Day: September 29, 2021

DEL RIO, Texas — On a metal bench outside this city’s small airport, a 27-year-old woman named Nephtalie sat with her husband as he spoke anxiously on the phone in Haitian Creole. Behind them, the airport was closed for the night, and the parking lot was empty. It was a little after 10 p.m. on Tuesday. The two had managed to buy tickets for a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago the next morning, where she has family. But with every hotel within 100 miles of Del Rio fully booked and little money to spend on a room anyway, they would have to weather the elements outside for the night until the airport reopened. The couple was more relieved than anything. They’d spent the last few days under a bridge at the border where as many as 15,000 migrants this weekend (down to about 5,000 today), mostly Haitians like them, have been camped, closed in on all sides by U.S. border agents and Texas state troopers.

At the bridge, about 4 miles south of the airport in Del Rio, the scene looks like a war camp, with hundreds of armed agents positioned on a field near thousands of migrants living in squalor. When some 15,000 people crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in the past week or so, it brought a spotlight on this Texas border town of 35,000, which has not been a historically popular crossing point (though it has seen more than 200,000 migrant encounters in the last year). It also raised the question of why and how so many migrants, particularly Haitians, arrived at the same time and the same place along the border. The answer is a mix of misinformation and desperation, exacerbated by the Biden administration’s application of draconian deterrence with seemingly random mercy.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security sent hundreds of additional U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to Del Rio, called in the Coast Guard for reinforcement, and announced the administration’s plans to put migrants on planes and fly them out of the country, including sending many back to Haiti. At the same time, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott seized on the situation to mobilize hundreds of state troopers and Texas National Guard officers to Del Rio to “secure the border,” including by creating a “steel wall” of patrol vehicles to prevent more migrants from entering the country.

The highway to the port of entry between the U.S. and Mexico that so many Del Rio residents are used to crossing everyday has been closed until further notice, and the massive presence of officers from different state and federal agencies, along with helicopters overhead, gives the city a sense of military occupation. But that occupation has done little to fix the country’s broken immigration system, of which the scenes in South Texas are only the latest symptom.

The harshest and most dramatic coverage of the recent migrant crisis — photos of Black immigrants being rounded up by CBP officers on horseback, stories of the dire conditions in the camp under the bridge — only hint at the bigger picture on the ground, in which people on both sides of the border, Mexico and the U.S., are living in a state of subjective and at times seemingly arbitrary enforcement of policy. In Del Rio this past week, but across the border for months now, people of any number of nationalities are getting through in small numbers, finding themselves suddenly relieved to be in the U.S. but at the same time uncertain about their future, let alone where they’ll sleep at night. On the other side, a growing mix of migrants is waiting, uncertain whether to cross and risk the consequences of not being let in or to stay and wait for a better opportunity that may not come. Ever constant is the threat of being sent back to their home countries, a fate most who have crossed up to now have been dealt.

The past few days in Del Rio, white prison transport vans have rolled at a steady rate down the dusty road to the bridge, where agents have forced migrants to board. From there, groups of migrants have been taken to the town’s airport, or nearby ones in San Antonio, Laredo and Brownsville, where they’ve been placed on flights back to their home countries. In order to do so without allowing these people their legal right to plead their case for asylum in court, President Joe Biden has relied on Title 42, a public health order implemented last year by the Trump administration to summarily expel border-crossers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I followed one bus to the Del Rio airport, where I watched a Coast Guard flight, loaded up with families with young children, including mothers with babies in their arms, take off. While the Department of Homeland Security says that some of these flights are taking families to be “processed elsewhere,” the department has also acknowledged it will expel families who do not request asylum. However, lawyers working with people in the camp say they’ve heard that CBP is not performing any “credible fear” interviews — the first and most basic step in the asylum process — and thus it’s unclear if families know they even have the right to make such a request. DHS did not respond to questions about how many families have been deported, whether or not credible fear interviews have been conducted or where the Coast Guard flight I witnessed would land.

Still, with so many people for CBP to process, not everyone in the camp has faced automatic expulsion. Every day, people ostensibly deemed too vulnerable to be immediately returned to their home country have been released into Del Rio. This has included pregnant women, travelers with disabling injuries and families with young children, but there are no clear criteria for who gets released and who gets expelled. (Most single adults are being expelled.) Many of the released migrants themselves are unsure of why they’ve been allowed to cross while others have been left behind. One Venezuelan woman was allowed into the town; her twin sister was forced to stay in the camp. Such a lack of order has created a tense and chaotic situation south of the Rio Grande, where people still in Mexico face an opaque sort of lottery with severe stakes: There is incentive to cross — after all, CBP is letting some people into the U.S. But hundreds more are being deported to potentially perilous home countries. With no sign of better options, it’s a chance many are willing to take.

Nephtalie, like almost all the Haitians in Del Rio, did not arrive on the U.S.-Mexican border straight from Haiti. Instead, she came from Chile, where she and her husband lived for four years. In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, many Haitians fled to South America, in particular Brazil and Chile, where a large expat community had taken root. In recent years, however, Chile has cracked down on Haitian immigrants, putting many people’s visa status in jeopardy. Nephtalie and her husband, unable to find work and beset by anti-Black discrimination, decided to travel north to the U.S. earlier this year, in June.

They started an immense and arduous odyssey, taken by hundreds of thousands of people over the last several years, out of South America: Buses through Chile to Bolivia, a long trek through mountains, a boat over Lake Titicaca into Peru, and then more buses and more walking. Bit by bit, they made their way northward. In Panama, migrants must face the Darién Gap, a 50-mile stretch of swamp and jungle too dense for any roads, and incredibly dangerous to get through. Nephtalie says she entered with a group of nine. Only five made it out. She watched fellow travelers swept away during multiple of the many river crossings, potentially joining the hundreds of migrants who have lost their lives there to the river, snakebite, thieves or starvation. A fall in the Panamanian jungle left Nephtalie’s husband with a spinal injury for which he’s been on crutches ever since.

When Nephtalie and her husband finally arrived on the Mexico-Guatemala border in late July, they made their way into Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state. There, they began a long wait, along with hundreds of other migrants, shut out of entering the United States. Throughout the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden administration, Mexico has become home to tens of thousands of exiles from across the globe. Many of them form communities based on their countries of origin, waiting their chance to lawfully enter the U.S. and plead their case for asylum. But that wait has become interminable.

For the last five years, they’ve been blocked by a succession of policies, from Trump’s use of “metering” (more or less artificially limiting the number of people who could cross each day at ports of entry), which created a bottleneck at the border, to the Migrant Protection Protocols (commonly referred to as the “Remain in Mexico” policy), which returned asylum seekers to Mexico to await their immigration court dates. As more and more asylum seekers have arrived to Mexico in the last year and a half, Trump and Biden have used Title 42 to expel any who try to cross the border into the U.S. Not to mention, U.S. presidents since Barack Obama have strong-armed Mexican authorities to crack down on immigration, too. In Chiapas, Nephtalie was among the thousands placed in a notorious detention camp, before eventually being released weeks later with a permit only valid for work and travel within Chiapas and strict instructions not to travel northward. Even today, as CBP officers and state troopers patrol the U.S. side of the Del Rio border, Mexican police are cracking down on immigrants in neighborhoods on the other side.

As time wears on, however, with no end in sight to the border being officially closed to asylum, desperation has led some people who have been waiting for months and years to try their luck. Last March, I visited a camp of migrants on the streets of Tijuana who had gathered with the hope that Title 42 would soon end and they would be able to cross to request asylum. But Biden showed no signs then (or since) of reopening the border to asylum seekers. While I was there, a false rumor lit up the camp that to the east in Tecate, CBP was letting people cross. One night, a group of about two dozen decided to travel out into the desert to try their chances.

This is what’s happening today, in Del Rio and all across the border. For eight months, the Biden administration has not provided clear information about when, if ever, Title 42 will end, going so far as to fight in court to keep it in place; it’s given people no advice about a proper way to seek protection. But while Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas have all said on no uncertain terms “Don’t come” and that Title 42 will be enforced, on the border the reality is more fluid: Minors have been allowed in; people deemed “extremely vulnerable” by local CBP officers have been allowed to cross to seek asylum. Every time one of these lucky few makes it to U.S. soil, say in Del Rio, a rumor can spread across the border: They’re letting people in in Del Rio.

