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An apocalyptic mood sweeps over the congressional press corps every couple of years as the federal government approaches its debt ceiling and representatives and senators meet to bicker over whether to raise the ceiling, temporarily suspend it or perform other legislative magic to finance the workings of the U.S. government. Take, for example, this page one, above-the-fold lede from the Sept. 22 edition of the Washington Post, which all but unleashes the Seven Plagues on mankind and tosses the unbelievers into a lake of fire. The lede reads:

The United States is careening toward an urgent financial crisis starting in less than two weeks, as a political standoff on Capitol Hill threatens to shutter the government during a pandemic, delay hurricane aid to millions of Americans and thrust Washington to the precipice of defaulting on its debt.

Careening! Urgent! Crisis! Standoff! Shutter! Precipice! Default! If you were new to the subgenre of debt-ceiling journalism, the tone of this piece might be enough to encourage you to make like a doomsday prepper, liquidate your market positions and start stockpiling rations, batteries, water and weapons. Because it’s true that a default on the federal debt would fracture the economy and unleash a blood-dimmed tide over humanity — but it’s equally true that such a calamity has never happened, won’t happen this time and will likely never happen because members of Congress who love to play chicken never follow through. They always chicken out. Checking the fossil record, we find that Congress has averted disaster at least 78 times in the past 60 years by passing legislation to forestall the debt-ceiling end times that would otherwise unfurl. We will be writing about the 79th time before the month is out.

The same day’s New York Times avoided the Post’s hysterical stylings in its coverage, pushing the debt-ceiling story inside to Page 14 and playing it as a standard “process” story. No “careening” or “crisis” here, but the Times does allow that House legislation, which passed with Democratic votes only and kicks the debt ceiling issue down the road to December, was “urgently needed.” The Associated Press did the same, predicting a “high-stakes showdown” with Senate Republicans who are likely to oppose it.

Why do the Republicans oppose a new debt ceiling? They want to pretend that it’s about taming out-of-control government spending, but this is very slim cover. Raising the debt ceiling merely allows the government to borrow to cover previously approved congressional spending. As financial columnist Allan Sloan noted in the Washington Post earlier this month, Republicans approved three debt-ceiling increases and a debt-ceiling suspension during the Trump administration. What it amounts to, Sloan writes, is blackmail, something the Democrats have done but which Republicans now routinely inflict upon the Democrats. In 1995, the Gingrich Republicans forced two government shutdowns on the Clinton administration over raising the debt ceiling. They wanted spending cuts but settled for a couple of “Contract With America” initiatives. In 2011, the Obama administration horse-traded spending cuts for its debt-ceiling increase. (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell currently says it’s up to the Democrats to pass the debt-ceiling bill on their own. We’ll see about that.)

None of this is to suggest that playing political chicken over the debt ceiling is smart. It’s a little like playing catch with sharp knives — if you’re practiced at it and pay attention, nobody gets hurt. As the White House has warned Republicans, a federal default — something that has never happened — could push the economy into recession or worse. The GOP’s financial “blob”—former Republican Treasury secretaries—have been warning McConnell and other party leaders that the economy might topple off a cliff if the ceiling goes unrepaired. But as Reuters reported a week ago, investors are betting that an increase or suspension of the debt ceiling is in the offing. The economic sky isn’t cloudless, but neither is it falling.

Properly vetted, the current round of debt-ceiling “brinksmanship” isn’t brinksmanship at all. The Democrats know that the Republicans know that they know how vigorously the entire debt-ceiling apparatus can be stressed before the springs and rivets start popping out. As POLITICO Chief Economic Correspondent Ben White put it succinctly in a tweet Wednesday morning, “We are not going to breach the debt limit and default. Simply no way Dems will ultimately allow that kind of a catastrophically unthinkable own-goal to happen heading into midterms.”

Donald Trump conveyed an unusually honest sentiment this morning in one of his “Save America” fundraising emails to explain why congressional Republicans are playing showdown with their Democratic colleagues. “The only powerful tool that Republicans have to negotiate with is the Debt Ceiling, and they would be both foolish and unpatriotic not to use it now,” Trump wrote, using his best art-of-the-deal voice. “Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede.”

If it’s so self-evident that the the debt-ceiling problem is doomed to work itself out, why all the annihilation imagery of the Washington Post piece? There’s a long journalistic tradition of juicing up a perfectly standard story without actually straying from the facts. It’s called “writing your way onto Page One.” And it works more often than not.

