just over 400,000, advertises the expected trappings of any placid gulfside community in southwest Florida — a historic fi shing village, an award-winning local library system, outlet malls. Eighty-six percent white and a noted sec-ond-home locale for retirees fl eeing the North-east in winter, Manatee has voted for every Republican presidential nominee since 1948 — the sort of homogeneity that typically produces staid politics. In the summer of 2020, as the county’s residents turned their attention to the race for District 7’s seat on the board of county commissioners, some of the hot-button issues were a new storm-water fee and the wisdom of using public funds to extend 44th Avenue East.

One Republican vying for the offi ce was George Kruse, a 45-year-old fi nance veteran and novice candidate who owns a commercial real estate debt fund. Kruse, who has an M.B.A. from Columbia and started his career at an aff ord-able-housing equity fund, says he got into the race partly to address the area’s lack of aff ord-able housing; in interviews with local media, he talked about restructuring the county budget and establishing long-term plans for sustain-able growth. But from the outset his campaign included a concession to political reality. The top item on his ‘‘Conservative Principles for a Better Manatee’’ brochure was ‘‘Support Presi-dent Trump to Keep America Great.’’

Kruse’s principal opponent for the Republi-can nomination was Ed Hunzeker, the county’s 72-year-old former administrator, who left the position in 2019 after clashing with the county commission over a controversial decision to authorize the construction of a new radio tower next to a local elementary school. In announc-ing his campaign, Hunzeker called himself a ‘‘strong supporter of President Trump,’’ and he began fl ooding Facebook with ad after ad to pro-mote his affi nity further (‘‘LIKE if you support

President Trump!’’). Kruse did not feel his own bona fi des were in question; one of the fi rst pho-tos posted to his campaign page showed him smiling with his arm around a cardboard cutout of Trump. Nevertheless, on June 30, he debuted his campaign’s new slogan: ‘‘Make Manatee Red Again.’’ ‘‘Real Conservatives in Manatee County are done with the RINO Purple/Blue wave tak-ing over our supposedly conservative County Commission,’’ he declared.

Three days later, Hunzeker put out an ad jux-taposing photos of himself and Trump and prom-ising: ‘‘Ed Hunzeker Stands With Our President.’’ He followed up with a six-second YouTube video featuring a gentle guitar strum, Hunzeker sport-ing a button-down shirt and hopeful gaze and a single line of text: ‘‘Keep Manatee Great.’’ Two days later, a slightly perspiring Kruse fi lmed a Facebook Live to clarify his own allegiance. ‘‘Peo-ple who know me know that I support President Trump,’’ he said. ‘‘They see me get out of a truck with a Trump sticker on the back. They see me walking through Publix with a Trump hat on. They see me wearing a variety of diff erent Trump shirts. I don’t need to tell people I support the president. People just see that I support the presi-dent.’’ He continued: ‘‘So, you know, consider that over the weekend.’’

In the month that followed, it was as if Don-ald Trump’s Twitter feed achieved three dimen-sions in Manatee County. Kruse set his profi le picture on Facebook to an image — a meme that previously surfaced on Donald Trump Jr.’s Instagram — of Trump’s face superimposed on George Washington’s body, with a machine gun in one arm and a bald eagle perched on the other, with a photo of Kruse himself added just outside the frame. He posted updates tracking ‘‘Lyin’ Ed’s’’ Facebook ad spending. Hunzeker called attention to Kruse’s small donations to Barack Obama in 2008; ‘‘George Kruse: Proud Financier of Barack Obama,’’ one of the ensuing ads announced.

Shortly after, many in Manatee County received a text claiming Black Lives Matter had endorsed Hunzeker, who, it said , wanted to defund the police; Kruse’s campaign denied hav-ing anything to do with it. When a local group calling itself the ‘‘Trump Committee’’ revealed ‘‘BY POPULAR REQUEST’’ its endorsement of Hunzeker, Kruse’s supporters were quick to point out that these Trump supporters were not affi liated with the offi cial Trump campaign orga-nization. Kruse warned voters to stay vigilant against the sway of current county commission-ers like Carol Whitmore, who had been vocal in her support for Hunzeker. ‘‘The inner circle, deep state of Manatee County is scrambling to close ranks,’’ he wrote in a Facebook post shortly before the primary in August.

Kruse’s Facebook page was such a relent-less barrage of wild-eyed warnings that when

I reached Kruse by phone recently, I was sur-prised to fi nd that he was a pretty standard-issue Republican, prone to reciting standard-issue Republican platitudes: The private sector knows best; the free market is fundamental to prosper-ity. His display of Trump superfandom was a rational political decision precisely because his politics were not obviously Trumplike. ‘‘I can sit here all day and say, ‘Here’s my fi ve-step plan on work force housing,’ and a vast majority of voters aren’t going to listen to a word I say,’’ he told me. ‘‘But if I say, ‘I support President Trump, and the other guy doesn’t support him as much as I do,’ — well, anybody who’s going into the polling place, that’s the sentence they need to hear.’’

What Kruse believes that sentence commu-nicates is not all that revolutionary in the con-text of Republican thought. It means that you ‘‘believe in free markets’’ (even if Trump him-self believes in trade wars) and ‘‘a conservative approach to things’’ (even if Trump often seems enamored of big government). It means you’re anti-abortion and pro-gun rights. ‘‘That’s more of the Trump Republican kind of mentality,’’ he explained.

To the extent that self-described Bob Dole Republicans still exist, they’d probably say the same thing. But Kruse said Trump’s appeal wasn’t just a set of beliefs; it was a willingness to go to extremes to pursue and defend them. ‘‘I think that’s one of the biggest diff erences he’s brought into the Republican Party,’’ he said. ‘‘It was somebody who was just willing to do what was right, even if others thought it was wrong.’’

Kruse and Hunzeker did not actually disagree much on what was right. In debates and inter-views with local outlets, the diff erence between their respective pro-growth agendas came down to particulars like the value of impact fees on new development (which, Kruse now points out, they didn’t diverge on that much). But once a candidate embraced the maximalist us-or-them mode of Trump — ‘‘You have no choice but to vote for me,’’ Trump told rallygoers in New Hampshire in summer 2019, or else ‘‘everything’s going to be down the tubes’’ — no election could be less than existential.

In August, Kruse beat Hunzeker in the Repub-lican primary by nearly 15 points. His only opponent in the general election is a write-in candidate. Five days before the primary, Kruse shared an image of what appeared to be a Rev-olutionary War soldier on Facebook. The text on the image read: ‘‘2020 IS NO LONGER REPUB-LICAN VS. DEMOCRAT. IT’S FREEDOM VER-SUS TYRANNY.’’

‘‘I feel the same way about our race against the inner circle, deep state of Manatee County!’’ Kruse wrote alongside the picture. ‘‘Don’t let Ed and Carol control your lives!’’

Pre

vio

us

pa

ge

s:

Sa

ul

Lo

eb

/A

ge

nc

e F

ra

nc

e-P

re

ss

e,

via

Ge

tty

Im

ag

es

. T

his

pa

ge

: M

an

de

l N

ga

n/A

ge

nc

e F

ra

nc

e-P

re

ss

e,

via

Ge

tty

Im

ag

es

.

Op

po

sit

e p

ag

e,

clo

ck

wis

e f

ro

m t

op

le

ft:

Jim

Wa

ts

on

/A

ge

nc

e F

ra

nc

e-P

re

ss

e,

via

Ge

tty

Im

ag

es

; G

eo

rg

e K

ru

se

via

Fa

ce

bo

ok

; s

cre

en

gra

b f

ro

m Y

ou

Tu

be

.

24 11.1.20

25The New York Times Magazine

The panic and excitement attending Donald Trump have always shared an assumption: that his election marked a profound break with the American politics that came before it. During his inaugural address, as he surveyed the national landscape of ‘‘American carnage,’’ Trump himself invoked the advent of ‘‘a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.’’ In the years and events that followed — the end-less soap opera of the White House, the forceful separation of children from their families at the border, the pandemic, Trump’s refusal to permit even a passing interest in a peaceful transfer of power — it seemed increasingly clear that the world never had.

But for all the attention paid to what Trump represents in American politics, the most salient feature of his ascent within the Republican Party might be what he doesn’t represent. When Ronald Reagan overthrew the old order of the Republi-can Party in the 1980 election, he did so as the fi gurehead of a conservative movement that had been gestating since the 1950s, with an intellectual framework that William F. Buckley Jr. had been articulating for a quarter-century, with a policy

TK

blueprint provided by the Heritage Foundation and with a campaign apparatus that quickly piv-oted to the task of converting the new constituen-cies he’d brought into the party to a base durable enough to build on. The total merger of his move-ment with his party didn’t happen immediately, but the key elements of it were in place by the end of his fi rst term, and there was not much ambigu-ity about what the G.O.P., if it was transforming, was transforming into.

Trump’s takeover, by contrast, has been as one-dimensional as it has been total. In the space of one term, the president has co-opted virtually every power center in the Republican Party, from its congressional caucuses to its state parties, its think tanks to its political action committees. But though he has disassembled much of the old order, he has built very little in its place. ‘‘You end up with this weird paradox where he stands to haunt the G.O.P. for many years to come, but on the substance it’s like he was never even there,’’ said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist.

During Trump’s presidency, his party has become host to new species of fringe fi gures. Laura Loomer, a self-identifi ed #ProudIslamo-phobe and erstwhile Infowars contributor who has been banned from Twitter and Facebook, earned presidential praise — and a campaign-trail cameo from Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump — for winning her Florida congressional district’s Republican primary in August. There is also Marjorie Taylor Greene, the party’s current nominee in the race for Georgia’s 14th district, whose embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theory and litany of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic statements didn’t dissuade Trump from calling her a ‘‘future Republican star,’’ or Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republicans’ leader in the House, from pledging to give her committee assignments should she win in November.

But Trump’s infl uence is also refl ected, in a more pedestrian but equally revealing way, in the ease with which George Kruse and others like him have transposed Trumplike signifi ers onto other-wise utterly conventional suburban Republican

platforms. Republican voters are essentially the same people who voted Republican before Trump; the party’s politicians are still mostly the same people, hiring mostly the same strategists. But their relationships to the party now fl ow through a single man, one who has never off ered a clear vision for his political program beyond his imme-diate aggrandizement. Whether Trump wins or loses in November, no one else in the party’s offi -cial ranks seems to have one, either.

This is a far cry from the certainty with which those same offi cials regarded Trump nearly fi ve years ago. In January 2016, Republican lawmakers gathered at a harborside Marriott in Baltimore for their annual conference retreat. Paul Ryan, then the speaker of the House, would preview his ‘‘Bet-ter Way’’ agenda, a collection of policy proposals addressing the economy, national security, the social safety net. In scheduled sessions, members would debate the fi ner points of the agenda that Ryan stressed would transform the G.O.P. from an ‘‘opposition party’’ to a ‘‘proposition party.’’ And in unscheduled interludes, they would consider how their party’s presidential primary could very well come down to a contest between a reality-televi-sion star, whom they hated, and Senator Ted Cruz, whom they also hated.

By the end of the retreat, many had privately agreed that the best way to achieve Ryan’s prop-osition-party ambitions in such a scenario was to nominate the candidate with the fewer proposals. As one Republican congressman explained to me at the time, when I was reporting on the confer-ence for National Review Online, Cruz had his own ‘‘divisive’’ ideas (though in fact they were not so diff erent from Ryan’s own). But with Trump, ‘‘there’s not a lot of meat there,’’ the congressman said. If Trump became the party’s candidate, he serenely predicted, he would ‘‘be looking to answer the question: ‘Where’s the beef?’ And we will have that for him.’’

As it turned out, Trump wasn’t especially inter-ested in running on Ryan’s ‘‘bold conservative pol-icy agenda.’’ ‘‘Put a Stop to Executive Overreach’’ may have been a Better Way, but Trump believed

Candidates like

Ed Hunzeker and

George Kruse

of Florida now

use Trump and his

imagery to signify

a particular brand

of Republicanism,

even as their

platforms — and

voters themselves

— remain reliably

conventional.

Th

is p

ag

e,

fro

m t

op

: A

lex

Ed

elm

an

/A

ge

nc

e F

ra

nc

e-P

re

ss

e,

via

Ge

tty

Im

ag

es

; s

cre

en

gra

b f

ro

m Y

ou

Tu

be

. O

pp

os

ite

pa

ge

: M

as

on

Ad

am

s.

26 11.1.20

the people — his people — would be more galva-nized by a ban on all Muslim travel to the United States, which he fi rst proposed the month before. (‘‘Off ensive and unconstitutional,’’ Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, tweeted of the ban at the time.) ‘‘It’s the party’s party,’’ Reince Prie-bus, the Republican National Committee chair-man, nevertheless repeatedly insisted through the summer of 2016. ‘‘The party defi nes the party.’’

It was as though Priebus and others believed the G.O.P. to be some cosmic body animated by a logic undisclosed to humankind, rather than a collection of overgrown college politicos who worked in a building opposite a restaurant called Tortilla Coast and who had lost the popular vote in fi ve of the last six presidential elections — in other words, an institution ripe for hijacking. Paul Ryan announced his retirement 15 months into Trump’s presidency (‘‘We are with you Paul!’’ Trump tweet-ed shortly thereafter). Kevin McCarthy, then the House majority leader, told reporters about how his wife gave him an autographed copy of ‘‘The Art of the Deal’’ in the late 1980s while they were dating. Priebus went to the White House with Trump as the new president’s chief of staff , only to learn via Twitter six months into the job that he had been replaced. (‘‘We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him!’’ Trump said.) The R.N.C. is now run by Ronna Romney McDaniel, Mitt Romney’s niece, who dropped the ‘‘Romney’’ from her name in apparent deference to Trump. As the newly inaugurated vice president, Mike Pence applaud-ed Trump’s early executive order banning half the world’s Shiite Muslims from entering the country.

This June, as Trump prepared for his second convention as the Republican presidential nomi-nee, the party’s leaders decided to dispense with the fuss of a new platform altogether and simply readopted the 2016 platform. Never mind that the document contained some three dozen condem-nations of the ‘‘current president’’ and ‘‘current administration’’ and ‘‘current occupant’’ of the White House; and never mind that it expressed full support for Puerto Rico’s statehood, which Trump had called an ‘‘absolute no.’’ Offi cials did, however, manage to draft a new preface: ‘‘The Republican Party,’’ it proclaimed, ‘‘has and will continue to enthusiastically support the presi-dent’s America-fi rst agenda.’’ In Priebus’s parlance, the party had defi ned the party.

That this is no longer Paul Ryan’s party is clear. What Trump has turned it into, though, is less so. Republican lawmakers and offi cials now refl exive-ly tout their proximity to Trump — like the ‘‘100 percent Trump voting record’’ that Senator Kelly Loeff ler of Georgia claims in a recent ad. They reference ‘‘Trumpism’’ casually and constantly and accede that it will in some way dictate the future of the party. But they can’t seem to agree on what it actually is. ‘‘The party right now is just Trump, right?’’ said one senior Senate G.O.P. aide. ‘‘So when you take him out of it, what do we have left?’’