In late August, Nephtalie and her husband, still waiting in Chiapas, began to hear a rumor spreading around the Haitian migrant population living across Mexico. From interviews this week with other migrants in Del Rio, and conversations with attorneys who have met with dozens more, it seems that many people had the same experience. The rumor went like this: First, information went around that, while most of the border was closed, U.S. immigration authorities were allowing people to cross and ask for asylum in Mexicali — on the border with Calexico, California — and in Acuña, the Mexican city across from Del Rio. (This was not true, but it spread like wildfire among people yearning for a glimmer of hope.) Second, the rumor said that Sept. 16 would be the best day to travel. That would be Mexico’s Independence Day, and migrants figured that the Mexican authorities, who have bowed to U.S. pressure to more stringently police immigrants in Mexico, would be preoccupied, allowing them to travel within the country unimpeded northward. Finally, the bus routes to Acuña were cheaper than to other spots along the border, like Mexicali. So, as el Día de la Independencia de México arrived, thousands of people who had heard the rumors — by word of mouth or on WhatsApp or on Haitian social media — began traveling to Acuña to cross into Del Rio.

When I asked one Haitian man at a gas station in Del Rio, “Why did you choose to cross from Acunã to Del Rio?” he replied: “Where is that?” Like many, he had probably simply followed others along what sounded like an opportunity to finally be accepted in the United States.

But the stakes of following such a rumor only to be faced with the reality of a closed border are tragic: Most of the Haitians in Del Rio today left Haiti years ago. Now, after traveling thousands of miles with the hope that they could eventually gain asylum in the U.S., many are instead being returned to the very island they fled. In March, BuzzFeed News reported that U.S. officials knew deported Haitian migrants would very likely face harm due to the country’s increasing political and economic instability. And that was before Haiti was wracked by a presidential assassination in July and multiple natural disasters in August. That’s all on top of an ongoing pandemic, for which less than 1 percent of the country is vaccinated and there are fewer than 200 ICU beds among a population of more than 11 million.

In a news briefing at the White House today, Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. is “working with the International Organization on Migration to ensure that returning Haitian migrants are met at the airport and provided immediate assistance.”

Neither the White House nor CBP responded to specific questions for this article, but the Biden administration has publicly maintained that its justification for the mass expulsion campaign is to discourage others from making the “dangerous journey” to the U.S. “Our objective is not to keep the policy as it is,” Psaki said at the White House today, describing Title 42 as “not workable long term” and adding that it remains the administration’s desire “to put in place a new immigration policy that is humane, that is orderly, that does have robust asylum processing.” Still, she added: “But we’ve also reiterated that it is our objective to continue to implement what is law and what our laws are, and that includes border restrictions. Across the border, including in the Del Rio sector, we continue to enforce Title 42. Families and single adults are typically expelled under this CDC directive when possible.”

Guerline Jozef, the founder and executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a major U.S. organization providing direct aid to Haitian migrants, has spent the last week on the ground in Del Rio. Thinking of the route taken by people like Nephtalie, she finds the administration’s deterrence strategy unbearably naïve: “They have walked past human bones in the jungles of Panama,” Jozef said. “If that was not enough to deter them, how does Biden think he can deter them here?”

In Colombia, Nephtalie says she and her husband were kidnapped and held for ransom for three days. While waiting in Mexico, she saw many other migrants robbed, kidnapped and assaulted. Still, she waited to cross. Like so many of the people stuck in Mexico by metering, MPP or Title 42, or held by Mexican immigration authorities, Nephtalie simply bided her time, waiting for any sign of hope — a rumor, a chance, an opening — that she would be able to cross.

“If people are desperate,” Jozef emphasized, “they are going to come no matter what.”

Even for the migrants in Del Rio who do make it out from under the bridge and into town rather than on a plane back to their home country, the journey is far from over. With few resources and a deeply limiting language barrier, many have found themselves sleeping on the concrete at a gas station, or, like Nephtalie, at the airport. None of the migrants I spoke with had received a credible fear interview. Attorneys who had met with dozens of people CBP had released also confirmed that they hadn’t met anyone processed under the normal procedures of U.S. asylum law. When I asked Sarah Decker, an attorney with the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, what sort of legal situation people were finding themselves in — were they in the asylum process? on parole before an eventual expulsion? in expedited deportation proceedings? — she shook her head: “We have no idea.”

The migrants released by CBP, including Nephtalie and her husband, were given a slip of paper called a “Notice to Appear,” instructing them that they would have to go to a courthouse to begin immigration proceedings — proceedings that might still result in them being expelled.

When Decker and other attorneys read these notices, they found many of them lacked both a date and location for their court appearance. “They’re obligated to check in with their local ICE field office, wherever they end up, within 60 days,” Decker explained, saying that they’ll likely receive their actual court date then. “But a lot of them haven’t been told that, or didn’t understand when they were told. And they may not know how to locate an ICE field office.” Those who don’t report will forfeit their right to fight deportation.

On Wednesday afternoon, Nephtalie texted me: “Dios está conmigo,” God is with me. She had landed in Chicago and said her first stop, after finding a place to sleep, would be an ICE field office, to begin a potentially yearslong legal process she hopes will end with asylum for her and her husband.

STRONGSVILLE, Ohio—One evening earlier this month, on the grass of the commons outside the police station and the chambers of the city council here, a couple hundred people gathered with “Thin Blue Line” flags mounted on thick plywood posts for an event they wanted to serve as a show of political force.

On hand to back the local cops while fending off what they see as looming leftist enemies, the speakers who took the stage included two city councilmen, the Republican state representative, a onetime Cleveland police union boss and Fox News-prominent former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke — but the obvious emcee of the occasion was an operative with gelled-down hair and a gap-toothed grin.

Shannon Burns, the president of the Strongsville GOP, slid behind the microphone and delivered a puckish prompt. “Anyone ever heard of us backing down from a fight?”

“No!” the crowd shouted back.

Many of the attendees had paid $40 for a flag to stand in a public space to decry a scarcely discernible controversy. The happening went on for roughly an hour before some of them shifted inside to chambers to lecture their elected officials about “so-called,” “self-appointed” “social justice activists.” The episode wasn’t some natural groundswell. It was a coordinated effort that has become quite common lately in this town of 45,000.

Triggered by former President Donald Trump’s rise but even more by his (electoral) demise, Burns has stoked a steady boil of outrage — organizing more than a dozen events around culture-war wedge issues like masks and vaccines to critical race theory and “defund the police.” No issue, though, has been a bigger, more visceral animator for Burns and the members of the Strongsville GOP than what they considered the heresy of Anthony Gonzalez — their congressman who was one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection earlier this year. Relentlessly modeling Trump-style politics — politics as entertainment, politics as business, politics as personal and perpetual combat — Burns zeroed in on Gonzalez, censuring him, hounding him for his “betrayal” and calling on him to “RESIGN.”

Throughout 2021, Burns has transformed the local Republican party in this suburban corner of northeast Ohio, making a local partisan group less local and more partisan. He has dispensed with much of the staid standard fare and even the pedestrian goals of a traditional place-based Republican club like actually electing Republicans. Instead, he has presented what can feel like almost non-stop programming — movie nights, gun range nights, grandiose political summits with right-wing A-list-ish guests. In fact, Burns no longer is even running a local Republican club — because the Strongsville GOP at this point is legally the Better Ohio PAC, a political action committee Burns started just nine days after Gonzalez’s fateful vote. I’ve been here five times since April, and each time I have left more convinced that what Burns is up to is emblematic of the nationalization of our grassroots political life: the apocalyptic pitch, the hostile, conspiratorial talk, the obliteration of any semblance of a lull between elections. Being around Burns and his minions this spring, summer and fall began to feel to me very much like an on-the-ground, scale-model glimpse at the building of a bridge from Trump 2020 to the impending possibility of Trump 2024.