The debt-ceiling squabble is ugly. It’s potentially perilous. And nerve-wracking for financial markets. But it’s not about to uncork a Book of Revelation-type cataclysm. We’ll muddle through as we always do. It’s only a matter of what the Democrats will surrender in order to bring peace back to the kingdom.

******

Nobody ever talks about the debt floor. Send economic advice to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts have a long cash position. My Twitter feed lost all of its money in the dotcom bomb. My RSS feed thinks it’s a chunk of bitcoin.

LEWISTON, Maine — Remember Paul LePage? Sure you do. He’s the former governor of Maine who has called himself, accurately enough, “Donald Trump before Donald Trump” — a hot-headed, vulgar and sometimes erratic figure who regularly made international headlines for doing things like celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day by telling the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” rushing up to a television crew at the State House to volunteer that a state senator liked “to give it to the people without providing Vaseline,” and leaving an unhinged, obscenity-filled message for a Democratic legislator which he said he wanted recorded and released “because I am after you.”

He joyfully mused about bombing newspaper offices and shooting rivals, cartoonists, and lawmakers. His final term was spent tangling with legislative leaders of his own party, having his vetoes of bipartisan legislation and budgets overturned, and watching his handpicked successor get walloped by Janet Mills, the Democratic attorney general with whom he had regularly sparred.

When term limits ended his governorship in 2018, he didn’t just leave office; he left Maine. “I’m going to retire and go to Florida,” he proclaimed just before Election Day, to the relief not only of Democrats but much of his own party. “I’m done with politics. I’ve done my eight years. It’s time for somebody else.”

But now: He’s back. Making good on years of threats, he filed papers last month to run for his old office against Mills, a popular incumbent backed by Democratic legislative majorities whose approval ratings have generally run more than 10 points higher than LePage’s best ratings during his eight years in office. And on Wednesday evening, he held a kickoff rally at the Augusta Civic Center, touting his fiscal austerity and casting his opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal who’d disrupted the economy and the future of schoolchildren by imposing lockdowns and closures during the pandemic. “May the Almighty give us the strength and wisdom to overcome what divides us,” he concluded.

In Maine, this has sent tremors through the political system — turning the state into something of a preview of what may happen to U.S. presidential politics if Donald Trump jumps back in.

While LePage has been in Florida, Maine politics has returned to a semblance of normality. The legislature passes bipartisan bills. The heads of state agencies and departments field lawmakers’ questions. Mills sometimes takes positions that upset conservatives or progressives — or even both — but she hasn’t been making headlines worldwide for regularly saying shocking and ghoulish things.

Voters here are still dealing with a resurgence of the coronavirus and the accompanying disruption of the labor market, which is filling hospital intensive care units and has forced restaurants, nursing homes and retailers to cut back hours or close entirely. Here on the ground, the 2022 election still seems far away for most Mainers.

But inside Maine politics, even as elected officials try to remain focused on recovering from a crisis that has racked all levels of government, storm winds are picking up. Interviews with strategists, former officials and journalists portrayed a state house rife with anxiety about what a LePage run will look like now that Trump has altered what is acceptable in mainstream politics, even more broadly and deeply than LePage himself did. There are Republicans, too, who are worried about the further damage a LePage run could do to their party, just as it was beginning to heal itself from the ruptures his campaign and administration provoked. LePage has declined to speak to the media in these early stages of the campaign and didn’t respond to POLITICO Magazine’s requests.

But there’s also a countercurrent of excited expectation among the former governor’s myriad, diehard fans, which is further amplifying the fear on the other side. This excited, relentlessly engaged base is, after all, what led to upset wins for the former governor in two previous elections. And nobody who has to stand in a primary election wants to upset them, which may account for Sen. Susan Collins’ Tuesday endorsement of LePage, a man who in 2016 said she was “done” in Maine politics — “she’s really cooked her goose” — for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump.

“[LePage’s] style of politics is dangerous and his policies are dangerous, and together they make him doubly dangerous,” says Democratic political operative David Farmer, who was deputy chief of staff to LePage’s predecessor, Gov. John Baldacci. “I just hope that our politics have turned after eight years of LePage and four years of Trump and that those calls to our ugliest side aren’t answered anymore.”