When I asked even retiring or former members of Congress what the G.O.P. could be said to stand for today, few were willing to venture an answer on the record. Paul Ryan was ‘‘not doing interviews these days,’’ a former spokesman said. Lamar Alexander, the retiring Republican sena-tor from Tennessee, was ‘‘more than glad to be in touch for future opportunities,’’ his spokesman told me. When I put the question to John Boeh-ner, the former Republican speaker of the House, after a round of small talk, he said, ‘‘Hmm, no. I think I’ll pass on that one.’’

‘‘It’s national populism and identity-politics Republicanism,’’ Representative Justin Amash told me, and ‘‘it’s here to stay for a while.’’ It was early October, and Amash, who has rep-resented Michigan in Congress since 2011, was sitting — maskless, but across the room — in his Capitol Hill offi ce. Amash was a founding mem-ber of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republican hard-liners, most of whom identifi ed with the Tea Party movement, who came together out of frustration with the party’s congressional leadership boxing out the

rank-and-fi le during the legislative process. The caucus became a right-wing media darling after one of its members, a backbencher from North Carolina named Mark Meadows, fi led a motion to oust Boehner from the speakership in the summer of 2015. The vote on that motion never happened; Boehner announced his retirement that fall. But by then, the group had built out its ranks enough to thwart any piece of legislation in the Republican-led House.

‘‘The main purpose of the Freedom Caucus was to open up the process and ensure all voices could be heard,’’ Amash told me. But its members were best known as trenchant conservative ideologues, preaching austerity and refusing to cede ground on social issues. During the 2016 presidential primary, its members were broadly, if obliquely, critical of Trump: ‘‘We need someone who will restore greatness to America, not as a talking point or a punchline, but someone who wants to restore constitutional values,’’ Representative Andy Harris of Maryland said after he endorsed Ben Carson. Others blamed the G.O.P. establishment for not doing more to stop Trump’s rise.

While the establishment transitioned with relative ease to the onset of Trump’s presidency, the Freedom Caucus, for a time, seemed to rep-resent a potential thorn in its side. Many of the new administration’s policy ambitions — trade protectionism, a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill — were direct aff ronts to the stated values of the Tea Party crowd. ‘‘The conservatives are going to go crazy,’’ Stephen K. Bannon, chief executive of Trump’s campaign and an incoming White House adviser, crowed in a postelection interview.

It was common in the Freedom Cau-cus’s weekly meetings for members to mock Trump; ‘‘I can’t believe he’s only been bank-rupt that many times,’’ one of its members quipped, according to Amash. In March 2017, the group’s unwillingness to fall behind Ryan’s fi rst stab at an Obamacare replacement — which they rejected both for its substance and the closed-door process by which it was written

Lawmakers now

reflexively brag

about their proximity

to Trump — as

in this ad for Senator

Kelly Loeffler

of Georgia —

and mention

‘‘Trumpism’’ casually,

even if they

rarely define it.

Jordan insisted to me recently, Trump is ‘‘going to focus on that in his second term.’’) As for health care, Trump backed ‘‘Paul Ryan’s proposal to expand socialized medicine’’ only because he received ‘‘bad advice’’ from the ‘‘liberal wing’’ of the party (by which he meant Ryan and McCar-thy). ‘‘Fortunately, Donald Trump, after listening to our conservative arguments, was persuaded that we were right, and our liberal wing was wrong,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s the mark of leadership. As you get information, you should change as that information requires. And President Trump did.’’

Trump’s resolve to confi rm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in October 2018, Amash says, dulled the remaining criticisms of the president in the Freedom Caucus — and the midterm elec-tions a month later all but extinguished them. The Democrats’ rout of the Republicans in the 2018 House races was unequivocally tied to Trump’s unpopularity — according to exit polls, 90 percent of voters who disapproved of him voted for the other party in their local House race. But that fate fell upon pro- and anti-Trump Republicans alike.

At the same time, Republican primary voters’ devotion to Trump was such that even in the Sen-ate, candidates who had criticized or otherwise distanced themselves from the president, like Dean Heller of Nevada, struggled to make it to the general election, backpedaling their criticisms and holding their breath until Trump’s blessing fi nally came via Twitter. Raúl Labrador, a found-er of the Freedom Caucus, had all but nabbed Trump’s endorsement in the Republican primary for governor of Idaho when supporters of his main opponent, Brad Little, packaged together clips of Labrador bashing Trump in 2016 and delivered them to the West Wing. Today Labrador is back in the private sector. Little is now governor of Idaho.

All told, 26 congressional Republicans — some moderates, others facing stiff odds in the gen-eral election — decided to retire from politics in 2018, the party’s second-highest number in more than 40 years. ‘‘Republicans tried to steer clear of Donald Trump a little bit in that election,’’ Amash said. ‘‘They tried to avoid him as a topic. And they weren’t successful. And Donald Trump came back after that and said, ‘I told you so.’ ’’

Some caucus members, meanwhile, seemed entranced by the proximity to power that loyalty aff orded them. Mark Meadows, who became the Freedom Caucus chairman in January 2017, liked making a show of his ever-more-frequent phone calls with the president and liked ensconcing himself on weeknights in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel, the favored Washington haunt of Trump’s coterie of advisers and hang-ers-on. And as Trump proved ever more willing to attack his colleagues in the Freedom Caucus, Meadows seemed ever more willing to let him.

In 2018, Representative Mark Sanford, a Free-dom Caucus member from South Carolina and a vocal Trump critic, lost a primary in which

27The New York Times Magazine

— prompted Trump to excoriate its members on Twitter. ‘‘The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast,’’ the president raged. ‘‘We must fi ght them, & Dems, in 2018!’’

Mo Brooks, a Freedom Caucus member from Alabama, was among Trump’s harshest critics during the primary, castigating Trump as a ‘‘notorious fl ip-fl opper’’ with ‘‘huge character fl aws’’ whose presidency would ultimately make his base regret voting for him. Brooks had cast his own ballot for Trump grudgingly: ‘‘You have to decide who is the lesser of the two evils,’’ he told a group of Duke University students at the time, ‘‘and then vote accordingly.’’

There was still plenty to be unhappy about in Trump’s fi rst year, like the health care deba-cle and Trump’s publicly excoriating — ‘‘water-boarding,’’ in Brooks’s words — Brooks’s fellow Alabamian Jeff Sessions, then Trump’s attorney general, for his recusal from the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. But Brooks found there was a lot more to like. ‘‘On border security, the president has been spot on,’’ he told me. He went on: ‘‘The president showed he would take the public-policy stances that, by and large, are supported by conservatives, and those who believe in the foundational principles that have combined to make America the great-est nation in world history.’’

Brooks’s transformation is instructive insofar as he doesn’t see it as a transformation at all. The true conservatives hadn’t changed, Brooks insist-ed; Trump just surprised everyone by governing a lot like one. By 2018, Bannon was out, and by November the party’s leaders had major tax cuts and a slew of new conservative judges to show for their acquiescence. On the ‘‘moral value side of the coin,’’ Brooks said, ‘‘President Trump has been strongly pro-life.’’ On the economy, Trump ‘‘has fought hard for free enterprise, which is premised on freedom and liberty, and against socialism.’’ And after years of railing against the constitutional abomination of Barack Obama’s governing by pen, the Freedom Caucus members found that executive orders weren’t so bad when you liked what was in them, such as regulatory relief for companies in defi ance of Obamacare’s contraception mandate. ‘‘I am fi ne with executive orders that do the right thing,’’ Brooks told me.

‘‘I wish we had done better with defi cit and debt,’’ Brooks allowed. But when pressed on this and other ways Trump had fallen short on either his own promises or longstanding conservative priorities in general, he invoked the same villains he might have in the Freedom Caucus’s heyday: special-interest groups and irresponsible party leaders. He’d been in meetings, he said, where he heard the president ‘‘expressing dissatisfaction with these huge defi cits,’’ which, under Trump, have achieved record proportions. (And in any event, the former Freedom Caucus chairman Jim

Trump endorsed his opponent. Later, Trump visited a House Republican conference meeting and proceeded to ridicule Sanford. Meadows did not come to his colleague’s defense. ‘‘It was a betrayal and an abandonment of someone who is part of our family,’’ Amash said. It was the only moment during our interview that he betrayed a sense of anger over the past four years. (Meadows declined to comment for this article.)

It was shortly after that that Amash gave his fi nal speech to the group he helped start. ‘‘At some point, I didn’t feel like the Freedom Caucus was really producing what we had founded it for — pre-cisely to push back on things like Donald Trump taking full control of government, you know, using the executive branch as a legislative branch, or Congress not doing its job as an oversight body,’’ he said. The caucus’s about face, he argues, is a useful way to grasp the extent of Trump’s takeover of the party. Such a takeover was not inevitable, he insists; the Freedom Caucus’s early willingness to stand up to Trump seemed to off er the hope of maintaining healthy debate and disagreement among Republicans under his presidency. ‘‘I was not even the fi ercest critic, compared to some of the others,’’ he recalled of those early days.

In 2019, Amash left the G.O.P. to become an Independent. Earlier this year, he switched his party affi liation again to become the fi rst Liber-tarian member of Congress, and after briefl y con-sidering and rejecting a third-party presidential candidacy this spring, he decided not to run for re-election. ‘‘Everything is about personalities now,’’ he told me. Trump didn’t start that trend, he pointed out, but he certainly accelerated it. ‘‘You can see changes in some of the senators, too — the way they are now trolling people on Twitter. This sort of disparaging of the left is dif-ferent; it’s materially diff erent from what we saw before Donald Trump.’’

Congressional Republicans who have left the fold in the Trump years invariably attest to the private discomfort of their friends

A lesson from Trump, in the words of

Mark Joe Matney of Virginia: ‘‘You can’t

be nice and cordial to your opponent —

you have to make him enemy No. 1.’’

(Continued on Page 41)

LeftBehi

Over the last fi ve years, at least 28 American military contractors have been imprisoned in Kuwait — some of them on trumped-up drug charges, and many after being physically abused. Why has the government done so little to help them?By Doug Bock Clark Photograph by Erika Larsen

29

nd

YWZZQQSF

30 11.1.20

the fi rst night of the Republican National Con-vention, the opening video asserted that America treats all its citizens equally regardless of race. But at the midway point of the event things took a dark turn. Images of razor wire and jail bars fl ashed. ‘‘American hostages,’’ a deep voice intoned. ‘‘Forgotten and wasting away in far-off prisons. Wrongfully detained by foreign govern-ments. Americans were beaten, abused, starved and left for dead. Until President Donald Trump stepped in.’’ A montage of news clips showed Trump welcoming recently freed Americans at airports and news conferences. Then the feed cut to the White House, where Trump sat fl anked by six former prisoners, fi ve of them white, among them a Navy veteran, a missionary and two pas-tors, who had been accused of crimes including currency smuggling and stockpiling weapons. They thanked him for securing their releases.

Perhaps no other president has made the mis-treatment of Americans imprisoned abroad so central to his administration’s identity. The presi-dent seems to relish personally elevating these cases into geopolitical issues, even going so far as to threaten Turkey on Twitter with econom-ic sanctions over the imprisonment of Andrew Brunson, one of the evangelical pastors. And after Otto Warmbier, a university student, was fatal-ly brain-damaged while incarcerated in North Korea, Trump made the tragedy integral to the administration’s confrontation with the dictator-ship over its nuclear threat, pledging ‘‘to honor Otto’s memory with total American resolve’’ in the 2018 State of the Union address.

‘‘I’m very pleased to let everyone know that we brought back over 50 hostages from 22 dif-ferent countries,’’ Trump announced during the

convention. ‘‘We’re very proud of the job we did.’’ The video voice-over declared, ‘‘No American should ever be left behind.’’

But when Nicodemus Acosta, a Black Navy vet-eran, heard the president’s claims, he knew that this was not the full story. Acosta had recently spent over a year imprisoned in Kuwait for deal-ing marijuana — a crime he had not committed. But despite his military service and glaring prob-lems with the Kuwaitis’ case, he felt that he’d been completely abandoned by his government. And Acosta knew that he was not alone. Though he had been liberated from Kuwaiti custody, he had left a number of men behind in the emirate’s notorious Central Prison Complex. A total of 28 Americans have done time there for drug off enses over the last fi ve years and received little help from the State Department, whose obligations to them are somewhat limited. And yet the specifi cs of their cases suggest that more could have been done.

All of these Americans share uncannily similar stories. They were private contractors, supporting American military operations in the Middle East, before being arrested in what were often kick-in-the-door nighttime raids by Kuwaiti police. Some say they were tortured into making false confessions — claims sometimes supported by the State Department’s own records. Most of the contractors say that Kuwaiti police trumped up minor personal drug use into serious traffi cking charges, often building off the coerced confes-sions. All say that they were convicted without due process under Kuwaiti law — assertions that Kuwait’s own police fi les sometimes support. And they universally complain that the Trump adminis-tration has been of little help to them during their ordeals — despite the State Department’s being aware of Kuwaitis torturing Americans.

It’s clear that some of the accused, though not all of them, were not guilty of the charges against them. But regardless, the United States has some basic responsibilities to the welfare of all its citizens imprisoned overseas. And fre-quently, especially under this administration, it goes above and beyond those obligations. Acosta and the others believe there is a simple reason that their predicament has been overlooked: race. All but three of these contractors are Black; not one of them is white.

This article is a result of two and a half years of reporting and is based on dozens of interviews with the prisoners (over their contraband cell-phones), State Department offi cials, Kuwaitis, the prisoners’ families, private military contractors and experts in international law and military con-tracting. It draws from extensive State Department records and hundreds of pages of Kuwaiti govern-ment fi les, including police reports. Together, the prisoners’ experiences reveal a failure by the State Department to urgently address systemic Kuwaiti mistreatment of Americans. And strikingly, they point to an unexpected cost of deepening inequal-ity in the United States: As Americans increasingly

chase prosperity abroad, they are plunging into risks they do not fully understand.

Like everyone else, Americans in foreign nations are subject to those nations’ laws. Unlike everyone else, Americans have the last remaining military superpower in their corner. But the United States’ response to a citizen’s imprisonment overseas can vary widely, depending on the law in ques-tion, our government’s sense of the other gov-ernment’s legitimacy, our diplomatic needs at the moment and numerous other factors. These prisoners’ welfare is technically the responsibility of the State Department — though actually it has no concrete guidelines for tending to them. It aims to provide biannual health checkups and minor boons, like reading material and vitamins. In exceptional circumstances, the government can play a central role in high-profi le cases, as when Americans are used as geopolitical bargain-ing chips by adversarial nations or when a citi-zen is able to leverage media attention signifi cant enough to force the government to respond to popular opinion. But most Americans must con-duct and pay for their own legal defenses, which often proves overwhelming in a legal system and language they don’t understand.