And this month was peak proof.

Over the course of a week and a half, in this red suburban corner of Democratic Cuyahoga County, Burns went from the “Back the Blue Rally” ($40 a flag) to the Strongsville GOP clambake that went for $76 a head to the news last Thursday night that Gonzalez was not going to run for re-election. Gonzalez made national news with his retreat, the first of the 10 Republican impeachment supporters to quit in the face of Trump-driven outrage. Locally, though, his pullout had its own meaning: It sharply underscored the extent to which Burns has become the head of a field office of Trump, and a vehicle for the former president’s unrelenting efforts to exact revenge. Because if Gonzalez’s announcement was a win for Trump and for his chosen primary challenger — the favored former aide Max Miller — it was a triumph, too, for Burns.

In terms of sheer publicity, this registers as a highwater mark in his life in and around politics. But with publicity comes scrutiny. Burns, 46, a mostly middling Republican consultant and now a state central committeeman, is plainly an able and energetic schmoozer. He’s also, though, a slipshod businessman at best — and perhaps something worse as well, according to reams of county, state and federal records, which show evictions, bankruptcies, hundreds of thousands of dollars of back taxes and more than two dozen lawsuits filed against Burns and his companies. “A shyster,” one of the plaintiffs said when we talked this month. “A flimflam artist,” said another. “Scammin’ Shannon,” Ralph King, a longtime conservative activist in the area, told me. “You got the red and you got the blue, but Shannon’s ‘conservatism’ is green,” King said. “Who can put it in his scamming little pocket?” Even this, though, the fact that Burns is doing what he’s doing right now in spite of a documented litany of misconduct, is nothing if not evocative of a former president who transformed the landscape by (among of course many other things) trafficking in controversy, weaponizing his own scandals and simply plowing brazen-faced and full steam ahead.

On the Strongsville commons, Burns took to the mic — to upsell a topic that had been confined for the most part to the public-comment piece of a single meeting of the city council.

“There’s this group that put together this fake report about our police, and this fake report is trying to use some statistics that say that our police are racist,” he said, referring to Indivisible Strongsville and its request that the city council look into racial disparities of the people the police pull over. Burns paused. The crowd knew the cue. Boo! “And then they also want the ‘Thin Blue Line’ flag in headquarters to be taken down because they think that’s a racist symbol.” Boo! “Know what we said? We said, ‘Hell no,’” Burns said. “Hell no!” hollered the crowd. Before he was done, he called for the ousters of the two female members of the seven-person city council, painting them as sympathetic to Indivisible, which Burns, buzzing with buzzwords, called “gutless” and “Marxist” and “tied to George Soros.” It was a Tuesday in Middle America, and this was a miniature Trump rally.

“There’s something unique about Shannon,” Josh Mandel, arguably the most pro-Trump candidate in Ohio’s sprawling, Trump-torqued Senate primary, told me recently. “I think President Trump inspired them to become active,” Mandel said of the members of Strongsville GOP, “and I think Shannon has done a terrific job of keeping them active.”

“The fringe groups, and I wouldn’t even call them fringe groups, these are people that are just fed up, but Shannon has taken it one step further,” said a praising Jim Renacci, the 16th district congressman before Gonzalez who is now running for governor in an intraparty fight against Mike DeWine. “Shannon’s capitalizing on a couple of things,” he added, noting the anti-Joe Biden, anti-Covid-cautious-DeWine, anti-mask, anti-vaccine and anti-Gonzalez grassroots rage.

“He is an opportunist,” Doug Deeken, the GOP chair of nearby Wayne County, said when I called to talk about Burns. “And when do farmers make hay? They make hay when the sun shines. The sun is shining right now in Strongsville, and Shannon’s making hay.”

The night of the Gonzalez news, Burns crowed that the Strongsville GOP was “the tip of the spear.” The next morning, I found Burns in a “celebratory” spirit.

“It’s definitely a great day,” he said. “There’s no other way to frame it.”

The first time I saw Shannon Burns was the first time I was in Strongsville. It was at the April monthly meeting of the Strongsville GOP. I had come not because I was interested in Burns but to cover the nascent primary pitting Miller against Gonzalez. Burns was not on my radar because Burns by any normal measure was not a major player — the head, after all, of not even a county-level Republican club. With a stubborn Northeast Ohio nip in the air, that evening’s gathering was on the asphalt outskirts of the town’s huge mall sprawl, at an indoor-outdoor pub that was packed with people wearing plenty of MAGA merch but next to no masks. My own mask was so at odds with the group vibe a woman physically removed it from my face. A man, meanwhile, told me he thought the vaccines — not the virus — were going to kill millions of people. Bob Frantz, a sort of local Limbaugh, was the keynote speaker, but the person who held court on the stage by the bar was Burns. It wasn’t, though, until a Saturday in the middle of May at something Burns was billing as the Ohio Political Summit that I started to see him truly as a significant character in his own right.

For all the ways in which Florida is the foremost bastion of the Trump-led GOP, Ohio also is a white-hot epicenter, a swing state that by now has mostly swung — a state Trump won twice, a state with a governor seen by Trump supporters as too pandemic-strict, and a state that is every bit a roiling, high-stakes congressional battlefield. And Strongsville even more specifically, a site of presidential pit stops of the past, is known due to its confluence of throughways as “the Crossroads of the Nation.” In press releases, Burns hyped his summit as “the first major event of the season,” announcing a roster of most of the major GOP candidates running in the most important races — plus a one-two punch of headliners: Lauren Boebert, the heat-packing congresswoman from Colorado, and right-wing celebrity Candace Owens.

But when Burns added another eyebrow-raising, non-Ohio provocateur to the lineup — Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, mired at the time in controversy over alleged sex trafficking — many of the candidates who had committed to the event discovered they had conflicts. Reporters in the days leading up to the shindig started to hear the scuttlebutt of eleventh-hour cancellations. I had one person call me to make sure I knew — concerned I would ruin my weekend for a Burns-led dud. Not privy to these developments (because Burns was being mum) were most of the 600 people who had purchased tickets for (as he had put it in promotional materials) “Only $75.”

Outside the venue, past a Ford EcoSport SUV with window stickers saying “F— Biden” and “Trump 2024,” the line to get in stretched around a bend and down the side of the building. On the doors, signs said Ohio policy mandated masks, but basically the only people who wore them once inside were the dozen or so reporters from around the state and beyond. In the men’s room, under the soap dispenser, somebody had planted a sign of his own: “MASKS DON’T WORK!” Out in the main ballroom, where the crowd was shoulder-to-shoulder in chairs, people watched on a pair of big screens a piped-in YouTube video of Trump’s rally in Orlando from the summer of 2019. It seemed at first like maybe a way to set the mood. Before long, it became clear that it was more just to kill time. People began to look around and check their phones.

I found Burns in a corner.

“So,” I said, “the schedule …”

“Well, you’ll have to see.”

“A surprise?”

“You got it.”

For most of the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon — with the exception of Mandel, who called Gonzalez a “traitor” that “spit in Donald Trump’s face” — the candidates who took the stage to speak were lesser lights with little chance. As the people ate their box lunches, they listened to Senate candidate Mark Pukita (“if you’re a Republican and you didn’t vote to object to the certification of the Arizona and Pennsylvania election results, you need to be primaried … they need to go”), gubernatorial candidate Joe Blystone (“the only way we can change the system is take over the system”) and congressional candidate Jonah Schulz (he called DeWine “our tyrannical governor”). Late adds and slot-fillers included somebody from a Republican club in a town near Columbus, a congressional candidate from the other side of Cleveland and a congressional candidate from … Georgia. And Bob Frantz again — the local radio personality. “I can’t smell freedom through face diapers,” he said.

Owens and Gaetz, when they finally took the stage well into the afternoon, felt like relief.

“Factually speaking, we are producing the dumbest kids that have ever lived in America,” she told the crowd that had given her a standing ovation and would give her another when she finished her less-than-an-hour-long speech-plus-question-and-answer-session for which Burns’ Better Ohio PAC had cut her a check for $30,000. “But now you can major in gender studies, which is interesting, because that should be five minutes in kindergarten — two genders!”

