Photographs from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 2024, by Bruce Gilden © Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos

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In the seventh hour of my flight to the Republican National Convention, I received a text message from a friend saying that the piece I was en route to write had just gotten “way crazier.” I bought the expensive Wi-Fi. Photographs said to be making history circulated: striking, well composed. I texted my friend, half a dozen others, my editor. The lights were dimmed, though the time at our destination was a sunny afternoon; I vibrated like a cell phone. In between time zones, high above place, I was alone in my knowledge that, miles below, something had actually happened. Although I’ve watched every current event of my adult life take place through the smudged screen of social media, it was not at that moment enough. I could see where Don DeLillo was coming from: the crowd, the broadcast, the clip you watch over and over, Hitler studies, LHO. As the news was breaking I wanted to actually experience the experiencing of it, to remember “where I was when” and to observe the reactions of the others who were there, too. The older woman next to me kept her bifocals fixed on the large font of her Kindle, unaware. In the liberal custom, though one forged after her time, I asked if she would be comfortable hearing breaking news; she might not like the sight of blood, even if it was just a bad cut. “Is that real?” she whispered, looking at my phone. She turned around to tell her daughter, whose regional accent was annoying. Only Frances McDormand, playing a character whose funny simplicity belies a profound knowledge of what she has seen, should be allowed to have it. “This lady’s a journalist,” the mother said. “She says Trump has been shot.”

I went to the bathroom. News spread. “Oh my God, what?” I heard a woman my age say. “Yeah, I saw that,” her husband replied, not looking up from his phone. “Tot?” the German flight attendant asked me. No, I replied, just injured. And barely. The speed with which the plane processed history’s happening should have signaled that the assassination attempt would merit a forty-eight-hour news cycle, max, but all it did then was make things more surreal. Attention soon turned to the baby wearing a sleeping cap in the next row; Lufthansa offered a bassinet that attached to the bulkhead. Wasn’t that great, the mother and daughter agreed, eyes glassy with hormonal memory. Wasn’t that just so cool. They were standing in the exit row, blocking my stretch. The presence of a baby was pacifying; the baby had behaved well the whole trip, lulled by its ingenious crib. Another flight attendant paused to appreciate it while preparing the cabin for landing. “Bye, baby!” he said in his German accent, patting its little head. “Have a good life!”

For the next week the Republicans would exist in a time outside time, a crowded fantasy world cruising above reality, in which their future victory had been “all but” assured by what they called an act of God. Joe Biden, who could barely string together a sentence except to insist that he would not drop out of the presidential race, was asked if he had been briefed on the news as he left a church service, and responded, simply, “No.” Eventually, he extended prayers, condemned violence, and paused his television ads. Might this, liberals wondered, be an opportunity to push for gun-control measures? Also no. It was not the time for politics, which meant the shooting was all anyone could talk about on air. “This is the only news in the world right now,” a Scottish journalist said apologetically into her phone, in Milwaukee’s mostly empty Fiserv Forum the night before the convention began. The Republicans spoke and moved with the weightless optimism of young lovers meeting in a summer town, or junkies who have finally scored. “He’s not gonna have post-traumatic stress from this,” a doctor on Fox & Friends declared, citing Trump’s good spirits. “It’s either fear or courage, guys, either fear or courage.” To the murmuring disappointment of the Democrats, Trump had displayed the latter; he had insisted on pausing his escape from danger not only to improvise a moment of political theater—raising his fist in the air and exhorting his audience, with his Simpsons mouth, to “Fight, fight!”—but also to get his shoes. Even the nebbishy way he repeated “Let me get my shoes” as Secret Service agents tried to rush him out suggested calm in a crisis, though perhaps not presence of mind. Why they were off, we may never know; one remembers, barely, the rumor that he was afraid to walk down stairs. During the convention, it was emphasized that the phone calls and messages he exchanged in the wake of the shooting were heroically selfless. He asked Steven Witkoff how his kids were doing. He told Tucker Carlson that he was proud of the crowd in Pennsylvania, because they didn’t run. “A leader is the bravest man,” Carlson said onstage, having forgone a script. “The first thing I thought was, ‘Well, of course they didn’t run!’ His courage gave them heart. A leader’s courage gives courage to his people. And the second thing I thought was ‘This is the selfish guy I’ve been hearing about for nine years?’ ”

They had been finally, actually, victimized. Here was proof of what they’d always known: that their children were ostracized on university campuses and their rich were dwindling in number. See what happens when you compare a man to Hitler? they cried. See what results when you call him a rapist and a threat to democracy? No matter that the shooter’s search history seemed to reveal only the contemporary mode of nihilism, that he had no motive except to shoot a powerful political figure, obsessed by neither candidate nor by a particular systematic view. The left had dismissed the concept of the lone wolf in the hopes of advocating for gun-control laws, so the right was free to gleefully perform the role liberals had written for themselves. Hosts on Fox News decried the dangerous rhetoric against their man. Did no one even care, they wondered, that he had sacrificed his salary to serve this country for four years? That he had lost money on the deal? That his family had suffered, too? As Trump himself pointed out, his sons “got subpoenaed more than any people probably in the history of the United States.”