The exceptions to this rule, however, are indi-viduals representing the United States, like dip-lomats and soldiers, who are typically shielded by formal agreements between the two nations. Historically, the treatment of American service members incarcerated by other powers, whether during war or peace, has been an issue of great bipartisan concern. But in the last two decades, the American military has increasingly out-sourced much of its labor to the private sector, creating a whole new class of citizens working for the nation’s military interests, though not tech-nically enlisted: military contractors. This trans-formation has weakened the bonds between the American military and those serving it, setting the stage for the ordeals that the 28 American contractors would endure in Kuwait.

When Acosta arrived in Kuwait in 2016, he could have been forgiven for concluding that he was doing so under the ironclad guarantees aff orded to soldiers with that hallowed promise of ‘‘no man left behind.’’ He was a veteran who had left the service to go into private military contracting. At Camp Ari� an, the headquarters of many American operations in the Middle East, he manned an I.T. help desk for the thousands of troops at the base. Orientation for his job took place at Fort Bliss, an Army garrison outside El Paso where the military trains contractors up to its standards. The one important diff erence, as he saw it, was that for the fi rst time in his life he was making real money: more than $100,000 a year. Enough, if he saved, to open up a juice bar near where his young son lived in Virginia.

Previously, this sort of success seemed out of reach for Acosta, who grew up in the Bronx

On

Photograph by Eli Durst for The New York Times 31The New York Times Magazine

without a lot of money. During his childhood, his father would return home every weekend from working the interstate railways to run him through baseball drills, with the hope that he might make the big leagues. Acosta had prom-ise — but then, at 16, he broke his ankle so badly it required screws and plates to salvage, ending his athletic dreams. He had heard countless sto-ries of his father’s Navy service, so ‘‘I was like, ‘I’ll follow you, Pops.’ ’’ Not long after graduating from high school, Acosta enlisted. He patrolled bases in Bahrain and Spain for fi ve years, earning a Navy Achievement Medal. He would have happily

spent his whole life serving, but as a petty offi cer he struggled to save for his future on $30,000 or so a year. While stationed in Spain, he talked to veterans who had become private military con-tractors and earned six fi gures. When his fi rst tour was fi nished, he used his military benefi ts to get a bachelor’s degree and, while separating from his wife, took the fi rst contracting job he was off ered. It was in Kuwait.

Acosta was entering a well-established pipe-line, constructed over the last two decades, that turns soldiers into contractors. For most of its history, the United States military has been

primarily made up of enlisted personnel — some-thing that began to change, incidentally, right around the time the United States became mili-tarily entangled in Kuwait. In 1991, after Saddam Hussein invaded the tiny oil-rich kingdom, Amer-ica’s colossal Cold War-era military easily drove out Iraqi forces, while employing only a small number of private contractors for specialized roles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Clinton administration began drawing down the number of active-duty troops, eventually achiev-ing a reduction of over 23 percent, hoping to reap a ‘‘peace dividend.’’ During the relatively quiet decade that followed, when the military needed to quickly bulk up for confl icts, like its involvement in peacekeeping missions in the Balkans, it did so by hiring private contractors and then letting them go afterward, like a retail store’s jettisoning temps after the holiday season. Then Sept. 11 happened.

Even as the United States military rapidly expanded for confl icts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the number of enlisted personnel grew only modestly. Instead, the Pentagon hired hundreds of thousands of private military contractors — so many that a 2019 Congressional Research Service report estimated that during those campaigns ‘‘contractors frequently accounted for 50 percent or more of the total D.O.D. pres-ence in-country.’’ Much attention has focused on contractors wielding weapons, with some critics arguing they are essentially mercenaries and prone to causing incidents like the Nisour Square massacre, during which contractors for Blackwater killed 17 Iraqi civilians. Many contractors, however, perform support func-tions, like food service, transporting supplies or maintaining computers. Though the number employed by the military has declined signifi -cantly since the peak of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, in July 2018 the U.S. Central Command still employed more than 49,000 of them in the Middle East. P. W. Singer, the author of ‘‘Corpo-rate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,’’ says, ‘‘We are a public-private hybrid military now — there’s no going back.’’

Today many soldiers leave the service only to return almost immediately in contracting jobs. The private sector off ers wages few mil-itary jobs can match and more fl exibility than a four-year enlistment. Critics point out, how-ever, that such perks come with signifi cant drawbacks; many involve tours in dangerous, unstable parts of the world — U.S. allies with repressive governments or even active com-bat zones. The trade-off for these high wages is that many contractors do not provide long-term benefi ts or job security — an exchange of stability for short-term gain familiar to those participating in the wider gig economy. Indeed, the government employs military contractors for many of the same reasons that contractors have become widespread across the private

Above: Karina Mateo, in Texas, texting with her partner, Jermaine Rogers, who is imprisoned in Kuwait but can sometimes access a contraband smartphone.Page 29: Nicodemus Acosta, a former military contractor in Kuwait who was released from a Kuwaiti prison last year after serving time on bogus drug-traffi cking charges.

32 11.1.20

sector: They are cheaper in theory, and can be demobilized when they aren’t needed.

There are nonbudgetary benefits for the government in hiring contractors as well. ‘‘The whole point of the private contracting system is to avoid political and legal externalities,’’ Singer says, though it weakens the once-sacred bond between the military and those serving it. This is, he says, ‘‘a feature, not a bug, of the system.’’ Unlike soldiers, who are often protected under treaties, contractors are technically private citi-zens, so when Acosta worked in Kuwait, he was just another of the roughly nine million regu-lar Americans living abroad, according to State Department estimates — a population that would be America’s 11th-largest state.

‘‘These men are economic migrants,’’ says Thomas Crosbie, a Canadian professor at the Royal Danish Defense College who studies mil-itary contractors who are killed abroad. In his research, Crosbie found that these contractors tend to be from places with limited economic prospects, with 60 percent coming from rural areas. And the armed services in general draw disproportionately from economically disadvan-taged Black communities. Seen this way, stagnat-ing economic mobility and racial inequalities in the United States have conspired to create a new class of itinerant worker, supporting the Ameri-can military but without its protections.

But Acosta didn’t see it that way at all. Indeed, it almost seemed as if he had not even left Amer-ica. ‘‘Camp Cupcake,’’ as Camp Ari� an is nick-named, had Starbucks, Burger King and Taco Bell, as well as plenty of other trappings of sub-urban American living, which made him feel at home. At the end of the day, he bused back to his apartment in Kuwait City, where he was still surrounded by military culture, as a vast majority of contractors are veterans. After two and a half years of contracting, and also running a side busi-ness repairing computers for wealthy Kuwaitis, he was about a year off from having socked away enough money to open his juice bar back home and help raise his son in person.

To unwind after 12-hour workdays, Acosta and other military contractors would party in private apartments, as there were no bars; Kuwait is a dry country with a legal system partly based on Islamic jurisprudence, and simply being intox-icated in public is illegal there. Nevertheless, at these events, marijuana was widely available. It didn’t seem like a crazy thing to partake. Even some Kuwaitis that Acosta knew smoked. Besides, his American citizenship and his military association made it seem as if he were shielded. At least until one night in late August 2018, when Kuwaiti police broke into his apartment.

It was about 1:30 a.m. when Acosta snapped awake to glass shattering. Sarah Floyd, another American contractor, who was staying over, guessed that a lock had been broken off the porch door. Lights

fl ipped on, blinding Acosta. The 29-year-old was confronted by an Arab man wearing work boots and a baseball cap, holding up a police badge. About 10 young policemen in street clothes backed him up. The lead offi cer threatened to charge him if he didn’t reveal information about a drug deal-er he called the Emperor and tell him where the ‘‘kilos’’ of drugs were stored. Acosta protested that he had no idea what they were talking about.

As the head cop interrogated Acosta, the rest dumped out his dresser drawers, cabinets and even tubes of Quaker Oats, until every inch of his fl oor was littered. When the offi cer asserted they had video of him dealing, Acosta worried that what they actually had was footage of him smok-ing recreationally on his porch. How bad could it be, he fi gured, to admit to possessing enough weed for a few blunts? In the United States, he’d just get a slap on the wrist.

‘‘All I do is smoke,’’ Acosta told them. ‘‘If I show you what I have, will you let me go?’’

The police suggested to Acosta that he would just be deported, so he directed them to his oven, where they found two glass Mason jars and a grinder. Acosta and Floyd maintain that there was at most enough marijuana in the jars to roll a dozen joints; grainy photos in the police report show only a small number of buds in the jars. And yet, the interrogator warned that if he didn’t reveal the ‘‘rest’’ of the drugs, he would get 25 years in prison.

Acosta wondered aloud how that was possible.‘‘This is Kuwait,’’ Acosta recalls the offi cer

answering. ‘‘We can do what we want.’’’ Still, he fi gured they were bluffi ng, even after he

and Floyd were driven to Kuwait’s Drug Enforce-ment General Department, where he was ordered to sit in an offi ce fi lled with messy stacks of paper and sleeping computers. Around 3 a.m., guards abruptly led in a tall, thin Black American with shoulder-length dreadlocks, dip-dyed blond. It was Kelvin Lowe, a contractor with whom Acosta had recently become friendly. Lowe was in his work clothes, a red Tommy Hilfi ger T-shirt and khakis — but he was barefoot and limping. That’s when Acosta realized something was deeply wrong.

About a month before his arrest, Acosta had been at a party in Kuwait City, where he met Lowe. They passed a joint and later started texting, mak-ing plans to smoke together. Lowe was arrested three days before Acosta, when a building manager smelled marijuana smoke coming from his apart-ment and called the authorities. Police records suggest they discovered a backpack containing a small amount of weed in three baggies, a grinder, several empty containers, a food-wrapping device and an electronic scale. It seems that the Kuwaitis also found on his phone the messages between him and Acosta, which led to Acosta’s arrest.

In the offi ce, events took a dark turn. Accord-ing to Acosta, Lowe and Floyd, the police now demanded to know why Lowe had told them that Acosta was a dealer, since he didn’t seem to be. Lowe denied ever saying this, insisting the

cops had misinterpreted their text messages. The interrogator called him a liar and struck him. Then, several policemen dragged Lowe into the hallway and started bashing his feet and legs with a stick, the culmination of what Lowe says was several days of physical abuse. As this happened, another offi cer continued interrogating Acos-ta, who tried to keep his nerve as the violence unfolded within view.

When the interview concluded, Acosta was told to stand, and four policemen marched him down a hallway to a dusty dead end, where old desks, chairs and fi ling cabinets were piled up. The offi cers ordered him to sit on the fl oor, and hand-cuff ed his feet and ankles together. Then they slid a wooden pole through the cuff s, and when they lifted the pole and laid it across the tops of two fi ling cabinets, he found himself dangling by his wrists and ankles, looking up at his captors. A light-skinned offi cer with a shadow of a beard started yelling: ‘‘Where drugs? Where drugs?’’ Each time Acosta answered ‘‘I don’t know,’’ he was kicked or punched. Acosta estimated he spent about 15 min-utes as a boxing bag, but what was truly agonizing was having all of his 200-plus pounds suspended by the cuff s. His fi ngers swelled and turned white. Finally, he told them he would confess.

Once Acosta had been set down, however, he refused to follow through — he even says he threatened to fi ght back if they tried to hang him up again. Eventually, the police escorted him to a windowless cell where several dozen prisoners slept on the grimy fl oor, including Lowe. He found a spot nearby and lay down. Acosta had thought of himself as a member of the American military, but as he languished with prisoners from South Asia, Africa and the poorer Middle Eastern countries, it was clear that Kuwait viewed him diff erently.

Some two million foreigners make up approx-imately 80 percent of Kuwait’s work force. The oil-rich nation provides such lavish benefi ts that some citizens don’t have to work. Many of these migrants are exploited or worse — so much so that in recent years, the Philippine government has twice banned its citizens from working in the country. Though Acosta was not sweeping fl oors or building skyscrapers, he was essentially helping Kuwait outsource its defense. After being easily overrun by Iraq in the gulf war, Kuwait let America build military bases there partly for protection from its more powerful neighbors. As Acosta struggled to sleep, he began to reassess his standing in Kuwait — and in America.

Without any windows or a clock it was impossi-ble to track the passage of time in the cell. Acosta and Lowe waited impatiently for the American Embassy to rescue them. But outside, there was no eff ort to intervene. This was in part because the Drug Enforcement General Department reg-ularly holds foreigners incommunicado for lon-ger than they are allowed to under Kuwaiti law, but also because Lowe’s girlfriend had to spend

33The New York Times Magazine

six days calling and emailing the embassy about his disappearance before it responded. At some point, guards came for them. They were shackled hands and feet, directed into a van, and eventually unloaded at a drab government building. In an upper-fl oor offi ce, they were seated in front of a young Kuwaiti man dressed in a traditional white robe, head scarf and sandals: Jassim al-Mesbah, a prosecutor, who would now conduct an inter-rogation to determine the charges against them.

The Americans struggled to understand al-Mesbah’s English; his translator, who often seemed to be distracted by her smartphone, didn’t speak much better. According to a tran-script of the interrogation, al-Mesbah opened by summarizing the police reports of the arrests and noting that the police had written that the Ameri-cans had confessed to dealing drugs — something both strenuously deny, though they admitted to personal use. Then al-Mesbah unpacked two backpacks containing the evidence seized from their apartments. He balanced Acosta’s two Mason jars on a scale to arrive at a weight of just over two and a half pounds of ‘‘a suspicious sub-stance’’ within, which he recorded in his report.

Two and a half pounds would indeed be a sig-nifi cant amount for which there is little reason-able explanation besides traffi cking. However, Acosta says the prosecutor weighed the marijua-na while it was inside the two Mason jars, adding the weight of the glass, despite his protests.

‘‘There’s absolutely no way you could get two pounds of weed into two small Mason jars,’’ says Tom Dean, a lawyer specializing in can-nabis-related crimes. Even mechanically com-pressed into a brick, two pounds would fi ll a large backpack, and the buds pictured in the Kuwaiti police report are uncompacted, with plenty of breathing room in the jars. Five experts who reviewed the photos concurred that they showed what is unlikely to be more than an ounce of marijuana — just a fraction of the weight that al-Mesbah recorded.