Gaetz lauded the ways and aims of Burns and his group. “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and I’m a Donald Trump Republican!” he said. “The way forward is not a repackaged version of Paul Ryan’s ‘Better Way.’ And it’s certainly not the Green New Deal and the socialist way. Isn’t it obvious by now? It is our America First ideas, not theirs, that fill the rallies and sell the tickets. I’m told that the Strongsville GOP has never sold more tickets than for today’s event. Congratulations to all of you!”

Boebert, though? A no-show.

I’ve talked to some people who heard from some people who grumbled about the rejiggered, less appealing run of show, but the people I talked to that day at the event seemed unbothered by the absence of Boebert or any of the other candidates who were supposed to have been there. No complaints of a bait and switch. No requests for refunds. And if people were angry, at least from what I heard, it wasn’t at Burns. “People are upset at the candidates that didn’t show up,” Dakota Sawyer told me. “Some people chickened out, and they’re going to take a hit for it,” Steve Kraus said. When I caught up with Gaetz in a post-speech scrum of enthusiastic selfie-seekers, he feigned ignorance that his presence might have been a reason. “They should’ve come,” he said. “There were a lot of great folks here. We had a great time.”

“It is head-scratching,” King, the conservative activist who dubbed Burns “Scammin’ Shannon,” told me this week. “The people on the right, you say you’re the smart ones, and the Democrats are dumb. You say you’re against the swamp. Yet you register no anger towards a guy that misled you. This is what the swamp thrives and survives on!”

The next day, Jeff Darcy, the editorial cartoonist from the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, sketched for the newspaper a caricature of Burns and opined that the Strongsville GOP “now appears to be acting more like a de facto Trumplican cult.”

Two weeks after that, Martin Schutte, another plaintiff in another lawsuit against Burns, sent an email to members of the Strongsville GOP. Schutte recently shared it with me. “I doubt all of you know that Shannon Burns robbed his employee’s (sic) of pay that they earned,” Schutte wrote. “This man is NOT a patriot! He is a fake Republican and a fraud!”

For most of the last decade and a half the people in politics who knew Burns knew him because of Victory Solutions. Victory Solutions, which he incorporated in 2006, according to state records, provided phones and computer software to help campaigns make more calls in less time. The Trump campaign in the 2016 cycle paid Victory Solutions $1,266,923, according to Federal Election Commission records. In the 2020 cycle, though, Victory Solutions did no work for the Trump campaign, and not that much work at all, based on FEC filings — and now is effectively shuttered because it’s so deeply indebted.

Just this past January, according to campaign finance records, Burns incorporated in Ohio a new company called WAB Holdings. It does not do business in Ohio, according to Burns. From February to June of this year, according to Texas records, WAB Holdings made a little more than $600,000 from a PAC called Save Austin Now — for “advertising” and “voter identification efforts” during a (successful) ballot initiative supporters described as an outdoor camping ban and critics considered too stringently anti-homeless. “He did all of our voter ID, all of our voter contact. He did our data analysis. He did our modeling,” Matt Mackowiak, the Austin-based GOP operative and a co-founder of Save Austin Now, told me. He added that he didn’t know much about Burns’ doings in Ohio. “I’m happy to learn more about vendors and people and their careers and things they do well,” he said, “and things they don’t do well.”

The unflattering parts of Burns’ past aren’t a secret. The Daily Beast offered up a rundown in the waning days of 2019, and it spawned some aggregation. Well beyond that coverage, though, Burns has attached to his name and the name of his companies a glut of daunting and damning county, state and federal records.

Going back to 2004, in residential apartments as well as office space, Burns has been sued for unpaid rent more than half a dozen times and evicted on at least three occasions.

Dating back to 2001, the Internal Revenue Service and state agencies have placed tax liens on Burns and his companies that add up to more than $800,000 — much of which he hasn’t paid.

In 2018, Burns filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection twice — declaring $231,901 in assets and more than $2 million in liabilities, according to records, in spite of reported earnings between 2016 and 2018 of more than $4 million. His efforts, though, were dismissed by the court, because shareholders didn’t agree to the terms.

Starting in 2001, just in Cuyahoga County, Burns has been sued more than two dozen times for unpaid wages and unpaid bills—by people who did work for him, by companies that did work for him, once by one of his own attorneys—amounts ranging from as little as just over $1,000 to more than $100,000. Burns’ chief business partner died in 2012 of brain cancer, and his widow, a minority shareholder of Victory Solutions, sued Burns for mismanaging the company and stonewalling her in any communication or ownership benefits—a case subsequently dismissed due to the bankruptcy filings. The elderly Holocaust survivor mother of his business partner sued Burns, too, alleging that she loaned him in 2009 $15,000 plus hefty interest and that he not only didn’t pay her back but ignored her calls for years after her son’s death—a case that resulted in a default judgment against Victory Solutions of $48,304.66.

“He’s a scumbag, and anybody associated with him needs to hang their head in shame,” said Elva Heuschkel, a former employee who sued him in 2013 for $3,384.61, got a court judgment in that amount and was actually paid by Burns. “I think I’m one of the few that got money from him,” she said. “I was one of the lucky ones.”

“He runs everybody through the mud,” said Schutte, who sent the email to members of the Strongsville GOP calling Burns a “fraud.” Schutte received in 2017 a judgment of $53,525.05. “He still has not paid me,” he said, “and no one makes him — like, there’s no consequences at all, and I think he knows that, so he doesn’t care. He’s, like, ‘If there’s no consequences, why should I have to do anything?’”

Schutte, who’s registered as a Democrat but insists that has nothing at all to do with his gripe, didn’t get many responses to the email he sent. But he did get some.

“Please remove me from your email list,” Jeanine Hammack, the group’s campaign chair, wrote back. Linda Savido, the events chair, said the same thing.

Burns’ odd new prominence is a byproduct of Trump’s unexpected emergence as a leader of lasting political consequence. “All I’ve done,” Burns told me this month, “is figured out how to catch the wave.”

He’s been in charge of the Strongsville GOP since early 2015 — just before Trump started running for president. In 2017, in the wake of Trump’s victory the fall before, two Republicans on the Strongsville City Council lost — in part, according to local GOP politicos, because Burns urged them to nationalize the campaign, using imagery of Trump and Hillary Clinton on mailers. But the setback and sore feelings receded, and Burns was elected in 2020 to the state central committee by presenting himself as a Trump candidate even though of course there was no such thing as a Trump endorsement in the comparatively small-potatoes race. Then came this year. In January, emboldened, Burns sniffed accelerant and cash and trained at Gonzalez his unwavering ire.

One Friday night in late June, the eve of the Trump rally in adjoining Lorain County, I made my way through the crowded dining room of the Strongsville Buffalo Wild Wings to get to a private back room. It was Strongsville GOP movie night. Burns all but reveled. I wasn’t even the only reporter there. So was Seth McLaughlin from the Washington Times. So was Sarah Ferguson from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Before he hit play on conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza’s 2018 film “Death of a Nation,” Burns told the few dozen people on hand to watch Fox News in the 9 o’clock hour: “Max Miller, who is, as you know, the congressional candidate running against the evil Anthony Gonzalez, is going to be on.”

“How does Donald Trump still get a big crowd to come out and see him?” Ferguson, the Australian reporter, asked Burns. “He lost.”

Burns said no.

“He may not be in office, but I don’t concede that he lost.”

This line of thinking, an absolute article of faith at Burns’ events, coursed through the crowd on the commons in September as well. “Trump won! Trump won!” a squat woman with an arm brace and a pack of cigarettes kept yelling in the briefest of pauses in the speeches.

“How is ‘Sippy Cup Joe Biden’ gonna win an election when he can’t even say a sentence?” she said to me when I spotted her and went to talk to her after the rally was over and the crowd had started to disperse or make their way to city council. “He didn’t win that. That election was stolen.” She said she didn’t want to give her name — “’cause I don’t trust anybody” — before shifting to the debunked notion of “FEMA camps” where Biden is planning to send the unvaccinated.