But he’s been underestimated before, in 2010 and 2014 — and many Mainers don’t want to make the same mistake again, including the Republicans who didn’t think he could win the first time. “There was nothing in his background that would have led a thinking person to think he would be good for the state of Maine, other than his rhetoric about lower taxes and less government intrusion,” says Republican political consultant Lance Dutson, a former Collins aide who has been critical of LePage and Trump. “All of us jerks who thought we knew everything laughed behind our hand at him.”

***

LePage was the most divisive governor in Maine’s history, inviting comparisons to Trump, whose presidential candidacy LePage supported early and enthusiastically. And in some important ways, their political trajectories are similar.

But unlike Trump, LePage was born with nothing. The second-eldest of 18 children, he was raised in the tenements of Little Canada, a densely populated Franco-American neighborhood squeezed between the textile mills on the riverfront of Lewiston, a scrappy industrial city of 40,000. Area residents recall his hustle and hard work, traits that eventually drew the attention of a young up-and-coming businessman, Peter Snowe, who would later marry another Lewiston orphan, Olympia Bouchles, the future U.S. senator. When LePage was 17, Snowe called in a favor to the president of Bangor’s Husson College, got his young mentee admitted and, with another businessman, paid his first year’s tuition.

“My only option was to work hard and outsmart my opponents,” LePage recalled of his escape from what he said would otherwise been a life of poverty in an interview with the late conservative activist Robert Shaffer in 2010. “For me it was a matter of seeing the Haves and the Have Nots, and making a conscious decision to be one of the Haves.”

LePage went on to get an MBA and serve in a series of senior financial administration roles at industrial companies, a consultancy that specialized in winding down bankrupt businesses, and as a general manager of Marden’s, a chain of retail salvage stores based in Waterville, a struggling mill town of 16,000 in central Maine, where he was elected mayor in 2004.

LePage won the gubernatorial election in 2010 with the support of just 38 percent of the electorate in a five-way race, hired his inexperienced daughter as an aide, attacked the press in his inaugural address, and unveiled an agenda so radical, Republican lawmakers declined to support swaths of it.

In a state with a long tradition of electing civil, consensus-minded centrists to statewide office — late Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Olympia Snowe and independent Sen. Angus King, to name a few — LePage generated controversies faster than they could be resolved.

“LePage’s style is very similar to Trump’s, though LePage came in with more experience in governing,” says University of Maine political scientist Amy Fried, referring to LePage’s prior tenure as a mayor and city councilor in Waterville.

After eight years as governor, LePage’s wife, Ann, wanted to retire to Florida. LePage had other plans.

***

Now, on the eve of another election that LePage could win, many in Democratic politics, and some Republicans, in Maine are shuddering. “Those were terrible times — the ugliness, the racism — and as the distance gets larger since he was in office, we forget that,” says Farmer.

Republicans, Democrats and independents alike worry about the people that the LePage campaign run will energize. “LePage needs to shore up his base, and it’s made up of white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, QAnon believers and hardcore conservatives who believe the 2020 election was stolen and are pushing for some sort of authoritarian rule,” says Andy O’Brien, a former journalist who now tracks and exposes extremist groups as a hobby. “And Paul LePage is a very authoritarian person. I don’t think this next year is going to be pretty.”

The ongoing pandemic emphasized the importance of steady, science-based management in the face of actual crisis, argues Maine Democratic Party Chair Drew Gattine, who is also the former legislative appropriations committee co-chair. “This state performed [about as well as] the country during this pandemic, whether you look at health care or economic performance,” he says. “It’s hard to imagine Maine would be doing better if he had been at the helm during this pandemic.”

Most Republicans welcome LePage’s return, including the top leadership of the state party. Republican Party Chair Demi Kouzounas announced her group was “absolutely thrilled” about his candidacy the very day he filed papers and called him “the only credible candidate running for the Republican nomination.”

But LePage reshaped the Maine GOP during his tenure in much the same way Trump did to the national party, driving out polite, socially liberal, fiscally conservative politicos and doubling down on racist dog whistles, anti-immigrant sentiment and visceral tribal politics. Nobody expects those changes to be dialed back as long as he is on the scene, and probably not after that, either.