Nevertheless, this estimate seems to have formed the foundation for the traffi cking charges al-Mesbah brought against Acosta and Lowe. In fact, in the whole of the prosecutor’s report, noth-ing explicitly links Acosta to exchanging drugs for money — no witness accounts, no photos, no videos, no text messages, nothing. Al-Mesbah’s secondary evidence seems to have been the approximately $55,000, mostly in Kuwaiti dinars, discovered in Acosta’s apartment, which the police report states Acosta confessed was ‘‘the proceeds of their sale of narcotics.’’ Acosta says he did no such thing. In fact, according to the Kuwaitis’ own transcript, Acosta explained to al-Mesbah that this money represented savings from his job and payments from his work as a freelance computer repairman for rich Kuwaitis. He says he also received a substantial month-ly housing stipend from his employer. Indeed, this was much of the money he was saving so he could open a juice bar in Virginia. And it isn’t all that unusual for contractors to keep cash on hand rather than in a foreign bank in the unstable Middle East.

Al-Mesbah, who did not respond to requests for comment, may have been harsher with Acosta because of the items seized with Lowe, especially the food-wrapping machine, scales and containers, which seemed to suggest Lowe could have been dividing up marijuana to sell. (According to the transcript, Lowe claimed that the food-wrapping machine was for food and that he used the scales to make sure he wasn’t cheated when purchasing marijuana, not when selling it.) But, importantly, Lowe was only accused of having a few ounces of weed, not enough to suggest a large traffi cking operation. To make his case, al-Mesbah appears to have cut and pasted together Acosta’s artifi cially infl ated weight and Lowe’s paraphernalia. He charged both Americans with traffi cking, which could put them away for decades in Kuwait’s strict legal system.

The next day, Acosta and Lowe were extracted from the cell and politely walked without hand-cuff s to a well-appointed offi ce, where a robed Kuwaiti offi cial and a besuited American consular offi cer sat beside a large wooden table. In the meeting, the Kuwaiti offi cial claimed that Acos-ta and Lowe had been well treated. Both began to protest: Lowe rolled up his shirt to show the bruising on his chest; Acosta explained that he still couldn’t feel his wrists. The embassy offi cial made notes that Acosta ‘‘had bruising all over his body,’’ as did Lowe. Furthermore, he added that ‘‘the pattern of mistreatment described was similar to other cases at the detention center’’; by 2020, the State Department would record at least nine ‘‘credible cases’’ of Americans being tortured in a similar manner. The offi cer moved the conversation on, and after about 20 minutes, he dismissed the two. Acosta was shocked at how unhelpful he was.

Consular offi cers tasked with prison visits are generally junior members beleaguered by many other responsibilities, whose preparation for deal-ing with such situations mostly consists of a day or two of classroom instruction and role-playing a few scenarios at the Foreign Service Institute. But the accused men also felt that the various consular offi cers they encountered, whom they remembered as largely white, assumed they were guilty — and those feelings may have been justi-fi ed. ‘‘The default assumption’’ among the offi -cers is that they ‘‘were picked up for some sort of just cause,’’ said an American offi cial, who asked for anonymity to candidly discuss the matter. Acknowledging that some cases were not given the attention they needed, the offi cial said: ‘‘Rac-ism is on such a subconscious level. These guys are so much easier to forget about.’’ (Represen-tatives of the State Department, White House and National Security Council vigorously denied that the prisoners’ race infl uenced the handling of their cases and asserted that the government had done everything in its power to help them.)

American soldiers posted abroad are normally covered by a Status of Forces Agreement, which formalizes the terms under which troops live in a foreign nation — and which generally stipulate, as is the case in Kuwait, that American soldiers will be prosecuted under American law, which would have likely given Acosta a comparatively light sentence. Such agreements, however, do not usually cover contractors, an intentional deci-sion made by the United States when negotiating these agreements. In Kuwait, where contractors are essentially interchangeable, the government decided it’s easier to replace a contractor than protect him. Shortly after his arrest, someone visited Acosta and told him his last check from his employer, Vista Defense Technologies, would be going to his father. That was it.

At fi rst, Acosta and Lowe were the only Amer-icans in their pre-sentencing cells, but as the months passed more (Continued on Page 38)

‘Racism is on such a subconscious level. These guys are so much easier to forget about.’

34

on my mind constantly these recent months are ‘‘room tone.’’ Room tone is the sound a space makes when there is no other sound but the sound of the space itself. The subtle sounds in a high-ceilinged room with brick walls and wide windows are diff erent from those of a small room with wood-paneled walls and narrow windows, or those of the upper deck of a completely empty stadium, or those of the lower deck of a completely empty stadium.

Every space has a tone; every space speaks. Capturing room tone is essential for fi lm and television production. After a scene of dialogue, some-one on set asks for silence so that the room tone can be recorded. This sound becomes the baseline atmosphere of the scene and is mixed into it in order to create a sonic commonality, a unifi ed fi eld. When room tone is lost, things seem less real; an unacknowledged or unrecognized intrusion interrupts the smoothness of life. When we stop and heed room tone, we cede the primacy of our voices to the sound of the space we inhabit. We often need what we don’t know we need. And silence is no exception. Silence invites the room tone from the background to the foreground. It emerges like the sun from behind a cloud, bringing with it a sense of contiguous reality that smooths over the gaps.

This is not always pleasant. When Macbeth’s chief servant, Seyton, returns from investigating a scream heard off stage, all he says is, ‘‘The Queen, my lord, is dead.’’ That’s it. After all the talking, scheming and speeches — all the sound and fury — what is left for Macbeth is the silence of that other space, and the simple truth of words, borne by his faithful lieutenant who has fi ve lines in the entire play, this one being his last.

Baseball’s empty stadiums bear a similar, heavy truth. By design, the game has always been as much about a spectator’s privilege to enjoy a few hours outside watching a ballgame played in a garden as about the doings on the fi eld. During the season, many players said something to the eff ect that once they’re between the lines, the game is still the same game. But is the game really the same game without onlookers? Soccer and basketball reveal things in that televised silence: how players talk to one another. Baseball players, on the other hand, communicate in coded signals, in the seclusion of the dugout, the webbing of a glove covering the mouth, a make-do face mask.

How does a sport with so many pauses in it make sense when those pauses reveal a vacuum, or worse, artifi cial noise? After all, an empty seat this year isn’t simply the consequence of public health precautions. An empty seat is a consequence of mass death and the threat of mass death. And every single death within that mass death is isolated and horrible. This is what that emptiness means. And this was the room tone of the 2020 Major League Baseball season.

A familiar voice from an unfamiliar number left me a message: ‘‘I understand that you wanted to talk to me about baseball during Covid-19. Give me a call.’’ I gave him a call. ‘‘You never really get the full impact of what it means to have an empty stadium except when you’re sitting there,’’ Dr. Anthony S. Fauci said. On July 23, he threw out the ceremonial fi rst pitch of the fi rst game of the baseball season. The Yankees were in town to play his favorite team, the Washington Nationals, last year’s World Series champions.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been an aff air of pomp and circumstance for the team and the fans, especially superfans like Fauci. But 2020 is playing out in far from normal circumstances. When last seen in action, Nationals Park brimmed with 42,000 noisy fans. Now, on a day that threatened rain, there were three: Fauci, his wife and a friend.

‘‘We’re looking around, and we’re the only people in the stands,’’ he told me. ‘‘It was so so extraordinarily unusual … almost eerie.’’

The game was called after six innings because of rain, with the Nationals losing to the Yankees. Juan Soto, Washington’s star, wasn’t there — he’d tested positive for Covid-19 — and the rest of the 2020 season wouldn’t be any kinder to the Nationals. They fi nished dead last in their division, and didn’t play a single game before their fans as the reigning champions. As I write this sentence, enough Americans have died of the novel coronavirus to fi ll Nationals Park fi ve times over.

Fauci’s pitch that day was the most important pitch of the 2020 season. But the less said about the pitch itself, the better: He reared back to throw the ball toward home and ended up looking instead as if he’d just blown his nose with his right hand and was trying to put the tissue into his left pocket. All the same, Topps made a baseball card commemorating the moment, and it set an all-time print run record: Over 50,000 people have bought the limited-edition card. Decked out in a white Nationals jersey and red World Champions mask, a dark glove with snazzy orange highlights on his left hand as the ball fl oats above his extended right arm, Fauci’s eyes following the ball’s ill-fated spin — it’s actually quite a beautiful shot.

‘‘You always hear these stories about politicians,’’ Brent Colburn, another committed Nationals fan, said to me. ‘‘You’ve heard this about a number of presidents who get invited to throw the fi rst pitch, and they carve time out of their schedule to go back out at the White House or wherever and prac-tice.’’ Colburn is the vice president for communication and public aff airs at Princeton, where I teach, and a veteran of many a presidential campaign.

Fauci’s damp squib of a fi rst pitch was easy fodder for cheap jokes and facile symbolism: He is, after all, the face — the scientifi c face, at least — of America’s coronavirus response. Colburn wasn’t having any of it: ‘‘It gives me confi dence that Dr. Fauci hasn’t been spending time working on his pitch-ing,’’ he said. ‘‘The last thing I want is Anthony Fauci practicing his fastball.’’

The Nationals suff ered a slow start, just like last year, which began 19-31, putting their chances of winning the World Series at 1.5 percent. But they didn’t defy the odds; they defi led them. Through one dramatic win after another in the playoff s and a fi nal defeat of the villainous and despised Hous-ton Astros (truly a nihilist’s fever dream of a baseball team), the Nationals reminded the country of baseball’s ability to captivate the imagination by hitting those fabled American grace notes of perseverance, resilience and beating the odds in order to rise above their presumed station. From the last pitch of last October, Nationals fans waited to pack the stadium and see something that their franchise — which has been in Washington since 2005, after spending its fi rst 35 years as the Montreal Expos — had never seen: a World Series ceremony in their stadium. It wasn’t to be.

‘‘I would say between 2005 and this year, I made at least 75 percent of their home openers,’’ Colburn said. Yet this year, he added, ‘‘is so much less import-ant than most things that people are dealing with right now. But it reminds you why people default to sports metaphors all the time. It’s just an easier way to express these things. There’s something kind of clean about sports, or easy to understand.’’ Colburn continued: ‘‘The contrast of what an opening day would’ve looked like this year versus what it does look like this year kind of sums up a lot of what the country is going through in a bunch of diff erent sectors and parts of the economy and parts of social and civic society and life.’’

By the time Jacob Blake was shot multiple times in the back by a police offi cer in Kenosha, Wis., on Aug. 23, the summer had already been stuck in a wretched cycle: unchecked police violence, protests, police taking on the protesters, repeat. The world had drastically changed from when pitchers and catchers fi rst reported to spring training in February. On the day Fauci took the fi eld, the players and coaches on the Nationals and Yankees came out onto the fi eld and took a knee (though not during the national anthem).

36 11.1.20

Op

en

ing

pa

ge

s: S

ou

rce

Ph

oto

gra

ph

s: K

ate

lyn

Mu

lca

hy/

Ge

tty I

ma

ge

s, A

lex B

ran

do

n/A

sso

cia

ted

Pre

ss, A

nd

rew

Ha

rnik

/Ass

ocia

ted

Pre

ss.

On the back of the mound, front and center on the television screen, were visible three letters — not ‘‘M.L.B.,’’ but ‘‘B.L.M.’’ (although not for long: by the next game, the ‘‘B.L.M.’’ had been replaced by a sponsor: ‘‘P.N.C.’’).

On Aug. 26, as tensions in Kenosha intensifi ed with the appearance of armed white vigilantes from near and far, the players of the N.B.A.’s Mil-waukee Bucks, sequestered in a bubble set up by the league in Orlando, had seen enough. They — along with the rest of the N.B.A. and the W.N.B.A. — refused to play. And, as afternoon turned to evening in Wisconsin, some-thing unexpected happened: The Milwaukee Brewers also refused to play; their scheduled opponent, the Cincinnati Reds, went along with them in solidarity. The Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres joined the protest; and then the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants did the same. The Dodgers star Mookie Betts, who is Black, had told his teammates that playing just didn’t feel right for him but that they should do what they felt was right. These were the teams that refused to play baseball that evening: six out of 30. Matt Kemp of the Colorado Rockies, Jason Heyward of the Chicago Cubs and Dexter Fowler and Jack Flaherty of the St. Louis Cardinals sat out while their teammates played. If you checked the box scores afterward, it seemed like any other night of baseball when three games get rained out.

On Aug. 27, Major League Baseball rescheduled those three games as parts of doubleheaders to be played that day. The protest, like the B.L.M. sign on the mound in Washington, had come and gone. And the games, this time all of them, played on again in one empty ballpark after another.

When David Price was traded, along with Betts, from the Boston Red Sox to the Los Angeles Dodgers in February, his fi rst thoughts weren’t about the Dodgers’ being one of the best teams in baseball. ‘‘I was like, ‘Man, this is Jackie Robinson!’ You know? I went to the team that broke the color barrier in baseball from the last team to have an African-American on their team.’’

For Price, who won the World Series with Boston in 2018 and a Cy Young Award with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2012, the tradition of the Black ballplayer is not merely symbolic; it’s a legacy. ‘‘I fell in love with baseball and the Braves,’’ he said. ‘‘They had Dave Justice, Fred McGriff , Terry Pendleton, Andruw Jones, Marquis Grissom.’’

He has more perspective now, at age 35, on where young players may feel they can and cannot take a stand in baseball. ‘‘The longer that I’ve done this, the more comfortable you feel, you know, speaking up. I mean, I know the way that I felt as a young guy in the league … you just don’t speak up. It’s … ’’ Price talks with thoughtful pauses. ‘‘You’re trying to get your footing under you on the fi eld and take care of everything.’’

He’s partnered with LeBron James (‘‘a Top 5 human being ever,’’ Price told me), among others, to form More Than a Vote, a coalition of Black athletes and artists. The coalition has turned Dodgers Stadium into a voting center for the 2020 election.

But Price’s eff orts for the Dodgers themselves will have to wait until the 2021 season. ‘‘I drove to L.A. on July 1, packed all my stuff , had my car, had a hotel rented for a month to get through spring training 2.0,’’ Price said. ‘‘I went to all the testing-training stuff , and then I woke up on the morning of the 3rd, and it was just another day of record highs for Covid and riots and everything that was really going on at the time, and I just told myself, ‘I need to be at home with my family.’ ’’ Price, who has a 3-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter, thought about it. Then: ‘‘This isn’t the time for me to be playing baseball. This isn’t the time for me to be separated from our fam-ily.’’ On July 4, Price announced that he was opting out of the 2020 season.

He went through with me some of the challenges to a baseball player’s habits under the rules of conduct outlined for the 2020 season. ‘‘You know there’s no sunfl ower seeds in the dugout. I mean, that was like the rule!’’ He went on: ‘‘No smokeless tobacco, obviously. I mean, because that’s gonna require spitting … you’re not to spit on the dugout fl oor.’’

I certainly saw players spitting on the dugout fl oor. ‘‘I mean, obviously, you’re still seeing guys spit, you still see high-fi ves … some teams take the air high-fi ve or do the elbows or whatever they come up with, but you still see some teams high-fi ving. It’s tough to get out of that stuff . I’m a big

high-fi ver, I’m a big hugger — when somebody does something real good, I wanna give you a big old hug.’’