“Shannon hustles,” Tom Patton, the area’s state rep, told me when I called to talk about Burns and the Strongsville GOP. “He’s got the reins, and he’s really transformed it into something more than a local little city group.”

“What I love about Shannon is just his passion for our country,” said Mark Fender, Strongsville’s chief of police. He told me the blue-line flag in the lobby of his station was going nowhere. “The flag,” he said, “has been around a lot longer than these other villanization movements against the police.”

The next morning, I met with two of the leaders of Indivisible Strongsville, Russ Smith and Beverly Masek. We drank coffee, and Smith offered toast with honey made by his beekeeping wife. They hadn’t gone to the rally the night before, or the city council, they said, because they didn’t want to play the foil for his social media feeds. Marxists? Socialists? Communists? “At election time, we’ll be the ones hanging vote-for-so-and-so on your doorknob — that’s about as wicked as we get,” Smith said. Masek and Smith gave me a copy of the letter they had written to the council, yellow highlights, blue-pen edits, saying Black drivers were “being unjustly ticketed by Strongsville Police” and referencing a “thoughtful meeting” with the city’s safety director “back in March.”

Playing a different game at a different pace, Burns was back at it the following Monday after the rally on the commons. Another bunch of people squeezed under a large white tent on the lawn adjacent to VFW Post 3345 at yet another event put on by the Strongsville GOP. For $76 a person ($140 a couple or $528 for a table) the clam bake promised a dozen clams or half a chicken, chowder, corn and rolls with butter — plus a familiar “Special Guest.” But Boebert was a no-show. Again. (Multiple spokespeople for Boebert didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Back behind another mic, Burns didn’t so much as mention her (and nobody I talked to brought her up, either). “Good evening, Strongsville!” Burns said. They prayed (“God, thank you, thank you for this wonderful crowd of like-minded people,” the first vice president said), they said the Pledge of Allegiance, they sang the national anthem, and Burns quickly introduced a handful of local polls before shifting focus. “We’re going to make certain that we are not going to have any critical race theory taught here in our schools,” he said to a rousing round of applause.

A school board candidate assured she would “fight like hell,” the executive committee chair of the county GOP urged the crowd “not to bend to the tyranny of the left,” and Mandel — the always-at-hand, not-Boebert keynote at Burns’ events — delivered a talk that rolled out like ready-made, red-meat bingo. Two genders. Critical race theory, the New York Times’ 1619 project? “Trash” and “lies.” And the election? “Stolen.”

“I hear you’re doing a hit piece on me,” Burns said as I stood off to the side. But he said it with that grin.

It’s not “a hit piece,” I said, if I’m standing here asking questions.

“I started a company, I had a lot of growth, and that growth also got me leveraged, right? And I got to a point where I was overleveraged. And it’s happened to plenty of others. What happens in that case? You get sued. Plain and simple. There’s no nefarious thing going on there, right? I employed a lot of people, and there are always ways to spin that and make it seem like you’re a terrible guy,” he said. “If people want to do that, they can.”

“But have you made people whole?” I said, knowing he has not.

“Well,” he said, “I’m only one man, right? There’s a company, right? There’s a company that had — you know, I don’t operate Victory Solutions anymore. Victory Solutions is no longer a company, since last year, right? I’ve got my own consulting firm now,” he said, meaning WAB Holdings. “And there’s no way for Victory Solutions to make it whole.”

He added later: “I was the head of the company, and I take responsibility for what happened, but I was only a 51-percent-share owner of the company. So, while ultimately the buck stops with me, I wasn’t the only owner — and, by the way, I lost more money than anyone else did.”

Besides, to some extent all publicity is good publicity, Burns suggested at the clam bake. That Darcy cartoon and commentary from May? “That one’s on my wall,” he said.

Some 72 hours later, Burns texted me a tweet — his — saying Gonzalez was “considering dropping out of the race,” saying Miller “will be the next Congressman,” saying the Strongsville GOP was “the tip of the spear.” He had tweeted it at 8:07 p.m. The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin, on the other hand, had tweeted his scoop 57 minutes later. Burns wanted to make sure I’d noticed. “I was the first one to put it out,” he said in a text.

Gonzalez, in his statement explaining his thinking, cited “the toxic dynamics inside our own party” and “the chaotic political environment that currently infects our country.”

“RINO Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, who has poorly represented his district in the Great State of Ohio, has decided to quit after a tremendous loss of popularity, of which he had little, since his ill-informed and otherwise very stupid impeachment vote against the Sitting President of the United States, me,” Trump said in an emailed statement in his bizarre strain of almost poetry.

At 10:50, he added a quick grace note: “1 down, 9 to go!”

In the interim, though, I talked to the “celebratory” Burns.

“I’m absolutely thrilled,” he said, mentioning Trump and his endorsement of Miller and the rally in Ohio on his behalf but claiming as well some credit for himself and his club. “We just kept the pressure on the whole time and never let it drop.”

People close to Gonzalez say that’s preposterous. “I can’t overestimate the zero that he is on my day-to-day life. Even commenting makes it seem like he’s more of something than he is,” one of them told me this week. “The only impact Shannon has ever had on the 16th congressional district is the time that gets taken away from my day from people calling to tell me about the next shady scam Shannon is up to.”

It’s not just Gonzalez allies who stress this. “Do we really think that Anthony Gonzalez not running for office had anything to do with Shannon Burns?” a wired, Ohio-based Republican lobbyist told me the other day. “A hundred percent — a thousand percent — not even close. I mean, the president of the United States, the former president of the United States, is attacking Anthony Gonzalez and coming to town for his opponent. And he thinks somehow Anthony resigned because of Shannon Burns?”

I’m wary, too, of giving him too much credit. At the very least, though, Burns has done more than his fair share to stoke the political terrain in which Gonzalez was going to have to run. And the environment this year for Gonzalez nonetheless went from uncomfortable to untenable. This doesn’t make Burns a genius. It makes him “an opportunist,” said the lobbyist.

“Shannon is a political version of a Kardashian,” he said, “all about creating as much chaos as possible… because if there’s chaos, he finds himself able to grow amongst that chaos.”

If the Gonzalez news, though, was for Burns a win, it was also a loss. “He lost his cause celebre,” another person close to Gonzalez said. “He’s got to find another one.” This person paused. “I’m sure he will.”

If there is a scoresheet of Burns’ performance, his critics say it ought to include some less prominent local defeats as well as the win against Gonzalez.

In an echo of the 2017 city council debacle, three Republican candidates who were set to run this fall for three at-large seats backed out due to a lack of help they expected to receive from Burns and the Strongsville GOP, local Republicans say privately. His priorities, they assessed, are elsewhere. “So let me get this straight,” King said in a tweet. Burns and his “PAC are so busy fleecing people … they forgot to find GOP candidates in his own city!” The club has commissioned a committee to read textbooks used in the local schools looking for evidence of critical race theory. The city council presumably at some point will have an answer for Indivisible Strongsville, and Burns, it’s safe to assume, won’t let that go quietly. Covid, Max Miller, Mike DeWine — even after Gonzalez, there remains plenty of national ammunition for Better Ohio PAC.

“President Trump, in order to get elected again, should he run in ’24, which I truly believe he’s going to,” Burns told me the other day, “he’s going to need guys like us, guys and gals like us, to keep the fight going right now.”

It’s movie night tonight in Strongsville. Scheduled to show in the back room of the Buffalo Wild Wings? “Trump 2024: The World After Trump.”

“This movie night,” said a still-basking Burns, “might include a few additional beers.”

Almost nine months after the fact, we’re still learning the full range of Donald Trump’s plot to flush the Constitution and extend his presidency long past its expiration date. This week, a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa revealed that Trump and law professor John Eastman made an 11th-hour effort to convince Mike Pence to unilaterally invalidate the election results, using a two-page-long, easy-bake recipe that Eastman confected. His memo, assessed as low-grade legal garbage by liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, has alerted us to how retrograde Trump politics can get.