On top of it all, they had to spend a week in Milwaukee. A “horrible city,” Trump had reportedly said in a closed-door meeting with congressional Republicans. Before the shooting, as their cigar-smoking foot soldiers podcasted endlessly about Biden’s cognitive decline—to the point that they were actually threatening to put their opponent’s name too much in the news—this is what the Democrats, who were at the time still completely hapless, had been pushing: Trump hates Milwaukee. He tried to take it back. In fact, he loves Milwaukee. “I picked Milwaukee,” he wrote on Truth Social, the “alt-tech” platform he set up after he was banned from Facebook and Twitter in 2021. “This is false, a complete lie, just like the Laptop from Hell was a lie, Russia, Russia, Russia, was a lie, and so much more.” Would he really say something so offensive to the people of a state that had helped determine his win in 2016 and his loss in 2020? Not that his loss in 2020 was legitimate. That’s what he’d meant by the “horrible” comment—that the city was ridden with crime and voter fraud—a spokesperson clarified.

Milwaukee did not want them there, either. Sixty-one percent of its residents are people of color, and the city votes blue. The city government is nonpartisan, but you can imagine which way they tend to lean. Republicans, however, control the Wisconsin state legislature, one Senate seat, and three quarters of the state’s seats in the House. Discussions concerning the decision to pursue hosting the convention were not entirely easy. The gotcha question was posed as to why the city had been happy to have the Democrats just four years ago—that convention was conducted mostly online because of COVID-19—but resistant to hosting the other side now. It was hypothesized that Democrats are more likely to seek out local bars and restaurants, and maybe even to carve out some time to patronize the municipal offerings, such as the city’s art museum, housed in world-class buildings designed by Eero Saarinen and Santiago Calatrava, set on the lake.

The beautiful lake! It was suggested in response that the 2 percent sales tax the city might have needed to levy in order to avoid bankruptcy might meet difficulties in the state legislature if the city did not open its doors to those across the aisle—and that the bill should probably include some stipulations, such as that the revenue should not be used to fund positions dedicated to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or spent on “the streetcar.” It was suggested that the city might at least be able to temporarily ban the carrying of guns in the security perimeter downtown during the four-day event. It was emphasized that this would be against state law. It was argued that they might as well institute the ban, let themselves get sued, and by the time the case went to court the convention would be over, weapons prohibited. Such a scheme would not have cost the city any money, but it was agreed that this was wishful thinking. Unanimously, the city approved the convention. A temporary ordinance permitted bars to stay open until 4 am. So there we were, eating fried cheese.

Milwaukee is similar to an Italian city in that, if you walk into a restaurant off the street without purpose or conviction, more likely than not you will find on the menu a set of about five regional variations on the national cuisine. In Milwaukee these are: butter burger, cheeseburger, cheese curds, bratwurst, and frozen custard. A butter burger is a burger with butter on it; the cheese is from Wisconsin. Sometimes there is a Caesar salad. I’m sure the city has restaurants and bars that would satisfy a dedicated reader of Google restaurant reviews—Wisconsin was the theme of this season’s Top Chef, concluded just weeks before the convention—but I didn’t have time to find them. “Our black colleagues on the council thought this was going to be a big boost to small, black-owned businesses and black-owned restaurants and bars in Brownsville and on the north side,” alderman Robert Bauman told me in his office at City Hall. Very messy; papers everywhere. “And I thought, ‘That is truly a stretch. That is highly unlikely.’ ” He had been trying to prevent the convention from coming there, but the optics were bad: “It’s four white liberals that are putting up the stop sign from the city receiving all this benefit and the national attention.” I heard a rumor that restaurateurs were instructed not to take reservations for nights during the convention and to expect a stream of walk-ins; this probably did not materialize, and what’s more, at least part of the local restaurant-going population had wisely chosen to take their vacation days that week. Even on foot, navigating sucked. Downtown Milwaukee was deserted but mazed with concrete barriers and high metal fences. A wide security footprint was restricted to vehicle traffic—guns were permitted here, even after the assassination attempt—and an inner “hard perimeter,” where all the actual convention stuff happened, required a stroll through metal detectors. They confiscated lighters; to smoke a cigarette within the inner perimeter during each day’s official convention sessions, you had to first locate someone already smoking, and more often than not they’d hand you the Marlboro from their own mouth so you could light yours. The thousands of out-of-state cops who’d been brought in often gave conflicting information about where you could walk and why, and sometimes they scared you with jokes like “Hey! You can’t yawn here.” On the second day, some of them shot and killed a homeless black man, known to the community, who had been lunging at someone with a knife about seven blocks from the perimeter. This seemed to vindicate the liberals who’d warned against hosting the convention, though the security plan for the 2020 DNC had also involved out-of-state law enforcement. The cops responsible released their body-cam footage that same day and hightailed it back to Columbus not long after.