So, was this season worth playing in a pandemic?‘‘It’s got to be worth it to diff erent people for diff erent reasons,’’ Price

told me. ‘‘You know, a lot of people are doing this because they think that if they opt out, they won’t be able to get a job in baseball next year, you know? Or that they need to go and collect this money because we’re in a pandemic — they don’t know how long it’s gonna last, and they don’t know how long their professional career will last. Like, guys have to make decisions, and I think that answer will be diff erent for everybody, whether or not this season was worth it.’’

I recalled Fauci’s telling me that ‘‘sports in general is such an important morale builder in so many diff erent ways for diff erent people.’’ I recalled his saying that ‘‘there would have been something symbolic’’ in baseball being ‘‘crushed by this pandemic, as opposed to ‘You can’t play the kind of season you’d like to play, but you’re still hanging in there.’ Sort of like almost just symbolically saying, ‘We’re still around.’ You know?’’ And I did know. Not about the pandemic, which I don’t pretend to know much at all about, but about symbols, my main trade; about these startlingly frank conversations, with their telling rises and dips of the voice, the pensive pauses, the occasional spouse or child in the background, the tone of gen-eralization, the tone of deep refl ection.

Symbols, of course, have their costs as well. Price’s ex-teammate and good friend Eduardo Rodríguez was his pick for the American League Cy Young Award this year. After a strong end to last season, ‘‘he was domi-nating’’ spring training this year, Price said. Then he tested positive for the coronavirus and fi nally tested negative two weeks later — and then, Price said, ‘‘they found out that it messed with his heart. He opted out because he couldn’t play anymore this year. And I just hope that it doesn’t linger into next year and aff ect the rest of his life.’’

The 22-year-old Juan Soto was Washington’s best player this year. But he was nowhere near Nationals Park when Fauci set the season in motion with his pitch. The Nationals announced just before the game that Soto had tested positive for Covid. After missing the fi rst seven games of the season following the diagnosis, Soto would recover and become the young-est player ever to win the National League batting title. His precocious, eye-opening talent left me wondering what it was like now for players even younger, who dream of making a name for themselves in the game.

Otis Brown III is a jazz drummer and a Blue Note recording artist. Both of his sons are serious players: ‘‘We’ve become a baseball family in every sense of the word,’’ Brown said through laughter. His younger son, Josiah, is rising up through the rigorous ranking systems and plays for the renowned baseball program of Delbarton School, a private all-boys Catholic school in Morristown, N.J. But this summer, instead of crisscrossing the country for tournaments and showcases, Brown trained at home in New Jersey. ‘‘I’m glad for this little window we had, a sense of normalcy and being able to see some baseball games,’’ his father said. ‘‘It’s meant a lot to us. And then, too, to be able to see baseball games in this time where players are speaking out about social issues.’’

‘‘Such a small portion of the league is African-American players, so I for one never thought that anything like Black Lives Matter or mentioning George Floyd’s name or things of that nature would ever make its way into Major League Baseball, and on the scale like it has now,’’ he continued. ‘‘You know, where players are like, ‘I’m not gonna play today,’ and their teammates are like, ‘OK, we’re not gonna play as a team.’ ’’

‘‘Mookie Betts speaking about it — he’s probably neck and neck with Trout for the best player in baseball — and him taking a knee in Major League Base-ball was unbelievable to me,’’ Brown said. ‘‘I was just like, ‘I never thought I would see anything like this.’ ’’

It’s October. The regular season came and went like a meek note squeezed out of an accordion. I watched games over these

37The New York Times Magazine

(Continued on Page 45)

38 11.1.20

began arriving. These included two longtime contractors, Roctavius Bailey and Corey Jones, and three more who asked that their names be withheld. As they compared notes, they came to understand that the Kuwaitis had been trying to catch an American drug dealer known as the Emperor, and that each time Kuwaiti police picked up an American, they would beat him and search his phone until they got the names of more Ameri-cans, whom they would then arrest and abuse for more names, and so on. (Some at the State Depart-ment would come to have a similar view of the situation.) Though Acosta sometimes wondered if his comrades were as innocent as they claimed, he also knew that an injustice had befallen him, and that there were eerie echoes among their cases.

Finally, in February 2019, Acosta got his day in court. Friends on the outside had hired him a lawyer, though she did little to help Acosta under-stand the byzantine process. (This was a common complaint among the Americans.) He hired a new lawyer before his trial, and from a cage beside the bench, he watched the judge fi ddle with his phone throughout the arguments and struggled to get his translator to explain what was being discussed in Arabic. He was found guilty of drug traffi cking, as well as the lesser sentence of personally using marijuana, and sentenced to 25 years — a ‘‘life’’ sen-tence in Kuwait. Lowe received a similar sentence.

Lowe’s lawyer told me that Kuwait had recent-ly been convulsed by a drug-use epidemic, fueled by foreigners bringing narcotics into the coun-try, and that authorities may have punished the Americans harshly to make an example of them. But there are also other factors that prob-ably infl uenced their fates. Kuwaiti society holds negative stereotypes of Africans; performers in blackface appeared on national TV as recently as 2018. The most common stereotypes of Black Americans — according to the contractors and an American offi cial — were those put forth by Hollywood fi lms and American TV shows pop-ular in the Middle East; Kuwaiti offi cials were accustomed to thinking of Black men as crim-inals and drug dealers. The contractors, some of whom had gone overseas at least in part to escape American racism, found they were still being haunted by the ghosts of their homeland.

And there was another factor that might have infl uenced the Americans’ fate. Kuwaiti law-enforcement officers are often offered rewards for confi scating drugs, such as promo-tions and monetary bonuses, sometimes scaled to the size of the seizures. In one exceptional 2019 case, several offi cers were awarded over $250,000 for capturing about 10 million narcotic pills. Trying to imagine why a Kuwaiti offi cial might weigh a small amount of marijuana inside a glass jar to increase its weight only requires an acknowledgment that self-interest can often

overwhelm morality, especially if an authority is already prejudiced against a suspect.

Acosta and Lowe were relocated to the long-term wing of Kuwait’s Central Prison Complex, a series of interlinked windowless buildings warehousing some 6,000 prisoners, located beside an industrial zone on the fringe of Kuwait City. There they were placed in a dormitory occupied mostly by Indians and Sri Lankans, as well as Jermaine Rogers, a 43-year-old American with a linebacker physique and a monkish demeanor. Rogers was in his fourth year of incarceration, and he took the newcom-ers under his wing. He pointed out which guards were abusive and who could help the newcomers procure contraband cellphones. He steered them away from the methamphetamines sold by other prisoners. And he laid out the hierarchy among the inmates crammed into the fi ve connected cells in their block of the prison: Kuwaitis on top, and then the economic migrants to the emirate, descending from Middle Easterners from less prosperous countries to Muslim South Asians, like Pakistanis, followed by Hindu Indians and Africans, many of whom were eff ectively house-keepers for those higher up. The tiny minority of Americans, he explained, were outside this peck-ing order and survived by backing one another up.

Together, Rogers, Acosta, Lowe and three others who soon joined them created an Amer-ican redoubt in a stand of three concrete bunk beds. They draped blankets around the beds for privacy, and kept their few possessions stuff ed into shopping bags, always within arm’s reach. They pooled funds sent by their families to buy raw chickens and vegetables from the prison commissary so they didn’t have to eat from the communal trays of food fought over by poorer prisoners. They hired an Indian prisoner to cook for them. They did push-ups and spent the rest of the time watching TV, taking turns on a PlaySta-tion and sleeping as much as possible.

Guards controlled the gate to the cellblock, but the place was more or less run by the inmates. This lawlessness could be terrifying; the inmates would brawl over card games. But in other ways it worked to the Americans’ advantage. With enough money, they could procure almost anything from outside, like smartphones. And with these, they surfed the internet and communicated with friends and fam-ily late at night — daytime in America — when the guards were least active. Acosta would talk with his 6-year-old son, telling him the reason he had missed Christmas was that he had an unbreakable contract. Rogers used his phone to speak frequent-ly to his fi ve children in the States and to regularly communicate with his partner, Karina Mateo.

Mateo had transformed Rogers’s life. Before meeting her, he joined the Army to get out of his poor corner of North Carolina, was discharged after a back injury around the turn of the mil-lennium and then struggled to get by on $13 an hour at the Texas arm of a military-contracting

corporation. Then, in 2006, he transferred to Kuwait, where he made more than four times his Stateside salary armoring Humvees for the confl icts in Iraq and Afghanistan. More import-ant, he met Mateo, also a veteran and contractor. The two fell in love.

But then in late 2015, Kuwaiti police arrest-ed Rogers, accusing him of being a major drug traffi cker. Rogers claims that, when the police searched his home, they found two bags of syn-thetic marijuana that actually belonged to a friend of his roommate’s, and that police increased their weight by mixing in herbal teas taken from his kitchen cabinets. He claims they also planted seven grams of cocaine. At the station, he says, the police handcuff ed him to a chair, tipped it back so he was supine and then hammered on his feet with a rod — abuse he says he reported to the embas-sy. (The State Department maintains no record of Rogers’s making such allegations, and his Kuwaiti police fi les do not show telltale signs of miscon-duct, like the photos in Acosta’s.) He was eventually sentenced to death by public hanging.

At fi rst, Mateo expected the embassy to rescue Rogers, but when she realized this wasn’t hap-pening, she took matters into her own hands. From Texas, where she moved a few weeks before he was arrested, she coordinated with Rogers, other imprisoned men and their families to wage a phone-and-email campaign for their freedom. Knowing that veterans locked away overseas have long been high-profi le causes, Mateo cast her net wide, emailing or calling by her estimate about a thousand people, including the White House, the offi ce of every member of Congress, the N.A.A.C.P., veterans’ NGOs, numerous media organizations and celebrities like the Kardashians. This resulted in some victories: The Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal contact-ed the State Department on behalf of Rogers, and Rogers’s death penalty was commuted on appeal to life in prison.

And in early 2018, Mateo managed to catch the interest of the military-news website Task & Purpose, which published detailed accounts of Rogers’s and several other veterans’ allegations of their abuse. The journalist Adam Linehan, who wrote the pieces, says: ‘‘Not a single politician lifted a fi nger.’’

In 2019, Mateo had a momentary burst of hope. A dream team of conservative lobbyists, includ-ing Neil Bush, son of former president George H. W. Bush, and Brian Ballard, a top fund-raiser for President Trump, had become involved in a campaign to free an individual imprisoned in Kuwait at the same complex as Rogers. Only that person was Marsha Lazareva, a Russian business executive, who was accused of defrauding inves-tors, including the Kuwaiti port authority, of huge sums. Politico reported that in the fi rst quarter of 2019, her Kuwaiti business partners spent $2.5 million on this lobbying eff ort in Washington — ‘‘nearly as much as major Ameri can companies

Kuwait

(Continued from Page 33)

39The New York Times Magazine

such as AT&T and Verizon spent,’’ the article notes — resulting in fi ve members of Congress calling for an investigation into the matter, suggesting economic sanctions against Kuwaiti offi cials might be justifi ed. Mateo and the American prisoners inundated Lazareva’s team with messages, unsuc-cessfully. A friend of Acosta’s even door-stopped Bush at one of Lazareva’s hearings in Kuwait, and the friend said that Bush promised to look into the case, but did not answer follow-up calls or emails. (Representatives of Bush declined to comment.)

Eventually Mateo concluded that her eff orts had failed for a simple, if intractable, reason: ‘‘It’s all about who you are, and how much you’re worth.’’

Though the imprisoned contractors couldn’t compel the Trump administration to take action for them, State Department records show that their message had registered, and illustrate the extent to which offi cials let them slip through the cracks, despite knowing their health was in dan-ger. Rogers’s band was just one of several groups of Americans scattered throughout the complex, who all kept in touch through their contraband cellphones. But there was one American, in a separate cell block, whose full name they didn’t even know. The few times that Rogers made contact with this isolate — during group visits with consular offi cers and at the health clinic — Rogers tried to engage him, but it was, he said, ‘‘like talking to a corpse.’’ The man seemed as if he hadn’t bathed in a very long time and was often missing pieces of clothing. When Rogers off ered to get him basics — like pants — or connect him with his people on the outside through his cell-phone, the man brushed him off .

This man, Justin Morrison, had chased the American dream to Kuwait, like Rogers and the rest. His life’s trajectory was derailed early on, when he was caught with a dime bag of weed as a high schooler. The best work he could fi nd was cooking at a pizza joint near his home in Fayette-ville, N.C. Eventually, a friend got him a job at the motor pool of nearby Fort Bragg, an expe-rience he leveraged into contracting in Kuwait around 2007. There, he was making good money for the fi rst time in his life — but after being seriously injured in an automobile accident, he returned to the States. He ended up sleeping in his car while searching for employment in the oil fi elds of North Dakota. Before long, he signed another contract in Kuwait. In August 2017, he attended a rave out in the desert. Afterward, when he pulled his convertible Mercedes up to his home and walked in, the police ambushed him. Kuwaiti offi cials informed the American Embassy that he had been arrested with about 17 pounds of marijuana.

When consular offi cers fi rst visited Morrison in jail shortly thereafter, he appeared normal, if dispirited, and he told them, according to their report, that he ‘‘probably deserved whatever he got.’’ He refused to sign a Privacy Act waiver, a legal

form that would allow the embassy to discuss his case with others, and requested they not contact anyone on his behalf.

Back in North Carolina, Morrison’s parents, who have asked not to be named, were frantic. All they knew was that their son was locked up in a Kuwaiti prison: State wouldn’t tell them any-thing beyond the most basic details. Eventually, they got in touch with an American who had been imprisoned with Morrison, who told them what had eventually befallen their son: When Morri-son was being roughly moved between cells, he pushed a guard. At least three guards then beat him into submission with their batons. After that, the man said, Morrison changed.

Indeed, the next time the consular offi cers saw Morrison, in November 2017, he was a diff erent man. ‘‘No clear grasp on reality,’’ they wrote. Soon, a Kuwaiti court sentenced him to 15 years, probably while he was not mentally competent to stand trial. At their modest brick ranch house, Morrison’s mother kept his place at the table set with plates, an upside-down champagne glass, and a candle. ‘‘You just have to encourage yourself,’’ she told me. Around two years passed without the Morrisons hearing from the State Department about their son. As the Morrisons saw it, their government had abandoned him.

Morrison’s circumstances, meanwhile, were dangerously deteriorating. Rogers heard from several other prisoners that a long-simmering confl ict between Morrison and some Iranians on his block led to a brawl. In the aftermath, a group of guards pinned Morrison down and jammed a stun gun repeatedly into his head, until he foamed at the mouth. That, as Rogers understood it, was the point at which Morrison became reclusive, taking whatever food he could scavenge from the public pan into the disgusting shared bathroom to eat privately, and started talking to the walls.