Writing this week in the Washington Post, neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan assembled a persuasive case that Trump’s continuing campaign of lies and subterfuge could well succeed in breaking our brittle system in 2024, essentially unbuckling democracy and installing Trump in office regardless of who wins. Yes, it could happen. Trump-directed state legislatures may very well skew election law to cancel a Democratic victory. Our contentious politics may become more violent. Federal authority may fracture and evaporate.

The Kagan nightmare scenario has triggered a large spasm of liberal panic since his essay published, driven partly by understandable worry about the fragility of our democracy, but also an undercurrent of powerlessness—as though Trump could, almost by waving his hand, reassert control of the country.

But there’s another way to look at it. Is this nighmare scenario really a function of Trump’s power and his dominance over his party? Or do the extra-Constitutional methods Trump might adopt as we enter the 2024 election penumbra reflect his essential weakness, and the continued decay of Republican power? Are we looking at a player holding a set of superior cards or as a weak-hand bluff artist threatening to blow up the casino unless he wins the pot?

It’s hard to know, and the political establishment—media included—has done an embarrassingly bad job of gaming it out in the past. As Kagan notes, we deserved Trump because we underestimated him the first time around. But going into 2024, does it make sense to compensate by overestimating him?

If Trump were the Election Day colossus that Kagan and other observers believe he is, wouldn’t the better strategy for 2024 be to run more like he did in 2016—a slightly feral Republican—and less like he did in 2020, as a crackbrained rager? He could just gather all those campaign donations pouring in and launch a solid ground game to win back states he won in 2016 but lost in 2020, and leave the Constitution and the election laws be. But so far, he’s not.

The only person or party that attempts a coup d’etat is the one that cannot win by other means. Gearing up for a coup—which we can concede that Kagan gets right about Trump—is not a sign of political strength but one of political weakness. By signaling an attempt to regain power by any means necessary, Trump essentially confesses that Trumpism is not and is not likely to become a majoritarian movement.

Evidence of Trumpian weakness abounds. Neither Trump nor his supporters exhibit much interest in debating the facts behind the issues, be it Covid-19, the climate, vote returns, or the time he stated erroneously that he has “total” authority over how states run their pandemic responses. The scores of bogus legal claims he and his team made in contesting election results have collapsed without much effort to defend them. Trump loves to argue by assertion, like every three-year-old, because in many cases his bold assertion is the only asset his argument contains.

Nor does the slavish obedience to Trump that so many of his supporters pay to him indicate a leader’s power. A strong political leader and movement reserve room for debate and consensus-building, grooming and developing new talent to expand the party. Trump prefers a monarchical arrangement in which he dictates from the top down—and which produces instability when no mechanism exists for the king to ultimately hand off power to his princes or princesses.

Revising voting laws, having elected state officials commandeer the election process, dispatching activists to harass vote tenders, and the other Trump strategies Kagan predicts in his piece are all very frightful. But they, too, convey the Republican conviction that Republicans can’t win elections unless a fat thumb is placed on the scale. It’s the strategy you’d see from people who know they’re losers and will never be able to summon a majority vote again, so they need to change the rules to institutionalize minority power. The Keystone Cops quality of the Eastman plan, which posits one impossible political pirouette after another, is a pastiche of fantastic thinking by a minority never encountered in American politics before.

If Trump were to pull off a coup in 2024—and I’m not saying it would be impossible—it bears asking how the non-Trumpers, who have been in the majority in the past two elections, would respond to the grab. “Liberal democracy requires acceptance of adverse electoral results, a willingness to countenance the temporary rule of those with whom we disagree,” as Kagan writes in his essay. But a coup does not require acceptance. A government installed by a coup enjoys not even a fraction of the legitimacy a government-by-election does, even if the election has a faint asterisk next to it, like the 2000 race did. It would only inspire a counter-coup by the majority, and maybe a counter-counter coup, and a counter-counter-counter coup. Trump is crazy enough to invite this fight, and narcissistic enough not to care what it does to the country. But is he shrewd enough to win it?

Trump and his Republicans fear their own disintegration. That sense of threat gives them power over the voter base, but it has also made them politically desperate. Their lack of scruples doesn’t make them omnipotent: it makes them vulnerable to serious and determined opponents. The wildness of Trump’s last-ditch maneuver, whatever it turns out to be, will require much from us, but above all it will oblige us to keep our cool and just vote. You don’t beat a crazy card player by going crazier.

******

Prince Donald Jr. or Princess Ivanka? Pick one via email to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts prefer Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin. My Twitter feed digs Harold Lloyd. My RSS feed fancies The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

If anyone tells you they know how the battle among congressional Democrats will be resolved, wish them a good day and walk away very quickly. They managed to pass an infrastructure bill in the Senate — with Republican support! — and are now in total disagreement on whether to vote on it in the House, not to mention what to put in a massive social spending bill, and whether one can pass without the other. There’s a chance that it could all fall through their fingers.

So the traditional reassurances that a party does not drag itself over a political cliff have no more weight than the assurances that the Congress will never permit the United States to default on its financial obligations, or that one of our two major political parties won’t work to undermine the results of the next election. We are simply in a different time and place (perhaps a darkling plain, where ignorant armies clash by night.)

It is, however, possible to trace the roots of the current Democratic disarray. It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of a central political truth, offered by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In turning her Conservative Party in a sharp rightward direction, she argued: “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.”

In shaping their sweeping social spending legislation, with a putative price tag of $3.5 trillion, President Joe Biden and the Democratic congressional leaders have argued that this is what the voters chose last November. And polls do show broad support for universal pre-K, lower prescription drug prices and expanded health care, paid for by higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. In essence, the argument goes, “We won the argument and the vote and now it’s time to turn these ideas into law.” The problem is that the Democrats did not win the vote — at least, not in the sense that mattered, given the unique nature of our system of government. And Biden has not even won the argument widely enough in his own party.

The Democrats’ victory in 2020 came on the thinnest of majorities in Congress and largely on an anti-Trump campaign — without reaching any internal consensus on the specifics of a governing plan. With moderates opposed to key pieces of his social spending plan and progressives threatening to tank the accompanying infrastructure bill, Biden will have to quickly find a compromise that can salvage his agenda and prevent political disaster.

When progressives insist that the Democrats are in “full control” of the federal government — an assertion echoed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell as he disdains to help avoid a government default — they embrace a seriously misleading assertion.

After a dozen House losses last November, and with unified Republican opposition to the Democratic agenda, it takes just three defecting Democrats out of 220 to defeat a bill. The Senate, of course, is evenly split, and even that fact does not measure how frail the Democrats’ hold is; had Georgia Republican David Perdue won one-quarter of 1 percent more of the vote last fall, the Senate would now be in Republican hands.

Yes, Biden had a plurality of some 7 million votes; in a system with a national popular vote, that 4 1/2 point margin over Donald Trump would have represented a reasonably comfortable victory. But all of that margin came from just two states — New York and California — which is why his election came down to some 42,000 votes in three states. And Biden’s win provided no “coattails” to down-ballot Democrats. You can bemoan the anti-majoritarian features of the Electoral College, the Senate and the gerrymandered House districts in many states, but the fact is that as a blunt political fact of life, Democrats did not “win the vote” that would have insulated the party from a single dissenting senator or a small handful of House members.

Biden is hardly the first Democratic president to deal with the unhappy facts of political life in a federalist system. Even with 57 senators and more than 250 House members, Bill Clinton got his tax and budget proposals passed in 1993 by one-vote margins in both houses, and only after jettisoning key elements of his plan. (“I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans now,” he groused to his Cabinet in 1993). President Barack Obama had at one point 60 Democratic senators, but he needed every single one of them to overcome a Republican filibuster to get the Affordable Care Act passed, and that too was slimmed down to progressives’ dismay.

Trump was also a victim of this reality in 2018, when three defecting GOP senators — including, most dramatically, John McCain — defeated his attempt to repeal the ACA. That political implosion came in large part because Trump and his congressional allies could not agree on any plan to replace Obamacare despite years of vowing to do so once they gained power.