make america great once again was the slogan displayed throughout the Fiserv Forum, and the convention’s themes were reconciliation, resurgence, return, revenge. If the redundant “once” signaled the fundamental awkwardness of a party threatening to fracture on ideological and generational lines, for the time being most everyone on the floor had donned rose-colored Oakleys, grooving to a cover band and, on special occasions, eighty-one-year-old Lee Greenwood. They had been through a lot, and they felt they’d earned this. As Carlson pointed out, himself there on what was said to be a kind of revenge tour after getting fired from Fox News last year, “Peter Navarro is back . . . suffering the fate that has happened to so many who are friends with Donald Trump. . . . They literally let Navarro out of prison.” The former director of the former White House National Trade Council, which quickly became the former Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, neither of which existed before or has existed after the Trump Administration, had indeed flown to Milwaukee directly from prison to give a speech. He was swimming in his suit and missing a tooth. The crowd went nuts. You can’t blame him if he rambled, warning that if they could come for him they could come for you, and used too many times the phrase “my girl,” referring to his fiancée, who eventually came out and gave him a war hero’s welcome before yanking him offstage.

The assassination attempt was seen as advantageous not only because it could sway uncommitted voters in the direction of the candidate who was not about to keel over even when in the line of fire, but also because it made the party fall in line. The week before, when the party platform was announced, aged evangelicals used to being treated like valued customers had realized they couldn’t harangue their way into a stronger position on “the unborn baby.” (“They rolled us,” Gayle Ruzicka, an eighty-one-year-old mentee of Phyllis Schlafly who was once known as a power broker in Utah state politics, told reporters as she left the platform committee meeting in dismay.) The platform is generally understood to be a bullshit document, but it did point to the likelihood of a New Right vice presidential pick in J. D. Vance, who grew up periodically attending Pentecostal churches and, in the years since the upsetting success of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in 2016, has heard the call of glossolalic bloggers urging him to retire all government employees. I was eating a burger with some young Republicans when the news that Trump had announced Vance as his running mate reached the convention; Vance’s speech would be on day three, but because Republicans had been instructed not to dwell on the assassination attempt, Vance, and not Trump, seemed to be the biggest story of the convention. Not that anyone I spoke to expressed huge praise for or doubts about Vance specifically; it’s just that Trump was boring and subdued, though he dutifully emerged from a VIP tunnel every day, usually accompanied by “Y.M.C.A.” and a video montage of him dancing like a dork. Only on night one, Trump’s first public appearance since he could have died, did he do anything interesting: he looked like he was about to cry during the entirety of “Proud to Be an American.” Still, DeLillo, the power of the crowd: I would find myself in a mosh pit surrounded by pushy cameramen angling to shoot the former president, and I would want to see him, too. I had to stop myself from reflexively joining in on certain rounds of applause. At one point, I ran into the podcaster Mike Pesca, bright with journalistic success, who had managed to get five minutes with Lauren Boebert. He sent me in her direction, but she was tiny and maneuvered too quickly through a thickening crowd near the VIP entrance. “She’s quite a critter, isn’t she,” a delegate I’d met the previous day muttered in my ear. “Trying to get a glimpse of Trump as he walks by.” Floor whips—participants deputized to perform traffic control during higher-security moments, who act like this is the most important thing they will ever do in their lives—pushed me into a really good spot. Eventually J. D. Vance emerged; I got some good iPhone photos. As I was walking out the door to bum a light from someone, Trump came out right where I’d been standing.

Back inside I saw Matt Gaetz, the congressman from Florida who would be the subject of quiet protest among a few delegates when he took the stage later. When I asked them why they had turned their backs during Gaetz’s speech, one of them said, “Instead of serving in the U.S. Congress, he should be prosecuted for child molestation.” In Gaetz’s photo line, I stood next to a visibly nervous young alternate delegate from Tennessee. He asked if I’d take a photo of him with the congressman when it was his turn. Of course I would. But it became clear that neither of our turns would come unless I took some decisive action for us as a team.

What should I ask him? I asked the delegate as we waited. This was nice of me, I thought, to let this guy participate in the reporting process. He told me to ask him what he thought of J. D. Vance. Great idea.

“Incandescent intellect,” Gaetz replied. “America-first foreign policy. Connects with middle-class voters. Connects with voters in America’s heartland. He’s gonna help us win this election.”

Somehow prescient, because this would not become a major source of internet mockery until the following day, I followed up: What about his beautiful blue eyes? I’d just read an article that mentioned Trump’s praise for Vance’s beautiful blue eyes. Gaetz’s bearing changed. (Although images that later circulated online made his face seem pumped with filler, he looks relatively normal in person.) He replied immediately, as if he’d been waiting to talk about this all day. “It’s the lashes,” he said. “Anybody can fall for the eyes. Only J. D. Vance has those lashes.”