American prisoners repeatedly alerted embassy offi cers about Morrison being in danger, starting in early 2018. But they had known about this for months. Ultimately, it would be around 11 months between when consular offi cials fi rst recorded that Morrison had ‘‘no clear grasp on reality’’ and the next time they would see him. During this time, they tried to visit him on six occasions, but failed for a variety of reasons, including twice because, guards told them, he ‘‘would not put on pants.’’ Finally, in October 2018, Morrison was escorted to meet consular offi cers. He was dirty, unshaven and not wearing shoes. He denied his name was Justin, spontaneously laughed to himself during conversation and declared he was ‘‘fi ne because he writes on the walls in his cell and the walls talk to him.’’

Embassy offi cials could have taken this disturb-ing encounter as a prompt for forceful action, immediately pressing their Kuwaiti counterparts on the issue. They could have used it as lever-age in a long-running eff ort to have Kuwait sign a prisoner-transfer agreement, a common legal

framework the United States maintains with about 90 other nations, which allows for citizens convict-ed abroad to be repatriated to American prisons, where the cases against them can be re-evaluated. Instead, the offi cers did very little, asking pris-on offi cials to formally assess Morrison’s mental health. A Kuwaiti psychiatrist reported that Mor-rison was fi ne. Consular offi cials visited Morrison again in December, concluded this wasn’t true and noted that the issue should be elevated up the chain of command. In the end, though, no one saw him again for more than six months, at their next routine visit. State Department offi cials, cit-ing Morrison’s lack of a signed Privacy Act waiver, refused to discuss his case. But all evidence in his case fi le suggests he was more or less forgotten.

At the same time, the State Department was recording increasing numbers of Americans being brutalized by Kuwaiti law enforcement, especially by those from the Drug Enforcement General Department. One prisoner alleged abuse in 2017, six did in 2018 and at least one more did in both 2019 and 2020 — though the actual num-bers may have been higher; an American offi cial told me that at least four more instances could have been added to the tally, except that the State Department declined to do so for various technical reasons. (Americans weren’t suff ering alone: After a Kuwaiti was reportedly tortured to death by the same police unit, six offi cers were suspended.) American offi cials protested this mis-treatment to Kuwaiti offi cials to little eff ect: Each time, the Drug Enforcement General Department would conduct its own investigation, then deny any abuse had occurred. The Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington said, ‘‘We are presently working with the United States Embassy in Kuwait to carefully examine any complaint of abusive conduct,’’ but declined to answer specifi c questions. Offi cials in Kuwait’s Drug Enforcement General Depart-ment and Ministry of Interior did not respond to requests for comment, though read-message trackers indicated that the queries were opened.

Acosta appealed his sentence, and in July 2019, when his day in court fi nally arrived, he was sur-prised to be taken into a private room before the hearing. The new judge asked him for the truth. After Acosta again repeated that he had just smoked, the judge informed him that his traffi ck-ing charges would be dropped and that he was only going to be punished for using — reducing his life sentence to four years. ‘‘I just looked at him, like: What the hell just happened?’’ Acosta said. Lowe’s sentence was similarly mitigated. Acosta was ecstatic but perplexed about his sud-den turn of fortune.

What had happened was that people at the State Department had begun to be questioned about the contractors’ fate. In June 2019, I got in touch with the State Department about Acosta and the other men’s cases, after which it fi nally began to take discernible actions on their behalf.

SPELLING BEE

Unwritten (3 points). Also: Entwine, intertwine, newer,

nitwit, renew, retweet, rewire, rewrite, rewritten, tween,

tweet, tweeter, twine, twitter, wetter, wiener (or weiner),

winner, winter, wirer, wirier, wittier, write, writer, written.

If you found other legitimate dictionary words in the

beehive, feel free to include them in your score.

AT THE HALLOWEEN PLAY …

KENKEN

YIN-YANGFREEWHEELING

KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2020 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

Answers to puzzles of 10.25.20

Answers to puzzle on Page 44

Between July and November, American offi cials met with their Kuwaiti counterparts 11 times to discuss the abuse, a result of which was that the Kuwaiti prosecutor general fi nally agreed to open a new investigation. And about three weeks after my fi rst inquiry, American consular offi cers saw Morrison for the fi rst time in more than six months and initiated legal steps to bypass his lack of a Privacy Act waiver and get him medi-cal treatment. An American offi cial said that my investigation was raised repeatedly during internal State Department discussions about how to handle the cases. Another individual, who discussed these cases with senior Kuwaiti offi cials, said, ‘‘My impression was that senior Kuwaiti offi cials, knowing that there would be attention coming, wanted to make sure the weak cases were dismissed, so that if and when the [expletive] hit the fan, they had a defense.’’

Furthermore, Bill Richardson, the former ambassador to the United Nations who now runs a nonprofi t organization that negotiates the release of Americans held overseas, had become involved. In summer 2019, I sought expert com-mentary from him, and after learning of the situ-ation, he decided to take up their cases. Through the autumn of 2019 and 2020, he advocated with numerous high-level American and Kuwaiti offi -cials for their release, including personally dis-cussing their cases with the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States several times and eventually speaking with Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, after which the American Embassy in Kuwait was increasingly pressured to resolve the issue. The men’s release ‘‘would be of mutual inter-est to both governments,’’ Richardson argued, and ‘‘needs to be handled as a humanitarian issue.’’

After Acosta’s trafficking charges were dropped, he was allowed to enter a rehab pro-gram that eff ectively reduced his four-year

sentence to just a few months. In early October 2019, Acosta’s cellmates clapped as he hugged everyone goodbye and distributed all his posses-sions, from his watch to his extra uniforms. The day before he was released, in the hallway con-necting the cellblocks, he ran into the Emperor, the supposed American drug dealer at the center of the web of arrests. The Kuwaiti authorities had caught the Emperor with over $3 million worth of drugs, they say, including cocaine, and sentenced him to death. (A representative for the Emperor asked that he remain anonymous for his safety and said that while he did have some marijuana, law enforcement sensationalized his case by por-traying him as a bigger traffi cker than he was.) Acosta and many of the men believe they were collateral damage in the Kuwaiti police’s search for this man. Was it possible that none of this would have happened if not for him? No matter, they were still both Americans. They hugged. The next day Acosta walked to freedom with a few books and the clothes on his back.

Lowe was also freed around that time, leaving behind at least 11 Americans imprisoned for drug crimes, including Rogers, Morrison, Bailey, Jones, Gabriel Walker, Tyrone Peterson and fi ve others who asked not to be identifi ed. Then, in early 2020, a new American ambassador arrived in Kuwait: Alina Romanowski, a career Middle East hand. Romanowski pushed her Kuwaiti counterparts to sign a prisoner-transfer agreement. On the day that she was sworn in, the embassy sent a dip-lomatic note demanding that Morrison receive proper psychiatric treatment, hoping that this would lead to a pardon. In February, Morrison was fi nally transferred to a Kuwaiti psychiatric hospital, and consular offi cers noted that he was now ‘‘smiling’’ and looked to be ‘‘in better physical health,’’ though his mental-health issues persisted. The embassy logged more actions on his behalf in

40

Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined

box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box.

A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7.

KENKEN

S L E P T M M S A I M E M A I L S

M A N O R S M Y L A N T A N E S T E A

A U D I E N C E H I S S E D G N A W A T

C R I N K L E E P H E M E R A P A N E

K A N T M A R I O I R V S T E

B A R E B O N E S R E N D I T I O N

D E B G E N L T A N G E L O

A V A R I E T Y O F P A R T S L U C A S

S E C O N D B O L G E R S E R A P E

H U G P A I G E E A T S L I E

S P E X W A R T S A N D A L L G L A D

E E L W A R M S A U T E I R E

T R O J A N H A T E R S A N O R A K

H U R O N N O B O D Y T O A C T W I T H

E T A I L E R S I R E D M Z

R E F L E C T E D O N H I S R O L E

E L O D O T O A T E S S A G S

T E X T L I V E O A K S E R I T R E A

A V I A R Y A T T H E W R A P P A R T Y

P E E R A T C A R S E A T M O T E T S

E N R A G E A L A M R E D E T O O

I

C

C

N

E

U

P

N

A

E

H

O

Y

T

E

T

O

O

M

P

Y

S

P

R

ACROSTIC

A. Chew toy

B. Hogwarts

C. Eye shadow

D. Rotter

E. Inverted

F. Eywa

G. Daylight

H. Idaho

I. Myths

J. Athena

K. Lurch

L. Ivanhoe

M. Naught

N. Earwigs

O. E-waste

P. Mohawks

Q. Phantasm

R. Isfahan

S. Ruses

T. Erebus

U. Ojibwa

V. Folk tales

W. Who’s who

X. Irving

Y. Lestat

Z. Duchess

CHERIE DIMALINE, EMPIRE OF WILD — Rogarou . . . was

a dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his

fur, he wore moccasins to jig. He was whatever made you

shiver but he was always there, . . . whistling to the stars so

that they pulsed bright in the navy sky . . . .

and former colleagues on Capitol Hill who remain in good standing with the president. ‘‘A healthy percentage of them want Trump to lose,’’ Jeff Flake, the former senator and congressman from Arizona and one of the 2018 cycle’s many Republi-can retirees, told me. ‘‘There are no illusions about where the party is going under Trumpism. This is a dead end. This is a demographic cul-de-sac. My colleagues know it. And they had higher aspi-rations, nearly all of them, than to approve the president’s executive calendar.’’

The fact that these private expressions of despair have stayed private cannot be pinned on rabid primary voters alone. Ultimately, a great many in the party have quite enjoyed their time on the Trump train — as Mark Meadows, who is now Trump’s chief of staff , could attest. Yet for all the attention paid to loyalty as an ordering principle in today’s Republican Party, it’s not entirely clear what dividends it will pay in Trump’s absence.

Consider Mike Pence. The vice president has dutifully, even enthusiastically, taken on Trump’s critics and made the president’s many enemies his own, be they kneeling N.F.L. players or his own friends. In the spring of 2019, accord-ing to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, the International Republican Institute, a nongovernmental organization that for more than two decades was chaired by Senator John McCain, tried to honor the vice president with its annual Freedom Award. But when the news made its way to Trump, along with word of the organization’s ties to McCain, he told Pence to turn it down, according to one of the sources. Pence did, and the award was given to Mitch McConnell instead.

‘‘It’s been painful to see,’’ Flake, a friend of Pence’s since they served together as archcon-servatives in the House years ago, told me. ‘‘I had hoped that he would have infl uence on certain issues and could sway some things, because I trust where he is more than the president. But I haven’t seen that infl uence.’’ When I asked Flake if he and Pence had ever discussed what had become of their friendship, he said they hadn’t. ‘‘Mike is unfailingly loyal to the president.’’

That Pence harbors ambitions for the presi-dency in 2024 is no great secret, and for a time, his devotion to Trump was his strongest claim to his mantle. ‘‘He stood by Trump in 2016, after the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, when no one stood by Trump,’’ recalled one former Trump campaign offi cial. Did Pence privately accept Reince Prie-bus’s off er to lead the ticket should Trump drop out? Well, sure, this campaign offi cial acknowl-edged. (Pence denies this.) ‘‘But he did go out on national TV and defend Trump. Mrs. Pence didn’t want him to do that, but he still did it.’’

But as fealty to Trump has become central to the Republican Party, Pence’s steadfastness no longer

seems as exceptional as it did in late 2016. ‘‘Pence’s whole brand has been that he’s stayed loyal to the president, that he’s the O.G.,’’ one R.N.C. offi cial told me. ‘‘Which is great, but what is there beyond that? He’s a late-’90s version of what a Republican primary voter wants. If you’re running a campaign, it has to be about the future.’’

Of the 30 or so Republican offi cials I inter-viewed for this article, from the White House and the Trump campaign to Congress and the R.N.C., probably half of them laughed when I asked if they considered Pence the party’s heir apparent. ‘‘Pence is a very good — he’s a very good man,’’ the former Trump campaign offi cial told me, as if off ering a consolation prize. ‘‘A very good person.’’

Pence’s plight illustrates a paradox peculiar to the Trump administration. The high-level Trump offi cials who seem most poised to seek higher offi ce — the sort who, in a normal presidency, might be expected to perpetuate and advance the president’s legacy — are largely people who, like Pence, were brought in expressly because of how un-Trumplike they were, and as such seem obvi-ously ill suited to carrying his torch. This bind was apparent in the speech that Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations and a frequent vessel for the G.O.P.’s future hopes, gave at this year’s Republican National Conven-tion. In 2015, in the aftermath of the mass murder of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., Haley, who at the time was governor of the state, unabashedly called for and oversaw the remov-al of the Confederate fl ag from the statehouse grounds. In her R.N.C. speech, she appeared to tiptoe around the episode by nebulously recast-ing it as the removal of a ‘‘divisive symbol’’ done ‘‘peacefully and respectfully.’’

The idea that conventional Republicans like Pence and Haley can repackage themselves through Trump loyalty fails to reckon with the desire of many Trump voters to genuinely overturn the party’s status quo. Oren Cass, the domestic policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, argues that in 2016, Trump in some ways ran the most substantively policy-focused campaign of the Republican fi eld, on trade pol-icy, on immigration and ‘‘ultimately on how the market economy is serving people.’’ ‘‘Was he powerfully articulating that? No. But there was an opening for someone to do just that.’’

Earlier this year, Cass founded a think tank called American Compass to off er a policy vision — reforming organized labor and ‘‘reshoring’’ sup-ply chains, remedying failures in fi nancial markets — to address the dissatisfaction with conservative economic orthodoxy that he believes Trump’s 2016 campaign indicated. In August, he hosted American Compass’s fi rst live conversation, a remote interview with the junior senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, billed as a discussion about the ‘‘empty platitudes and hypocrisy of ‘woke

41The New York Times Magazine

G.O.P.

(Continued from Page 27)

the fi rst quarter of the year than it had recorded making for him in all of 2017 and 2018 combined.

In June, as the pandemic infi ltrated the Central Prison Complex and threatened the lives of the American prisoners, especially Rogers, who has a weakened immune system from a hereditary kidney ailment, Romanowski formally requested the release of all the Americans on health and humanitarian grounds. Through October, howev-er, the Kuwaitis refused to grant it. Ambassador Romanowski said the prisoners’ cases were ‘‘very much a high priority’’ and strenuously denied that race had anything to do with their treatment. But in the give-and-take of diplomacy, whatever the administration was willing to do to free these men has been insuffi cient — and minuscule compared with what has been done for the likes of Warm-bier, Brunson and others. Rogers’s third and fi nal appeal has been denied, and he faces many more years in prison. In September, Morrison was returned from the psychiatric hospital to the Central Prison Complex. Around that time, the Emperor lost his last appeal. There are no more legal barriers to his execution.