Is that an unfair analogy to today’s Democratic scrum? Didn’t Biden campaign on a pledge — reflecting popular opinion — to make the government an ally of the poor and middle class, and pay for it with higher taxes on the affluent?

The answer is a rousing: “it depends.” When the argument moves from the general to the specific, cracks in the Democratic base open. Democrats representing some of the “bluest” states want their affluent constituencies to be able to deduct their local and state taxes; for progressives elsewhere, that sounds like comforting the comfortable. Democrats from more purple districts argue that the more expansive parts of the budget bill are too much for their constituents to swallow. Progressives argue that with Democratic majorities in jeopardy next year, this is the one chance they have to put ambitious social legislation into law; centrists say the more ambitious proposals are what puts the majority in even further jeopardy. The one clear element about these fractious battles is that the paper-thin majorities in the House and Senate do not give Democrats anything remotely like the power they had in the days of the New Deal and Great Society (not to mention significant Republican support in those eras). The attempt to analogize to those days of social legislation amounts to historical illiteracy.

This is manifestly not an argument for abandoning ambitious goals. It suggests, by contrast, a last-ditch attempt to pass that infrastructure bill and a budget bill that reflects both a significant effort to make life less unfair and an honest embrace of what the politics of the moment will accept. It recognizes the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s aphorism that “my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.” It argues for the kind of result that gives Democrats the only reasonable chance to waging a midterm fight where they will be weighed down by history and Republican perfidy in gerrymandering and voter restrictions. That chance lies in their ability to argue:

“We promised to repair the physical infrastructure of the country, to address the needs of rural America, to put government on the side of the poor and middle class. And that is what we are doing.”

That argument may not be enough to overcome the force of cultural resentments, or White House missteps, or the GOP assault on the vote. But without visible evidence of the Democrats’ core argument — without pre-K, some form of expanded heath care, some steps toward a fairer tax system — Democrats will go into next year with one or both hands tied behind their back.

If there is a chance for some compromise, Democrats would do well to heed the words of Obama as he looked back on the fight over heath care and the laments from the progressive wing about the compromises necessary to pass the bill.

“The carping,” he wrote in his memoir, “carried immediate political consequences for Democrats … by preemptively spinning what could be a monumental but imperfect victory into a bitter political defeat, the criticism contributed to a potential long term demoralization of Democratic voters — otherwise known as the ‘what’s the point if nothing ever changes?’ syndrome, making it even harder for us to win elections and move progressive legislation forward in the future.”

Republicans, Obama wrote, “understood that in politics, the stories too were often as important as the substance achieved.”

The lesson? Democrats not only have to come up with some unifying compromise, but with a “story” that centrist and progressives alike are willing and eager to tell: “We’re doing what we promised, your lives will be better, and not a single Republican helped make this possible.” There’s no guarantee that this will win them the argument and the vote next year. But what other chance do they have?

COLOGNE, Germany — On a warm evening in early September, Annalena Baerbock took the stage on a packed city square here. There were just over three weeks to go until Germany’s general election, which will take place on Sunday, and around 2,000 people had come out to see the progressive, pro-environment Green party’s first-ever candidate for chancellor. “You can feel the change here on Wilhelmplatz,” Baerbock told the audience, to cheers and applause.

As she spoke, four young girls toward the front of the crowd climbed a metal divider to get a better look at the candidate. Baerbock, energetic with microphone in hand, occasionally referred to them in her speech: When a handful of right-wing protesters started shouting, she reminded them there were children present, and during her Q&A session, she came over and answered the girls’ question about how to live a more climate-friendly life. Over the course of the rally, other girls wandered over from their parents until about a dozen stood there, grouped together near the stage, eyes turned up toward Baerbock.

These girls have an experience of politics American girls don’t: They have never known a country in which a woman didn’t hold the highest office in the land. For the past 16 years, Angela Merkel has been a steady hand at the country’s helm and arguably the most powerful woman in the world.

But in Baerbock’s candidacy, they’re also watching a real-time demonstration that even in Germany — a country often held up as a model for embracing and re-electing a powerful woman leader — sexism isn’t easy to root out of politics. It can be difficult even to disentangle the two.

Baerbock was an early contender in the election, leading her two main rivals for several weeks in the spring — an unprecedented feat for the Greens, who have never before had a real shot at the chancellery. Since then, she has come under unrelenting attack for a series of off-the-trail missteps, including revelations of plagiarism and resume inflation, while male rivals have more easily sidestepped their minor scandals. She has also been the target of frequently gendered disinformation attacks, one of which featured her face photoshopped onto a naked woman’s body with a caption implying she was a sex worker. Along the way, Baerbock has faced more familiar examples of sexism, such as questions about whether she can balance the chancellorship with being a mother.

The Greens are now polling at 16 percent, behind the center-left Social Democrats and Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats, and Baerbock is effectively out of the chancellor’s race. Baerbock herself has avoided speaking too explicitly about sexism in the campaign, though others close to her have been vocal on the subject. In an interview with POLITICO Magazine this month, she mentioned the connection but was cautious about blaming the attacks on gender.

“There are always going to be moments when, especially as people run out of real arguments, they hit below the belt — we know that about campaigning,” Baerbock said. “But in this election, there’s also been an element of hate and smear campaigning, that’s been exacerbated by social media, at times gender-based.”

Her candidacy has left German political observers wrestling with the question of just how open-minded Germany actually is when it comes to women leaders. Baerbock might be the second woman to run for Germany’s top office, but she’s the first to experience the post-Merkel climate for female politicians seeking the job. It’s a contradictory environment in which a female candidate is no longer a historic first and embracing gender is far more culturally accepted — but in which the winner will preside over a parliament that is still more than two-thirds male, more skewed than many of Germany’s European neighbors. And, at least for Baerbock’s supporters, it’s hard not to look at the substance and tone of the attacks on her and detect very different treatment than her rivals.

“One can’t say that Germans don’t trust a woman to do [the job of chancellor]. We had a first example,” said Franziska Brantner, a member of parliament from the Greens who led the party’s campaign in the state of Baden-Württemberg earlier this year. “But still, a female candidate is getting different attacks — and on a different level — than male counterparts.”

Female politicians in Germany are disappointed, but not surprised, that a country that has broken such a visible gender barrier still has so far to go.

“You would think that, with a female chancellor leading the government, things would have steadily improved for women in politics,” said Sawsan Chebli, a state secretary in Berlin’s city government who is running for the Bundestag as a Social Democrat. “I wish that were the case.”

In many ways, Baerbock is exactly what Merkel wasn’t: She’s young (just 40 years old), running on a platform of structural change (Merkel leads one of the two major centrist parties), and has openly embraced being a woman and mother (the chancellor has, until recently, largely avoided discussion of gender).

When Merkel first ran for chancellor in 2005, she faced her own uphill road: Ascending the ranks of the male-dominated CDU, she was referred to as “Kohl’s girl,” a reference to former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel’s mentor and predecessor as party leader. She’s gotten questions about her clothes, and critics have implied that as a woman without children she doesn’t fully understand the lives of mothers and families. Even the well-known nickname often applied to Merkel, Mutti (or “mother”), has sexist undertones.

The difficult atmosphere Merkel has confronted might help explain why women’s representation hasn’t advanced as much as some hoped during her 16-year tenure. She chose early on to strategically downplay her gender, and likely calculated that for a leader of the conservative CDU, becoming a vocal champion of feminist politics would be a liability.

Just 31 percent of the members of Germany’s parliament are women, which is higher than the U.S. Congress (27 percent) and the global average (25 percent) but lower than many of Germany’s European neighbors. Four years ago, the percentage was actually higher — 37 percent — but dropped when the heavily male, far-right Alternative for Germany party won seats in 2017. In executive positions, women are far rarer: Just 9 percent of Germany’s mayors are women, and women lead only two of the 16 federal states.

Only since Merkel announced that she wouldn’t seek a fifth term has she begun to speak more openly about gender and feminism. In 2019, in a rare long-ranging interview, she discussed the challenges of being a woman in politics (“I wear the same blazer four times within two weeks, the letters start pouring in,” she said) and the need for gender parity in public life, which she said “just seems logical.”