The frat-boy familiarity of this ostensibly flirtatious line was unsettling. Although Vance’s speech later in the week really pissed me off, I also wondered if they were kind of fucking with him. Pundits and loved ones claimed that Trump had “softened” since the assassination attempt; skeptics suggested to me that this was all an act for the famous reality-TV star. Regardless, the serendipitous timing has made Vance seem like a charity case benefiting from Trump’s new, more generous personality, and so even more in danger of falling out of favor than any other precariously employed Trump adviser. Since Trump was elected in 2016, it’s been fashionable to think of all public behavior, committed by anyone, as an act, and to forget that these acts are also what produce a reality, for both the actor and those around him. I think Trump was genuinely out of sorts, maybe even authentically emotional, after the shooting, and he allowed that to show because it was politically useful. Vance’s problem is that he doesn’t know how to act at all, but for a week everyone trusted Trump’s decision-making, blessed as it had been by God, and awaited the premiere of Revenge of the White Working Class 2: Chinese Fentanyl at the Southern Border.

Lighting on the floor produces excellent photographs. Face to face, when one is leaning in close to hear a subject speaking, it highlights whiteheads, eczema, plaque, and the saliva that collects in Invisalign braces. The smell of the arena’s concession stands, where the regional variations were served, occasionally wafted onto the floor as we circulated; everything was loud and red, but at least not hot. Things got rowdier, physically pushier, and more disturbing as the week progressed. Day two was dedicated to the also-rans—when Nikki Haley took the stage, she was met with some interruptive boos and a post-internet pink backdrop that complemented the flowers on her dress. In the days before the shooting, she had communicated, with the regulation dignity of an age-appropriate first wife, that she was not invited and “fine with that” because Trump “deserves the convention he wants.” Mortality puts things in perspective. When she said, over the hecklers, that Trump had invited her after all to drive home the new, death-brushed message of party unity, Trump was seen possibly fact-checking her in his royal box, mouthing to Vance something that looked to one internet lip-reader like “She asked. I didn’t want her to speak. Here we go.” She established that you don’t have to agree with him one hundred percent of the time to vote for him. When Ron DeSantis took her place, the backdrop changed to big-boy blue. The only former candidate to get a passionate audience response was Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech billionaire with whom the convention was on a first-name basis despite his opening bit: “I’m proud to say that I achieved the impossible, which is that most of you actually know how to say my name by now.” (They can barely pronounce “Usha.”) Throughout the week he would be spotted traversing the arena in his skinny suit, never breaking his striding smile, even when a mother in a photo line just had to tell him that her son had really wanted him on the ticket, and she’d had to console him by saying that it “just wasn’t his time yet.” I came to recognize the Vivek guys: entrepreneurial, clean, and as one twenty-two-year-old heir to a regional liquor-store empire told me, deeply concerned about tariffs.

Young women not stressfully employed were scarce, save for one I saw in a pink MAGA hat queening out with a friend upon the appearance of Tucker Carlson. Hot guys could be found among the photographers, foreign journalists, and imposing functionaries of square jaw and evil hair. Spotting a beautiful giant gently placing his huge arms on admirers’ shoulders, I asked his handler who he was and was told “NBA player.” “Enes Kanter!” a sporty friend replied when I sent him a photo. “Nicknamed penis cancer by disgruntled fans on some former team, maybe Utah? Criticized erdogan and now can’t go back to Turkey. Apparently changed his last name to freedom.” Other athletes attending included Riley Gaines, the former college swimmer who has made a little media career out of failure, in a Wildcat blue going-out top, and an older man on the floor in sweatpants, with skin the color of rust and hair that survived the Eighties, who appeared in an aisle as we impatiently waited about half an hour for Hulk Hogan to take the stage and rip off his tank top. Ezra Klein, the influential liberal podcaster, claimed Hogan’s was the best speech of the night on the grounds that “it understood that the root of Donald Trump’s politics are as a showman, as a reality-television star, as a WWE Hall of Famer.” Klein was watching the convention from home, and also living in 2016; these things do not matter anymore. We would all love a new showman, someone who tapped into and so defined our unarticulated collective media needs, someone whose odd appeal journalists could buzzingly clarify, but the guilty pleasure of bad television is beyond stale. No one can kid themselves that poor people enjoy watching this kind of thing anymore—everyone watches short clips on their phones. Needless to say, Hogan’s reception on the floor was not particularly rapturous.

Democrats have a monopoly on celebrity; the famous people who attend the RNC are real losers. The message of the week was that, as long as you’re not trans or fleeing a persecutory foreign government without offering us some recompense in the form of elite athletic ability, “you’re welcome here.” Like Democrats, Republicans have come to care a lot about not being perceived as racist, with many speakers lamenting that illegal immigrants are stealing what Trump calls “black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” and emphasizing that, as South Carolina senator Tim Scott declared, “America is not a racist country!”