I fi nally met Acosta face to face in early Novem-ber 2019. During our hours on the phone while he was imprisoned, he seemed to me preternaturally composed. But as he warily scrutinized the other patrons at a cheerful diner near a Virginia naval base, I could see that the experience had exacted a toll. Over brunch, he described the diffi culty of putting what had happened behind him. He had recently taken his son trick-or-treating, but when the time came for parting, his son clung to him, shaking. ‘‘It wasn’t a normal cry,’’ Acosta said. ‘‘He doesn’t know if he’ll see me again.’’ Acosta’s goal now was to be there for his son, but he was also considering contracting again, probably in Europe. Lowe, too, was seriously thinking about signing another contract. This time they knew the risks, but the incentives drawing them overseas were just so strong.

As our meal ended, Acosta wondered aloud whether the United States had a place for him, especially after it failed to defend him while he was incarcerated. So many things had combined to make him feel stateless — institutionalized racism, the nation’s forever wars, the off shor-ing of the middle class, the privatization of the military’s responsibilities to those working for it and an administration unwilling to do much for him and his comrades — it was a question that seemed impossible to succinctly answer. He kept scratching at a fresh wrist tattoo: the name of the grandmother who helped raise him, who died while he was imprisoned. It had become infected. Even after drinking several mimosas, he did not seem to fully relax. If he did stay, he told me, it would only be because of his son. A month in America had already made it clear: Though he didn’t know exactly where home was now, this was no longer it.�

42 11.1.20

capital.’ ’’ The youngest current member of the Senate, Hawley, at age 40, has become a favorite among those in the conservative think-tank class who believe the lessons of Trump’s resonance are primarily ideological. ‘‘The old political platforms have grown stale,’’ Hawley told the audience at the inaugural National Conservatism Conference — an eff ort by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a new think tank, to map the contours of what might be called a post-Trump nationalism — in July 2019. He rebuked the American right for its celebration of ‘‘hyper-globalization,’’ its dogmatic aff ection for the free market.

The diffi culty with engineering a new para-digm that builds on Trump’s 2016 win is that the president himself is not especially committed to it, and the numbers of those in his adminis-tration who are have dwindled. Trump’s pres-idency has not itself departed much from the substance of the old platforms — and not only because his party has not bothered to formally update them. For all of Bannon’s bold postelec-tion talk, Trump’s White House ultimately came to resemble something much more traditionally Republican, pursuing a mostly conventional con-servative agenda beneath its roiling surface noise of organizational chaos, casual racism and weird tweets about the ‘‘Suburban Lifestyle Dream.’’

‘‘I think it is obviously the case that certain facets of the administration’s policymaking became kind of very traditionally supply-side,’’ Cass told me. He said he has had ‘‘very construc-tive conversations’’ with staff members at the agency level who are receptive to both the con-ceptual arguments and policy ideas of American Compass. ‘‘But actually moving policy forward in an administration depends on the focus of the principal. And obviously there’s — I don’t think there’s suffi cient focus from the top on actually developing and advancing a coherent agenda.’’ He acknowledged that Trump has in this way hurt the project he is credited with helping give life to. ‘‘It has put eff orts to build a coherent and construc-tive foundation in the context of an administration that people are looking to to do that, but isn’t.’’

It’s unclear, however, whether the ‘‘people’’ Cass was referring to include Republican voters — among whom Trump has consistently enjoyed an approval rating north of 75 percent in spite of any number of disappointing Infrastructure Weeks. Which may explain why, apart from a handful of senators like Hawley, Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, ambitious Republican politicians aren’t scrambling to associate themselves with American Compass the way they might have with the Heritage Foundation in the Reagan years or the American Enterprise Institute during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Instead, they are much more likely to try to ingratiate themselves with Charlie Kirk, the 27-year-old founder of the right-wing student organization Turning Point USA. Kirk shot to prominence on the right in 2012, when, as a high

school senior in Illinois, he wrote an article for Breitbart News arguing that high school teach-ers were indoctrinating students through liberal textbooks. He started Turning Point shortly after, and in the eight years since, he has transformed the group into a well-funded media operation, backed by conservative megadonors like the Wyoming businessman Foster Friess.

Turning Point’s political arm has worked dili-gently for Trump’s re-election; according to The Washington Post, its eff orts have included hiring teenagers to amplify disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and claims of voter fraud. Kirk himself has become close with the Trump family and earned retweet sprees from the pres-ident for his musings on the ‘‘Wuhan Health Organization.’’ A conference hosted by Turning Point at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in December attracted Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, Jerry Falwell Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, the conservative talk-radio celebrity Mark Levin and the former ‘‘Bachelorette’’ contestant Josh Murray.

The conference, which at one point fea-tured a dance routine by models representing an energy-drink company, was not Paul Ryan’s world of PowerPoints in Marriott ballrooms or Cass’s blizzard of white papers. Kirk’s rapid ascent has occurred more or less entirely out-side the traditional professional apparatus in which conservative activists and intellectuals like Cass built their careers even a decade ago. It suggests how rapidly infl uence has shifted within the G.O.P. Politicians who want futures in the party now try to cultivate Kirk’s enormous audience, appearing on his podcast or speaking at Turning Point events. Privately, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is known to be explor-ing his own 2024 presidential bid, has tried to build a relationship with the right-wing activist as well; earlier this year, according to two people familiar with the matter, Pompeo invited Kirk to a get-to-know-you meeting. ‘‘I mean, four years ago I wasn’t even verifi ed on Twitter,’’ Kirk told me. Today ‘‘there’s moments where you kind of realize, ‘Oh, wow, when I tweet something, it moves opinion.’ And that’s a cool thing.’’

Kirk echoed Cass and others in his defi nition of what he calls the ‘‘MAGA doctrine’’ — challeng-ing the Republican orthodoxy on trade, ‘‘open borders’’ and the corporate class. (‘‘I love the idea space,’’ he told me.) But he argued that the one thing that truly unifi ed the Republican base in its support of Trump was a belief that he was a ‘‘fi ght-er.’’ ‘‘There’s an agreement in the conservative base nationwide that the last couple of decades has been this managed decline of center-right surrender, right? That we win elections, but we lose our country, and we seem OK with it.’’

Trump, on the other hand, was willing to shut down the government for 35 days for a border wall — even if he caved in the end. ‘‘That really was a diff erent type of Republican,’’ Kirk said. ‘‘We don’t forget that kind of thing in conservative circles.’’

In September 2016, The Claremont Review of Books published an essay called ‘‘The Flight 93 Election,’’ by a pseudonymous author later revealed to be Michael Anton, a former speech-writer for George W. Bush’s National Security Council and Rudy Giuliani. The essay’s title was a reference to the passenger plane that crashed in a fi eld in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, after the passengers and crew tried to overcome the Al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked the aircraft. ‘‘2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,’’ Anton wrote. ‘‘You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fl y or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.’’

Anton would later serve on the staff of Trump’s National Security Council, and four years later, his essay still reads as perhaps the most accurate summary of Trumpism. Anton’s only really specifi c ideological appeal in ‘‘The Flight 93 Election,’’ with its warnings about ‘‘the ceaseless importation of third-world foreigners with no tradition of, taste for or experience in liberty,’’ was ethnocentrism. Otherwise, the essay in some ways anticipated the ecumenical aspect of Trump’s Republican Party, its willingness to take all comers as long as they believe that Democratic governance is tantamount to playing ‘‘Russian roulette with a semi-auto,’’ as Anton described the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. This premium on combativeness, on ‘‘fi ghting back’’ above all else, has, on one end of the spectrum, knocked down most of the barriers that at one time would have kept brazen conspir-acy theorists at bay. And on the other end, it has made essentially normal Republican politicians present themselves as extremists, even in the least extreme of situations.

‘‘I will tell you this: Donald Trump showed me something about running a serious campaign,’’ Mark Joe Matney told me. Matney, a 54-year-old former high school special-education teacher active in the local Republican Party in Washing-ton County, Va., ran for county commissioner of revenue in 2019. He had noticed that in the slate of local positions up for re-election, two Demo-cratic incumbents — the treasurer and revenue commissioner — were running unopposed. He decided the second position was a better fi t for him; he has an M.B.A. from Averett University and a doctorate in organizational leadership from Nova Southeastern University.

As he prepared his bid, Matney recalled, he considered what the president’s example had taught him about politics. ‘‘You know, you can’t be nice and cordial to your opponent — you have to make him enemy No. 1. In other words, in a serious, competitive race, you can’t be nice to your opponent and win.’’ He later clarifi ed: ‘‘I’m not say-ing I took it that far. But Trump takes it that far, and shows us you have to be tough to win an election.’’

For Matney, being tough in the race to be the next chief of property assessment meant

43The New York Times Magazine

telegraphing to voters that the soul of the county was at stake. ‘‘In the local elections here, before Trump came along, they never said, ‘This is the Democrat, this is the Republican.’ They said, ‘This is John Doe running against Jim Doe.’ And I wanted to make sure that people understood that, no, local elections are not just about — ’’ He trailed off . ‘‘The party puts you on the ticket. And I wanted to distinguish that he was a Democrat, and I was a Republican.’’

And not just a Republican. The yard signs that Matney began standing up throughout his south-ern Virginia county read: ‘‘Dr. Mark Matney: Trump Republican for Commissioner of Reve-nue.’’ The ‘‘Trump Republican’’ tag, he believed, told voters most of what they needed to know. That it may have told voters little about his abil-ity to assess the county’s motor-vehicle tax was beside the point. ‘‘It was about the fact that my opponent gives money to a party that supports abortion,’’ he said. There was no need, he said, for the issues-laden brochures that local candidates dispensed in the past; rather, a business card that on one side reiterated his support for Trump and on the other said, ‘‘Go vote, or Democrats win,’’ would do the trick.

Like George Kruse in Florida, Matney doesn’t view Trumpism as any great ideological depar-ture from the G.O.P. of, say, the George W. Bush era. But he stressed that were he running for this position 15 years ago, he wouldn’t have adver-tised himself as a ‘‘Bush Republican.’’ For Mat-ney, a Bush Republican is a guy like Ed Gillespie, who lost the race for governor of Virginia in 2017 because he was ‘‘too nice’’ to Ralph Northam.

This was a curious point of reference: Gilles-pie was indeed the model of a Bush Republican, an R.N.C. chairman during Bush’s fi rst term and a counselor to the president during his second. But during the gubernatorial race, he had tried to pocket his establishment résumé and stake his campaign on Trumplike positions: arguing to keep the state’s Confederate monuments in place, fulminating against ‘‘sanctuary cities’’ and accusing Northam in an ad of abetting the rise of the MS-13 street gang. In the end, he lost by nine points, owing to a decisive defeat in Virginia’s once-purple suburbs.

The conventional political wisdom was that Gillespie’s attempts to mimic the president served him poorly. But Matney insisted that the lesson of Gillespie’s crushing loss was that he didn’t go far enough. ‘‘He wouldn’t press the issues that separate us and wouldn’t attack the other side,’’ Matney said. ‘‘I watched a debate between Northam and Gillespie, and I was tell-ing people, this is ridiculous. Oh, you go ahead and talk. Oh, I’m sorry, I interrupted you. I’m like, are you guys going to go outside and kiss after? I mean, it was terrible. It was the worst campaign I’ve ever seen in my life.’’ In November, Matney beat his own opponent, the 12-year Democratic incumbent, by six points.

‘‘What Trump understood,’’ says the Republican consultant Jeff Roe, who ran Ted Cruz’s 2016 pres-idential campaign, ‘‘is that Republican voters have become more polarized but less ideological. A great number of them cared about some of the issues, but they didn’t want esoteric debates on trade policy, or, frankly, defi cits or things like that either. They just wanted a politician to be on their side.’’

There’s one way to interpret the party’s sud-den receptiveness to policies like the child-care tax credit or coverage for pre-existing conditions, which is that voters are consciously urging their leadership toward a new ideological frame-work. The other interpretation, and the one Roe believes is correct, is that the Republican base today is willing to bend more on policy in service of what it believes to be a more existential war.

Roe leveraged this observation in Alabama’s Senate Republican primary this spring, running Tommy Tuberville’s campaign against Jeff Ses-sions, whose devotion to formalizing Trump’s instincts on trade, immigration and law and order was unmatched within the party. It was true that the former senator and attorney general was already loathed by much of the Republican electorate, even his ex-constituents in Alabama, for ‘‘letting down’’ the president. But Roe was most struck by the resonance of another attack, on Sessions’s vote to confi rm President Obama’s pick for attorney general in 2009. ‘‘Jeff Sessions voting for Eric Holder?’’ he said. ‘‘Yeah, those days are over. If Jeff Sessions were a senator in 2024, he ain’t voting for Eric Holder.

‘‘And I think that’s going to be a pretty critical component of the legacy of this presidency, be it four years or eight years,’’ he went on. ‘‘It’s: Are you willing to go to Washington and not cabal with the other side? Because they want some-body, above all, that’s going to fi ght the Demo-crats. They actually don’t really care often what you’re fi ghting about.’’

Marc Hetherington, a political-science profes-sor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says this is where eff orts to ‘‘refi ne’’ Trump-ism will very likely hit a wall, as they implicitly assume that Trump’s supporters see his ‘‘aggres-siveness’’ as a distraction from his appeal rather than a key feature of it. Hetherington and his colleagues are in the early stages of research that suggests Trump’s most salient contribution to the party is in many ways apolitical. They’ve found that those who agree that only fi ghters are successful in life, or that the best strategy is to play hardball, even if it means being unfair, tend to prefer Donald Trump, while those who agree with statements like ‘‘cooperation is the key to success’’ tend to prefer Mitt Romney. ‘‘It’s not a partisan thing at all,’’ Hetherington told me. ‘‘It’s a worldview thing. And now, there’s a constituency in the Republican Party for that.’’

On an evening in October, I drove to John-stown, Pa., for one of the fi nal rallies of Trump’s

re-election campaign. On the edge of a parking lot outside a fi re station a mile or so from the rally venue, I found dozens of people, huddled under blankets and Gap hoodies, holding their phones aloft. They were almost all white, many of them men and women in their 50s and 60s, others young families with children. A minute or two later, Air Force One sliced through the black sky. Its drone muff led the whoops and hollers that followed. These weren’t rallygoers, it turned out: They just wanted to see the plane.

‘‘He has his base so energized,’’ Jeff Link, 65, told me, his cheeks fl ushed from the cold. ‘‘Look, we came just to get a mile away from him!’’

Link and three friends had driven from a cou-ple of towns over for this moment. What did Trumpism mean to them? I asked. ‘‘It means for the people,’’ Susan Datsko said. ‘‘We are for the people.’’

‘‘America fi rst, absolutely,’’ Charlotte McFad-den echoed. A retired nurse and lifelong Repub-lican, she went on to describe the us-versus-them posture that Trump, to her, so revolutionarily embodied: ‘‘We have got to stop trying to save everybody in the world. Americans are very, very generous people. But we’re getting crushed. We just want people to come the right way; we welcome them just like our ancestors were wel-comed. And we can’t help anybody if we can’t even help our own people. You have to help your-self before you can help others.’’