Many county committees were taken over by LePage loyalists in 2010, and earlier this year, the one in Waldo County — halfway up the coast from Lewiston — went so far as to pass a resolution banning former state Senate President Kevin Raye and another former Republican state senator, Roger Katz, from running for office in Maine. Their crime? Turning against Trump ahead of the November 2020 election. Meanwhile, three sitting GOP legislators’ participation in a July rally in the county seat, Belfast, featuring a prominent Holocaust denier Robert David Steele and one of the nation’s leading vaccine conspiracy theorists, Christiane Northrup, received no such censure.

Members of the former establishment wing are worried their party is diminishing itself by demanding allegiance not to policies but to personalities. “The party has been almost completely replaced from what I recognize, or have ever known, as the Republican Party,” Raye, also a longtime chief of staff to Sen. Olympia Snowe, told Maine Public radio recently. “Many of the people who were involved, and activists who worked in the trenches for years, are no longer even involved in the party.”

“There are a lot of conversations going on where people are asking, ‘Is this our party anymore? And what can we do about it?’” Katz told a reporter earlier this summer.

“He brings out a set of people who don’t believe in the Republican Party or the ‘political establishment,’ but they truly believe in Paul LePage,” says former Republican state Sen. Garrett Mason, a conservative who still found himself in the governor’s crosshairs from time to time. “Their No. 1 thing isn’t some bureaucratic promise or accomplishment, it’s the fact he was openly fighting for them, without compromise, if, ands or buts.”

***

Between incumbency, relative approval ratings and recent election results, most political watchers give Mills the edge. But what worries Republicans and Democrats alike in Maine right now is that LePage could upset all of those predictions and win handily. He’s done it twice before.

When he burst onto the statewide political scene to run for governor in 2010, few took the two-term mayor seriously. Polling by rivals of reliable GOP primary voters suggested the upstart firebrand — who gave fiery anti-government, pro-creationist speeches to Tea Party supporters — had little to no support.

That June, he crushed all six of his GOP rivals under a tidal wave of new voters, garnering more votes than the next two candidates combined. In November, he eked out a win with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race as his opponents split their vote between independent Eliot Cutler (who got 36 percent) and a hapless Democrat, former Maine Senate President and House Speaker Libby Mitchell (who got just 19). A majority of Mainers couldn’t believe what had just happened, and not a few chalked it up to a fluke.

Four years later, LePage’s approval rating had never broken 50 percent, and pundits predicted he’d be ousted by his experienced challenger, veteran legislator and six-term Democratic Rep. Mike Michaud, himself a working-class Franco-American. Instead LePage boosted his share of the vote to 48 percent, edging out Michaud by 5 points and Cutler by 40 points.

His biggest obstacle to recapturing office is Mills herself, a former legislator and career public prosecutor, who as attorney general had no problem locking horns with LePage. (He sued her, unsuccessfully, for joining a legal effort to protect young immigrants from deportation; she sued him for withholding $4.9 million in legislatively approved funds from her office.) Mills — scion of a western Maine political dynasty closely allied to Margaret Chase Smith — has generally governed from the center, kept Maine one of the safest places in the country throughout most of the pandemic, and has an approval rating in the mid-50s and low 60s. (Like LePage, she declined to speak to POLITICO about the race.)

Mason, who was Republican majority leader in the state senate in the final two years LePage was in office, says this race will be the “fight of his life.” “It’s going to be a blood sport,” he says. “It’s no secret that the two of them do not have the highest regard for each other and have very different views of governing.”

LePage also has a major advantage he did not enjoy a decade ago: a national profile and the support that comes with it. “Paul is the caricature the national Republicans want; they couldn’t come in here from central casting and come up with a better character,” says Dutson. “He will have third party money, field work, additional data and polling, a fundraising apparatus. Paul still has his people around him, but D.C. is going to run this race.”

LePage’s best hope may be to run a replay of 2010, when his opponents split their votes between centrist and left candidates, giving him a narrow victory. Anger over that race drove Maine voters to institute, via referenda, ranked choice voting at all levels to end this spoiler effect. Ironically, however, while it is now used in primaries and for federal races, a quirk in the state constitution has prevented it from being implemented for state-level general elections, including next year’s gubernatorial.

“What you have to remember about Paul LePage, which is also true about Donald Trump, is that they both draw people to the polls who normally don’t vote, and that makes it hard to predict the makeup of the voting electorate,” says Cutler, the independent who nearly beat LePage in 2010. “I wouldn’t be sanguine.”

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.

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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.