In the driveway of the Saint Kate hotel I smoked a cigarette with Amber Rose, of blue-white teeth and Lucite heel, but she didn’t want to do an interview before she gave her speech, which, promoting unity, would fall into the popular genre of conservative conversion story. “I believed the left-wing propaganda that Trump was a racist,” Rose said onstage that night, hissing sweetly through her veneers, sounding a little like her crazy ex. In fact, Trump is “kind and generous and funny as hell.” As we smoked, a protest across the street was dispiritingly contained, following the weekend’s huge blow to left-wing morale and protracted debate with the Milwaukee city government about whether protesters could march within shouting distance of the action. The main issues being fought for—Palestinian liberation and rights for women and LGBTQ people—barely came up at the convention, though there was a “salute to pro-Israel elected officials” event on the last day. I skipped it; I thought I was already attending a salute to pro-Israel elected officials.

USA. Milwaukee. July 18th, 2024. Professional wrestler Hulk Hogan (Terry Gene Bollea) speaking at the Republican National Convention.

A Harper’s Magazine credential was a soft asset on the floor, and not only because any interviews I conducted wouldn’t come out for about three months and would after that live behind the secure borders of the paywall. If Republicans didn’t know the magazine, I could explain that it was the oldest general-interest monthly in the country, institutional and stalwart, and elide my own political beliefs by saying I don’t usually write about politics, which is true. If they did know the magazine, they were fans. “Of course I know Harper’s,” at least two older men replied when I asked. “They endorsed Abe Lincoln!” Lincoln heads tend not to like Trump and respond to questions on this point as did Al Taubenberger, a delegate and a member of the Philadelphia Parking Authority Board, with some version of “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

More useful was my dormant regional accent. I often use it to flirt with men, though I understand that its erotic appeal is that it makes me sound stupid, and softens what I’m told is an intimidating . . . let’s say frankness, which, I realized rereading Hillbilly Elegy, is possibly something I inherited culturally. Smiling nicely, with a bright-red manicure, I flattened my vowels and transmogrified my r’s. “Hi,” I drawled, over and over. “I’m a reporter from West Virginia, and I was wondering . . . ” Just as the standing ovation for a single mother who lost her husband to “the drug epidemic” caused by “Democrats’ open border policies” finished, I found myself next to my home state’s delegation, in their matching hard hats decorated with stickers. Miraculously, I saw someone I recognized. “I’m sorry,” I said, bending down. “Were you my AP World History teacher?”

If you didn’t know better, you might have thought he taught drama. Mr. Higginbotham’s face changed gradually from confusion, to hesitant recognition, to ironically scandalized shock. He had been the faculty sponsor for the Teen Age Republicans, but my memories of whatever specific political opinions he held had since been overtaken by those of a different teacher, who once passed around an essay he’d written arguing that gay sex was morally equivalent to bestiality. (To be clear, I was the president of Hurricane High School’s chapter of the Young Democrats of America.) I reminded Mr. Higginbotham of my name; he stood up; we hugged. “My former student!” he told the curious delegation.

“So how are you?” he asked, looking me up and down, and then at my left hand. “Are you married?”

“No!” I said, waving my ring finger.

“Me neither!”

We laughed conspiratorially. I remembered he was always talking about not being married.

For about a day, I was the darling of the West Virginia delegation, and they looked at me like I was a famous actress who was dating their nephew. They gave me a Babydog sticker—Babydog is the governor’s sixty-two-pound bulldog, who was onstage with him during his speech—and called out “Putnam County!” when I walked by. I would soon betray them, but for the moment we all reveled in the smallness of the world.

Day three, themed Make America Strong Once Again, was dedicated primarily to yelling at people on the floor for standing still in the wrong places or moving to places they had been directed to but weren’t supposed to go. Agitated by the floor-is-lava situation, I passed my proud aunts and uncles in the West Virginia delegation and talked to Matt Herridge, the chair of the West Virginia Republican Party. He had just sold his Burger Kings, though he was still a Qdoba franchisee. I asked him about the hard hats. Many delegations treat the convention like senior week and wear matching outfits—Hawaii’s were obviously the best, but the Wisconsin delegates had their traditional postmodern tricornes shaped like cheese. I overheard one chair say that it was easier to corral a delegation when they all looked the same, but the general approach to stepping out made clear that it was more about crafting, and possibly latently supporting the freedom fighters at Hobby Lobby, which won the right to refuse to cover employees’ birth control in a Supreme Court case ten years ago. Anyway, what did the hard hats represent?

“We are, of course, in West Virginia coal country,” Herridge said. “We are fans of the fossil-fuel industry. We know it provides a lot of great jobs. We believe in clean energy, but we also believe that we want energy independence for this country.” They didn’t want what happens in Texas—the grid failures, the rolling blackouts—to happen there.

“What about water?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, “where my family lives, we can’t really drink the water.”

“Oh, really,” Herridge said.

“Yeah.”