Maybe others in the party before believed this, too; what made Trump special to them was his willingness to say it. ‘‘Not to be rude,’’ Rick Dats-ko said, ‘‘but the past Republicans never had any balls. They never stood up for Republicans. Look at Romney: Obama chewed him up.’’

‘‘We all understand he’s a little crude,’’ Link said. ‘‘But crude is OK!’’ Datsko interjected.Link went on: ‘‘We knew that he had no halo

on his head,’’ he said. ‘‘We’re all like that a lit-tle bit. So we kind of identifi ed with that. We understood.’’

They struggled to articulate precisely what they wanted from the party whenever the post-Trump era commenced. Just more of this. ‘‘The same thing,’’ Datsko said.

‘‘To continue along the same lines,’’ McFad-den agreed. To perpetuate the euphoria cours-ing through still more parking lots nearby, the merchandise truck catering to ‘‘THE SILENT MAJORITY,’’ the expletive-laden T-shirts, the dozens of Trump fl ags whipping in the wind.

Still, an inchoate anxiety lurked behind the mania, a fl eeting cognizance that for all their demands of more, nothing could ever match this. Even the thought of four more years brought its own strange layer of distress. Because if Trump wins, as Mark Matney explained to me, he can never run for president again. What happens, then, when it’s all over?

‘‘My scary thought,’’ Matney said, ‘‘is where do we fi nd another one like him?’’�

SPELLING BEEBy Frank Longo

How many common words of 5 or more letters can

you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer

must use the center letter at least once. Letters may

be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7

letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not

allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points

for a word that uses all 7 letters.

Rating: 9 = good; 17 = excellent; 25 = genius

W

E

U

T

I

N

R

Our list of words, worth 27 points, appears with last week’s answers.

ON-SET EXTRASBy Patrick Berry

YIN-YANGBy Wei-Hwa Huang

Put a white or dark circle in each cell so that all the white

circles are connected along their edges in an unbroken

chain and all the dark circles are connected along their

edges in an unbroken chain. No two-by-two set of cells

can be all white or all dark.

>

Ex.

The 30 words below can be grouped into 10 sets, each

containing three items that fit a common category.

Each word, though, has been given two extra letters

that turn it into a new word. For example, GOLFED,

PARAGON and PLEADS could form a set of chemical

elements if their extra letters were removed: GOL(fe)D,

(p )AR(a)GON, (p )LEAD(s). The 10 categories are listed

at the bottom.

AMOUNT ___________ LIMBER ___________

BANDANNA ___________ MINUTEST ___________

BETRAY ___________ ORDAIN ___________

CARHOP ___________ PAISANO ___________

COLLAR ___________ PHYLUM ___________

CONGEAL ___________ SALTINE ___________

COURSING ___________ SIGNMAN ___________

CRAYONS ___________ SPINSTER ___________

DELIGHT ___________ SUNBOW ___________

ENGINE ___________ SWEATER ___________

FLUSTER ___________ TANGELO ___________

FORTIFY ___________ TOWELED ___________

GRAMMAR ___________ TUNDRA ___________

HAZILY ___________ TURBAN ___________

JUSTICE ___________ TURNOUT ___________

Categories

Beverages 1 2 3 Dances 1 2 3 Fabrics 1 2 3 Fish 1 2 3

Fruit 1 2 3 Greek letters 1 2 3 Musical instruments 1 2 3

Numbers 1 2 3 Precipitation 1 2 3 Relatives 1 2 3

ACROSS

1 Recipes confused bores (7)

5 Where to find fruit or leafy vegetable (7)

9 Warmest lake screened by bureau (9)

10 Have last two missing in search party (5)

11 Delayed consuming true Starbucks product (5)

12 Left a group of players I finally liked (9)

13 Daughter in a relationship progressed slowly (7)

15 Suspect Teheran is made of clay (7)

17 Costs mother lots of time (7)

19 Opposes sisters horsing around (7)

21 Unfortunately, in dens, see poverty (9)

23 Get sharper in pursuit of red European flower? (5)

25 Leader of lions exposes hideouts (5)

26 Related salesperson sent west, intent on getting new order (9)

27 Sound from young swans and seals (7)

28 Catch Serena playing, winning opening at net (7)

DOWN

1 Preserved choice and went first (7)

2 Standing up before court (5)

3 Vehicle with engine malfunction running out of control (9)

4 Conveyor of drinks set out beside room in hospital (7)

5 Lack of power concealing Republican anger (7)

6 Love god’s name on back of trophy (5)

7 Contributing to tabs in these drinks not often permitted (9)

8 Doctor needs new place to live in Germany (7)

14 Asleep, not at first sawing logs, perhaps (9)

16 Limits showers following nap (9)

17 Swings around 500 corners (7)

18 Lady’s found in resorts with Himalayan aides (7)

19 Substitute’s about to start game (7)

20 Cover girl next to boy (7)

22 Starts to impose some sanctions upon English kids (5)

24 In recession, a way to lose auto works (5)

CRYPTIC CROSSWORDBy John Forbes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28

44

Puzzles

limped into the postseason with more losses than wins, taking advantage of the fact that the league expanded the playoff format from fi ve teams per league to eight. Taking advantage has been the Astros’ M.O. over recent years: In January, Major League Baseball concluded an investigation that found Houston guilty of a sign-stealing scheme during the 2017 season in which the team ended up winning the World Series. No players were punished. Rumors persisted that the Astros con-tinued to cheat well after the 2017 season, which they have denied. No one, aside from their fans, seemed interested in a redemption tour for a team that never sought redemption, a team that preened and snarled their way to an everlasting ignominy they had worked hard to earn. Accord-ing to Sports Media Watch, Game 7 of the Astros-Rays A.L.C.S. was ‘‘easily the lowest rated and least watched Game 7 in M.L.B. history.’’

When the Rays fi nally outlasted the Astros, and the Dodgers fi nally outlasted the Atlanta Braves, the stage was set for a fi nal act of the longest shortest season ever, an East Coast ver-sus West Coast battle, set in Arlington, Tex. — in front of a smattering of spectators allowed back into the stands. In the end, I didn’t only see them; I could hear them from time to time. As the ball soared up into the air after the thwack of the bat, I’d glimpse them and have to remind myself that they were there. By now I’d turned

short summer months with great sadness. Even-tually, I turned the volume off . The cardboard cutouts of fans in the seats behind home plate were strange enough without all the artifi cial fan noise being pumped through the broadcast with a cold relentlessness that only an algorithm could love. The game seemed diminished without an audience and without sound in a way that other sports simply do not. Everything about baseball that transcends baseball is connected to the crowd: The game’s most famous song is ‘‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’’; ‘‘Casey at the Bat’’ is about Mudville, not Casey; and the best poem on baseball is William Carlos Williams’s ‘‘The Crowd at the Ballgame’’:

The crowd at the ball gameis moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessnesswhich delights them —

One of baseball’s most iconic moments is one of stillness, when Lou Gehrig tells the crowd at Yankee Stadium how lucky he was to be stand-ing before them, two years before A.L.S. would take his life. The glory of Jackie Robinson was that the crowd had to learn to behave itself, get over it and get on with watching him compete — the question was never whether he was good enough to play with whites; it was whether the whites could get their act together, be a little less racist and sit in a seat while a Black man played baseball. The game changed irrevocably when the crowd changed slightly.

And so, I ask you again: Is the game really the same game without people there to see the free and easy White Sox; the mad scientist Trevor Bauer; the living, breathing fun zone that is Fer-nando Tatis Jr.; the time bandit Nelson Cruz; the endlessly sequestered excellence of Mike Trout? What came of them?

In a typical season, the story would have been the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series. They were a very good team from start to fi nish; they lived on the timely home run; they have a stable of fairly anonymous, interchangeable, hard-throwing pitchers; they had a rookie play out of his mind when it mattered most. Entering the playoff s, they had a record that made them one of the favorites, and the name on their jer-sey made them one of the underdogs. They are contemporary baseball excellence straight from central casting: the output of calculations from an offi ce and grit from minor-league fi elds. They are exciting and dull. And they may have saved Major League Baseball from a nightmare scenario.

Because unlike the Nationals, the Houston Astros returned to the playoff s this year. They

the volume back on, and sometimes I’d crank it up and listen for the crowd, those sounds betwixt and between the interspersed vacancies and momentary pauses of the game. Maybe, when the camerawork allowed, you, too, saw them on the television and were, as I was, both amazed by and scared for them.

Maybe you saw Mookie Betts make it all look so easy from oh so close.

Maybe you saw Tampa Bay’s radiant Cuban rookie Randy Arozarena in the fl esh and realized you’d get to one day say, ‘‘I was there when … ’’

I don’t know if this would make you lucky or unlucky. These are the times we live in. What is lucky and what is unlucky hangs in the air. We either catch it or we don’t.

Ali Smith begins her novel ‘‘Autumn’’ like so: ‘‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again.’’

And indeed, it is autumn again. One team won. One team lost. The story of baseball in 2020 has ended in Tampa and Los Angeles, but no baseball has been played in either city for a month.

Still, people will wait in lines outside Dodger Stadium and Tropicana Field into November. Not for playoff baseball. ‘‘Baseball,’’ a summer word, won’t be what hangs in the air there then. Base-ball had come and baseball had gone — the words of the crowds there having changed by then to ‘‘election,’’ ‘‘justice,’’ ‘‘vote.’’�

M.L.B.

(Continued from Page 37)

Puzzles Edited by Will Shortz

WEST-SOUTHWEST

46

ACROSS

1 Amenity in G.M. vehicles

7 R.N.’s workplace

10 ‘‘Awake in the Dark’’ author

15 Down at the bar?

19 Peace and quiet

20 Tease constantly, with ‘‘on’’

21 Bottom lines?

22 Spanish Steps city

23 What an unsteady tightrope walker may do?

25 Number cruncher, in Wall Street lingo

26 Spelling clarifi cation

27 CPR experts

28 ‘‘____ to My Family’’ (song by the Cranberries)

29 ‘‘It’s just too $%#@ hot!,’’ e.g.?

31 Fasten again, as documents

34 Dish cooked in an underground oven

35 Bolshoi debut of 1877

36 Thesis defenses, e.g.

37 Thereabouts

39 Me-day destination

40 What a beekeeper receives at work?

45 Pettily punishes

50 Dynamite

51 Explode on Twitter, say

52 ‘‘____: Ragnarok’’ (2017 blockbuster)

54 Catty comments

55 Upstanding person

57 Flood protector

59 Bird that carries Sinbad to safety

61 ‘‘Little Fockers’’ actress Polo

62 Little auk, by another name

65 Japanese audio brand

66 Cousin of a clarinet

67 Why the knight went shopping?

73 Letters no longer seen on most phones

74 Ingredient in une quiche

75 Source of the words ‘‘O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;/It is the green-ey’d monster . . . ’’

76 Bohemian

77 ‘‘Hate Me Now’’ rapper, 1999

78 2019 award for ‘‘What the Constitution Means to Me’’

79 ‘‘Magnifi co!’’

84 Fully grown fi llies

86 Statistician’s calculation

88 Cruz known as the Queen of Salsa

91 Regenerist skin-care brand

92 Upfront?

94 Hogs, after being scrubbed clean?

97 Even a little bit

99 Take ____ from (follow)

100 Thrill

101 Resident of the lowest circle of hell, in Dante’s ‘‘Inferno’’

106 Spring setting in San Antonio: Abbr.

107 Border of a lagoon, say

111 What the ecstatic janitor did?

113 Porcine pad

114 Paul of ‘‘There Will Be Blood’’

115 Actress Taylor

116 ‘‘Stop it, I’m blushing’’

117 ‘‘Michael Jordan’s Top 10 Free Throws’’ and others?

120 Rental units: Abbr.

121 Ballet shoe application

122 Shakespearean prince

123 Cuts off

124 Interlock

125 Choral composition

126 N.F.C. South city: Abbr.

127 Kids’ camp crafts project

DOWN

1 Figure-skating champ Brian

2 Reinvented self-image

3 Tiff s

4 Spots to shop for tots

5 The Sun Devils’ sch.

6 One squat, for example

7 What soap bubbles do

8 Pet shop purchase

9 ‘‘Yuck!’’

10 Sublime

11 Toto’s creator

12 They’re full of questions

13 Holds on to one’s Essence, say?

14 Fasteners of some heels

15 Go at a glacial pace

16 Book before Joel

17 Boat sometimes built around a whalebone frame

18 Soul, e.g.

24 Give a shout

29 Nothing of the ____

30 Digital sounds?

32 Something up one’s sleeve

33 Original site of the Elgin Marbles

34 Beyoncé, for one

38 ‘‘How neat!’’

40 Uncle ____

41 Heartbreak

42 Martin who wrote the ‘‘Baby-Sitters Club’’ series

43 Conclude (with)

44 Coarsegrained igneous rock

46 Tagging along

47 Martial-arts-based workout

48 Trial’s partner

49 Went cross-countrying, say

53 Spiked wheel on a boot spur

56 Farm-to-table program, in brief

58 Shish ____

60 Scientist who said, ‘‘The cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff ’’

63 First string

64 Puts out

65 How obedient dogs walk

67 Gets a head?

68 Host of an Apple TV+ book club

69 In again

70 More sardonic

71 Paperless airplane reservation

72 Trifl ing amount

78 Because (of)

80 Sky fall?

81 Whitney of cotton gin fame

82 Headed

83 ‘‘Later!’’

85 Button on an old video game controller

87 Org. that publishes the journal Emotion

89 Prepare for a guided meditation, perhaps

90 Cavity fi llers

93 Homogeneous

95 ____ Gobert, 2018 and 2019 N.B.A. Defensive Player of the Year

96 Benchmark: Abbr.

98 ‘‘Over here!’’

101 Religion symbolized by a moon and star

102 Make a choice on Tinder

103 Isle of Man men, e.g.

104 Gorillalike

105 Suite meet?

108 Made lighter

109 One might begin ‘‘Dear Diary . . . ’’

110 ‘‘All That Jazz’’ director

112 Screenwriter Lee, sister of Spike

113 De-bug?

117 ____ cha beef (Chinese entree)

118 V-J Day prez

119 Ni‘ihau necklace

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127

By Julian Lim

11/

1/2

0

Julian Lim, of Singapore, is an assistant professor at the

School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore.

He leads the school’s Awake Lab, which studies the effects

of mindfulness practice on sleep, well-being and cognition.

He holds a B.S. from Duke and a Ph.D. from the University of

Pennsylvania. Julian started solving British crosswords in high

school, later getting hooked on American ones. He says he has

solved every New York Times crossword since 2004. — W.S.

Puzzles Online Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles:

nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year). For the daily puzzle

commentary: nytimes.com/wordplay.