And earlier this month, she finally used a word that remains loaded in German politics: “Yes, I’m a feminist,’” Merkel said for the first time.

That Merkel has become more comfortable opening up about the topic may be a sign of the changing times. Baerbock, by contrast, speaks on the campaign trail about being a mother to two young daughters, and spent much of a recent debate performance discussing policies to lift up women in Germany.

But the Green candidate has confronted a challenge that Merkel, who still doesn’t have a Twitter account, didn’t have in 2005: online hate speech and disinformation attacks that experts say are often gendered and disproportionately target women.

Baerbock has been hit by an especially high amount of disinformation, according to studies by the German Marshall Fund and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, from Russian state-backed sources as well as from inside Germany. Some of these attacks play on preconceived notions about the Greens, like the false claim that the party wanted to ban housepets to reduce carbon emissions. But other attacks have been distinctly sexist: One image that made the rounds online featured Baerbock’s face photoshopped onto a naked female body with the caption, “I was young and I needed the money.”

Michael Kellner, the Greens’ campaign manager, has spoken out about the disproportionate challenges Baerbock has faced due to her gender. “As an experienced campaign manager, I can tell you that this spread of hate and lies affects women much more than men,” he told Die Zeit in June.

Female candidates from across Germany’s political spectrum are familiar with online abuse. Earlier this year, the magazine Der Spiegel found that 69 percent of female parliamentarians in Germany had experienced “misogynistic hate,” and 36 percent described physical attacks on themselves or on their office or home. Similarly, the European Academy for Women in Politics and the Economy recently found that female mayors in Germany experience significantly more harassment.

This comes as Germany, like other countries, is grappling with an overall rise in hate speech, fueled in part by the AfD — a party which, like similarly-minded politicians in the U.S., continually pushes the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable speech.

Wiebke Winter, a 25-year-old Bundestag candidate from Merkel’s center-right CDU, said that overall, Germany’s political scene has become more welcoming to women because parties like hers recognize they need to be more representative of the population as a whole.

But after a recent TV appearance where she discussed her role as her party’s new adviser on climate issues, her Twitter account was flooded with hateful attacks. “I really don’t know why,” Winter said in an interview. “I think I broke too many clichés at once: I’m a woman for climate in the CDU, and that’s not the story that people want to tell.”

The online harassment was one thing, but when someone started burning her campaign posters close to her home, she contacted the police.

Chebli, the SPD party member in Berlin, travels with police protection due to the volume of credible death threats she’s received. In Chebli’s case, multiple factors make her a target: She’s not just a woman, but also a Muslim daughter of refugees who speaks openly about racism in Germany. “Women who have a voice, who are visible, who defend themselves — these are the ones who are most often affected,” she said. “What happens online isn’t detached from what happens in analog life.”

Many of the online attacks targeting Baerbock are examples of what the German Marshall Fund calls “sexualized subversion of credibility” — playing on gender stereotypes to enhance existing concerns about a female candidate’s competence and trustworthiness. Baerbock took a number of hits that undermined her credibility in voters’ eyes, and her candidacy never fully recovered.

After a near-flawless campaign rollout in April, Baerbock’s party shot to first place in the polls. She appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel, posing confidently with her hands on her hips, projecting the assuredness and ease that her opponents (both middle-aged white men) were lacking at the time. But the Greens’ numbers began to decline after a series of unforced errors. First, German media reported that Baerbock hadn’t disclosed supplementary income from her party. Then, evidence emerged that she had inflated parts of her resume and plagiarized numerous passages in her book (she has since apologized for the plagiarism, promising to add more accurate citations).

Baerbock’s missteps quickly became the defining narrative of her campaign: “Not even a quarter [of Germans] still believe Baerbock!” read one headline from the tabloid Bild.

But while Baerbock’s allies acknowledge the campaign’s errors, some believe gender bias is subtly amplifying an existing narrative of incompetence and inexperience. Both her rivals, the CDU’s Armin Laschet and SPD’s Olaf Scholz, had minor plagiarism scandals of their own; while neither was as extensive as Baerbock’s, those revelations made far fewer waves and haven’t defined their campaigns in the same way. And some of the more serious scandals the two male candidates have faced, whether Laschet’s failure to distance himself from an ultraconservative candidate in his party or Scholz’s involvement in a major tax-evasion controversy, also had less of an impact. (On Thursday, my POLITICO colleagues marveled at how Scholz had survived multiple scandals, calling him the “Teflon candidate.”)

“Annalena Baerbock obviously has to meet stricter standards than her competitors,” the writer Tanja Dückers argued in a column for Deutschlandfunk.

Petra Weißflog, head of the Greens in the eastern city of Cottbus, said things have improved for women in politics since she first ran as her party’s lead candidate in Brandenburg in 1994. But she can’t help feeling the party’s male co-leader, Robert Habeck, would have been treated differently than Baerbock.

“These small faux-pas that happened with Annalena, they weren’t her fault: That was her advisers, who didn’t vet things as carefully as they should have,” Weißflog said. “I think if these things had happened to Robert, everyone would have simply said, ‘Well, he’s a very busy man.’”

For advocates of women in politics, the questions about Baerbock’s credibility highlight a familiar difficulty: how to distinguish legitimate scrutiny of a candidate’s competence from what they see as unfairly heightened expectations for women.

The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which studies the challenges women face running for office in the United States, has found that voters tend to assume men are qualified but need more evidence to believe the same of a woman — especially when she is running for executive office.

Amanda Hunter, the foundation’s executive director, says this dynamic makes it doubly difficult for Baerbock, who is already facing questions about her qualifications for the job due to her lack of executive experience. “Attacking a woman’s qualifications is a tried and true tactic in a campaign, because it can be very effective,” she said. “So the allegations of plagiarism, for example, or whether or not she inflated her resume — those chip away at the assumption that she is competent, which is already a weak spot for women.”

Watching Baerbock’s campaign try to recover from real political stumbles while grappling with whether the reaction had a gendered element, I was reminded of the spring of 2015. Back then, I covered Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign for National Journal, including the unfolding scandal over Clinton’s private email server. The server was a substantive problem that also exacerbated an existing narrative about Clinton — that she considered herself above the rules — just as Baerbock’s issues have underscored her youth and lack of experience.

Of course, Clinton was one of the most experienced presidential candidates in recent memory and a well-known, highly polarizing figure long before her campaign. Baerbock, meanwhile, was a political newcomer when she became the Greens’ co-leader in 2018 and, unlike Clinton, is running on a progressive platform advocating fundamental change. Her party proposes investing massively in climate infrastructure, phasing out coal years earlier than the current government planned and raising taxes on high earners, among other initiatives.

Still, the sense that smaller scandals are cumulatively having an intangible, yet undeniable, impact on a female candidate’s chances feels remarkably familiar.

Baerbock nodded to the parallels in her conversation with POLITICO Magazine: “It’s a phenomenon that we’ve already seen in the latest U.S. elections,” she said.

Verena Duden, a Greens supporter in the northern city of Kiel, said after a party rally this summer that she did see a gender element to the way Baerbock’s credibility had tanked.

“The mistakes happened, that’s not a question,” she said. “But I think … in politics, people react much more aggressively to women. Especially in social media, where you don’t have to use real names to express yourself, I really have the feeling that there really is a difference.”

Despite the hurdles female German politicians face, one thing has certainly improved since Merkel’s first run in 2005: Openly discussing gender-based discrimination and abuse is far more accepted.

When Winter was attacked on Twitter, she was heartened by the support she received. “Many other people jumped on top of it, even from other parties, which I really appreciate — from the Green Party, from the Social Democrats, from the liberals,” she said. “So many people called and asked me how I was.”

Taking audience questions toward the end of her rally in Cologne, Baerbock was asked, “How do you deal with people who insult you?” There were a few knowing chuckles from the audience as Baerbock considered her answer.

“That’s a very good question,” she said seriously. “How do I deal with it when people attack me? I have a very, very amazing party. And I have so many people who say, ‘That’s not how we should speak to each other.’”

“The absolute most important thing,” she added, “is that you’re not alone.”