Since the 2014 Elk River chemical spill dumped about ten thousand gallons of coal-processing stuff into the water supply, more and more people I’ve spoken to while visiting West Virginia say they do not feel comfortable drinking the water in most of the state, which is, like so many things about the place, ranked among the worst in the country. The contamination problem (PFAS, arsenic, and other chemicals) is in part believed to be the result of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract natural gas, and mountaintop removal to mine coal. Plus, shitty pipes. In 2006, then-governor Joe Manchin tried to change the state slogan to open for business, and people got so mad that the government had to quickly backpedal, removing costly signs. I remember but cannot find documentation of complaints that the proposed new slogan made us sound like prostitutes.

“Yeah, yeah,” Herridge said. “Well, I mean, clean water is extremely important. . . . Absolutely. Absolutely clean water is . . . we’ve got to have that as our population grows, and we want it to grow in West Virginia.”

The crowd cheered loudly in response to something happening onstage.

“Well, I think I’m missing something,” he said.

Vance is not technically from Appalachia, but he really wants to be. “I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast,” he writes at the beginning of Hillbilly Elegy. “Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.” He was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, which his detractors describe as “suburban” and he describes convincingly as a hillbilly enclave, the product of generations of migration from ailing mining towns to the manufacturing jobs of the Rust Belt along “the hillbilly highway.” Before factories closed, too, companies courted workers from the holler, who brought their values and customs with them. According to Vance, these include “an intense sense of loyalty, a fierce dedication to family and country,” a distrust of outsiders, an intense pride and concomitant shame, a defensive quickness to anger, a tendency to “blood feud,” and a lack of agency, which sometimes he attributes to “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay” and “a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” Accepting the vice presidential nomination eight years after he published the book, he invoked his lovably murderous mamaw, whose Kentucky roots justify his fierce and only partially self-serving identification with the region, and extended an emotional acknowledgment to his mother, ten years sober up there in the royal box, before burying identity politics once and for all in his family cemetery plot in the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky. “When, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and my kids follow us,” he said onstage that night, “there will be seven generations just in that small plot.”

You never leave Harlan alive. He mentioned the cemetery plot one too many times; it almost seemed as if he was in a hurry to get there. There’s an easy political explanation for why someone would “identify” with a place they describe as horrible, but Vance does so with a desperation to belong that rivals that of teenage girls and elicits similar responses. Since the convention ended, Vance has been on a humiliation tour in the liberal media, mocked for, among other things, drinking Diet Mountain Dew, making unfunny comments, being “weird,” being a self-mythologizing phony, reading Joan Didion, whiffing it with a doughnut purveyor, wearing eyeliner, and fucking a couch (someone on the internet just made that up). That some of these things mark him as of authentically shithole origin doesn’t matter. The governor of Kentucky, which Vance considers “home” and where he experienced “the fondest memories” of his childhood, rejected him, saying, “He ain’t from here.” The writer Tracy Moore, who lives in Los Angeles and posts on X using the handle @iusedtobepoor, complained that Vance “cosplayed” the hillbilly role after rolling her eyes and saying that “we are knee-deep in the pig shit of essay after essay about Appalachia and hillbillies.” A person from this region doesn’t tend to have much social capital—a “professor’s term” Vance spends a little too long explaining in Hillbilly Elegy—so whenever the book returns to the news cycle, the national media’s four secret rednecks fire up their laptops to remind the world that they do have teeth, actually. And dignity!

I personally would not challenge Vance to a past-life poor-off, though I usually get knocked out in the quarterfinals anyway because there’s no drug addiction in my immediate family. (They have other problems, if you’d like to take this outside.) If you haven’t read Vance’s notoriously reviled best-selling autobiography but are familiar with left-wing criticism of it—that Vance caricatures Appalachia and argues that the region’s suffering would not be ameliorated by extreme governmental intervention, but is rather the result of backward cultural norms, including laziness, that must be addressed with bootstrapping—you might not really know that Vance endured a particularly traumatic and abusive childhood, with few consolations in the form of the idealized pleasures of a rural existence, like quilting or bluegrass or the bucolic picking of green beans. (The people Vance writes about don’t eat tons of vegetables, an observation I’ll cosign.) Erratic and addicted to pain pills, and later heroin (“the Kentucky Derby of drugs”), his mother bounced from boyfriend to boyfriend, house to house, and Vance lived an extremely peripatetic life, surrounded by fights at home and fights in the neighborhood, developing what they call “behavioral problems”—and dental problems—as he sometimes went along with his mom and sometimes decamped to his mamaw and papaw’s house. The book dramatizes his success afterward—from the Marines to Ohio State to Yale Law to acolyte of Peter Thiel with a book deal—which has nothing to do with his own innate abilities, but the work ethic he developed because his grandparents, while also fighty, took good care of him. He frequently cites moments that illustrate how they “saved” him, as well as moments that would have “consumed” him or when he was on a “precipice”; the book is written with a great deal of narrative drama, and his is the rare life story that can handle it, though of course the prose, a combination of actual vestigial coarseness, put-on folksiness, and intentional dumbing down that you also get in his “weird” speeches, leaves something to be desired. Still: this is a man who, in high school, was coerced into pissing in a jar so his mother could pass a drug test, just weeks after she nodded off on him at a Chinese buffet.

Must we let him speak? What agitates the liberal commentariat so much about Vance is that, in using his personal experience to justify a political program, his book is a classic example of millennial identity politics; what has always been the problem with this is that you can use personal experience to justify any belief you want, and the only way for an opponent to object is to question that personal experience. While left-wing critics tend to ignore Vance’s stories of drugs and abuse, glossing over them as “problems” in the region, they have questioned, or just ruefully made fun of, the details Vance includes of his Podunk introduction to the wider world. In one passage that was very popular online, Vance attends an informal interview at a fancy restaurant with an elite law firm and his classmates at Yale; facing a classic class dilemma, he doesn’t know the difference between sauvignon blanc and chardonnay, nor which fork to use, and furthermore he orders sparkling water, which he has never encountered before. He thinks the adjective must just be a “pretentious” advertising ploy—“like ‘sparkling’ crystal”—but reasons the fancy water probably has “fewer contaminants.” I don’t remember the first time I had sparkling water, but I also didn’t grow up drinking it; I can certainly remember a period of wariness, of being offered it in restaurants and declining out of unfamiliarity and the needless cost. I’ll admit I sort of disliked all the conversation around this point. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely that I would ever in a million years have “literally spit it out” at a group job interview at the Union League Cafe, because I’m not a fucking dumbass.

Anecdotes like this are canny acknowledgments of Vance’s audience: not fellow “hillbillies,” or even fellow upwardly mobile secret rednecks like myself, but people for whom the kind of dull isolation experienced in Appalachia is literally unimaginable. This is the book’s appeal, as Gaetz suggested: not relatability, which is the goal of so many liberal identity-politics texts, but real talk. It’s clearly the product of urging from professors and classmates at Yale Law, where Vance felt, “for the first time in my life, that others viewed my life with intrigue.”

It’s not common for a vice presidential candidate to have widespread national name recognition; Vance does. He was not chosen as some kind of representative of the white working class—though his stories will be familiar to people from Appalachia, even if they’d like to pretend otherwise—but rather as someone who has already established himself as a public figure, famous for having the kind of background you want a politician to have. It’s hard to imagine an undecided voter from Wisconsin caring, or understanding, that Vance is not “really” from Appalachia, home to a contingent the Republicans already have in the bag. When I asked the West Virginia delegation how they’d managed to get such good seats on the floor—they were just stage left, with as good a view as Wisconsin—someone told me he didn’t know for sure, but he thought it was because West Virginia had had a very high plurality of Trump voters in both elections. About Vance, they were enthusiastic but not insane. “I hope that he will make aware that we are here and help us to get more development,” Margitta Mazzocchi, a brightly blond “legal immigrant” from Germany and member of the state House of Delegates, told me. “We need more jobs, more education, more opportunities for our people.” When I spoke to her in German, she responded in English, though Germans do that in Germany as well. She and her husband had read Hillbilly Elegy aloud to each other, which is interesting because in that book Vance is specifically against the government providing more opportunities for the people of Appalachia.

What’s so “weird” is that like many formerly essential tenets of the Republican platform, the straightforward anti-welfare stance Vance advocates in Hillbilly Elegy is disorientingly out of fashion in Trump’s party; now, instead of spending much time decrying government programs, they just call your attention elsewhere. One of the major issues at the convention, discussed over and over, is what “everyday American” Anne Fundner called onstage “the tragic reality of open borders,” which the party has sought to use as a scapegoat for the third wave of the opioid crisis, during which overdoses have become the leading cause of death in Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. Fundner’s son Weston died when he was fifteen; he took something a friend gave him. “This was not an overdose,” Fundner said through tears. “It was a poisoning.”

The idea is that eleven to thirty million “illegals” have brought Chinese fentanyl over the southern border on “border czar” Kamala Harris’s watch. In order for this critique to work, the conservative Overton window on drug use has had to shift significantly, or maybe crack, over the past twenty years; the suggestion here is that a fifteen-year-old should be able to try a drug given to him by a friend and not immediately die. The crowd agreed; they cried and chanted Fundner’s dead son’s name, watching with the transfixed focus of people who actually do have PTSD. While I agree that’s true, the timeline of the opioid epidemic, and Vance’s personal experience of it during the Clinton and Bush Administrations, suggest a problem that first must be dealt with at home. As Vance spoke onstage of “Joe Biden’s economy,” in which “dreams were shattered, and China and the cartels sent fentanyl across the border, adding addiction to the heartache,” he sounded like another piece of white trash pointing fingers at his problems, too proud to admit he lives in a horrible place. Many such cases, as his new daddy would say. In 2016, Vance tried to use his book to promote the Never Trump campaign, and even referred to him at one point as “cultural heroin.” Because of my background, I struggle with political correctness sometimes: It would be insensitive, right, to call Vance a junkie?

Although he’s young and maintains his conservative values despite his multicultural family—Usha is pronounced as it’s spelled—Vance doesn’t represent progress for the Republican Party, but rather another kind of reconciliation with 2016. By the time Vance ran for the Senate, in 2022, he’d changed his mind on Trump. “J. D. is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad,” Trump said at an Ohio rally, after he’d endorsed him in the Senate race. Though it’s Trump who’s not a crook, Vance has become his personal fall guy, a desperate young Nixon to Trump’s bizarro Ike. While Trump’s blatant lies have become so customary that they are paradoxical indications of authenticity—of how many people do we say, “Oh, that’s just how he is”?—Vance’s congenital inability to think for himself strikes the consumer of the American political system as affected. He pauses in the wrong places, raising his eyebrows slightly as he wonders if you’re going to laugh first at what he might think is funny. Worse for the Republicans, his earnest striving is so noxious to average American voters, who want to be manipulated while still imagining they are making a sophisticated choice informed by insider knowledge, that he detracts attention from an actual political star. If they lose this election, Vance will find another club that will have him as a member, not because he is a son of privilege but because he is privileged with unique reserves of willpower unencumbered by critical-thinking skills. For now, they’ve somehow gotten themselves into a situation where Donald Trump is the one making excuses for someone else’s gaffes. The vice president has “virtually no impact,” he had to say. “You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion . . . and then that dies down and it’s all about the presidential pick.”

I began the last day of the convention possibly more tired than I have ever been, eating a banh mi across from a booth advertising a VR experience of the Holocaust and swatting away an alternate delegate from Texas who wouldn’t stop asking me about the boyfriend I’d made up to get him to go away. Why wasn’t the boyfriend here with me? I’m a modern woman, I explained, and escaped to the Dove Hydration & Wellness “relaxation suite,” where I paid $30 to take a fifteen-minute spin in a massage chair. The day before, Biden’s face had appeared on a television in a bar under the headline tests positive for covid-19, and rumors circulated among smoking journalists that it was possible he would drop out that night. One guy’s plan to write about how lighters were the most coveted merchandise at the RNC was probably unnecessary now, but we agreed that dropping out would be an amazing move to distract from Trump’s speech.

Unfortunately, Biden waited until Sunday to step aside, so we endured the longest acceptance speech ever given by an American presidential nominee at a convention, beating his own previous record by around twenty minutes. The first fifteen minutes consisted of the story of the shooting; he was only going to tell it once, just then, he explained, “because it’s actually too painful.” His doctor had told him the ear bleeds more than any other part of the body, “so we learned something.” (Apparently this isn’t true.) After that, delegates looked at their phones; I sat on the floor, fluorescently bored, texting with four other journalists, one of whom was on acid. Trump seemed tired, unable to stop talking though unenthusiastic about being there; he promised he’d refer to Biden by name just the one time, which was a mistake. The balloon drop is actually really cool, but as I overheard some women in the ladies’ room say, “That’s not Pavarotti singing the national anthem.”

Is it possible for a baby who flies coach to grow up to have a good life in the United States? I don’t really think so, nor, apparently, do the Republicans, who obsess over the “radical gender ideology” being taught in schools and decry the overdoses that are one of the leading causes of death in people under eighteen. If Vance has done one good thing in the short time he has been scrutinized not merely as a public figure but as a vice presidential candidate, his resurfaced comments on “childless cat ladies” have provided much-needed perspective on the inane conversations about having children that have been a feature of left-wing discourse for the past few years. As vocal support for abortion access waned and the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, bobos wrung their hands about how broody they’d become. is it ok to have a child? the headlines wondered, invoking imminent climate collapse, among other problems. This is not a question that occurs to normal people, and it occurs to the liberals who might debate it at a wine bar only as a thought experiment that has news value. As concerned studies proliferate on Americans’ waning desire and willingness to make babies, pronatalism remains creepy to those of us who don’t like too much government influence in our private lives. Have children if you want them; most people still do. While Ramaswamy and others wrote op-eds with titles like “A Baby Shortage Threatens America’s Future,” liberals ambivalently produced more future college graduates who will not want to assume caretaking jobs for the aging population. I heard that, at the DNC a few weeks later, access to fertility treatments was “like the main thing they talked about.”

A person who moves away from Appalachia is said to have “gotten out.” At the airport, it’s wonderful to be child-free. As I stood in line for security, my flight was delayed by four hours. Drinking a margarita, I tried to rebook through the United app, but it was frozen, and the cell network was working at a pace that would alarm conspiracy theorists. A friend had texted with the news at four in the morning, when I was busy with other things, but only now did I have to accept that it affected me, too: a global system had crashed, and the screens were all blue.